It is only in recent years that I have come to appreciate visual art, in the same way that I love something like theatre. I think that I felt, for a long time, my ignorance of the artists, of the contexts, and of art technique. I have come to appreciate that most of that is nonsensical. Paintings, sketches and sculpture are about how they make one feel. I have been helped by having an Art History graduate in the family, and visiting galleries with her has become a great joy to me – something to share, as well as what is usually a profound learning experience to me.
Thinking about the mind and about creativity, which are pillars of psychoanalytic thinking, has enabled me to focus on what artists convey and what they stimulate within me. Music often affects my emotional register, but it took some time before canvases hung in a gallery did the same. I like the union between painting and music though. A week or so ago I was able to watch the Bowie film “Moonage Daydream”. Bowie took some time before sharing his canvases with the public, unlike the way that he had little difficulty displaying his performative self, and allowing his writing, his work as a lyricist to be exposed.
In the past few years I have seen some remarkable exhibitions at the Tate, Tate Modern and at the RA. The latest ‘must see’ to roll into town is Cezanne at Tate Modern. I did a little prep for this one. Cezanne lived through a period of political turbulence. He was part of an extended artistic group that included the individuals behind Zola’s words and Pissarro’s images. He moved in highly political circles and yet kept politics away, at least in the way he resisted becoming outspoken. His art may not be apolitical, but it is not making political statements.
Raised in Aix, he was, his father hoped, going to find a future in Law. Zola was a schoolfriend and had established himself in Paris. Cezanne followed him, but the capital was never a place he settled into and he had a life split between Paris and Provence. This split, or ambivalence, as any psychoanalyst might highlight, was significant. Paris did introduce him to Pissarro (an anarchist), though, and they developed some radicalism between them, in terms of artistic technique, of composition and approaches to uses of colour. This is the impressionist revolution. In 1874 the first impressionist exhibition was held in Paris, at which Cezanne had three exhibits.
In the one of the first rooms of the exhibition is the beautiful portrait Scipio which may have drawn him to the abolitionist movements. Such political views as he held are perhaps expressed in an adjoining exhibit, The Conversation, one of my favourites in the whole exhibition. This is around the time of the suppression of the Paris Commune, after Prussia had invaded. It must have been an uncomfortable city to call home and to want to experiment artistically.
The exhibition takes one next to examine some family portraits. I felt that these were looking for somewhere to hang but did not help me think about his development or naturally follow what had come in the room before, called ‘Radical Times’. I do, however, note the radicalism of his life-long companion and model, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, with whom he lived ‘in sin’, defying contemporary convention, until they married in 1886. Their son had been born in 1872.
His escape from Paris was usually to holiday in l’Estaque, a village in the bay of Marseille, where he first went to avoid military conscription. Over multiple visits over the years he produced more than forty paintings of the views. These are striking in the use of colour, the interpretation of light and in the sense of contentment and serenity that they conveyed to me.
To me, who regards himself as artistically ill-educated, there is something about Cezanne’s experimentation and use of many media that feels very modern. I found myself thinking of Hockney, of contemporary artists whose work I could think about in similar ways, and whose work has had similar affects for me. The pencil and charcoal works are things that really appeal to me – somehow I am impressed by something that suggests simplicity in its use of materials, but complexity in what they have been used to express.
Even someone ill-informed about art , knows that Cezanne could be recognised by his still-lifes. That he believed that he could change the world through the simple representation of an apple. This middle part of the exhibition is a rewarding part of what is on display, but when I attended it was day two, and seeing it should not be, and does not need to be rushed. Day two meant dense and enthusiastic crowds. The exhibition does not close until March next year. As it was day 2, it was, perhaps, too crowded, and I think I will get more from this room with at least one more visit, as his still-lifes were a focus for his experimentation. They represent – same theme – different approach(es).
The room ‘Bathers: Tradition and Creativity’, comes next and brought some familiar images to me. I had a board game when I was younger called ‘Masterpiece’, which had cards with tens of great paintings on them and was about the auction houses and owning and trading masterpieces against the risk of owning and not trading fakes (I think). This is the room where I found myself going “Oh I know that one” and I assume it was because of their appearances in the board game. Cezanne painted bathers of both sexes, using museum sculptures rather than live models as his inspiration. Notwithstanding this starting point, many of the paintings have figures of a rather androgynous quality. The Tate’s little guide throws this little informative gem, “Proportionally, artists have purchased more of Cezanne’s bather works than any other subject”. Three Bathers , on display here, was once owned by Henry Moore. Picasso and Matisse also owned works by Cezanne.
As Cezanne came to the end of his life, and as the exhibition moves one out into the inevitable retail offering, the recurring themes of apples and bathers, of the bay of Marseilles and the Aix landscape, start to become infiltrated by death. Landscapes get moodier, and skulls start to appear. I am not sure quite what that made me feel, but I was rather drawn to these moody images. As he contemplated the end of a life of creativity and some innovation, he became a revered figure, with many peers and young artists visiting him to pay respects. Not a bad way to review one’s life.
As is clear, I am no expert, but I think this is a really fine exhibition, and I shall return when it is slightly less busy and cramped, so that I can take in and be moved by the canvases. The gallery has done a superb job in collecting so many for one exhibition, and even had I not been dealing with the dense crowd of Tate patrons, I think I might have found it overwhelming. So, I shall return, and I recommend it to art lovers.
One of the finest things about reaching my age, and about the whole mindset of a Second Innings, is that it is a time where there is much more pleasure in learning from one’s children than from teaching them. I now have multiple opportunities each month to learn from something my children say to me, or recommendations that they make to me, and there are few things that I feel able to teach them nowadays.
One of the best things that happened for me when we raised our family was to pass on a love of books. There were not that many books in the home in which I grew up, although I was encouraged to have my own and to ask for many titles for my ‘birthday list’ or my ‘Christmas list’. I grew up progressing via Famous Fives, to Secret Sevens, to Just William, to Jennings, on to Biggles, before breaking into adult literature via Alastair McLean and Len Deighton.
When I was much older, and lucky enough to have a well paid career, I indulged myself and created a study cum library, in our home in North Essex. I used to spend hours in it, admiring the books I had collected, and occasionally remonstrating with myself for the many that had yet to be read. “When I retire…”, I thought. Books, however, keep getting written and the ‘to be read’ list never shrinks. I was also not ready for how much my reading habits would change, and that different genres and different authors, different themes and perspectives, would suddenly become important. Also, the joy of learning, especially for ‘mature students’ like me, is that one appreciates that the more that one knows, the more one is aware of what one does not know. Cue, more books need to be read!
A little over a week ago, my daughter pressed a novel into my hands and talked with such appreciation, and a little urgency, that I had to read the book she was handing over. It was battered. When I was younger, perhaps because there were few books at home, I determined to leave books as close to mint condition as possible, even after reading them. My paperbacks never had damaged spines, and I Iiked to admire my collection, which was bookshop ready, as if I was preparing to have a sale.
Now, I like books to be battered. It shows an interaction, it suggests an intimacy, it reflects that reading about lives is as messy as living lives. I now prefer second hand books, with the turned pages, the marginalia, the dates they were first owned, the occasion of the gifting where appropriate. My daughter’s interaction was clearly intense and messy and intimate. (This seems especially relevant for the book she chose to recommend). Little wonder she was urgent in her recommendation.
The book in question is Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”. It is long, but it is not the length that makes it a time consuming read, but the messiness and horrors of the lives contained within it, to say nothing of the extraordinary acts of love. I finished it this weekend and I am sure it will take me some weeks to truly reflect on what I gained from it. Like the darkness of Dostoevsky, or the caricaturing of Dickens, it takes the reader to places deep within themself, to ask questions and provoke reactions.
When I returned from having dinner with my daughter, I was on a high, because I was enjoying that sensation of learning from my children. I posted a picture of the book on Facebook. Within hours, my two best friends, both of whom live overseas, had responded and suggested I was in for a great read. Shortly after, one of my psychotherapy colleagues, and a man who claims not to have time to read much, told me that I should get the tissues ready – I think he meant for my tears.
Last weekend, I attended an event where two psychoanalysts were in conversation. I walked into the room and immediately a couple of the attendees commented on my book, assuring me that I would carry many feelings with me once I reached the end, and wanting to know what I had made of the pages I had read so far. Another attendee, like me, had somehow missed it when it had come out and wanted me to summarise the plot – a challenging request. When I started to do so, I think my enthusiasm was enough and she wrote down the title and author, so that she could go and buy it that afternoon. I started to wonder at just how I had missed it. Perhaps writing this blog piece about it will be more redundant than anything else I have written because most people I know will have read it. Perhaps.
In 2015 it was the bookie’s favourite for the Booker Prize. Somehow, it had never registered with me, although I tend to acquire at least two or three from each Booker shortlist. It was a time of a great deal going on in my personal and professional life as I attempted to rebuild my professional reputation at a new employer, and as we adjusted from a large country detached house existence, to a London apartment, as home. I can only think that it was a year when I read little fiction and so it passed me by. I must read Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, which won, because I am struggling to think of what might be superior to Yanagihara’s personifications of dark themes.
Reading it made me think of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’. When she wrote her book, after contemplating the ‘work’ of Eichmann, she noted how evil deeds could be done without evil intentions. Banal. In a brilliant LRB review of Yanagihara’s book, Christian Lorenzen, is not quite as impressed as my daughter or me, and one reason is the view that the prose is dull and that “there is a sterile quality” to describing the abuse that the protagonist, Jude, has suffered. I think that is a key point. Jude has numbed his body, and his social interactions, as his coping mechanism. He is repressing pain, not expressing it, but of course anything repressed needs an outlet, and for Jude it comes in multiple self-harming episodes, escalating to suicide attempts.
If that sounds depressing; it can be. Parts of the book, definitely are. Please don’t let that turn you away, though. Whilst wannabe psychoanalysts like me can get deep into the narcissism, the sadism and masochism, Freud’s death drive, the missing love object for the abandoned baby, and so on, the book is truly a hymn to love. There is plenty of sex apart from the details of abuse, much of it awkward but loving sex, and also some celebrations of physicality and promiscuity over emotional attachment, but the love being celebrated is mainly unconsummated love.
Without trying to give away the whole plot, Jude, our often anti-hero, is rescued from a life of abandonment, that starts incredibly young, that has made him vulnerable to sexual abuse. In trying to run from it, he repeatedly runs into the arms of apparent protectors, who come to reveal themselves as ever more sadistic companions. Beatings and whippings are common. He is pimped, escapes by opting to sell himself, and is then imprisoned as a sex slave. When his torturer tires of him, he sets him free to run, but chases him in his car, knocking him down and forcing him to run again until ultimately running over his limp body and leaving him to die.
He does not die and finds a counsellor to whom he fails to tell his story completely, but who shows him a glimmer of what empathy might be. It is no accident that she is female. The contrast between sadistic males and nurturing females is an underlying theme. Unfortunately for Jude, she dies from cancer and he is once again alone. Jude, however has a remarkable intellect, nurtured by the brothers in the monastery where he had first been brought up and where he was first abused. Her gift to him is to encourage him to go to college. There he meets the three friends who will attempt to show him he is loveable, is capable of love, and who will try to show him that we do not have to be shaped by our pasts, although our pasts will always inform our present.
Jude goes on to become an exceptional lawyer. His choice of how he practises law and what it gives to him is also relevant to the outcome. He is admired by a distinguished law lecturer, who eventually adopts him as a son. The man’s own son had died young and so we explore loss and voids, as the parentless Jude replaces Harold’s birth son. His three closest friends, after unpromising beginnings, become highly regarded and sometimes decorated, figures in their fields. An actor, an artist and an architect. Their relationships with Jude, with Jude’s secrets, and with Jude’s self-harming and addiction to work, to each other, and to Harold and his wife, give heft to the seven hundred plus pages.
Jude has other friends, but not many. One is a medic, Andy. To me he is the unstated and understated hero of the novel. Whilst Jude and his important trio of uni flat mates are the centre of the novel’s friendship circle, it is Andy who first introduces love. Before Jude is adopted, it is Andy who shows him the selflessness of love, the importance of every human life and the way that love does not judge, and can be tested. Andy is not Jude’s doctor, but he recognises the legacy of the impact of his spinal injuries from the car running over him. He understands the scars from the past but the more recent scars from self-harm. He becomes his self-appointed personal physician. He gives Jude a place to have wounds dressed, to have access to medication and to feel truly cared for, out of the public’s prurient gaze.
Lorentzen’s studied indifference to the novel’s excellence includes this observation, “By now the narration has degenerated into a series of repetitive contemplations of the scenario”. Surely, though, that is the point. The book examines multiple lives and one in particular to highlight the Freudian compulsion to repeat. This is exemplified by Jude’s unfortunate choice of a lover, after eschewing physical contact for twenty years. He is surprised by a kiss and allows a fashion company CEO, recently arrived from London, into his life and home. The man, of course, is a physical and sexual abuser, projecting his own contempt and disgust for his sexual preferences.
One of Jude’s friends, JB, who becomes an internationally regarded artist, is a man whose work is based on working with material from the friendship group, especially Jude and the actor, Willem. Although it is about chronology, the focus in the art is one of repetition. Further, Jude’s choice of career is significant. Law, is based on precedent, which is akin to repetition. In a tragic phase towards the end of the book, Jude attempts to address his loss by repeating sensations, using a fragrance, and garments from his lover to mediate his pain. Jude’s place in Harold’s life is a sort of repetition of Harold’s first son’s place and his place in Willem’s is to repeat what Willem gained from his now deceased brother, who suffered from cerebral palsy and parental indifference and neglect.
As I think about the novel now, a couple of days after absorbing its pains and joys, I feel deeply affected. I feel sadness for Jude, anger on his behalf, but also joy for the way the deep friendships mitigated his pain and gave him a sense of worth, that his wretched early years had all but taken from him. I cared for him in the way that the public mourned Dickens’s Little Nell. She represented so much that was good in a shady world. Jude is not that character, but he is someone who invites us to empathise and to not judge – either his physical incapacities or his psychic defences, including his self-harming. Lorentzen was struck by the “ecstatic reviews” the book had received, and clearly was not ecstatic, though often complimentary. I can see why it made such an impact. If you, like me, have not discovered this apparently widely-read, much admired novel, grab yourself a copy.
