The psychoanalytic ear and the sociological eye: toward an American independent tradition 2019009236, 2019011957, 9780429026393, 9780367134211, 9780367134235

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Toward an American independent tradition
Acknowledgments
Note
Chapter 1: The American independent tradition: Loewald, Erikson, and the (possible) rise of intersubjective ego psychology
Notes
PART I: From Freud to Erikson
Chapter 2: Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond: drives, identity, and Freud’s sociology
Civilization and Its Discontents
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter 3: “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” “Thoughts for
the Times on War and Death,” and “Why War?”:
whatever happened to the link between psychoanalysis
and the social?
Notes
Chapter 4:
Born into a world at war: affect and identity in a war
baby cohort
Notes
PART II: The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald
Chapter 5: The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald
Loewald’s doubled vision
Primary undifferentiation and contemporary infant research
Loewald’s vision of the psyche
Loewald’s vision of psychoanalytic goals
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter 6: Reflections on Loewald’s “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego”
Notes
Chapter 7: A different universe: reading Loewald through “On the
Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis”
Loewald’s opening paragraphs: introducing everything
Part I: Analytic stance
Part II: Interlude on the psychic apparatus
Part III: Analytic activity, the language of interpretation, and reintroducing the topographic
Part IV: Ghosts into ancestors
Recapitulation
Notes
PART III: American independence: theory and practice
Chapter 8: From behind the couch: uncertainty and indeterminacy in psychoanalytic theory and practice
Paradoxes of psychoanalytic self-knowledge
The paradox of self and other
The analyst’s viewpoint
Listening to and listening for
From analyst to patient
Notes
Chapter 9: Listening to James McLaughlin: tribute to an American independent
Notes
Chapter 10: Regard for otherness: reading Warren Poland
Notes
PART IV: Individuality as bedrock in the consulting room and beyond
Chapter 11: Toward an American independent tradition: recapitulation
Notes
Chapter 12: Beyond the dyad: individual psychology, social world
Notes
Chapter 13: Why is it easy to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist but not a psychoanalyst and a sociologist?
Notes
AFTERWORD: Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?
Chapter 14: “Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?” Psychoanalysis, the academy, and the self
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC EAR AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL EYE

In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, Nancy J. Chodorow brings together her two professional identities, psychoanalyst and sociologist, as she also brings together and moves beyond two traditions within American psychoanalysis, naming for the first time an American independent tradition. The book’s chapters move inward, toward fine-tuned discussions of the theory and epistemology of the American independent tradition, which Chodorow locates originally in the writings of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, and outward toward what Chodorow sees as a missing but necessary connection between psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the social world. Chodorow suggests that Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson, self-defined ego psychologists, each brings in the intersubjective, attending to the fine-tuned interactions of mother and child, analyst and patient, and individual and social surround. She calls them intersubjective ego psychologists—for Chodorow, the basic theory and clinical epistemology of the American independent tradition. Chodorow describes intrinsic contradictions in psychoanalytic theory and practice that these authors and later American independents address, and she points to similarities between the American and British independent traditions. The American independent tradition, especially through the writings of Erikson, points the analyst and the scholar to individuality and society. Moving back in time, Chodorow suggests that from his earliest writings to his last works, Freud was interested in society and culture, both as these are lived by individuals and as psychoanalysis can help us to understand the fundamental processes that create them. Chodorow advocates for a return to these sociocultural interests for psychoanalysts. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality and advocates for a field of individuology in the university.

Nancy J. Chodorow is Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Professor of Sociology Emerita, University of California, Berkeley, and Lecturer Part-time in Psychiatry, Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School. She is author of five previous books, including the groundbreaking The Reproduction of Mothering.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC EAR AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL EYE Toward an American Independent Tradition

Nancy J. Chodorow

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2020 Nancy J. Chodorow The right of Nancy J. Chodorow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chodorow, Nancy, 1944- author. Title: The psychoanalytic ear and the sociological eye : toward an American independent tradition / Nancy J. Chodorow. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. Identifiers: LCCN 2019009236 (print) | LCCN 2019011957 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429026393 (Master eBook) | ISBN 9780367134211 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367134235 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis—United States. | Social sciences and psychoanalysis—United States. | Loewald, Hans W., 1906-1993. Classification: LCC BF175.4.S65 (ebook) | LCC BF175.4.S65 C55 2019 (print) | DDC 616.89/17—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009236 ISBN: 978-0-367-13421-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-13423-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02639-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

For Carl

CONTENTS

Preface ix Acknowledgments xxii   1 The American independent tradition: Loewald, Erikson, and the (possible) rise of intersubjective ego psychology

1

PART I From Freud to Erikson

21

 2 Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond: drives, identity, and Freud’s sociology

23

  3 “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” and “Why War?”: whatever happened to the link between psychoanalysis and the social?

48

  4 Born into a world at war: affect and identity in a war baby cohort

71

PART II The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald

91

  5 The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald

93

viii Contents

  6 Reflections on Loewald’s “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego”

113

  7 A different universe: reading Loewald through “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis”

125

PART III American independence: theory and practice

145

  8 From behind the couch: uncertainty and indeterminacy in psychoanalytic theory and practice

147

  9 Listening to James McLaughlin: tribute to an American independent 172 10 Regard for otherness: reading Warren Poland

182

PART IV Individuality as bedrock in the consulting room and beyond

189

11 Toward an American independent tradition: recapitulation

191

12 Beyond the dyad: individual psychology, social world

208

13 Why is it easy to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist but not a psychoanalyst and a sociologist?

226

AFTERWORD Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?

243

14 “Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?” Psychoanalysis, the academy, and the self

245

Bibliography 263 Index 281

PREFACE

“What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” That was the question posed in 1999 by Adrienne Harris and Stephen Mitchell, who were putting together a special issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. What a welcome invitation! As a psychoanalyst, I could think historically and theoretically about American psychoanalysis and help to define it. As a sociologist and former aficionado of the culture and personality tradition in anthropology, I could think about the history and character of psychoanalysis in the United States and its possible “Americanness.” I identified and named an American independent tradition, intersubjective ego psychology, and asked what made American psychoanalysis “American.” I begin with my contribution to “What’s American?”: “Toward an American Independent Tradition: Loewald, Erikson, and the (Possible) Rise of Intersubjective Ego Psychology.” There I suggest that we find in Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson two self-identified ego psychologists, deeply attentive and attuned to the intrapsychic and the development of self and ego capacities, yet each making central the relationship to the other, drawing thereby from the concerns of American interpersonal-relational psychoanalysis. Loewald gives us an intersubjective conceptualization of development and analytic process, through consistent attention to the asymmetrical mother-child pair and analytic dyad and to the role of each asymmetry in individual development and psychic change. Erikson provides a developmental stage model of the life cycle in both one- and two-person terms, as he describes changing intrapsychic processes each in relation to a particular way of being with the other, and of the other, whether internal or external, being with the self. In Erikson’s formulation, the relationship with the other extends beyond the two-person dimension. From his earliest writings, Erikson attends to the intertwining of ego, psyche, and development with culture and history—the effects, as these are filtered and created intrapsychically, of culture and history on the

x Preface

psyche, and the psychohistories of those who have themselves shaped and reshaped history and culture. Loewald, like Erikson, extends his attention to life history, culture, and history, and he notices sociology’s interest in internalization. We find, then, both writers reflecting, through an ego psychological lens, long-standing American attention, both within psychoanalysis and in the university, to culture and psyche—to the ways that culture and social practices interact with individual experiences of psyche and identity. Loewald’s influence and importance within psychoanalysis continue ever to expand. Several of his papers are now widely recognized as foundational, and we find him mentioned (for Loewaldians, not nearly enough) in relation to a variety of psychic and developmental phenomena. By contrast, Erikson, of little contemporary influence as a psychoanalyst or social thinker (though he is memorialized in the Erikson Institute for Education and Research at the Austen Riggs Center), was once a giant public intellectual, writer, and professor who brought the sociohistorical to bear on individual clinical cases and lives, first, and most originally and astonishingly, in his 1950 book Childhood and Society. Exemplifying his contribution as co-founding an American independent school, Erikson’s eight stages of development elaborate the foundational status of intersubjectivity for the ego, beginning with trust versus mistrust, which is two-way, and continuing through to the intrapsychic intersubjectivity of ego integrity. There and later, Erikson gives us a clinically derived culture and personality anthropology, as well as the fields of psychohistory and psychobiography. Mitchell and Harris’s invitation evoked my own roots in hybrid psychoanalytic traditions and in a hybrid social science. I was trained in a classical ego psychological institute, where the theory we learned ranged all the way from Freud to Hartmann, Brenner, Gill, and Gray (ever a contrarian, it would have been inconceivable to me at that time that I would end up advocating for a version of ego psychology). Yet, well before beginning training, I had read Erikson and taken seminars with him, and I had drawn in The Reproduction of Mothering and elsewhere upon British object relations theorists like Fairbairn, Guntrip, Alice and Michael Balint, and Winnicott. I learned how the British independent tradition was elaborated by these analysts and others of their generation and the next. In a study of early women psychoanalysts, I had interviewed several British independents. And, thanks to a free year-long seminar series generously offered in the early 1970s by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute to graduate students in the social sciences and humanities, I had discovered Loewald, whom I read and reread before eventually formulating the notion of an American independent tradition. I was well prepared to notice hybrid, double-focus traditions. The British independent tradition had its own self-designation, or several designations. From Fairbairn and Guntrip, we have object relations theory; from the Controversial Discussions, the Middle Group. Finally, we have the British independent tradition. Yet in the context of American psychoanalysis, it seemed that the only respectful way to think of those hybrids, Loewald and Erikson, was in terms of their own self-definition, as ego psychologists, even as they differed

Preface  xi

radically from classical ego psychology and criticized, and were criticized by, ego psychologists. Alternatively, they were creative, original, and unique individuals whose psychoanalytic location could not easily be articulated. An American independent tradition, like the British tradition a both/and middle group, needed to be named and described: hence, intersubjective ego psychology. Intersubjective ego psychology, finally, seemed to capture my own diverse psychoanalytic background and the hybrid nature of my own psychoanalytic identity and origins. This identity includes respect for ego psychology itself, in its deep commitment to the complexity of individuality and one-personness, especially in our contemporary world that is so predominantly anti-ego psychological and so committed to the two-person/two-mind perspective. In 2012, I was invited to contribute the chapter “Twentieth-Century American Psychoanalysis” (Chodorow 2016) to what would become the massive Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Elliott and Prager, eds. 2016). In the proposed table of contents, I found chapter listings on Kleinian psychoanalysis, Kleinian infant observation, object relations theory, Bion, Kohut and self psychology, Winnicott, attachment theory and mentalization, Lacan, relational psychoanalysis, dream theory, psychoanalytic field theory, and intersubjectivity. There were also to be individual chapters on psychoanalysis in the different regions, psychoanalysis in relation to several academic fields, and psychoanalysis in relation to political and historical processes. But where was ego psychology? Ego psychology as a separate theory and tradition was apparently not considered by the editors to be worthy of its own chapter. Had I not focused my contribution on ego psychology, this important tradition and perspective would have gone unnoticed, unmentioned, and unrepresented. Intersubjective ego psychology, then, provides a synthetic both/and formulation, echoing my immersion in both the British independent tradition and in psychoanalytic social theory. Each of these fields addresses questions concerning how subject and subject, psyche and other, patient, analyst, and analytic dyad, analytic dyad and analytic culture, and, finally, individual psychology and social world, work together. The origins of this hybrid, intersubjective ego psychology, emphasizing both individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity, can be found in my earliest work. The Reproduction of Mothering, a barely revised version of my 1974 dissertation, relies heavily on the British object relations tradition, especially on Fairbairn, for his portrayal of an object-relational intrapsychic world, and on Alice and Michael Balint, Bowlby, and Winnicott, who conceptualize the first relation and its influence on development, psyche, and selfhood. In a similar vein, in “Gender, Relation and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective” (Chodorow 1979), I claim that “separateness is defined relationally” and that “true differentiation, true separateness, cannot be simply a perception and experience of self-other, of presence-absence. It must precisely involve two selves, two presences, two subjects” (pp. 102, 103). I describe the hopefully intertwined development of autonomy and “confident separateness” with a “relational self,” and I write, “Differentiation is not distinctness

xii Preface

and separateness, but a particular way of being connected to others” (p. 107). In a similar vein, I titled a 1986 paper (published during the year in which I began psychoanalytic training) “Toward a Relational Individualism” (Chodorow 1986a). The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye is a collection of essays, but it also has a trajectory and makes an overall argument. Everything in it grows from invited contributions directed toward particular audiences, and in almost every case these essays and lectures, or parts of them, were initially presented—spoken and heard before published and read. In sometimes retaining the lecture style, I am in good (if unmatched) company: throughout his writings, Freud speaks to his readers directly, as if to individual members of an audience. He writes to a “you” who is reading or listening, a “you” with whom he is personally engaged. In Chapter 1, I develop my initial description of the American independent tradition and its generative place in American psychoanalysis. Subsequent chapters circle, directly or indirectly, around one or another of the themes and observations to be found there. These themes range from the inmost individual psyche, private personhood, and intrapsychic self, to the largest connections, addressed first by Freud, among society, culture, and psyche. I consider gaps and scotomas in psychoanalytic attention to the social and to the social sciences and, reciprocally, in academic attention to psychoanalysis. These are the dualities, or contradictions, that shape this book and begin to form an American independent tradition. “What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” is not only a question about theory and practice. It is also a question about national character, as well as an historical and sociological question. It calls upon us to look at the history of theory; for me, it also recalled my undergraduate fascination with culture and personality theory, an interest itself so intertwined during a particular era with American interpersonal psychoanalysis. In this context, my opening chapter is at times self-consciously ironic and mildly mocking, reflecting my skepticism about, yet attraction to, generalized discussions about “American-ness,” or any culture and personality or national-historical generalization. Anticipating the rest of this book, I also defend and even extol some characteristics of American psychoanalysis, not only ego psychology but also pragmatism and multitheoretical perspectives. The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye draws together essays and lectures that have grown up around my initial project, retaining a focus on a psychoanalytic American independent tradition and noticing how this focus reaches toward a deepening of attention to psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as outward to social science and the university. Addressing the Eriksonian, sociocultural side of the American independent tradition, Part I considers Freud’s sociology and the missing link between psychoanalysis and the social sciences, and it presents an Erikson-inspired psychocultural study of generation. Part II, pointing toward the volume’s metapsychological and theoretical center, offers close readings of Hans Loewald, theorist and clinical epistemologist of intersubjective ego psychology. Part III elaborates an American independent clinical and theoretical stance and considers some authors central to the tradition. Part IV, beginning with a recapitulation that looks back on (and forward toward) an American independent tradition,

Preface  xiii

addresses understandings of individuality and context in both the consulting room and the academy. It looks at the costs to psychoanalysis of its retreat from individuality and a one-person perspective, on the one side, and of its insufficient sociological understanding of itself, on the other. Reciprocally, it explores the uneasy relationship between the social sciences and psychoanalysis. I end with a call to academics, analysts, and the intellectual world, as I assess the costs to scholarly understanding and students’ educational experience that result from the absence of a field focused on the study of individuality and selfhood. Most of this book’s chapters were written for psychoanalysts and concern psychoanalysis as a theory and practice, yet in both the background and the foreground is the university, especially in those chapters written originally for audiences in the humanities or social sciences. Here I hover between criticizing psychoanalysis for its distance from the social sciences and its disinterest in the social and criticizing the academy for its lack of a field that studies individuality in its full complexity. There is at the heart of this book, and perhaps at the heart of my professional identity, a paradox. Because I come from social science, where everything comes from without, it has always been important for me as a psychoanalyst to emphasize one-person theories, to insist that everything in the mind is not co-constructed, co-created, or part of a field or bulwark. I came to psychoanalysis out of fascination with and passion about individuality as a necessary corrective to the sociocultural determinisms and lack of theorizing about, recognition of, or basic interest in individuality found in social science. At the same time, I was from the beginning eager to find some place, in my own clinical work, in listening to the work of others, and in my writing, for recognition of the fundamentally social and relational contribution to individuality and individual subjectivity. In 2000, I delivered the plenary address at the national meetings of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, an organization founded in 1956 by psychiatristpsychoanalysts with theoretical roots in the interpersonal and cultural strands of American psychoanalysis. My address, “Psychoanalytic Visions and Personal Meaning,” a precursor of the writings found here, carried the deliberately provocative subtitle “Why We Still Need One-Person Ego Psychologies.” There I advocated for what in The Power of Feelings I had called psychoanalytic visions of subjectivity. I grouped together as congenial to my perspective Erikson and Loewald, along with writers from the British independent tradition like the Balints, Margaret Little, Marion Milner, and Winnicott. I emphasized the importance of the separate individual, even in the context of the treatment relationship. Reaching to conceptualize, I criticized what I called a “more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts” two-person approach that doesn’t leave room for the separate individual (in Norway during May–June 1998, I had missed Warren Poland’s plenary address, with its elegantly succinct “two-person separate” and “two-person unified” distinction). I concluded: Without a strong commitment to the individuality and intrapsychic life of the patient, two-person approaches, but especially more-than-the-sum-ofthe-parts two-person approaches (which often, in fact, use the mother-child

xiv Preface

metaphor for the analytic pair) threaten to make the analyst into the Runaway Bunny’s mother. Inner life, fantasy, affect, transference, are in the patient’s mind. It is the patient’s mind that should be the central focus of our work. The purpose of transference observation and interpretation, after all, is not to prove that nothing exists outside of the analytic relationship, but to help the patient to understand her- or himself. How, after treatment, are patients to make sense of dreams if all dreams are created within and refer only to the therapy and the therapist? By eschewing one-person psychologies as we embrace two-person approaches, we ignore our commitments as clinicians and people to our own individuality, to our “I-ness,” and to our hopes that our patients too will integrate an “I” rather than being driven by unavailable, fragmented, splitoff overwhelming drives and affects. And we ignore that there is an active person with whom we are interacting, a person who is not entirely a product of their own transference or our own countertransference creation. There are two people there, even as the two of us create a particular reality between us through which we try to understand this patient and our relationship. It is the perspective of the individual subject that is most at stake. (Chodorow 2000) It is the perspective of the individual subject that is most at stake. On the opposite pole from psychoanalysis, the social sciences, even as they call for attention to the deeply social and cultural rooting of the mind, also cry out for attention to the one-person individual, for acknowledgment that the mind is not a product of society or of interaction. How can we keep in mind both social-relational context and takenfor-granted sociocultural practices and beliefs, on the one hand, and an individuality that is not determined or shaped by context, on the other? For the social thinker, psychoanalysis is a refuge and a wonder, the most complex theory and practice for studying and changing individuality from within, even as many ingredients of this individuality are drawn from the social, cultural, and historical surround. On the side of psychoanalytic recognition of the social, the American Psychoanalytic Association has recently turned its attention to racism, through a plenary address, a film, panels, and a special 2017 issue of The American Psychoanalyst. There is now also at least one discussion group on the sociocultural in relation to the clinical and one on Erich Fromm, both of which point toward recognition of the social. Within international psychoanalysis, we find some attention to political and social trauma, meetings in Berlin with discussion groups on the Holocaust and in Argentina on the disappeared. Yet, as I note in what follows, these efforts have developed largely without acknowledgment of, or benefit from, fields that study the social. Within psychoanalysis since Freud (though not including Freud), the role of the social in the intrapsychic has with few exceptions been contested or largely denied, especially in the debates (sometimes occasioning vicious excommunications) so often punctuating the history of American psychoanalysis. At the same

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time, the analyst stood outside, an external observer of the patient’s psyche. Gradually a change occurred, as interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis grew and strengthened, and a rapprochement with classical ego psychology was achieved. Transference-countertransference moved to the forefront, to the near exclusion of anything else. For Kleinians, this was a matter of projective identification, and the analyst remained a neutral recipient of these projections, in what Racker called the countertransference based on complementary identification. But along the way, concordant countertransference—the analyst’s own psychic conflict and fantasy drawn forth by the patient’s transference—was also recognized. On the side of individuality, the perspective of the individual subject has been over the years a moving target. A recurring concern throughout this book is my observation that hegemonic psychoanalysis—the articles we read, the case presentations and panels we hear—has increasingly become analyst-centered. As attention to countertransference and projective identification increasingly drew our attention, at first as a necessary corrective to a view of the analyst as neutral outside observer and scientist of the mind, analysts focused more and more on their own minds—well beyond thinking about the patient’s meanings, emotions, defenses, and ways of being—as the best route to knowing the mind of the patient. Field theory, in its American version drawing originally from Sullivan, the “I” and the “me” of the social psychologist G.H. Mead, and the work of Edward Sapir and other social scientists, has become Bionian field theory, focused, it has sometimes seemed to me, exclusively on the field of the analyst’s mind. Similarly, enactment theory, initially a project to explore what the analyst’s microactions in the clinical setting could tell the analyst about herself, her patient, and what was going on between them, later came to involve the analyst’s noticing how every statement and every action on the patient’s part was part of an enactment with the analyst that itself needed analysis, as did every action on the part of the analyst, further centering attention on the analyst and tying the patient to him or her. Analyst-centered interpretations were named as such and then in some quarters came to take precedence over patient-centered interpretations (now seemingly less astute, less valued). Books and articles bear titles referencing the analyst’s mind, the analyst’s position, the analyst’s subjectivity. Today, then, we find, on the one hand, two people and their two minds, the dyad or the field, and on the other the mind of the analyst alone, what Pinsky (2017) calls the “Olympian delusion.” Except from those still in training or recently graduated, we do not hear case presentations that focus mainly on a patient. Or we return to the social, and we find that nothing exists beyond what comes from the two people in their interaction. Throughout this book, my aim is to return us to the core contribution of psychoanalysis, for ourselves and our colleagues, for our students and our patients: it is the perspective of the individual subject that is most at stake. We learn about this perspective through intersubjective recognition of the separate other. The American independent tradition encourages us to recognize that perspective, and to bring such understanding to the individuality of our patients and to the study of individuality in the academy and beyond.

xvi Preface

A second arena of focal attention in this book concerns the social and psychoanalysis. Just as I mourn the loss of a theoretical and clinical focus on the individual in psychoanalysis and in the academy, so I advocate for a more robust understanding of the social and the social sciences among psychoanalysts. I myself first met Freud as an undergraduate, in Civilization and Its Discontents. As I make clear in later chapters, this is but one of Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis and society. From his first writings through to the end of his life, from his great social works to his most detailed case reports, Freud brought consistent attention to the sociocultural in relation to the psyche. Following Freud, and drawing on the Eriksonian side of the American independent tradition (Loewald too was deeply interested in the social), I suggest that the American independent tradition grew from the beginning, much as did interpersonal psychoanalysis, partly from connections to and collaboration with social science and from an attention to history, culture, and the social in both psychic life and clinical process. My own training included five formative years studying anthropology and another five in graduate school in sociology. These were followed by thirty-some years as a professor of sociology, with special focus on feminism and gender, family, and theory. At the same time, throughout my career, there has always been a psychoanalytic ground bass.1 I have never written anything that did not include or center on psychoanalysis, I rarely taught courses that did not include, directly or indirectly, psychoanalytic ideas and readings, and I became a practicing analyst and teacher in psychoanalytic institutes and other clinical training programs. This dual identity and preoccupation—my social science lurks in the background of my psychoanalytic (and psychoanalytic feminist) identity, practice, and teaching, and my psychoanalytic identity has been in the foreground throughout my social scientific career—began as early as my first reading of Erikson and my undergraduate studies in psychological anthropology and solidified through the graduate studies that led to The Reproduction of Mothering and eventually to analytic training and practice. Throughout, I have continued to wrestle with a duality I thought I had resolved. Recursively, I have found myself, and the reader will find me, considering psychoanalysis sociologically, as theory, practice, and profession. On the one side, I want a psychoanalytic theory that does not threaten to absorb or subsume the individual into the social, even into a two-person co-constructed relational dyad. On the other, I want a social science that does not ignore subjectivity from within and that values the clinical and theoretical understandings that psychoanalysis offers. Further, I argue that psychoanalysts’ lack of understanding about the social organization of analytic training, analytic institutes, and the sociology of analytic practice poses fundamental educational and ethical challenges, while I argue also that academics do not understand the psyches of their students and the benefit of such understanding for teaching and learning.

Toward an American independent tradition The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye opens with “The American Independent Tradition: Loewald, Erikson, and the (Possible) Rise of Intersubjective Ego

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Psychology.” There I draw on observations of the British independent tradition, along with my preference for both/and formulations, to locate those founding American independent theorists, Erikson and Loewald, and to place them in their American psychoanalytic location. I situate them between Hartmann and Sullivan, ego psychology and cultural-interpersonal psychoanalysis. I briefly describe the history of psychoanalysis in the United States. Part I, “From Freud to Erikson,” begins with Freud’s sociology. Chapter 2, “Civilization and Its Discontents and Beyond: Drives, Identity, and Freud’s Sociology,” considers this work, flawed perhaps, but among our great works of social theory. I point to developments in psychoanalysis since Freud that complement or generate different understandings of the aggression and violence that Freud addresses. In Chapter 3, “‘The Question of a Weltanschauung,’ ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,’ and ‘Why War?’,” I notice Freud’s continual attention to and knowledge about the sociopolitical and his remarking on the family connections between the weltanschauungs of psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Continuing to employ both psychoanalytic ear and sociological eye, Chapter 4, “Born Into a World at War,” moves from Freud to Erikson. Originally an epilogue to a collection of first-person reflections by members of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1965, this chapter explores emotional themes and psychohistorical identities in the war baby generation. Curiosity about cohort or generation, I discovered after the fact, winds its way through this book, perhaps because of “Born Into a World at War,” perhaps because of the book’s attention to Erikson. As I rethought Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud’s great work on social theory, I realized that Freud shares not only an interest in psyche and society with sociology but also close cohort status with the founding sociologists Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber. Writing about Loewald, I discovered that his birthdate falls exactly between the European ego psychologists Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein on the one hand and the Americans Arlow, Brenner, and Gray on the other. Part II, “Reading Loewald,” provides close readings of this founding theorist and clinical epistemologist of intersubjective ego psychology. Loewald progressively articulates a comprehensive conceptualization of the clinical encounter and of psychoanalysis as a process and theory that founds and instantiates a clinical and theoretical intersubjective ego psychology. Loewald does not ignore the sociocultural, especially in his Yale Freud Lectures, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual, and in his invitation to the sociologist Talcott Parsons to help initiate a conference on internalization. Loewald calls upon readers to read him closely, just as he reads (and we often read) Freud. And just as we do close readings of Freud without bringing in clinical material to support such reading, so also, even in the absence of clinical material, we benefit from attending in minute detail to what Loewald writes and how he writes. For some, such reading leads more toward immediate, conscious changes in thinking and technique; for others, it leads more toward preconscious shifts of stance and being. “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald” (Chapter 5) was my first attempt to characterize the scope and depth of Loewald’s theory, his conceptualization

xviii Preface

of the psychoanalytic process, and his image of the clinical and human goals of psychoanalysis. “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald” also contains the first published naming of the American independent tradition. In my abstract to this 2003 article, I characterize it, with historical accuracy, as one of very few writings on Loewald: Hans Loewald is a comprehensive and original theorist on a par with any major post-Freudian thinker, yet neither his ideas nor his person has become the basis for a Loewaldian school or approach, and he is not as well known as other innovators of comparable quality. (Chodorow 2003c) Since that time, and thanks to the attention and writing of a small but devoted group, Loewald is now more widely mentioned and cited. Following the broad sweep of “The Psychoanalytic Vision,” Chapter 6, “Reflections on Loewald’s ‘Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego,’” addresses Loewald’s specific understandings of the continuities of differentiation, internalization, and externalization over the life cycle, especially internal differentiation in relation to the superego and to termination. This chapter was written at the invitation of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, as part of its project to reprint one or two of the most important articles published in each decade since the Quarterly began publication. Part II concludes with “A Different Universe: Reading Loewald through ‘On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis’” (Chapter 7), which considers this transformational contribution. “Therapeutic Action” most fully elaborates Loewald’s conceptualization (and perhaps the field’s fullest conceptualization) of the psychoanalytic process and its capacity to enable a wide range of experiencing in the individual, in development, in the relationship, and in psychic life. Part III, “American Independence: Theory and Practice,” contains readings and reflections that elaborate this tradition. In this section, I broaden out from Loewald toward further consideration of the clinical moment, the conceptualization of the psyche, the character of analytic interaction, and the analyst’s practice. “From Behind the Couch: Uncertainty and Indeterminacy in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice” (Chapter 8) is an overview chapter on fundamental challenges and paradoxes in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Here I notice and contrast “listening to” and “listening for.” “Listening to,” I discover inductively, seems to characterize a number of British analysts, each of whom identifies herself or is seen as an independent. I also notice that “listening to” seems to characterize individuals whom I later recognize as American independents. This chapter bears the mark of multiple origins. Ideas about the foundational contradiction of psychoanalysis—that it seeks to know an unconscious that is, by its very definition, unknowable—were first presented in July 2000 at the 5th Delphi International Psychoanalytic Symposium, that year titled “Self-knowledge Before and After Freud.” There I talked about curiosity, uncertainty, paradox, and the

