Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. I. Discursivity
In this series of entries, I draw on a range of Paul Ricoeur’s writings. I do this in order to grasp several concepts that, for Ricoeur, define the meaning of Freud and Freudianism — both theoretically and clinically. The texts include, especially, the early essay, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” the concluding sections of Freud and Philosophy, and several pieces from the collection, On Psychoanalysis. Over time and across these texts, Riceour consistently develops certain idiosyncratic concepts that help clarify the structure of psychoanalysis. In the first entries I will consider the four “criteria” that, for Ricoeur, constitute analytic experience as such: “discursivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “psychic reality,” and “narrativity.” Later, I will consider the place of “archaeology” and “teleology” in his accounts. What do these admittedly commonplace terms mean, for Ricoeur, in the context of analytic theory and practice? And what kinds of experience and knowledge are unsealed by these concepts that might otherwise remain inaccessible?
Four Criteria: An Introduction
In several places, Ricoeur enumerates the four characteristics — four “criteria” — of an analytic “fact.” The proximate motivation and context for this enumeration is epistemological: Ricoeur wants to establish whether, and in what sense, psychoanalysis trades in “facts” analogous to those found in the natural sciences — whether, that is to say, psychoanalysis can be scientific, and how. (Ultimately, Riceour argues that it cannot be a natural science, which reckons with “facts” that are differently constituted.)
We may abstract from this epistemological context, though, and rehearse these criteria as a ways of grasping Ricoeur’s “picture” of analysis — not, that is, to assess whether analysis bears comparison with the natural sciences, but rather to determine — as a clinical matter — what kind of thing analysis is or ought to be. On the one hand: what is the “object” of an analysis? What sort of “thing” do analyst and patient activate, experience, examine, and the like? On the other hand: how, according to which norms and principles, do analyst and patient relate to this object? — and with what end in view? It seems to me that Ricoeur’s discussion of analytic “facts” provides answers to these fundamental questions surrounding the “identity” of psychoanalysis.
While Ricoeur is not at all time clear on this point, these criteria seem to share a common denominator: that is, they presuppose the patient’s “desire” as in all cases the sui generis clinical focus. What these four criteria elucidate are the necessary dimensions of desire, or the “modes” in which desire must appear in analysis.
In this respect, “desire” in analysis is something akin to Kant’s “concept of an object in general,” a placeholder for a theoretical entity — an “x” — which is never directly apprehended, but which “appears” through certain specifiable “categories” of experience. For Kant, any object of possible experience will evince certain features: a spatiotemporal “substance” with “properties,” linked by chains of causality with other such substances, and so on. By analogy, we may say that, for Ricoeur, any object that admits of analytic experience must, likewise, conform to a suite of conceptual conditions of possibility. The account is in either case “transcendental.” That is, one begins with an uncontroversial item of experience and inquires: what must be true in order for that item to exist as it does? So we may observe a typical analytic situation and ask: what kinds of “structures” must be in place, latently but effectively, such that this situation is possible at all? For Kant, the “categories” of inter alia “substance,” “causality,” and “plurality” are constitutive of any object of experience. What, on this analogy, are the “categories” constitutive of any possible analytic experience?
First Criterion: Discursivity. The desire that is in any way accessible to analytic investigation is discursive, or verbally expressible:
“All that enters into the field of investigation and treatment is that portion of experience capable of being put into words…This screening by discourse in the analytic situation thus functions as one criterion of what will be taken to be the object of the discipline: not an instinct as a physiological phenomenon, not even desire as a kind of energy, but desire as a meaning capable of being deciphered, translated, interpreted. The theory must therefore take into account what I will call the semantic dimension of desire” (54)
We might like to enter a caveat here, or a reminder about how this account is framed. Ricoeur needn’t be claiming that human desire is always and everywhere discursive — a strong ontological claim. To be sure, there may be reasons to attribute such a strong claim to Ricoeur, based on the drift of his thinking as a whole. But in the present context, he is committed only to a weaker claim: namely, that in order to show up in analysis, hence to constitute an analytic fact, desire must be expressible in words. That is to say, this account does not in principle preclude other approaches towards, and conceptions of, desire. A neuroscientist or research psychologist, say, might organize their experience along different lines, and in ways that enjoy perfect legitimacy in their object-domains. Hence, for instance, to show up on a brain imaging device, or on a longitudinal study of a control group’s behaviors, “human desire” must conform to other categories of experience.