“It is only by analysing the transference situation to its depth that we are able to discover the past both in its realistic and phantastic aspects”. (Klein, 1952). In this essay, I shall attempt to define the psychoanalytic terms transference and countertransference. I shall begin with definitions and Freud’s discovery of transference, and go on to explain how the idea of transference and its utility in the analytic process has changed with time. Change came with later psychoanalysts, but the most profound impact may have been that of Melanie Klein, and so I consider her work, and the impact of theories based on projection and projective identification. I then attempt to review what transference is when it is in the clinic, referencing several post-Freudian analysts. Before discussing what countertransference is, I consider the term negative transference, in order to distinguish it from countertransference. I go on to think about transference in the analytic session, how it works, and also to reference the importance of erotic transference. I consider if transference is used outside the clinic given that psychoanalysis is not just a form of therapy. Lastly, I make a few short conclusions.
How does one define transference, which I regard as fundamental to the analytic process? Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) give one of the best definitions, in my opinion: “A process of actualisation of unconscious wishes. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. Its context par excellence is the analytic situation. In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy.” Transference, whilst unconscious can be brought into consciousness and enacted. Many analysts believe that how the analysand reacts to the frame i.e. the fixed timing and location of the session, is a form of transference. Lateness is interpreted as a punishing anger, and early arrival as something revealing anxiety. Transference might come into a session as (attempted) manipulation or as a provocation. Frosh (2012, p.192) cites Spillius et al (2011) in considering how transference became central to psychoanalysis from its early beginnings. It now seems to be much more about externalising unconscious fantasy, informed by the past and developed in the relationship in the analytic sessions, whereas Freud held that it was a displacement of an unconscious idea from a person in the analysand’s past, on to the analyst in the room. Having originally thought transference interfered with the work of analysis, he came to see value in the analysand’s feelings, believing that they had value as a means of understanding a neurosis. In his 1914 paper “Remembering, repeating and working-through” he explored how primitive emotions could have free expression and become useful for self-exploration.
The origin or discovery of transference is attributed to Freud. However, in 1917, in letters to first Sandor Ferenczi, and then to Karl Abraham, he draws their attentions to the work of Georg Groddeck, with whom he had just started corresponding and who may be regarded as the first ‘wild analyst’. Groddeck eventually stayed outside of the psychoanalytical organisations, but was famous for his work on somatic and psychosomatic illnesses. Groddeck had emphasised the importance of transference, particularly negative transference, which I explore later in this essay, which had impressed Freud. Freud originally thought of transference as an obstruction and that it inhibited a patient from free associating. Transference was discovered by Freud, when thinking of the difficulties that caused Breuer to stop seeing his patient, known as ‘Anna O’. Breuer was worried by the unconscious emotional charge in the room, as it was erotic. It complicated the work. It was a little later that Freud himself came to understand its efficacy, as a tool for ‘working through’. The analysand brings buried feelings and thoughts from past relationships and ‘transfers’ them to the analyst.
Freud identified its more positive influence (1905, p.116) as part of what became known as the ‘Dora case’. He wrote of “new editions of the impulses and phantasies” which was about how feelings were transferred into the room when they properly belonged elsewhere. Freud came to see himself as the recipient of ‘transferred feelings’; things that were unresolved from past relationships and a window into the unconscious of the analysand. Although ‘Dora’ ended her therapy with him, and he came to see it as a ‘failed case’, it is one of the landmark moments in the development of psychoanalysis. He thought if analysands could be helped to identify what was being transferred, especially how patterns of past maladaptive relationships tended to repeat, then they could be helped to moderate the impacts. Freud went on to note that it was the most difficult, as well as the most important, part of analytic technique. In 1914, he was writing that the analytic setting was a playground where the repetitions could take place and in his 1915 paper, “Observations on transference love” he noted “there can be no doubt that the outbreak of a passionate demand for love is largely the work of resistance”.
A little after Freud, Strachey (1934) wrote about transference interpretation. Its weight and significance is conveyed by “that which the analyst most feared and most wished to avoid”. One of the reasons for the fears, are what is happening to the analyst. Money-Kyrle (1956) noted that “the analyst’s experience of the patient’s projections may be linked with the analyst’s own internal reactions to the material.” I develop this below when discussing projective identification and countertransference, which Money-Kyrle (ibid. p.361) called a “delicate receiving apparatus”. It was Fairbairn (1958) who best summarised the centrality of working with transference as part of the treatment: “psychoanalytic treatment resolves itself into a struggle on the part of the patient to press-gang his relationship with the analyst into a closed system of the inner world through the agency of transference” (my italics). The transference is of little use without acknowledgement, and more significantly, interpretation. Strachey understood it as a lengthy process, “modification of the patient’s super-ego is brought about in a series of innumerable small steps by the agency of mutative interpretations, which are effected by the analyst in virtue of his position as object of the patient’s id-impulses and as auxiliary super-ego.”
Around the time that Strachey was writing, Melanie Klein was developing her ideas and in 1946 produced the seminal paper on projective identification. She wrote, “projective identification involves projection in that it is an identifying of the object with split-off parts of the self. Projective identification has given an added dimension to what we understand by transference, in that transference need not now be regarded simply as a repetition of the past.”. Transference, from a clinical point of view was evolving. Sandler (1987) felt it gave an ‘added dimension’ to transference “in that transference need not now be regarded as a repetition of the past”. Arundale and Bellman (2011) wrote that the projection of “early infantile states of mind” are akin, clinically, to transference and countertransference in having both ‘communicative’ and ‘evacuative’ functions. Feldman (2009) described Klein’s formulation of projective identification as “an unconscious phantasy in which the patient expelled what were usually disturbing contents into another object”. He goes on to describe how the object is then transformed in the patient’s mind because it now contains the expelled material. He added that it was not just a “method of evacuation” but provides other comforts for the patient such as believing that they can possess or control the object. “The patient’s phantasies, expressed by gross or subtle, verbal or non-verbal means, may come to influence the analyst’s state of mind”.
The modern and Kleinian work of analysis is to contain the projections, work them through until they can be handed back, ‘introjected into’ the analysand, in a tolerable form. Klein saw transference as feelings being remembered and used. Steiner (1993) described it thus “We have come to use countertransference to refer to the totality of the analyst’s reactions in his relationship with the patient. The recognition of the importance of projective identification in creating these reactions led naturally to the idea that counter-transference is an important source of information about the state of the mind of the patient.” However, he warns “self-deception and unconscious collusion with the patient to evade reality makes counter-transference unreliable without additional corroboration”. Brenman-Pick (1985) reminds us that “constant projecting by the patient into the analyst is the essence of analysis”. Feldman (2009) describes projective identification as using an ‘omnipotent phantasy’ to defend primitive anxieties. He also highlights Bion’s work on containment to note “the mother’s responses to normal or pathological varieties of projective identification, emphasised the mother’s crucial function of taking in and allowing herself to be affected by the infant’s projection of severe anxiety or distress”.
The analyst also has his or her own transference. One thing the analyst has to be aware of, and be able to analyse, is the possibility of an analysand working through an enactment, sometimes called an ‘actualisation’. This is when something unconscious affects the participants and the responses cannot be contained and become part of the behavioural responses. Often these can lead to damaging and inappropriate responses known as ‘boundary transgressions’. The analyst needs to isolate the analysand’s responses and to understand when they might be acting out something informed by past relationships. If done well and appropriately, it becomes something to discuss, to ‘work through’ and can be explored as part of the therapy. Auchincloss and Samberg (2014) describe it thus: “Enactment is a co-constructed verbal and/or behavioural experience during a psychoanalytic treatment in which a patient’s expression of a transference fantasy evokes a countertransference “action” in the analyst. Enactments are “symbolic interactions” … in that they carry unconscious meanings for both patient and analyst, unconsciously initiated by the patient and evoking unconscious compliance in the analyst.” What is happening is exemplified by Brenman-Pick (1985), describing the clinical temptation to be a maternal figure, “we may act out by becoming excessively sympathetic to the patient”.
In the clinic, it is often this relationship, with the primary carer, that is transferred, and the analyst that needs to do the maternal containing, usually because it had been absent in the past, through reasons of a mother being overwhelmed and neglectful. Brenman-Pick (1985) described a state of mind which sought another state of mind “just as a mouth seeks a breast as an inborn potential.” The analysand may make assumptions about the analyst’s personal life and therefore thoughts, even though she has no information on which to base such assumptions. The analyst uses these fantasies rather than dismiss them. Winnicott (1947) goes so far as to describe ‘exploiting’ the transference. An analyst might note how the analysand is prone to assume something about them especially if it feels judgmental. This may be because of a past where judgment, particularly if it was from a parent, has been common. An analyst can illustrate that the analysand is responding as if she was attacked, and yet there was no attack from what is likely to have been an open ended, perhaps ambiguous comment. It might manifest as a need to impress, perhaps by listing achievements, which might reveal an insecurity about not being respected, by a teacher or an employer. It might be a hastiness to agree with an interpretation, which is little more than speculation, but is transferred from avoiding conflict in other relationships, often a spouse.
Arundale (2011) reflects on Feldman’s work in this area and writes “As he understands it, the historical objects from the patient’s past are alive in the present moment as internal objects, so that they are available as transference objects”, she goes on to add that when the transference relationship is understood and properly experienced it allows the past to become clearer and for internal objects to be modified. She credits Strachey (1934) with creating a template for psychic change for future generations of analytic schools by identifying “mutative transference interpretation”. In the work, the relationship with the analyst is a foundation; a template for how future relationships might be formed to break the patterns of the past. Ultimately the aim is to reach a Bion moment of significance, when the analysand can be introduced to his or herself. Frosh (2012, p.190) puts it very concisely “…the reality of the analyst’s behaviour. Why should the analyst’s silence be interpreted as hostile judgment rather than supportive listening? The answer here is ‘because of the transference’”. Sandler (1976) considered the manipulative element of the dyadic relationship and wrote that “in the transference…the patient attempts to prod the analyst into behaving in a particular way and unconsciously scans and adapts to his perception of the analyst’s reaction”. He writes about the analysand resisting the impulse to be aware of any “infantile relationship” that he/she might be trying to impose. Separately Sandler (1990 p. 869) wrote about how an analysand might try “to impose on the situation a role relationship with the analyst”, which is the enactment described above.
What to do with all this transferential material, though? Roth (2001) observes that the transference has different levels of interpretation in the clinic. At one level, it links what is happening in the clinic with the analysand’s past, but moves to a level linking events in the analysand’s life outside the clinic and on to interpreting unconscious phantasies about the analyst and the analysis. The deepest level is to “enact phantasy configurations”. Roth opens her paper referencing another analyst’s material about a dream, but what is being considered is transference. She goes on to use other clinical examples of her own, to consider the multiple ways a transference can be interpreted and what the clinician needs to be aware of. How to separate layers of material and how to identify working with transference on the countertransference. I write about countertransference in more detail below. Roth notes how she is reviewing “complex transference manifestations” as she attempts to maintain the analysand’s trust and interest, but to get her to understand the links between what she is saying and what it means, and how it is being brought into the clinic. She guides us through her work deeper, by transference interpretation level, past an aggressive projective identification to a level four enactment which is a kind of seduction scene. Her conclusions summarise the importance of transference, which I regard as the foundation of the analytic work; “our sense of conviction about our patient’s internal world comes ultimately from our understanding of the here-and-now transference relationship between us”.
What happens when the analysand is transferring something from a difficult past relationship, or needs to project aggressive, hostile and unwanted, intolerable feelings into the analyst? This is the realm of negative transference; hostile feelings that the analyst’s presence elicits in the analysand. Analysts often have to start their work by demonstrating a caring side to become a ‘good object’, so that there is trust. This is the ‘therapeutic alliance’, but most often the effective work is done when the analyst becomes the ‘bad object’, and can show the analysand that the clinic is a non-judgmental space, and that difficult feelings can be contained and worked through. Understanding a phenomenon such as negative transference and more importantly, appreciating its utility, was largely the work of Melanie Klein, who had developed the ‘good breast/bad breast’ understanding of infantile love and hate, and she noted that the analyst was often split by the analysand into a good figure and a bad one, often in the same session. The demand of the analyst is to contain the anger, to ‘work through it’ and to behave as the nurturing mother of early infancy, and once again, to not judge the person from whom the hostility has come. The gentlest of questions, the most ambiguous of references, the calmest of silences can all be interpreted as hostile by an analysand with a negative transference. In Klein’s 1952 paper she wrote “we can fully appreciate the interconnection between positive and negative transferences only if we explore the early interplay between love and hate, and the vicious circle of aggression, anxieties, feelings of guilt and increased aggression, as well as the various aspects of objects towards whom these conflicting emotions and anxieties are directed.” And “I became convinced that the analysis of the negative transference, which had received relatively little attention in psycho-analytic technique, is a precondition for analysing the deeper layers of the mind.”
There is something in the word ‘counter’ that suggests resistance and even an aggressive return, as in ‘counterpunch’. Negative connotations perhaps, so is it related to negative transference? No. Countertransference has more than one definition, but is not negative transference. It might be a psychic response to it, though. Laplanche and Pontilis (1973, p.92) define “the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analysand’s own transference”. Also, “some authors take the counter-transference to include everything in the analyst’s personality liable to affect the treatment, while others restrict it to those unconscious processes which are brought about in the analyst by the transference of the analysand.” This is difficult because if, as in some definitions, it is to be used as a tool in the analytic work, how can we deploy something that is unconscious? Nonetheless, prominent post-Freudians such as Winnicott (1947) thought it played a central role in the analytic work. He described it as “the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behaviour of the patient”. For Freud, it was the analyst’s transference, how she had been affected by what the analysand had brought to the session. He regarded it as the neurotic response of the analyst, not a good thing, and something to be resolved by more analysis for the analyst. Sandler (1976) notes that Freud saw it as impeding understanding, because it clouded the mind, which was the tool needed to do the work; an interference with the work of interpretation.
More lately, with a Kleinian influence, it has come to mean the specific response of an analyst to the analysand’s transference. It is about taking in the analysand’s projections and being able to contain them. The analyst, in this way, comes to feel what the analysand is feeling and her ability to absorb and reflect helps the analysand when the projections are passed back and reintrojected. The analysand starts to feel things are more manageable and to be able to master integration, shifting from paranoid-schizoid positions to a depressive one. The working out of transference and countertransference go on together as a relational event – the feelings in the analysand become the data to analyse, upon which interpretations and reflections can be based. The analysand will be looking for signs that what she has projected into the analyst is being contained and perhaps cared for, or alternatively what is happening, if it is causing some panic or discomfort. In this understanding of countertransference there is a view that it signals to the analyst what is happening in the analysand’s unconscious life; rather different to the Freudian sense that it was exclusively an issue for the analyst. So, it is both the analyst’s own transference and her response to the analysand’s transference. Not only does an analyst feel her own countertransference but must then productively and subsequently analyse it.