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need for openness to different theories. Also in 2000, I spoke at a two-part symposium in honor of Robert Wallerstein, “The Common Ground” and “Psychic Change.” I suggested, in dialogue with Wallerstein’s plenary address as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, that perhaps analysts’ clinical listening was not a “common ground” among divergent theories, but that some theories lead more toward “listening to” and others toward “listening for.” The chapter was further developed as my Fellows presentation at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during the 2001–2002 academic year, and finally I recrafted it for submission to the humanities journal Common Knowledge (Chodorow 2003a). James McLaughlin and Warren Poland are among those I single out in my initial reflections on the American independent tradition and in “From Behind the Couch.” “Listening to James McLaughlin” (Chapter 9) and “Regard for Otherness: Reading Warren Poland” (Chapter 10) both come from “Meet the Author” symposia. I was a panelist at a “Meet the Author” for James McLaughlin at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association in June 2006, a symposium for which I had advocated and that, fortuitously, took place just weeks before McLaughlin died. I introduced and chaired a “Meet the Author” for Warren Poland at the 2015 meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association. My introduction, with minor revisions, later became a preface to Poland’s 2017 book, Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis. Part IV, “Individuality as Bedrock in the Consulting Room and Beyond,” reasserts the centrality of individuality and hovers over complementarities and contradictions between individuality and the social. “Toward an American Independent Tradition: Recapitulation” (Chapter 11) reviews clinical and theoretical themes that describe an American independent tradition, especially, a focus on individuality and “listening to” that ground this tradition and also link it to the British tradition. I notice that individuality includes both intrapsychic reality and life history in context, and I borrow the phrase “local knowledge” from Clifford Geertz. “Beyond the Dyad: Individual Psychology, Social World” (Chapter 12) was originally my 2010 plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association. Like my earlier plenary, I begin with advocacy for the separate individual, for one-person theory and clinical epistemology—then and there as much as here and now. I pose a challenge: “individual psychology”—true self, subjectivity, individuation, personhood—describes and expresses the core of psychoanalysis, the theory and practice that advocates and works toward enhancing individuality. Yet our work toward enhancing and developing individuality takes place of necessity in a dyad, which we specify as we circle around or settle upon intersubjective/ relational terms like transference-countertransference, recognition, basic trust, potential space, and relationship. “Beyond the Dyad” argues against what I see as an increasingly hegemonic two-person focus throughout the psychoanalytic world (American relational and interpersonal psychoanalysis, Latin American and Italian Bionian field theory, British Kleinian and Klein-Bion psychoanalysis, and so forth). I challenge psychoanalysis in two directions. From one perspective, we have lost our focus on

xx Preface

personal, private, individual subjectivity. From the other, we understand neither the sociology of dyads nor the sociology of our profession, in which dyadic relationships are encoded. These sociological scotomas undermine and potentially corrupt our clinical work itself, as well as tainting our psychoanalytic institutions and the organization of psychoanalytic training. “Beyond the Dyad” expresses and consolidates what would seem contradictory positions throughout this book. I want something close to a one-person clinical psychoanalysis and theory, whereas many colleagues today want co-creation, the field, vinculo, the relational, enactment, interpersonal psychoanalysis, and so forth. Yet I argue for a psychoanalytic sociology and sociological understanding of the psychoanalytic dyad and psychoanalytic institutions. Where “Beyond the Dyad” concludes with discussion of the challenges (and the crucial importance) in getting psychoanalysts to consider the sociology of the dyad and of their profession, the following chapter, “Why is it Easy to be a Psycho­ analyst and a Feminist but Not a Psychoanalyst and a Sociologist?” (Chapter 13), looks at the reverse. It notices the resistance among social scientists to considering the perspective of the individual and the challenges and difficulties (and great rewards) of my hybrid location and that of others who want to bring psychoanalytic understandings to social science and the academy and to bring psychoanalysis out of its odd professional isolation and exceptionality. The chapter was written originally for presentation at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Confirming my title, it was first published in a collection of autobiographical statements by feminists in the humanities—literature, philosophy, history, art criticism, racial-ethnic and non-Western literary feminism (Gubar 2011). Eventually the presentation found its way from psychoanalysis to sociology, when it was included in a collection called The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis (Chancer and Andrews 2014). My Afterword, “‘Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?’: Psychoanalysis, the Academy, and the Self” (Chapter 14), is a plea to academic and analytic colleagues. It turns back to where I began—to where most of us begin—in the university. Here, I wonder how we can bring the insights and understandings of psychoanalysis to this important site and to the students who inhabit it. Originally prepared for a lecture series at the Humanities Institute of Scripps College, and later presented to the Five Colleges Psychoanalytic Consortium and at the Modern Languages Association, this chapter advocates for a psychoanalytically based field that I name “individuology.” Against prevalent academic trends that find psychoanalysis in the university almost exclusively within the humanities (we also find an occasional course in psychology departments in small liberal arts colleges), I claim that this field should be located among the social sciences. The social sciences comprise those academic fields that study people empirically and that have theories and methodologies for so doing. Social scientific study of the individual and individuality is a glaring omission. The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition draws on my thirty-plus years as an analyst and thirty-plus years as a professor

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of sociology. It brings together writings that address topics from individuality and intersubjectivity to the largest concerns of social theory and that establish a new psychoanalytic tradition, an American independent tradition. While my audience for most of these writings was made up largely of psychoanalysts, several were written for academics in both the social sciences and the humanities. Throughout, the book keeps in mind, as its subtitle implies, epistemological, theoretical, and clinical commonalities shared by the American and British independent traditions.

Note 1 The ground bass is a repeating bass undercurrent in music, particularly found in early European music through the Baroque. Its musical name is basso ostinato, and this ostinato, this obstinacy, describes well my tenacious holding on to the psychic while being a social scientist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writings and presentations that became this book span many years. In a work so long in the making, my gratitude and debts are as great as the volume itself. I have been honored by invitations from local, national and international psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutes, departments, and publications, academic and analytic conferences, and universities and colleges. All provided opportunities to elaborate my ideas and to hover over my identities as psychoanalyst and scholar, while providing me freedom to range broadly and to make connections across fields and among seemingly disparate issues, theories, and theorists. Over time, this variety of occasions and opportunities enabled me to find some unity, or continuity, in what concerns me. Throughout, it is hard to separate the personal and the professional. I am grateful to Adrienne Harris and the late Stephen Mitchell for inviting me to write about what’s American about American psychoanalysis, initiating my conceptualizing an American independent tradition. My preface alludes to my invited plenary address to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis (Chodorow 2000). An invitation to the 1996 conference, “Civilization and Its Enduring Discontents: Violence and Aggression in Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspective,” at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, led to “Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond” (now Chapter 2). “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (Chapter 3) was written for this book. I discovered Freud’s lecture in preparing the 2004 Robert Liebert Memorial Lecture of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute and Cornell Weill Department of Psychiatry. “Born into a World at War” (Chapter 4) was written at the invitation of Nancy Blackmun and Maria Tymoczko as an afterword to a collection of writings, also Born into a World at War, by members of my college class. “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald” (Chapter 5) grows from an invited presentation at a 1999 conference, “The Legacy of Hans Loewald,” organized by Joel Whitebook at the New School for Social Research. “Reflections on Loewald’s

Acknowledgments  xxiii

“Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (Chapter 6) was invited by the Psychoanalytic Quarterly as part of that journal’s project to reprint and look back at one or two of the most significant articles published during each decade of its existence. I presented earlier versions of Chapter 7, “A Different Universe,” to colleagues in San Francisco, Toronto, and New Haven. In San Francisco, Terrence Becker’s written response and in New Haven, Braxton McKee’s insights during the discussion were especially helpful. A variety of invitations and honors provided time and infrastructure for the writings that have become Part III, “American Independence: Theory and Practice.” “From Behind the Couch” (Chapter 8) began as an invited presentation in 2000 at the 5th Delphi International Psychoanalytic Symposium. Also in 2000, I was a panelist on an all-day two-part symposium, “The Common Ground” and “Psychic Change,” organized in honor of Robert Wallerstein by the Department of Psychiatry of the University of California, San Francisco. “From Behind the Couch” was the title of my Fellows talk during the 2001–2002 Radcliffe Institute fellowship year, a year in which I was also a presenter at a day-long Radcliffe event, “A Symposium on the Value of Psychoanalysis for Contemporary Life.” My presentation, “Subjectivity and Its Discontents," was another opportunity to think broadly about psychoanalysis. I note earlier that Chapter 9, “Listening to James McLaughlin,” grows from my participation in a “Meet the Author.” My dear friend Warren Poland, through the International Psychoanalytical Association, invited me to chair a “Meet the Author” in his honor. My presentation appears here as “Regard for Otherness” (Chapter 10). I was honored to present the plenary address, “Beyond the Dyad: Individual Psychology, Social World” (Chapter 12), at the January 2010 Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. “Why Is It Easy to Be a Psychoanalyst and a Feminist but Not a Psychoanalyst and a Sociologist?” (Chapter 13) was first written for presentation when I was CORST (Committee on Research and Special Training) honoree (a morning seminar, lunch, and paper presentation) at the June 2005 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I am grateful to Professor Yuval Avnur, then Director of the Scripps College Humanities Center, who invited me to speak at a Claremont Colleges series on the self, for which I first wrote “Could You Direct Me to the Individuology Department?” (Chapter 14). I loved speaking to attendees, ranging from undergraduates to senior scholars. I acknowledge especially the undergraduate psychology majors who were moved and appreciative, even to tears. Joan Raphael-Leff gave me my first opportunity to write about being an analyst and professor, through her invitation to contribute to Between Sessions and Beyond the Couch. Susan Carey’s and Carter Wilson’s clear-eyed reading sharpened my thinking.. Several of these chapters, or the ideas they now contain, were presented in early form to Bob and Judy Wallerstein’s “Seminar for Semi-Baked Ideas.” Everyone who participated in that group remains grateful for the warm companionship and supportive but clear-eyed criticism it provided. From before I began psychoanalytic training until he died, Bob Wallerstein was, simply, always there. Bob assumed the

xxiv Acknowledgments

compatibility of psychoanalysis and social science and affirmed the worthiness of theory. He was, in the best sense, disinterestedly interested. The meetings of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, a great loss when I moved East, enabled me, along with many others, to feel sustained and to thrive with a dual professional identity. I have been fortunate, since moving to Cambridge, to be on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School. It has been a privilege to teach and learn from trainees, to facilitate and myself benefit from a faculty writing seminar, and to participate in this generative and committed treatment and academic environment. I have also been welcomed by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where trainees have eagerly let me teach about Loewald, the American independent tradition, comparative theory, and clinical work, and colleagues have provided encouragement, support, and friendship. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Institute in many ways, especially to Drew Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, who, as Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, extended an unsolicited invitation to be a Fellow during the 2001–2002 academic year, and to Judith Vichniac, Director Emerita of the Fellows Program, who for years sustained the vibrant, generative, on-the-ground intellectual and emotional life of the institute and has been a good friend. The Radcliffe Institute has continued to serve as support through its Summer Fellows Program and its Concord Avenue writing offices. Personal gratitude warrants a volume in itself. I have already said that Adrienne Harris and Stephen Mitchell’s invitation helped initiate the thinking that led to this volume, but that does not begin to do justice to the generous personal and intellectual support, friendship, and sisterhood that Adrienne has offered. Likewise, Warren Poland not only helped to create the frame for my thinking. He has provided continuous, deep emotional and intellectual friendship since we first met. Rosemary Balsam shares my Loewald enthusiasm and has been a constant intellectual companion and close and caring friend. I first met Michael Parsons and Melanie Hart in Delphi in 2000. Michael and Melanie helped move me from past to present in thinking about the British independent tradition and have provided personal connection to its practitioners, along with warm friendship and support. Glen Gabbard and Judy Kantrowitz have been close friends and have modeled and shared their remarkable understanding of psychoanalysis and the commitment of the psychoanalyst. Ellen Pinsky read and commented insightfully on several chapters and is always there to understand the challenges involved in writing. I could not have written this book without the current and past support of academic colleagues, friends, and students (too many to name, but honored collectively in Chapters 12, 13, and 14). The UC Berkeley Shakespeare scholar Janet Adelman, co-teacher and much mourned dear friend, was a generative interlocutor as we made our way through psychoanalysis and our university subjects. From the generous Neil Smelser, mentor and supporter long before we even met, I

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learned that you could be a sociologist and a psychoanalyst. My dear friends and colleagues Arlie Hochschild and Barrie Thorne knew psychoanalysis and its value, and I learned enormously from and felt supported by both of them, as also by Michael Burawoy and Peter Evans, who thought that anyone who cared deeply about what she studied and taught should be encouraged and supported. The psychoanalyst-sociologist Jeffrey Prager continues to be a valued intellectual companion and friend. Carole Joffe and Fred Block, not themselves psychoanalytic social scientists, understand someone who is. As I finished a first draft, the sociologist Judith Adler, with overwhelming generosity, read the entire manuscript and sent pages of comments. In its final stage, the book benefited from the exemplary editorial ear and eye of Michael Farrin. My cover comes from Jonathan Palmer’s “The Shadow of the Object” series. This book illuminates the shadows of many personal and professional objects. As always, I am grateful for the enthusiastic support and encouragement of my children, Rachel Chodorow-Reich (who also helped design my cover) and Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, support and encouragement that I now also receive from their spouses, Yu Matsumoto and Abigail Fee, and their children, Liam, Kana, and Asher. I have also for these last several years enjoyed the warmth and support of my expanded family: Rachel Salzman, Jonathan Summey, Josh Salzman, Julie Bayer, and Ben and Miles. My husband, Carl Salzman, has been my most wholehearted and loving advocate. This book, and a huge part of my life, is dedicated to Carl. I am grateful to the following for permission to publish: The Analytic Press for Chapter 1, “The American Independent Tradition”; Maria Tymoczko and Nancy Blackmun for Chapter 4, “Born into a World at War”; The International Journal of Psychoanalysis for Chapter 5, “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald”; The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for Chapters 6, 7, and 9, “Reflections on Loewald’s ‘Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego,’” “A Different Universe: Reading Loewald through ‘On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,’” and “Listening to James McLaughlin”; Duke University Press for a version of Chapter 8, “From Behind the Couch”; and Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association for Chapter 12, “Beyond the Dyad.”

1 THE AMERICAN INDEPENDENT TRADITION Loewald, Erikson, and the (possible) rise of intersubjective ego psychology

“What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” Here I introduce, name, and describe an independent tradition in American psychoanalysis. My account has both theoretical and historico-cultural dimensions. Theoretically, I suggest that, just as the British independent tradition, known early on as “the Middle Group,” incorporated elements of both the Anna Freudian ego psychological and the Kleinian approaches, so also the American independent tradition incorporated and synthesized elements from the two dominant and antagonistic schools— Hartmannian ego psychology and Sullivanian interpersonal psychoanalysis—that constituted classical American psychoanalysis. I call this synthesizing theory intersubjective ego psychology. Intersubjective ego psychology remains firmly committed to ego psychological understandings and technique while also theorizing, without thereby coming to self-identify as either interpersonal or relational, the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, and transference-countertransference fields. I locate the origins of the American independent tradition and intersubjective ego psychology in the work of Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson. Both Loewald and Erikson begin from self-identification as ego psychologists, but each brings in, foundationally, something of the relational-interpersonal. Loewald gives us the most comprehensive and finely detailed description that we have of intersubjectivity in the analytic dyad and the psychoanalytic process, while among Erikson’s eight stages, basic trust, intimacy, generativity, and ego integrity point especially to the intersubjective (this last, a relationship with the self).1 Throughout, Erikson attends to the sociohistorical and to personality and culture. Each nods to the other’s terrain, Erikson with his eminently intersubjective eight stages, and Loewald with his later writings on life history and the history of the individual, as well as in his conceptualization of the child’s being centered upon by her mother.

2  The American independent tradition

My account of the American independent tradition is historical and cultural as well as theoretical and clinical. In what follows, I explore and make tentative suggestions about what makes American psychoanalysis American, though I also suggest that defining, other than descriptively, what is characteristically American is itself problematic and can be done only with self-conscious irony. Through its historical exploration, the chapter provides a brief reminder of psychoanalytic controversies in the United States, and it considers schematically the relations between “American” and “European” psychoanalysis. “What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” Mitchell and Harris suggest that “national character and sensibility, environment and place, political and social history must have a deep and pervasive impact on the ways in which psychoanalysis has developed in different countries” (2004, p. 166).2 Such an observation, expressing an assumption that national character and sensibility are among those subjects we can talk and write about, moves us right to the heart of the matter. The assumption is grounded, recursively, in the work of the uniquely American, psychoanalytically influenced anthropological field of culture and personality founded and elaborated by Ruth Benedict, Abram Kardiner, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and many others, a tradition that in turn directly shaped and was intertwined with the only homegrown classical American psychoanalytic tradition: the interpersonal-cultural psychoanalysis initiated and theorized by Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm. At the same time, Mitchell and Harris’s question and claim require us to characterize theoretically and describe the history of the various psychoanalyses that happen, empirically, to have developed on American soil and to see these developments in the light of the larger history and culture of the country. I have found myself diffident before these challenges. Even as I am mindful that no single characterization can be comprehensive, I elaborate in what follows one historical and theoretical reading of American psychoanalysis. I center my theoretical investigation on the contributions of Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson. I also suggest some ways in which American psychoanalysis is distinctly American. Much of what characterizes American psychoanalysis reflects what we (and our European critics, the most severe of whom, perhaps, was Freud) might consider national patterns. The project of defining what makes something distinctly American returns me to my own professional psychoanalytic roots. Swept away in my earliest college years by Childhood and Society (Erikson 1950) and Patterns of Culture (Benedict 1934) but having training and a continuing partial professional identity in contemporary psychological anthropology (see Chodorow 1999a), I am aware that the legacy of national character studies and culture and personality anthropology is extremely problematic. Both within anthropology and in contemporary multicultural studies, we have learned that generalizations about cultural or national character obscure as much as they illuminate, and that this obscuring has often been at the political and cultural expense of marginalized groups and at the empirical cost of psychological individuality.3

The American independent tradition  3

At the same time, however, generalizations about national or cultural characteristics (and similarly, about qualities of gender, ethnicity, and so forth) always do seem to have a grain of truth—recognizable patterns that apply widely, even as we also see exceptions and variation. In what follows, I do not resist the temptations of generalizing. I not only attempt the difficult task of characterizing American psychoanalysis, but I also suggest what is distinctly “American” about it. Mindful that such generalizations cannot at the same time be made, I see this latter characterization through a distinctly ironic and recursively self-eliminating lens. I am serious and playful at the same time when I suggest that the features I describe hang together as quintessentially “American.” In order to make such a claim, of course, I overgeneralize about cultural characteristics and ignore exceptions, overlaps, and variation. I probably overgeneralize too much for historical and cultural accuracy and not enough for persuasive argument. This caveat is equally true of the comparative generalizations I have to make along the way about what is not American—particularly my claims about what is “European” or what characterizes “European” approaches to psychoanalysis. I focus on the origins of, and try to articulate, a strand in American thinking that I call, provisionally, intersubjective ego psychology. Intersubjective ego psychology integrates the two theoretical and clinical developments that, indisputably, have characterized American psychoanalysis, first, ego psychology, and second, interpersonal (its current label, but in the past it was also called “cultural school” or “neo-Freudian”) psychoanalysis. I am describing, not surprisingly, my own psychoanalytic location and identity. I see intersubjective ego psychology as a sort of middle terrain between classical structural and contemporary ego psychology on the one hand and classical interpersonal and contemporary relational psychoanalysis on the other, much as the British independent or Middle Group (with which the American independent tradition shares some theoretical and clinical commonality) originally located itself between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.4 Intersubjective ego psychology involves an apparently contradictory insistence, following the Hartmann-Anna Freud legacy, on a radical “one-person” intrapsychic perspective centered on fantasy, drive-derivative wishes, resistances, defenses, and compromise formations, and in consonance with the work of Sullivan, Horney, Thompson, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, and others, on the “two-person” importance of the analytic, the mother-child, and, by extension sometimes, the sociocultural field.5 Intersubjective ego psychologists use the ego psychological language of interpretation, individuality, autonomy, insight, analytic neutrality, and other similar concepts, and also the language of enactment, transference-countertransference, the contribution of the analyst’s mind and subjectivity, and other similar concepts that arose initially from interpersonal psychoanalysis. In addition, although advocacy of an analytic attitude of uncertainty and curiosity rather than certainty and authority has crossed all psychoanalytic schools in recent years (protagonists of these different schools, of course, have different opinions about the uncertainty and curiosity of those in other schools), I think it can be said that the founding intersubjective ego psychologists, like the founding British independents, found their way to this attitude sooner.

4  The American independent tradition

The theoretical-clinical label intersubjective ego psychology comes initially from my reading of contemporary thinkers (especially Dale Boesky, Judith Chused, Theodore Jacobs, James McLaughlin, Warren Poland, and Owen Renik),6 but I center my remarks on two earlier thinkers, Loewald and Erikson, who, in my mind, initially created this hybrid and defined its territory. My original title for this chapter was “Working notes on American psychoanalysis,” and my musings remain exactly this. Each draft has reminded me of further problems in my characterizations, occasioned more second thoughts, and suggested more distinctions that I should be making. I hope, nonetheless, that the ideas have some generativity in helping us think about this complex, and of course still unfinished, American psychoanalysis. The first of my second thoughts requires elaboration. By naming the American independent tradition as intersubjective ego psychology, I begin perhaps more from Loewald than from Erikson. I thus minimize another important American hybrid outcome, one that we might call cultural ego psychology. Cultural ego psychology would bring Erikson more to the fore, and I think in this context especially of contributions by those formed in ego psychological institutes that have challenged, from an explicitly feminist stance, traditional psychosexual and gender theories (books include Almond 2010, Balsam 2012, Kulish and Holtzman 2008, Notman and Nadelson 1982, and Person 1999).7 These for the most part medically trained psychoanalysts emphasize, like Erikson, bodily psychosexual experience and the actual female body, while also following Horney and Thompson in stressing that cultural factors have shaped female and male psychology and psychoanalysts’ theories about these. By contrast, those of us who were feminists first and then psychoanalysts (relational feminists like Benjamin, Dimen, Goldner, and Harris, and a hybrid intersubjective ego psychologist like myself) have been much longer in coming to acknowledge the actual body (see Chodorow 1999b, 2003c, and, for founding relational feminist accounts of sexuality, Dimen 1996, 2003). Several caveats seem in order. First, part of what makes it so difficult to define what is American about American psychoanalysis is the pre- and post-World War II psychoanalytic diaspora. Until a certain generation, most of the leading “American” psychoanalysts (Sullivan and Thompson are the most notable exceptions) were born, educated, and trained in Europe. Loewald and Erikson are no exception. Neither of these third-generation psychoanalysts began life or professional training in the United States (this is also characteristically American: the United States is a country of immigrants). Second, I write throughout of “American” in the imperialist sense, meaning psychoanalysis in the United States. Third, as I have indicated, much of what I claim characterizes these quintessentially “American” thinkers Erikson and Loewald also characterizes the theory, the developmental approach, the view of the analytic encounter, and the analytic attitude found in the writings of contemporaneous British psychoanalysts like Michael and Enid Balint, Margaret Little, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, and others of their generation in the

The American independent tradition  5

British independent tradition. In contrast to Klein, Anna Freud, and many of their followers, with the exception of Michael Balint these British independents were all British-born. Finally, as a psychoanalyst trained in a psychoanalytic institute of “The American,” as we in shorthand call the American Psychoanalytic Association (another imperialism, this time within the imperialist center itself), it is not accidental that I am beginning and working out from ego psychology and an intrapsychic, one-person perspective, not only as an historical feature of American psychoanalysis but also, implicitly, as an important perspective on psychic life.8 Yet I originally found psychoanalysis from without and not from within, as a solution to problems in psychological anthropology and feminism (Chodorow 1974). I am mindful, being a social scientist as well as a psychoanalyst, that if I had trained at a Sullivanian institute, whose approach would have been more consonant with my professional origins, I might well have begun this chapter with the view that it is precisely the cultural or interpersonal perspective that most distinguishes American psychoanalysis from its cognate practices in Europe or Latin America.9 My convoluted oscillations in these matters of my psychoanalytic origins and identifications, which do not at all begin from ego psychology, provide one perhaps extreme intellectual and historical instantiation of the characteristic conflicts and compromises in American psychoanalysis that, I believe, have led to that hybrid, intersubjective ego psychology that I describe here. As a theorist, I was from the beginning looking to incorporate both the intrapsychic and the relational-interpersonal. My first systematic readings beyond Freud and Erikson were the British Middle Group—Fairbairn, Guntrip, Balint, and Winnicott. I argued then (Chodorow 1974, 1978) that, unlike psychological anthropology or Neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, these analysts provided a nonculturally determinist but fully relational intrapsychic perspective. Reaching from the beginning for conceptualizations that could maintain this doubled approach, I described differentiation and individuation as forms of connection and argued for what I termed “relational individualism” in both theory and clinical work (Chodorow 1979, 1986a). Training and clinical work made the intrapsychic even more compelling and in need of articulation. For me, this included, especially, the Loewaldian world of transferences from the past and from the unconscious, the Kleinian and Loewaldian worlds of internal fantasy that so powerfully shape all experiences, conflicts, defenses, and compromise formations, and the unique, clinical individual—whatever the origins of all these in relationship, whatever the clinical relationship that helps them to become conscious or transformed. Klein with her emphasis on the intrapsychic focused on projective identification, splitting, envy, aggression, and spoiling was a first help, but finally the Kleinian approach seemed only partial—useful for certain psychic expressions but not others. Meanwhile, the classical ego psychology of transference as a resistance and the ego as a site of increasing self-observation and correction seemed to overrationalize the powers of unconscious meanings and psychic life. Loewald, by contrast, promised to encompass the whole. The perspective

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that I now call intersubjective ego psychology, then, brought together my own history and clinical and theoretical projects and also seemed to bring together those found in the vicissitudes of American psychoanalysis. American identification with ego psychology, beginning shortly after World War II, has been repeatedly pointed out and, by now, repetitiously attacked. This identification emerged out of the psychoanalytic diaspora and the internal fights that it generated. Anna Freud, along with Heinz Hartmann, one of the founding theorists of ego psychology following Freud, found her views challenged by Klein and Klein’s followers when Miss Freud and her father arrived in England. It was important, therefore, that she maintain her connections to the Viennese émigré analysts who moved to the United States. American psychoanalysis, linked to Anna Freud in London and fueled by the arrival of many of Sigmund and Anna Freud’s colleagues and students, including the other great classical theorist of ego psychology, Heinz Hartmann, became a bastion of ego psychology. Following the arrival of these ego psychologists in the late 1930s and early 1940s, internal purges within the United States, beginning with Horney’s expulsion from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, ensured ego psychology’s triumph and the marginalization of the homegrown interpersonal-cultural school. Just as in the political world, a sort of Cold War period ensued in psychoanalysis from the late 1940s through the 1970s. In psychoanalysis, however, the Iron Curtain fell not within the borders of Mitteleuropa but somewhere to the west of Ireland. From the Kleinian ranks in England, by way of the continuing fight with Anna Freud, came attacks on the American belief in interpreting ego defenses and resistances from the surface rather than directly interpreting unconscious fantasies that expressed id and punitive superego drives and affects (disagreement about the reality and utility of the death instinct played a part here as well). From across the channel in France came a preference, still characteristic of French psychoanalysis, for the first topography over the structural theory, wherein the division between unconscious and conscious mentation is primary, the Ucs. is still seen as an entity, and there is a more direct focus on psychosexual drives and experience than on ego activities and resistances. In the United States, psychoanalytic social and political critics like the émigré Herbert Marcuse and the native-born Norman O. Brown advocated a view similar to that of the French (both psychoanalysts and academics). These critics claimed that Americans no longer “believed in” the unconscious or the drives. They misread Hartmann’s Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939) to be advocating a person’s adjustment to a sick society rather than as an attempt to rethink “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (Freud 1911) through the structural theory of the ego—that is, as an investigation of how the ego instantiates the reality principle through cognition, perception, and proprioception, and of how these capacities can be more or less free of intrapsychic conflict. American psychoanalysis itself also had an equivalent Cold War fervor against unorthodoxy, both at home and across the Atlantic. American analysts argued

