Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (II)

In the last entry, I introduced the two conceptions that, for Greenberg and Mitchell, form the “endpoints” of psychoanalytic theory: namely, the “drive-structure” and the “relational-structure” models. And in its historical struggle to define the (self-evidently important) role of “others” in mental life, psychoanalysis has oscillated between the two. We have seen that, according to the drive-structure model, established canonically in Freud’s “Drives and their Fates,” everything pertaining to human mentality — very much including the “other” — is reducible to inner drives and their “discharge,” according to principles of pleasure and unpleasure. Human “others,” so-called “object relations,” are  important only inasmuch as they facilitate this discharge. Hence “interpersonal” reality is something secondary to “intrapsychic” reality.

By contrast, “relational-structure” theorists — quintessentially Harry Stack Sullivan and Ronald Fairbairn, but also, to varying degrees, others like Donald Winnicott and Heinz Kohut — organize their meta-psychologies along rather different lines. While certainly making room for experiences of pleasure and displeasure as such, these latter are divested of their fundamental weight in explaining human thought, feeling, and behavior. Instead, they are relativized against a more encompassing and significant context of human relations, that is, the definitively human effort to establish, maintain, and regulate relations with others, as well as the defensive operations adaptively necessary to manage less successful attempts.

Is this polarity sustainable? Freud himself insists on the inseparability of (a) the individual mind and (b) significant “others” — perhaps most incisively in the opening passages of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:

The contrast between individual psychology and social or group [Masse] Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely…In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (3)

I have examined these passages in an earlier entry and won’t belabor the point here. In fact, Greenberg and Mitchell themselves (46) draw attention to this text, while arguing that — ultimately — for Freud “social phenomena are explicable entirely within the terms of an individual psychology” (46). (I tend to think that Freud’s “proviso” here is more subtle than the authors are prepared to allow, but for the sake of our reconstruction it is not so important at the moment.)

In a roughly similar way, Freud himself came to question the hegemony of the “pleasure principle” in the biological universe — human and otherwise — at least in its initial conception. Indeed, he complicates the principle in a couple of ways. On the one hand, he acknowledges, in the “Economic Problem of Masochism,” that pleasure cannot simply be a matter of tension-reduction — a reflection of the “constancy” model — since there are situations in which an increase of tension is felt as pleasurable, for example in sexual foreplay. This acknowledgement is relevant, of course, inasmuch as our picture of drives and drive “discharge” is grounded in notions of tension and tension “release.”

On the other hand, and more notoriously, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle identifies a separate drive — the death drive — governed by an essentially different, indeed antithetical “principle”: decomposition, regression, or “aggression” (as the drive is subjectively experienced and objectively observed). Despite these late innovations, however, Freud refused to draw the sorts of conclusions to which they might have led him. For they effectively call into question, not only his early construal of a “drive,” but the concept itself.

Now, it was partly in order to satisfactorily explain the repetition compulsion that Freud felt compelled to introduce the death drive into his metapsychology. (How this innovation assorts, or doesn’t assort, with his early treatment of “repetitious” behavior in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” as an unconsciously enacted form of memory in lieu of its conscious recollection — this is less clear.) For Greenberg and Mitchell, though, it is a considerable advantage of the “relational-structure” model that it can illuminate domains of human functioning such as painful, self-sabotaging mental illness without recourse to so obscure and “metaphysical” an entity as the death drive. If we are essentially object-seeking, and not pleasure-seeking, then manifestly “un-pleasurable” pathologies pose no special theoretical problem: for they are finally explicable as efforts to maintain or salvage precarious relations, internal “object ties,” even where the latter undermine pleasure and, in fact, bring about great suffering.

Yet there is a thorny semantic issue raised by this relational “solution,” which Greenberg and Mitchell seem at times to recognize but which they never directly address, let alone resolve. For surely it is always open to the classical drive theorist to reply in something like the following fashion: ‘True enough, this range of behavior is conceivable as “object-seeking,” even to the point of causing unpleasant or “painful” neurotic symptoms — say, somatic complaints, or intrusive thoughts, or a great spectrum of self-defeating behaviors. This is evidence, however, not of the absence or even limitation of the pleasure principle, but precisely of this principle’s power. It simply demonstrates that the “pleasure” of the object-relation is, from the perspective of drive, worth the cost of some quantity of displeasure. Or, alternatively: it shows that the massive “displeasure” occasioned by the loss of the object-tie would outweigh the relatively trivial loss of hedonic gain seen in neurotic behavior.’

In other words, apart from limitations in theoretical imagination, nothing prevents the drive theorist from recognizing object-relations as the loci of both the greatest possible happiness and the most terrible pain of which human beings are capable. And this thought, of course, is hardly a correction or amendment to Freud’s considered view of human motivation; on the contrary, it is a straightforward summation of it. Freud makes this abundantly clear in Civilization and its Discontents, where he catalogues the manifold sources of human suffering: “[W]e are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love” (29). And we can read the entirety of “Morning and Melancholia” as an extended meditation on this same theme. The “work” of mourning, in which the the ego struggles via “reality-testing” to overcome its original “libidinal position” and “withdraw attachment” from the lost object, attests to this suffering:

Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged…Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. (244-5)

To be sure, Freud considers the amount of suffering involved here an “economic” puzzle, given his theory of libidinal investment. But he does not for a moment dispute the reality of this immense suffering.

A “relational” thinker will presumably feel that, in such statements, Freud has “given the game away,” effectively confessing that the whole idiom of pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance is hopelessly unequal to the realities of object-relations, which are less privileged “vehicles” of pleasure than conditions of possibility for any pleasure überhaupt. It is as though the difference in intensity or volume of “pleasure” or “pain” between the two cases — say, the “pleasure” in having a transient hunger satisfied, as against the “pleasure” of contact with the mother — is so vast that they are finally incommensurable. As Hegel teaches us, at some particular threshold changes in “quantity” tip over into changes in “quality.” Just as, in the natural world, incremental increases in temperature, though for some time leaving water’s essential “quality” untouched, at some point converts the latter into another “state,” that is, into steam, likewise, behaviors that admit — within some range — of “measurement” in terms of units of pleasure, seem finally to become qualitatively different, demanding other predicates altogether than “pleasure” and “unpleasure.”

I will continue this line of reflection in the next entry.