Heiman (1950) was the first analyst to consider the positive influence of countertransference, “an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious” – she describes it as the “patient’s creation” and that it is a part of the patient’s persona. Therefore, the analyst can use it as a guide to understanding the transference the analysand offers. She noted that the analyst has to sustain the feelings stirred within her, and not to let them go as the analysand does, but to “subordinate them to the analytic task” functioning as a “mirror reflection” to the analysand. Her definition was “all feelings which the analyst experiences towards his patient”. Her paper was the first to suggest that countertransference was ubiquitous. All feelings and everywhere makes it a complicated tool to use. To what extent is one dealing with the analysand’s material and to what extent might it be more about the analyst’s own past? Being able to engage, and yet analyse the situation with detachment, is a critical skill. Heimann wrote that the analyst “has to perceive the manifest and latent meaning of his patient’s words, the allusions and implications, the links to former sessions, the references to childhood situations behind the descriptions of current relationships”. She best summarised it as “in the comparison of feelings roused in himself with his patient’s associations and behaviour, the analyst possesses a most valuable means of checking whether he has understood or failed to understand his patient.”
The post-Heimann approach continues to evolve and become more nuanced. Roth (2018) takes Heimann’s mid-twentieth century view as countertransference being something pathological, and something for the analyst to own for her own self-analysis, and shows how it moved into being accepted as a tool to help with an analysand’s development. How to utilise it has been subtly different in the techniques of many analysts and he cites Balint, Fairbairn, Tower and Winnicott. Nonetheless he emphasises Heimann’s view of it as a creation brought to her. What it meant was a shift from conventional analysis requiring the neutrality of the analyst, sometimes called ‘the blank screen’, to the analyst being actively involved in a process; a more dynamic therapeutic alliance, properly open to projection and introjection. To clarify this, he cites Money-Kyrle (1956) “as the patient speaks the analyst will, as it were, become introspectively identified with him and having understood him inside will re-project and interpret”. In Segal’s 1997 paper, “The use and abuse of countertransference”, however, there is a warning to emphasise the need of proper understanding. As Segal suggested, whilst it can be “the best of servants” it can also function as the worst of masters. One example might be ‘enactment’ – against which Freud had warned – as I highlighted above. Roys (2011, p.163) describes how the analyst shifts position back and forth between concordant (a sense of sharing the analysand’s experience) and complementary (when the transference has affected the analyst so that something is felt towards the analysand).
Freud’s early encounters with transference were noteworthy because of the erotic elements. Having explored the erotic transference as resistance, he wrote, “of the first kind (of resistance) are the patient’s endeavour to assure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the doctor’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover”. What he understood was the need to work with it, having initially seen it as nuisance. “To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be, not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one”. He thought it would be bringing repressed material into the conscious realm, but then ensuring it was repressed once more by a fearful patient, who would “feel only the humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it”. For clarity’s sake, “analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands”. He added that the patient would have “what all patients strive for in analysis – she would have succeeded in acting out”, which is probably the first reference to what I refer to above as ‘enactment’. Freud’s patients were, of course, predominantly women and usually treated for hysteria, hence the slightly unbalanced gendered views; modern clinical work is consistent with transference from male, female and non-binary individuals. As he noted, though, ‘transference-love’ must be worked through in the therapy “and traced back to its unconscious origins”. An analyst must be able to demonstrate distance from the transference love as Mann (1999, p.7) observed, “the erotic connects people at deeply unconscious levels, driving them into relationships at least at the level of fantasy”. He thought that closeness activates erotic material in the unconscious, but also that the greater the activation of erotic material in the unconscious, the closer the bond two people develop.
Before concluding this essay, it is important to ask, ‘does transference exist outside the clinic?’ Klein (1952) was clear, “in some form or other transference operates throughout life and influences all human relations”. I think it is helpful to imagine walking into a room of strangers at a party or a conference. Does one want to be seen and not heard, or to be acknowledged, heard and visible? What is happening? We are seeing around us a number of people as hostile, or as potential allies. This is informed by our past relationships and some form of transference is underway. Sandler, Dare and Holder (1973) observed that it enters all relationships and these (e.g. choice of spouse/employer) are often determined by some characteristic of the other person who (consciously or unconsciously) represents some attribute of an important figure of the past. It seems highly probable that it goes on at all times in our lives. Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick, suggests it is a form of transference that political leaders exploit to facilitate what the psychologists understand as ‘group processes’. Generations after generations this seems to be a constant, as we note today with the tragic manipulation of the Russian people.
This essay has discussed the psychoanalytic terms, transference and countertransference. It has described their origination and their development. It has asserted that they are fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis in the clinic, but also that they are ubiquitous and exist outside the clinic. It has considered how such an important concept continues to evolve as the theoretical baton gets handed on to each new post-Freudian generation, but has focused on what Melanie Klein and Object Relations Theory brought to developing Freud’s discovery, and how Paula Heimann was the critical developer of countertransference by seeing it as an important tool for the clinician. In conclusion, I suggest that psychoanalysis is only effective when the pillars of the clinical work, that are transference and countertransference, are properly understood and deployed.
References
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“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch”, so said William Styron. What is the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis?
In this essay, I want to explain what psychoanalysis is when it is applied ‘outside the clinic’. I develop the thinking by focusing on the relationship between both disciplines. In an oft-cited paper Felman (1982) considered the relationship, but talked about psychoanalysis as dominant to literature, akin to the master-slave relationship. I consider that paper and why I find that problematic. Using examples from writers who pre-date the birth of psychoanalysis, when the first of Freud’s papers were published in 1895; first, I think about how literature gave psychoanalysis the descriptive skill that articulates the impact of the unconscious. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert and Dickens are all relevant. Second, I then consider Freud’s writing, specifically ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) and how it defines something presented to us by Shakespeare’s melancholic, Jaques, from ‘As You Like It’, and from Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Is this an example of psychoanalytic mastery and dominance? I suggest it is not, but that the relationship is one of symbiosis: mutualism not parasitism. Third, I continue by considering the psychoanalytic reader. What is the emotional impact of being a reader and how does reading words on a page engage our emotions? What is happening unconsciously and to our unconscious?
Finally, I consider modern literature and what psychoanalysis has brought to it – I wonder if it allowed us to tolerate damaged psychic states and so gave room for the publication of something like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. If literature has informed psychoanalysis, it must be in how it presents itself. Therefore, I consider psychoanalytic writing, as distinct from bringing psychoanalysis to reading. The brilliant analysis of Freud’s Dora case analysed by Marcus (1976), allows me to examine the writing of modern psychoanalysts such as Thomas Ogden and Adam Phillips before I draw my conclusions.
What is it for psychoanalysis to be outside the clinic? Psychoanalysis is far more than a therapeutic treatment. Whilst it is a method for treating neuroses, it is extended to a body of knowledge about the mind. It is also a research tool; a method or approach, in seeking knowledge. The tool is the therapeutic use of ‘free association’ rooted in the work done in the clinic. The critical claim is that there is an unconscious. What is psychoanalysis, when it is outside the clinic? Is there a difficulty that a text cannot respond, unlike the analysand in the clinic? The response to an interpretation is part of the clinical work, so how can psychoanalysis work, never mind thrive, outside the clinic? Can you draw on psychoanalysis without being an analyst? Can you have not undergone analysis, but still be able to lend insights back to psychoanalysis? I think so. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan thought so, emphasising one must analyse the words, not the person, not unlike a literary critic. The difficulty is that the unconscious is dynamic. Text is static, but how we read it is dynamic – it can suggest different things to us. We are not stepping into the same river twice. We notice different things each time we read a text, watch a film, hear music or look at a sculpture. What is psychoanalytic, is the comfort with one’s ‘not knowing’. An analyst does not tell an analysand the meaning to her life, but lets it emerge, so that the analysand feels she has more awareness.
In considering the work of Hanna Segal, Bell (1999) argues for psychoanalysis outside the clinic. He asserts that his perspective views psychoanalysis as “a body of knowledge of the mind”, which is distinct from the application of that knowledge. This is important when considering the master-slave relationship in the Felman essay. Bell suggests that critics of psychoanalysis look for validation of its core claims when examining accounts of treatments, but he suggests a “realist ontology” for the objects which it investigates. He talks about transference and projection as being as real as tables and chairs. He cites Freud’s 1908 paper “Creative Writers and Day dreaming” and he notes that psychoanalysis meets literature “on a number of different terrains”. First, it might be that literature is something that can illustrate psychoanalytic theory, second, the reverse, the theory can illuminate the text, noting that Klein wrote three papers with literary themes. Segal too, used psychoanalytic theory to illuminate a number of literary texts. This illustrates the concept of the portability of the clinic. The theory can move beyond the physical analytic frame, which is the clinic. Outside the clinic it is the application of theory.
Similarly, Frosh (2020) notes that a psychoanalytic setting, the clinic, can move, and that what is retained “is little more than a theoretical orientation that accepts a notion of the ‘unconscious’ as crucial for understanding motivation and behaviour.” That is not to disparage its existence outside the clinic, but to recognise it. The key element is language, interpreted using psychoanalytic principles. The theoretical constructs are the dynamic unconscious, free association, transference and interpretation. This is not an exhaustive list. Psychoanalytic interpretation is not restricted to the intellect, but to the nature of relationships, and it is relationships that provide the opportunity for transference, countertransference and then interpretation. Frosh emphasises the role of the clinic: “The clinic out of which psychoanalysis has developed, the crucible for its concepts and practices, is thus a metaphorical space surrounding a live encounter”. Where, he later argues, it is not always welcome, is because applied psychoanalysis is often “an attempt at conquest rather than partnership” – in common with the start of the Felman essay I discuss below.
Psychoanalysis is a tool for understanding, not just individuals, and not just literature and the humanities, but also the social, legal and political worlds. So, if we accept it has migrated from the clinic, what impact does it have and is it beneficial? Frosh states that the two purposes of applied psychoanalysis are first to extend its reach, and second providing support for its claims. He reminds us of the formation of the magazine, Imago, by Otto Rank and Hans Sachs in 1912, which was “concerned with the application of psychoanalysis to non-medical fields of knowledge”. Frosh cares for psychoanalysis enough to highlight its role in advertising how the unconscious speaks through a subject but is not controlled by it, what he calls the “central importance of otherness in personal and social life”. Preserving this function is critical to keep psychoanalysis relevant “and prevent it ossifying into a form of expert received knowledge”. Like the unconscious; it must be dynamic. “Psychoanalysis holds something significant for all the other disciplines – specifically, a capacity to theorise subjectivity in a way that is provocative and unique, through reference to the unconscious.” Bell believes that Klein used literature as a means of expressing her ideas by “having a conversation with the artist”. This is different from applying theory to characters, which Jones famously did with Hamlet. An example of the Kleinian conversation is Segal’s 1984 paper on Conrad. A different meeting of the disciplines comes in her paper on Golding’s “The Spire”, which Bell claims, is more of a meeting of psychoanalyst and author coming to similar discoveries but via differing perspectives. Segal interprets Golding’s story of the building of a cathedral as a destructive delusion. In her 1981 paper, “Delusion and Artistic Creativity” she asks if the work of an artist or author is itself a creation or a delusion. She introduces us to the psychotic in text. How will we elaborate the text in the same way that the analyst listens to the analysand and is able to elaborate what they say? In other words, this is a textual and theoretical encounter, and its purpose is to raise questions and open up meaning, not dogmatically impose answers. This, as identified by Spillers (1996) is psychoanalytic hermeneutics. Does having a literary understanding enhance the work of a psychoanalyst? Felman writes that “there are no natural boundaries between literature and psychoanalysis”.
In her essay, Felman presents a case that literature is somehow a slave to psychoanalysis’s master. Can it really be realistic to think of literature and literary texts as something that can be enslaved. Are texts malleable? If we think of the clinic, the analysand seeks interpretation from the analyst. It is true that psychoanalysis lends an analytic interpretation to literature, and I argue below, might enhance literature, perhaps even making it publishable in the case of Morrison’s “Beloved”, but I find the master-slave argument stretched. A text cannot be made to do the master’s bidding and even more so, it cannot resist. This lack of the corporeal undermines Felman, I feel. She opens with a comment about the mutual relationship of literature and psychoanalysis, but within a couple of paragraphs moves to suggesting it is one in which literature is subordinate to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as a “body of knowledge” is called upon to interpret literature, a “body of language”. She claims that literature plays a role in service of the desires of psychoanalytic theory. Actually, Felman herself rows back from this point of view, and repeated re-readings of the essay have made me feel that she provocatively engages defenders of literature with the master-slave analogy, before explaining her own much more nuanced views.
She makes psychoanalysis sound active, “exercising its authority and power”, to a passive literary field. This is important because it reminds the reader of Freud’s essays on sexuality and his suggestion about active masculinity and passive femininity, views which have much less currency today. She continues that psychoanalysis is seeking its own satisfaction. I think this is revealing. It may seek mastery of itself, but that is very different from being master to another. She notes that a literary critic would desire a true dialogue between both as fields of knowledge and of language, and that what is required is avoiding a “universal monologue of psychoanalysis about literature”. This feels like a more appropriate position to me. This allows her to remind her reader that psychoanalysis falls “within the realm of literature”, and moves on to discussing the disruption of the master-slave relationship, in either direction. It is the text, like an analysand, where knowledge and meaning are expected to reside. This allows one to consider the importance of ‘not knowing’ which is critical to the work of the analyst in the clinic. She concludes that we should not think about the application of psychoanalysis to literature, what might be thought of as psychoanalysis working outside the clinic, but that we should think in terms of ‘implication’, not bringing a scientific knowledge to bear upon a text but rather, “to explore, bring to light and articulate”. She concludes, “literature is therefore not simply outside psychoanalysis, since it motivates and inhabits the very names of its concepts, since it is the inherent reference by which psychoanalysis names its findings.”