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technically, as accused, that interpretation needed to proceed from the surface, from where the patient preconsciously lives. Arguing against the interpersonalists, they elaborated theoretically through the structural theory Freud’s claim that all psychic expressions are intersystemic compromise formations that arise as a result of past intrapsychic development. I am not sure that orthodox fervor is typically American, but it certainly characterized American psychoanalysis, as American politics, during a particular era. The internal purges of interpersonal and cultural school thinkers begun during World War II kept potential American dissidents in line, while against the Kleinians and the French, Americans held fast to the structural theory and to ego psychological technique. The Cold War period, based on a purge of interpersonalists and an orthodox fostering of ego psychology and structural theory-based practice, is now apparently over, as classical and relational-interpersonal Americans meet each other in organizations and on panels and as the mid-Atlantic Iron Curtain seems to have rusted and dissolved. Yet, whereas within American psychoanalysis today there seems to be extensive cross-fertilization between the classical and relational societies and organizations, we can see a typically American pattern in transatlantic interchange, which, in my observation, is mainly one-way.10 The psychoanalytic diaspora, perhaps also helped by Freud’s well-known contempt for America, had established an American climate in which European-trained analysts were deferred to and in turn asserted their own status as closer to the cradle of psychoanalysis.11 In the present period, relational and ego psychological institutes alike seem endlessly eager to host European and (increasingly) Latin American visitors. Like the characters in a Henry James novel, these institutes seem convinced that what is European must be better and that European critiques and dismissals of naive, provincial American thought and practice were right all along. Although the psychoanalytic Cold War is largely over, it has had lasting effects. After Horney and Sullivan, and until the great flowering of American relational psychoanalysis beginning in the 1980s, there were few major innovative thinkers in interpersonal psychoanalysis. This school of thought sustained itself to a large extent by its distance from and critique of ego psychology. With the exception of Sullivan, in fact, the major immediate forebears of the contemporary relational perspective came from within the ranks of the classical institutes and from British object relations theory.12 At the same time, relational forebears like Erikson and Loewald, who focus on the relationship and two-person interaction, located themselves firmly in the ego psychological tradition. They did not want—as some relational and interpersonal thinkers seem to hope that they wanted—to throw out, with what is to some relationalists the dogmatic, polarizing, rigidly defined one-person ego psychological bathwater, the baby of Hartmann’s undifferentiated ego-id matrix (which Loewald drew on to develop an entire theory of psychic growth and regression in terms of differentiation and dedifferentiation). They held on to Anna Freud’s ego defenses (made central in Erikson’s writings) and to a classical psychosexual developmental perspective that allows for innate unfolding as well as for a field in which this innate

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unfolding takes place (both Loewald and Erikson hold to some version of the traditional psychosexual drive theory). Erikson and Loewald continued to problematize ego and reality (this Freudian and Hartmannian theme is central to the thinking of both) and to attend to conflict-free ego functioning and its impediments. They assumed the intensity, uniqueness, and contingency—as this is created from within and partly dependent on innate biopsychological givens, not as it is mainly created and experienced in relationship—of one person’s psychic functioning. Accordingly, the Loewald-Erikson two-person vision of the analytic encounter is of the interaction between two individual psychologies, in which transference and countertransference come mainly from the unconscious and from the past of each participant. Unlike contemporary American relationalists (and perhaps Winnicott among British independent thinkers), neither Loewald nor Erikson is predominantly what I (2000) have called a “more-than-the-sumof-the-parts” two-person analyst (potential space, analytic third, co-creation), or what Poland (2000), more succinctly and elegantly, would call a “two-person unified” analyst. Ego psychology has been in many ways profoundly emblematic of American psychoanalysis, including among the leading predecessors of the relational tradition. It must then be—we might, as culture and personality theorists, speculate— characteristically American. With its one-person psychology, a metapsychology focused on intrapsychic life and conflict, and a preference for thinking that we create our psyches from within rather than primarily in relationship, ego psychology reflects American individualism. A view in which reality exists only as it is created by the ego is a radically individualist view, and we find such a one-person subjectivism most fully in Loewald. Loewald advances the view that there is originally no ego and reality, no ego and object, no inner and outer. Ego and reality are created at the same time, differentiated out of an undifferentiated matrix (here Loewald extends Hartmann). Loewald does not hold the view, he tells us, that objects and reality do not exist if we do not experience them, but as a psychoanalyst, he is concerned “merely with the question how this world becomes psychologically constituted” (1951, p. 11). In specific contradistinction to analysts like Klein and Fairbairn, for whom a differentiated ego and object exist from birth, and Hartmann, following Freud, for whom reality is an external reality to which the ego needs to adapt (thereby generating its differentiation out of the ego-id matrix), Loewald concerns himself with how inner and outer, ego and object, are created in the first place. Only after “primary internalization” and “primary externalization” (Loewald 1962a)—the very creation of internal and external—can it be meaningful to speak of projection and introjection, of libido or aggression directed toward the ego or toward objects, of a reality principle that represents the requirements of reality. This initial creation of ego and reality sets off a lifelong process of fluid interchanges and meaning creation, as inner and outer reality are continually reconstituted through projective and introjective fantasies.

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Loewald redefines illness and health in this process. In severe illness, as the ego regresses and disintegrates, object and reality dedifferentiate and disintegrate as well. In health, people shift considerably, from day to day, at different periods in their lives, in different moods and situations, from one such level to other levels. In fact, it would seem that the more alive people are (though not necessarily the more stable), the broader their range of ego-reality levels. (1951, p. 20) A distinctly ego-centered, one-person view of the psyche emphasizes individual psychic experience in all its depth and range. We find such a view in Loewald’s vision “of the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life” (1960, p. 250) and in his claim that “our present, current experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication . . . with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences” (p. 251). In his view of transference, Loewald emphasizes the intrapsychic transfer from unconscious to conscious over that from ego or libido to objects. And he emphasizes individuation and separateness in his advocacy of oedipal individuation and atonement and in his later reflections on religious experience and the experience of eternity (Loewald 1978c). We can also see a one-person individuation in the trajectory of Erikson’s developmental theory, moving from basic trust, found in the mother-child matrix, to the absolute responsibility for and recognition of the lone self that is found in the stage of ego integrity. Erikson, who moved out of the center of exclusively psychoanalytic debates in mid-career, is not so much involved in questions of how to characterize transference-countertransference or the analytic field. A recognition that an individual creates her or his own psychic life characterizes ego psychology, and this same emphasis on the individual also generates American independent approaches toward countertransference. Ego psychologists were originally among those most critical of countertransference. They advocated the neutral, scientifically objective analytic stance. Following Freud, they were most likely to see countertransference as a mark of pathology or insufficient analysis (see, e.g., Reich 1951, Gitelson 1952), in contrast to the interpersonal psychoanalysts and Kleinians who first came to valorize the countertransference. Recently American psychoanalysis has been much more cognizant of the role of countertransference. Certainly within intersubjective ego psychology, the recognition of countertransference and countertransference enactments links these theorists to their British and relational colleagues—Gabbard (1995) calls countertransference a new common ground. But there remains, I think, a legacy from the American ego psychological heritage and the analyst-centered Freudian perspective on countertransference that makes for a difference in emphasis from the British and British/interpersonally influenced relational perspectives.

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Thus, contemporary intersubjective ego psychologists like Boesky, Chused, Jacobs, McLaughlin, and Renik, along with the more relational Irving Hoffman, as well as other contemporary “mainstream” American psychoanalysts who describe countertransference and countertransference enactments, all focus on the analyst’s subjectivity as well as on that of the patient. They describe the analyst’s countertransference and, more generally, the analyst’s feelings. Yet even as these feelings are thought to be elicited by what the patient is saying or doing, or what is going on between patient and analyst, they are described as expressing and drawing on the analyst’s own emotions, history, and personality, rather than as being primarily the result of projective identification (compare in this regard Hinshelwood 1999, and Jacobs 1999).13 Boesky (1990) tells us that an analysis is not complete if it has not elicited unforeseen emotions in the analyst, and Hoffman (1998) alerts us to the fact that what the patient sees in the analyst is often actually what the analyst is. Chused (1996) advocates an analytic neutrality that consists in both recognition and dispassionate observation of the analyst’s intense passions, while Renik (1993) forcefully advocates sharing the analyst’s subjectivity. Both Jacobs (1991) and McLaughlin (2005) use their emotional and physical responses and personal memories to understand their patients. Such a view of countertransference, as arising more from within the analyst than mainly from the patient or as a co-creation, also leads, among intersubjective ego psychologists, to a characteristically American, perhaps individualist, emphasis on the analytic relationship as one between two people, each of whose subjectivity contributes to the relationship. Loewald says, “If a capacity for transference . . . is a measure of the patient’s analyzability, the capacity for countertransference is a measure of the analyst’s ability to analyze” (1986, p. 286). An emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity—on the analyst as a person with emotions, a history, and idiosyncratic reactions, as well as with training in how to understand a patient’s communications—also leads to a particular technical stance, a perspective that emphasizes the analyst’s not knowing rather than knowing. In this view, pioneered by American interpersonalists like Sullivan and adapted, in the intersubjective part of their identity, by Loewald and Erikson, analyst and patient together are working to understand and help the patient rather than the analyst’s being the expert on the patient’s psyche. What the analyst brings, along with her subjectivity, is training (as Loewald [1975] puts it, not only in a science but also in an art). What the patient has is a privileged insider view of her own experience. Such a position is now widely shared across the analytic spectrum, but it is in distinct contrast to the classical Kleinian and ego psychological positions, in which the analyst’s subjectivity was a hindrance and the analyst seemed to have not only training but also, based on his theoretical understanding, a better view than the patient of the patient’s psychic world.14 Characteristically American, it may also have other typically American characteristics—our historically ideological commitment to equality rather than hierarchy, for example, as well as our pragmatism and the commitment to empiricism that has been challenged by some European colleagues.

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One of the most comprehensive early statements of not knowing and indeterminacy can be found in a classical intersubjective-cultural ego psychological case: Erikson’s case of Sam, which opens Childhood and Society. Sam is a little boy who has seizures, and Erikson wishes to describe the specific genesis of these seizures, even in an illness with an indisputably physiological basis. As he tries to explain Sam’s seizures (and, as far as the reader can tell, seems to have explained them to Sam himself), Erikson is not content with a physiological explanation. In a few short pages, he brings in a number of factors: Sam’s family history of migration and its personal effect on him; Sam’s mother’s conflicts about aggression; his grandmother’s accidental death; Sam’s stage of psychosexual development, and the maturational stages of Sam’s ego capacities, psychomotor skills, and intelligence. Finally, turning to the psychocultural-psychohistorical, Erikson describes a characteristically Jewish internal conflict over, and external prohibition against, aggression. Erikson concludes: Of the catastrophe described . . . we know no “cause.” Instead we find a convergence in all three processes of specific intolerances which make the catastrophe retrospectively intelligible, retrospectively probable. The plausibility thus gained does not permit us to go back and undo causes. It only permits us to understand a continuum, on which the catastrophe marked a decisive event, an event which now throws its shadow back over the very items that seem to have caused it. (1950, pp. 37–38) I am in the terrain of the relationship between patient and analyst, and this takes me to the other, apparently contradictory, side of what is American about American psychoanalysis. Just as it was a center of a Viennese-inspired, classical one-person ego psychology, so too has the United States always housed an analytic world that emphasizes the analytic dyad and the interpersonal/cultural. The 1930s and 1940s witnessed the development of the interpersonal and cultural school and the rise of culture and personality theory, and both Erikson and Loewald were influenced by these developments. Beginning with Sullivan, Thompson, Kardiner, and contemporaneous 1930s–1940s culture and personality anthropologists, U.S.-born Americans created this perspective. However, it received some generative help from Budapest, through Thompson’s analysis with Ferenczi, who was himself also a pioneer in attending to the analytic field, and perhaps thereby also indirectly through the work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst-anthropologist Géza Róheim. Erikson collaborated with anthropologists in the field during the 1930s and 1940s and was continually interested in and identified with cultural and personality anthropology, and Loewald received his psychoanalytic training at the BaltimoreWashington Institute, which was a Sullivanian center. But even Hartmann (1964), along with other classical ego psychologists, was interested in and wrote about the relations between psychoanalysis and social science. We are not surprised, then, to

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find a dual emphasis in these founding intersubjective ego psychologists, Erikson and Loewald. While both portray inner vitality and character, internal life and conflict, ego defenses and the ego’s creation of its own reality, they also emphasize the role of others in the creation and experience of self. We begin with Erikson. In intellectual and popular culture, Erikson was certainly the most widely influential American psychoanalyst of the twentieth century, yet for a number of reasons he is today almost unacknowledged as having been a psychoanalyst at all.15 Anna Freud seems to have felt that Erikson’s theories and practices strayed too far from the Freudian fold (as she felt also about Bowlby and, to some extent, Mahler). Erikson’s developmental theories went beyond an emphasis on early psychosexuality toward the psychosocial and the entire life cycle, and his case reports, though not his self-identity, aligned him also with the interpersonal and cultural schools. He may in general have become too much of a public intellectual and commentator for the tastes of mid-1950s American psychoanalytic orthodoxy. As I have noted, one branch of American psychoanalysis, founded by Sullivan, Horney, and Thompson, emphasized that we are born and live within a social-cultural-interpersonal field. In this context, Erikson’s contribution to our understanding of the ways that, as he puts it, history and culture assume “decisive concreteness” in individual development (1946, p. 17) and “appear in specific transferences and resistances” (p. 29), makes him exemplary and a major proponent of this American concern. Yet Erikson remains a hybrid. His conception of the intersubjective-cultural field argues that all psychological experience is filtered through the interaction of soma, developmental pattern, and society, and most of his writings are cultural and historical. But although, more than any other analyst, he looks with evenly hovering attention at psyche, culture, and society and their interaction, Erikson self-identified as an ego psychologist during the period of the psychoanalytic Cold War (see Erikson 1946, 1950; see also Rapaport 1959, who certainly recognized this identity). Erikson’s intersubjective ego psychology and stage theory of development make foundational the intersubjective mother-infant matrix, especially in the constitution of the first stage, basic trust versus mistrust. An interpersonal field reappears in Erikson’s definition of identity, which he describes as more than a sum of identifications but, rather, a centeredness that at the same time requires confirmation by another, and in generativity, where recognition and caring, rather than being received, go toward the next generation. Throughout his description of his eight stages, culture is not mentioned. It is perhaps a taken-forgranted background. Yet, as Erikson elaborates his approach, culture hovers everywhere. Psychoanalysis had always concerned itself with sex-gender—the psychosexual stages, psychosexuality as foundational in psychic life. Erikson does not give up, but expands upon, the idea of a stage theory of development (in two ways: development does not stop in childhood, and Freud’s original psychosexual stages also

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include relational and self components). At the same time, he makes ethnicity central.16 Long before American culture and politics became focused on it, Erikson was obsessed with identity, especially with the particulars of racial-ethnic-cultural identities, spoiled and outcast identities, and identity fragments that must, somehow, be cemented into a psychologically working whole. He tells us (1946) about a successful Midwestern businessman who, after retirement, became, psychically, a Wandering Jew from the Pale of Settlement and a blond dancer whose overly rigid posture expressed not just masculine phallicity but also German-Prussian military bearing, and about a little boy, the “son of a bombardier,” trying to create an all-American masculine identity during World War II, in a surround of women relatives and father-absence (1950). Erikson’s ego psychological clinical and developmental approach, then, specified to the individual, melds with a cultural psychology, as he emphasizes that each person is born into and lives within a social-cultural-interpersonal field. This clinical individual, these elaborated and specific case examples, contrast with the more general statements found in Sullivan and his colleagues and in contemporaneous culture and personality anthropology. Erikson brings ego psychological and developmental case specifics to the transferentially internalized specifics of culture. In contrast to Erikson, Loewald’s view of the developmental field, identity, and the interpersonal matrix does not have the same wide sweep into culture and history (though see Loewald 1978c).17 Yet Loewald is more attentive to the intersubjectivity of the analytic encounter. Loewald is a subjectivist who believes that reality exists only to the extent that it is psychically created, but he is equally an object relations theorist, who argues that ego and object, drives, and the division of primary and secondary process, all differentiate from a primary global unity, a unity that is the mother-child matrix. In consonance with Erikson, Loewald claims that developmentally, mother-child “relatedness is the psychic matrix out of which intrapsychic instincts and ego, and extrapsychic object, differentiate” (Loewald 1978b, p. 216). His subjectivism thus meets an equally stressed intersubjectivism (see also Loewald 1978a). Even the drives, libido, and aggression, rather than being inborn energic charges, evolve out of the mother-child field: “Instincts . . . are to be seen as relational phenomena from the beginning and not as autochthonous forces seeking discharge” (Loewald 1972, p. 322). Loewald brings his dual ego psychological and object-relational perspectives—his relational view of development, his understanding of transference and consciousunconscious interchanges in creating meaning and aliveness, and his goal of flexible ego-reality differentiation—to the role of the analyst and his conception of the analytic encounter. In his preface to Papers on Psychoanalysis (Loewald 1980), he claims: “In psychoanalysis it becomes increasingly clear that interactional processes—those that are intra-psychic and inter-psychic ones, and these two in their interactions—are the material of investigation, epitomized and highlighted in the psychoanalytic process” (p. vii). Similarly, Loewald opens “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” with an elegantly expressed, seamless fusion of the two perspectives:

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If “structural changes in the patient’s personality” means anything, it must mean that we assume that ego development is resumed in the therapeutic process in psychoanalysis. And this resumption of ego development is contingent on the relationship with a new object, the analyst. The nature and the effects of this new relationship are under discussion. (1960, p. 221) Here Loewald is arguing for a relational, as against a subject/object, natural science observational model of objectivity, yet his is nonetheless a stance that folds back into a one-person view (retrospectively, we might identify it as two-person separate). Analysis, he says, “requires an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and for individual development” (p. 229). In Loewald’s well-known formulation, the analyst operates just on the edge of the patient’s readiness for insight. We are reminded of the non-American Winnicott, with whom Loewald shares so much, but Loewald’s working from the surface, his attention to the exact location of readiness for interpretation, is quintessentially American. Analysis takes place in an analytic field in which the analyst, like the mother, acts as a “mediating environment” (p. 238), but Loewald (being both a one-person and a two-person analyst) also keeps in view that this field is composed of two separate individuals with two separate existences and two separate roles: The analyst in his interpretations reorganizes, reintegrates unconscious material for himself as well as for the patient, since he has to be attuned to the patient’s unconscious, using, as we say, his own unconscious as a tool, in order to arrive at the organizing interpretation. (1960, p. 241) Loewald has been taken to task by some critics for holding an inegalitarian view that privileges the analyst’s perspective. As he puts it, “The analyst functions as a representative of a higher stage of organization and mediates this to the patient, insofar as the analyst’s understanding is attuned to what is, and the way in which it is, in need of organization” (p. 239). Yet at the same time, analysis has egalitarian goals that require the gradual decrease of this initial distance, and patient and analyst are in it together: “the therapeutic effect appears to have something to do with the requirement, in analysis, that the subject, the patient himself, gradually become an associate, as it were, in the research work” (p. 227). Thus, he is very specific about the nature and constitution of analytic authority and its eventual fate. Intersubjective ego psychology, first enunciated in the writings of Loewald and Erikson, holds in tension and reconciles two contradictory psychoanalytic approaches—ego psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, established by their founding American theorists Hartmann and Sullivan—that have characterized the theory, clinical practice, and politics of American psychoanalysis since the 1930s. One tendency began firmly committed to a one-person perspective on the mind,

The American independent tradition  15

to a focus on intrapsychic conflict, compromise formation, an internal world, and intrapsychic fantasy. It stressed that transference was brought from the patient’s past and unconscious to his present and his conscious mind and that the analyst was the interpreter of the patient’s experience. According to this perspective, as the analyst’s participation entered the picture, it was mainly as an interpreter of transference and resistance or through a countertransference that came from the analyst’s own unconscious and past. The other tendency started from an interpersonally and culturally created psyche in which the patient was also firmly situated in his sociocultural and familial surround. It began with a focus on what goes on between patient and analyst and a belief that not everything comes from the patient. It led among other consequences also to a view that the patient may affect the analyst’s countertransference, or, as Hoffman (1983) put it, also be the interpreter of the analyst’s experience. This co-created analytic field, described first by interpersonalists and inherited by relational psychoanalysis, is, in some sense, more than the sum of the twoperson parts. By contrast, intersubjective ego psychologists hold both perspectives at the same time and thereby modify each. Poland expresses the intersubjective ego psychological dual perspective with clarity and elegance: How can it be that no man is an island and that at the same time every man is an island? . . . It is misleading to speak glibly of one-person psychology versus two-person psychology. No single person exists outside a human, object-connected field; the analytic space colors how such a single person comes to understanding by the other and to insight. At the same time, the mind of any individual can be engaged by another yet is always crucially apart, a private universe of inner experience. (1996, p. 33) As we return from Loewald and Erikson, and those debates and trends that have characterized American psychoanalysis from within, to the larger question, “What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” we find ourselves faceto-face with our critics. As in other intellectual and political arenas, critics have accused Americans of optimism and pragmatism, taking form within psychoanalysis specifically as curative goals and abandoning the unconscious. Along with optimism, pragmatism, and ignoring the unconscious, critics have sometimes also accused American psychoanalysis of “empiricism,” a continental European critique of Anglo-American thinking in general.18 To my mind, the best way to face one’s detractors is to be straightforward and undefensive, although, as I have noted, the defensiveness of colonials has been characteristic of American psychoanalysis. I conclude, then, in a sort of afterword, by addressing our critics more directly, through the lens of classical intersubjective ego psychology. Just as its detractors suggest, American psychoanalysis tends to have an optimistic edge and to be unabashed in its interest in cure and the mitigation of suffering (Mitchell [2001] and Goldberg [2002] both point to American pragmatism).19

16  The American independent tradition

We (those of us with some Californian identity) had our Gold Rush in the midnineteenth century, and we saw that those who obsessed about finding gold got not nearly as far as those who settled for mundane family life and jobs. In a similar vein, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some of us stopped worrying about diluting the “pure gold” of psychoanalysis. In different ways, Loewald and Erikson can both be seen as early representatives of this undefensively pragmatic and optimistic trend. Loewald is unapologetic about spelling out visions of oscillation between different levels of integration of ego and reality and living both on the oedipal level of individuation and morality and on the level of the “psychotic core” of fusion and symbiosis. He dares to use the term psychic health: “psychic health has to do with an optimal, although by no means necessarily conscious, communication between unconscious and preconscious, between the infantile, archaic stages and structures of the psychic apparatus and its later stages and structures of organization. And further, that the unconscious is capable of change” (Loewald 1960, p. 254). Meanwhile, Loewald’s vision of the integration of transference, fantasy, and reality can at times exhibit an almost sentimental sense of the wonder of human existence: To make the unconscious conscious, is one-sided. It is the transference between them that makes a human life, that makes a life human . . . I shall try to develop the thesis that the concept of transference opened up the historical dimension of man’s love life while at the same time disclosing the erotic dimension of his individuation and historicity, of his becoming what may properly be called a self. The concept of transference provides a scientific approach to the phenomenon of love. (Loewald 1978c, pp. 31–32) Erikson’s clinical writings, similarly, are filled with a buoyant therapeutic enthusiasm. His eight stages of man, especially in his later writings, where they are tied to what he calls virtues, point toward an image of human fulfillment through the life cycle. His immigrant enthusiasm for America is often embarrassing. Yet neither Erikson nor Loewald is giving us what Norman O. Brown once called the “lullabies of sweetness and light which the neo-Freudians serve up as psychoanalysis” (1959, p. 98). Erikson’s case writings, especially his child-analytic cases, portray the tragedies of internal life as well as the uncontrollable accidents of family and history. His social writings indicate an awareness of poverty, of the mistreatment of Native Americans, and of the depression and self-blame that immigration or living in a racially biased world can foster. Erikson acknowledges the depression and melancholia of immigration and loss and reminds us of those “who were not allowed to join us in migration, the dead” (1964, p. 85). His conception of ego integrity, which requires the acceptance of one’s life as the only life one could have led, has a tonal cast that requires mourning

The American independent tradition  17

and rueful recognition. In his chapter on American identity in Childhood and Society, he gives us everything from platitudes about American individuality and stick-to-itiveness to brave condemnations of racism, capitalism, exploitation, and mass society (brave: this book was published in 1950, at the beginning of the McCarthy era, and Erikson was soon after its publication required to leave UC Berkeley because he refused to take a loyalty oath). Loewald, meanwhile, like Erikson a refugee, not only begins his collected papers with a foreword that addresses the “most hurtful betrayal” he experienced when Martin Heidegger, who had been his teacher, joined the Nazi Party. He also focuses developmentally on the unavoidable killing of one’s parents and oedipal atonement, and he recognizes the intractability of certain negative therapeutic reactions based in part on the death instinct (Loewald 1972, 1979). Americans, finally, are accused by some of our European colleagues not only of therapeutic optimism but also of abandoning the unconscious. Indeed, the continually growing Jamesian transatlantic attraction—first to the British Kleinians, then to Bion and British, Italian, and South American Bionians, with Lacan on the side—seems, in addition to being a welcome advance from orthodoxy and an openness to various theories, designed in part to defend against this critique. I argue, by contrast, that the unconscious arrived early and never left American psychoanalytic shores. It is more from the ego psychological than the interpersonal lineage that we draw American interest in the unconscious, including an interest in the drives. In ego psychology, we find attention to unconscious fantasy and to drive derivatives that have been distorted or repressed, and, following the structural model, to the view that all aspects of the psyche operate unconsciously, including the id-ego-superego interactions that produce compromise formations. We find a portrayal of the unconscious in Loewald’s powerful argument for the meaning, depth, and intensity of experience that comes from the integration of conscious and unconscious through fantasy and transference and from his portrayal of the integration of primary-process affective density, taking us to the deepest wellsprings of human existence, with secondary-process language. In Loewald and the intersubjective ego psychologists who follow him, we find concern with the analyst’s unconscious and its effects on the clinical process. We find the unconscious in Erikson’s ego psychological attention to anxieties and defenses and in his elaborately and empathetically described accounts of symptom formation in children. Throughout Loewald’s and Erikson’s writings, we find, without their making special claims, a taken-for-granted assumption that the drives—libido and aggression—are forces in unconscious and conscious life. The drives may gain shape and direction in development and interaction, but they are never thought to be simply reactions to interactional experience or frustration. It is precisely because psychoanalysis begins from a recognition of the unique subjectivity created in each individual by unconscious affects, drives, fantasies, conflicts, compromise formations, and a personal dynamic history, along with a recognition that two subjects bring

18  The American independent tradition

their uniqueness to the analytic transference-countertransference field that they also create, in a particular cultural and analytic environment, that intersubjective ego psychology—an American fusion of ego psychology and relational-interpersonal psychoanalysis—continues to grow.

