Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (V)
In the last entry I collected in one place some ingredients in the drive-structure model, as a way of reckoning the likelihood of an “accommodation” with the relational-structure model. I suggested that any such accommodation would depend upon which ingredients, specifically, we were hoping to preserve. To reiterate: according to the classical account, drives are
organized by considerations that are narrowly hedonic — pertaining to pleasure and unpleasure. Even in Freud’s mature conception, when (1) the notion of psychic equilibrium, the “constancy principle,” is implicitly revised, and (2) the “death drive” — manifesting psychologically in and as aggression — raises the prospect of some motivation “beyond the pleasure principle,” there is every indication that this distinct motivational stem, though perhaps not itself hedonic, becomes discernible only on account of its complex, uneasy fusion with erotic life, hence (indirectly) yielding its own sort of pleasure.
structurally peculiar: either inner excitations, somatic tensions pressing for discharge, or — later on — trends of unification and dismemberment
classifiable according to distinct typologies: either libidinal and self-preserving, in Freud’s early work, or erotic and death drive infused, in the later.
Now, of the dimensions I’ve isolated here, it seems clear that (b) carries the least likelihood of assimilation by relational thinkers. Whatever meaning tropes like “attachment” and “object-seeking” convey in contemporary discussions, they do not include — seem patently to exclude — tensed, “energic” quantities, continuously inducing the psychic apparatus to “work” — direct and discharge — onto some suitable vehicle; nor would they have much use even for the late Freud’s more amenable tendencies of unification and dissolution, since their abstraction verges on vacuity. Certainly organic life universally evinces both tendencies. But the usefulness of this recognition for analysts — theoretically or clinically — is far from obvious.
Somewhere in the middle, as I’ve been suggesting, is (a). This is, I think, the most intriguing drive “ingredient” of the three. Since the last few entries were dedicated to examining the semantic force of phrases like “pleasure-seeking” and “object-seeking,” I will not elaborate here on the obstacles to their “reconciliation," except to repeat that the aim is worth pursuing.
At the other end of the spectrum, (c) seems to raise the least possible obstacles to the rapprochement in view. After all, nothing will prevent us from introducing another column to the drive-typology. Alongside the “drives” of libido, self-preservation, and aggression, we may clear space for an “object-seeking” drive in our discourse. Whether this novel drive enjoys equal standing vis-à-vis the others, or, indeed, becomes the most important one, in terms of which the others are finally explicable, does not matter so much. A “drive” it remains.
We find several precedents for the theoretical strategy of “derivation” in Freud’s own writings. He, too, feels compelled to address observations of human behavior and mentality that threaten to complicate his account. Such observations incline his theoretical opponents to attribute basic motivational trends to human beings — “drives” — rivaling Freud’s own candidates.
In the “History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” to take one example, Freud criticizes Alfred Adler for inter alia denying foundational standing to the “libidinal drive.” In other words, Adler fails to recognize certain other observed tendencies — variously called “self-assertion,” the “will to power,” and the “masculine protest” (54-55) — as in the last analysis “epiphenomenal” or derivative of the former.
Likewise, in a section of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that bears even more directly on Greenberg and Mitchell’s thesis, Freud insists — with his inimitable self-assurance — that everything going by the names “herd instinct,” sociality, gregariousness, and the like, invested with “foundational” explanatory value by other social and political analysts, is nothing more than a belated “reaction-formation” against Freud’s drives.
Once Freud has recognized his two-fold drives as the only irreducible springs of human motivation (libido and self-preservation; later, Eros and Thanatos), then the full sweep of human experience must be more-or-less disguised expressions of them. Sometimes, these drives are observed in something like their “pure” form — as in “genital” sexual behavior when it is minimally “aim deflected.” Even here, however, Freud would underline the Kantian-flavored caveat that we know and experience, not the drives themselves, but merely their psychical “representative.” We know them, in other words, only inasmuch as they “put the mind to work.”
