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

Loewald concludes his excursus on Freud’s evolving drive concept by once again evoking the failure of psychoanalysis to assimilate that evolution, that is, to profit theoretically from it:

“Thus it has come about that the ego is seen as an organ of adaptation to and integration and differentiation with and of the outer world, whereas instinctual drives were left behind in the realm of stimulus-reflex physiology. This, and specifically the conception of instinct as an ‘inner’ stimulus impinging on the nervous apparatus, has affected the formulations concerning the role of ‘objects’ in libidinal development and, by extension, has vitiated the understanding of the object-relationship between patient and analyst in psycho-analytic treatment.” (23)

At the same time, of course, he tacitly gestures here towards the light Freud’s mature drive concept may throw, not only on early development and the adult mind, but on the clinical situation and “therapeutic action.”

In the following section, then, and on the basis of these revisions to the drive concept — the acknowledgement, in short, that there is such a thing as drive-organization — Loewald pursues the meaning of this “object-relationship between patient and analyst” (23). He does this, once again, by first re-examining “the dynamics of interaction in early stages of development” (24), only now with the aid of the newly-won figure of drive-organization. How does the interaction of mother and infant appear to us once we’ve brought this figure to bear?

Somewhat unexpectedly, given the intellectual trajectory Loewald has only just finished charting, he now turns our attention to Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic and unpublished “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895). Here Freud famously outlines a program that he will abandon shortly afterwards. Again, we may be astonished by the chronological strangeness of Loewald’s account: an “early,” inadequate concept of drive (1915) gradually gives way to a “mature,” more viable one, starting around 1920 — a mature concept, the use of which is somehow best captured in Freud’s hastily-abandoned reflections on infant-mother interactions from 1895!

In any case, the picture found in that section of Freud’s “Project” titled “The Experience of Satisfaction” is something like the following. At the very beginning of life, the infant is a bearer of “as yet undifferentiated urges” (24), or, alternatively, “relatively uncoordinated urges” (24). This seems to mean that the infant is incapable on its own of “fulfilling” these urges or even, indeed, of “recognizing” them. So the infant is not only helplessly unequipped to satisfy its need for, say, nourishment, and hence totally dependent on the mother for that “function.” Beyond this, the infant is initially in no position to “recognize” its urges — to distinguish them from  one another (is this sensation hunger, or physical discomfort, or anxiety…?), or to know what, exactly, would meet that need (the breast, the bottle, the blanket…?). Thus Loewald writes:

“The understanding recognition of the infant's need on the part of the mother represents a gathering together of as yet undifferentiated urges of the infant, urges which in the acts of recognition and fulfillment by the mother undergo a first organization into some directed drive.” (24)

To the infant, the mother embodies, and is something like an ambassador for, a higher level of psychological organization. It is as though the infant, which cannot yet make sense of, let alone gratify, its urges, must “delegate” these functions to the mother until they have crystallized in the infant itself. In fact, it is precisely the mother’s attitude towards, and behavior with, the infant’s still inchoate stock of urges which facilitates that crystallization:

“Gradually, both recognition and satisfaction of the need come within the grasp of the growing infant itself. The processes by which this occurs are generally subsumed under the headings identification and introjection. Access to them has to be made available by the environment, here the mother, who performs this function in the acts of recognition and fulfillment of the need. These acts are not merely necessary for the physical survival of the infant but necessary at the same time for its psychological development in so far as they organize, in successive steps, the infant's relatively uncoordinated urges. The whole complex dynamic constellation is one of mutual responsiveness where nothing is introjected by the infant that is not brought to it by the mother, although brought by her often unconsciously. And a prerequisite for introjection and identification is the gathering mediation of structure and direction by the mother in her caring activities. As the mediating environment conveys structure and direction to the unfolding psychophysical entity, the environment begins to gain structure and direction in the experience of that entity; the environment begins to ‘take shape’ in the experience of the infant. It is now that identification and introjection as well as projection emerge as more defined processes of organization of the psychic apparatus and of environment.” (24)

We are now better positioned to grasp a proposition, concretely, which we contemplated earlier in a more abstract and undeveloped form. In that place, we considered the notion — closely associated with Hegel — that what someone “is” depends upon what he or she is “for another.” One’s self-relation — the way in which one regards oneself —is inseparable from the regard of others. Loewald, we said, gives a development-psychological turn to this notion, so that the infant’s self-integration is made co-extensive with its “object-integration” — that is, its emerging relation with the mother. The mother’s manner of recognizing and handling the infant establishes that infant’s capacity to “do likewise” to itself.

At the time, however, we had not yet considered Loewald’s recovery of the drive concept intimated by the mature Freud. For that reason, the way in which infant self-integration depends upon object-integration lacked specificity. With the assistance of this revised drive concept, though, we are now able to enrich our picture. In particular, the original drive concept of an internal, constitutional stimulus in no sort of contact with, hence not adapted to, reality —this concept precluded an understanding of the earliest self-other integrations. The mother’s activities of recognizing, calling into order, and satisfying the infant’s urges — obvious facts of the mother-infant dyad — would be imponderable if these urges were as reality-indifferent as the early drive theory supposed.

Now, however, with the revised drive concept in place, according to which id is in its origins very much in contact with reality and shaped by that experience — now the mutual activities of mother and infant are not only ponderable but, in a sense, plainly necessary. The infant whose ego is as yet inchoate can be nothing but this bundle of indeterminate, that is, undifferentiated urges. (Loewald seems to be saying that these urges are not initially determinate, differentiated, and articulate: is not as though they simply lacked an ego to notice them and bring them to “fruition.” On the contrary, these urges are themselves inchoate, and remain so insofar as they lack the impress of the mother’s recognition and treatment. By the time the infant possess an ego agency capable of relating to these urges — as the mother had previously — the urges themselves have changed.)

Loewald now brings the separate threads of his account together in the following way:

“[T]he organization of the psychic apparatus, beyond discernible potentialities at birth (comprising undifferentiated urges and Anlagen of ego-facilities), proceeds by way of mediation of higher organization on the part of the environment to the infantile organism. In one and the same act—I am tempted to say, in the same breath and the same sucking of milk—drive direction and organization of environment into shapes or configurations begin, and they are continued into ego-organization and object-organization, by methods such as identification, introjection, projection. The higher organizational stage of the environment is indispensable for the development of the psychic apparatus and, in early stages, has to be brought to it actively. Without such a ‘differential' between organism and environment no development takes place.” (24)

This dense and evocative passage appears to summarize Loewald’s considered view regarding infant development. It is, evidently, a conclusion to which the preceding refections ostensibly entitle him. In the next entry, I will develop these ideas in greater detail.