Notes 1 Erikson and Joan Erikson added a “ninth” stage. To me, this stage has always felt like an afterthought, not foundational, fundamental, and integrated as the original eight stages. 2 The Psychoanalytic Dialogues special issue “What’s American about American Psychoanalysis?” appeared in 2004. A panel with the same title at the January 2016 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association echoed Mitchell and Harris’s inquiry (Mullen 2016). Contributors reprised several themes and observations found in the Psychoanalytic Dialogues issue, as well as developing new ones. 3 I assume that similar caveats (that they both obscure and illuminate) apply to cultural, political, and historical studies that generalize about America or imply American uniqueness, e.g., American individualism, the tyranny of the majority, and democratic despotism (de Tocqueville 1835), the special role of the frontier (Turner 1893), the “American political tradition” (Hofstadter 1948), Americans as “people of plenty” (Potter 1954), the United States as a “melting pot” (Glazer 1963), etc., but I have only glancing acquaintance with this field. In 2017, we found almost daily allusion in the newspapers to Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1965). 4 In a related vein, Spezzano (1995, 1997) identifies an “American Middle School,” which he sees as integrating British object relations and neo-Kleinian theory, American interpersonal psychoanalysis, and contemporary affect and motivational theory. Although our perspectives overlap, my impression is that Spezzano’s designation comes from his seeing the particular combination that he is describing not only as akin theoretically and clinically to the British Middle Group but also as especially characterized by its exclusion of classical American ego psychology in favor of a relational perspective on mind. By contrast, it is the betweenness within two American traditions, and the preservation of each, very much including ego psychology, that I am stressing. Summary overviews of the British independent tradition can be found in Kohon (1986), Parsons (2014), and Rayner (1991). 5 I use, but with quotation marks, the labels “one-person” and “two-person.” These have become reified labels, eschewed by many of those assigned to one side or the other, but they do, I believe have historical accuracy, and they capture something of the emphasis and major themes of each position (or, as more and more people reject the labels, something of what comes to any fusion or hybrid from each side). 6 Books or influential articles include Boesky (1990, 2008), Chused (1991, 1992b, 1996), Jacobs (1991, 2013), McLaughlin (1996), Poland (1996, 2000, 2017), and Renik (1993, 1995, 1996). Aron (1996) refers to this same collection of author-psychoanalysts as Freudian interactionists. My purpose in naming these few contemporary names is simply to give some ethnographic sense of the Loewald-Erikson legacy and to locate thinkers in the generationally and theoretically mediating position to which they belong. Definitive locating of contemporary thinkers is beyond the scope of this chapter and threatens to become inaccurate pigeonholing (of which we do not need more in psychoanalysis!). Since 2004, as colleagues have read about or heard me speak of the American independent tradition, I find that the identity feels congenial to many. 7 All of these authors, named for illustrative purposes only, were publishing articles from the 1980s and 1990s onward that led to these books. Other ego psychologically trained authors include Eva Lester, who wrote about pregnancy and sexuality with Notman (Lester and Notman 1986, Notman and Lester 1988) and Phyllis Tyson (e.g., 1994, 1996, 1997).

The American independent tradition  19

8 As was typical of those trained in my era, our theory readings ranged from Freud to Hartmann, Brenner, Gill, and Gray. In the last three weeks of our last year we read Klein. 9 Ironically, this could not have happened. Although the interpersonal-cultural perspective is the only classical psychoanalytic approach created by U.S.-born Americans, and although the interpersonal analysts were close to Sapir, Mead, Benedict, Du Bois, and other social scientists, the interpersonalist institutes and organizations, like the medical American Academy of Psychoanalysis, were traditionally even less hospitable to the clinical training or participation of academics than “The [ego-psychological] American.” 10 “Today” was the historical present of the original writing, 2000–2003, and my claim is less true now than it was then. I would argue, however, that my observations, though perhaps with some modulation, still hold true. North Americans are much more interested in psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic theories from across the Atlantic (and from Latin America) than the reverse. The taken-for-granted hegemony of British thinking and intellectual and institutional control over international psychoanalysis (the permanent London location of the IPA headquarters and International Journal of Psychoanalysis; British dominance of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP)-Web), growing originally from the early role of Ernest Jones and the Freuds finding refuge from Nazism in London but sometimes feeling like a last remnant of British imperialism, might surprise scholars from other fields, as might the regularity with which analysts move from one idealized theory and clinical approach to another. As of this writing (2019), we find on the ostensibly universalistic PEP-Web book list, maybe a hundred in all, nine by the Kleinian Meltzer or Meltzer and a co-author, seven by Winnicott, five by Bion, and four by M. H. Williams, whose name was unfamiliar to this writer but who seems to be a British Kleinian who writes about poetry and literature. We find one Hartmann, no Erikson, and no Loewald. 11 An American interviewee in my early 1980s study of second- and third-generation women psychoanalysts reported that the Americans used to refer privately to the “beiunsers.” These were émigré analysts who said repeatedly, “Bei uns it was like this; bei uns we did it like that.” 12 I follow Mitchell (2000) here, who locates the origins of relational psychoanalysis in Loewald, Bowlby, Fairbairn, and Sullivan (my colleagues Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris might add Ferenczi), and we notice also that Mitchell’s first two publications (1978, 1981), were ego psychological. Meanwhile, Mitchell’s early co-author, Jay Greenberg, has repositioned himself first in the “middle voice” (2005) and now finds himself in the center of the center, editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and fully participant in “the” American. 13 This division has grown wider in the last decade or so, as a Bionian perspective from the U.K., Italy, and Latin America, along with the Barangers’ conceptualization of bulwarks (1961–1962), has swept through psychoanalysis. Bion’s “without memory or desire” has, it seems to me, transformed itself into analytic certainty about what the patient means and how this meaning is always about the present moment in the hour and the analytic relationship. The analyst’s “use of the self,” to borrow Jacobs’s term, seems for many entirely in order to be certain of the projective identification from the other. 14 Schwaber (1983) makes this argument most forcefully against classical ego psychology, and Bion (1962, 1967) perhaps most forcefully, although more elliptically, against rigid Kleinianism. Of course, all analysts would take the position that they are working with their patients to understand the patients’ psyche rather than being the expert, but I think (as I elaborate in Chapter 8) that even today we find a distinction among analysts as to how much they bring a preformulated theory to their listening and interpretation. 15 The Erikson Institute for Education and Research at Austin Riggs is a thriving enterprise, but I am not sure about the extent of its reach or recognition, or if colleagues outside the Institute know about the work and history of the person for whom it is named. 16 In later chapters, I note Freud’s extensive and persistent thinking about Jewishness and his attention to the sociocultural details of his patients’ surround, as well as his great

20  The American independent tradition

works on psyche and society. Yet I would argue that Freud does not make ethnicity theoretically and clinically constitutive of psyche and development, as does Erikson. 17 Balsam (2018) points out that the concept of internalization also links Loewald to understandings of “cultural influences on the formation of the psyche.” 18 I will not deal directly with these critiques. My own personal approach—well outside the scope of my considerations here—would be to be undefensive on this score as well. Of course, we find empirical research useful. Of course, we want to create and evaluate theories and clinical work in as many ways as possible. Of course, we are pragmatic and care about goals. 19 Almost all the contributors to the 2016 “What’s American” panel referenced American pragmatism, whether as an elaborated philosophy and philosophically driven approach to psychoanalysis or simply as a direct “How does it work?” question (Mullen 2016).

PART I

From Freud to Erikson

2 CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS AND BEYOND Drives, identity, and Freud’s sociology

Men who share an ethnic area, a historical era, or an economic pursuit are guided by common images of good and evil. Erikson Homo homini lupus. Freud

Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud’s remarkable attempt to explain the role of aggression in the psyche and in culture, stands as one of the great socialtheoretical works of the twentieth century. Like its precedents in classical sociology—Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), and Simmel’s extensive writings (Wolff 1950)—all of which employ psychologically derived explanatory concepts (Durkheim’s anomie, egoism, and altruism, and individual and collective consciousness; Weber’s ethic, spirit, and charisma; Simmel’s individuals and groups, dyads and triads, intimacy and isolation)—Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, anticipates Freud’s direct advocacy, in “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” of combining the psychological and the social, psychoanalysis and the social sciences.1 In this book, Freud elegantly weaves together an account of the human psyche with an account of civilization, showing how basic cultural processes depend upon transformations of the sexual and death/aggressive drives and how, without these cultural processes, people, literally, would not survive. Drives, the most basic components of psychic life, are incompatible not only with society per se—with group life, interpersonal commitments, families, and economic cooperation—but also with civilization and “high” culture—religion, art, and politics.

24  From Freud to Erikson

Freud’s project is twofold. On the one side, there is the general spirit of his argument, what has been called Freud’s “pessimism.” He portrays the inevitability of conflict, aggression, and unhappiness in human life. On the other, he elaborates a specific argument based on the dual-drive theory found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the structural theory of The Ego and the Id. What do we make today of these brilliantly developed, elegantly formulated arguments about the genesis and inevitability of aggression? How do subsequent psychoanalytic formulations help us understand extreme aggression, and what do they contribute to our insights into sociopolitical and cultural violence? Here I suggest that Freud’s drive-based sociology, though rhetorically and intuitively powerful, cannot in itself explain either the prevalence or particular historical expressions of collective violence. By contrast, Erikson’s formulations about identity seem to provide us greater dynamic understanding of and a more experience-near explanation for the genesis of such violence. Klein is the drive theorist who connects and mediates between Freud and Erikson, even as later theories and clinical accounts give us further insight into the experiential conditions under which aggression emerges. Klein’s conceptualizations of splitting, projection, and projective identification mediate between Freudian drive theory and Erikson’s ego psychology. Klein’s formulations bring in a personal, identity-consonant subjectivity and description of an experiencing psyche, ego, or self in terms of felt threats of annihilation, anxiety, fear of fragmentation, and other terrors. These are the very subjective experiences that, ideologically, often justify collective violence. Reciprocally, Erikson’s conception of identity gives us a psychosocial and intersubjective ego psychological conceptualization of the kind of psyche/self that Klein describes. Identity moves us nearer to the ideological explanations that collectivities themselves give for collective violence, and, reciprocally, Kleinian explanations of the psychodynamics of rageful aggression, projection, and projective identification provide a convincing drive-based underpinning for the virulence of such aggression and rage. The psychohistorian Erikson, bolstered by a Kleinian reformulation of drive theory, extends and transforms Freud’s sociology, helping us understand the kinds of violence that Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents and that we have seen in the world since Freud. I note, in conclusion, two challenges. First, we are left with troubling difficulties when we try to explain collective behavior on an individual level and when we ignore individual differences: who does, and who doesn’t, participate in this behavior, and with what underlying motivations? And finally, any generic account of the psychogenesis of collective violence and aggression, beginning with Freud’s, overlooks the important fact that the vast preponderance of those who engage in such violence are men.

Civilization and Its Discontents Psychoanalytic thinking about violence must begin with a reconsideration of Civilization and Its Discontents, and it must concern itself not only with “ordinary,”

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  25

normative individual and collective violence and aggression but also with the extremes of violence, often tied to nationalism and its tribal, ethnic, religious, and racial equivalents, that we have witnessed throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Seventy-plus years after the Holocaust, which still stands, at least in the Western mind, as the ultimate instantiation of collective cruelty, brutality, killing, and torture, we confront death squads, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and political and religious rage expressed through torture, murder, rape, and mass shootings. We witness genocidal annihilation of indigenous peoples and ethnocidal tribal warfare, as well as widespread gang violence and gang wars throughout the world, a variety and extent of violence that cannot be fully enough described.2 Can Civilization and Its Discontents help us understand this? In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud makes strong claims for the inevitability of aggression: The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? (p. 111) Freud notes that whereas this innately propelled aggression usually waits for an excuse for provocation, it sometimes just emerges at will: “when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien” (p. 112). He lists examples very much in the national, ethnic, racial, and religious realm: “the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War” (p. 112). Freud continues to elaborate on the national-racial-ethnic-religious identity question, pointing to what he calls “the narcissism of minor differences” that rationalizes aggressive tendencies and leads neighbors like the English and the Scots, or the North and the South Germans, to fight. He notices the ease with which larger national or cultural groups latch onto smaller groups or groups seen as social intruders as foci for the expression of innate aggression, and he with rueful irony (and tragic prescience) recognizes especially how the Jews have, historically, “rendered most useful services” (p. 114) throughout European history

26  From Freud to Erikson

and across the European continent by being outsiders and potential collective targets of violent aggression. This account of aggression conveys the spirit of Freud’s argument. Who can contest his observations of widespread violence, torture, and hatred? Who would want to ignore it? Given German Aryan and German Jew, Serbian and Bosnian or Kosovar, Israeli and Palestinian, Hutu and Tutsi, Shiite and Sunni, and more, who would argue against the view that a narcissism of minor differences seems to underpin and rationalize much collective violence? Freud captures our interest and attention by boldly taking on these central problems of human interaction and physical and cultural survival. Yet in spite of his powerful and empirically accurate account of cultural violence and aggression, Freud’s attention to them in Civilization and Its Discontents and his “pessimistic” conclusions about the origins of human misery in fact stem from a different source. Freud is less concerned with the actual destructive violence that he finds inevitable and more concerned with psychic costs. Civilization and Its Discontents, finally, is about the problem of guilt—of aggression turned not outward but inward. Repression, rather than action, is the threat that most concerns him. He reviews his project: “my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (p. 134). In this chapter, I suggest that we have to ask whether the specific psychodynamic argument that Freud makes addresses adequately either the question of guilt as a civilizing force or the question of aggression. Freud assumes that in the normal course of events, guilt works. The superego that he describes institutes repression, holding in check the drives that threaten civilization. Freud does not need continually to concern himself with unmitigated aggression as a threat to civilization. In this view, when unbridled aggression erupts, it has two sources, both in the weakening of the superego. First, by definition, either adequate superego formation and internal guilt did not develop in the first place, or the aggressive drives that should have been turned inward as guilt have been redirected outward. In parallel fashion, Freud has argued in “On Narcissism” (1914a) that the libidinal drives can be directed inward or outward.3 Second, in addition to this re-externalization of drive aggression itself, a weakening or failure of superego standards—of morality and ethics—also may enable excessive violence. The superego holds moral standards against which it measures the desires of the id, and these standards are formed through the internalization of parental, and hence societal, norms. There is a problem with both of these claims. I return below to current psychoanalytic understandings of aggression as a drive, but here I focus on a problem with the second source of aggression: the weakening or failure of morality and ethics. Sagan (1988) persuasively argues my case. He notes that Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents and Lecture XXXI of New Introductory Lectures (1933a), his summary description of psychic structure, describes a superego that is in some ways largely id.

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  27

It is an expression of cruelty and violent condemnation, not of conscience, morality, empathy, or kindness. Even more pertinent, Sagan notices that the Freudian superego’s standards and behavioral dictates come entirely from without. The superego has no innate morality or ethical standards. Thus, as Anna Freud’s concept of “identification with the aggressor” makes clear, there is nothing in the development of internalized guilt or in superego formation that in itself would prevent expressions of extreme violence and aggression, as long as that violence and aggression were in accord with or sanctioned by societal standards or practiced by a particular identified-with aggressor. There is nothing that “by itself, can make a judgment between a moral and an immoral value” (Sagan 1993, p. 12). Sagan observes that “the Nazis used all the trappings of the superego to promote genocide: purifying, healing, curing, oath, community, the Volk, social usefulness, ideal society, sacrifice and dedication, ideology, idealism, and morality” (p. 12).4 Thus, although Civilization and Its Discontents is certainly moving, evocative, and in a deep sense true (it is among Freud’s greatest writings), we cannot turn to it for a psychodynamic explanation of cultural or individual violence. More generally, as many contemporary analysts observe, it is unclear that the structural theory, with its underlying drive-repression dynamic, its focus on the Oedipus complex, and its assumptions about the constraining influence of the superego, can serve as the final word on psychic functioning. Accordingly, it would seem that concepts like identification with the aggressor are inadequate, unless we can explain the unconscious motivations that lead to such identification. Alternatively, we have to ask what made the aggressor himself aggress, find the answer in his identification with the aggressor, and so on back through the generations, a partially true, but much more complicated, process.

After Freud: drives, aggression, and the internal object world Within post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the status of aggression, even more than sexuality, became an arena of both insight and contention. Klein agreed with Freud that innate destructiveness fuels psychic life, and she provides a more elaborated account of how the individual manages this aggression, an account that, like Freud’s, is dynamically and clinically persuasive, whether or not one agrees with the specifics of Klein’s innatist drive theory. Klein described a rapid-fire cycle of psychic management of drive aggression through processes of splitting, projection, and projective identification. Innate annihilation and persecutory anxiety—drive aggression that comes both from within and from without—continually refuels this management project, both aggression against the object and the projective fantasy that the object itself is the source of aggression, thus reconstituting, with ever more differentiation, fears of persecution and destruction. Since the object, or other, is also a source of goodness (initially the good breast), the infant’s fantasy of destroying the good breast/object with hatred and aggression

28  From Freud to Erikson

leads to persecutory anxiety about being destroyed by the bad breast/object and to attempts to reconstitute a good self and good breast, cyclically leading to further defensive splitting, projection, persecutory anxiety, and so forth. Moreover, from the beginning, innate aggression fuels envy at what is seen as the good object that seems to hold and withhold goodness. Juggling and managing fantasied aggression toward the self and the object is the major Kleinian psychodynamic project. Without such management, a whole self and whole other cannot emerge, and the psyche is overwhelmed by intolerable schizoid splits and persecutory and annihilation anxiety. For Klein as for Freud, aggression does not in the first instance require explanation. It is a push from within, and explanations for its invocation are post hoc justifications. Against Freud and Klein, neo-Freudians like Fromm, as well as British independents like Fairbairn and Guntrip, claimed that their clinical experience showed that aggression is a reaction to environmental intrusion, danger, frustration, failure of fit, depressive affect, or anxiety. Incorporating both sides of these classical debates, many analysts have come to hold a middle clinical and developmental ground. Whether they believe theoretically in innate aggression or a death drive or not, they focus on what seem to be the immediate internal contexts in which aggression emerges. Stephen Mitchell (1993) puts this case clearly. Holding to a drive-side perspective, he argues that aggression must be biologically hardwired and that it is universal, driven from within when experienced, and that it has dynamic depth and centrality for the individual. At the same time, Mitchell embraces the environmental side. Aggression may have a biological substrate, yet rather than its being an innate, destructive, antilibidinal force driving independently and without proximate cause for release, it emerges situationally, as a response under particular environmental or constitutional conditions or in particular relational contexts. Much as Balint (1965) argued, against primary narcissism and for primary love, that clinically, whenever we find narcissism we explain it developmentally and clinically in the individual case, so also, Mitchell and others note that when we find aggression, we look for its history and psychodynamic meaning to the individual rather than assuming that it simply expresses an innate drive. Another contemporary understanding of aggression (increasingly overcited and relied on, as are many Winnicottian concepts) comes from Winnicott’s “Use of an Object” paper (1971). Reflecting the drive theories of both Freud and Klein, Winnicott claims that the child’s capacity to destroy the object in fantasy while it survives in reality is not only inevitable but also necessary to development. In fact, the object becomes separate and external in the first place—externality is created— only through the object’s survival of psychic destruction. As the object survives, her innate destructiveness becomes, for the child, less terrifying. Winnicott here is talking about relating through destruction in the internal world rather than about actual destruction (though also about actual chompingat-the-breast destruction). The object must be there after the destruction has occurred. The same could be said, perhaps, about Klein’s account of initial splitting

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  29

and projection. As Klein notes, especially in “Mourning and Its Relation to ManicDepressive States” (1940), if there is an actual loss, the inner world threatens to fragment and collapse. Yet in Klein’s and Winnicott’s writings, as well as in the work of contemporary Kleinians, it is unclear whether developmental and clinical descriptions of paranoid-schizoid splitting and projection and unconscious aggressive and destructive fantasies require, or simply take for granted, a theory of innate death or aggressive drives. When we pinpoint post-Freudian formulations that are particularly useful (perhaps more useful than Freud’s) for thinking about extreme aggression, what they seem to have in common is their observation that aggression (and in the Klein-Winnicott case, anxiety about the consequences to the psyche-self of this aggression) emerges in reaction to threats to the self and the object. The management of aggression is especially central to Kleinian accounts of psychic functioning, and thus, although Klein does not bring her views to social theory, her theory nevertheless forms our first contender. In Klein’s view, cycles of splitting, keeping separate both good and bad internal objects and good and bad self, projection of aggression into bad objects, and persecutory anxiety define paranoid-schizoid functioning. Depressive position functioning is found when a whole object can be seen to have good and bad aspects, enabling, reciprocally, a sense of good and bad whole self to emerge (Winnicott’s survival of the object plays a similar psychic role). Guilt for having previously harmed what is now seen as a whole object with feelings develops, leading to the wish to make reparation for one’s destructiveness. A Kleinian perspective would imply that extremes of collective as well as individual destructive aggression reflect paranoid-schizoid functioning, where the other is seen as a part rather than a whole object and the self is also fragmented. When we deconstruct paranoid-schizoid fantasy, the paranoid element involves persecutory anxiety, feeling attacked by the object and wanting to retaliate or attack first, while the schizoid element involves the splitting of different aspects of self and object so that neither self nor object is whole. Such splitting may also include derealization— an absence of depth of feeling in oneself and one’s perception of the other, so that neither seems real and alive. In such fantasy it is important to keep good and bad objects separate in order to keep separate good and bad aspects of the self and to protect good aspects of both. Yet this makes the bad aspects of self seem worse and further demonizes the object world, as bad elements of the self are evacuated and put into that world. Like Klein’s, other psychoanalytic accounts focus on the implication of selfhood in aggression, claiming that aggression appears when the psychological self feels threatened. Mitchell (1993, pp. 366–367) points to the many ways that infants may experience threats and dangers: lack of attunement, separation, parental anxiety, environmental impingement, unresponded-to hunger, and other physiological distress. More or less following Klein, he suggests that these sufferings tend to be experienced as intended, as coming from without (indeed, they may come from without). Therefore, the ensuing suffering is intended by an external agent (or a

30  From Freud to Erikson

projectively externalized agent). Winnicott would seem to agree: the used object is not meant to retaliate, or it will be experienced as aggressive and destructive. The belief that another intends one’s suffering is found not only in the internal world of childhood but, as Klein, Winnicott, and others aver, throughout life. As a result, suffering becomes unconsciously hooked up with feelings of being attacked, endangered, and threatened by another, and defensive retaliatory feelings ensue. For some people—for example, those with punitive superegos or predominantly paranoid-schizoid dynamics—the internal world becomes organized centrally around these feelings of threat and danger. Their unconscious fantasy life revolves around aggression and attack, and they are likely to projectively experience the world as attacking and threatening and to respond accordingly. A patient says, “I’m always vigilant to keep bad things from happening, and I feel threatened by people who aren’t.” Mitchell stresses that the actuality of danger and threat here is not important. Subjectively, the person feels endangered, and these “threats to the integrity of the self, as subjectively defined, tend to generate powerful, deeply aggressive reactions” (1993, p. 368). Here Mitchell sums up a widely accepted psychoanalytic perspective, although he is careful, following Klein, to make clear that he is talking not only about actual threats to the self but also about internal fantasy and projective-introjective spirals of attack and defense. Several developmental accounts describe, not in drive but in object-relational terms, the emergence of the kinds of self likely to enact destructive aggression. These accounts begin from the developing child’s need for intersubjective recognition (see Benjamin 1988, 1995). In order to develop a psychological self—a depressive position psyche capable of seeing self and other in terms of internal mental states, feelings, beliefs, intentions, desires, and so forth—the developing child needs parental reflection of her thoughts and feelings (Winnicott writes in this context of holding, Bion of the container who returns, in more integrated form, the child’s frightening, fragmented, projections). According to Fonagy and colleagues (Fonagy, Moran, and Target 1993; Fonagy and Target 1995), when a young child’s self-expression is ignored or interpreted as aggression, a psychological self cannot develop. Further, when there is an inability to experience oneself in the mental domain, thoughts, beliefs, and desires will be expressed and managed physically. In a psyche lacking whole, alive, reflective objects and functioning at a paranoidschizoid level, then, aggression may become inextricably fused with self-expression. Extreme destructiveness becomes an attempt to express an inadequate, defective self-structure when confronted by other human beings, beings who are themselves also seen as inanimate, nonreflective selves or dangerous objects. Moreover, insofar as these others are perceived internally and externally to be without feelings or thoughts, they are also seen as being without the capacity to suffer, thus further reducing inhibitions against aggression. Alternatively, the other’s suffering at the hands of the self shores up the self, because the sufferer must recognize the self and thus affirms the self’s existence. Fonagy, Moran, and Target describe David, who

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  31

exhibited “uncertainty about his identity except when angry and fighting,” and for whom “meaningful emotional experience had been replaced by mindless aggression” (1993, pp. 477, 478). As most analysts have seen, the relations of aggression and the self can go either way. Some people use aggression and rage to combat feelings of disintegration. Expelling feelings outward organizes and focuses their threatened psyche, and they feel bounded and whole when angry. For others, the expression of rage, and aggression itself, threatens disintegration. They hold in and deny feelings of anger at all costs. A lack of sense of aliveness is worth the flooding disintegration and loss of the object that might ensue from the expression of anger In contrast to Freud and Klein, then, for later analysts aggression does not drive innately toward expression and gratification. It emerges from a variety of situated psychodynamics that, in the most general sense, seem connected to self/ego and other, to status as subject or object. Aggression defends against an endangered self, whether the sense of danger is physiological, a fantasied or perceived threat of physical or emotional attack, punitive guilt, shame and humiliation, or fragmentation. Such danger can be felt to come from within or without, and aggression in this context may be an attempt to express a self in a situation of internal paranoidschizoid fragmentation or lack of internal wholeness or capacity for mentalization. The person relies more on the body for expression, and perhaps also sees others more as bodies than as minds. Projective constructions of the object as well as of the ego can lead to aggression. Klein (1957) and her followers point to the unconscious fantasy that the object is aggressive and threatens the ego—originally, the bad breast threatening the infant-self, leading to the fantasy of retaliation and destruction of the object, as well as to envious feelings toward the good object and the desire to destroy its goodness. These analysts also point to the preference for hatred of a bad object over envy of a good one: it is better to destroy something bad and therefore hateful than good and therefore envied. With envy, in the Kleinian view, we are certainly on the terrain of innate aggression, but whatever its origins, we often see clinically the power and terror of destructive fantasies toward envied goodness.

Erikson: from psychic self to identity; from individual to culture Drive and object-relational conceptualizations beginning with Freud and continuing through Klein seem generative for an understanding of destructive aggression and violence, yet they are not enough. Freud’s speculations, and his characterization of the pervasiveness of cultural violence, seem intuitively right, yet they give us no methodological guidance for understanding when and under what conditions such violence erupts. Klein provides more specificity about the psychodynamics of aggression, of how aggression works in the mind, but her universalistic account, like Freud’s, cannot help us understand the particular times and places where extreme violence emerges, neither where such psychodynamics seem especially

32  From Freud to Erikson

virulent nor where they assume collective form. As with Freud, an inquiry focused on the individual and individual minds takes us only part way to cultural violence and aggression. From the point of view of fields that study collective processes—sociology, anthropology, political science, social psychology, and economics—psychoanalysis has foundered when it has tried to address such processes. Psychoanalysts have tended to assume either that collectivities operate like individuals and have no separate modalities of operation or that collectivities can be understood simply as the sum of the individual actions and psyches that make them up; exceptions include psychoanalyst-sociologists (Smelser 1998, 2007; Prager 2008, 2011) and a very few psychoanalysts (Volkan 1997, 2013; Varvin and Volkan 2003). Yet as Smelser notes, social fields that try to explain human behavior without recourse to theories of individual motivation and action also founder. In looking, then, at extreme collective violence from the viewpoint of classical drive theory and its reformulations, beginning with Civilization and Its Discontents, we run into problems similar to those we face in any cultural psychoanalytic inquiry. In what ways can we see cultural practices and processes as those of individuals writ large? How can peoples be reduced to or equated with individuals? Do we explain cultural violence on the basis of differential child-rearing practices, or culturally prevalent patterns of failure of recognition and intersubjectivity in infantile life? And so forth. Cultural commentators have documented persuasively the complexity and difficulty of tying the individual psyche to culture or society and the reductionist dangers in so doing. We see this complexity and difficulty clearly in psychodynamic analyses of rituals, myths, culturally laden dreams, beliefs about sexuality, and so forth. In all such cases, we expect and find complex symbolization, mediation, transformations, and condensations of themes, and we find that these themes also have a cultural and historical life of their own, even as a psychodynamic account helps us further understand them. Such complexity must also be true to some extent of culturally normative violence. Yet in contrast to these other realms of collective behavior, there is something unique about the psychodynamic case of extreme cultural violence and aggression. To begin with, such behavior itself—killing, mass killing, torture, rape—seems directly, as Freud would have it, physically and violently drive-aggressive. We may be observing and needing to understand paranoid-schizoid interchanges inside the head, but we are also talking about how this internal world is enacted. Perhaps more important, the consciously articulated cultural ideologies that tend to justify such behavior often seem directly, and without much symbolic transformation or elaboration, to express exactly what psychoanalysts describe as the individual unconscious motivations and internal constructions that lead to aggression. That is, several of these ideologies—us-them, good-evil, pure-polluted, etc.—seem particularly expressive of unconscious life. In this sense, such ideologies may well also serve for some individuals as a kind of personal symbol (Obeyesekere 1981) or transitional concept, linking what comes psychodynamically from within the individual to a similar formulation that comes culturally from without.

