Abstract
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. Every psychoanalyst should instantly recognize this inscription, not only for its place in psychoanalysis but also from its original context in Virgil’s Aeneid. Alas, I highly doubt the latter, and Freud’s use of the line as an epigraph to the dream book is a fantasy of white Western privilege. Similarly, I think the bulk of Joseph Fernando’s book presents concepts all psychoanalysts should be familiar with: drives, repression, defense, reconstruction, and more. Yet many psychoanalytic fundaments have been declared moribund of late, and are discarded or lost: forgotten, suppressed, or repressed by the counterforce of uncomfortable inconvenience and theoretical reformation. Today’s study and use of the psychoanalytic past is paradoxically reclaimed in outsider circles as a chic “return to Freud,” unwittingly tweaking the Yom Kippur liturgy of repentance and renewal via a return to faith, though leavened in the current instance with a healthy skepticism. The ubiquity of loss and the awkward conflict over return permeate psychoanalytic practice, so that we might expect a coherent practice and theory. Instead we find ourselves split, splintered, and reassembled with philosophical duct tape and bubble gum. Ideas of the mind as a system of dynamic functions mediating and translating interfaces at the frontiers of various realities and traumas, including losing or retaining experiences of self and other, have been superseded by ideological camps on one or the other side of the psychic-somatic and self-social divides, claiming either integration or the other’s irrelevance. Largely in reaction to the clinical shortcomings of some aspects of early theory, psychoanalysis has rejected, nearly in its entirety, the concept of a mental system working parallel to, or in sequence with, the now favored, purely abstract psychic function of relatedness. In short, psychoanalysis has rejected the idea that a one-person psychological system may be functioning, let alone driving other, two-person psychological functions. Sadly, our discourse today is a cacophony less productive than reductive, amounting to an understanding little more nuanced than the fictional priest in the 1990s Irish sitcom Father Ted: Father Ted gives Father McGuire a diagram depicting a cartoon head in profile, “Reality” on the outside and “Dreams” on the inside.
Enter the fray Fernando’s The Processes of Defense: Trauma, Drives, and Reality—A New Synthesis, winner of the Gradiva Award in 2010. Why review a book published back in 2009, nearly a decade ago? Fernando revisits the past to enlighten our present and future. This deep review of the theory and practice of defense analysis presents significant propositions for theoretical and clinical advances, propositions derived primarily from the author’s original considerations of the mind as a mediator of reality, especially regarding trauma.
Fernando returns to fundamental building blocks, undertaking, and more or less accomplishing, the enormous task of “developing a more coherent and much more clinically powerful theory of defense” (p. 33). He approaches this project through reviewing psychoanalytic basics, including repression and defense. He is specifically inclusive of the popularly superseded idea of understanding and working with drives and energy; essential functional structures of mind representative of one-person psychology; the utility of reconstruction; and ideas of psychic and material reality. He meticulously, at times arduously, provides historical context, definitional updates, and clinical examples of these concepts. Part 1, “Basic Forms of Defense,” includes detailed reviews of repression, denial, externalizing and internalizing defenses, and trauma. Part 2 is divided into sections on narcissism, masochism, and perversions. Part 3 presents “A General Psychoanalytic Theory” emerging from his reviews and revisions of past theory along with new ideas.
Alert to potential critics who will likely assume he is addressing outmoded psychoanalytic concepts, he early on attempts to strike a deal:
I have no illusions as to the extent of the negative reaction I will draw upon myself by avowing my support for . . . a theory [about counterforce defenses and neutralized aggression]. . . . However, rather than engaging in a theoretical polemic on the issue, which in my experience convinces no one but those who are already convinced (which in this case is almost no one), I would propose to do something different. If the reader will attempt to keep an open mind on the issue I will, at appropriate times through this book, point to specific clinical phenomena that are quite puzzling, that are not easily explained by theories such as narcissistic wounding, and which I think at least raise the possibility that the counterforce used in repression is derived from aggression [p. 44].
Fernando presents these ideas and techniques as clinically useful, identifies views he considers wrong, and offers theoretical and clinical corrections. Part 1 is extensive and quite dense, but the reader will be rewarded with a review of “basic concepts” essential to the author’s ultimate “new synthesis” that makes the book worth reading. Chapter 2, “Repression,” is illustrative of Fernando’s complexity. He begins with a critique of the concept of primal repression, distinguishing passive and active. He presents one of the clinical examples he uses throughout the book, and introduces the history of, and his ideas about, the concepts that inform his theories: traumatic anxiety versus pervasive anxiety; after defenses and secondary defenses; repression and the aggressive drive; the nuanced complexity of drive theory; the role of the superego; selective repression; and screen memories. He also offers an articulate description and clarification of specific types of memory processes. Finally, he integrates these ideas in a description of clinical technique. This is an important, forty-page chapter that doesn’t always quite pull together, in which Fernando seems to suggest that analysts need a large mental desktop to make use of skills and insights. Fortunately each chapter has a summary, a glossary of terms, and notes. Unfortunately, this format, while helpful, also produces an infantilizing, textbookish quality that suggests an unnecessary conceptual opacity. I would have preferred a different organization and greater refinement of the arguments. These may be minor faults relative to the strength of the ideas presented, but they do at times obscure the message.