In most cases, in fact, these drives manifest in ways that are distorted to varying degrees. Consider again the case of a nominal “social instinct,” as it’s assessed in Group Psychology. In that place, Freud construes the “fraternal” feeling of community members for one another, not as an irreducible datum, or an immediate, guileless, “natural” expression of good will, but a highly convoluted and essentially misleading “management” of disavowed aggression. All else, it seems, is similarly reducible. (We might further recall, in this connection, Freud’s “Anal Erotism” piece, which outlines the mechanisms underlying “character” and its development from out of the drives.)
All of this, of course, is broadly of a piece with Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” his “archaeological reduction” of what is later, more refined, and “higher,” to what is early, primitive, and base. And in this program, nothing incarnates the latter as do libido and aggression. This is continuous, too, with Freud’s position in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” namely, that no human activity or achievement entirely transcends the “pleasure principle” — that even science, as close to a sacred telos as one is likely to discover in Freud’s writings, does not embody the “reality principle” alone, but remains irremediably tethered at places to its “pleasure principle” origin (and antipode).
I have allowed myself these comments, which may strike the reader as slightly tangential to the unique “content” of Greenberg and Mitchell’s book — namely, the relational-structure paradigm — precisely for what they suggest about “formal” argumentative strategy. For it may equally be said of thinkers in the relational mould (especially Ronald Fairbairn and Heinz Kohut) that they avail themselves, in a formal way, of this same hermeneutics of suspicion. Only the "direction of fit” is inverted. For now all human phenomena redolent of Freudian drives are “reduced” to something else. They are made distorting ephiphenoma, derivatives — in Kohut’s words, “disintegration products” — of the “irreducible” need for attachment, object-relations, security, and so on.
In any case, and notwithstanding the formidable subtlety and care of their exposition, it seems to me that the authors’ concluding discussion essentially collapses each of these three distinctions into a single, incautious position which only entrenches the “irreconcilable” polarity represented by the two models.
Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (IV)
In the last entries I have parsed the distinction between the drive-structure and relational-structure models — hence their potential reconcilability — in terms of motivation. Are human beings essentially pleasure-seeking, as Freudians insist, or — as Fairbairn proposed — object-seeking? But this emphasis on motivation somewhat obscures the specificity of drive theory. Freud never stipulates “pleasure seeking” and “unpleasure avoidance” in some generic way, but always something rather concrete: early on, libidinal and self-preservative drives, later, erotic and aggressive drives, as the sui generis media of pleasure (and frustration), depending upon reality’s cooperation with their satisfaction. Accordingly, the mutual exclusivity of “drive” and “relational” models of mind has to do, not merely with the pleasure principle as such, but with the status of these particular motivations, together, finally, with the basic “picture” of a drive generally. The latter is either (a) the early Freud’s “inner excitation”, pressing on the psychic apparatus — “putting it to work” — which enables its “discharge,” or (b) the more broadly “unifying” and “dissolving” tendencies of mind, observable at all levels of the biological world, found in Freud’s later thinking. (In fact, as I noted in a previous entry, Greenberg and Mitchell emphasize the former almost exclusively, a curious oversight that diminishes some of the impact of their account. Hans Loewald provides a corrective to this oversight.)
So for the relationalists, to be sure, the human being is object- or attachment-seeking, rather than fully explicable in terms of other “urges” (sexual, self-preservative, aggressive, or otherwise). Yet the basic nature of these tendencies, trends, motives, are — apart from the types — themselves discrepant. In particular, it seems that relational thinkers are inclined to recognize, not (a) inner excitations pressing for discharge, or (b) the universal, combinatory and destructive activity definitive of biological reality, but (c) so-called “motivational systems.” (John Bowlby and Harry Stack Sullivan ought perhaps to be mentioned at this place.) Thus, on the questions both of the types of motivation attributable to human beings (“libidinal” or “relational," say), and the nature of a “motivator” generally (for instance, “inner impulsions” or “systems”), the two models part ways. Perhaps, finally, it is for these reasons that relational thinkers have rejected drive theory, rather than for reasons pertaining to the “pleasure principle” per se.