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  33

When we move from the individual to the social, especially in the realm of mass violence, self and psyche become refigured as and expand to incorporate identity. It is identities—ethnicity, tribe, sectarian religious group, country—that are subjectively called upon. In this context of identity, of us versus them, Erikson becomes our primary theorist and closest clinical-cultural observer. Erikson theorized more than any other analyst the importance of identity to psychic health, and we take from Erikson an argument for identity as a primary motivational force. Moreover, insofar as identity for Erikson is linked to basic trust, and definitionally dependent upon being recognized for who the subject is, with history, continuity, and a place in the world, his theory is closely tied to that of Winnicott, Kohut, Benjamin, and others who make recognition central. Erikson observes not only identity but ethnicity, and he makes an incontrovertible case for the centrality of ethnicity to many people’s individual identities and senses of self. Further, he provides clinical vignettes along with psychocultural analyses of ethnic, national, and racial identity. These vary in extensiveness or persuasiveness, but they are consistently, to use Erikson’s term, generative (or, to use Lévi-Strauss’s phrase, good to think). When Erikson describes case accounts of disrupted, spoiled, or subjected identities (Native American, African American, immigrant), he tends to describe these as leading to depression and despair at nonrecognition rather than to rage and aggression, but he does not so directly address identity in the psychology of the victimizer rather than the victim (his description of Hitler’s motivations toward violence, aggression, and anti-Semitism, for example, based on Hitler’s relations with his mother and father and the problem of paternal authority in Germany more generally, has less to say about German identity than Erikson’s accounts of almost every other national-ethnic group). Pervasively, this violence seems to organize itself around identity. Almost definitionally, then, when we consider the psychodynamics of such violence, we are in Eriksonian territory. Identity, broadly construed, seems to be an ideological or cultural concept that consolidates and justifies genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, and terrorism. We think of the Armenian genocide, the German Volk versus the Jews, Serbian versus Bosnian or Kosovar, Jewish-Israeli versus Palestinian, Muslim and Hindu, Hutu and Tutsi, Shiite and Sunni. The list is endless, each pairing evoking horror and terror. To think about such matters is of course complicated. Yet it is useful to observe that ethnicity and religious affiliation here seem to operate, both psychologically and culturally, as ego identity on a social scale, or the social equivalent of psychic selfhood. They seem to have the same deep roots and centrality to a sense of being recognized and being whole. Yet identity by itself does not explain collective violence: it only describes the collectivity in terms of which such violence operates. Here we return to Klein. Klein and her followers do not use the word identity, or even self, yet we can see that the paranoid-schizoid fantasies and cycles of projection and projective identification that she describes are experienced by a subject/ego in relation to an other. It is a short step toward seeing this mind as psyche/self/identity. By extension, we can begin to understand how, just as paranoid-schizoid threats to the psyche/self generate paranoid-schizoid aggressive

34  From Freud to Erikson

fantasies in the individual, so also, under particular conditions, similar fantasies and felt threats drive collective violence. Kleinian dynamics can be drawn upon to describe collective violence cast ideologically and psychosocially in Eriksonian terms. Violence justified through splitting and projective identification becomes a way to affirm collective selfhood and identity, just as projective fantasies that disavow aggression affirm an individual psychic self and hoped-for sense of internal goodness. The psychological here is not, as some social or political commentators might believe, simply a displacement or rationalization for political and economic causes (nor, of course, would we say that social factors and forces are simply displacements of the psychological). Genocide and ethnocide, then, present a rare confluence of factors. In contrast to the results of many of our attempts to reflect on the psychodynamics of the social, in this case conscious, subjective explanations, as well as our observation of them, resonate directly with our conception of the dynamic unconscious. Narcissistic threats, humiliation, shame, trauma, being unrecognized—all may lead on an individual level to an aggressive response, and these are exactly the terms in which collectivities often describe their reasons for violence. Similarly, psychoanalysis locates hate-filled thoughts on the paranoid-schizoid level, focusing on psychic splitting and the projection of hatred and aggression, and collectivities and individuals in collectivities justify national-racial-ethnic-sectarian violence in split, projective terms, in terms of the objective evil, destructiveness, and badness of the enemy (Erikson’s “common images of good and evil”) that is being attacked or eliminated.5 Social groups thus define themselves in terms of identity and then justify their behavior ideologically in terms that invoke splitting and projection. The enemy is all bad, and we are all good. We cannot know, of course, whether individual actors experience these dynamics psychologically (though as we read these accounts or watch the news, we often notice both intense rage and pleasure in destroying the other). It would seem to be relatively straightforward here for individuals to bring personal psychodynamics directly to cultural symbols and culturally sanctioned actions. Accounts of the rise of Nazism often point to Germany’s humiliating defeat at Versailles in 1918, and Hitler certainly appealed consciously to German shame. Serbian language in Bosnia and Kosovo expressed, consciously, self-identity dynamics that focused repeatedly on the humiliation and defeat of Serbia over the centuries (Volkan 1997). The language of Jewish and Palestinian and of Shiite and Sunni, though ostensibly religious, seems also an ideological cover for a collective (and always differentiating) identity, us versus them. If questions of identity and selfhood are ideologically central in cases of extreme violence, it also becomes clearer why the enemy, as Freud first noted, is found close to hand rather than far away or in the nonhuman environment. An object fantasied to be like the self is more likely to threaten the self’s integrity and sense of difference, and it is also the object most easily introjected and set up as an internal persecutory object. We find mediating developmental psychodynamics here as well. Loewenberg (1971) makes such a case. He argues that a confluence of self and identity experiences

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  35

in the generation growing up during and after World War I in Germany and Austria generated intense, destructive oral rage, intolerable anxiety, and a lack of internal ability to modulate and control intense emotions. These experiences included father absence, followed by the return to a collapsed economy of some individually defeated or mutilated survivor fathers, along with psychically and nutritionally unavailable mothers and extreme hunger and privation. These childhood experiences accompanied national defeat, humiliation, and political-social collapse. As this generation grew up, its members’ anxiety-laden, hate-filled psychic fragmentation met a polity filled with anger and potential violence. We may be able to find developmental meshing of this sort in other cases of extreme social and cultural violence, but I would not necessarily expect that we would in all cases. What seems more likely is that in the realm of this kind of violence, we in fact are seeing, for some reason empirically, social processes as to some extent a sum of individual processes (I hesitate to make this suggestion, given the use of psychological reductionism in the history of psychoanalysis). Individuals themselves feel humiliated, endangered, and attacked, and their individual feelings resonate directly with collective ideologies and claims—Obeyesekere’s personal symbol. Reflecting what analysts describe psychodynamically, language on an ideological level prevalently explains violent expansionism, racism, ethnocide, and sectarian violence as a reaction to humiliation, defeat, and being wronged. Paranoid-schizoid thinking is another dynamic element that may not seem as directly available to collective as to individual subjectivity, yet such thinking, as with pathological aggressive fantasies in the individual, does seem nonetheless in some cases to be part of the collective unconscious fantasy complex that helps fuel extreme violence and aggression. Thus, it seems that in polities that did not provide previously for adequate mentalization, illusion, and psychosocial depressive-level integration, social disintegration leads to a collective psychic disintegration expressed in splitting, projection, and violent acting-out of projective fantasies. Just as analysts find flooding, fragmentation, and dissolution of boundaries, intertwined with reactive aggression, in someone who feels endangered and who has not been able to develop a reflective self (whose potential container has not provided transformations of anxiety into meaning), so also the breakdown of a totalitarian state or a state symbolized by one leader, like the Soviet Union or the former Yugoslavia, or the sudden withdrawal of an absolutist colonial power (the British from India-Pakistan or Palestine-Israel, colonial powers throughout Africa), may lead to violent lawlessness, ethnic war, and ethnic cleansing. There is a connection here between a sense of meaning—on the psychological level, a person who contains projections and reflects and integrates subjectivity for the developing self; on the social level, a society and polity not founded on aggression and social repression—and a sense of identity, on both individual and collective levels (I am in the terrain of early, globalized psychological anthropology, thinking, as Benedict might have, of paranoid-schizoid societies). We also witness paranoid-schizoid disintegration in polities that, though ethnically exclusionary in a systematic way, also include democratic features and institutions.

36  From Freud to Erikson

In the United States, for example, there can be rageful hatred of illegal immigrants, including the demonizing of children desperate enough to risk dangerous travel and border crossing. Israel, to take another instance, operates as a civil democracy (I do not minimize either anti-Mizrahi sentiments or the extensiveness of antiPalestinian policies, which seem to get more personalized and virulent each year—but I believe we can distinguish Israel from the former Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and other totalitarian states). Yet, when there is a Palestinian suicide bombing, or an attack in the West Bank or Gaza, we find Israeli rhetoric and behavior becoming suddenly more militaristic and the imagery of Palestinians becoming universalistically demonized. Note that when Rabin was assassinated, there was no psychic space in the Israeli collective consciousness for normal splitting, given that the assassin was a Jew.6 By contrast to this Erikson-Klein account of extreme ethnic and nationalist violence resulting from threats to the collective self or identity and of communal paranoid-schizoid splitting and projection, a more classical, Freudian explanation, consonant with Civilization and Its Discontents, or with Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, would look rather to oedipal dynamics. We would focus on the decline of a paternal authority able to rein in aggression and create guilt, identification with the aggressor, group psychological identification with a leader, and so forth. We think, for example, of the end of the Soviet Union, the death of Tito, the end of the colonialist British Raj or Palestinian Protectorate. Horkheimer (1936) and Mitscherlich (1963) guide us here. These accounts, of course, are not entirely wrong. Most notably, we cannot rule out either the loss of capacity for displacement onto an oppressive leader of both self-sustaining idealizations and hatred of racial-ethnic others, nor identification with the aggressor while that aggressor is in power. Such idealizing identifications also defend against personal humiliation, as Fanon (1952) describes in Black Skin, White Masks. But such explanations, beginning from innate aggression and the lack of guilt, do not adequately describe the fragmentation of identity and hate-filled destruction let loose for which a more object-relational Kleinian or self/identity account of disintegration and its consequences can account. We find paranoid-schizoid functioning and its social-identity expressions also on the level of symbolization. The swastika, for example, became a concrete symbol (Klein 1930, Segal 1957), standing only for itself rather than having elaborated purposes and meanings. With a concrete symbol or symbolic equation, the ego does not differentiate between the symbol and the thing symbolized. There can be no elaborations and transformations of the symbol in relation to other symbols. National-racial-ethnic politics often organizes itself around just such concrete symbols of nation or ethnos, perhaps specific historical events or the land itself: Judea and Samaria, Greater Russia, “America” (an imperialist locution now used universally by Democrats and Republicans alike, and easily slipping, as we witness repeatedly through our history, into rightwing white ethnic racism and nationalism), Islam (or Sunni and Shia Islam), Greater Serbia, Palestine.

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  37

By contrast, true symbols are felt to be created by the ego and therefore can be modified, entered into connection with other objects and symbols, and transformed into other symbols. As Segal puts it, “the symbols, created internally, can then be re-projected into the external world, endowing it with symbolic meaning” (1957, p. 167). Along the same lines, Prager (1993) argues that creative and imaginative democratic politics operate in Winnicott’s realm of illusion, with its capacity for symbolic and intersubjective transformation and elaboration (Obeyesekere’s symptom versus symbol distinction [1990] is also pertinent here). I am focusing on two arenas involving challenges to the collective self or collective identity. On a more ideologically articulated level on which unconscious fantasy finds expression and reflection in conscious collective fantasies and ideologies, humiliation and shame, both self-identity dynamics, seem one route to the generation of extreme violence (Germany was humiliated in World War I). In this context, we would assume that defeat takes different forms, depending on how it is put into collective fantasy. The sense of humiliation linked to defeat might lead to more retaliatory narcissistic rage, whereas “defeat with honor” might lead to less. By contrast, on a less articulated level of psychic and social functioning, social disintegration seems to generate paranoid-schizoid fantasies homologous with those found in psychic disintegration: Yugoslavia disintegrates, Britain leaves IndiaPakistan (and helps create Partition), and there is no longer a container (however disturbed and repressive it had been). I expect further that we need also to differentiate among enemies (or victims). This differentiation, based on whether enemies are more or less dehumanized, may bear some (not direct and simple) relation to paranoid-schizoid on the one side or humiliation-identity fantasies on the other. To what extent are enemies thought to feel and suffer, so that there is identificatory joy in torture, rape, or sadistic retaliatory violence for humiliation? Alternatively, to what extent is the enemy thought of as not having thoughts or feelings at all, but as bad part objects that are expelled and destroyed? Finally, it must be noticed that grief and loss in themselves do not seem to lead to pathological collective violence. Psychoanalytic conceptualizations of mourning can help us here, pointing toward mediating dynamics that signify, for example when grief and loss become tied to injury and rage.7 A patient tells an anecdote: an Irishman sits at the negotiating table with the British. He is offered one thing after another —the return of Northern Ireland, unification, economic help. Finally, he gets up and begins to walk out: “I’d rather have my grievance.”

Individual and culture, coupled and uncoupled I have suggested that we find a notable isomorphism in numerous sociopolitical settings, one we cannot dismiss, between individual and cultural rages and aggression. Yet we are on tricky ground. Without clinical evidence, or at least evidence based on intensive individual interviews or observations, we cannot assume that these culturally prevalent explanatory and ideological claims, however straight out of a

38  From Freud to Erikson

psychoanalytic text they might be, are necessarily what motivate those individuals who act aggressively in cultural situations. It is certainly likely that in many individual cases, when cultural violence becomes psychodynamically animated and personally constructed, this is a result of individual life histories. This personal animation does not necessarily replicate, but can use defensively and ideologically, the social claim. On the one side, ideologies and politics have their own history, even when cast in language consonant with particular psychodynamic explanations. On the other, participation in politics can be understood only on the individual level, in terms of personal psychodynamic meaning. As Erikson (1946) would remind us, our challenge is to show how collective historical processes “assume decisive concreteness in every individual” (p. 17). To take one example, many projective ideologies—nationalism, xenophobia, racial-ethnic hatred, and so forth—support the view that identity is psychosocial as well as individual. Yet, if we were to analyze those particular individuals who engage in ethnic violence, we might well find that their individual unconscious and conscious fantasies involve not threats to selfhood but any of a range of individual motivations—reparative wishes toward a parent, survivor guilt, separation fears, depressive anxiety, homosexual panic, defensive masculinity, identification with a soldier father or a father who has lost his job and status, manic denial of or triumphant elation at survival, mourning a loss, and any number of other individual fantasies. Annihilation anxiety, or anxiety about impingement, might fuel the behavior of an individual involved in an arena of collective violence that is itself described ideologically as a reaction to national humiliation. Personal humiliation and a sense of narcissistic injury might, by contrast, fuel an individual’s participation in ethnic warfare organized around questions of ethnic survival and identity. On a cultural level, then, there are processes similar to those on the individual level. Cultures have identity questions, feel persecuted, symbolize racial-ethnic others in terms of pollution, engage in paranoid-schizoid projection and splitting, all of which form the ideologies that justify violence and aggression. Cultures may also have individual ideologies (of manhood, whiteness, being American, Aryan, or Serb) that lead to violence—both culturally sanctioned individual violence and war (ritualized warfare, torture, ambushing, racist attacks) or group violence (mass rape or murder). Finally, there are individual psychodynamic reasons for adherence to a cultural process or belief system. Counterexamples, of course, help to turn descriptions into explanations. We know, and can observe both clinically and historically, that identity and selfhood seem dynamically important on both individual and cultural levels. We know that projection and splitting are prevalent ways that individuals and cultures create selfhood and peoplehood. We know that this projection and splitting link up intrapsychically in fantasy with aggression and destruction and that they can do so behaviorally as well. We know something about how integration works on the individual level, how paranoid-schizoid functioning can be replaced by depressive functioning and desires for reparation toward rather than destruction of the other,

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  39

how holding or containing help development, and how potential space and the realm of illusion foster creativity and playfulness in the individual and intersubjective cultural creativity among individuals. We know less about how to describe such conditions on a political, social, or cultural level. It is striking, for example, that although there has certainly been political, racial, and ethnic violence in post-apartheid South Africa, this violence is not at the level of ethnic cleansing and has not meant the deaths of millions. Here, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, something akin to societal depressive-level functioning was instituted (see Gobodo-Madikezela 2015), by contrast to societies that operate more in terms of paranoid-schizoid ideologies. Vamik Volkan’s fertile formulation, “chosen trauma” (1997), a term he first developed in relation specifically to Cyprus and Kosovo, also seems important. There seems to be something not only of what the traumatic experience has been but also of how it is subjectively conceptualized (“chosen”), and how and whether a response has been developed that enables some resolution and hope. Many factors are intertwined here. Is cultural-ethnic-national-religious identity able to be reconstituted in an integrated way that does not involve rigid boundaries and projective splitting-off of hated aspects of a collective self into a collective other? Does the collective trauma involve humiliation, which seems so potent a predictor of retaliation? Is there a well-defined projective other who inflicted the humiliation?8 Alternatively, is there a more complex ideological picture of what happened, with a sense of differentiated and connected forces that makes it harder to divide the world into good and bad? Is there someone, or a set of laws or practices, that can be experienced as a benevolent protective intervener in the trauma (much as the analyst hopes to contain, process, and return splitting and projection in a more differentiated and integrable form)? Such questions take us to linked psychological and ideological conceptualizations. We can ask not only what situations are most conducive to extreme violence, but, among members of particular social groups, who is more likely to engage in such violence? We are in the realm of both individual differences and, it often turns out, modal group differentiation. There is a complex linkage between the individual and the culture.

Men and violence “Der Mensch nicht ein sanftes . . . Homo homini lupus.” I began this chapter by exploring Freud’s explanations in Civilization and Its Discontents for collective violence. I recognize the brilliance of Freud’s account, including his insight into the narcissism of minor differences and the racial-ethnic and nationalistic identifications and differentiation, more than propinquity or economic competition, that seem to underpin this violence. Yet a drive theory alone cannot explain these specific features or the specific historical manifestations of political, communal, and sectarian violence. We begin to understand such violence further by looking at its specific ideological justifications and the dynamic roots that seem consonant with these.

40  From Freud to Erikson

At least in the last century, in cases of extreme sociopolitical violence we often find a demonizing of the enemy that Klein’s drive theory, describing innate aggression and elaborating upon paranoid-schizoid splitting, begins to describe. Wanting also to retain Freud’s insight that collective violence seems to grow from group identification and disidentification, I notice that Erikson’s conception of identity potentially describes a psychosocial Kleinian ego or self that splits and projects. Yet we also notice that in both German and Latin, Freud’s claims refer, in a way common to many languages, both to a generic human and, specifically, to a man: das mensch (translated by Strachey as “men,” rather than “man”) and homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to man. Freud does not notice this doubled referent or a major feature of collective violence and war, nor do Kleinian and Eriksonian extensions or modifications. Pervasively and almost universally, the vast majority of those who engage in both individual violence and collective violence are men, individual men who describe their own masculine identification as part of their action, as well as collectivities of men. Men make war. They are the soldiers and, as politicians and generals, those who instigate and lead the fighting. For the most part, men have been the concentration camp guards, the SS, those who perpetrate genocide, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, mass shootings, pogroms, torture, and the murder of children and old people. Some combination of hormones, personality, and the social and political organization of gender that includes male bonding and male dominance leads many (but certainly not all) men to react to threats with violence and aggression in a way that most (but certainly not all) women do not and to get pleasure in violence as most (but certainly not all) women do not. Even in a query whose primary goal is to consider Freud’s sociology, this almost universal link between violence-aggression and men requires notice. We cannot turn for insight to Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud notices social gender in several writings. Studies on Hysteria focuses on women, their sociocultural constraints and psychic lives, often in class-specific ways, and Freud further consolidates a picture of female, as well as male, constraint in “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.” In several social works, Freud notices men and masculinity specifically. In Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he considers the sons’ overthrow of the father and male leadership and followership. In Moses and Monotheism, he claims that recognition of the father as the true parent is a “victory of intellectuality over sensuality . . . an advance in civilization” (1939, p. 114). In contrast to these other social writings, in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud does not specify that he is talking about gendered dynamics, about either men or women. We find, rather, what we have come to notice as a tacit male norm, in which superego development, internalization, and the sense of guilt develop in relation to the father, but Freud writes generically in this work of the “human” sense of guilt and of “the child” in relation to the father. His interest is in aggression turned inward, not outward, in the childhood need for protection and identification with parents, all leading to internalization and superego formation. Masculinity as masculinity does not enter the picture. Similarly, when we consider

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  41

Kleinian and Eriksonian dynamics—threats to the self and identity, flooding and disintegration, narcissistic injury, humiliation, and paranoid-schizoid fantasies—we know that these are psychic processes that affect humanity in general. We find, then, an asymmetry. Since Freud, who notices castration anxiety, identification with the father, superego formation, and so forth, psychoanalysts specify gendered dynamics found predominantly in women (for Freud, narcissism and masochism), whereas dynamics that predominantly characterize men are more likely discussed in generic human terms. Until late in our history, our literature did not focus on men qua men (exceptions include Fogel, Lane, and Liebert [1986] and, specifically on men and violence, Gilligan [1996] and Nadelson [2005]). Stoller (see, e.g., 1975) describes perversion in terms of a desire to humiliate and aggress against the other, and Person (1999) discusses men and power, but neither considers men and violence. Recent psychoanalytic writings address sexual orientation and gender identity, and earlier writers have discussed fathers and father absence, disidentification from the mother, fear of castration, and so forth (for a review, see Chodorow 2015). Meanwhile, clinical and theoretical explorations of shame, humiliation, and narcissism, major dynamics in the generation of social violence, have been cast as gender-neutral. Cultural and political constructions of masculinity foster or make understandable individual and collective male, more than female, aggression. We see the eagerness with which friends, teachers, and fellow parents notice boys’ “roughand-tumble play” and generalize about boys’ turning sticks into weapons, whereas they do not notice girls who are as rough-and-tumble as many boys or boys who prefer contemplation and quiet. Yet not all men are violent, and not all women are peaceful. Some men are peacemakers and are revolted by extreme violence, and some women support or become torturers, ethnic murderers, and rapists. There were brutal female concentration camp guards, and we have been reminded in recent years of female sadism and pleasure in setting bombs, in humiliating others, and in torture. Neither Freud nor Klein wishes to claim that the aggressive drives, hatred, or paranoid-schizoid splitting and projection inhere in one sex only. In “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity,” I write: We cannot contrast men’s universal aggression with women’s universal non-aggression. Aggression is found and develops in pathological and nonpathological ways in both sexes, and some women are violent. Even if we take for granted typical hormonal differences between women and men, hormones can take us only so far, since most men are, in fact, not violent. Moreover, while there is certainly typical hormonal variation between the sexes, it is hard to imagine that Serbian men, for example, have higher levels of testosterone than do their more peaceable Slovenian neighbors, or that the Israeli settlers and Orthodox Talmudic scholars who attack fellow Jews who violate the Sabbath, or who attack and destroy Palestinian villages, have higher levels of testosterone than do their Peace Now brothers. (Chodorow 2003b, p. 125)

42  From Freud to Erikson

At the same time, we cannot assume that extreme violence is masculinity writ large in culture and society. Even as extreme violence is carried out predominantly by men, my observations here, following Freud, notice that the dynamics of extreme violence, as well as ideological justifications for it, seem to arise not from subjective gender but from reactions to humiliation, threats to identity and selfhood, and paranoid-schizoid fantasies, all universal psychic experiences. What, then, can we see in their psychology that might make men particularly vulnerable, or vulnerable in particular ways, to these certainly universal threats? Only then can we ask, further, what leads, or allows, men to express their innate aggressive drives as a result of these vulnerabilities? How does psyche meet culture in gender-inflected ways? I begin with a mediating link. We notice that although men are the perpetrators and enactors of extreme violence, the conscious identity involved in much of this violence is, as Freud (1930) first suggested, ethnic-racial-national: I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other—like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name “the narcissism of minor differences,” a name which does not do much to explain it. (p. 114) For Freud, this ethnic strife is “a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier” (p. 114). Freud implies here, and Erikson makes explicit, that national ethnicity or peoplehood (in Erikson’s formulation, psychosocial identity) is psychodynamically experienced as cultural selfhood. As such, threats to it are experienced projectively as attacks on what we might call a Kleinian cultural psyche. Gendering in this context comes in only secondarily, when the language of ethnic hatred and splitting, as well as unconscious fantasies involving such hatred and splitting, are cast in gendered and sexualized terms. In my early work (Chodorow 1978, 1979), I suggest that issues of selfhood and identity tend to differentiate men and women. Seeing the self as not the other, defining the self in opposition, does not seem developmentally or dynamically as important to women as to men, nor does merging seem as threatening. Insofar as ideologies of self and identity are involved, then, it makes sense that women would not feel as endangered as men by threats to cultural selfhood. The unconscious intertwining of ethnicity and self-otherness with gender identity itself might further reinforce the felt danger of men, whose sense of maleness is generally more fragile than women’s sense of femaleness (Stoller was right). Humiliation, also, seems more closely tied to masculinity for men than to femininity for women, as psychoanalytic accounts beginning with Horney suggest (Horney 1932; Person 1999; Benjamin 1988; Chodorow 2003a). Horney and Person especially emphasize phallic narcissism, the humiliation of being a little boy

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  43

in relation to grown men or women (for a still powerful cultural psychoanalytic sociology of maternal power, male narcissism and men’s vulnerability to humiliation, see Slater 1963). I have suggested (Chodorow 2015) that the humiliated, rageful warrior Achilles may be a more apt mythic model than Oedipus. In cases both of identity and humiliation, fathers as well as mothers enter the picture. Yet a humiliated father alone does not generate cultural or individual male violence. Identification with such a father would rather tend to lead to submissiveness (a complaint brought by Freud against his own father). But a humiliated father who turns on his son in rage might lead that son to his own violent reaction to feeling humiliated (see, e.g., Adorno et al. 1950). As James Gilligan observes, “the most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid that they are wimps” (1996, p. 66). Similarly, although recognition, mutuality, depressive guilt, and reparation toward a mother with subjectivity all form a primary container for the development of an integrated self in both boys and girls, many accounts also describe the role of a (paternal) third.9 The third helps children move to an observer’s position vis-à-vis the mother-child dyad and provides another image of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Fonagy, Moran, and Target claim that a third allows ”space to think . . . capacity to present the child with a reflection of his place in relationships” (1993 p. 497). In the absence of a specifically paternal third, moreover, when boys may experience intersubjectivity as a female-male (originally motherson) affair, they may split off intersubjectivity from relations with other men and feel driven to fall back on less mentalized externalizations. Focusing on mentalization and aggression, Fonagy, Moran, and Target note that both men and women engage in violence when mentalization is not available, but that men are more likely to direct hostility toward others, whereas women engage more in self-mutilation—hostility toward the self. In both cases, the goal is to get rid of intolerable fantasies about another’s mind (originally, the fantasied parent’s). Identification with the same-sex parent may feel more painful and inescapable, so that the primary wish will be more to attack the thinking of the same-sex parent. If, as my early writing would predict, for both girls and boys the mother’s thoughts about the child are intersubjectively experienced earlier and represented more as from within, whereas the father’s thoughts are experienced more as coming from without, then we would expect a woman to attempt to destroy an internal object (her mother/self), whereas men would be more likely to engage in external violence against an object experienced as other and outside. The girl or woman tries to rid herself of the mother in her mind; the boy or man tries to rid himself of the mother or father out there.10 Experiences of humiliation, identity, and psychic selfhood, and of masculinity and manhood themselves, seem to have two potential components. On the one side, we find a male-male, father-son/adult-child dichotomy, where the psychic and cultural emphasis is on being an adult man versus being a little boy, often humiliated by a senior male or humiliating a junior male. In a related vein, for Freud, becoming a man involves identification with the father's aggression rather than being humiliated

44  From Freud to Erikson

and castrated by him. On the other side, we find male-female/mother-son, and we follow Horney, Stoller, Greenson, Slater, Chodorow, and Benjamin (and the anthropologist John Whiting) in emphasizing masculinity as being not female, not a woman, perhaps not even a differentiated self (for a discussion of these alternative masculinities and their mythic counterparts, see Chodorow 2015). Political challenges may similarly be felt psychologically in one of these two ways. Hertz (1983) describes episodes in French nineteenth-century history cast as male-female, in which threats to political authority were experienced as Medusalike challenges to organized masculinity, and disheveled, sexualized, evil women came to symbolize socialist misrule and chaos. “Ordinary” war, by contrast, seems to be historically a male-male affair, in which the threat is of being defeated or humiliated by other men. In extreme violence, it seems that these two components of masculinity operate together. In the Holocaust and other genocides, in ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence, in the mass rape of women and girls and the murder or torture of men and boys by dictatorships, and in racial, ethnic, religious, and tribal violence, we find that felt challenges to ethnicity, identity, and nation lead to collective paranoid-schizoid splitting and projection. And although we can only speculate, it seems that in these situations the close developmental and experiential interlinking of selfhood and gender means that masculinity is also threatened. It is in such overdetermined psychic and racial-ethnic-national situations that we find extreme masculine violence. Paranoid-schizoid gender, based projectively on split-off images of repudiated women and feminized or boy-like men, fuses with paranoid-schizoid splitting and projection of badness and evil into the object. Enemies are construed as part-objects without subjectivity, yet at the same time, destroying their subjectivity helps provide the sadistic pleasure of violence. Rigid splitting and the expulsion both of bad objects and bad aspects of gender identity at the same time threaten a disintegrative flooding of self-object boundaries and drives, so that the projected object and threatened aggression not only return in paranoid fantasy but also threaten to meld and fuse with the self. Affects and drives overwhelm the subject and lose their linkage to organized fantasy. When social, national, cultural, religious, or tribal wholes are felt to fracture, and identity, via conscious and unconscious concepts of peoplehood, nation, or ethnos, is threatened, gender and gendered selfhood in men seem to fracture along similar lines.

