Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960) (III)
We ended the last entry with 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)
Loewald’s use of the term “integration” in this place signals several things:
While ultimately Loewald is indeed concerned with self-integration proper — the more-or-less adequate coordination between the agencies of mind — he is to begin with, and as a preparation of sorts, interested in the integration between the self and its object. The manner in which a person relates to another (a caretaker, say, or an analyst), assimilating that other via the combinatory “processes” Loewald names — this is evidently the first and persisting content of “integration.”
The next observation follows from the first: self-integration — above all the manner in which ego “takes up” and expresses id energies, or fails to — is a function of self-other integration. While Loewald studied under Heidegger, whose mitsein is a categorial cognate of this idea, the claim is Hegelian at its core — a recapitulation, in the idiom of developmental psychology, of Hegel’s famous assertion in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other; i.e., it is only as a recognized being” (Para. 178). To simplify greatly: how a person regards himself is mediated by, or dependent on his experience of others, and how they regard him. In the vocabulary of object-relations: in order to grasp, and perhaps to alter, the adult neurotic’s self-integration — the structural disposition, say, to repudiate certain unacceptable impulses — we must view it as the repetition, intrapsychically, of an antecedent self-other relation, whose specific qualities have hardened into enduring psychological patterns. What sort of “qualities” characterize early object-relations, between infant and caregiver, which subsequently become the adult’s basic modes of self-relating? Consider the following, remarkable passage:
“The child, by internalizing aspects of the parent, also internalizes the parent's image of the child—an image which is mediated to the child in the thousand different ways of being handled, bodily and emotionally. Early identification as part of ego- development, built up through introjection of maternal aspects, includes introjection of the mother's image of the child. Part of what is introjected is the image of the child as seen, felt, smelled, heard, touched by the mother. It would perhaps be more correct to add that what happens is not wholly a process of introjection, if introjection is used as a term for an intrapsychic activity. The bodily handling of and concern with the child, the manner in which the child is fed, touched, cleaned, the way it is looked at, talked to, called by name, recognized and re-recognized—all these and many other ways of communicating with the child, and communicating to him his identity, sameness, unity, and individuality, shape and mould him so that he can begin to identify himself, to feel and recognize himself as one and as separate from others yet with others” (20)
Loewald’s quotation above ends with an important, though mainly tacit distinction between the “defensive” and non-defensive functions of the “integrative processes.” I find this distinction intriguing, since a strong current in the history of psychoanalysis reduces these processes to their defensive uses. Introjection and projection, for example, are accordingly conceived as essentially unconscious, self-distorting means of managing intolerable contents: paradigmatically, anxiety-laden sexual and aggressive drives. Yet in Loewald’s account, particularly at the beginning of life, but optimally in adulthood as well — i.e. in analysis — these “integrative processes” are viewed, not as self-distorting defenses, but as vital, necessary modes of self- and other-relating. Freud himself appeared to equivocate in his characterization of these processes. When introducing the mechanism of “identification,” in "Mourning and Melancholia,” the accent is plainly on its “pathogenic” origin and consequences: it is described entirely as the unconscious response to loss among those with narcissistic constitutions. Rather than mourn the loss, the melancholic unconsciously “identifies” with the lost object, and punishes that (now internalized) object with its self-reproaches. But later on, for instance in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud recognizes identification as an indispensable phase and enduring stem of normal human development.
When an analysis achieves what it ought to achieve, in fact — the so-called “structural change” of personality — it represents a period of ego “consolidation” that stands comparison with the “consolidations” of the Oedipus complex, that of “the end of adolescence,” and other, unnamed episodes occurring “at various other life-stages” (17). Following Erik Erikson’s concept of “identity crisis,” Loewald argues that these phases of ego consolidation “follow periods of relative ego-disorganization and reorganization” (17) — that is, just the sort of “ego-regression” evinced in a patient during an analysis. As Loewald now puts it:
“An analysis can be characterized, from this standpoint, as a period or periods of induced ego-disorganization and reorganization. The promotion of the transference neurosis is the induction of such ego-disorganization and reorganization. Analysis is thus understood as an intervention designed to set ego-development in motion, be it from a point of relative arrest, or to promote what we conceive of as a healthier direction and/or comprehensiveness of such development.” (17)
The transference-neurosis, what Freud called an “artificial illness,” refers to the patient’s recapitulation of the early, conflict-ridden constellation at the root of his adult neurosis, only this time vis-à-vis the analyst and analytic situation. But for Loewald, this plainly presupposes the analyst as “co-actor,” as “object”:
“The transference neurosis, in the sense of reactivation of the childhood neurosis, is set in motion not simply by the technical skill of the analyst, but by the fact that the analyst makes himself available for the development of a new ‘object-relationship’ between the patient and the analyst.” (17)
How might such a new object-relationship look? And how does it comport with “traditional” views of analytic practice?