All of which is to say: neither the opposition between the drive-structure and relational-structure models, nor — therefore — the potential for a genuine rapprochement — are straightforward problems. Indeed, Greenberg and Mitchell’s book consists largely in chronicling the history of unsuccessful attempts by psychoanalytic theorists to “reduce" one model to the other, or to “mix” and “reconcile” them on a more equal footing. And in the last entry I quoted a striking passage in which the authors underscore the basic futility of this effort:
It is neither useful nor appropriate to question whether either psychoanalytic model is “right” or “wrong.” Each is complex, elegant, and resilient enough to account for all phenomena. The drive model establishes individual pleasure seeking and drive discharge as the bedrock of human existence; the rest of human behavior and experience, including social needs and activities, is derived from the operation of drive and its vicissitudes. The relational model establishes relational configurations as the bedrock of existence; all other human behavior and experiences, including compulsive and impulsive sexuality and aggression, are relational derivatives. Each model establishes a different natural order; each can explain everything. Each model swallows up the other. The models, to use Kuhn’s term, are “incommensurable”; they rest on fundamentally different a priori premises. Any dialogue between their adherents, although useful in forcing a fuller articulation of the two models, ultimately falls short of meaningful resolution. (404)
As I have now suggested, however, the putative “intractability” of the opposition between these two models — hence the dim prospect of some encompassing synthesis — appears to depend upon which ingredients in the drive-structure model we have committed to “honoring.” In the foregoing discussion I have differentiated a number of these ingredients in the drive-structure model, not all of which carry equal potential for accommodation, given the bedrock, non-negotiable premises of the relational-structure model. To collect these ingredients in one place: in the classical account, drives are
organized by considerations that are narrowly hedonic — pertaining to pleasure and unpleasure. This remains the case even in Freud’s mature conception, where (1) the notion of psychic equilibrium, the “constancy principle,” is implicitly revised, and (2) the “death drive” — manifesting psychologically as aggression — raises the prospect of some motivation “beyond the pleasure principle.” For even here, there is every indication that any distinct motivational stem, though perhaps not itself hedonic, becomes discernible only on account of its complex, uneasy fusion with erotic life, hence (indirectly) yielding its own sort of pleasure.
structurally peculiar: either inner excitations, somatic tensions pressing of discharge, or — later on — trends of unification and dismemberment
classifiable according to distinct typologies: either libidinal and self-preserving, in Freud’s early work, or erotic and death drive-infused, in the later
In the next entry, I will conclude with some comments on the likelihood of a rapprochement between the drive-structure and relational-structure models in light of these particular features.
Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (III)
We’ve been investigating some of the central differences between the “drive-structure” and “relational-structure” metapsychological models. In particular, we’ve been trying to make sense of the claim, associated especially with Ronald Fairbairn, that human motivation is in the first instance a matter, not of pleasure-seeking, but of object-seeking. As I began to suggest in the last entry, this idea raises a cluster of semantic difficulties that Greenberg and Mitchell intimate without, however, directly addressing. (Years later the authors will independently redress this oversight — the former in Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory, the latter in Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. For now, however, I will restrict my focus to the jointly authored Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.)
One may certainly allow, as drive theorists do, that object-relations, attachment, and the like, figure prominently in human affairs; that, indeed, this motivation eclipses all others, including more narrowly “hedonic” impulses and behaviors that seem to abstract from these relations; and yet still maintain that, nonetheless, this very object-seeking motivation is best characterized in the language of pleasure and unpleasure. And I considered several passages from Freud’s writings, including “Mourning and Melancholia” and Civilization and its Discontents, that appear to reflect just such a position.