Conclusions Since 1895, when Breuer and Freud walked us into the cultural and sociohistorical surround of psychopathology, showing us in minute (though unremarked) detail the environments in which Anna O., Emmy von N., Elizabeth von R., Miss Lucy R., and Katharina lived, psychoanalysis has wrestled with the ways in which the individual, the social, and the cultural are and are not connected. We find this project in Freud’s case studies, in contributions like “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (Freud 1908), and in large sociocultural

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  45

studies like Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism. We find it in Freud’s great work of psychoanalytic sociology, Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud’s account of the problem of aggression in civilization contains brilliant observations and a brilliant argument about where we can see these problems most acutely, at least in the history of the Western world up to Freud’s time. In this chapter, I begin from this work. I note that Freud throughout his life saw an intimate connection between psychoanalysis and sociology, the psychological and the sociocultural. I ask what we have learned from Freud and since about the dynamics of aggression that might help us understand the kinds of communal aggression and extreme violence—genocide, sadistic torture, racism, and nationalism—that we have witnessed since Freud published his book. Extending Freud’s dual-drive account by way of Klein and Erikson, I focus on paranoid-schizoid splitting, felt humiliation, conscious and unconscious threats to self and identity, and lack of mentalization in reaction to threats. One problem confronting us in this endeavor is that we are never talking about all members of a particular society or culture when we speak of that society’s participation in violence. We are always in the territory of individuals within the group and the difficult balancing of individuality and warranted generalizations against the dangers of universalizing. Finally, I speculate about how my conclusions might help us explain a specific feature of communal aggression that Freud does not address: the fact that collective violence in all eras is carried out largely by men. I suggest that, just as Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria describes an illness predominantly of women (of a particular era), but that, as Freud argued, men too may be hysteric, so the dynamics of identity, self, other, and humiliation that tend to underpin extreme sociocultural violence are part of our generic humanness, but particularly affect men. The dynamics and defenses of masculinity intertwine with and help fuel a social organization of gender and ideologies of masculinity that further underpin and rationalize the driven violence that Freud addresses, so elegantly and brilliantly, in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Notes 1 Freud’s sociological writings came later than those of Durkheim,Weber, and Simmel, but the four men were very much a birth and cultural cohort, born within ten years of one another. Freud was born in 1856, Durkheim and Simmel in 1858, and Weber in 1864. Freud and Durkheim were raised and identified as Jews, and Simmel’s Jewish father converted to Christianity. Only Weber was fully not Jewish. Freud, Simmel, and Weber all had Austro-German educations. 2 My examples in this chapter are dated. Throughout, readers will find references to a world situation that accords with the chapter’s 1997–1998 dates of presentation and publication. In that pre-9/11 world, my attention was drawn to the breakups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, to Israel-Palestine, Rwanda, and ethnic and national violence. Today we focus more on religiously justified extremism and nationalism—the violence and terror of the Islamic state amid the seemingly pervasive sectarian violence throughout the Muslim world; Israeli intransigence and aggression against Palestinians and a

46  From Freud to Erikson

Palestinian state, generating terrorism on both sides. Now, in the U.S., we find ever increasing gun violence—school shootings, killings in black (and white) churches, shootings in Planned Parenthood clinics, and other killings and massacres. Throughout the U.S. and Europe, we observe racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim nationalism. Several years ago, I wrote myself a note: “As I read the news each day, I wonder if Freud was right: humans (or, perhaps, as Freud puts it, ‘men’?) are simply driven by a need to be hate-filled and violent. Aggression, finally, is an innate drive that seeks expression and release.” In that 2014 Sunday NYT “Week in Review,” I had read articles about the violence, sexual violence, and drug wars in Central America that drive many children to risk crossing the border into the United States, along with the screaming xenophobia of many Americans in the cities to which these children flee or to which they are sent for deportation. There was reference to the endless saga of violence in Israel and Palestine, the murder of three Israeli boys and retaliative torture and murder of a Palestinian boy, followed by shelling and killing in Gaza, and to the still-unfound 300 Nigerian schoolgirls who had been kidnapped. An op-ed piece on “the data of hate” reported on a survey across the states, and there were observations on the ongoing sectarian Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Now, in 2019, I am mindful that this entire chapter could refer exclusively to contemporary politics and behavior in the United States and in some other Western “democracies.” One could also claim that there has always been collective violence with similar motivational and ideological underpinning. If so, perhaps what marks the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is our more powerful weapons of destruction and worldwide mobility and communication. 3 Of course, aggressive drives turned inward can, instead of constituting a benign and appropriate superego, instigate punitive attacks on the self and primitive guilt. 4 Sagan argues that innate ethical standards—conscience, morality, empathy, and ultimate human values—arise from the early mother-child relationship, formed, in the desirable case, around nurturing, recognition, and attentiveness to the needs of the other (infant observers also describe children’s desires to reciprocate nurturance, their growing intersubjective capacities for recognizing the other, and their identification with caretaking behavior). Children may well aggress against an other or identify with an aggressor, but even very little children identify with victims or those who seem unhappy and attempt to comfort them. Benjamin (1988) makes a related argument. Appraising the Frankfurt Institute’s analysis of society without the father and the decline of the internalization of paternal authority, she notes that paternal authority itself represented the very oppressive bourgeois values and society that the Frankfurt School otherwise critiqued. Like Sagan, she makes recognition of the other’s subjectivity, first learned in relation to the mother, rather than internalization of paternal authority, central to ethical human development. 5 I am in the terrain of different forms of prejudice written about brilliantly by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996), but her conceptualization of these matters as supra-individual and of the relations between individual and society is unclear. 6 This chapter was first presented and published in 1996–1997, shortly after Netanyahu’s defeat of the Labor Party leader Shimon Peres. Then, I wrote, “To take a personal example of paranoid-schizoid splitting and projection, I found myself, shortly after hearing about Peres’s defeat, wrathfully thinking that if the Palestinians stepped up bombing and violence, the Israelis would be getting what they deserved.” My reaction, though from another era and repeatedly intensified (getting more paranoid-schizoid) in the years since, as military operations, terrorism, and land takeovers escalate, makes immediate the personal-political paranoid-schizoid identity dynamics I am describing. Though my shock, horror, and condemnation of the sectarian massacres we have witnessed throughout the world since, in the Muslim Middle East, in some African countries, and in parts of Asia, is equally strong, it does not feel so personalized. My personal associations extend also to the growing racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States.

Civilization and Its Discontents and beyond  47

7 An individual and cultural case of the relations between grief and loss on the one hand and injury and rage on the other can be found in Rosaldo’s “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” (1989). 8 All of these can be brought to bear upon the current situation in Europe and the United States—the rise of white nationalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, a general right-wing drift, etc. I leave such an analysis to others. 9 The original version of this chapter was published in 1997, well before the explosion of theoretical and clinical writing on alternative families, gender choices, and so forth. I hope that the generalizations I am making about “typical” family structures, necessary to even begin to get a handle on this larger question of male national-cultural violence, will not be taken as advocacy for the traditional, normative family. 10 Fonagy, Moran, and Target note that men trapped in feelings of maternal engulfment specifically are more likely to turn toward self-mutilation or suicide.

3 “THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG,” “THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES ON WAR AND DEATH,” AND “WHY WAR?” Whatever happened to the link between psychoanalysis and the social?

In my opinion, then, a Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly, on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place. It will easily be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung of this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Freud

Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis invites readers to immerse themselves in brilliantly concise lectures that include his near-final thoughts on just about everything: dreams (Lectures XXIX and XXX), psychic structure (XXXI), anxiety and the late instinct theory (XXXII), and—remarkably—femininity (XXXIII). Following these, we find “Explanations, Applications and Orientations” (XXXIV), an unnoticeable chapter with an unremarkable title, and then another unnoticeable chapter, though here, one with a distinctly remarkable title: “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (XXXV). In this lecture, Freud alerts us to the ways that ideological shields and taken-for-granted assumptions affect thinking. He contrasts what he sees as the proper, scientific attitude of psychoanalysis with nonscientific, often religious, modes of thought. Beginning from Freud’s explorations—noticing this wonderful chapter in itself—I consider the weltanschauung of psychoanalysis. Specifically, I notice that the psychoanalytic weltanschauung tends to overlook the social and the social sciences. My considerations apply not to Freud, who, as I will describe, valiantly and persistently noticed the sociocultural and the social sciences, but to pervasive current assumptions that, I believe, lead both to a narrowing of our understanding and perhaps, as I argue in Chapter 10, to a blindness that has clinical, educational,

The link between psychoanalysis and the social  49

and ethical consequences. Building on Chapter 1, I also allude to interest in the social sciences within 1930s–1940s interpersonal psychoanalysis. Following my consideration of Civilization and Its Discontents, this chapter attends further to Freud’s interests in the sociocultural and points toward the Eriksonian side of the American independent tradition that underpins my next chapter, “Born into a World at War.” Civilization and Its Discontents is not only a part of our psychoanalytic heritage but also a general work. As I claim in the preceding chapter, it is one of the great social-theoretical works of the twentieth century. At the same time, we need always to remember that Civilization and Its Discontents is among a number of contributions that express Freud’s persistent interest in the link between the psychological and the social. Freud’s interests in psychoanalytic-sociocultural linkages are not only a late development. Psychoanalysis begins with both sociocultural and clinical observations. In the opening paragraphs of “Anna O.,” Breuer walks us into the class, gender, historical location, and individual family organization of his patient. He describes an unusual, but also in many ways typical, late-nineteenth-century bourgeois girl. Anna O. is smart, well educated (but only to a certain point), and has nothing to do with her education and intellect except spend her time doing household duties without complaint and taking care of the poor: Fräulein Anna O. was twenty-one years old . . . She was markedly intelligent, with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect which would have been capable of digesting solid mental pabulum and which stood in need of it—though without receiving it after she had left school. She had great poetic and imaginative gifts, which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense. Owing to this latter quality she was completely unsuggestible; she was only influenced by arguments, never by mere assertions. Her willpower was energetic, tenacious and persistent. . . . Even during her illness she herself was greatly assisted by being able to look after a number of poor, sick people, for she was thus able to satisfy a powerful instinct. . . . This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family. She embellished her life in a manner which probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, by indulging in systematic day-dreaming, which she described as her ‘private theatre’. While everyone thought she was attending, she was living through fairy tales in her imagination; but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so that no one was aware of it. She pursued this activity almost continuously while she was engaged on [sic] her household duties, which she discharged unexceptionably. (Breuer and Freud 1895, pp. 21–22)

50  From Freud to Erikson

All the cases in Studies on Hysteria pay close attention to the sociocultural surround and its effects. Each woman is coping with (and Freud describes this extensively) what Erikson would call inner and outer conditions. Such dual observations can be found throughout Freud’s cases, as well as in his early writings. Freud notices contradictions in female and male sexual education among the bourgeoisie that produce marital tensions and psychological illness (1908, 1910, 1912a), class differences in the sexual enlightenment of children (1915–1916), the impact on male sexuality of being raised by nurses and nannies (1909), and the effects of particular family sleeping arrangements (1918). From The Interpretation of Dreams to the very end, in his personal and professional writings, Freud alludes to ethnicity—his Jewishness and its impact on his inner and outer life, Jewish traditions and ceremonies, the specificities of the religious belief system itself. From the beginning, Freud’s theorizing likewise engages the social. His remarkable “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908) provides an early comment on contemporary sexual culture, and these interests continue through major psychosocial works, beginning with Totem and Taboo (1912–1913). Freud theorizes about civilization, culture, and class, men and women. Indeed, he does not seem to think that psychoanalysis can be separated from the social any more than it can be separated (as he notices from the Project onward) from human biology. In its origins, then, psychoanalysis was deeply interested in the social. Throughout the 1920s, especially, Freud’s development of the structural theory and his initiating attention to the ego and superego coincided with his increasing attention to social and cultural matters. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), for example, relies on the new psychology of the ego. The dual drive theory, along with Freud’s increased understanding of superego formation, led to the socialcultural concerns expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), with its centered focus on the challenges of the death drive and the role of psychic structure, ego and superego, in meeting these challenges. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud turned his attention to organized religion, as well as to religious beliefs. Those who founded American ego psychology followed Freud’s lead.1 Hartmann (1950) devoted a full article, as well as passing attention throughout his writings, to the intertwining of psychoanalysis and social science. In “Psychoanalysis and Science” (1968), a plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association, Charles Brenner, eager to present psychoanalysis as a science, brings in the social sciences and history, specifically, as kindred fields in which a scientific attitude— “a scientific, an empiric, a questioning mind” (p. 678)—is what defines a field as scientific. Invited to discuss the future of psychoanalysis, Arlow and Brenner (1988) claim familiarity with the uses of psychoanalysis in literature, literary criticism, anthropology, and sociology, even as the bulk of their article concerns the future of clinical psychoanalysis itself. In this context, they regard questions about the organizational life of psychoanalysis and the professional identity (medical or not?) of its practitioners as a “sociology of psychoanalysis” (p. 12). Indeed, if we include interpersonal psychoanalysis, interest in the social and in interaction could

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be said to have characterized American psychoanalysis more generally for several decades. Erik Erikson, of course, made psyche and society and the psychocultural his central concern, although at some point he was seen (and seemed to see himself) more as an academic and public intellectual than as a psychoanalyst. Freud’s interests in the social are both taken for granted and wide-ranging. He was a public citizen as well as a private thinker throughout his career. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), written shortly after the beginning of World War I, expresses Freud’s shock and concern, which, he tells us, reflect the shock and concern of all civilized peoples, that those who share so much by way of culture should be destroying one another. The worst has happened. Echoing Yeats, Freud laments that “science herself has lost her passionless impartiality” (p. 275).2 Freud writes of his disillusionment and, he suggests, that of every civilized person. He describes with evocative precision the Europe he had known, a civilization comprising several countries with shared, overarching cultural, scientific, and artistic values, a polis in which “‘foreigner’ and ‘enemy’ could no longer be merged” (p. 277) and whose borders were crossed freely by citizens: anyone who was not by stress of circumstance confined to one spot could create for himself out of all the advantages and attractions of these civilized countries a new and wider fatherland, in which he could move about without hindrance or suspicion. In this way he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow-covered mountains and of green meadow lands; the magic of northern forests and the splendour of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature. This new fatherland was a museum for him, too, filled with all the treasures which the artists of civilized humanity had in the successive centuries created and left behind. As he wandered from one gallery to another in this museum, he could recognize with impartial appreciation what varied types of perfection a mixture of blood, the course of history, and the special quality of their mother-earth had produced among his compatriots in this wider sense. Here he would find cool, inflexible energy developed to the highest point; there, the graceful art of beautifying existence; elsewhere, the feeling for orderliness and law, or others among the qualities which have made mankind the lords of the earth. Nor must we forget that each of these inhabitants of the civilized world had created for himself a “Parnassus” and a “School of Athens” of his own. (ibid.) Into this paradise, bewilderingly, a vicious war of all against all has entered. Freud cannot believe it: The enjoyment of this common civilization was disturbed from time to time by warning voices, which declared that old traditional differences made wars inevitable, even among the members of a community such as this.

52  From Freud to Erikson

We refused to believe it; but if such a war were to happen, how did we picture it? We saw it as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of comity among men. (p. 278) We read here—we can actually hear, in Freud’s puzzlement about how massive slaughter can occur—the proto-beginnings of the dual drive theory.3 We notice, moreover, that 1915 is relatively early in the war. Freud cannot know what will come—the fields of Flanders, millions of deaths, enormous food shortages in Germany and Austria, such that doctors (including psychoanalysts) traded treatment for eggs, whether his own sons will return from the fighting! He does not have the war poets, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the other war novels that appeared in the next ten years in every major European language. We understand how, by the time of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud could cite the Latin proverb “homo homini lupus,” and why he would come to see the death drive as ubiquitous, directed, but never adequately modulated, both inward and outward. I have quoted “Thoughts for the Times” to raise a question. In what follows, I wonder what ever happened to such large-scale sociopolitical/theoretical interests and to the assumption that psychoanalysts are social observers and citizens? Why and to where have these interests disappeared, reappearing only recently in the clinical thinking and writing of a few medical analysts (e.g., Volkan, Varvin, Moss, Twemlow) and in that of analysts who like me have backgrounds in the academy, and often in “’60s” politics (Benjamin, Dimen, Harris, Lear, Loewenberg, Prager, Young-Bruehl, Bollas, and a few others)?4 I ask, how can we turn the lens of psychoanalysis—our listening to and observing of the unsaid within the said, the unseen within the seen, the music within the words—onto our analytic practices and theories themselves. I consider how our taken-for-granted practices and theories affect, sometimes unbeknownst to us, our thinking both inside and outside the consulting room. Whatever happened to the link between psychoanalysis and the social sciences? To address my question, I turn to Freud’s lecture, “The Question of a Weltanschauung.” This lecture claims that psychoanalysis, as a science, is immune from the groundless beliefs that characterize religion. It provides at the same time further documentation of Freud’s enduring interest in society, both in theory and on the ground. Freud’s observations tell us how such scotomas and absences come into being and the costs we may pay for them, even as the field that he created is itself limited by the very practices he abhors. I discovered “The Question of a Weltanschauung” completely by happenstance. I needed, one day, a quote found in Lecture XXXIII, “The Riddle of Femininity,” a riddle not solved but certainly addressed extensively over the past century and more.5 My Standard Edition volume fell open, however, toward the end of Lecture XXXV, and I began to read.6 In these remarkable, little-cited Freud reflections, he contrasts what he takes to be the proper, the scientific, attitude of psychoanalysis with other, nonscientific, modes of thought, those in which taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions affect thinking.

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Beginning from Freud’s explorations, I consider here ways in which such contrasts, between the evidential and the taken-for-granted or faith-based, continue to be played out in psychoanalysis, as we ourselves toggle between scientific curiosity and openness on the one hand and unnoticed scotomas and beliefs, or tenaciously held theories, on the other. I focus especially on the divide between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Some of my conclusions about this divide help us understand other lacunae in our ideas (I return to the question of taken-for-granted assumptions in Part IV). “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” this last of Freud’s New Introductory Lectures, is little read, whether by psychoanalysts or by others.7 It was not assigned in my analytic training, though we certainly read, several times, Lectures XXXI and XXXII (“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” and “Anxiety and Instinctual Life”), just as all those interested in women have repeatedly read Lecture XXXIII. “The Question of a Weltanschauung” may be even more marginal and less read today, as we strive in our curricula and in our own reading to master multiple theories and points of view and as Freud’s writings take a less central role—as our own psychoanalytic weltanschauung has changed. Freud’s text, now as then, goes unnoticed, a throwaway chapter that Freud felt like writing, as was his wont. I was sure that I myself had never read the lecture, but I then happened to find (or refind) my wellworn graduate student copy of New Introductory Lectures, replete with underlining. In this extraordinary lecture, Freud is, as usual, substantively and rhetorically brilliant. As with many of his writings, here also it is tempting to skip one’s own contribution and simply to quote Freud. He defines a weltanschauung: A Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place. It will easily be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung of this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Believing in it one can feel secure in life, one can know what to strive for, and how one can deal most expediently with one’s emotions and interests. (p. 158) Freud’s particular project in his query is to identify and describe the weltanschauung of psychoanalysis. He claims, firmly, that psychoanalysis is a science and that it cannot be anything other than a science. According to Freud, psychoanalysis is “a specialist science, a branch of psychology—a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious” (p. 158). Freud’s claim needs a context, and this turns him to science and the scientific weltanschauung in general: the Weltanschauung of science . . . assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfilment of which is relegated to the future. Apart from this it is marked by negative characteristics,

54  From Freud to Erikson

by its limitation to what is at the moment knowable and by its sharp rejection of certain elements that are alien to it. It asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations—in other words, what we call research—and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination. (pp. 158–159) The reader, through “careful scrutiny” of the preceding two quotes, might find a contradiction. As Freud defines it, a weltanschauung “leaves no question unanswered” and puts everything in “its fixed place.” Yet deciding substantively, a priori, that psychoanalysis is a “specialist science,” what is and what is not a “depth psychology of the unconscious,” would seem the opposite of the step-by-step building of an edifice from “carefully scrutinized observations.” A weltanschauung, Freud notes, enables someone to slip things that don’t belong into their “fixed place” and not to notice things that do belong there. Even when a weltanschauung is explicit, it may fold in many taken-for-granted assumptions. Freud is alerting us to potential blinders upon thinking: psychological filters and scotomas and the cultural presuppositions that people inevitably bring to thought. He alerts us especially to the dangers of interests and emotions that contaminate science with wish fulfillment. Nor is he much happier with philosophy, which, he remarks, may sometimes be compatible with science but which may go awry when it claims to present an overly coherent picture of the universe and especially when philosophers rely too exclusively on logic and intuition rather than on observation (Freud means, I think, “thought experiments”). Most of “The Question of a Weltanschauung” is spent in Freud’s passionately elaborated comparison between the scientific attitude—that appropriate to and instantiated in psychoanalysis—and the religious attitude that preceded and, he notes, still contrasts with it. His arguments draw from his recently completed The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents.8 But Freud’s sociological epistemology also takes on more briefly (and surprisingly) two other weltanschauungs that challenge the scientific one. First, appearing here as a premature anti-postmodernist, Freud takes a stand against what twenty-first-century readers would find to be a familiar epistemological relativism, a late-1920s Viennese version of what we thought was a post-1968 phenomenon. In Freud’s time as in ours, this epistemological relativism borrowed from politics, and it also drew upon a metaphoric extension of physics, and science more generally, to all interpretive thinking (for Freud, relativity theory; for us, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or, more recently, dynamic systems theory).9 As Freud sees it, this epistemological antiscientific weltanschauung is “a counterpart to political anarchism, and is perhaps a derivative of it” (1933a, p. 175). He goes on: There have certainly been intellectual nihilists of this kind in the past, but just now the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their head . . . According to the anarchist theory there is no such thing as truth,

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no assured knowledge of the external world. What we give out as being scientific truth is only the product of our own needs as they are bound to find utterance under changing external conditions: once again, they are illusion. Fundamentally, we find only what we need and see only what we want to see. We have no other possibility. Since the criterion of truth—correspondence with the external world—is absent, it is entirely a matter of indifference what opinions we adopt. All of them are equally true and equally false. And no one has a right to accuse anyone else of error. (pp. 175–176) Freud concludes by turning to a second contemporary challenge to the scientific weltanschauung. This “other opposition,” he tells us, “has to be taken far more seriously, and in this instance I feel the liveliest regret at the inadequacy of my information” (p. 176). Freud is talking, it turns out, about Marxism and its current political manifestation in Bolshevism. He discusses these as separate phenomena, and, in spite of his disclaimers, we would have to say that Freud turns out to have a relatively sophisticated understanding of Marxian dialectics, their Hegelian roots, the situation in Bolshevik Russia, and other relevant matters. Along the way, he astonishes the contemporary reader, used as she is to the analyst being an analyst, with his freedom to allude to the Great Depression (“our present economic crisis”), the “Great War,” and the fact that no one foresaw that the daring prewar achievement of flying over the English Channel would lead, almost inevitably, to the Zeppelin bombings of World War I. What we notice here, once again, is the breadth of Freud’s knowledge and interest in the sociocultural. He is agnostic about the future of communism, accurately portraying its excesses (he is writing before the Stalin purges) but reserving judgment on its potential. In this context, he acknowledges Marx’s claim that economic circumstances play a large role in human motivation—“the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes” (p. 178)—though he criticizes Marxism for its onesidedness in these matters. We wonder, here, how much Freud knew about the Frankfurt Institute, and we recall that Civilization and Its Discontents is also explicitly critical of an exclusive Marxism, as Freud puts it: it cannot be assumed that economic motives are the only ones that determine the behaviour of human beings in society. The undoubted fact that different individuals, races and nations behave differently under the same economic conditions is alone enough to show that economic motives are not the sole dominating factors. (p. 178) Freud wants a more complex psychological theory of motivation than he thinks Marxism provides, one in which drives, the superego, and other psychological factors themselves shape and guide human responses to circumstance. He also

56  From Freud to Erikson

wants to emphasize that action is further shaped by cultural developments that have come before and are now relatively independent, consolidated in the human psyche so that they further shape action. He notices also that Bolshevism did not bypass the drives or undermine his arguments for their ubiquity, but that it actually used innate aggression to turn poor against rich and revolutionaries against former rulers. Freud treats us to these considerations on the antiscientific challenges of some epistemologies and of Marxism, yet throughout “The Question of a Weltanschauung” his main interlocutor and opponent is religion. Of all human endeavors, religion is the most opposed to the scientific weltanschauung: “Of the three powers which may dispute the basic position of science [Freud names art, philosophy, and religion], religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy” (p. 160). Borrowing from The Future of an Illusion, Freud summarizes religion’s appeal. Religion, he notes: fulfils three functions . . . first [like science] it satisfies the human thirst for knowledge . . . second [and here science is no match for religion] . . . it soothes the fear that men feel of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, when it assures them of a happy ending . . . In its third function . . . it issues precepts and lays down prohibitions and restrictions . . . . (pp. 161–162) In contrast to religion, science describes experimental and observational senseperceptions uninfluenced by affective factors. As Freud puts it, “its endeavor is to arrive at correspondence with reality—that is to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us.” In this anti-religion argument, Freud has no question that even Bolshevik communism, for all its mistakes and cruelties, is an advance: There are men of action, unshakable in their convictions, inaccessible to doubt, without feeling for the sufferings of others if they stand in the way of their intentions. We have to thank men of this kind for the fact that the tremendous experiment of producing a new order . . . is now actually being carried out in Russia. At a time when the great nations announce that they expect salvation only from the maintenance of Christian piety, the revolution in Russia—in spite of all its disagreeable details—seems none the less like the message of a better future. (1933a, p. 181) Freud, we see, is ambivalent. Like many Jewish Viennese analysts, Freud in his earlier years, and in different historical times, was a Social Democrat. He takes for granted wide political as well as cultural knowledge and involvement on the part of the analyst. Yet he criticizes not only Russian Bolshevism but also some tenets of Marxism, with which he otherwise has sympathy (and of which he has knowledge!). “The strength of Marxism,” he says, “clearly lies, not in its view of history or the prophecies of the future that are based on it, but in its sagacious indication of

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the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes“ (p. 178). Yet, Freud goes on, the determinative importance of technological development on its own, especially that of weaponry, provides a challenge to Marxism’s argument for historical development as a product of property, labor, and class competition. Both technological development and weaponry instigate autonomous processes of cultural development that then turn back upon and influence other factors. To contest Marxism more specifically, Freud restates his earlier arguments (those found in Totem and Taboo and in Civilization and Its Discontents) about innate aggression and its social legacy, and he widens his scope to further psychological and nonpsychological factors. The problem with Marxism, he finds, is that it has only a partial understanding of human motivation. Providing further challenge to Marxism is the autonomy of those “psychological factors” (p. 178) that constitute our human disposition: the superego’s pull toward tradition and the past, and the insistence of the drives. Freud summarizes his argument: It is altogether incomprehensible how psychological factors can be overlooked where what is in question are the reactions of living human beings; for not only were these reactions concerned in establishing the economic conditions, but even under the domination of those conditions men can only bring their original instinctual impulses into play—their self-preservative instinct, their aggressiveness, their need to be loved, their drive towards obtaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure. (p. 178) Such arguments are no longer new, nor do they seem relevant to our task as analysts. And who among us today, analyst or nonanalyst, would advocate for a pure Marxian theory or politics? Yet, from an almost eighty-year-old Freud (he has reminded us earlier that he is a “very old man . . . [who] was already alive when Darwin published his book on the origin of species” (p. 173), they are astonishing. I bring them up because they portray, in contrast to most psychoanalytic writings and presentations today, the capaciousness of Freud’s interests and knowledge, and because of where he goes with his ruminations, that is, toward a firm linkage between the social sciences and psychoanalysis. Freud says, if anyone were in a position to show in detail the way in which these different factors—the general inherited human disposition, its racial variations and its cultural transformations—inhibit and promote one another under the conditions of social rank, profession and earning capacity—if anyone were able to do this, he would have supplemented Marxism so that it was made into a genuine social science. For sociology too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology. Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science. (p. 179)