The spirit of both fields of language exploring the other, bringing to light and articulating is best illustrated, I believe, when considering Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, (1917) which may be one of the greatest literary psychoanalytic contributions. The syntax and the form demonstrate why he was awarded a Goethe prize. The melancholic, however, was something literature identified for psychoanalysts. Two examples: Dickens’s Miss Havisham and Shakespeare’s Jaques. Miss Havisham is one of Dickens’s greatest portraits, almost certainly informed by Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholia’ (1621). Abandoned, jilted and defrauded by her betrothed, she cannot recover from this trauma and lives on in her wedding attire, to maintain a link to her loss. She lives out of sunlight – a representation of her broken, dark, inner world. She has all the clocks stopped at the time when she received the letter from her fiancé, that revealed the deception. The issue of stopped time was of interest to Freud because the unconscious has no temporality. Freud observed, “in melancholia, what is lost is the ego”. Melancholia is linked to a narcissistic pathology and to mania. It is clinical depression and distinct from ‘ordinary depression’ with which we all come into contact and does not prevent us from functioning. Havisham adopts a young girl, Estella, seeking to protect her from the hurts she has herself suffered. Freud described melancholia as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity”. Keeping the world at bay by avoiding sunlight, she projects into Estella her hatred of men, but ultimately this too will leave her abandoned and unfulfilled. Avoiding the world is because, Freud notes, melancholia “culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment”.
What is different from mourning is that “when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again”, whereas a melancholic displays “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale”. Miss Havisham’s self-regard is destroyed when she is jilted. She fails to mourn the loss of the romance and becomes melancholic. As Freud elegantly observed “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” – a melancholic attitude is one of intense self-denigration. Before Dickens, Shakespeare had provided us with Jaques. He blames the outside world for imposing its “infections” upon him, leaving him to wrestle with his inner world: “Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world”. He is described as being able to “suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs,” and is sufficiently self-aware to describe “a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness”. In his most famous speech “All the world’s a stage”, Jaques lambasts everyone else. They are all merely performers, and are hiding from their true selves.
I choose these two examples to make a couple of simple points. First, literature pre-dates Freudian understanding. Second, Freud was able to find the language for the psychic condition he noted, and how it differed from the condition of mourning, because of the literature with which he was familiar. I think Freud’s brilliant understanding enhances literature, but is not imposing any sort of mastery. Jaques tells us he is a melancholic, but Miss Havisham, sometimes dismissed as a sort of cruel and damaged crone, becomes an object of pity when we understand her melancholic affect.
I believe that psychoanalysis has enhanced literature and not subordinated it. I want to continue examining reading psychoanalytically, before moving on to what psychoanalysis has offered writers. Flaubert, like Dickens pre-dates Freud. In Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” we see the impact of a delusional fantasist on those around her, as well as her own death drive path to destruction. Sodre (1999) showed how psychoanalysis and literature come together in the typical analyst/analysand relationship in a paper titled “Death by Daydreaming”. She considered Bovary in the context of Kleinian Object Relations, of her projections, and the overwhelming destructive death drive. Bovary is in thrall to a life in which her wish-fulfilling dreams dominate her mental life. She loses touch with reality. Her dreams have such force (id overwhelming ego) that she is forced to act them out and make them real. Enactment is frequently something that happens in the clinic and is in need of interpretation. Sodre notes, that the text shows us Emma’s repetitive romances are played out in her mind, as a defence against the impoverishment of her actual life, and that impoverishment drives the enactment of her dream life. She adds that as the novel progresses Emma becomes more contemptuous of people around her, whose weakness is that they do not live up to the standards of her dream companions. Sodre thinks that this allows Flaubert to introduce us to what we learn from Klein is an attack on her ‘good objects’, somewhat pre-dating Object Relations Theory. We also see how Emma, who is unable to love her daughter, Berthe, is also a ‘Bad object’. Emma’s fantastical thinking is a means for the reader to understand that the more attached she is to unconscious dreams, the more her sense of self deteriorates, as she is threatened by her internal reality. Sodre notes that she projects her awareness of her deteriorating inner world by covering up – both expensive material adornments and “elaborate, detailed and richer mis-en-scenes” because external reality is too ugly.
Freud himself remarked about how the philosophers and poets had been first to discover the unconscious – his discovery was a scientific method for understanding it. Given psychoanalysis is a relatively young science it is only reasonable to think of the way literature’s giants had already given a language to how what happens in our psychic lives takes place. We have only to refer to Oedipus and to Narcissus. I think that there is something psychoanalytic as far back as Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales frequently use tales of sex to illustrate drives and wishes. The device of the storytellers being on a pilgrimage gives the reader a sense of a frame. In the same way, a clinician listens to multiple tales as his work as the analyst. Although it is physically moving, the frame’s elements are fixed. In this sense Chaucer may be described as being the first writer to be working psychoanalytically, both in and outside a clinic.
Roth (2020) explores three main psychoanalytic interpretations of the reader experience. First, the transference relations toward the literary characters. Second, the impact of the text as a means of transcending the reader’s self-identity and third, how that allows the reader to achieve a new integration and “psychic equilibrium”. She notes the contemporaneous emergence of a publishing boom, improving literacy and the widespread development of public libraries, around the turn of the twentieth century, with the emergence of psychoanalysis. This led to academic enquiry, which she feels shifted the focus from “’scientific facts’ to ‘the subject’. She notes that Proust’s 1905 essay “On Reading”, allowed the emergence of contemporary literary theory. Proust writes about a trio comprised of author, book and reader. This is almost a hundred years ahead of Ogden’s (1994, 2004) ‘analytic third’. Proust explores the reader’s experience of being detached from reality and of the loss or freezing of time, as well as the identification that characters arouse in the reader. He suggests that readers can explore their psyche, “those dwelling places”, that would otherwise be impenetrable. We could say, the dwelling places are the unconscious. Some of this was taken up more specifically by Barthes (1967) is his essay “Death of the Author”, when the meaning of the text ceased to be dependent on author and content, but reconstructed by the reader; much as the analyst helps the analysand reconstruct what has constructed their own meaning. This confers dynamism on the text. It is not static, and dynamism takes us back to the unconscious. A modern example of this is Morrison’s “Beloved”; a harrowing tale, but also one of what trauma does to the psyche. We see it in the psychic fragmentation evident in both the protagonist, Sethe, and also in her sometime lover Paul D, who demonstrates splitting as a defence. The death drive consumes Sethe. Putting aside black authorship, characters and a white-dominant publishing industry, I think that the publication of the novel owes something to psychoanalysis, insofar as it enabled readers to comprehend and tolerate trauma.
Roth describes how the reader projects into the text a search for meaning, a fear of ‘other’ and existential fears such as life’s finitude. She argues that meaning and identity lead to processes of transformation, in both psychoanalysis and literature, but we remain unsure of exactly how. “The patient in analysis, like the reader of literature, is invited to drop everything else and raise, without any form of censorship, every topic that appears ‘in the pages’ of his awareness”. Optimum conditions are established for the transference relations towards either analyst or characters. A reader is alone in a book’s presence in a way that shares space with Winnicott’s (1958) view of the merits of talking “alone in the presence of someone”. In this way, we return to the merits of psychoanalysis outside the clinic. The reader has utilised the portability of the clinic.
What has psychoanalysis done, outside the clinic, for writing? Frosh notes that, especially in the form of case histories, that psychoanalysis is expressed in its own narrative form and that “it also treats its patients as literary beings, characters in search of stories that make sense”. Psychoanalysis is a literary endeavour in itself – exemplified by the case history, which Steven Marcus (1975) described as starting with Freud’s ‘Dora case’ and being a new literary form, distinct and structurally significant. Psychoanalytic journals are filled with vignettes and verbatim. These take the form of dialogue and are often presented as a playwright shapes a play. In his chapter “On psychoanalytic writing”, in “This Art of Psychoanalysis”, Ogden suggests, by using an example of his own clinical writing and an example of Winnicott’s theoretical writing, that “the way the language works” is essential to “the literary genre of analytic writing”. I like to think of this as evidence of one of literature’s gifts to psychoanalysis and a refutation of Felman’s proposition that it is slave to psychoanalysis. Ogden describes analytic writing as “a conjunction of interpretation and a work of art”. He quotes Bion: “I have had an emotional experience; I feel confident in my ability to recreate that emotional experience, but not to represent it” when explaining that what the reader reads is not the experience itself, but a new literary representation of it by the writer, about time spent with the analysand. He continues, “the analytic writer finds himself conscripted into the ranks of imaginative writers”. In recreating an analytic session, he notes that he is creating “characters’, something informed by the experience of enjoying literature. Both conscious and unconscious processes go into the writing. “Psychoanalysis is an experience in which the analyst takes the patient seriously, in part by treating everything that he says and does as potentially meaningful”. He makes it clear that he appreciates the symbiosis of literature and psychoanalysis, “What, for me, is certain is the idea that experimenting with the literary form used in analytic writing is part and parcel of the effort to develop fresh ways of thinking analytically”
Phillips (2016) talks about the psychoanalytic method as a way of telling a life story – free associating, “telling a life story by not telling a life story, but by saying whatever comes into your head”, adding “the analyst is giving the fragmentary discontinuous speech of the analysand a new narrative coherence”. He explores the extent to which Samuel Johnson pre-empted much of Freud, citing the work of Walter Jackson Bate, especially regarding the theory of repression. He adds that both Johnson and Freud believed in a Reality Principle, although Freud alone, called it that. Bate wrote in, “The Achievement of Samuel Johnson” that Johnson had anticipated psychoanalysis, and when he wrote of an inner resistance, he was identifying what psychoanalysis thinks more contemporarily as ‘defence mechanisms’.
On his work as both psychoanalyst and writer in several conversations that were published as a Paris Review interview and included in his book, Phillips noted that “psychoanalysis does not need any more abstruse or sentimental abstractions….it just needs more good sentences”. How literary a request can one get? He talks of the poor quality of reading contemporary psychoanalysis, excepting only Bion, Winnicott and Milner and adds “They were writers. Freud, to me, originally was a writer”. Freud, to him, he said, made sense “not in terms of the history of science or the history of neurology, but in terms of the history of literature”.
Phillips likens the form of psychoanalytic writing, specifically the sessions, as unlike novels, epic poems, lyric poems or plays, (although they are like play dialogues), but that they have the structure of an essay. “There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions…” Literature has brought its own influence to bear on psychoanalysis, not least in treating Freud as a writer rather than a scientist. It offers something back to psychoanalysis, what Frosh noted is an understanding of “its own textual unconscious”.
In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate that there is a symbiotic relationship between psychoanalysis and literature and not, as is sometimes asserted, one where psychoanalysis adopts a position of superiority and of a more profound insight. Psychoanalysis has much to thank literature for, and in turn, has provided insights into texts, characters and the psychosocial that have made literature richer. My conclusion is that the relationship is symbiotic; I reject Lacan’s ‘master discourse’ and Felman’s ‘master-slave’ ideas and believe there exists a mutuality, rather than something parasitic. There is definitely a place for psychoanalysis outside the clinic and it is the place of broadening understanding. Not just in literature but in other fields such as law, the social sciences and film and the arts, I think that is additive, rather than imposing and superior. Literature’s place in our minds before psychoanalysis makes me clear that it has offered as much, if not more to psychoanalysis, as psychoanalysis has contributed as an interpreter of literature. Indeed, it was Felman who wrote that, “in the same way that psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of literature, literature, in its turn, is the unconscious of psychoanalysis”. Perhaps, an emphasis on the ‘is’.
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I learned today from twitter that I was exactly three weeks old when West ham won their first trophy. Today’s is the 58th anniversary of that triumph. It is one, but far from the only reason that I am a Hammer. The main reason is my mum grew up in Plaistow, she married in West Ham and I was christened there. My nan worked as a florist in Canning Town.
In those fifty-eight years, it has certainly felt true that most Hammers dreams truly “fade and die” as out beautiful anthem tells us. “Fortune’s always hiding” we belt out at games, and so it typically proves. This past week has felt like so many of the past seasons, of hope and disappointment. Against a well-drilled Eintracht Frankfurt team, who certainly merited at least a draw, we contrived to lose 1-2, but would have won if Jarrod Bowen’s first half effort had not been deflected by the keeper’s outstretched leg against a post and his second half effort, which flew past the ‘keeper, had not crashed against the bar.
This weekend, with some first-choice players rested, we managed to outplay Arsenal for much of the game, but contrived to concede two goals to their centre halves, whilst our centre halves were either suspended or recovering from injury. Consequently, we played a full back at centre half and duly failed to defend set pieces as well as usual.
In December, 2019 I wrote this, about ‘Being a Hammer’: “On Monday night a little after nine pm most things were right in my world. I was in a pub, nursing a very decent pale ale and watching multiple screens displaying my beloved Hammers, who were a goal to the good against London rivals, Arsenal. To say they were playing well, never mind the fabled ‘West Ham way’, would have been stretching truths and the veracity of my descriptive prowess, but they were winning. In a nine-minute spell, just as I contemplated another pint to celebrate the win over the local rivals, the team was cut apart. It conceded three goals. As the Hammers anthem reminds me weekly, “fortune’s always hiding”. Yes; I have “looked everywhere”.
For the first, the team’s ‘shape’ was gone and the opposition waltzed through. For the second, a team almost as bereft of confidence as the Hammers, contrived to deliver a world class finish from a previously season-long impotent striker. For the last, the hitherto anonymous, but world-class, Arsenal centre-forward, produced his world-class moment. The appeal of the next pint palled and I walked home to rely on the BBC website for reports of a West Ham revival that I knew was not going to come. I walked home, cold and miserable and contemplating what it means to ‘be a Hammer’.”
This is not a whine, though. This has been the finest season I can recall as a Hammers fan. Only 1986 might rival it. Then, the ‘Boys of ‘86’, as now, took us into the final month of the season with a realistic chance of glory. In that case it was pinching the League Championship from a great Liverpool team. In the end, it was not to be and Everton pipped us to the runners-up spot. It is comparing what has happened since I wrote that first piece about another Arsenal disappointment, that means I have to update ‘On Being a Hammer’. We then, with almost half the season played, were less than a handful of points clear of the relegation zone. Peak excitement then was avoiding relegation. Now? Well.