But I suggested a likely relational rejoinder: that Freud’s own writings signal the inadequacy of “pleasure-seeking” and “pain-avoidance” vocabulary, which obscures “object-relations” altogether. As I wrote in the last entry: “It is as though the difference in intensity of “pleasure” or “pain” between the two cases — say, the “pleasure” in having a hunger satisfied, as against the “pleasure” of contact with the mother — is so vast that they are finally incommensurable. As Hegel teaches us, at some threshold changes in “quantity” tip over into changes in “quality.” Just as, in the natural world, incremental increase in temperature, though for some time leaving water’s essential “quality” untouched, at some point converts the latter into another “state,” that is, into steam, likewise, behaviors that admit — within some range — of “measurement” in terms of units of pleasure, seem finally to become qualitatively different, demanding other predicates than pleasure and unpleasure.”
Against these considerations, a drive theorist might revive and repurpose the conceptions of John Stuart Mill’s “utilitarianism.” The latter, too — now in the moral domain — measures the value of action by the “criterion” of pleasure. While eager to distinguish and rank pleasures according to their vulgarity or nobility, lower or higher, Mill did not hesitate to reduce the run of human behavior, moral or otherwise, to the “pleasure principle” avant la lettre. The excitement of aesthetic experience and the tranquility of philosophical abstraction, no less than the satisfaction of the animal functions, can and should be embraced by one and the same “principle.” To be sure, we can, and should, prefer the “pleasures” of art, philosophy, and — yes — community, over those considered “base.” And yet, these distinctions notwithstanding, “pleasures” they all remain, and there is no compelling reason to suspend the idiom of pleasure in favor of some other category, just because we have located a superior instance of it — indeed, the “highest” — whether that is sagely wisdom or, alternatively, the “attachment” we feel and cultivate with our fellow human beings. Again, an unreconstructed drive theorist may avail him- or herself of some such line of reasoning, designating the infant’s manifestly attachment-seeking behaviors, as well as the adult’s, as privileged vehicles of pleasure.
And so the debate might continue.
Now are the parties to this dispute — “drive” theorists and “relational” theorists — simply caught in some kind of conceptual confusion or quibble? Would the putative differences, evidently so fundamental to both, simply evaporate once
drive theorists acknowledged, unreservedly, that human beings are ultimately motivated by the “pleasure” attendant upon object-integration, and the “unpleasure” of object loss, insecurity, and mis-integration; and, conversely, once
relationalists acknowledged that what essentially matters in human mentality and behavior — whatever their internal differentiations — is still pleasure and its opposite?
In fact, Greenberg and Mitchell ultimately discount even the possibility of such a rapprochement between the two positions, so irreconcilable are their alleged premises. In a concluding discussion reminiscent, in its elegiac tone, of Freud’s own representation of the mythical struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the authors insist on the permanence, the irresolvability of the dispute. Their conclusion is something on the order of Kant’s “antinomies” in his critical system:
“It is neither useful nor appropriate to question whether either psychoanalytic model is “right” or “wrong.” Each is complex, elegant, and resilient enough to account for all phenomena. The drive model establishes individual pleasure seeking and drive discharge as the bedrock of human existence; the rest of human behavior and experience, including social needs and activities, is derived from the operation of drive and its vicissitudes. The relational model establishes relational configurations as the bedrock of existence; all other human behavior and experiences, including compulsive and impulsive sexuality and aggression, are relational derivatives. Each model establishes a different natural order; each can explain everything. Each model swallows up the other. The models, to use Kuhn’s term, are “incommensurable”; they rest on fundamentally different a priori premises. Any dialogue between their adherents, although useful in forcing a fuller articulation of the two models, ultimately falls short of meaningful resolution” (404)
I will develop these ideas in the next entry.
Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (II)
In the last entry, I introduced the two conceptions that, for Greenberg and Mitchell, form the “endpoints” of psychoanalytic theory: namely, the “drive-structure” and the “relational-structure” models. And in its historical struggle to define the (self-evidently important) role of “others” in mental life, psychoanalysis has oscillated between the two. We have seen that, according to the drive-structure model, established canonically in Freud’s “Drives and their Fates,” everything pertaining to human mentality — very much including the “other” — is reducible to inner drives and their “discharge,” according to principles of pleasure and unpleasure. Human “others,” so-called “object relations,” are important only inasmuch as they facilitate this discharge. Hence “interpersonal” reality is something secondary to “intrapsychic” reality.
By contrast, “relational-structure” theorists — quintessentially Harry Stack Sullivan and Ronald Fairbairn, but also, to varying degrees, others like Donald Winnicott and Heinz Kohut — organize their meta-psychologies along rather different lines. While certainly making room for experiences of pleasure and displeasure as such, these latter are divested of their fundamental weight in explaining human thought, feeling, and behavior. Instead, they are relativized against a more encompassing and significant context of human relations, that is, the definitively human effort to establish, maintain, and regulate relations with others, as well as the defensive operations adaptively necessary to manage less successful attempts.
Is this polarity sustainable? Freud himself insists on the inseparability of (a) the individual mind and (b) significant “others” — perhaps most incisively in the opening passages of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:
The contrast between individual psychology and social or group [Masse] Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely…In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (3)
I have examined these passages in an earlier entry and won’t belabor the point here. In fact, Greenberg and Mitchell themselves (46) draw attention to this text, while arguing that — ultimately — for Freud “social phenomena are explicable entirely within the terms of an individual psychology” (46). (I tend to think that Freud’s “proviso” here is more subtle than the authors are prepared to allow, but for the sake of our reconstruction it is not so important at the moment.)
In a roughly similar way, Freud himself came to question the hegemony of the “pleasure principle” in the biological universe — human and otherwise — at least in its initial conception. Indeed, he complicates the principle in a couple of ways. On the one hand, he acknowledges, in the “Economic Problem of Masochism,” that pleasure cannot simply be a matter of tension-reduction — a reflection of the “constancy” model — since there are situations in which an increase of tension is felt as pleasurable, for example in sexual foreplay. This acknowledgement is relevant, of course, inasmuch as our picture of drives and drive “discharge” is grounded in notions of tension and tension “release.”
On the other hand, and more notoriously, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle identifies a separate drive — the death drive — governed by an essentially different, indeed antithetical “principle”: decomposition, regression, or “aggression” (as the drive is subjectively experienced and objectively observed). Despite these late innovations, however, Freud refused to draw the sorts of conclusions to which they might have led him. For they effectively call into question, not only his early construal of a “drive,” but the concept itself.
Now, it was partly in order to satisfactorily explain the repetition compulsion that Freud felt compelled to introduce the death drive into his metapsychology. (How this innovation assorts, or doesn’t assort, with his early treatment of “repetitious” behavior in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” as an unconsciously enacted form of memory in lieu of its conscious recollection — this is less clear.) For Greenberg and Mitchell, though, it is a considerable advantage of the “relational-structure” model that it can illuminate domains of human functioning such as painful, self-sabotaging mental illness without recourse to so obscure and “metaphysical” an entity as the death drive. If we are essentially object-seeking, and not pleasure-seeking, then manifestly “un-pleasurable” pathologies pose no special theoretical problem: for they are finally explicable as efforts to maintain or salvage precarious relations, internal “object ties,” even where the latter undermine pleasure and, in fact, bring about great suffering.
Yet there is a thorny semantic issue raised by this relational “solution,” which Greenberg and Mitchell seem at times to recognize but which they never directly address, let alone resolve. For surely it is always open to the classical drive theorist to reply in something like the following fashion: ‘True enough, this range of behavior is conceivable as “object-seeking,” even to the point of causing unpleasant or “painful” neurotic symptoms — say, somatic complaints, or intrusive thoughts, or a great spectrum of self-defeating behaviors. This is evidence, however, not of the absence or even limitation of the pleasure principle, but precisely of this principle’s power. It simply demonstrates that the “pleasure” of the object-relation is, from the perspective of drive, worth the cost of some quantity of displeasure. Or, alternatively: it shows that the massive “displeasure” occasioned by the loss of the object-tie would outweigh the relatively trivial loss of hedonic gain seen in neurotic behavior.’
