Mike Becker 7/9/23 Mike Becker 7/9/23

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).)

Mike Becker 7/2/23 Mike Becker 7/2/23

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

In the last entry, we considered Loewald’s analysis of Freud’s original drive concept, one associated with the 1915 essay, “Drives and Their Fates.” Loewald now argues that “Freud gradually moves away from this position” (22), and quotes materials from Beyond the Pleasure Principle and An Outline of Psychoanalysis which reflect this changing conception.

What sort of changes do we observe? Loewald is less concerned with obvious change in classification. From the division of drives into the “self-preserving” and “sexual,” Freud arrives at the mythical pair, Eros and Thanatos, allegedly discernible at all levels of (biological) reality. But what is significant, it seems, is not merely that Freud parses drives according to different features and applies new names — as though he were now classifying animals, say, by their number of legs, rather than the color of their fur. What a drive essentially is — its nature, function, and its relation to the rest of the organism — is re-conceptualized.

We saw that, in "Drives and Their Fates,” a drive was considered an "inner stimulus” that the “nervous apparatus” must somehow discharge. With the aid of some suitable object, the “tension” represented by the drive is reduced, one’s discomfort resolved. As early as Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, Freud ascribes another suite of characteristics to drives:

Whereas earlier, “function” or “purpose” applied to the apparatus — which worked to address and discharge the inner “stimulus” — these now apply to drives themselves. That is to say, drives are now invested with particular and variable functions. (These functions, we will find, go well beyond the — somewhat vacuous — “aim” of discharge or satisfaction.) And this means: “Instinct is no longer an intrapsychic stimulus, but an expression of the function, the ‘urge’ of the nervous apparatus to deal with environment” (22).
These functions — whose seat is now the drives, not the “apparatus” as distinct from the drives — are themselves of a different sort. The apparatus, in the earlier model, had the task of addressing, taking up, and discharging a stimulus arising from an inner source — a process that Loewald calls the “reflex arc.” Now, however, the drives — Eros an Thanatos — are viewed as per se “urges” to unify and dissolve: “[T]he aim of the instinct Eros is no longer formulated in terms of a contentless ‘satisfaction,’ or satisfaction in the sense of abolishing stimuli, but the aim is clearly seen in terms of integration” (22). This evidently means that a drive need not await the emergence of a fully-developed apparatus to acquire a “functional” character. On the contrary, from its earliest origins, a drive, and so the id, is defined by these irreducible functions of unification and dissolution. A drive, finally, is not something in connection with which the apparatus “functions”; it is the function itself.
One significant implication of these revisions is a much tighter link between “drive” and “object.” A drive, again, is no longer simply an inner, self-contained, and antecedent “stimulus,” which a separate apparatus may arrange to expend upon an appropriate object as a “vehicle” for it. A drive is rather a “function" that cannot be separated even in thought from its object. “Unification” and “dissolution” presuppose “that which is unified" and “that which is dissolved.” A drive “exists” at all only inasmuch as it is unifying and dissolving its object. It is no longer solely the ego — classically the agency of “integration” par excellence — which relates to objects in this way. Hence while there is still some basis for distinguishing between the levels of id and ego, they can no longer be distinguished according to the former criteria: “In such a perspective, instinctual drives are as primarily related to ‘objects,’ to the ‘external world’ as the ego is” (23).
Finally, I have just been hinting at another, related implication of Freud’s mature revisions: not only is a drive now inseparable from the object upon which it acts; it is at the same time inseparable from the mental apparatus as a whole — above all from the ego. Here is Loewald’s evocative description of the mind’s differentiated “unity,” according to the picture now emerging:

“In his conception of Eros, Freud moves away from an opposition between instinctual drives and ego, and toward a view according to which instinctual drives become moulded, channelled, focused, tamed, transformed, and sublimated in and by the ego organization, an organization which is more complex and at the same time more sharply elaborated and articulated than the drive-organization which we call the id. But the ego is an organization which continues, much more than it is in opposition to, the inherent tendencies of the drive-organization.” (23, my italics)

We may also look at things in the following way: Freud’s late modifications to the concept of “drive” entail corresponding modifications (likewise unappreciated) to the concepts of (1) “aim,” (2) “object,” and (3) “apparatus” — each of which, of course, pertains to drive. These revisions carry us

from the “aims” of discharge or satisfaction to those of unification and dissolution
from the “object” as vehicle for discharge to the object-for-appropriation or object-as-appropriated, and
from the “apparatus” as an autonomous, superordinate system — one that absorbs and “works off” inner stimuli pressing for discharge — to a more-or-less sophisticated, internally-differentiated expression of the drives themselves, the irreducible urges to unify and dissolve manifested at all levels of (biological) reality

Thus Loewald associates Freud’s early definition of drive with “the reflex-arc scheme of a self-contained, closed system” (22) — essentially “intrapsychic,” it seems, because the drives have as yet no necessary relation to the “object” of experience. (Except, again, as a vehicle “fitted” to satisfaction.) By contrast, Freud’s subsequent descriptions of drives imply some kind of “metabolism" or “interchange” between mind and world at the first, most primitive levels of development. And if mind, even at the level of the drives — so-called id energies — is bound up inseparably with its object, then the very notion of a purely-intrapsychic mind becomes questionable. In fact, the form the “drives” assume in any particular person will depend on the earliest “objects” it has “integrated.” These drives, after all, are simply this unifying and dissolving activity itself, and thus have no antecedent independence, no self-definition, apart from those particular “objects” he or she has engaged from the first.