On Thursday, Hammers need to overturn that 1-2 deficit in Frankfurt in a second leg tie. Then a European final in Sevilla beckons. In 1976, against the same club, they did exactly that, winning the second leg 3-1 to reach the European Cup Winners Cup Final. My all time Hammers hero, Sir Trevor Brooking, gave a masterclass to seal the win. Of course, the bubbles popped before the cup was handed out at the final, and Anderlecht took it in a 4-2 win.
That first FA Cup win, in 1964, was achieved with goals from John Sissons, the great Geoff Hurst and from Ronnie ‘Ticker’ Boyce. The current team does not possess a forward with Hurst’s outstanding abilities, but in Pablo Fornals we have an endlessly chasing and harrying midfield runner like ‘Ticker’, and as then, when we were led by the peerless Bobby Moore, we are once again led by a world class likely England captain, in Declan Rice.
I will be pretty devastated by not making a final after such a season, and I still hope that despite Arsenal’s intervention, Hammers can achieve a second successive top 6 finish in the Premier League, which would be setting a new standard. However in my first piece I wrote the following:
“It is a family thing for us. My grandad used to queue patiently during the week for tickets, and my dad took us to games. I remember that wins were rare, even then, and celebrated for their surprise element as much as their quality. My brother has even trained at Chadwell Heath with the first team during his cricket career off seasons, and I have now passed it on this curious association/infliction to my son. As a very young boy he claimed to be a Liverpool fan, like his best school pal, but I taught him better. After all, what pleasures would have been his if he had supported Liverpool?
Being a Hammer means subscribing to a style of play – the ‘West Ham way’, and genuinely believing that ‘the Academy of Football’ has an east London postcode. Yet, the record of FA Youth Cup wins is of no note, and the progression of West Ham youngsters to the peak of the game is not exceptional. Good, but not exceptional. I saw Michael Carrick coming through and could see he was a little special; Ferdinand and Lampard too, but I was surprised Joe Cole’s trickery made it all the way to a distinguished international career. Of the most recent Youth Cup winners we have had, the best talents have not progressed and have been sold (Oxford) or loaned out (Samuelson). I hope for the emergence of Johnson, Coventry and Holland and one of the goalkeepers, but the record is poor, with Rice (acquired from Chelsea) and Noble, being the only players to emerge, to be established first-teamers, in the past couple of decades.”
The past two seasons have rubbished the idea that wins were a surprise. The levels of expectation are fabulously high now. My son, who has many fewer years of banked disappointment, is fully invested now and keeps me informed about the young teams and the West Ham Women, as the claret and blue runs through his young adult veins. And, under David Moyes, the style of play has been impressive. The standard of passing and the pace of the team on the break has made the ‘West Ham Way’ visible; tangible even. The Academy too, is starting to live up to the standards of yesteryear. Rice and Johnson are established first-teamers and Coventry, Ashby, Alese, Baptiste, Perkins, Okoflex are all likely to feature next year, as the U23 has finished runners up to Manchester City, and the U18 have dominated their league.
So, Being a Hammer, is now less about a philosophical shrug of the shoulders when watching the team beaten by a ‘big club’, but is about drawing strength from the glorious couple of decades starting 58 years ago, when FA Cups were won, European finals were reached, one a victory, and when Liverpool were taken to a replay in the League Cup Final and then almost denied a League Championship.
By playing good football, a modern West Ham way, and by doing much better work with junior level teams and reinvigorating the spirit of The Academy, the club is something to be proud of, and Being a Hammer feels good, not something of a guilty, sheepish half-pleasure. Thursday is, in Hammers argot “massive”, just as the fans like to sing about the club, but for me there has been a change since I first wrote about ‘Being a Hammer.’ It feels that it is right to talk about the heroes of yesteryear, because the current team is earning the right to be discussed in the same breath. In 2019, talking about Moore, Hurst and Peters, or Brooking, Martin, Bonds and Devonshire, felt slightly embarrassing – hanging on to former glories because there was nothing modern to celebrate.
Whatever Thursday’s outcome, I have loved “Being a Hammer’ so much over the past couple of years and I am optimistic about the club’s future. And, perhaps, like 58 years ago, the dream won’t fade and die just yet, it will roll on, to more trophies next season and to our best players winning internationally for England. Come on You Irons!
Is psychoanalysis, as a body of knowledge, free of politics, and equally available to be drawn into any politics, or does it naturally lean towards a particular politics?
“I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics… The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa” – Eugene Ionesco
Ionesco was understanding something profound when he wrote that the human condition directs the social condition. In some perceptions of an ordered life there is an “idealogically enforced split” (Layton, Hollander and Gutwill, 2006) between the political order and personal life. In this paper, I attempt to argue that psychoanalysis is not free of politics, and moreover should not be, because none of our lives are free from politics. Our politics are core to us as manifestations of our drives. Modern day United States understands that ‘MAGA’ is an appeal to feelings, to the emotions, not the intellect, and yet, it was seduced by it. So, our politics are often the consequence of our feelings, rather than rationalisations. This essay has a Freudian drive theory foundation, although it resists the idea that somehow psychoanalysis represents anything finite. It demonstrates that the post-Freudian world has shown that there is still more we can learn psychoanalytically, just as man’s other scientific fields are not boundaried. If, as I maintain, we are driven by needs, desires and wants that are often irrational, we may seek satisfaction of our needs with political alliances. I consider whether psychoanalysis leans to any political preferences and later, also develop the theme of neutrality. I do not specifically conclude that it might ‘lean towards a particular politics’ because I think that requires the context of the era in which it is being contemplated, such as Communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Cold War United States, but I do think that from the intimacy of the earliest session of “the talking cure”, to today, psychoanalysis is about the particular drives inside the individual. No two individuals are alike, and so philosophically, it is hard to argue that psychoanalysis itself can somehow be co-opted, and therefore might ‘lean’ to a particular politics. Its ubiquity means it can be drawn into any politics, I suggest.
In developing this argument, I think it is helpful to define a couple of the critical terms. First, what is psychoanalysis? In, and out of the clinic, it is a way of knowing things. The International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) defines it as a theory of the human mind as well as a therapy. It adds that it is also a research method and a means of viewing social and cultural phenomena, of which politics is one. The British Psychoanalytical Association (BPA) defines it as “a process of deep exploration of the unconscious psychic processes of the individual, within the relationship between the analyst and patient in the consulting room.” It is a ‘body of knowledge’ too, as elegantly asserted by Bell, (1999) and he writes, that it is as such, that it ought to be judged. For today’s adults in Britain, the polarisation of society, the manipulation of the collective psyche by modern media, the political attempt to sell a vision of exceptionalism and isolationism, the response to the coronavirus, anxiety and grief, and the decisions taken for us by our leaders, frequently dominate conscious thoughts. Layton, Hollander and Gutwill (2006) highlighted that “a traumatogenic environment is constituted when individual and group physical safety, social security and symbolic capacities are all simultaneously assaulted. Psychoanalysis, which is devoted to analysing what it means to people when their experience is traumatic and then rendered unnameable and unspeakable, can illuminate this phenomenon as it occurs in the relationship between the individual and society.”
Politics ought to be easier to define. It is derived from the Greek word, politika, and meant “affairs of the cities”. Today it is associated with group decision-making, with distribution of power between individuals and a wider distribution of resources and status. Samuels, (2003) noted that “political power is experienced psychologically; in family organisation, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the lives of individuals.” Today, it is the way people make, maintain and update the laws under which they live. That serves to define politics in the nation state, but politics operates at more personal levels too; in the workplace, the family and even in couples. Even in these more micro examples it is about power, and therefore about conflict and cooperation. It is sometimes conflict resolution. To politicise something is to make its contrast with an alternative, explicit. As psychoanalysis shows, through drive theory, people have needs that require satisfying. However, not all needs can be satisfied simultaneously. If we have conflicting needs and a scarcity of resources, we inevitably have politics. To suggest that psychoanalysis, or indeed any body of knowledge is free of politics, would be to make it unique.
This brings us to the response to the first part of the essay question – is psychoanalysis free of politics? I aim to show with some selected examples how the young science of psychoanalysis inevitably became political and then how the circumstances of its development coincided with its importance in understanding the politics of the societies in which it operated. In the second half of the essay I use the example of Marie Langer, to personify how psychoanalysis, or certainly a psychoanalytic life, is not free from politics. If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, with respective nods to the likes of Charcot, Janet and Breuer, then it is informative to think about Freud’s attitudes to politics. My assertion is that in his determination to preserve and to develop his discovery he was prepared to act politically. His splits with the likes of Jung, and with Adler, are both psychoanalytic splits, pushing away that which he could not tolerate, as well as political splits, maintaining a pure ideology. Jung accused Freud of treating his pupils like patients, and criticised him for not having been in analysis, other than self-analysis, whereas Jung had been analysed. There was some personal antipathy, Freud writing, “I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. I shall lose nothing by it”, but the main differences appear to be theoretical, and I suggest, political. Drive theory, the Oedipus Complex, castration complex had to hold sway – any dilution of Freudian principles might undermine his confidence in his own principles.
Another split was with Willhelm Reich. Reich was briefly a follower of Freud and was inducted into the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. He worked at the Vienna Polyclinic, established by Freud for less affluent patients. Reich offended some of his peers with his work on orgasms, and others with his socialist and Marxist politics. His publication of “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” in 1933, embarrassed Freud, who had wanted to keep politics and psychoanalysis apart. Reich had suggested that fascism was the political expression of patriarchal family structures, amongst other assertions. Freud encouraged him to leave for Berlin. I see this as a political action by Freud, ironic given it was a means of disguising the inevitable psychoanalytic and political connection. Reich had been bold enough to criticise Freud’s ‘death instinct’ hypothesis, when considering masochistic behaviours. Freud magnanimously advocated that Reich’s paper and view were published, but he was bothered that he himself interpreted Reich’s view of the death instinct as being a feature of the capitalist system. In 1934, ahead of a psychoanalytic conference in Lucerne, Reich learned that he had been expelled from the German Psychoanalytic Society. One might argue he is the best example of a political victim of psychoanalysis. He is not alone though. Decades later the IPA expelled Lacan. Politics lends itself to analysis. In democracies, the need to persuade a majority of the polity to vote one particular way means understanding the collective psyche is fundamental.
In 1913 Freud worked to oust Jung from his positions as president of the IPA and his various editorial positions. He had achieved this goal by the spring of 1914 and published the polemical History of the Psychoanalytic Movement in the summer. It is thought to be his reckoning with both Adler and Jung and is therefore, overtly political. Gay (1989), in his introduction to The Freud Reader makes clear that this paper, known to Freud’s cohort of friends and supporters as “the bomb”, was part of a campaign of “pointed acts of explanation and aggression” and that these were designed to rally his followers. It was from these beginnings that psychoanalysis “grew from a cluster of scientific ideas into a movement”. Freud had defined thoughts, political or otherwise, as a “trial run of action”, and I think this is among the most helpful phrases to support the idea that psychoanalysis is not free of politics, because in converting unconscious impulses and feelings to conscious thoughts we are preparing something actionable. All actions (and inactions too), have political consequences. Surely societies that turn on intellectuals are inimical to something like psychoanalysis? If so, should psychoanalysis effect a non-political stance, as part of a means of preservation? This would support a refutation for psychoanalysis not being free of politics. History, suggests otherwise, bringing up the question of neutrality.
Neutrality is fundamental to Freudian psychoanalytic technique. It is also fundamental to political strategies. How does neutrality work under the state-induced paranoia of a repressive regime? After the National Socialists came to power in Germany, many psychoanalysts, because they were Jews, left the country. The Nazis had two difficulties with psychoanalysis – it was perceived as a “Jewish science”, and if society was purged of minorities and a complete Aryanisation of the populace could be achieved, why would a master race need help for mental anxiety? Jews were ‘primitive’, hence the focus on sexual drives. A master race was above all of these manifest weaknesses. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, set up in 1920, was politically left wing in orientation as well as dominated by Jewish members. It is the perfect example of how psychoanalysis might be made to ‘lean’ politically, albeit ironically for Aryan ideals, to do so, it became psychoanalytically impure. To preserve psychoanalysis, Freud agreed to Felix Boehm and Carl Muller-Braunschweig opening negotiation with the Nazis, notwithstanding that his own books had been publicly burned.
Muller-Braunschweig was convinced psychoanalysis could ‘remodel’ people and be of service to the political leadership. Psychological health was a ‘duty’. When Goring became leader of the German psychotherapists, what became the Goring Institute in 1936, he might have had ‘leaning’ in mind when he said “we are called to educate children and adults in the right spirit”. Without concluding that psychoanalysis is, or should be malleable, it can be seen in the example of 1930s Germany, that it can be made to ‘lean’ towards a particular politics. Can it be made to lean in the opposite direction? After the Revolution in Russia in 1917, psychoanalysis briefly thrived. It had the support of leading figures like Trotsky, and had some state funding. That changed with the emergence of Stalin. Until about 1930, it benefited from the export of ideas from Vienna and many of its leading early exponents had studied with Freud, some with Jung. These included Sabina Spielrein, Nikolai Osipov and Vera and Otto Schmidt. Tatiana Rosental was responsible for establishing psychoanalysis in St Petersburg, whereas other early practitioners were Moscow-based. Tragically she took her own life in 1921. Others were leaving the country, but in 1922 the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was formed and the Detski Dom was opened. This was a school and children’s home, and a kind of laboratory. It predated the Nazis’ Aryanisation approach to psychoanalysis, but had a similar motive, in this case, to build a model Communist man. It was run by Vera Schmidt and attempted to harmonise Freudianism with Marxism. It was closed in the months after Lenin’s death in 1924.
Anna Freud, writing to Ernest Jones in 1933 had opined that “psychoanalysis has no part in politics”. She was writing about Reich, whom she thought her father had believed had “forced psychoanalysis to become political”. This, of course, is different from psychoanalysis being free from politics. This returns us to the concept of neutrality. It is axiomatic that in a Freudian analysis, where the patient is to free-associate, that the analyst does not reveal themself in terms of preferences, background, personal habits, circumstances or biases. That does not mean that one has no politics, merely that the analyst leaves them aside for the purposes of the work. One might argue, in a Freudian context, that they get repressed. However, Anna Freud’s own tussles with Melanie Klein are evidence of how politics associates itself with psychoanalysis at all times. This famously led to ‘The Controversial Discussions’ in 1943-4; a political tug of war between Freudians and Kleinians. Anna Freud’s position, and I think, her father’s are frequently linked to the idea of ‘neutrality’. This seems to support the idea that somehow politics can be left out of the consultation room, or of the conference hall. Klein herself might suggest it is a form of splitting. Indeed, her work on the paranoid-schizoid position is the foundation for the apolitical – political ideas are pushed into the ‘bad breast’. Nonetheless, Laubender (2017) suggests that Anna Freud’s papers on child analytical technique were heavily invested with the politics of the era. Anna Freud was focused on childhood dependence and the positon of authority. “Far from being removed from the socio-political order, Anna Freud’s clinical writings affirm that the psychoanalytic clinic is always already in conversation with the historical context in which it is embedded.”
