Abstract
In the final ten pages of Mitchell and Greenberg’s Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), in a section titled “The Models: A Deeper Divergence,” we are informed that the drive/structural model is felt to be “incommensurable” (p. 404) with the relational/structural model. On philosophical as well as psychological grounds, this “deeper divergence” reveals two incompatible visions of life. Can these divergent views co-exist? Can an analyst shift between several theoretical frames or, due to philosophical incompatibilities, must he stay true to a single theory? It is to this thorny comparative psychoanalysis problem that Morris Eagle is lending his hand. Unlike his predecessors, however, who organized their study genealogically (historically, biographically), Eagle opts for a conceptual approach: seminal authors are organized within sections dedicated to five core concepts: theories of mind, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment, this last divided into (1) treatment goals and analytic stance and (2) therapeutic actions and ingredients. The advantage of this approach is that the ideas of major theorists are subordinated to an organizing theme. This method emphasizes similarities, minimizes differences, but risks reductionism. Problems may arise when alternative theoretical contributions are minimized to the point of being discarded, not fitting into the procrustean bed. That being said, though their approaches differ, comparative psychoanalysts generally agree on the goals of their effort, namely, identifying convergences and divergences between psychoanalytic traditions, and determining whether we can agree on common ground.
Eagle’s first task is to establish the historical (“classical”) ground he will compare with the new figure of contemporary psychoanalysis. (The Oxford Dictionary [2005] definitions of the word classical being numerous, one wonders whether Eagle is using it to mean [1] “representing an exemplary standard within a traditional and long-established form or style,” or [2] “relating to the first significant period of an area of study, as in classical Marxism.” For an up-to-date explanation of the confusing misnomer “classical” [or Freudian or orthodox], see Gottlieb [2012].) Although Eagle says he is interested in Freudians up to the present day (definition 1), a closer reading reveals he is interested primarily in Freud’s (not Freudian) theory (definition 2). In fact, in an opening disclaimer, Eagle defends his neglect of “contemporary Freudians” by saying his focus is on the “radical departures from and challenges to classical psychoanalytic theory” (p. xiv). For his purposes, we could argue, establishing where we originally came from—and not where the originalists evolved to—will help us better understand where we’ve gone. Because his intent is more to offer us a general reminder of the tradition from which our field evolved, a critique of what elements of our Freudian past (or classical present) Eagle has omitted seems beside the point.
In his conceptual overview of aspects of Freud’s theories, Eagle reminds us of some of the basic “bedrock” principles of Freudian metapsychology: the dynamic (“a cauldron full of seething excitations” [p. 39], the economic (the constancy principle), the structural (the second theory of anxiety), the topographic (the unconscious to be discovered), the genetic (linear, psychosexual development), and the adaptive (progressive aims). In Eagle’s hands, Freud’s model of the human emerges as instinctual, antisocial, fragmented, mechanistic, and highly abstract. Freud the antihumanist reigns supreme: the relation between drive and object is “contingent” (on pleasure, gratification [p. 48]) rather than inherent (contact for contact’s sake). Psychopathology is the result of a reluctance to relinquish primary objects and of difficulties resolving one’s oedipal struggle.
To prepare for the contrasting of contemporary (another term begging definition) views, Eagle further paints a stark (though not wholly inaccurate) picture of Freud’s theory of action and therapeutic stance. Eagle emphasizes the goal of “conflict resolution” (p. 77) wherein the inner conflict between infantile psychosexual and hostile wishes is confronted and resolved by the strategy of making the unconscious conscious. The treatment encourages regression, the return of the repressed, the abreaction of strangulated affect, and “associative rectification” (p. 80). The method is linguistic. To facilitate the regressive process, the analyst’s stance is analogous to a stress interview: he is anonymous (allowing the projection of wishes, defenses, and conflicts), neutral (at risk of seeming indifferent), and abstinent (at risk of seeming cold). The goal is the relinquishing of infantile oedipal objects for more mature object relations via the strategy of gaining insight, afforded by the technique of tactful and carefully timed interpretations of the transference. Genetic interpretations linking the childhood there-and-then to the transference here-and-now result in an increased ability to tolerate warded-off material, which strengthens the ego, a sense of agency, and ego flexibility. Granted, many will cry foul at this caricature of the traditional theory of mind and treatment method, but again, Eagle’s larger mission is to set a problematic scene out of which nontraditional psychoanalysts would evolve.