Now, this detour through Freud’s evolving treatment of drives has enabled Loewald to accomplish several objectives:

He has revisited and appropriated a drive concept whose definition is consistent with the innovations of ego psychology, and thus permits a reconciliation between this psychology and a “drive theory” previously regarded as incompatible with it, or at least awkward to assimilate.
He has rectified a stubborn misconception within psychoanalysis, premised upon an outmoded understanding of drives — namely, the view that only the ego, and emphatically not the id, is a creature of integrative adaptation, structured with and by its world and, in particular, early object-relations.
He has established an intellectual foundation for an understanding, not only of early development, but of —as the essay’s title has it — the “therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.” For only an understanding of drives along these lines supports a picture of analyst-patient interaction which involves the “mediations” of both (1) self-environment and (2) ego-id. Indeed, as Loewald argues, we now perceive the inseparability of these two “relations” — 1 and 2 — with one another. As I anticipated in a previous entry, the integration of ego and id is now regarded as co-dependent with the integration of self and other.

Mike Becker 6/25/23 Mike Becker 6/25/23

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

The article’s second section contains an excursus on Freud’s concept of drive (Trieb), which — Loewald insists — underwent substantial, largely unacknowledged revisions between the early “Drives and their Fates,” and later accounts, inter alia in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Outline of Psychoanalysis. Loewald indicates that ego-psychology, the latest iteration of psychoanalytic theory, has failed to assimilate these revisions, which has in turn hampered its understanding of object-relations generally, and the analyst-patient relation, in particular.

Loewald begins by questioning a dichotomy to which the “structural point of view,” or the ego-psychology then dominant, has led, between

the ego, conceived as something in contact with, and adapted to the world, “a creature of and functioning in conjunction with external reality” (21), and
the id, treated by contrast as something purely internal and constitutional, an “area of the instinctual drives…unrelated to the external world” (21).

Accordingly, while the ego is in part shaped by experience, that is, contact with reality, the id appears to be unalterably itself, purely “immanent,” and unaffected — both at its origin and afterwards — by any such contact. This way of parsing things, Loewald suggests, has prevented ego psychology from assimilating a theory of drives. He makes use of a familiar, Freudian image to illustrate the position under review:

“To use Freud's archeological simile, it is as though the functional relationship between the deeper strata of an excavation and their external environment were denied because these deeper strata are not in a functional relationship with the present-day environment; as though it were maintained that the architectural structures of deeper, earlier strata are due to purely 'internal' processes, in contrast to the functional interrelatedness between present architectural structures (higher, later strata) and the external environment that we see and live in.” (21)

In other words, it is true that the adult id-unconscious, still governed by the pleasure principle and primary process, is older and in some respects more fundamental than the “late” ego; and, moreover, it is not now in direct contact with reality, for which the reality-responsive ego provides the necessary mediations. It does not follow, however, that simply because the id is not now in direct contact with reality — or shaped, without intermediary, by it — that it was never in such a state. So Loewald corrects the analogy and with it our picture of the id:

“The id, however—in the archeological analogy being comparable to a deeper, earlier stratum—as such integrates with its correlative ‘early’ external environment as much as the ego integrates with the ego's more ‘recent’ external reality. The id deals with and is a creature of ‘adaptation’ just as much as the ego—but on a very different level of organization.” (21)

The dichotomy at issue has more than theoretical interest, of course. Fortifying “the conception of the psychic apparatus as a closed system” (21) has practical consequences for the conduct of an analysis. Indeed, “the traditional notion of the analyst’s neutrality and of his function as a mirror” (21) is ultimately connected, for Loewald, with this conception.

It is just here that Loewald revisits the concept of “drive” and charts its developments in Freud’s writings. In doing so, we gather, Loewald hopes to rectify the untenable conception of id as an item totally “insulated” from both reality and its sequel, the ego. In particular, by appropriating from the mature Freud a concept of drive neglected in ego psychology, Loewald positions himself to describe the “psychic apparatus” in a way that does justice to the centrality of object-relations both in infancy and in the unique situation of an analysis.

