Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960) (I)

Hans Loewald studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger in the 1920s — before the latter’s conversion to National Socialism — and his writing reflects a philosophical sensibility. This sensibility is evident, for example, in Loewald’s conspicuous use of concepts infrequently found in the psychoanalytic canon (“mediation,” say). It is also evident in his subtle attention to the epistemic standing of psychoanalysis — the questions of whether, and in what respects, psychoanalysis is a “science,” and how the analyst’s clinical attitude of “objectivity” and “neutrality” comport with this status.

Beyond this, Loewald draws out the implications of Freudian concepts for traditional philosophical questions such as, for instance, the relation of self and world. We will observe this, in particular, in Loewald’s treatment of Freud’s evolving concept of “drive.” The meaning of this concept in Freud’s early writings is by no means identical with his mature ideas, and Loewald correlates each drive “concept” with distinct visions of self, world, and their unity.

Loewald’s article was published in 1960, though parts of it were presented as talks beginning in 1956. Perhaps owing to this publication date, when “Ego Psychology” enjoyed such hegemony in the culture of American psychoanalysis, the essay is framed as a respectful, sympathetic contribution to this current — even while Loewald appears to contest several of its basic premises, from the critical standpoints of both “drive” and “object relations” theory.

More specifically, the essay addresses and explores “the psychoanalytic process,” defined as “the significant interactions between patient and analyst which ultimately lead to structural changes in the patient's personality” (16). Throughout the essay, Loewald applies the rubric “interaction with environment” (16) to both

1. the early experiences of the child with caretakers, and

2. the contemporary analytic situation

This is hardly accidental. Indeed, the reader quickly learns that, for Loewald, the analytic process “re-actives” that early experience which had, for one reason or another, miscarried short of optimal ego-development and integration.

Hence Loewald emphasizes that both phases, infancy and analysis alike, are defined by the “connexion between ego-formation and object-relations” (16). So he writes, as a kind of précis:

If ‘structural changes in the patient's personality' means anything, it must mean that we assume that ego-development is resumed in the therapeutic process in psycho-analysis. And this resumption of ego-development is contingent on the relationship with a new object, the analyst. The nature and the effects of this new relationship are under discussion. It should be fruitful to attempt to correlate our understanding of the significance of object-relations for the formation and development of the psychic apparatus with the dynamics of the therapeutic process. A first approach to this task is made here. (16)

Loewald’s attempt to establish such a correlation compels him, however, to revisit the meanings of such ingredients of psychoanalytic theory as object-relations, transference, drives, and the function of the analyst (16), each one of which will acquire new significance as a result of this exploration. Remarkably, though, wherever these revisions deviate from the psychoanalytic mainstream, Loewald takes care to “ground” them in Freud’s own writings — as a rule, in passages that have gone overlooked or undeveloped, both by Freud’s followers and by Freud himself, perhaps because they call a number of analytic doxa into question.

Again, Loewald himself defines the article’s objective in relatively narrow terms. He wants to get a handle on a feature of therapy about which a consensus has emerged, namely, that is involves, or at least ought to involve “structural change” in the patient, in the direction of greater health. Loewald hopes to illuminate what precisely such a change involves, once it is construed as a reactivation of childhood development. In other words, he considers how the clinical process must itself be re-conceptualized, once early development is recognized as a “prototype” for the ideal result at which an analysis aims.

Loewald notes that contemporary views of the “object-relationship between patient and analyst” fail to assimilate “our present understanding of the dynamic organization of the psychic apparatus” (16). We might raise the questions, then:

1. what does this “present understanding” involve?

2. how ought this understanding to affect our ideas of the patient-analyst relationship?

Whatever Loewald’s considered answers to these questions, which are only gradually unfolded, he emphasizes here that ego-psychology does not merely constitute an “addition” to the earlier drive-theory. That is, ego psychology has not only discovered pieces of the mind and their development alongside the drives themselves, but imparts “a new dimension to the conception of the psychic apparatus as a whole” (17). For this reason, Loewald suggests, the drives themselves must be re-conceptualized in light of this contribution.