Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960) (VIII)
I ended the last entry with a lengthy quotation from Loewald’s article, and a promise to develop its implications. Here, again, is the passage:
“[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)
In today’s entry, I will reproduce this passage piece by piece, with my own running commentary interpolated. For readability, I have emboldened Loewald’s words, but not mine:
[T]he organization of the psychic apparatus, beyond discernible potentialities at birth (comprising undifferentiated urges and Anlagen [investments] of ego-facilities), proceeds by way of mediation of higher organization on the part of the environment to the infantile organism. “Mediation,” a concept associated with Hegel and his European disciples — hence inter alia Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology — has become so semantically overloaded that it can be difficult to say, in a given instance, what exactly is meant. At some high level of generality, if A is “mediated” by B, then A is somehow dependent upon B. But in practice this can mean any number of things.
“Mediation” carries, of course, the sense of a process opposed to “immediacy.” For instance: rather than an immediate, direct experience, one may speak of an experience mediated — that is, “inflected” — by concepts, symbols, emotions, or desires. And communication is “mediated” by language, that is, takes place in and through the medium of language, which accordingly “transmits” mental contents from one person to another. We may also speak of labor “mediating” raw materials — forming and shaping them — into a finished artifact. Similarly, one may also develop, elaborate, or concretize — mediate — something which begins as simple and undeveloped, or a mere “potential.” (This is one way of viewing education — a possible translation of the German Bildung.)
Finally, a stark opposition between two items — say, subject and object, or freedom and determinism, or fact and value — may be theoretically or practically “mediated,” such that they are “reconciled,” that is, no longer opposed in a hard and fast way. A “peer mediator” is a person who assumes this role in the disputes of others. In Hegel’s thought, a "mediating” concept that embraces two, seemingly antithetical concepts has such a reconciling function. In the Science of Logic, for example, the concept “becoming” embraces and thus reconciles “being” and “nothing.”
Loewald’s frequent use of the term “mediation” in this essay trades on a number of these meanings at once. Thus when Loewald says that development in mental “organization” involves the “mediation of higher organization on the part of the environment to the infantile organism,” on my reading he is saying several things. Plainly, and very generally, the developing infant (a) depends upon (is mediated by) the mother’s “higher organization,” which is (b) transmitted or conveyed (mediated) to that infant, whose “psychic apparatus” is (c) shaped or contoured (mediated) by the mother’s behavior. At the same time, and in a way that anticipates the mechanism of “therapeutic action,” the mother (d) reconciles (mediates) the infant with itself, with its own urges, at a point in time when the infant cannot achieve this on its own.
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.
Again, Loewald appears to do several things in this sentence:
He continues the emphasis on “mediation” of the infant by the “environment.” This mediating process, beginning in the most primitive and inchoate mother-infant metabolism, gradually “differentiates” things via more sophisticated “methods” (nota bene: not “defenses”) such as identification, introjection, and projection.
He applies the terminological distinctions he’d introduced earlier: “drive direction” is the infantile precursor to the subsequent, more advanced “ego organization”; just as the infant’s initial “organization of environment into shapes and configurations” is superseded by a relatively determinate “object-organization.” The infant advances on a continuum of increasing determinacy, as regards both its “self” and the “world” in which it finds itself.
He concretely solidifies the principle of “coincidence,” formerly discussed rather abstractly in his detour through the drive concept. The correspondence between self-complexity and world-complexity, it seems, is a necessary, conceptual one. For it is really the same unity, viewed now under the aspect of the self, now under the aspect of the world. Greater world-organization — carved up into stable, defined objects with predictable qualities, rather than shifting, porous “shapes” — just is greater self-organization — a mind capable of that world-organization, because in possession of coherent concepts, feelings, and desires, and no longer a package of “uncoordinated urges” imparting a no-less-chaotic, uncoordinated schema to its environment. This necessary coincidence is signaled, I think, by the first, evocative part of Loewald’s sentence: “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…”
We may now add that, for Loewald, environmental “mediation” underlies this coincidence. Self-organization and world-organization, each an index of the other, are together functions of the mother’s responsive, recognizing, fulfilling interactions with the infant. Any particular piece of this interaction — “the same sucking of milk” — gives rise inseparably to developments in the infant-self (‘This is the meaning of this urge’) and the infant-world (‘That is the object which meets this urge’).
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.” The strong thesis of the “primacy of the object” (as Theodor Adorno might phrase it) follows from our last point above. There is neither self-organization nor world-organization in the absence of “mediating” interactions that, so to speak, “educate” the infant in the ways of both. Such interactions, that is, presuppose an “educator,” a psychic apparatus organized at a higher level, whose handling of the infant, and specifically whose attention to the infant’s urges, inculcates in the latter certain self-conceptions (‘I am hungry’) and corresponding world-conceptions (‘That object will eliminate this hunger’) — conceptions that cannot otherwise develop. Phrased slightly differently: making this “differential” between infant and mother necessary to development entails that the infant cannot develop in organization from out of its own resources, but depends upon the presence and cooperation of a “better” organized psychic apparatus, which it must “incorporate” in any number of ways.