As he moves into the second, contemporary psychoanalysis portion of the book, Eagle’s primary aim is to present the radical differences the “new view” psychoanalysts unleash on our classical landscape. To be sure, Eagle is fully aware of the important differences among contemporary modern and postmodern psychoanalysts (see Eagle 2003). Nonetheless, he uses the term contemporary rather loosely, even using it to refer to postwar theorists who broke with the mainstream American ego psychological tradition. (To call Kohut, Alexander, Loewald, or even Mitchell contemporary is a bit of a stretch, but we see where he’s going with this.) In declaring that most psychoanalysts today think very differently than their predecessors, he aims to highlight some of the fundamental shifts the new view (call it “two-person”) has effected, including the idea that the mind is not fully formed but emergent. Using Donnel Stern’s theory as an example, Eagle points out how the new school perceives psychological meaning as emerging from unformulated into meaningful by virtue of an interactional context. As he revisits the contributions of the forefathers of contemporary thinkers, Eagle stresses how non-Freudian object-relational thinkers, and later today’s relationalists, posit that we have underestimated our past and presently ongoing need for deeply emotional, primarily preoedipal sustenance: wishes for security, confirmation of love, and positive reflections on our self-esteem.
Because Eagle’s post-Freudian overview covers so much ground, he perforce must be highly selective. When it comes to the newer, contemporary views of object relations, Eagle does touch on the main points: radical deemphasis of genetically programmed processes (an internally driven developmental pathway) and increased emphasis on the role of environmental failure (the conflict vs. deficit debate). He stresses Fairbairn’s “bedrock” view (and that of Mitchell, his protégé) that we need objects to preserve continuity and connection with a personal, interactional world. He invokes Kohut’s similarly “bedrock” ideas on narcissism as a separate line of development. Despite Kohut’s being neither object-relational nor contemporary, Eagle has a strong affinity for his theory of the ongoing relationships—selfobject or merged object relationships—that enable normal object relations to unfold.
Eagle’s overview of contemporary theories of psychopathology, in turn, captures the general post-Freudian emphasis on environmental trauma and the absence of mind-facilitating figures. Trauma theories (parental deficiency, the persistence of early [pathological] modes of relating, maladaptive representations) assume a one-to-one correspondence with a past deficient reality. Inadequate parental attunement results in self (mood) dysregulation. Constricted experiences (Stolorow’s “horizons of awareness”) are the result of the chronic invalidation of desires—for separation, for autonomy—too threatening to object ties. These “bedrock” views have led to the idea that what is unconscious is a learned sense of helplessness or fear. If the mind is socially constructed, here is an example of a traumatic experience (growing up) and an expectation (in the present, for better or worse) of more of the same. The mind is defective and arrested by virtue of its neglect. And, given that the insult occurred early on, at a time when the person was nonverbal, any communication of the meaning of the person’s symptoms emerges nonverbally, by way of behavior or somatically.
Next Eagle turns his attention to how the ontological questions raised by the new schools unavoidably influence the analyst’s attitude and stance with the patient. In a world where knowledge is not discovered ready-made but is unfolding, the analyst’s authority is undoubtedly called into question. In a world where self-regulation is no longer a developmental outcome completed by a good enough upbringing (or a good enough analysis), but rather is an ongoing, mutually regulating experience whenever two people meet, the analyst, never neutral, is always desiring something for the analysand (as well as for himself). Neutrality is debunked, and interaction is free to be the focal point of treatment because it is always mysterious, tendentious, and potentially rich in meaning regarding what is being transacted between both parties. Discarded are making the unconscious conscious, the discovery and renunciation of infantile wishes, and reconstruction. Championed are not interpretations but having a new experience with a new parent, a new object. Now, rather than “outcome goals” (i.e., “structural change” resulting in more adaptive compromise formations), the emphasis is on “process goals”: meaning-making and the reorganization of experience (Mitchell), an expanding range of experience (Stolorow), the resumption of developmental growth (Loewald), and enhanced reflective capacity (Fonagy).
Likewise, Eagle points out, epistemological questions and issues of therapeutic action are reconceptualized to square with the new humanism. Because the deficit model conceives of the patient as deficient, the analyst’s experience (the “totalistic” countertransference) and puzzling interactions (enactments) are felt to offer knowledge about the analysand’s (and also the analyst’s) wishes and fears. Not that this radical skepticism toward the analyst’s knowledge and authority necessarily sits well with Eagle. He warns us against the slippage, in the service of antiauthoritarian emancipation, into an unselfconscious tolerance for an “anything goes” wild analysis. Just as he rejects Renik’s position (p. 201) and prefers the view that biases, prejudices, and personal countertransference feelings can be monitored, so he laments Ogden’s too facile characterization of projective identification as a finger-pointing exercise in which the analyst disavows that the unwelcome feelings he is having may also come from him (pp. 221–223).