Anna Freud was friends with social and educational reformers, and therefore familiar with political developments. One such example was Maria Montessori. Children’s education could be a site for freedom from historic oppression and oppressive hierarchies. Child analysis became a vehicle to challenge psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Laubender notes that the political turmoil of the 1930’s was inspiring Freud himself to write his own most political papers, notably Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and quotes Zaretsky, from his psychoanalysis history, Secrets of the Soul: “In contrast to those that had propounded the classical liberal separation of public and private life, the thinkers of the 1930s recognized the unavoidably psychological and cultural character of modern politics, and thus the impossibility of separating the problems of democracy from those of personal autonomy, gender and sexuality, group identity, and the commodification of everyday life.” In a similar vein, Rose (1993) thought that the question of identity was the “central issue through which psychoanalysis enters the political field”.
We apply neutrality to politics and to analysis. Neutrality is never passive. It is an active position, designed to improve a situation for a longer-term benefit. It starts in the nursery, when an infant is projecting all its frustration and hatred upon the mother. The mother contains this projection and presents a neutral object. The importance of neutrality is that it allows for development. In his Observations on Transference Love, Freud wrote “our control over ourselves is not so complete that we may not one day go further than we intended…we ought not to give up the neutrality toward the patient, which we have acquired through keeping the counter-transference in check.” He added, “The more plainly the analyst lets it be seen that he is proof against every temptation, the more readily will he be able to extract from the situation its analytic content.” Can one be neutral despite a political orientation? Hanna Segal’s left wing politics did not affect her analytic contributions. However, she did feel that psychoanalysis had an active contribution to make. She was appalled by the governmental response to the threat of annihilation from nuclear attack. She co-ordinated meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society to address the collective denial of reality of nuclear attack. Bell (1999) explains that when she gave her paper ‘Silence is the real crime’ at the inaugural conference of the International Psychoanalysts for the Prevention of Nuclear War, she showed that denial and splitting led to destruction, paranoia and helplessness; a sort of collective psychic ailment. What would she have done if she was working with a patient who believed in the policy of deterrent?
Before I leave the argument that psychoanalysis is not free of politics, I want to examine what happens in the clinical setting, such as might have confronted Segal. How should an analyst respond to politics being brought into a session, and how should the analyst treat their own politics in the transference? Samuels (2003) authored a questionnaire, exploring what political issues came up in therapy, sent to fourteen professional organisations in seven different countries with over 2000 recipients. The worldwide response rank for what comes into the sessions is led by gender issues for women, followed by economic issues, violence in society, and fourth equal, national politics, gender issues for men, and race or ethnic issues. International politics came next. Recall that this was done in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. His survey of the therapists and analysts revealed that almost half (44%) preferred to keep politics out of the session. Obviously, that means that the majority engaged, many indicating that having an engagement with the external world is part of growing up, of individuation. One survey respondent wrote “We are political animals. Everything we are and do takes place within a political framework. It is impossible to divorce this from the inner world of either our patients or ourselves.” If analysands do not show any apparent concern over political issues eg governance of the pandemic response, climate policies, addressing social and economic inequality etc. does that have meaning? Layton, Hollander and Gutwill (2006) describe it as a defence; “the psychodynamics of terror and aggression and the unconscious defences employed to deny reality offers powerful insights into the microscopic unconscious way that ideaology is enacted and lived”.
The final part of this essay is psychoanalysis’s availability to different types of politics and whether it naturally leans in a particular political direction. I use the example of Marie Langer, as the personification of political leaning. Psychoanalysis does not choose its subjects, or its politics. Whether we live in a socialist or communist era, it is chosen to explain, just as it was regarded by Nazis and the Bolsheviks as having a place. The question is whether or not an understanding of drive theory is more inclined to an association with the political right or left. Sports are often regarded as a socially acceptable way for people to expel and express their aggression. It is of interest to me, therefore, that politics is often described as ‘the great game’. I see politics as a means of handling drives in a socially acceptable way. Whether I support a blue team or a red team, in a sporting or a political contest is irrelevant, it is still how I relieve the psychic impulse. Either side of the Atlantic a kind of fundamentalist conservatism v liberalism appears to have evolved. Thinking about the idea that psychoanalysis might lend itself to one particular political direction, is wrapped up in projecting intolerance, othering, and repression on to the more conservative group and somehow elevating, idealising, the perceived more tolerant, progressive, empathic traits with liberalism. Oddly it is now the political right that has adopted a ‘freedom’ mantra, despite its general trend to be authoritarian and law setting. This seems to be evidence of both projection and introjection.
The probability of psychoanalysis’s particular politics leaning one way is largely
an accident of timing. It emerged at a time of radical politics, but the unconscious and politics already existed. Freud himself talks about how philosophers and poets got their first. Thinking about the unconscious is not the preserve of Freudians, however psychoanalysis, because of Freud’s breakthrough work and writing, emerges from its own developmental stages and latency right into a century of conflict and neuroses. Wars, pandemic, political ideologies – Communist or Fascist – and then the post-war, Cold War threat of annihilation, which might be analysed as the triumph of the death drive. Does it, should it ‘lean’? Roazen (2003) highlighted that the International Psychoanalytic Association prioritised the survival of analysis in the trying 1930’s era and was willing to compromise with the demands of right-wing regimes. I do not think that is evidence of ‘leaning’, but of a defensive pragmatism.
One of psychoanalysis’s greatest gifts has been the attempt to explain the emergence of fascism; what made Nazism so effective in colonising the unconscious? Another concept is ‘resistance’. Resistance to fascism is properly lauded, but it may have left the impression that as a body of knowledge, it is inclined to a harsher view of extreme right-wing politics than of extreme left wing. Today, it is sometimes described as ‘progressive’ but not in a complimentary way, but in the sneering way that is attached to the term ‘wokeism’. Another Ionesco quote seems apt: “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together”. In Katz’s (2006) essay, she wonders if people are unable to connect present events with history and are being overwhelmed by ideology, which is designed to frighten us to a primitive psychic state. This is akin to the paranoid-schizoid state identified by Klein at the very start of life. I conclude that psychoanalysis adapts to the politics of its time, perhaps sometimes adopts them, but does not have an inherent bias.
One thing about exploring if psychoanalysis is free of politics is to think about the many people who claim to have no interest in politics, or to have rejected it. They think of themselves as apolitical. Yet, they neglect the politics in their personal lives. The Oedipal Complex is framed by power and the political, in my opinion. One example that fascinates me is a major psychoanalytic figure, who was very interested in politics in what might be regarded as the grand scale. Her politics were of ideology and of international breadth. Why this is of interest is that she attempted to leave the political behind, and yet it reappeared to dominate the latter decades of her life. That woman was Marie Langer. In the film Chasing the Revolution, she is portrayed as a political and psychoanalytic exemplar, seeking change in society, but also described as “having avoided politics for half her career”. She was a co-founder of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, but left it in protest against its unwillingness to abandon political neutrality when confronted with a repressive regime.
She had been Viennese born (1910) and trained, joined the Communist Party and just as shifting international politics had taken her from her home as a young woman, she subsequently had to leave the home she had made in Argentina, for her own safety, settling in Mexico. Communism took her to Spain to support the International Brigades fighting fascism. Escaping Spain took her to Uruguay just before Europe became a battleground again, and four years later to Argentina.
Argentina was ruled by Peron and by what seemed to her to be a familiar nationalistic fascist playbook. She therefore ‘dropped’ her politics, ostensibly to focus on analysis and maternity. However, her ‘repressed’ political identity manifested itself in a focus on women’s psychological difficulties. In the period of her life when she was devoted, as she seemed to see it, more to maternity than to politics, she was expressing her interpretation of neutrality. In so doing she offended feminists who thought her views of maternity and the family were ultra-conservative and suited the regime. Her ‘neutrality’ was simply a different expression of the political. By the beginning of the 1970’s she was ready to publicly denounce neutrality and to re-adopt a more active political stance aligned with her youthful ideological positions. She brought her international politics to the psychoanalytic world and presented a paper at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) that challenged its hierarchies and training methods. The IPA refused to publish it and she resigned. For me, Langer, who went on to get involved with politics in Mexico and Nicargaua, personifies the way that psychoanalysis is not free from politics. Just as the Kleinian baby comes into the world with love and hate, so psychoanalysis, always and everywhere is political.
In this essay, I have considered the politics of the era when considering if psychoanalysis is free from politics. I have given examples of highly politicised states like 1920’s Russia, and 1930’s Germany, and 1970’s Argentina as well as considering the Cold War period, to examine how politics intrudes on psychoanalysis. I have also considered how politics is part of the psychoanalysis field itself, by highlighting Freud’s splits with Jung and Adler, his appeasement of the pro-regime analysts in Germany, and his daughter’s political fight with Melanie Klein. Psychoanalysis is not free from politics in my view. I am less inclined to believe it naturally leans in one political direction or other, and think that it reflects its time and location rather than influences. I have considered the concept of neutrality, politically and psychoanalytically. I do think it is available to be drawn into a particular politics, including sexual politics and feminism. This, I believe, is one of its many great strengths.
Bell, D., 1999. Introduction: Psychoanalysis, a body of knowledge of mind and human culture. In Psychoanalysis and Culture (pp. 1-24). Routledge.
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Hollander, N.C., 2006. Psychoanalysis and the problem of the bystander in times of terror. Psychoanalysis, class and politics: Encounters in the clinical setting, pp.154-165.
Horney, K., 2013. The neurotic personality of our time. Routledge.
Katz, M., 2006. The beheading of America. Psychoanalysis, class and politics: Encounters in the clinical setting, p.141.
Layton, L., Hollander, N.C. and Gutwill, S. eds., 2006. Psychoanalysis, class and politics: Encounters in the clinical setting. Routledge.
Laubender, C., 2017. On Good Authority: Anna Freud and the Politics of Child Analysis. Psychoanalysis and History, 19(3), pp.297-322.
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Roazen, P., 2001. The exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 37(1), pp.5-42.
Rose, J., 1993. Why war?: Psychoanalysis, politics and the return to Melanie Klein. John Wiley & Sons.
Samuels, A., 2003. (a) Working directly with political, social and cultural material in the therapy session (pp. 128-152). Routledge.
Weeks, J., 2017. Sex, politics and society: The regulation of sexuality since 1800. Routledge.
In this essay, I describe one of the most significant concepts in post-Freudian psychoanalysis; Melanie Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position. Having described it , I attempt to give it context and to consider its strengths, and also what limitations it has. I conclude that it is one of the most important post-Freudian concepts, and has helped us understand ego formation. One might argue that we can thank Freud for the discovery of the ego, but we needed Klein to begin to understand its formation. Her work on both paranoid-schizoid position and depressive position are foundation stones for object relations theory, which has been widely adopted, so much so that the Freudian drive theory may be somewhat obscured these days, despite Klein’s own Freudian base and particular attention to the life and death drives. In attempting to describe what the paranoid-schizoid position is, I run into one of the more problematical issues which is that the position is defined by the defences it provokes in the infant. To describe it is to have to describe associated concepts, such as splitting and projection. I take the view that these are part of what needs to be described, even if we define them as independent of Klein’s position itself.
To describe the concept, it is important to appreciate that Klein believed that the neonate had what might be called ego material, but that its ego was unformed. It responds to its new experiences, particularly anxiety, and in so doing starts to develop its ego. To manage its experiences the infant employs defences such as splitting and projection, which I describe below. From its earliest months, the infant has a mix of anxieties, develops its defences, all of which inform its internal and external object relations. Klein believed that, linked to the life and death drive, that intense feelings of love and hatred are earliest manifestations of ego formation. Paranoid-schizoid is the first elemental configuration of psychic life. It is the exclusive feature of the first three or four months, until the ego has developed sufficiently to progress to the depressive position, but it remains with the individual throughout life. The splitting; the separation of good and bad, is the means of protecting the ego from the death instinct. It has also been described as the beginning of coherence.
The paranoid-schizoid position is the state of splitting the self (the ego separates the loving from the destructive) and the object, into good and bad. When the position is first adopted, by a young infant, there is no capacity to integrate the split object. The splitting defence is one of two major defences, the other being projection. Simplistically, the infant feels either good loving feelings or bad hateful feelings, and projects these into the primary caregiver, the Object. Anxiety comes to be felt as a fear of persecution. (This is the very first emergence of the super-ego). These two objects (sometimes referred to as the good and the bad breasts) are taken in, or introjected by the infant, forming split ego-object relationships in the infant psyche. Klein helps us understand that this is how the ego is formed and how it is organised (around phantasies). In establishing the paranoid-schizoid position, the infant is attempting to overcome the primary anxiety, that of annihilation, the product of the death drive. This is important because it emphasised the link between Freudian thinking and her original, yet derivative work. The expulsion of the impulse by projection creates the paranoid environment for the infant and hence the name of the position.
Splitting, then, is a consequence of projection and introjection but is also a defensive strategy in its own right. The early infant employs splitting to avoid the ego being overwhelmed by the destructive impulse of envy. Klein believed splitting was innate, and that it pre-dated repression, which requires a developed ego to remove anxiety-producing content from the conscious mind. Bad experiences are denied (omnipotence) and cast out, whereas good experiences are idealised as a protection against the persecuting breast. This is one of the great strengths of the paranoid-schizoid position – it gave analysts more understanding of how Freudian concepts required stages of ego development. Successfully negotiating the paranoid-schizoid position is when the infant comes to recognise the overwhelming strength of the good object compared with the bad object. The infant then can then form an understanding that its own libidinal impulses can master its destructive impulses. Integrating the persecutory and the ideal is now possible, because the fear of being overwhelmed by the bad object diminishes. The infant can move to, and adopt, the ‘depressive position’, (feelings of ambivalence towards the object and of reacting to loss and to guilt), something Klein identified, at least using the chronology of her published papers, before the paranoid-schizoid position.
