Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (III)
We’ve been investigating some of the central differences between the “drive-structure” and “relational-structure” metapsychological models. In particular, we’ve been trying to make sense of the claim, associated especially with Ronald Fairbairn, that human motivation is in the first instance a matter, not of pleasure-seeking, but of object-seeking. As I began to suggest in the last entry, this idea raises a cluster of semantic difficulties that Greenberg and Mitchell intimate without, however, directly addressing. (Years later the authors will independently redress this oversight — the former in Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory, the latter in Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. For now, however, I will restrict my focus to the jointly authored Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.)
One may certainly allow, as drive theorists do, that object-relations, attachment, and the like, figure prominently in human affairs; that, indeed, this motivation eclipses all others, including more narrowly “hedonic” impulses and behaviors that seem to abstract from these relations; and yet still maintain that, nonetheless, this very object-seeking motivation is best characterized in the language of pleasure and unpleasure. And I considered several passages from Freud’s writings, including “Mourning and Melancholia” and Civilization and its Discontents, that appear to reflect just such a position.
But I suggested a likely relational rejoinder: that Freud’s own writings signal the inadequacy of “pleasure-seeking” and “pain-avoidance” vocabulary, which obscures “object-relations” altogether. As I wrote in the last entry: “It is as though the difference in intensity of “pleasure” or “pain” between the two cases — say, the “pleasure” in having a 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 threshold changes in “quantity” tip over into changes in “quality.” Just as, in the natural world, incremental increase 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 than pleasure and unpleasure.”
Against these considerations, a drive theorist might revive and repurpose the conceptions of John Stuart Mill’s “utilitarianism.” The latter, too — now in the moral domain — measures the value of action by the “criterion” of pleasure. While eager to distinguish and rank pleasures according to their vulgarity or nobility, lower or higher, Mill did not hesitate to reduce the run of human behavior, moral or otherwise, to the “pleasure principle” avant la lettre. The excitement of aesthetic experience and the tranquility of philosophical abstraction, no less than the satisfaction of the animal functions, can and should be embraced by one and the same “principle.” To be sure, we can, and should, prefer the “pleasures” of art, philosophy, and — yes — community, over those considered “base.” And yet, these distinctions notwithstanding, “pleasures” they all remain, and there is no compelling reason to suspend the idiom of pleasure in favor of some other category, just because we have located a superior instance of it — indeed, the “highest” — whether that is sagely wisdom or, alternatively, the “attachment” we feel and cultivate with our fellow human beings. Again, an unreconstructed drive theorist may avail him- or herself of some such line of reasoning, designating the infant’s manifestly attachment-seeking behaviors, as well as the adult’s, as privileged vehicles of pleasure.
And so the debate might continue.
Now are the parties to this dispute — “drive” theorists and “relational” theorists — simply caught in some kind of conceptual confusion or quibble? Would the putative differences, evidently so fundamental to both, simply evaporate once
drive theorists acknowledged, unreservedly, that human beings are ultimately motivated by the “pleasure” attendant upon object-integration, and the “unpleasure” of object loss, insecurity, and mis-integration; and, conversely, once
relationalists acknowledged that what essentially matters in human mentality and behavior — whatever their internal differentiations — is still pleasure and its opposite?
In fact, Greenberg and Mitchell ultimately discount even the possibility of such a rapprochement between the two positions, so irreconcilable are their alleged premises. In a concluding discussion reminiscent, in its elegiac tone, of Freud’s own representation of the mythical struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the authors insist on the permanence, the irresolvability of the dispute. Their conclusion is something on the order of Kant’s “antinomies” in his critical system:
“It is neither useful nor appropriate to question whether either psychoanalytic model is “right” or “wrong.” Each is complex, elegant, and resilient enough to account for all phenomena. The drive model establishes individual pleasure seeking and drive discharge as the bedrock of human existence; the rest of human behavior and experience, including social needs and activities, is derived from the operation of drive and its vicissitudes. The relational model establishes relational configurations as the bedrock of existence; all other human behavior and experiences, including compulsive and impulsive sexuality and aggression, are relational derivatives. Each model establishes a different natural order; each can explain everything. Each model swallows up the other. The models, to use Kuhn’s term, are “incommensurable”; they rest on fundamentally different a priori premises. Any dialogue between their adherents, although useful in forcing a fuller articulation of the two models, ultimately falls short of meaningful resolution” (404)
I will develop these ideas in the next entry.