58  From Freud to Erikson

Here, in one of his last grand statements about psychoanalysis, then, Freud claims on behalf of psychoanalysis (or “psychology”) all of the social sciences, even as he also situates psychoanalysis among them. For anyone even passingly familiar with his writings, it is hard not to notice, here as elsewhere, Freud’s continuous preoccupation with the culture-society-psyche link. From Studies on Hysteria through Moses and Monotheism, the substantive weltanschauung of Freud’s psychoanalysis included, as in “The Question of a Weltanschauung” itself, consideration of the social and cultural. Even later, we find in the “Outline of Psycho-Analysis” (1940) society entering psychic structure: “We have repeatedly had to insist on the fact that the ego owes its origin as well as the most important of its acquired characteristics to its relation to the real external world” (p. 201). How might we reflect upon Freud’s ruminations, in which “application” means consideration of all the human sciences? Is there a way that psychoanalysis today is (to draw a metaphor from Civilization and Its Discontents) only a “shrunken residue” of Freud’s original “more inclusive—indeed, all-embracing” vision? (p. 68). Have we given up on the scientific weltanschauung on which Freud grounds psychoanalysis, a weltanschauung that claims a substantive and inextricable link between psychology pure and applied—sociology, politics, anthropology, religion, the history of culture, epistemology? Our weltanschauung affects our clinical work. I am thinking about how few contemporary case histories pay attention theoretically or empirically to culture as a constitutive force drawn on by the patient in fantasy and conflict, or to society as a substantive ingredient in mental life. I am thinking about how, in contemporary clinical writings, case conferences, and discussion groups, we tend no longer to focus even on life history, the past, or reconstruction and to find our colleagues impatient with and critical of those who do. We increasingly prefer to focus on one or two sessions, or even a small fragment of one session, our attention often locked exclusively upon the immediate interaction of the moment (or the unconscious interaction, inferred from what is said and done) as the best window into what is happening in an analysis. We do not consider that it might be equally useful to attend to the long-drawn-out, deep unfolding of our knowledge of the patient, of the patient’s growing self-knowledge, and of the large swings and shifts in what can be emotionally felt or intuited over the long run of an analysis.10 Our scientific methodology—our weltanschauung—has become almost behaviorist in its required focus on these details of process in a particular session and in the analyst’s mind, as if the only possible empirical data are the immediate who-saidwhat-to-whom and what the analyst infers about the unconscious underpinnings of these statements. We notice in particular, and want to notice, what is said or can be inferred to be “about” the analyst or about “the” relationship, “the” projective identification that encodes “the” transference, and thus what the analyst—as much as, or more than the patient—is consciously observing or thinking about what is going on at any moment. It is Freud who, even while noticing and indeed naming transference, advocates against occlusion of the sociocultural and denial of the outer world. Psychoanalysis

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is and must be a science, and not a religion: “It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromises or limitations, that research regards every sphere of activity as belonging to it” (1933a, p. 160). In this context, Freud criticizes Kantian essentialism, in a critique that could apply equally to a psychoanalysis that does not extend beyond the two people in the consulting room. “The philosophy of today,” he writes, “has retained . . . the overvaluation of the magic of words and the belief that the real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on them” (pp. 165–166). Later he adds, “no belittlement of science can in any way alter the fact that it is attempting to take account of our dependence on the real external world” (pp. 174–175). Thus Freud, as he advocates for a scientific weltanschauung, invites us to think about how our own theory and practice have gradually moved from full attention to “real events in the world [and] our dependence on the real external world” to a more partial and selective attention, to an a-contextual internal world, the detailed unfolding of process in the clinical hour, and to what we reify as “the” transference, often first observed through “the” countertransference. The “real external world,” that is, the social and the cultural, and the links between psychoanalysis and the social, have gone missing, not only in our clinical work and case presentations, but in our theories, our interests, and our interdisciplinary curiosity.11 Our weltanschauung has moved toward religion and away from science. Freud’s account itself makes our case. In this context, we might also ask, what has happened to the wide range of drives that Freud describes? “The Question of a Weltanschauung” does not choose among drive theories. Freud tells us that men’s instinctual impulses include “their self-preservative instinct, their aggressiveness, their need to be loved, their drive towards obtaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure” (p. 178). This is, I think, a broader view of human instinctuality and its importance, including relational and tension-release drives, than has found its way into most contemporary thinking (for an exception, see Schmidt-Hellerau 2001). We also wonder, what about the influence of culture and family history on the shape and content of early memories and ways of being, on forms of regression and conflict, on the content and intensity of the superego, or the influence of what Freud would call the group—economic circumstances, nationality, racial-ethnic position—on the very unconscious itself, and on the relations between patient and analyst? The strengths and challenges of our weltanschauung confront us clinically, especially through our preconscious importation of theory and derivative theories of technique into our work. As Freud reminds us, we are likely to use, consciously and unconsciously, “an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly . . . .” In the current period, our intellectual construction that solves all problems perhaps centers on Bion, along with his British, Italian, and Latin and North American interpreters and descendants. Yesterday, Betty Joseph left no questions unanswered, and before that, we had Brenner. Not just theory, but too often “one overriding hypothesis,” shapes clinical listening for good and ill, as we know from our current situation and from our history of theoretical contestation and schism beginning with Freud’s first breaks with Adler and Jung.12

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Returning to Freud’s lecture, we recall his claim: “A Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.” In his lecture, Freud’s goal is to exempt the scientific weltanschauung, for him including psychoanalysis, from these problems. Psychoanalysis, like science, is a programme and not a substantive theory. In contradistinction to Freud, and against his wishes and beliefs, I have suggested that psychoanalysis itself has not employed a scientific weltanschauung. In its method and epistemology, it is also a substantive theory and practice that has not been immune to the totalizing limitations that a substantive weltanschauung entails. Our clinical approaches and fashions have not followed the scientific precepts and epistemology that Freud advocates and that he thought he had established. Beginning from Freud’s lecture, itself written shortly after Civilization and Its Discontents, and in the context of his extensive sociocultural writings, we return to the question of a weltanschauung. Whatever happened to the link between psychoanalysis and the social sciences—between, as Freud would put it, “psychology, pure and applied”?13 We return to Freud. Over his lifetime, Freud wrote long and short sociocultural works: Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion, Moses and Monotheism, Civilization and Its Discontents, and the brilliantly insightful “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.” In addition to these well-known works advancing general social theories, Freud addresses specific contemporary problems and issues—Marxism and Bolshevism, war and death, and, throughout his writings, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism— and his case studies, as well as short vignettes and observations, always notice (albeit as background rather than theory) history, culture, and class, in addition to gender and sexuality. In 1933, the same year he published New Introductory Lectures, Freud published a short piece, “Why War?” (1933b). Albert Einstein, invited by the League of Nations to write on this topic, was asked to choose an interlocutor. Einstein chose Freud. We note Freud’s response not because it gives us new psychoanalytic insight, but because it yet again documents how, for Freud, psychoanalysis was deeply imbued with the most basic and far-ranging questions of society and culture. Throughout his exchange with Einstein, Freud is both erudite European intellectual and psychoanalytic sociologist. And he is interested. He is interested in explaining his theories about the development of civilization from “a small human horde” to what we know today. He has opinions about the development of tools, among which he considers weapons. He alludes to Civilization and Its Discontents and Group Psychology, noting the role of emotional ties between societal members and between rulers and followers, as well as the use of violence to dominate. He is well apprised of the workings of the League of Nations, which, he says, follows one of his two social principles. The League, he reminds Einstein and their mutual readers, makes use of emotional, identificatory ties between people. It hopes to

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rein in violence through sociocultural transformation, even as violence, he reminds us, is universal and based on innate drives. Freud’s argument, as usual, cannot be summarized, and even in this short exchange bears rereading. We notice once again that Freud simply takes it for granted that psychoanalysis has wide social applicability and that he, as a psychoanalyst, will engage in social commentary. He will know about the League of Nations, about human history, about war and competition from the Greeks to the present, about social formations that have worked to combat naked social competition and violence. Unable to resist a bit of irony, Freud reminds Einstein of the dual drive theory: “I should like to linger for a moment over our destructive instinct, whose popularity is by no means equal to its importance” (p. 211). He alludes, in a brief paragraph, to all that follows from the theory of the death drives, mentioning selfdestruction, conscience, and war—destruction turned both inward and outward. In a comradely comment to a fellow scientist, he acknowledges that his dual drive theory is “a kind of mythology,” but then he wonders, teasingly, “Cannot the same be said of your own Physics?” (p. 211). Certainly “Why War?,” like “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” is not a major part of the Gesammelte Werke. And certainly Freud, to have been invited by Einstein to respond to him, was an eminent elder. The availability of the exchange is itself an artifact of our wish (of Freud’s German colleagues’ and Strachey’s) to preserve everything Freud ever wrote. Its availability reflects those very religious rather than scientific aspects of psychoanalysis that Freud disavows. Nor, we notice, was Freud taking the time to respond to just anyone. Yet this little gem of an exchange reminds us again how much Freud saw himself and psychoanalysis as embedded in the sociocultural and political, as well as in the clinical. It documents again how likely Freud was, when he moved beyond case, technique, and theory, to venture toward the socio-cultural-political as toward Shakespeare, Leonardo, or Goethe. Given this history, we wonder what, within the succeeding psychoanalytic weltanschauungs, has led to a radical decline in curiosity or interest vis-à-vis the social and the social sciences, a correlate of our increasingly exclusive focus on the microdynamics of the interaction of minds in the consulting room (and sometimes, even more exclusively on the analyst’s mind).14 How has our current weltanschauung, which, as Freud describes all weltanschauungs, “leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place,” prevented our seeing links with our epistemological, empirical, and theoretical neighbors in the human sciences? As Freud warns, difficulties in thinking may arise when intuition and emotion encrypt wish fulfillment, or when premodern, unscientific, religious attitudes consider that challenges to shibboleths are heresy. Perhaps our epistemological neighbors, the social sciences themselves, might help us make useful observations about and generate some tentative explanations of the psychoanalytic weltanschauung. German social theory, the sociology of knowledge, social phenomenology, and ethnomethodology—Weber, Simmel, Schutz, Mannheim, and their descendants (Loewald is heir to this form of thinking)—

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all wrestle with the same questions that Freud addresses in “The Question of a Weltanschauung.” Each asks, in broad form, how do we understand the underpinnings and implications of different forms and practices of knowledge? From both the perspectives of sociology and of psychoanalysis, then, we can address the seeming lack of interest by most psychoanalysts in the social sciences, the absence of any sense that psychoanalysis is kindred to the social sciences or may even be one of them. It seems sometimes that for many psychoanalysts, the social sciences—systematic thought and research about the social—simply do not exist. Social scientists make clear why they are so critical of psychoanalysis, but on the side of psychoanalysis concerning these matters, we find, even in study groups and presentations on the social, mainly silence (it is worth reminding ourselves that in another era, though not today, there was a great deal of connection to and interest in psychoanalysis among social scientists). We begin from ethnographic observation. Psychoanalysts, it seems, have had and continue to have a love affair with (or crush on) many disciplines and fields of inquiry—on the scientific side, psychiatry, medicine, and. more recently, neuroscience; on the side of the humanities, philosophy, literature, biography, opera, music, painting, sculpture. We find discussion groups in the American Psychoanalytic Association on creativity, novels and novelists, painters, and music. We admire analyst poets and find a poetry section in local and national psychoanalytic newsletters, as well as journal articles on the poetic elements in the analytic experience. Some colleagues spend years studying the philosophy of mind or Heidegger and steep themselves in Derrida, Lyotard, and Cavell. Others become expert in neuroscience and neuroanatomy. By contrast, as we look at our literature and meetings, psychoanalysts who range toward theory seem to be uncurious about the Frankfurt Institute, Talcott Parsons, or Neil Smelser, all of whom have proposed understandings of psyche and society. We live in a multicultural world, yet few Western analysts cite Sudhir Kakar, a long-active Indian colleague who has written extensively about the cultural components in clinical work (among many works, see, e.g., Kakar, 1978, 1992, 2003, 2011), as well as about the psychocultural experience of analytic training in a culture other than one’s own (for Kakar, Germany), or, for his work on culture and immigration, Salman Akhtar (1999, 2011). In the contemporary period, only psychoanalytic anthropologists themselves seem to read psychoanalytic anthropology. Analytically informed ethnographers (along with many ethnographers who are not primarily focused on the psyche) observe and theorize the psychological and cultural lives of individuals, the intersubjective, the transference-countertransference encounter (often identified as such) of anthropologist and informant, dreams, minute mother-child interactions and other child-development patterns, concepts of person, self, and feeling, and permissible and impermissible emotions and the anxieties and defenses that are engaged to enforce these. They assess and try to elicit unconscious fantasies and individual patterns of projection and introjection, as well as ways that cultural groups collectively enforce feeling rules and engage in projective splitting and dehumanizing of others. They describe cases—book-length

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psychodynamic studies of individuals and cultures or families—and they liken anthropological investigation to psychoanalytic methodology and epistemology. Here is Gananath Obeyesekere, sounding like a psychoanalyst: “ethnography highlights, more than any other human science, the intersubjective relationship between the scholar and the subject of his study, by focusing on a single individual, or a couple at most, hopelessly trying to make do in an alienating field situation” (1990, p. 225). And here is Jean Briggs sounding like (she is!) a baby-watcher: Of course, my image of the world that a child is building will never match exactly that of the child . . . I can never have access to all the material out there in the world that the child has to build with; I can never see, hear, smell, and feel all that happens to the child. Secondly, and more fundamentally, I am not that child; I do not have the child’s accumulated store of thoughts and feelings with which to meet events, react to them, create them, and build on them. Moreover, not only do I not have the child’s thoughts and feelings, I have a great many of my own, which interfere. (1998, pp. 147–148) My attention is toward a small, non-hegemonic subfield. Psychological anthropology is on the margins of a field that has redefined itself as a postmodern or postcolonial humanities discipline or an activist politics, that is for the most part antipsychological and may think of cultures as texts. But it is a strong margin, and that is the puzzle. Even this social science, as close epistemologically, theoretically, methodologically, and substantively as any social science, as indeed any field, to psychoanalysis, is not noticed by psychoanalysts. Our interdisciplinary papers and panels often range widely across cultural periods and trends, literary authors, composers, artists (and increasingly, neuroscience), but no one in recent time has thought to propose a panel or discussion group on contemporary psychoanalytic anthropology, on the 1920s anthropological debates about sexuality and the Oedipus complex, or on the legacy and role of anthropology in 1940s American psychoanalytic politics, in which splits so often developed over the role of culture in psychic life. Meanwhile, in sociology, Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983) created the sociology of emotions, and many other qualitative sociologists do psychologically attuned, in-depth interviewing about emotionally charged experiences (among other subjects, racial identity, sexual identity and desire, motherhood, abortion, the experience of being an abortion provider, class, jobs and joblessness, and immigration, along with anti-immigrant experience and cultural loss). Even as they might benefit from a fuller understanding of unconscious fantasy and defense, all of these researchers nonetheless document conflicts, difficulties, and psychological dilemmas articulated by interviewees, those very experiences that constitute the sociocultural grounding of our patients. In her brilliant study, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), Hochschild focuses on what analysts would call countertransference.

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She describes the “empathy wall” that she spent five years of research trying to scale, in order to understand the psychological and cultural meanings and commitments of those who held views completely the opposite of her own, and, in her initial perspective, also against their own interests. Also on the side of sociology, those few sociologists who notice the “unhappy divorce of psychoanalysis and sociology” (Chancer and Andrews 2014) are dispersed, but they come together at meetings once a year. There seems, then, to be an analytic scotoma when it comes to the social sciences, a scotoma worth remarking in itself and one with consequences.15 First of all, it affects our ability fully to understand our patients, who are not only unconscious minds but also people who live in particular sociocultural and economic-political worlds. Our scotoma, or disinterest, recursively turns back upon analysts’ abilities to understand our own differences of opinion, whether in appropriate cultural context or in terms of the history of psychoanalysis and its cultural-political locations.16 We do not for the most part notice, beyond occasional empirical observation (Faimberg [2005] is a pioneer in integrating such observation with clinical methodology and theory), that the clinical consulting room and the transference-countertransference field are always psychodynamically inflected instantiations of particular social, cultural, and political assumptions that vary cross-culturally and historically. When analysts do notice these differences, they do not generally have adequate resources for understanding them in sociocultural and historical context (I note earlier that Kakar is an exception, as are some Rio de la Plata analysts, some with roots in social phenomenology, as well as in their countries’ unavoidable politics). Our international meetings, as well as the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association (I do not know the situation in other countries), are full of panels with participants from various countries. Americans invite prominent British independents and Kleinians, Europeans, and Latin American analysts (usually the same ones) to speak, and in turn some Americans are invited to these analytic cultures (my impression is that these few colleagues are those already seen to have a theoretical affinity with analysts in these other locales), but there is little attention, beyond empirical tracing of individual lineage and perhaps migration patterns, to potential sociological, sociohistorical, or ethnographic explanations for these patterns of difference. We have no sociology of knowledge.17 Nor, with rare and recent exception, are there panels or discussion groups, as is the case with literature, philosophy, psychobiography, music, and so forth, on crossover concerns of psychoanalysis with sociocultural fields themselves, even as interest grows in society and culture as factors in psychic life. In contrast to analytic disinterest, Chancer and Andrews’s recent collection, The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis (2014), attests to the interest of at least some sociologists in psychoanalysis. Writers document the divide between psychoanalysis and the social sciences, particularly sociology, and the growth of this divide since the 1950s, from a time when Fromm and the Frankfurt School, along with Talcott Parsons, helped form a psychoanalytic sociology. They notice how, within the social sciences, psychoanalysis is ignored, or, when noticed, dismissed, and how these fields express suspicion, ambivalence, and even antipathy toward

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personal individuality and toward any suggestion that the individual is not a tabula rasa affected by social and cultural forces. Most of the contributors write of the difficult, uphill struggle for psychoanalytic sociologists, of sociology’s condemnation of “psychological reductionism,” and of a suspicion of anything once advocated by Parsons, the now toppled midtwentieth-century king of integrative social science and structural-functionalism. Yet three contributors to this book have trained at institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association, several others have trained or are in training in other psychoanalytic organizations, and the authors describe at least one psychoanalytic study group among sociologists that has gone on for over twenty years. If The Unhappy Divorce suggests that at least a small group of sociologists wish to remarry (or to create a mutually beneficial emotional and intellectual partnership), I am not sure, as I suggest in this chapter, that psychoanalysis wants to accept the proposal. For psychoanalysis as a whole, I have suggested, the social sciences seem more or less not to exist. Not following Freud and his colleagues, our weltanschauung has largely marginalized concerns about the social, political, and cultural and, even more, about the fields that study these systematically. I have tried to explore, from the side of psychoanalysis as a field and of psychoanalysts’ confounding wishes, intuitions, idealizations, and emotions, the factors that distance the “scientific programme” of psychoanalysis from fields that would seem to have much in common with it epistemologically and methodologically, and that in their topics of inquiry, bear upon our work. Why does our “scientific programme,” when we range beyond the clinical and theoretical, lead nearly exclusively to neuroscience, literature, philosophy, and the arts? Just as social scientists are for the most part suspicious of personal individuality and personally created meaning from within, it would seem that there is a reciprocated suspicion, ambivalence, and antipathy among analysts toward the systematically investigated and theorized social, political, historical, and cultural. I speculate. Perhaps, considering the social sciences, especially in their qualitative modalities, we face a narcissism of minor differences. Psychoanalysts, further, may feel challenged by or defensive about fields that, like psychoanalysis itself, purport to study and understand people. Perhaps they are aware of the strong criticism (or simple nonrecognition) that comes from the social sciences themselves, which argue, sometimes forcefully and with disdain, that psychoanalysts do not sufficiently take the social, economic, cultural, and political into account, either in theory or in clinical work, or that psychoanalysis lacks a valid or reliable empirical basis. Might there be a diffidence among analysts that has led to distancing? Psychoanalysts, after all, do not have the training or institutional infrastructure from which to study other cultures and historical periods, or to do qualitative interviewing, ethnography, or sociological, cross-cultural, or political science research more generally. By contrast, “anyone” can read poetry, watch a movie, or go to a museum, opera, or concert. It is moreover assumed that people of culture, and not only professional critics and academics, will do just that. Perhaps our preferences reflect

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a wish to be cultured cosmopolitans, as were our Mitteleuropean psychoanalytic ancestors (that the American Psychoanalytic Association constitutes the only professional organization in the United States to hold its purportedly “national” meeting yearly in New York speaks to this hypothesis). Psychoanalysts are perhaps aware that psychoanalysis is drawn upon extensively and revered in many fields in the humanities. Or perhaps, coming from a field associated with psychiatry, on the low-prestige end of medicine, and now also from clinical psychology, on the disappearing end of academic psychology (in elite universities, now clinical science, while clinicians train in freestanding Psy.D. programs) and social work, psychoanalysts have intuited that with the exception of economics, the social sciences have lower academic prestige than the sciences (perhaps for some also, the humanities).18 My observations do not intend to question the psychoanalyst’s necessary primary focus on the clinical consulting room, technique, and theory, but rather to focus attention on our selective outside interests. When I have presented these observations, formally or informally, I have received several useful suggestions. One is that psychoanalysts look to disciplines that seem to address directly, or as directly as possible, the primary clinical data of our field: unconscious mental processes. Thus, psychoanalysts interest themselves in neuroscience because it gives us more understanding of how unconscious mental processes come about and in baby-watching because we have (tacit or not so tacit) assumptions that the clinical interaction borrows from, replicates, or in some way grows out of the sorts of interactions that begin early in life, as well as assumptions that our patients’ psychic lives have received their first imprint from the unthought known.19 We are interested in literature, opera, and art because they portray directly and indirectly (and at times discuss) the psyches of the characters they present, as well as evoking our own feelings in response. By contrast, the social, political, or cultural, it is thought, are supra-individual: we do not learn from them about the unique individual consciousnesses with whom we work. The divide I describe may mirror one within contemporary psychoanalysis, between, on the one side, those who restrict psychoanalysis to the consulting room and think it consists exclusively of an unfolding relationship between two unique unconscious minds at a particular time, including, in some cases, analysts who may be uninterested even in the patient’s history or current life in the world, and, on the other, those who continue to think of psychoanalysis, as did Freud, in terms of general laws of human behavior. Yet we must wonder whether any psychoanalyst believes, preconsciously, unconsciously, or consciously, that there are two pure, disembodied, and dehistoricized unconscious minds, rather than two people with histories, in the room. If not, then we must wonder how we can understand our patients if we do have fuller understanding of family, social, and cultural processes themselves, as well as their impact on the psyche, of how conflicts, defenses, and fantasies revolve around relational experiences and images that encode cultural and social formations, of how people create and use personal symbols, drawing from and filtering a cultural surround. We refer patients for medication because we know something about the biological correlates of some

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mental distress. Similarly, we might benefit by knowing something more than what we read in the newspaper about the effects of history and the social. Sociocultural factors are all features of patients’ lives that Freud described and that Erikson and the Sullivanians made central. Accordingly, we wonder whether the history of psychoanalysis itself points to another answer to the question of our weltanschauung. To what extent did declining interest in the social sciences and their topics of inquiry, once advocated for so forcefully, and, we would think, required by a weltanschauung that “leaves no question unanswered,” arise indirectly out of attempts to bury aspects of the psychoanalytic sociopolitical past, whether the collaboration of some psychoanalysts and official psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany, the self-depoliticization of émigré psychoanalysts who gained entrance to the anti-Communist United States (Jacoby 1986), politics in Argentina (and, more notoriously, Brazil),20 and so forth? Erikson left UC Berkeley, jeopardizing his academic future, rather than sign a loyalty oath, and we assume that other émigré (and non-émigré analysts) faced similar choices. We know less about Europe and the U.K. in regard to such matters. When we move to more specific arenas of inquiry, we see both how our understanding has been shaped by our taking into account or ignoring social science and its domains and how cultural blinders have distorted our knowledge. Child observation, the psychic impact of alternative family forms, ethnicity, war neuroses, terror, torture, the Holocaust, all testify to our necessary reliance on the social sciences and social understandings, just as we rely on psychoanalyst-linguists and psycholinguists to understand language and neuroscientists to understand the brain. Yet, as I have suggested, there seems to be within contemporary psychoanalysis, in comparison to the psychoanalysis of our forebears, and especially that of Freud, a decline in interest in the social, as well as an absence of interest in the social sciences. The question of a weltanschauung. We return to Freud. I have described Freud’s continual clinical and theoretical interest in the sociocultural from his earliest to his latest writings. I have noted his associations in “The Question of a Weltanschauung” that link psychoanalysis and the social sciences, as he alludes in a single sentence to Marxism, sociology, and applied psychology. I notice how, in this lecture, Freud expresses passionate opinions about contemporary politics and political theory (Marxism and Bolshevism) and epistemology (those premature postmodernists of Freud’s day). We are all aware of Freud’s substantial sociocultural theories—elaborated in Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism—and I have alerted us further to Freud’s discussions of immediate politics, his little-cited but wonderfully astute “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and “Why War?.” Throughout his life and career, this psychoanalyst cared passionately about the social and the political and about the social and political sciences. Drawing from these sources, I have suggested that there is a contradiction between the weltanschauung that Freud proposes, based on a program of “carefully scrutinized observation [and] research,” and our tendency to participate in

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the sort of totalizing weltanschauung that he criticizes, one that solves all problems uniformly, leaving no question unanswered, basing our practice and theory partly on our emotions, intuitions, and interests (and perhaps treating our theories as religious doctrine and Freud’s own work—Freud ipse—as revelation). Freud is cautioning us not only about others but about ourselves. Our contemporary weltanschauung is infused with its own emotional and ideological shields and assumptions, and one macro-arena of this infusion has been our clinical and epistemological ignoring of the intertwining of psychic, sociocultural, and historico-political life, and the costs, in those contexts where we do so, of our lack of substantive knowledge of those fields, the social sciences, that study them. As it leads us to ignore the wide range of constitutive components of psychic life, of operations and experiences that constitute “psychology, pure and applied,” our weltanschauung influences and perhaps distorts the very scientific “programme of study”—our clinical work, “depth-psychology or the psychology of the unconscious”—that we are called on to engage.

