Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960) (VI)
We saw in the last entry that, for Loewald, it follows from the revisions to Freud’s drive concept that, “it is by no means the ego alone to which he [Freud] assigns the function of synthesis, of binding together” (22). This expansion of synthetic activities beyond the ego proper is implied in some of Freud’s later writings, such as “On Narcissism: An Introduction” and Civilizations and its Discontents. (To be sure, these texts do not explicitly revisit the “definition” of drives themselves.) In both cases, Loewald argues, Freud’s postulation of a “primary narcissism” stage presupposes the mind’s ability and tendency to “bind” well before the emergence, let alone the consolidation, of an “ego” agency. That is to say: “[O]bjects, reality, far from being originally not connected with libido, are seen as becoming gradually differentiated from a primary narcissistic identity of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world” (23).
By this point in Loewald’s exposition, it is plain that the sort of “unifying” activity that interests him is the mind’s integration with its environment, and most centrally with its early “objects.” Loewald focuses only secondarily on the mind’s synthesis of the elements of experience with one another. (One synthesizes the “manifold” — to use Kant’s expression — by connecting this patch of blue with that red; this softness with that roughness; and all together into a discrete object — a table, say — which one then relates to other such objects, and so on.) In the first instance, again, Loewald focuses on the mind’s synthesis of reality, the world as a whole, with itself.
Now, we may be temped to quibble with Loewald’s attempt to link this idea of self-world integration to the picture of primary narcissism found, for instance, in Civilizations and its Discontents. After all, Freud’s main point in that discussion is that, notwithstanding the infantile view of things — conserved in and as the religious adult’s “oceanic feeling” — the originary self-world identity is essentially illusory. Hence the integration of mind with the world at this stage is no “integration” at all, strictly speaking; it is rather the infantile, omnipotent misrepresentation of the facts, which are themselves “objectively” registered — by Freud — as perfectly differentiated, discontinuous, and the like.
Moreover, we need not look to so late a text as Civilizations for such a picture, in Freud, of illusory self-other “integration.” Consider, most significantly, the position reflected in the 1911 essay, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” — written, we will observe, four years before “Drives and Their Fates.” The idea here is essentially the same: to begin with, so long as the “pleasure principle” reigns, and to the extent that it does, there is for the mind no sense to dichotomies such as inner and outer, subject and object. (Much the same point appears years later in Freud’s “Negation,” from 1925.) These dichotomies — hence the view of oneself as (a) an individual, persisting entity over against (b) an independent world with which one interacts — are precisely the hard-won results of frustration, and thus the increasing suspension of the “pleasure principle” in favor of the “reality principle.”
How might Loewald respond to this line of objection? I imagine he has at least two types of rebuttal at his disposal.
Loewald might reply that, while the infant does not “see things as they are” and, under the sway of primary process, does indeed conflate the independent mother’s free ministrations with his own magical “manifestation” of the breast — nonetheless, this magical activity is, for all its distortions, a form of self-world integration. It is a regime of wish, affect, image, and idea governed by the “pleasure principle,” of course, and must therefore gradually be corrected, refined, and called into logical order by the frustration-induced “reality principle.” But fantastical integration is still integration.
Yet Loewald might also argue as follows: alongside the infant’s subjectively misapprehended or “distorted” articulation of his integration, we will observe an “objective” correlate in the behaviors of the infant-mother dyad. That is, whatever the legitimacy of the infant’s manner of “making sense” of his situation, he really is — from the first moment onwards — immersed in “integrative” activities that both unite and (increasingly) differentiate him and his environment. And this objective side of self-other integration is seemingly what Loewald means to capture in his descriptions of infant-mother interchanges. As we saw, in fact, these descriptions crucially involve the mother’s view of the infant, a view which she conveys to the latter via her responsive ways of handling him. This, as we saw earlier, is precisely the context and condition of possibility for “identification” and “introjection”:
“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. The child begins to experience himself as a centred unit by being centred upon” (20)
Here I will reiterate a point I introduced in the last entry: not only do Freud’s late revisions to the drive concept incline us to view the id, no less than the ego, in adaptive interchange with its environment; they also permit us to repair the unmediated split, in the structural model, between id and ego themselves. Traditionally, these agencies have been regarded as sui generis, governed by totally distinct principles, with separate functions. Small wonder, then, that the relation between the two became imponderable. (On that model, the id comprises drives — that is, blind stimuli seeking discharge; the ego is a reality-chastened “negotiator,” arranging — where possible — for that discharge.)
But if Loewald, following Freud’s mature speculations, is correct, then no mysterious split is necessary or even, really, imaginable. Rather, starting from the earliest (in time) and the most elementary (in organization), mind and its “drives” (the two are no longer distinct) evince an “integrative” activity — unifying and dissolving, synthetic and analytic. The “ego” that subsequently emerges is less an independent, sui generis artifact than a prolongation and refinement, at a higher level, of precisely the same integrative conatus belonging to the id. We can of course in some ways distinguish the id’s mode of integration from the ego’s. The primary process of “archaic mental functioning” (as Loewald’s disciple Jonathan Lear names it) will look rather different from its sequel, a “secondary process” that is (relatively) logical, discursive, and reality-bound. But in terms of function — the integration after which mind strives — these agencies are no longer incommensurable.
Finally, the two “dichotomies" we have examined, as well as their suspensions — id versus object; id versus ego — are, to emphasize once again, exact corollaries. For as long as a drive is considered a “dischargeable stimulus,” it is difficult to conceive any necessary “continuity" between it and
the environment (which may, or may not, “absorb” its discharge), or
the ego (which may, or may not, “arrange” its discharge).
Conversely, by reconceptualizing drives as “functions” of unification and dissolution, the id can no longer be anything except
mutual activity with its environment, and
the first, primitive prototype for the same integrative activity “taken over,” albeit with modifications, by the ego.
The revisions in the concept of drive that Loewald explicates and develops accomplish both “reconciliations” at a stroke.
The originary “bond” between drives and their objects — drive-organization — has been overlooked, Loewald indicates, precisely on account of its primitiveness in comparison to ego-organization. The latter achieves unity-in-difference — objects are at this level fairly distinguished, both from oneself and from one another. It is to these independent “objects” that ego “relates.” Drive-organization, by contrast, is “unified” with its object in an inchoate, undifferentiated way. Hence to speak of “connection” in this context is arguably a misnomer, since — both subjectively and objectively — there is as yet no discrete “I” or “objects” which could be connected:
“Instinctual drives can be seen as originally not connected with objects only in the sense that ‘originally’ the world is not organized by the primitive psychic apparatus in such a way that objects are differentiated” (23)
For this reason, Loewald suggests we adopt a vocabulary more appropriate to the sort of primitive integration attributed to mind at this level. “The qualitative difference between the two levels of organization might terminologically be indicated by speaking of environment as correlative to drives, and of reality as correlative to ego” (23). Beyond this recommendation — differentiating levels by speaking of the drive’s “environment,” rather than ego’s “reality” — Loewald suggests, a little further along, that we speak of “shapes,” rather than the ego’s distinct “objects.” (Loewald favors “shape” to the inapt “part objects or object-nuclei” (23), as it lacks “the connotation of object-fragments” (23).)