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

For Loewald, the “interaction-processes” in an analysis are accompanied, upon observation, by “steps in ego-integration and disintegration” (17), that is, by subtle and unsubtle personality changes. Yet a “theoretical bias” has prevented psychoanalytic theory from appreciating this fact, namely, “the view of the psychic apparatus as a closed system” (17). One factor in this bias is the notion of an analyst, “not as a co-actor on the analytic stage” (17), but rather “as a reflecting mirror” (17), a function “characterized by scrupulous neutrality” (17).

This idealized picture of the neutral analyst — upon whose reflective surface the patient simply “projects” thoughts, wishes, fantasies, and conflicts, in short, transferences — has been vigorously contested in the last decades by inter alia the interpersonal and relational psychoanalytic schools. The latter have questioned both the desirability and, indeed, the possibility of such “neutrality.” What I find intriguing, in the present context, is that Loewald makes his criticisms from a standpoint, not outside of ego psychology, but within it — a type of “immanent criticism,” as this sort of approach has come to be labeled. It is finally a development of ego-psychology itself that compels us to re-imagine the analyst as a “co-actor on the analytic stage.”

But why exactly has psychoanalysis demanded “neutrality” of the analyst in the first place? What aim or aims does this value serve? Loewald identifies two, related justifications for the technical requirement of neutrality — neither of which, finally, can be upheld without qualification:

    1. The “scientific objectivity” of the enterprise is allegedly compromised by deviations from neutrality. Specifically, it is “contaminated by the analyst’s own emotional intrusions” (17).

    2. Only the neutral analyst can “guarantee a tabula rasa for the patient’s transferences” (17)

Both justifications signal wariness of “interference of the personal equation” (17). One supposes, in the first case, that any “data” affected by the personal equation is ex hypothesi tainted, and that, in the second case, this personal equation will deprive the patient of the freedom needed to “transfer” conscious and unconscious materials onto the analyst. If transference-analysis consists ultimately in interpreting the patient’s distortions regarding the analyst, it will naturally be hampered inasmuch as the analyst conforms in reality to those very suppositions. Thus,

“the analyst must avoid falling into the role of the environmental figure (or of his opposite) the relationship to whom the patient is transferring to the analyst. Instead of falling into the assigned role, he must be objective and neutral enough to reflect back to the patient what roles the latter has assigned to the analyst and to himself in the transference situation. (17)

In fact, at this point Loewald abruptly drops the theme of “transference,” taking it up again only in the last pages of the article. So I, too, will put it aside for now.

Instead, let us reflect for a moment on the first justification for analytic neutrality. How is the “field of observation” — the arena of “scientific objectivity” — compromised by the personal equation, i.e. the non-neutral analyst’s “emotional intrusions”? What is the classical position? While Loewald does not parse things in just this way, I suppose the alleged contamination might take at least two forms.

  1. An “emotional” analyst might not see things “as they are.” His anger, anxiety, or arousal handicaps his ability to notice things, and distorts — as in a funhouse mirror — the details he does notice. We might say: the lens on his microscope is scratched or clouded by feelings, obstructing access to the situation “in itself.”

  2. At the same time, the emotional analyst, to the extent that he is emotional, impinges upon the patient, whose behavior thence expresses, not “intrapsychic reality” alone, but also a response to the analyst. In this scenario, it is not merely the subjective lens that the analyst’s emotion alters; emotion also disturbs or disorders the object itself, the “independent realty” of which is now lost to view. (For other thinkers, of course, the very notion of an individual self’s “independent reality” is mistaken.)

Significantly, Loewald does not so much discard the values of neutrality and objectivity — as aims, indeed, toward which good analysts ought to strive — as redefine them in a way that comports with the real analytic situation. “But such objectivity and neutrality now need to be understood more clearly as to their meaning in a therapeutic setting” (17).

For this reason, Loewald now proposes “a fresh look at the analytic situation” (17). Such a fresh look is necessary precisely in order to determine the meaning and legitimacy of values like “objectivity” and “neutrality,” and in a way that does justice to the classical wariness surrounding both. Loewald construes this analytic situation as a “phase,” at least ideally, of “ego-development,” further described as “a process of increasingly higher integration and differentiation of the psyche apparatus” (17).

Now clearly, for Loewald this ego-development concerns more than the “ego” in its narrow sense — as a discrete agency, alongside “id” and “superego,” in the structural model. On the contrary, “ego” refers to the full “psychic apparatus” as a system that is more or less “harmoniously” constituted. At other times, Loewald writes simply of “self-development” (18), which seems in keeping with this conceptual broadening.

But what sort of process, exactly, is captured in phrases like these? What, in particular, does Loewald have in mind when he describes the components of this process with terms like differentiation, integration, and consolidation? It is one thing to idealize, as Plato and Aristotle did, “the well-ordered soul” — the picture of which implies some kind of congruence between practical reason, habit, and desire. For the ancients, a person’s soul was considered well-integrated when impulse and affect, arising as a matter of “second nature,” were precisely those determined by reason. Conversely, a soul was badly integrated, “divided” against itself, when reason and appetite conflicted — when the desires that grip me are not those I have rationally chosen or those I would choose.

We may reasonably expect a different “picture,” though, in Loewald’s account. And he provides a clue as to his meaning in the following passage:

“I am trying to indicate that the activity of the analyst, and specifically his interpretations as well as the ways in which they are integrated by the patient, need to be considered and understood in terms of the psychodynamics of the ego. Such psychodynamics cannot be worked out without proper attention to the functionings of integrative processes in the ego-reality field, beginning with such processes as introjection, identification, projection (of which we know something), and progressing to their genetic derivatives, modifications, and transformations in later life-stages (of which we understand very little, except in so far as they are used for defensive purposes)” (21)

In the next entry, I will begin by commenting on this passage.

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