Summarising my description, if the mother can tolerate the hatred of the infant, being cast as a Bad Object, without responding punitively, it allows the infant to moderate its destructive feelings, allowing the reciprocals of envy with gratitude, and hate with love. The infant comes to recognise these co-exist in itself and its object. Whilst this is carried forward into adult life the paranoid-schizoid position is, most significantly, a function of the first year of life, especially the first four months. Unlike the Freudian developmental stages which one progresses through, Klein saw even the earliest psychic structures as ‘positions’ and ones to which an individual returns multiple times. A return is usually a regressive response to environmental stresses. What happens when there is a healthy development and a progression to the depressive position? The infant has learned to tolerate guilt (for inflicting hatred on the same Object it realises it loves) and its loss of narcissistic omnipotence. The ego strengthens and the infant’s sense of self and independence evolve. However, unfortunately, the outcome can be one of unhealthy development, whereby good and bad objects fail to become integrated. In this case, splits widen, guilt becomes too great to bear, differences become concrete, and even an adult will return to the paranoid-schizoid position. Everything is then overwhelmingly good or bad, often with the delusional impressions of the psychotic.
Assessing strengths, one notes that Klein’s opinions were far from universal, although paranoid-schizoid as a foundation to Object Relations has made it an enduring legacy. One powerful, but perhaps unintended strength of Klein’s insight, was that she had been able to identify something that was a feature of the life of the infant individual, but has had applications for groups, for adults, and indeed for nation states. She did not claim these applications of her work, but a concept that allows us to appreciate the source of hatred, aggression, envy, and love, is right to have been applied at more macro levels. Indeed, Alford (1989) wrote a whole book on her work’s application to modern Critical Social Theory. I share the Segal (2006) view; she believed that the Cold War tensions of the US and the USSR reduced the whole world to a paranoid-schizoid position, with each empire threatening total annihilation and acting out schizoid mechanisms such as projection, fragmentation, dehumanisation and splitting. It is an important insight that one can identify the position of the collective psyche. Segal points out that Mutually Assured Destruction had the appropriate acronym, MAD. She explains the West’s need to find a new enemy in order to maintain the paranoia and avoid the shift to facing our depressive problems. This century’s ‘War on Terror’ has been the obvious successor. Klein’s view had been that the demonstration of psychic development was the management of anxiety; moving beyond the paranoid-schizoid.
That said, I remain convinced that the greatest strengths of the concept lie in the understanding of the individual and how ego formation is the function of the first significant dyadic relationship. It means her work is critical in the clinical environment; perhaps as significant as the Oedipal Complex. Providing understanding for ego formation and that maturation of an individual does not exclude returning to the earliest psychic structure, gave a platform for psychoanalysis to keep developing. Bion is one of many who took up her ideas. As explained by Britton and Steiner (1994) he showed the individual starts with a fragmentary state and with every emotional experience moves towards coherence. Comparing this with Klein reveals significant overlap; fragmentation and paranoid-schizoid, and coherence of the depressive position. In the analytic alliance, analyst and analysand have to address phases of disintegration with each new experience before achieving a state of integration. Bion developed Klein’s work for his theorising about linking and the differences between the psychotic and non-psychotic. His “Attacks on Linking” specifically works from a Kleinian foundation, up to an analysis of borderline psychosis. It seems that much of our understanding of the psyche, especially those damaged, is built upon Kleinian insights. The strength, as with Freud, is that the concept is an insight, and something malleable to work, for the enhancement of our understanding.
All great concepts have limitations. For Klein, one view is that in focusing on a relationship, an Object, she was working with the conscious mind only. In other words, her concept is not truly psychoanalytic. One can see some merits in this criticism, but I regard it as rather ‘un-Freudian’ in its pedantry. Freud showed a capacity for new thinking and for avoiding anything that was theoretically ‘boundaried’, and we know admired much of Klein’s contribution to a burgeoning field of study. It was important to him that it was developed. Freud himself was keen for psychoanalysis to be a science and for himself to be regarded as a scientist. Although the work does not lend itself to controlled experiments, and to empirical evidence; by developing and refining theory one might argue that psychoanalysis gives a necessary nod to the scientific method. Klein’s work was in the vanguard of this development. Carstairs (1992) made clear the limitation of psychoanalytic interpretation when an infant cannot talk. As an infant has no language skills any psychoanalytic treatment of infancy is necessarily retrospective. Bick (1968) thought that one limitation was misunderstanding of the role of the skin relative to ego development. She theorised that the physical skin, containing the organs as well as any psychic self, came before feelings of love and hatred by providing a boundary, allowing the infant to conceive of internal and external spaces. It is then that “the stage is set for the operation of primal splitting and idealization of self and object as described by Melanie Klein.”
Lussier (1988) was more concerned that a focus on the Object undermined the primacy of drive theory, “there is no drive without object, and no object relationship except in the context of the drives.” He lines up Anna Freud, Diatkine and Winnicott as supporters for his views. In contrast, Glover, (1945) had made more constructive observations, but highlighted limitations in an essay on the “Klein System of Child Psychology”. He felt that her view that libidinal phases reduced early anxieties was unoriginal. He highlighted Freud, Jones and Abraham, amongst others, who had understood the ambivalence that is the heart of the transition to the depressive position. In common with Lussier, he seems to feel that Klein did little more than reinterpret and rebrand Freud, “according to her, impulses of hate bring about the oedipus situation, and stages in the development of the libido really represent positions won by the libido in its struggle with destructive impulses.” Perhaps the most important limitations come expressed by Klein’s own daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, who felt that the positions depended on assumptions about the predominance of aggressive impulses, projection and introjection and of the infant’s lack of reality awareness. None of these could be tested as appropriate hypotheses and Kleinian theory had insufficient regard for mechanisms like repression, sublimation, isolation, some of which might actually counteract projection and introjection. One might summarise the critical analyses as being “how can we know?” It seems that there is a case for saying that about all psychoanalytic theory.
I conclude this paper by asserting that the paranoid-schizoid position is one of the most significant concepts in the field of psychoanalysis. I have described it and how it evolves and believe that it is our best understanding of how and when the ego is formed. It builds on Freud, but gives a platform for derivative thinkers such as Bion. It is a focus for our understanding of the individual, but one of its many strengths is that it can be scaled up to enhance our understanding of adults compared with infants, of groups rather than individuals and indeed, of nation states. I explore some limitations, including how psychoanalytic it is, but think psychoanalytic thinking would be much the poorer, perhaps might not have continued a post-Freudian development, without the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
References
Alford, C.F., 1989. Melanie Klein and critical social theory: An account of politics, art, and reason based on her psychoanalytic theory. Yale University Press.
Bick, E., 1968. The experience of the skin in early object-relations. BOTT-SPILLIUS, Elizabeth. Melanie Klein today: developments in theory and practice: mainly theory, 5, pp.187-191.
Bion, W.R., 1959 Attacks on Linking International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40 pp. 308-15
Britton, R. and Steiner, J., 1994. Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalued idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, pp.1069-1078.
Carstairs, K. 1992 Paranoid-Schizoid or Symbiotic International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73, pp. 71-85.
Freud, S., 1955. Beyond the pleasure principle. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (pp. 1-64).
Glover, E., 1945. Examination of the Klein system of child psychology. The psychoanalytic study of the child, 1(1), pp.75-118.
Klein, M., 1946. Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, pp.99-110.
Laplanche, J., Pontalis, J.B., Lagache, D. and Nicholson-Smith, D., 2018. The language of psycho-analysis. Routledge.
Lussier, A., 1988. The limitations of the object relations model. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 57(4), pp.528-546.
Roth, P., 2001. The paranoid-schizoid position. Kleinian theory: A contemporary perspective, pp.32-46.
Schmideberg, M., 1930. The role of psychotic mechanisms in cultural development. International journal of psycho-analysis, 11, pp.387-418.
Schmideberg, M., 1971. A contribution to the history of the psycho-analytic movement in Britain. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 118(542), pp.61-68.
Schmideberg, M., 1931. A contribution to the psychology of persecutory ideas and delusions. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 12, pp.331-367.
Antony Sher is dead. RIP. He was one of the greatest actors I got to see live. He was also a novelist, playwright, diarist and artist. A renaissance man. Fortunately, as well as seeing his “bottled spider” of a Richard III, and other great performances, I saw his last London stage appearance in Kunene and the King. I am going to think about some of those performances and the pleasure that I got from them and what great artists, musicians and sportspeople can do to us, but death is very much on my mind, and not just because of a couple of weeks of studying Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud and the Death Drive.
About a fortnight ago I heard that a friend of mine had killed herself. She messaged me at the start of that week, to decline an invitation to a group lunch of our student group, and said she was having some problems with her mental health. It was the first I had heard of it, and when we had built our friendship pre-pandemic, at the university, I marvelled at her love for her family – a husband and two adult sons – and her capacity for work. It was no surprise that she graduated with a first class honours degree. And yet, her internal world must have been crumbling. I don’t think I am in denial, but I am so shocked and numbed by the news that I am not sure I feel anything yet.
Just today, one of my children’s godmothers has let me know that her mother died yesterday. I spent some time working with the Cruse, the grief counselling charity, and even with that experience I don’t know what to do as an immediate response. I know that listening is critical, and encouraging those grieving, to talk about the person they have lost, but somehow it all feels inadequate right now.
My brother recently gave the eulogy at a celebration of the life of one of his great cricketing friends. A man who had the joys of representing his country, but who had to take on cancer after the discovery of an inoperable brain tumour twenty or so years ago. We know life is finite, but we also think that it will be lengthy. We may not believe in our immortality, but we tend to expect to be mortal for some time to come. I wonder how one lives with something like the news of an inoperable tumour. I never met him, but my brother has long celebrated him, like a brother. A man with a largeness of heart that few could rival, and with a compassion for others, rather than dwell on the compassion he himself warranted.
Melanie Klein was responsible for Freud giving greater consideration to the Death Drive, and the experience of World War I veterans made him revise his earliest ideas about the primacy of the sexual drives. But death is an inevitability and life, therefore, should be about preparing for as good or satisfactory a death as possible. To be clear, the death drive is not about a unhealthy wish to die, but an angry, destructive drive, with annihilation at its heart. People who die in acts of uncommon bravery, especially in war, are not consumed by the death drive, but those pursuing a war for whatever political or territorial aim, definitely are. For Klein it was present from the outset for the newborn. She maintained that the baby attributed any of its pains and discomforts to hostile and persecutory forces, including the mother that nurtures it, but occasionally did not provide the nourishment it needed, as soon as it was needed. Hence the ‘good breast/bad breast’.
I have not seen the Ricky Gervais drama ‘After Life’ but there is little doubt that humour, however wry, or discomforting, can allow discourse to happen, where it usually prefers to hide. It seems that it is the most perfect vehicle for understanding our drives and our grief. Freud thought we pursue pleasure, or more accurately avoid unpleasure, and that was the life drive – Eros. The death drive (Thanatos) is constantly trying to overwhelm it, and provide unpleasure. Gervais manages to get audiences to laugh at a scenario where a man loses his wife to breast cancer and contemplates suicide. He wants to project his anger and guilt upon just about anyone, but is frustrated by the way people respond to his anger and guilt and grief, and show him the best of humanity.
I think this is the concept I am wrestling with. Just as my brother grieves, and my daughter’s godmother does, and as I think how fortunate I am that my parents have made it into their eighties, and are still relatively free from health difficulties, I know I will have to think about a time when I no longer have them in my world. However, this exercise was not meant to be maudlin. It was to think about the ends of lives as a point at which one celebrates the life lived, and highs for me often come from watching great actors, sportspeople and musicians. Sher, was one who made me marvel at the exceptional skill, the interpretive genius, and as I learned more about the actor behind the mask, was someone who I admired as someone who could shape his circumstances, not be defined by them. For me that is something of a leitmotif.
My introduction to him was through television. The History Man (1981) – playing Howard Kirk. In the mid-80s I was working, and earning enough to enjoy the best seats at the theatre, and that was how I spent my time when I wasn’t playing non-league football or Essex league cricket. In 1984 in Stratford, and in ’85 at the Barbican, Sher, despite the competition from ‘new Olivier’, Ken Branagh, redefined Shakespearian acting with a performance of such physicality and vocal menace, that I cannot see another actor as Richard III. (And yes, I did think Cumberbatch was pretty impressive). Whilst playing the ‘bottled spider’ and writing ‘The Year of the King’, Sher was ‘dragging up’ for an extraordinary performance in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy’. It is some play, but I think I saw it because he was in it, rather than for the play.
If it was possible, the best may still have been to come. In 1987 I saw him redefine Shylock. The pain that he revealed, of a man, who is outsmarted in court, and who seemed to come out from behind his character’s mask, as he gave the heart-wrenching ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, is still familiar to me. “If you prick us do we not bleed?” What would he have made of the disgraceful attack on the young Jewish bus passengers this week?
Critics loved his King Lear, but for me it was the one true disappointment. It came three years after his groundbreaking Falstaff. Once again his facility with the Shakespearian lines meant I can still hear him saying them – in this case the brilliant ‘Honour’ speech. “What is in that word “honour”? The Falstaffian contempt for it, “therefore I’ll none of it, honour is a mere scutcheon”, seems to me to be closely associated with our government of today. The Lear, was the only time I could not see his character clearly, and I felt that there was still some Falstaff coming through.
At different times he hid his homosexuality, before finding love with director, Gregory Doran; his faith (his parents had gone to South Africa to escape pogroms in Lithuania) and his white South African heritage, ashamed by apartheid. Yet he became an eloquent speaker about each of these issues that shaped who he was, and why he liked playing someone else on stage. So, I admired him for his multiple artistic talents and for his ability to speak out when necessary.
And so, 2019 came around. I did not know that it was to be the last time to see him on the London stage, but I was very excited by Kunene and the King. A two hander with John Kani, it pushed a black man and an irrascible, dying white man, together, as the black man reluctantly nurses the bigoted patient. Sher played Jack Morris, a fading Shakespearian actor. He has been offered King Lear, but knows he may not be well and strong enough to take it. Through reading parts together, the two men find ways of thinking about the changes in S Africa in the 25 years post apartheid. Morris is astounded that his carer knows Julius Caesar well – from a Xhosa version.
