Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (V)
In the last entry I collected in one place some ingredients in the drive-structure model, as a way of reckoning the likelihood of an “accommodation” with the relational-structure model. I suggested that any such accommodation would depend upon which ingredients, specifically, we were hoping to preserve. To reiterate: according to the classical account, drives are
organized by considerations that are narrowly hedonic — pertaining to pleasure and unpleasure. Even in Freud’s mature conception, when (1) the notion of psychic equilibrium, the “constancy principle,” is implicitly revised, and (2) the “death drive” — manifesting psychologically in and as aggression — raises the prospect of some motivation “beyond the pleasure principle,” there is every indication that this distinct motivational stem, though perhaps not itself hedonic, becomes discernible only on account of its complex, uneasy fusion with erotic life, hence (indirectly) yielding its own sort of pleasure.
structurally peculiar: either inner excitations, somatic tensions pressing for discharge, or — later on — trends of unification and dismemberment
classifiable according to distinct typologies: either libidinal and self-preserving, in Freud’s early work, or erotic and death drive infused, in the later.
Now, of the dimensions I’ve isolated here, it seems clear that (b) carries the least likelihood of assimilation by relational thinkers. Whatever meaning tropes like “attachment” and “object-seeking” convey in contemporary discussions, they do not include — seem patently to exclude — tensed, “energic” quantities, continuously inducing the psychic apparatus to “work” — direct and discharge — onto some suitable vehicle; nor would they have much use even for the late Freud’s more amenable tendencies of unification and dissolution, since their abstraction verges on vacuity. Certainly organic life universally evinces both tendencies. But the usefulness of this recognition for analysts — theoretically or clinically — is far from obvious.
Somewhere in the middle, as I’ve been suggesting, is (a). This is, I think, the most intriguing drive “ingredient” of the three. Since the last few entries were dedicated to examining the semantic force of phrases like “pleasure-seeking” and “object-seeking,” I will not elaborate here on the obstacles to their “reconciliation," except to repeat that the aim is worth pursuing.
At the other end of the spectrum, (c) seems to raise the least possible obstacles to the rapprochement in view. After all, nothing will prevent us from introducing another column to the drive-typology. Alongside the “drives” of libido, self-preservation, and aggression, we may clear space for an “object-seeking” drive in our discourse. Whether this novel drive enjoys equal standing vis-à-vis the others, or, indeed, becomes the most important one, in terms of which the others are finally explicable, does not matter so much. A “drive” it remains.
We find several precedents for the theoretical strategy of “derivation” in Freud’s own writings. He, too, feels compelled to address observations of human behavior and mentality that threaten to complicate his account. Such observations incline his theoretical opponents to attribute basic motivational trends to human beings — “drives” — rivaling Freud’s own candidates.
In the “History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” to take one example, Freud criticizes Alfred Adler for inter alia denying foundational standing to the “libidinal drive.” In other words, Adler fails to recognize certain other observed tendencies — variously called “self-assertion,” the “will to power,” and the “masculine protest” (54-55) — as in the last analysis “epiphenomenal” or derivative of the former.
Likewise, in a section of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that bears even more directly on Greenberg and Mitchell’s thesis, Freud insists — with his inimitable self-assurance — that everything going by the names “herd instinct,” sociality, gregariousness, and the like, invested with “foundational” explanatory value by other social and political analysts, is nothing more than a belated “reaction-formation” against Freud’s drives.
Once Freud has recognized his two-fold drives as the only irreducible springs of human motivation (libido and self-preservation; later, Eros and Thanatos), then the full sweep of human experience must be more-or-less disguised expressions of them. Sometimes, these drives are observed in something like their “pure” form — as in “genital” sexual behavior when it is minimally “aim deflected.” Even here, however, Freud would underline the Kantian-flavored caveat that we know and experience, not the drives themselves, but merely their psychical “representative.” We know them, in other words, only inasmuch as they “put the mind to work.”
In most cases, in fact, these drives manifest in ways that are distorted to varying degrees. Consider again the case of a nominal “social instinct,” as it’s assessed in Group Psychology. In that place, Freud construes the “fraternal” feeling of community members for one another, not as an irreducible datum, or an immediate, guileless, “natural” expression of good will, but a highly convoluted and essentially misleading “management” of disavowed aggression. All else, it seems, is similarly reducible. (We might further recall, in this connection, Freud’s “Anal Erotism” piece, which outlines the mechanisms underlying “character” and its development from out of the drives.)
All of this, of course, is broadly of a piece with Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” his “archaeological reduction” of what is later, more refined, and “higher,” to what is early, primitive, and base. And in this program, nothing incarnates the latter as do libido and aggression. This is continuous, too, with Freud’s position in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” namely, that no human activity or achievement entirely transcends the “pleasure principle” — that even science, as close to a sacred telos as one is likely to discover in Freud’s writings, does not embody the “reality principle” alone, but remains irremediably tethered at places to its “pleasure principle” origin (and antipode).
I have allowed myself these comments, which may strike the reader as slightly tangential to the unique “content” of Greenberg and Mitchell’s book — namely, the relational-structure paradigm — precisely for what they suggest about “formal” argumentative strategy. For it may equally be said of thinkers in the relational mould (especially Ronald Fairbairn and Heinz Kohut) that they avail themselves, in a formal way, of this same hermeneutics of suspicion. Only the "direction of fit” is inverted. For now all human phenomena redolent of Freudian drives are “reduced” to something else. They are made distorting ephiphenoma, derivatives — in Kohut’s words, “disintegration products” — of the “irreducible” need for attachment, object-relations, security, and so on.
In any case, and notwithstanding the formidable subtlety and care of their exposition, it seems to me that the authors’ concluding discussion essentially collapses each of these three distinctions into a single, incautious position which only entrenches the “irreconcilable” polarity represented by the two models.