In other words, apart from limitations in theoretical imagination, nothing prevents the drive theorist from recognizing object-relations as the loci of both the greatest possible happiness and the most terrible pain of which human beings are capable. And this thought, of course, is hardly a correction or amendment to Freud’s considered view of human motivation; on the contrary, it is a straightforward summation of it. Freud makes this abundantly clear in Civilization and its Discontents, where he catalogues the manifold sources of human suffering: “[W]e are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love” (29). And we can read the entirety of “Morning and Melancholia” as an extended meditation on this same theme. The “work” of mourning, in which the the ego struggles via “reality-testing” to overcome its original “libidinal position” and “withdraw attachment” from the lost object, attests to this suffering:
Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged…Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. (244-5)
To be sure, Freud considers the amount of suffering involved here an “economic” puzzle, given his theory of libidinal investment. But he does not for a moment dispute the reality of this immense suffering.
A “relational” thinker will presumably feel that, in such statements, Freud has “given the game away,” effectively confessing that the whole idiom of pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance is hopelessly unequal to the realities of object-relations, which are less privileged “vehicles” of pleasure than conditions of possibility for any pleasure überhaupt. It is as though the difference in intensity or volume of “pleasure” or “pain” between the two cases — say, the “pleasure” in having a transient hunger satisfied, as against the “pleasure” of contact with the mother — is so vast that they are finally incommensurable. As Hegel teaches us, at some particular threshold changes in “quantity” tip over into changes in “quality.” Just as, in the natural world, incremental increases in temperature, though for some time leaving water’s essential “quality” untouched, at some point converts the latter into another “state,” that is, into steam, likewise, behaviors that admit — within some range — of “measurement” in terms of units of pleasure, seem finally to become qualitatively different, demanding other predicates altogether than “pleasure” and “unpleasure.”
I will continue this line of reflection in the next entry.
Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) (I)
I recently read Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell’s Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, in preparation for a book panel at the William Alanson White Institute commemorating its 40th anniversary. I was invited onto the panel as a discussant, and given the opportunity to ask Greenberg any questions I liked. (The co-author, Mitchell, died some years ago, and so he was not around either to complement or complicate Greenberg’s account of the book’s gestation, publication, and subsequent reception.) The event was recorded and I’m attaching a link to the video here:
In these entries, I would like to recount some of the reactions and questions I had while reading this important work — as influential as any in recent psychoanalytic intellectual history. And I will repeat some of the questions I posed directly to Greenberg.
First, though, I want to sketch some of the the book’s central claims. My procedure here will depart somewhat from precedent: the previous entries generally contain close readings, interpretations, and reconstructions, with a minimum of critical comment on my part. The objective has been to clarify, to grasp the material as best I can. In these entries, my approach is different in two respects. On the one hand, there is little “close” reading — I want rather to rehearse the rough movements of a book that runs over 400 pages, without much (or any) concern for the intricacies of argument. On the other hand, I want to share some open-ended questions, and critical reactions, to the book as a whole.
Object Relations is sometimes credited as the founding document — the proverbial “bible” — of relational psychoanalysis. To what does the book owe this reputation? In fact, Greenberg and Mitchell develop an idiosyncratic history of psychoanalytic theory, which — for partly heuristic purposes — they conceive as a persistent struggle between two metapsychological models or paradigms. From nearly the beginning, in Freud’s own writings, the discipline has been riven between two, profound, and (on the evidence) mutually-exclusive visions of the human mind, its motivation, and its development. These are designated (a) the “drive-structure” model and (b) the “relational-structure” model. Each provides comprehensive answers to a number of basic questions: What is the mind? Of what “stuff” is it compounded, and according to which principles does it function? What essentially motivates human thought and behavior, and how do these forces intersect with the mental and behavioral development of human beings from infancy to adulthood? And finally: what is the role, standing, and meaning of other persons — so-called “object relations” — in connection with each of these metapsychological questions?
