Abstract
In his introduction to Tra il sapere e la cura, Francesco Conrotto thanks his students at the Italian Psychoanalytic Society in Rome for having inspired him to conduct an in-depth and comprehensive reflection on the foundation and development of psychoanalysis. This book is the answer to their quest for greater understanding of Freud’s thinking. Conrotto, the author of numerous influential works, combs through Freud’s writings, culling and examining details—some unfamiliar but all significant—of what can be known about Freud’s thinking and how it led to and affected future developments. He believes that without rediscovering and re-appraising Freud’s thinking, it will be impossible to consider what should be reemphasized, retained, reelaborated, or even abandoned. Conrotto does not support orthodoxy. Rather, he demonstrates how psychoanalysis has evolved into a postmodern psychic relational experience that occurs in the analytic setting.
This is an important book. Profound, complex, and thorough, it is well organized, economically written, specific, and lucid. Perhaps most important, it is written with a fervor that draws the reader in.
The book is organized into three parts: The first, “Origins and Genesis of Psychoanalysis,” traces the public’s recognition of the notion of representation, from romantic culture to hysteria, to dream, to language, and on to the untamable nature of affect. This interest forced the door open onto Freud’s new model of the mind, based on the dream and representation. The book’s second part, “The Model Tested by the Clinic,” highlights the “anaclitic theory,” which once understood clarifies many of the concepts and principles guiding modern psychoanalytic practice. The third part is “The Second Freudian Model and Its Implications in Contemporary Psychoanalysis.”
Part 1, largely historical, lays the foundation for the second. Here Conrotto illustrates how Freud’s Three Essays represents a turning point and first correction (p. 74). The first theory was based on the dream and on representation; the second theory introduces and is based on the fundamental concept of anaclisis and its derivative, drive. “Anaclisis” comes from the Greek anaklitos, meaning “leaning on” and implying strong emotional dependence on another, here the mother or caretaker. “Drive” denotes psychic energy that propels toward action. Conrotto sees drive as originating in the early mother-child anaclitic relationship. Freud, he believes, found drive inconceivable outside the theory of anaclisis—two mutually interdependent concepts. With the introduction of the anaclisis concept, the central psychoanalytic paradigm is no longer the dream. Instead the paradigm becomes the relationship of maternal care, in which a two-way emotional leaning occurs. Conrotto believes that when the interdependence of drive and relationship is understood, the concept of oedipal conflict makes absolute sense, as does the nature of the conflict embedded in the heart of every human being. Psychic conflict, he contends, arises between sexual drive and the need for sustenance.
One aspect of anaclitic theory that Conrotto insists on is the secondary, derivative character of sexuality and the sexual drive. This detail, he stresses, had been left behind, specifically the fact that although the initial stimulus is the physiological need of the child—hunger—as part of the mother-child connection, the arousal becomes pleasure-seeking, sexual, giving rise to the phenomenon of libidinal co-excitement. Here then is a clear illustration of the nature of drive as a transformative process from somatic to psychic, and simultaneously from self-preservation to pleasure. Conrotto believes that the conceptual separation of drive and anaclisis caused the concept of drive to be understood in an excessively biologistic way.
Conrotto offers a richly detailed section dealing with the functions of mirroring, which for him is part of anaclisis. He stresses that to fully understand the anaclitic theory one must recognize not only that sexuality develops from the early functioning of the organism’s physiological systems, but also that it is conveyed via bodily and affective ministrations in childcare. That is, the sensuality that vests the object (the child) derives from those who have provided its care. This formulation of anaclisis introduces the role of the object as contributing to the drive, rather than simply revealing it, a point made by André Green in 1995 (p. 79). But the fullest grasp of this aspect of anaclisis, Conrotto contends, is to be found in the work of Winnicott and Bion. Winnicott asked what the infant sees when he looks at the mother’s face. The answer: he usually sees himself. That is, the mother looks at the child, and how she appears to the child is related to what she sees and perceives. The “maternal glance” is not simply a perceptual-sensorial phenomenon; it is also a “message,” the content of which, according to Winnicott, is that the child, libidinally invested with sensuality by the maternal glance, is “acknowledged” and “identified” as being precisely that certain child. The maternal glance is the first gesture that establishes the child as subject; once identified and libidinally vested by the mother, the child is introduced into the symbolic order (p. 79).