Again, it is not just any piece of experience that in analysis is put into words, at least centrally, but something specific, namely: desire. Everything about the “analytic situation” is arranged, in fact, such that it “forces desire to speak” (54). This criterion, especially, nods to Freud’s “Repetition” essay, and its premise that certain mental contents, when they are not known and recollected in analysis — in the medium, finally, of communication — are instead unconsciously discharged in deed, “acted out,” repeated. Ricoeur seems to extend or enlarge upon Freud’s position. Not only must analysis bring the patient to explicitly recollect repressed memories, rather than repeat them in action, as a more primitive mode of “remembering.” Beyond this, and while perhaps including it, all desire must be spoken, put into words.
Now, broadly construed, this first criterion would not in itself distinguish analysis from the natural sciences. After all, in the latter, too, nothing — no observation or data — finally enters its domain except in propositional form. Hence in claiming that nothing counts or figures in analysis except “that portion of experience capable of being put into words” (54), Ricoeur must have something narrower in mind. Analysis centers desire, not merely as something given propositional form — “from the outside,” so the speak — but as something expressed, verbalized, or communicated and not realized. Precisely inasmuch as this desire is not “acted out,” it enters into the medium of language, whereupon it admits of “analysis” proper — discussion, association, interpretation, and the like.
The expression of desire need not, for course, take as direct or literal a form as “I want to do x” or “I wish to possess y.” On the contrary, the working assumption of an analysis is that such an utterance is potentially unavailable to the patient until much later — not until after the resistances have been beaten back and the repressions loosened. We may rather suppose that, in the full range of the patient’s communications during analysis, many of which have no obvious contiguity with his or her “desires,” these latter nonetheless infuse and inflect everything: reports of dreams, accounts of interactions, descriptions of scenes that are remembered or imagined, and so on. Indeed, just because the patient’s desire is rarely, if ever, uttered in so artless, unambiguous, and undisguised as form as “I want x,” every communication falls under suspicion, as something “decipherable” in terms of that (otherwise unexpressed) desire.
Now, certainly Ricoeur does not deny the existence or discount the importance, in analysis, of such things as non-verbal communication, “acting out” and “acting in,” dreams and fantasies, somatic events and sensations — all phenomena that are not immediately, “as such,” or in the first instance “expressed in words.” (A dream itself, while it is being dreamt, is unlikely to have this quality.) Ricoeur’s point is rather that these things only enter analysis, become analytic “facts,” inasmuch as they are “spoken” and thus become “meaningful.” Not the dream per se — as-dreamt — but the dream-as-reported possesses “reality” in an analysis. What matters is not the slouch or provocative outfit, nor the tardiness or missed payment, but these same events as registered — remarked upon, associated to — and so drawn into the discursive vortex or “semantic field” of analysis, in which every “piece” relates to all the others.
In the next entry, I will discuss Ricoeur’s “second” criterion.
Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960) (IX)
The core of Loewald’s account, towards which his reflections on drive and early development have led, is now in view. For he is now able to elaborate a homology between (a) the infant-with-mother, and (b) the patient-with-analyst — and in considerable detail. In doing so, Loewald redeems a promise intimated in the piece’s title and explicit in its opening sections. For he still owes the reader an answer to the question of “therapeutic action”: what is structural change? — what does it look like, involve, and what are its enabling conditions?