In order to answer these questions, Loewald returns to a criticism raised earlier in the essay — namely, of the misunderstandings that surround the connection between psychoanalysis and science. To be sure, Loewald does not deny scientific standing to the discipline, nor does he call the value of that standing into question in some unqualified way.
(This, incidentally, sets Loewald’s position apart from subsequent developments in psychoanalytic theory — in particular, a tendency to repudiate the traditional “scientific” pretensions of psychoanalysis, in favor of viewing it as a hermeneutical craft, a pragmatic collection of more-or-less useful metaphors and models. According to this view, these metaphors and models, while indispensable for the purposes of therapy, nonetheless have nothing universal or timeless about them.)
Rather, Loewald is rejecting a specific picture of the analytic situation. According to this picture, the relation of analyst to analysand is itself a scientific one — between a detached “observer,” on the one hand, and an observed “object,” on the other. Loewald distinguishes sharply, then, between
psychoanalysis as a science, that is, a body of interconnected, truth-apt propositions about the mind, and
psychoanalytic practice, which, apart from furnishing the raw data for observation and subsequent theorization, also presupposes a human relation that is itself hardly “scientific”
But there is a considerable difference between “using scientific knowledge and methods” (19) — a capacity Loewald is happy to grant to the analyst — and a more doubtful “insistence that the analytic activity is a strictly scientific one” (19). So, on the one hand, Loewald claims that he “in no way denies or minimizes the role scientific knowledge, understanding, and methodology play in the analytic process” (19), and, on the other, he dismisses as “untenable” any suggestion that “therapeutic analysis is an objective scientific research method” (19). This distinction is overlooked, however, in the notion that the analyst with a patient is akin to the biologist at a microscope. In fact, such a distortion obscures what is genuinely scientific in the analytic situation:
“While the relationship between analyst and patient does not possess the structure, scientist—scientific subject, and is not characterized by neutrality in that sense on the part of the analyst, the analyst may become a scientific observer to the extent to which he is able to observe objectively the patient and himself in interaction. The interaction itself, however, cannot be adequately represented by the model of scientific neutrality” (18-19)
Hence the analyst may periodically or even continuously withdraw from the analytic relationship, intellectually, as an “objective” observer; but the analytic relationship itself appears to possess many, if not all of the qualities constitutive of any human relationships. Most conspicuously, for Loewald, the patient’s “observing ego,” upon which analysis in its classical guise has always depended, is itself a function of identification:
“We speak of the patient's observing ego on which we need to be able to rely to a certain extent, which we attempt to strengthen and with which we ally ourselves. We encounter and make use of, in other words, what is known under the general title: identification. The patient and the analyst identify to an increasing degree, if the analysis proceeds, in their ego-activity of scientifically guided self-scrutiny. If the possibility and gradual development of such identification is, as is always claimed, a necessary requirement for a successful analysis, this introduces then and there a factor which has nothing to do with scientific detachment and the neutrality of a mirror. This identification does have to do with the development of a new object-relationship of which I spoke earlier. In fact, it is the foundation for it” (19)
At the same time, a caveat is necessary. This underlying analytic “relationship,” in itself non-scientific, does not “have anything to do with advocating an emotionally-charged attitude toward the patient or ‘role-taking’” (19). In this respect, Loewald’s position appears to be some distance from Ferenczi’s, nor does he exhort us to provision “corrective emotional experiences.”
Instead, the “identificatory” relationship that develops between analyst and patient, which underlies the analysis, and which must be distinguished from a scientific, knowledge-gathering enterprise — this relationship is constituted precisely by “classical” technique. In other words, it seems to require nothing beyond the complementary activities of the patient’s free association and the analyst’s interpretation.