This leads us to the point of Eagle’s book: in the final analysis, the mission of this type of comparative psychoanalysis is to determine whether the evolution of theory requires the renunciation of basic foundational (Freudian) concepts. Is psychoanalysis—as a theory of mind, as a method of investigation, as a treatment modality—inescapably tied to Freud as founder? Or has it, with newly proposed theories of the mind (and recent findings in allied fields), overstayed its welcome in the Freudian cathedral and in need of a new theoretical edifice? Eagle has appropriately defined Freud as a product of his time, heir to an Enlightenment “self-emancipatory” vision, dedicated to the quest away from the irrational to the reasonable, firmly embracing pretenses of positivism and objectivity. In the Kuhnian paradigm shift from modernism to postmodernism, Eagle invokes Rorty’s pragmatism, privileging solidarity as a postmodern organizing principle that new-school psychoanalysts can agree on. These are the kinds of divergences from the original that modern and postmodern thought require us to confront.
Unlike Greenberg and Mitchell, however, who seemed all too eager to sound the death knell of psychoanalytic incommensurability, for Eagle the question is less what our divergences are, and more what common ground we can share. In fact, Eagle seems adamant (heroically, I might add) about finding areas, in all his conceptual categories, on which we can all agree. He postulates a shared view of the mind in conflict, of a shared goal of maturity in adaptation. He finds overlap in the concept of the object as tension-regulating (never mind that one model perceives the object as intrapsychic, the other as interpsychic). He can even see overlap in the mind’s being object-seeking and being pleasure-seeking. He is delightfully surprised, yet also mystified, that Freud could champion a cure through love (he quotes the statement in “On Narcissism” that “in the last resort one must love in order not to fall ill” [p. 59]). He argues that all models have some version of excessive attachment to early object ties, poorly modulated affects, and a constricted range of experience. And he finds overlap and common ground in treatment modalities: working in the transference-countertransference (despite differences in how these are conceptualized) and the goal of new, more adaptive ways of relating.
To offer such a vast overview of our field, from its distant origins to our present-day controversies, is an ambitious, laudable feat. To organize the task not genealogically but conceptually is all the more challenging. Given it is an almost impossible task, there will inevitably be questions left unaddressed (or unresolved) and leaving the reader wanting. One such question, already touched on, is whether Eagle truly means to compare our Freudian origins to our present-day controversialists. Contemporary Freudians (incidentally, of many stripes [see Richards 2003]) have elaborated Freud’s concepts into current versions that stand up rather well (though based on different philosophical principles) to the ideas of present-day non-Freudians. Another problem, also alluded to, is the lumping together of contemporary theorists. I can see how having this heterogeneous bunch join each other on one side of the aisle serves to highlight their differences from the Freudian original, but the rather stark differences among members of the contemporary pool do not always (or even often) make them collegial intellectual partners. In fact, I wonder whether many contemporary psychoanalytic theorists (e.g., relational, interpersonal, hermeneutic, social-constructivist, intersubjectivist) were simply not included in Eagle’s overview because it would have required dividing up the contemporary concepts into, at least, those adhering to modernist perspectives (Kohut, most notably) as against those more fully engaged in the postmodern debate on knowledge and authority (Stolorow, for instance).
Does Eagle agree with Mitchell and Greenberg’s view (1983) that a “deeper divergence” has revealed two “incompatible” (p. 406) visions of life? Or with Kernberg (1993), who has argued that we as a community are more convergent than divergent? Or with Wallerstein (2002), who feels our cross-pollination by two-person psychologies has positively influenced one-person psychologies by adding a general focus on the interactional and intersubjective quality of the analytic encounter? In his final pages, Eagle inveighs against the risk of falling prey to the “reductionistic impulse” (p. 292), which emphasizes differences and incompatibilities, and expresses disinterest in identifying, from a more bird’s-eye view, what brings us together. For Eagle, despite our differences, there is ongoing value in meeting across the divide, in a spirit of pluralism and ecumenicism, to discuss the multitudinous ways we grasp the mind, interactions, illness, and cure. In the end, it is to the tradition of “a plea for a measure of humility” (Richards 2003) that this book belongs. To my mind, despite the book’s shortcomings, a contribution to that tradition remains a very salutary thing indeed.