In a typical passage, Fernando writes, “As I said previously, I think the concept and term ‘passive primal repression,’ and the idea it represents, even for those who do not use the term, is very confusing and should be dropped. I think the essence of repression is an active counterforce that bars the forward movement of a drive and the feelings and ideas to which it is attached, so that designating a repression as active is redundant, and designating it as passive is contradictory” (p. 34). He began to revise “passive primal repression” and got distracted: “I see that despite my earlier promise not to do so I have engaged in a certain amount of polemical argumentation about energic concepts—necessarily so, I think, given the present climate of accepted ‘truths’ about the invalidity of these ideas. In relation to their value in further developing psychoanalytic theory I can again go back to saying that I will try to demonstrate this at a number of points through this book in relation to clinical material, rather than merely argue the point” (p. 50). Fernando revives many of these older concepts. They may be out of fashion, but they are not outmoded, useless, or devoid of clinical and conceptual relevance.
Chapter 3, “Denial,” is about “the nature of our reality awareness that allows the attentional shift of denial to be used so effectively to defend against it” (p. 71). This chapter, like the preceding one quite long, is a clear and cogent discourse on denial and related concepts, including important new perspectives on old discussions of inner and external realities, drives versus affects, and splitting. Understanding denial and splitting is essential to a deeper understanding of dissociation as the mind’s reaction to trauma. In the section “Therapeutic Technique” this issue is addressed. There he compares the analysis of denial and that of repression, an elegant theoretical and clinical distinction. The relatively brief chapter 4, “Externalizing and Internalizing Defenses,” continues the theme of defenses as mediators between the individual and reality. Fernando makes an important distinction between projective identification and transference/countertransference experiences. While many readers may not agree with his understanding and use of these terms, all may agree that his clinical examples illustrate therapeutically useful distinctions.
Trauma, though first of the subtitular triad, finally gets a hearing in chapter 5. Here Fernando’s long exegesis on defenses, repression, energic theory, reality, drives, and indeed all of mental functioning comes together so he can present perhaps his most original and useful advances in theory and technique. When traumatized, he hypothesizes, the mind is overwhelmed so that not only is secondary processing disabled but, rather than regressing to primary processing, a new form of processing, the zero process, emerges. Here the glossary definition will prove useful:
This is a basic form of mental processing. It is a consequence of trauma, and is to be contrasted with both the primary process and the secondary process. In the zero process there is, as the name implies, no symbolic processing of any sort, as well as a lack of integration and coordination between elements. The contents of the zero process have characteristics of both memory and perception. They have the persistence over time of memory, but have the immediacy, intrusiveness, and tendency to run in one time direction of perceptions [p. 170].
Fernando reviews, relatively succinctly but in well-footnoted detail, a history of psychoanalytic views of trauma. Lest the reader think Fernando is staid or outmoded, he breaks from Abend and Brenner, both of whom he regards as “forceful proponents of a view that I think overextends extremely valuable analytic discoveries regarding the importance of unconscious conflict related to the drives” (p. 131). He continues: “As Phillips has remarked, merely because unconscious fantasies attach themselves to a trauma does not prove they are causative.” I wonder, however, if this point may be taken as a given these days.
Fernando helpfully reminds us that in chapter 2 he “criticized Freud’s concept of traumatic anxiety as the motive for repression, proposing instead to follow Yorke, Wiseberg, and Freeman in calling this type of anxiety pervasive anxiety” (p. 132). I quote these passages because they begin to demonstrate how careful and meticulous are Fernando’s arguments and counterarguments, and to show that they reflect an essential part of Fernando’s thesis, which relies on synthesizing the dynamic defensive processes behind screen memories and other forms of the mind’s reckoning with unacceptably uncomfortable aspects of reality. It should be noted, too, that Fernando freely credits the ideas of others on which he builds his theories and practice. Take the following: “Once the stimulus barrier has been breached and the reaction of avoidance of pain collapses, it is striking with what rapidity the traumatic process unfolds, and how little it is under the traumatized person’s control. As Furst (1978) pointed out, the problem with trauma is that the ego is faced with a fait accompli” (p. 133).