In fact, “homology” is probably too weak a term to use in this context. The patient in analysis is something more than “akin” to the infant in its environmental situation, though it certainly is that. The relation is more profound than a homology because — as Loewald indicated in the introductory comments — the patient just is the infant, whose thwarted, stalled, or warped development is “reactivated” in an analysis, albeit at a “higher level.” The two situations look so similar, in other words, because the “essentials” of both personality and personality-change remain the same throughout life. This premise, it seems, is necessary background for grasping the full implications of the next passage, which I will quote in its entirety:
"The patient, who comes to the analyst for help through increased self-understanding, is led to this self-understanding by the understanding he finds in the analyst. The analyst operates on various levels of understanding. Whether he verbalizes his understanding to the patient on the level of clarifications of conscious material, whether he indicates or reiterates his intent of understanding, restates the procedure to be followed, or whether he interprets unconscious, verbal or other, material, and especially if he interprets transference and resistance — the analyst structures and articulates, or works towards structuring and articulating, the material and the productions offered by the patient. If an interpretation of unconscious meaning is timely, the words by which this meaning is expressed are recognizable to the patient as expressions of what he experiences. They organize for him what was previously less organized and thus give him the ‘distance’ from himself which enables him to understand, to see, to put into words and to ‘handle' what was previously not visible, understandable, speakable, tangible. A higher stage of organization, of both himself and his environment, is thus reached, by way of the organizing understanding which the analyst provides. The analyst functions as a representative of a higher stage of organization and mediates this to the patient, in so far as the analyst’s understanding is attuned to what is, and the way in which it is, in need of organization.” (24)
Loewald’s choice of words, which can hardly be accidental, echoes and recapitulates the qualities of infant-mother interaction, as he’d previously described it. In short, the ideal analyst is assigned the same package of “functions” as the mother. Thus Loewald perceives the analyst “structuring and articulating,” “expressing,” “organizing,” “enabling,” and “handling” vis-à-vis the patient, in all the latter’s “productions.” And this analyst, “representative of a higher stage of organization,” and “attuned” to the patient, is accordingly also in a position to “mediate” whatever requires mediation. Once again, Loewald appears to trade on a number of the interconnected meanings of “mediation” — to convey the “dependence" of the patient on the analyst, who “shapes,” “develops,” “transmits,” and “reconciles” vis-à-vis the patient and the latter’s “need” of higher organization.
Now, the specific ways in which an analyst performs these mediating tasks — hence the identity of these tasks — will of course differ enormously from the mother’s activities. The latter, we found, are defined by their concretion — their “literal” quality. The infant is “seen, felt, smelled, heard, touched by the mother,” whose “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” (20) are all indispensable for development.
The analyst, by contrast, in ways suited to the patient’s relative psychological maturity, accomplishes analogous “mediations” principally through language. In fact, Loewald’s major innovation here arguably consists in re-describing the canon of traditional analytic technique in terms of this “mediating” function — a function shared, to reiterate, mutatis mutandis, with the mother in the infant’s first years of life. Again:
“Whether he verbalizes his understanding to the patient on the level of clarifications of conscious material, whether he indicates or reiterates his intent of understanding, restates the procedure to be followed, or whether he interprets unconscious, verbal or other, material, and especially if he interprets transference and resistance — the analyst structures and articulates, or works towards structuring and articulating, the material and the productions offered by the patient.”
And of course — to complete the homology — the analyst, too, occupies the position of a “higher stage of organization,” and this introduces that “differential” which conditions the possibility of psychological growth for the patient. What applied to the infant and mother earlier, then, applies equally to an analysis: “Without such a ‘differential’ between organism and environment no development takes place” (24).
At this point, a modern clinician familiar with psychoanalytic intellectual history since Loewald’s piece — familiar, indeed, with authors such a Sándor Ferenczi and Erich Fromm, whose writings preceded this piece by decades — may feel uneasy about the way Loewald frames analysis here. His guileless claim that the analyst embodies “a higher stage of organization” compared to the patient, a relation which in essence reproduces the situation in the nursery, surely constitutes an “infantilization” of the patient-position. Evidently Loewald’s view does nothing to upset, and everything to fortify, the traditional, inegalitarian, and potentially authoritarian hierarchy between a healthy, mature, and fundamentally sane analyst-expert, on the one hand, and a “sick” patient who is deficient along each of these axes, on the other. It may be useful, then, to examine this impression, to see whether or not such view can credibly be imputed to Loewald, or whether phrases such as “higher stage of organization” conceal a more complicated, and perhaps more politically benign, set of ideas.
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.
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.
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).)