What, Loewald now asks, is the “relation to objects” of the “instinctual drives” (21)? Our answer will depend, of course, on the concept of “drive” at our disposal. One such concept, and a traditionally hegemonic one, is introduced in Freud’s 1915 “Drives and Their Fates.” Before turning to the drive concept itself, though, Loewald quotes extensively from the piece’s opening section, where Freud comments on the essential provisionality, corrigibility, and fluidity of scientific concepts. While necessary for organizing the data of observation, these concepts develop, one definition giving place to another, in response to further investigation and reflection. It is faintly ironic that Freud introduces drive as one such “basic concept” — imprecise, tentative, “open to alterations in its content” (22) — in light of its stubborn resistance to revision in the history of psychoanalysis. The concept has remained permanently entombed, it seems, in these first formulations from 1915.

In any case, whatever the “relation to objects” of drives, according to these early remarks, we need not assume that this relation will hold constant in all possible iterations of the concept. Nor will it, in the event, according to the position reached in Freud’s own intellectual development. (This seems important to underscore straightaway, since so much of the ideological identity of more recent psychoanalysis is premised on discarding the drive concept as somehow incompatible with the “relational turn.” Yet here Loewald is insisting, in 1960, that the drive concept may be, and should be revised in a way that accommodates the facts of observation — very much including the constitutive “relationality” of mind.)

What concept of drive, then, emerges in Freud’s 1915 article? What concept, that is, has kept such a problematic grip on the psychoanalytic imagination? Here a drive is famously defined as an inner stimulus. Hence this stimulus, originating and operating continuously within the organism, is counterposed to any and all “external” stimuli. In fact, as Loewald documents, Freud offers the much less mysterious term “need” as a synonym for such an inner stimulus or drive. Entailed in this whole conception, Loewald observes, is a teleological, “functional” model of mind. He quotes Freud directly as follows: “[T]he nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level” (22). The organism, and more specifically the “nervous system,” functions to “discharge” the internal stimuli that reach it, to “minimize” them. By contrast, the aim of a drive itself is, on one description, in every case the same: satisfaction. This satisfaction in turn requires an “object,” which is likewise defined — at a certain level of abstraction — as that which affords this satisfaction. (There is evidently some mutual-determination or circularity involved in these definitions: we know of particular “drives” by those “objects” upon which they satisfy themselves; while a particular “object” receives its meaning from that “drive” it happens to satisfy.)

Again, it is precisely this conception of the drive-object nexus or interface — the one canonized in “Drives and Their Fates” — which has had such decisive influence on later psychoanalytic thinking. For it is here that Freud characterizes the “relation” of drive to its object as something fungible, tactical, and in some important sense arbitrary. Loewald quotes Freud arguing that a drive’s object is “‘what is most variable about an instinct,’ ‘not originally connected with it,’ and as becoming ‘assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible’” (22). Loewald then summarizes: “It is here that we see instinctual drives being conceived of as ‘intrapsychic,’ or originally not related to objects” (22).

In other words, the “intrapsychic” picture of mind originates, at least in part, in this first, fateful definition of a drive as essentially, and in the first instance, independent of its object. Conversely, this definition tacitly excludes any “interpersonal” picture of mind. And indeed: if the concept of drive admits only of this sort of analysis — as something contingently related to its object — then it would appear to lead ineluctably to the instrapsychic picture, to the mind as a closed system, and to repel all attempts to establish “relations” as — somehow — irreducible and primary. Hence, whatever else “drives” are, or involve, at this stage of Freud’s thinking, they enjoy a kind of antecedent, independent existence “within” the organism. Only subsequently do they establish, or fail to establish, “relations” with objects.

Now, Loewald does not linger long with this early model of drives. But we may wish to press for more clarification, and enter a caveat or two. For even here, Freud seems to set limits to the variability, arbitrariness, and thus the “separability” of objects in relation to drives. After all, in allowing that the assignment of an object to a drive depends on its “being peculiar fitted to make satisfaction possible,” Freud recognizes some link between the two. The infant’s self-preserving drive of hunger can, and will, attach to a breast or a bottle; but it will not attach to a stone or piece of fabric. The sexual drive — libido — will perhaps admit of greater variability in its object-choice: from breast, to thumb, to other organs, to fetishes. But even here, as a matter of empirical observation, there seem to be limits to this sort of “infinite” extension.

Nor is it altogether precise to deny any kind of “dependence” of drive on object. A drive “depends” on its object for discharge, tension-reduction, or satisfaction. The admitted range of objects that can bear this function — the fact that drive does not depend on any particular object — does not alter the fact that it will depend on some object. True, I can get along well enough without any specific foodstuff — this sandwich — or even, within limits that are themselves unclear, entire food-types — say, dairy. But without some consistent nourishment I will not survive. Thus, whatever changes Freud’s concept undergoes, departing from the intrapsychic model of mind, the link between drive and object must surpass this “thin” sort of interdependence.

I will discuss these revisions in the next entry.

Mike Becker 6/18/23 Mike Becker 6/18/23

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.

Mike Becker 6/11/23 Mike Becker 6/11/23

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:

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).
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.

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.”
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:

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