Bion’s approach then clarified the following aspects: the mother-child exchange is understood as a projective identification of the disruptive beta elements of the child’s psyche into the psyche of the mother, who accepts them and returns them as psychically endurable alpha elements better suited to mental life. As for the father’s function in the representations the child builds and takes in, Conrotto asserts that the paternal function is better viewed as being carried out by the human environment in which the child is immersed, even before birth.
The anaclitic theory, resting on the assumption that human sexuality is developed by a “leaning” on the function of the organism’s physiological apparatuses, identifies two movements: the first involves the vital needs of the nursing child (the order of self-preservation), which to be gratified require the caretaking on which they depend (anaclisis); the second involves the unconscious sensual energy of the adults present in the environment, an energy that is unwittingly, and in completely unconscious ways, expressed in tenderly caring for the child. These two movements interdigitate, forming an intersection that is the intersubjective meeting point between the adult and the child. When internalized by the latter, it forms the first “intrapsychic” nucleus. Conrotto writes that this first nucleus becomes intrapsychic as the result of primary repression and will be the seed of the unconscious; unfortunately, he fails to say exactly what is repressed. We can find elucidation on this point, however, in Laplanche’s Essays on Otherness (1999). There Laplanche states that the infant body is traumatized by the unmasterable excitation due to the maternal care of the infant, who has neither ego nor language, so that “sexuality is an effect of primal seduction” (p. 128). The newborn is at the mercy of the other, of messages to which the infant cannot give meaning; these messages are therefore repressed to form the unconscious and the body ego.
Thus, the intrapsychic nucleus is made up of the child’s needs and the other’s sensuality superimposed on them; the unmasterable excitation that results; its repression; and the ensuing formation of the unconscious—all will be part of a dynamic phenomenon that is traumatizing and significant, in that it will put to work both the tendency toward total discharge of tension (and the achievement of gratification or pleasure) and the push to translate and create sense (e.g., of the mother’s “enigmatic glance”).
The third part of this book, “The Second Model and Its Implications,” offers the same specificity, clarity, and thoroughness of the first two. Here Conrotto examines the question of revolutionizing or restructuring the conceptual field; the question of the death instinct or drive; the problem of the ego and the genesis of the id; and the metapsychological aspects of the second model—all of them viewed together as constituting the “turning point of the 1920s” (p. 145). Conrotto also reflects on “extramural” psychoanalysis, dealing with the anthroposociological interests and writings of Freud from 1927 to the end of his life, after which he turns to a psycho-philosophical discussion of psychoanalysis as a theory of knowledge “despite itself.”
The last part of his final chapter, on the implications of Freudianism for contemporary psychoanalysis, is devoted to Bion, whom he admires for being “more than anyone else the one who has advanced the implications of the second Freudian model and whose theoretical thinking has ‘worked’ to the extreme limit the epistemological questions that arise from the Freudian ‘invention’ of the unconscious and the problems of its expression” (p. 193). Conrotto feels that, despite his “manifest” Kleinian language, conceptually he is closer to Freud.
In conclusion, this book, written with fervor and chock-full of interesting associations, references to other authors, and new theories, is exciting and seductive. It is written from the viewpoint of Italian psychoanalysis, one characteristic of which is a tendency to borrow disparate ideas—mostly European—to create a medley of elements that seem compatible. The caveat is that with this approach, it is difficult to write for an audience not at all familiar with the elements, an audience that indeed cannot distinguish one from the other. It is also easy for the writer to go off on a tangent, lose cohesiveness, produce perplexing stretches of text, and in short make it difficult for readers to process what is being said. That tendency is the disappointing feature of this otherwise fine book.