Sher gave a performance of extraordinary nuance and depth. How could he patronise a man, initially dismissed as an identity-less member of “you people”, if like Morris, he appreciated and understood Shakespeare? Sometimes you go for the play, sometimes the playwright, often the actor. It was magnificent. I would have gone to see Sher in anything, like McKellen, or Branagh, or Rylance. He played Sigmund Freud, at Hampstead, in the play ‘Hysteria’, which I wish I had seen. As well as Freud, the other thing I would like to see, if we could travel through time, would be his BAFTA winning turn as Primo Levi (he not only won this acting award, he wrote the play!). It started at the National, but there are film versions. One can only hope it makes it back on to the screen as part of the tributes to him.
He had been ill. We all die. But some deaths make you think deeply about mortality, and about family. They also make you think about the need to live your life well, whilst you have the health and the mental fortitude to do so. A gay, Jewish, South African was probably not the role model I sought when I started work, and as I left school, and yet, I think he has played a big role in my life, as someone to admire and to appreciate just how complex we all are, and we all can be. And he put it on stage and screen, and I was lucky to see him showing me what it is to be multi-faceted, complicated, but above all ‘good’. Professionally, personally and probably morally. RIP.
In this essay, I shall describe repression and repression theory as an example of a fundamental concept in Freud’s work. For Freud, little was of greater import, it is the “cornerstone of our understanding of the neuroses”. In his Autobiographical Study, he called it “a novelty” and was clear that with his discovery, “nothing like it had ever before been recognized in mental life”. Once I have described and defined it, I aim to evaluate it, although historic evaluation including Freud’s own, about it being “a cornerstone”, not just of the understanding of neuroses, but of the psychoanalytic field, sets the bar high. From the outset, this concept is problematical, insofar as it is loosely defined, not least by Freud himself. In generic form, it is a psychic defence. This raises questions about what is being defended, how the defence works and what happens to repressed material. These are addressed below. Furthermore, Freud came to see repression as being two distinct things. Unhelpfully, what he called ‘repression proper’ turns out to be a derivative, whereas repression in what might be called its pure form, is described as ‘primal repression’. This essay restricts itself to Freud and his concept, but it is helpful to think of the term signifier, when thinking of the primal repressed, which was a word attached to it by French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, later in the twentieth century. Billig (1999) described repression as a “willed forgetting” and explained that we have a need to forget our secrets, but also the fact of having forgotten them. The forgetting of the forgotten is successful repression.
I shall start with an attempt to define repression; what it is we must forget we have forgotten. It is when we cannot recall a memory from the past. We say it is repressed. But what does that mean? In the original, the German word verdrangung, described what was happening. The best translations of this seem to be ‘to push away’; ‘to thrust aside’. What is being thrust aside? Beliefs that cannot become conscious, because the content is so shocking, or painful, (such as a murderous rage towards one’s father) that something obstructs them ie thrusts aside and makes repressed. Freud’s terminology translated as an instinctual impulse, as that which is thrust aside. It is the impulse which passes into a state of repression. Freud explains that such a horror would inspire a fight or flight response, but given that “the ego cannot escape from itself”, it cannot fly.
In his short paper on Repression, first published in Zeitschrift, Freud grapples with why should something need repressing. If what is being repressed is the satisfaction of a need, a drive, that is inconsistent with the view that satisfying a need generates pleasure. Therefore, for this psychic mechanism to happen, it must be responding to the risk of unpleasure, in the case of a murderous rage, perhaps the subsequent guilt attached to parricide. Having the impulse met, the need satisfied is pleasurable, but it is the coexistence of unpleasures such as shame and the condemnation of society that causes the repression. None of this ever reaches the conscious level of the mind, but is fought out by the impulse and the defence. Freud explains that the force of the feelings of unpleasure overwhelm the pleasure of satisfying the unconscious impulse. It is at this point that he addresses the question of what happens to the repressed impulse. Freud understood that it is kept “at a distance” from conscious activity, but that it continues to exist.
This brings him to the theorising of two types, or components of repression. Primal repression is the first phase, much as described above – the impulse is denied entry to the conscious. He notes that what happens next, repression proper, is when psychic derivatives of the initial impulse attach themselves and make a renewed attempt to become conscious. These derivatives are also repressed, which is why Freud describes recession proper as an “after pressure”. Unlike primal repression the material that needs to be defended in repression proper, has once been available to the conscious but has been defended against. An early trauma is an example – too difficult and painful to tolerate, but available nonetheless. To remind his readers that repressed impulses continue to exist, he writes that repression only exists to act as a bar to one psychical system, namely the conscious. He suggests, moreover, that the repressed impulse “proliferates in the dark”. The “censorship of the conscious” is weakened by how far the derivative is from the initial primal repression, and sufficient distance can allow it access to the conscious, at which point they manifest as neurotic symptoms. Lastly, repression is not uniform. He highlights this to emphasise that a repression is not a permanent event, and for repression to succeed it needs a pressure, because it has to be able to resist the upward pressure of the unconscious, to which the impulse has returned, but not disappeared. He writes of these forces as “repressive cathexes”, which relax during periods of sleep and contribute to the formation of dreams as a renewed attempt of the unconscious impulse to break through.
Freud was not the discoverer of the unconscious; he himself notes the many artists and philosophers who had an understanding that it might exist, but the theory of repression is his unique work. In his paper, “The Ego and the Id”, Freud noted that we obtain our concept of the unconscious, “from the theory of repression”. Whilst an awareness of the probability of the unconscious had been acknowledged, he thinks the theory of repression allows it to be conceptualised. Herein lies its significance. He thinks the ego itself is the mechanism of repression and in his later years he asserted that the work of the analytical treatment was to strengthen the ego in its battle with id. This is a curio, because one might interpret it as an invitation for more repression. Was he advocating that, consciously or unconsciously?
If it can be satisfactorily defined, we might get around to asking, is it a necessary process? Does it have any sort of protective function? Also, does it always work? The strength of one’s defences is not consistent. At times of weakness it allows unconscious material to intrude, hence parapraxes. More familiarly, our defence is weak when we sleep. Dreams, the things that when interpreted are the “royal road to the unconscious”, are the best example, alongside symptoms. For Freud, this is the return of the repressed and is linked to the repetition compulsion. Freud notes that repression is a mechanism originating in the ego, and also that it is unconscious. He had come to understand that ego is not exclusively conscious. Achieving that understanding was a consequence of the work on repression, giving weight to its significance to the development of psychoanalysis. We accept that the return of the repressed is an inevitability, because we have not overcome it.
What might we think about the nature of repression at a societal level? This is important because we come to ask if repression is important. It seems to be something that protects us from feelings of guilt and shame, which might be too debilitating to carry on living. In this way, it might be thought of as a kind of uber-defence. Either way, the significance of his theory is its impact on futures, individually and collectively. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he explores what the analyst can achieve working with something the analysand cannot remember: “The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be the essential part of it”. It is in this essay that Freud writes about a repetition compulsion. “He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience…” For me, it is this quality of the theory of repression, that it begot more ideas, that highlights its enormous worth. That something so radical could be taken up by future generations of analysts gives weight in any evaluation of repression.
In applying his discovery to treatments, specifically for neuroses, Freud started by believing that repressing material generated anxieties. An anxiety was the consequence of a repression because the energy associated with the unconscious drive had not been released – no pleasure. Patients were aware that something needed to be resolved, but not really what that was. Hence an anxiety. However, many years later he revised his thinking. In his revised view, anxiety begets repression, not being a consequence of it. An idea in the unconscious that is threatening to the integrity of the ego becomes the thing that the ego acts to repress. The anxiety came first; the defence, repression, was the response.
By evaluating repression, one is attempting to determine its significance, and to consider its strengths and also its limitations. How does one evaluate a “cornerstone”? Cohen and Kinston (1984) took the view that when Freud said that repression takes place only after a “sharp cleavage” between conscious and unconscious activity, and that in some papers he seemed to exclude some ages such as the pre-pubertal; that he might have wished to exclude some conditions, and they speculate those to be psychoses. It allows them to develop what they claim are long-standing theoretical inconsistencies, mostly linked with Freud’s views that primal repression was linked to trauma. They review the literature on borderline, psychotic and narcissistic patients in examining whether the theory of repression is inapplicable. Even if there is some merit to their argument, I am not convinced it truly damages the “cornerstone” or threatens to bring the structure down. In another criticism, they explore the use of cathexes and suggest that this is a convenient “economic metaphor” Freud used when he wanted or needed to avoid detailed definitions. They summarise that Freud allowed for ambiguity or for further research by using both a ‘cathexis hypothesis’ which mapped to his topographical model of the mind and concurrently working with a form hypothesis, which blends elements of both the topographical and the structural models of the mind. When one is dealing with something as dynamic as the unconscious, I take the view that it is wise to not be absolutist, and to leave room for fresh thinking. One final criticism the authors level is to take issue with the lack of “clearly stated hypotheses” regarding the formation and the “mechanism of primal repression”. This seems more justifiable, but Freud himself understood it, and it was his willingness to consider the impact of “environment” that allowed him to wrestle free from an impulse being realised as a potential source of unpleasure, not pleasure, and hence the cathexis for repression overwhelmed the cathexis to break into consciousness.
Blum (2003) has more to say on the significance of repression, especially in the dyadic analytical relationship because for him repression is indissolubly linked with transference. “Transference is a return of the repressed, with repressed memories embedded within a fundamental unconscious fantasy constellation.” It seems to me that this is critical in evaluating repression. Not only has it given psychoanalysis the theoretical foundation it required, and allowed us to explore unconscious, but it has been a productive tool in treatment. Blum’s essay is a response to an article penned by Peter Fonagy, who had disregarded the link between transference and repression. The enduring debates about Freud’s work are testament to its significance. Amongst Freud’s best-known and regarded psychoanalytic successors is Bion, who in his “Attention and Interpretation” also considered the analytical situation and the “experience of remembering a dream”. He thought memory should only be associated with a “conscious attempt to recall” and echoed Freud on the significance of repression proper making its renewed assaults on consciousness, often in dreams, when reminding us that “dream-like memory is the memory of psychic reality and is the stuff of analysis” (my emphasis).
This essay has described repression, one of Freud’s fundamental concepts, generally as a psychic defence, and more specifically, in explaining the way that primal repression forms and is repressed, and repression proper, which is sometimes repressed, and is an “after-pressure”. In the second half of this essay I have considered the significance of Freud’s great discovery, and his own view that it was first, a “cornerstone”, in the understanding of neuroses, and more boldly a “cornerstone” for psychoanalysis itself. In evaluating the discovery, I have reviewed papers that regard the definition and mechanism of primal repression as ambiguous and I have considered the significance of how the theory of repression has enhanced treatment, especially with regard to working with transference. I conclude that repression is fundamental to modern clinical technique and to the history, concepts and theoretical bases for psychoanalysis. Truly a cornerstone.
References
Billig, M. (2000) Freud’s Different Versions of forgetting “Signorelli”. Int. J. Psychoanal., (81)(3):483-498
Billig, M. (1999). Freudian repression: Conversation creating the unconscious. Cambridge University Press.
Bion, W. R. (Ed.). (2013). Attention and interpretation: A scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups (Vol. 4). Routledge.
Blum, H. (2003) Repression, transference and reconstruction International Journal of Psychoanalysis (84) (3) pp. 497-503
Cohen, J. & Kingston, W. (1984) Repression Theory: A New Look at the Cornerstone International Journal of Psychoanalysis (65) pp. 411-22
Freud, S. (1995). The Freud Reader. (Ed. P. Gay) United Kingdom: Vintage.
Frosh, S. (2012). A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
I had the very great fortune to get to know Jimmy quite well. He was still making huge television audiences laugh because, “it’s a funny ol’ game”, and beneath the jester, was a philosophical man, who knew that that phrase applied to life as much as it pertained to football.
I knew him because I played, first at Maldon Town, and later at Witham Town, with his sons Danny and Andy. Danny played the game like a second-generation tribute act to his father. Slight of build, clinical finisher and often laconic commentator on what was going on around him. He was good enough to play in the football league at Cambridge and Southend, but it never quite happened for him.
Andy was a marauding full back, with his father’s zest for life. He was irrepressible and bubbly and occasionally confrontational. He was one of those players that everyone else wants in the side. Although Jimmy was riding high with his broadcasting career he made time to watch his sons, and therefore he saw me play. Despite my many shortcomings he was always warm in praise for me and generous in advice.
In one evening game I played, Danny was horribly injured by a malicious tackle from a thuggish defender. He was not able to play again, but he became the manager of our Witham team. My memory is occasionally confused, but I think that was the time that Jimmy started to watch more often. I think he hoped Danny might still find a way into the game. The club had some modest sponsorship and I am sure it was Jimmy who decided we would be improved by a new strip.
We started to wear the red and black stripes with which he had been adorned in his AC Milan days. We were Essex’s Rossoneri. Jimmy thought that we would be more intimidating wearing such a strip. We did quite well too. Our finest run in the FA Cup came in that strip, before losing at Dartford, a couple of rounds before we could draw a league club.
I did see Jimmy play, but very little. My sense of him comes from old film. He slips past bemused defenders with a deft flick of his hips and suddenly is nonchalantly sidefooting the ball home. Chelsea and Tottenham fans will claim him as their own, given his great feats in their colours. For me, as a Hammer, we saw a player, who knew he had peaked, but could demonstrate, in flashes how high that peak had been. His scoring exploits for the national side only serve to remind us of the crushing disappointment that 1966 turned out to be for him.
His playing pomp was my childhood, so I was a Jimmy fan mainly because of his broadcasting. The real thrill to me was that he was completely unchanged off camera as in front of it. To have one of England’s finest sportsmen throw an arm around your shoulder and tell you things he had liked about your game, after another match when I had failed to deliver the ball into Danny’s path from my right-wing role, was to be swept into a special relationship. Occasionally, I thought he was helping me more with my game than he was supporting Danny or Andy. He had that way of making you feel special, which for me, meant letting me believe I was a good enough player.
My deepest condolences to Danny, Andy and the rest of the family. I know that the last few years have been difficult as Jimmy’s health deteriorated and I hope my old team-mates will get great comfort from what I am sure will be many fabulous testimonials and thoughtful obituaries. I think, for me, he was one of my very first relationships with fame and stardom, and he was able to show that whatever goals (in all senses of that word) had been achieved, the really important thing was how you treated people. And Jimmy treated people like me as family. RIP.
Second Innings 