Fernando remarks that under the influence of trauma there is “no symbolic processing.” We might ask, though, if a new form of processing is necessary. We may wonder if we should at this juncture explore branches of psychoanalysis where the theoretical and clinical focus is precisely on working with mental and somatic experiences and elements that never attain representation. Fernando has addressed this issue with his review of theories of trauma, particularly those of Bion and de M’Uzan. His main divergence from these theories is his assertion that Bion and de M’Uzan conflate developmental and traumatic processes, and that the zero process more accurately describes the effects of trauma. This section merits very close attention and an awareness that Fernando’s input promotes dialogue between schools of theory rather than occasions for triumph and suppression. He reviews and refines these ideas, again in dialogue with Bion and de M’Uzan, in his paper “Trauma and the Zero Process” (Fernando 2012).
Another new concept Fernando introduces is the contrast defense as an alternative understanding of what manifestly appears to be a repetition compulsion. It is the “defense of repeating something close to a past denied reality in order not to remember it” (p. 164). More than rhetorically, he asks, “So, have I really introduced a new idea with contrast defenses, or am I just redescribing in somewhat more convoluted terms a dynamic that we know very well already?” (p. 164). Initially, it seems, perhaps a bit of both. His clinical examples, however, suggest otherwise, and in my nascent psycho-educational use of the term in my work, I’ve found it quite useful.
The concepts introduced in Part 1 coalesce in the rest of the book. As I have noted, Part 2, “Specific Clinical Problems,” details his thinking on narcissism, masochism, and perversions. It is useful reading. Fernando maintains a consistent focus on the motivations and processes of defenses and myriad dealings with mitigating uncomfortable experiences of external and internal reality.
In this section Fernando elaborates the concept of compound defenses: “A compound defense is composed of two or more basic defensive processes, such as denial and counterforce, which act in concert and are quite tightly bound together. . . . one can generally analyze each part separately. The inability to do this indicates that the defenses are more tightly bound into a compound defense” (p. 281). Like many of Fernando’s terms, compound defense is both new and yet points to something very familiar. I could find only two PEP references to compound defenses: Selma Fraiberg’s “Pathological Defenses in Infancy” (1982) and Richard Tuch’s “Murder on the Mind: Tyrannical Power and Other Points along the Perverse Spectrum” (2010). Both align nicely with Fernando. Fraiberg uses the term in commenting on defensive forms of avoidance and “forms of defense employed in later ego organization when repression of those compound defenses which make use of repression close off the perception of a painful stimulus at the threshold of consciousness” (p. 632). Tuch, contemporaneous with Fernando, uses the term while describing the psychodynamics of fetishization in the context of realigning psychoanalytic conceptualizations of perversion.
Regarding perversions, Fernando effectively uses his disciplined approach of updating otherwise retrograde theory, paradoxically presenting a significantly progressive brief work on the subject. In a clinical example, the meaning and defensive use of the behavior and its relational dynamic define the perversion, rather than the manifest behavior itself. But while much of the book usefully revises “old” theory and practice, I think in the case of perversion it’s time psychoanalysis moved beyond redefinition to a new term free of pejorative connotations. Although intersubjectivity suggests a reclaiming and queer theory a new term, the bulk of psychoanalytic use of the term is so discordant with usage in the rest of the world that it is simply mistaken, an exercise in futility, to continue its defense as a nonpejorative clinical term.
If the average psychoanalyst can, at least for the duration of this book, accept drive theory, repression, and defenses, the value of reconstruction, and the notion that the mind has different modes of functioning and structures defined by functions, then the average psychoanalyst may be interested in and rewarded by Fernando’s work.
Again, why review this book now? For one thing, Fernando has continued to refine and expand his theories in subsequent papers. In “Trauma and the Zero Process” (2012) he presents a brief clinical illustration adding nuance to the “frozen” in time, “retentive quality of memory,” perhaps alluding to a classical anal-retentive perversion, thus bridging the gap between trauma and some notions of the perverse.
But perhaps the best reason for reviewing this book now is obvious: the global assault on reality, spawning multiple levels of realities that self-multiply and distort. So a working theory about the individual’s ability to discern and represent pleasurable and unpleasurable realities is essential to maintaining a grounded orientation. Thus, it is time to revisit and review core principles, anchor our clinical work, and propose theoretical alterations, revisions, and advances that go to the heart of the redundant and synergistic functional systems we call mind. Fernando’s main interest may have been trauma and the mystery of the repetition compulsion. Along the way, though, he found new insights about the basics of repression, denial, narcissism, masochism, and the perverse. As the epigraph to his book, he has aptly chosen a line from Freud: “All I was trying to do was to explain defence, but I found myself explaining something from the heart of nature” (p. vi).