“Accounting for the enormous clinical significance of object relations has been the central conceptual problem within the history of psychoanalytic ideas. Every major psychoanalytic author has had to address himself to this issue, and his manner of resolving it determines the basic approach and sets the foundation for subsequent theorizing” (4, italics in original)
Now, few of the theories canvassed in the book embody either of these two models in its “purity.” Only the Freud of “Drives and their Fates,” it seems, defends a metapsychology in which, to an extreme and uncompromising extent, all things human — the architecture, laws, motivations, and development of mind, as well as ostensibly “interpersonal” phenomena — are finally expressions solely of inner drives and their “discharge,” tension (unpleasure) and its reduction (pleasure). At the start, Freud dichotomizes drives into libidinal and self-preserving sorts; by the end, these give way to Eros and Thanatos, or libido (even more expansive than before) and destruction. But, so far as Greenberg and Mitchell let on, both the nature and limitations of Freud’s drive concept persist essentially unaltered throughout these “taxonomic” changes.
[At this place I would interpolate a first, critical reaction. As Hans Loewald demonstrates in his essay, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” Freud’s late concept of drive is essentially different from the early one. Its “mechanism” is, not discharge of tension as the psychic apparatus’s means to homeostasis, but the activity of unification (love and life) and dismemberment (death and aggression). Whether or not this observation would influence the authors’ considered judgment and classification of Freud is, of course, another question. But it is remarkable, I think, that such an important revision in the drive concept is barely registered — especially in light of the inclusion of Loewald’s piece in the bibliography, and a sympathetic (albeit brief) reference to it in the book’s final chapter.]
On the other hand, two figures qualify as especially “pure” representatives of the relational-structure model: Harry Stack Sullivan, innovator of “interpersonal psychiatry,” and Ronald Fairbairn, that “object relations” theorist who did the most to jettison the notion “drive” from his theory building. In the case of both, the human mind — its nature, lawfulness, motivation, and development — is grounded, not in drives pressing for discharge (in order to restore psychic equilibrium), but in the necessity of “relations" with others.
These two versions of the relational-structure model are presented in distinct vocabularies. In the case of Sullivan, who did not claim to by an “psychoanalytic” thinker and who kept analytic concepts at arm’s length, the “model” involved the “interpersonal” status of “personality.” A given item — a person, an action, a psychopathology, and so on — can be observed, understood, and treated only in its “interactions” and “integrations” with others. In the case of Fairbairn, by contrast, Freud’s thesis that the human being is essentially pleasure-seeking gives way to another, rival conception of the human conatus: we are essentially object-seeking. In both Sullivan’s and Fairbairn’s systems, though, and notwithstanding their different vocabularies, the nature, development, and motivation of human beings are inseparable from others.
By contrast, according to classical drive-theory, these “others” — despite their self-evident clinical and “phenomenological” significance for everyone — are demoted to secondary “vehicles” of drive discharge. Indeed, in Freud’s original formulations, the word “object” is evidently chosen for its neutrality in this connection. It so happens, that, in practice, the “object” of one’s drives is another person, the mother. But this is only, Freud suggests, because of all objects, she is best able to facilitate drive-discharge. Were a non-human object — animate or inanimate — equally or better-equipped for this function, then nothing would prevent it from bearing the full significance of a cathected “object.” In any case, it is finally the pursuit of pleasure, and avoidance of displeasure, that accounts for human mentality vis-à-vis its object — rather than integration, contact, attachment, or “object relations” per se.
I will say more about these contrasting “models” in the next entries.