Notes 1 I am certainly not enough of an expert on international psychoanalysis to know if anglophone American psychoanalysis was unique in this regard. My impression is that Latin American psychoanalysis counts some social scientists and social scientific interests in its origins. Within British psychoanalysis in the postwar period, we do not find social writings, even from the former anthropologist Elizabeth Bott Spillius, though we certainly find extensive social concerns among child analysts from the Hampstead and Tavistock Clinics, and from Bowlby. 2 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1921, ll. 5–8) 3 Cohort and generation again: In the fall of 2015, after finishing a near-final draft of this chapter, I happened to read, months after its publication and presentation, Christopher Bollas’s plenary address to the 2015 meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association (Bollas 2015). I was surprised and gratified to find that Bollas had turned his attention almost entirely to the sociopolitical state of the world and that he had drawn upon many classical writers on psychosocial history and theory (Fanon, Hofstadter, Stampp, and others). In even more specific coincidence, Bollas begins from Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times,” in the context of which he cites the same Yeats lines that I had already cited. My discovery anticipates and confirms the following chapter, in which I discuss the Mannheimian and Eriksonian question of generations. Bollas and I are both members of the World War II birth cohort and thereby also of the “’60s” generation. 4 The lecture from which this chapter takes its name was presented in 2004. I note in my preface to this book that, in the case of racism, the zeitgeist of the American Psychoanalytic Association seems to be shifting. The spring 2015 meetings included a screening of the film Black Psychoanalysts Speak and a psycho-socio-political University Forum that looked at truth and reconciliation in South Africa and labor migration and gender rage in neo-liberal India (Bell 2015). A year later, Dorothy Holmes (2016) gave a plenary address on the need for psychoanalysts to pay attention to race and multiculturalism, and in 2017 and 2018 we found University Forums on race and racism that included psychoanalyst, psychoanalyst-academic, and academic presenters. For the most

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part, however, the University Forum has featured speakers from the humanities, often turning to postmodern-postcolonial humanists even for social and political analysis. Since 2016, we find new discussion groups on historical and social factors and cultural narratives, as well as plenaries on racism and homophobia. The spring 2017 issue of The American Psychoanalyst featured a special section on race. Stoute, especially, astonished and pleased this reader with her capacious and insightful review of social science studies and books going back to the 1930s. Such developments are to be applauded. Yet in what follows, I notice the still relative rarity of such contributions, as well as the general absence of consideration of the academic fields that study them, as if it is enough to be a concerned citizen. In later chapters, I notice that in the social scientific ignoring of psychoanalysis, the academy certainly reciprocates. 5 My plan for the 2004 lecture from which the present chapter is developed was to consider, along with the absence of social science and social interests, a missing psychoanalytic psychology of men, which I called “the riddle of masculinity” (in 2005, I chaired a panel with that title; see Brady 2006). Here also, the noticed and not-noticed: “We know nothing about it, yet the existence of two sexes is a most striking characteristic of organic life which distinguishes it sharply from inanimate nature. However, we find enough to study in those human individuals who, through the possession of female genitals, are characterized as manifestly or predominantly feminine” (1933a, p. 116). 6 Alas, such serendipity is much less likely in the current period. Rather than opening a volume for a particular quote, I and others would be more likely to simply type it into the PEP-Web search engine. We would find only what we were already looking for. 7 I do not have direct evidence here, but citations are one indication. The Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing archive (PEP-Web) lists twenty-five, of which only one (Figueira 1990) is an extended discussion of the lecture, while the rest refer to it in one sentence. 8 Freud’s claims about the biases, distortions, and ideological and political uses of religion, though not directly germane to a consideration of the weltanschauung of psychoanalysis, are startlingly relevant to contemporary American society and politics, and his throwaway reference to science from the Greeks through to Copernicus, Darwin, Pierre Curie, and contemporary anthropology is vintage intellectually omnivorous Freud. 9 According to the intellectual historian Martin Jay (personal communication, 2004), there were from the nineteenth century onward German attacks on Enlightenment universalism that emphasized cultural and historical uniqueness as these determined stance, perspective, point of view, and so forth. As Jay put it, Einstein’s theory of relativity was “available for a vulgar appropriation by relativists who needed some scientific backing.” 10 There is now growing attention to the social and cultural, but I believe that my larger point, alluding to the contemporary (at least North American) zeitgeist, influenced by Kleinian and Bionian approaches originating in England, Italy, and South America, still holds true. 11 My observations are certainly two-way. We could ask, equally, why the social sciences are for the most part hostile to and dismissive of psychoanalysis. Much of my writing and career was directed to addressing this latter question, which I return to in Chapters 12 and 13. Here I address this interdisciplinary lacuna from the point of view of psychoanalysis. 12 I am in the domain of listening for and listening to, that I elaborate in Chapter 8. There I claim that analysts range themselves across the theoretical spectrum and that any analyst will prefer some theories of mind and technique to others.Yet for some a theory of mind seems to determine clinical interventions, whereas for others, following the patient seems to take greater priority. For some more than for others, there seems to be “one overriding hypothesis” about the mind (or two minds) that “leaves no question unanswered.” 13 “As Freud would put it”: I am as guilty as the next analyst here in my indirect move toward religion and away from the weltanschauung of science. Freud ipse, I have called this. How many of our articles, presentations, and books begin sentences with “Freud himself . . .”?

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14 Freud’s claims can support such an exclusionary focus. He points out that “the Weltanschauung of science . . . is marked by negative characteristics, by its limitation to what is at the moment knowable.” Some analysts argue that what is at the moment knowable is exclusively what is going on in the consulting room, and perhaps, even more specifically, what is observable in the analyst’s mind. Analysis, here, would need to restrict itself to “the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations” of the patient’s and the analyst’s mind. Contra Freud on science versus religion, however, the analyst must use, if not revelation or divination, at least intuition. 15 Chapter 12 describes the potentially serious clinical, ethical, and organizational consequences of this scotoma in our weltanschauung, specifically regarding our lack of knowledge of the sociology of the dyad. By not knowing our social science neighbors, we remain unaware of structurally induced ethical weak spots and occlude for ourselves what we can and cannot address exclusively through the teaching and practice of clinical psychoanalysis. 16 The late Robert Wallerstein was (here as elsewhere!) an exception. Unlike most analysts, he was interested in the social sciences. He co-taught and co-wrote with the sociologistpsychoanalyst Neil Smelser (Wallerstein and Smelser 1969), and he was always a supporter of analytic training for nonmedical clinicians, as well as for arts and sciences (CORST) analysts. I note in this context that Wallerstein’s brother, Immanuel Wallerstein, the creator of world-systems analysis, is as well known in sociology as Robert is in psychoanalysis. At Robert Wallerstein’s memorial, Immanuel suggested that his brother saw psychoanalysis not only as a science and practice but also as a movement. He cited Robert’s IPA plenary address, “One Psychoanalysis or Many?” (Wallerstein 1988). Both brothers, it would seem, were interested in the sociology of social movements and in the social grounding of knowledge. 17 As Chapter 1 would predict, in these cross-cultural encounters, Europeans often seem to feel free to criticize Americans and dismiss them out of hand.We recall the André Green/ Theodore Jacobs exchange at the IPA Congress in 1993, and recently I have noticed a similar dismissal in a Psychoanalytic Dialogues exchange on the field, with contributions by the American relational analyst Donnel Stern (2013) and the Italian Bionians Ferro and Civitarese (2013). There Stern describes his work and clinical thinking in great detail. In their “dialogue” response, Ferro and Civitarese feel free to dismiss their colleague’s work almost scornfully: Stern does not stay focused on what the analyst knows about the patient’s unconscious. That is, Stern is not a Bionian. At the 2000 Delphi psychoanalytic conference, a French analyst assigned to introduce and chair an American infant researcher’s presentation announced that she did not believe in empirical research and then walked off the stage and left the room as the American was presenting. In France at a conference two weeks earlier, an American empirical researcher on psychoanalytic process had been booed off the stage as he tried to present. In my own limited experience, I have not seen or read of such dismissal—though of course I have seen and read radical disagreement—going in the other cultural direction. 18 I note in Chapter 13 an irony: the most scientific, mathematical, and prestigious social science—economics—has, among all the social sciences, the most fully developed theory of the individual (albeit one that does not accord with psychoanalytic understandings). 19 Psychoanalytic baby-watchers do seem to collaborate with and know those in academic psychology, in fields like attachment, mother-infant recognition, and so forth. Erreich (2017) reviews the literature on infant cognition. 20 During his presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Robert Wallerstein brought sanctions against the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society for covering up some of its members’ participation in the analysis of torturers.

4 BORN INTO A WORLD AT WAR Affect and identity in a war baby cohort

Men who share an ethnic area, a historical era, or an economic pursuit are guided by common images of good and evil. Infinitely varied, these images reflect the elusive nature of historical change; yet in the form of contemporary social models, of compelling prototypes of good and evil, they assume decisive concreteness in every individual’s ego development. Erikson . . . to develop a sense of self-identity, means to experience ourselves as agents, notwithstanding the fact that we were born without our informed consent and did not pick our parents. Loewald

“Problems of patienthood caused by outer and inner conditions overlap,” Erikson tells us (1964, p. 89). Outer conditions of war, politics, economics, and culture affect our thoughts and actions, but they do not, without being filtered and created through inner life, cause them. At the same time, inner conditions of temperamental propensity, affect, fantasy, defense, and conflict predispose us to behave in certain ways, but they do not, apart from encounters with external reality, cause us to do so. Family serves as a middle ground. Family is outer condition, yet by virtue of providing the original external world and original template of affect, fantasy, and conflict, it also provides the constitutive ingredients of internalization, identification, introjection, and projection. Loewald, in “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” adds that psychic consolidation—agency in his view, ego integrity in Erikson’s—requires appropriating the outer and making it ours. This duality poses a pervasive challenge to psychoanalytic practice and theory, from work with individual patients to psychocultural, psychosocial, and psychohistorical analysis. In another duality, psychoanalysis begins from the individual and

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provides our most comprehensive theory of individuality, yet from its Freudian beginnings, its accounts of patients and the self-analytic writings of its founders have focused on patterns of fantasy, neurosis, character, and development that are widespread. Freud brought cultural, social, class, and historical factors into his theoretical and clinical reflections. He would not have recognized many of today’s cases, which give so little specificity to the class, gender, cultural, and historical factors that lend Freud’s own cases such richness and depth. Psychoanalytic listening also begins from a duality. In clinical work, our goal is to understand, and help a patient understand, his unconscious life—defenses, conflicts, fantasies, and affects that are importantly and by definition in part nonlinguistic. Yet listening with the third ear begins by attending to spoken words, words in a particular language that is usually one learned early in a particular family and historical period (but see Amati-Mehler, Argentieri, and Canestri 1993). Patient and analyst then draw upon their own affects, as well as their observation of nonverbal behaviors and communications, to find meaning.1 Secondary-process language and narrative can only indicate what is beyond and before, in primaryprocess feeling and thought. “Born into a World at War” explores these dualities of internal and external reality by listening indirectly, through reading, to personal narratives told by people born toward the end of World War II. Specifically, I consider affective and familial themes in first-person narratives written by members of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1965 and collected in a book, Born into a World at War (Tymoczko and Blackmun 2000). The book grew out of a panel at a college reunion, when the participants were in their early fifties. From the initial moment of listening to the panel, I was enthralled, both by the narratives themselves and by the tumble of associations that arose as I listened. Later, I was invited to furnish the book’s epilogue.2 Initially titled “Individuals in History and History through Individuals,” this chapter poses a dilemma. How can the major cataclysmic and tragic event of the twentieth century be held in mind in all its compelling and sweeping wholeness and impact while we also hold in mind the specific uniqueness of individuals, especially when obliteration of the recognition of individual humanity contributed to the development of World War II? Do my own experiences and those of others— individuals in history—take precedence over outer conditions, over history itself? Yet, as we know, individual stories—cases—can both document the specificity of unique individuality and illuminate patterns. Within the wide variety of stories told by people from different backgrounds and countries, we can find, by listening to affect through a psychosocial lens, prevalent emotional themes, tonalities, and retrospective constructions of childhood selves. Filtered through unconscious as well as conscious parental communications, an affective psychocultural ethos seems to have permeated the inner lives of this war baby generation. Although experienced by preverbal infants and toddlers whose families went through the catastrophe in very different ways, World War II came to have a living psychic reality with some features in common.

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I begin with Erikson. All people live external as well as internal lives, and in a period when few psychoanalysts, perhaps for their own personal-historical reasons, attended to this fundamental intertwining, Erikson made it central. All those who notice gender, race, ethnicity, sociosexuality, and individual experiences of history and culture thus owe Erikson a great debt. So also, “Born into a World at War,” as it looks at a psychohistorical and generational cohort, draws indirectly and directly on an Eriksonian model. Following Erikson, I have suggested (Chodorow 1999a) that people create and experience social processes and cultural meanings not only materially and discursively but also psychodynamically, in unconscious, affectladen, nonlinguistic, immediately felt images and fantasies that everyone creates from birth onward, images and fantasies about self, self and other, body, and world. Social and historical processes, including those shaped by the family unit, are given, and they will probably lead to patterns of experiencing in common, as our extensive literature on gender and sexuality, and our less extensive literature on race and collective trauma, document, but this experiencing is refracted through personal individuality and is as much affective and nonlinguistic as it is cognitive and verbal. Among classical psychological anthropologists as well as classical clinical thinkers, Erikson most clearly theorized the individualized and personalized filtering of history—how individual and cultural-historical experience become intertwined. Erikson argues that history, society, and culture are pervasively involved in the organization and experience of self and psyche, animating fantasies, identity, and conflicts. He thus mediates between the clinical-historical Freud of the case studies, who always elaborated the outer as well as the inner world of his patients, and the cultural-historical Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion, and “Why War?.” In considering the link between the social and psychoanalysis that several founding psychoanalysts and founding American independents, along with some social scientists of previous generations, noticed, Erikson extended and specified a way of thinking and treatment that Freud in his early clinical studies took for granted. Problems of patienthood caused by outer and inner conditions overlap. Currently for the most part unnoticed, Erikson provides theoretical and clinical grounding for a subsequent return among many contemporary psychoanalysts, from a period when only internal life (the ego and its defenses, intrapsychic oscillation between paranoid-schizoid and depressive functioning, beta elements and alpha elements) mattered, to our current period, when we find widespread attention to the field (see, e.g., Stern 2013), as well as to the personal, psychohistorical, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, the social and cultural concomitants of psychological gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and so forth. More generally, we find increased attention to the historically induced emotional filtering of history, as Faimberg (2005) has put it, to the “telescoping of generations.”3 Following Erikson, I point to the ineluctable individuality of historical experience while also emphasizing the consequences of belonging to a particular generation or age cohort. The narratives I discuss show that history and social location affect people psychologically no less than they do physically and materially,

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and that this psychological impact is registered emotionally and unconsciously, as well in conscious thought. Complementing sociological insight into the pervasive relevance of cultural and historical conditions to an understanding of the inner life, the psychoanalytic study of individual subjectivities affords an enriched and fuller understanding of history, society, and culture. Erikson’s thinking is not historically or culturally determinist. Even as he tells us that those who “share an ethnic area, a historical era, or an economic pursuit are guided by common images of good and evil” (1946, p. 17), he also emphasizes clinical specificity. These images “assume a decisive concreteness in every individual’s ego development” (p. 17) and “appear in specific transferences and resistances” (p. 28). With a clinician’s sensibility, he highlights in his cases individual usages of historical and cultural contributions to identity, usages that are deeply implicated in selfhood, formed in part through identifications with parents, and related in complex ways to life goals that may be pursued or shunned. These culturally and historically infused components of identity are tied up with affect, including shame, guilt, and fear, and with defenses such as denial, projection, and reaction formation. They take particular form or present particular challenges depending on when in the developmental life cycle they are experienced. While calling upon psychoanalysts to theorize how history and society assume “decisive concreteness” in the individual psyche, Erikson makes a complementary demand upon historians and social scientists, a psychoanalytic admonition to attend to childhood: “Students of history continue to ignore the simple fact that all individuals are borne by mothers; that everybody was once a child; that people and peoples begin in their nurseries; and that society consists of individuals in the process of developing from children into parents” (1946, p. 17). Erikson shows, through specific cases, how the cataclysmic events of World War I, World War II, and immigration are drawn into unconscious fantasy life and inform his patients’ inner worlds and identities. At the same time, history as a cultural force is created in individual minds. Consonant with my project here, Childhood and Society draws case vignettes particularly from the treatment of children born during World War II and from war experiences. Like several children in the 1943–1944 birth cohort, the “son of a bombardier” was left at home with a mother and female relatives. In this boy’s father’s absence, these female relatives disparaged his father. Yet, when his father became a war hero, he became a source of his son’s budding masculine pride, which in turn suffered a punitive blow when his father was killed. In another vignette, Erikson tells us of a marine who froze as he was supposed to fire a gun and who subsequently developed a severe guilt- and shame-induced war neurosis. Erikson names ego identity—sameness and continuity in one’s own and the other’s view—as the foundation of psychic health. Identity depends not simply on identifying with others but on being confirmed and recognized by others as a particular individual in a particular universe. Speaking directly and indirectly in “Identity and Uprootedness in Our Time” (1964) to the experiences of many born into a world at war, Erikson investigates the psychologies of refugees, immigrants,

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and migrants. He explores the consequences of losing one’s place in historical and generational continuity and of losing one’s native language and country, as well as—especially relevant in the case of World War II (and in recent immigration and migration as well)—the consequences of losing many family members along with the very physical space of home and community. For the immigrant, history does not meet the person with a continuity of generations and tradition. An uprooted people, rather, confront the difficult challenge of trying to preserve identity in the face of radical historical change. They have a “basic hope for recognition and [a] basic horror of its failure: the dead, the stillborn identity” (1964, p. 95). Identity for Erikson is inextricably personal and sociocultural. It is also multiple, as we continue to find clinically in the many fragmentary, overlapping, partial transferences that emerge over the course of therapy or analysis, and as is likewise confirmed by research and theoretical work in the social sciences and humanities. With empirical and clinical accuracy, Erikson gives us a prescient picture of the complexities of identity, of multiple and fragmented identities, that resonates closely with contemporary thought and that seems truly universal. As I have put it, “Erikson’s concern with the setting of psyche in a particular cultural-historical cohort and generation is in itself one of his great contributions to psychoanalytic thinking” (Chodorow 1999a, p. 231). But Erikson also writes of identity as a more integrated phenomenon. Here he moves closer to a concept of self. By “ego identity,” Erikson (1946) means what he calls an ego synthesis, an objective quality or consolidation of selfhood that includes a subjective, confident sense of continuity in time and a personal selfsameness, as well as a sense of self and continuity that is dependent on being confirmed and recognized by others as a particular individual in a particular universe. Identity here includes but is more than the sum of identifications with others. It is measured not only descriptively, in terms of the multiple aspects of identity that go into any psyche, but as an achievement, an enduring synthesis, something that is established and comfortable and that contrasts with non-consolidation or identity diffusion. Identity issues are found throughout the life cycle, but for Erikson they are a particular challenge at adolescence, when a young person should integrate previous particularized identifications and also develop a general identification with his or her culture and life setting. The other side of identity is identity crisis or diffusion. The notion of an identity crisis grew out of Erikson’s attention to the adolescent’s epigenetic task, and it emerged as central to his thinking in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the World War II cohort was coming of age and when other commentators remarked on that generation’s alienation and politicization.4 Just as Freud’s psychosexual theories and his attention to repression bear the mark of prewar Viennese culture, so also, it would seem, Erikson framed and refined his developmental theories, and found his most poignant early clinical cases, in part among the cohort born just before, during, and after World War II.5 He was able to use this cohort—the sons and daughters of bombardiers—as grounding, and to refine and extend his concepts by teaching them.

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In spite of this grounding, Erikson’s writings on the identity crises of youth seem to lose the historical and individual specificity of his other writings. What he saw as an issue for the life cycle in general—identity, in the sense both of selfsameness and of multiple historically specific, fantasy-imbued identifications—becomes implicitly tied to a specific class- and race-based cultural crisis and is then reuniversalized as a necessary life stage. Reciprocally, in the case of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of ’65, this World War II cohort learned to think of identity and to have a psychosocial consciousness partly from Erikson. This group attended Erikson’s hugely popular course on identity and the life cycle en masse, and identity, identity crisis, and identity moratoria were topics of everyday discussion and articles in college newspapers. Erikson was the war babies’ psychosocial theorist. It is no accident that the life narratives provided by the war baby cohort can be theorized and clinically illuminated through Erikson. At the same time, as we reflect on the disruptions and transformations in early life for those born into a world at war, we can rehistoricize identity.6 As I read the stories told by the class of ’65, I paid attention to the intertwining of individual and cultural-historical experience, looking at how history, society, and culture—the province of the social sciences—became involved in private experiences of self and enlivened fantasy and conflict—the province of psychoanalysis. My goal was not to find external or internal causes or constraints, but rather, as the psychoanalyst and sociologist Neil Smelser puts it, to employ “clinical inference about uniquely convergent patterns of forces in the individual’s psyche . . . the internal representation . . . of that reality” (1987, pp. 198–199). I wanted to elucidate patterns without losing individual specificity. I tried to listen internally to affect as well as to consciously described feelings— to the emotional tonalities of the various contributions—and to transference templates—unconscious, immediately felt but not narratively constructed pictures of self and other that seemed to affect the contributors’ views of the world. I listened for conflict and resistance and for when I thought a contributor was avoiding something or covering it up, so that what I picked up didn’t quite hang together. Through this listening, my conception of the effect of war was broadened and my sense of the consequences of being born during the war decentered. These various accounts show how people bring personal interpretations to unconsciously as well as consciously transmitted cultural and historical circumstances and to parental fantasies and identity. Throughout, I kept in mind the use of the self (Jacobs 1991)—society and history through my own individual senses and my own countertransference. These stories evoked affect and memory for me as well. My associations document the generic, seemingly inevitable consequences of belonging to a particular generation or age cohort, while they at the same time further illuminate the individuality of historical and social experience. They suggest that history, when it matters, always matters emotionally and unconsciously to individuals, as well as registering in their consciousness and cognition, points made again and again in the work of Erikson.

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Even as Erikson gives us foundational psychoanalytic theorizing of the individual and the sociocultural, we turn to the sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim to theorize the idea of generation. In “The Problem of Generations,” Mannheim (1928) claims that a generation requires more than chronology: “individuals of the same age are united as an actual generation in so far as they participate in the characteristic social and intellectual currents of the society and period, and in so far as they have an active or passive experience of the interactions of forces which made up the new situation” (p. 304). Mannheim suggests that by virtue of living in the same “historico-social space” or “historical life community,” generations will share perspectives on life, will have common ways of knowing and perceiving. The conception of generation became a popular cultural trope beginning with one generation in particular, the “baby boomers.” Subsequently, it was picked up to characterize “Generation X,” “Gen Y,” and beyond. Yet it seems that dividing people into generations was a prevalent American practice throughout the past century, beginning with the “flappers” of the “roaring twenties.” Nonetheless, since the baby boom, and perhaps beginning with the flappers, generations who get playfully and colloquially named tend to be noticed for their culture and lifestyle, rather than for being affected in serious and irrevocable ways by political or economic events. Although we know that military experience and the return of the G.I.s after World War II created a cohort, it is my impression that these men did not have a generational name until they began to die off, when they became “the greatest generation” (Brokaw 1998). They were not named as a cohort, even though the G.I. Bill, which radically affected education, housing patterns, and the economy in many ways, was created for their benefit. Similarly, much American social policy was created for those who suffered during the Great Depression (Elder [1974] describes this psychosocial cohort in Children of the Great Depression), but we do not think of the Depression generation in playful or colloquial cultural terms. By Mannheim’s definition, members of the class of ’65 are part of a generation. They were men and women who found themselves in a specific historical-social space and specific historical life community, at the same university during the first half of the 1960s. An extremely fine-tuned birth cohort, they were born almost without exception in 1943 or 1944. Such a group could be said to occupy elite status by virtue of its education, yet, equally remarkably, there is no common pathway that led its members to this university, no sense, as was more likely the case for previous Harvard-Radcliffe generations, of coming largely from similar class or ethnic backgrounds, from the same kind of family, from the same region. We find over and over in these accounts descriptions of displacement. People came from all over the world, taking varied paths, to arrive at this relatively safe haven at age seventeen or eighteen. Many have lengthy stories of migration from there to here. The class of ’65 was brought together in the same classrooms and dormitories from far-flung places and backgrounds. The generation of writers in Born into a World at War does not have a culturalgenerational label: being “born into a world at war” does not have a cheerful ring.

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Members of this generation remember food shortages or rationing, father-absence, sharing apartments with relatives, and mothers squeezing yellow coloring into margarine. A few remind us that we were “war babies” (e.g., Tymoczko 2000), but this name has not stuck. Hugh Field, who describes a painful childhood filled with puzzlement, expresses a cultural-affective tonality when he remarks that he considers himself “part of a rather subdued, gentle, and reserved pre-Baby Boom age group” and notices “a subtle discontinuity between us and the Baby Boomers” (2000, p. 181). He says, “With war raging overseas, it must have been a subdued time” (p. 181). In spite of our resilience and success, Field suggests, we do not have the buoyant optimism of baby boomers and their sense of limitless possibility. From what we know of the 1943–1944 generation, some of these writers participated during and after college in a New Left cultural politics of “never trust anyone over thirty.” Yet we see in their accounts, perhaps especially in those of the children of immigrants, a great sense of piety and obedience in orientation toward parents—children trying to do what parents want and to support and protect parents. Similarly, we certainly were part of the generation that initiated student protest against the war in Vietnam, and we can imagine that our conscious and unconscious immersion from birth in a war where right and wrong were absolutely clear, where humanity itself was threatened, and where parents were forever affected, played some part in the questions asked by those who challenged the Vietnam War (as well as in the urgency of those who felt that participation and fighting were the right things to do). Tymoczko, remembering participation in antiwar politics, notes that she learned from World War II that war doesn’t just make men; it also breaks them. As a generation, the 1943–1944 birth cohort was very much born into history— into the biggest historical event of the twentieth century—and it seems self-aware about this historical location. That such a volume was put together and that so many wanted to contribute attest to this sense of historical self. We were not born during postwar prosperity to united families with optimistic parents but in all cases to families in which parents were directly or indirectly affected by war, in which fathers and other male relatives were often far away and mothers, sometimes far from home themselves, were worried and overwhelmed. In the most tragic cases, we were born to families torn apart and destroyed. For many of us, there was a general cultural atmosphere of anxiety and fear about the present and future. Before we could speak, these formed part of the affective messages communicated by our parents. I was born in January 1944, so I was five months old on D-Day and a year and a half on V-E Day. During a trip to France in the early 1990s, my family visited Omaha and Utah Beaches. From a childhood visit during my father’s 1955–1956 sabbatical year in France, I remembered vividly (or had a vivid screen memory of) the concrete bunkers and gun emplacements left by the Germans, which it had been so bizarre for a child to find on a beach. During this later visit, however, I also noticed, and was riveted by, various memorial pillars and monuments. These pillars had inscriptions on top such as “In Memory of the 248th Engineering

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Division of the U.S. Army, landed June 6, 1944,” or “In Honor of the Men of the 126th Division of the United States Marines, landed June 6th, 1944,” followed by lists of all the men who had died during that invasion. I began to weep, and I could not stop weeping. Since before memory I have been mesmerized by footage of the D-Day landings, those men with weapons and vehicles rising out of the waters onto the beach. When I first began working on this chapter, I was not sure if this was my fantasy image of the D-Day landing. Where could I have gotten such a peculiar idea? Had I invented it? How can men and vehicles rise up out of the waters? I was too young to have seen such footage in contemporaneous newsreels, but these landings are nonetheless forever imprinted in my memory. Nor do they have personal familial resonance. My father did not go away to war but was a physicist who lived at home and worked on the development of microwave tubes used in radar.7 One dream during my training analysis was particularly vivid. It condensed a number of personal themes, and I returned to it again and again. This dream resurfaced in my memory as I wrote about being born into a world at war. I am standing up in my crib. My mother and my analyst’s mother, both dressed in unmistakably 1940s suits and hats (I vaguely remember a purple suit with shoulder pads that my mother may have once owned), are going off to Times Square to celebrate V-E Day. In this dream, then, World War II enters my unconscious via cultural screen images, yet also, here in my dream, accurately pinpointed at the right time in my life, at about age one-and-a-half, when babies can stand up in their cribs to be picked up, or, as in this dream, not to be picked up but left behind. Events that happened in World War II have thus not only entered my fantasy life in dreams and day images, but even as an adult they place me at the right age among these events. The dream portrays loss and abandonment, as well as exclusion, in dream images of the excitement of those V-E Day celebrations that by then I had seen represented so many times. My mother, when I asked her, said that she did not go into Manhattan from Queens to celebrate V-E Day. Nor did I experience frequent mother-absence. During the first several years of my life, my mother was a full-time stay-at-home mother. But loss, separation, and being left, as I will describe presently, are prominent among the affective themes that this war seems to have evoked in my classmates and me.8 Another set of associations arises from the actuality of the effects of World War II on my life (I allude here to Erikson’s 1961 plenary, “Reality and Actuality: An Address,” published in 1962), in which he distinguishes psychic reality and historical actuality and explores their intertwining). My father’s co-workers in New York during the war were for the most part Westerners, physicists and engineers who had been colleagues and students at Stanford. Shortly after the war, in 1947, my father joined the Stanford physics department and we moved to California, where, even as late as 1961, when I graduated from high school, I was one of only five or six Jews in a high school class of over three hundred, perhaps the only Jewish girl, and one of a few class members with any Eastern identity (there was probably an equivalent total of non-whites—Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans). I was a

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Jewish New Yorker who grew up in California and who as a preschooler wanted to be a cowgirl (actually, a cowboy). Later, playing King of the Mountain with my friends, we yelled “Bombs over Tokyo!” having no idea what it meant. As an older child and teenager, I puzzled about why most of my friends thought World War II took place in the Pacific and was against Japan, when it was so clear to me that it took place in Europe and centered on Hitler and the Jews. To return to dream and screen, to this day I am attached to train travel. Trains originally took us West and, every few years, East to visit “the family” (West and East were capitalized locations). I am at home in the East and, during my thirtyplus adult years living and teaching in California, having also grown up there, I felt conflicted about every return to “the West.”9 In New York City itself, I for many years alternated between feeling warmly and completely at home and sadly adrift and desolate. I was, finally, reminded of the sadness and displacement that for me are associated with the period of World War II when I went in 2000 to an exhibit of the work of Chiura Obata, a Japanese-American artist, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. I had known and loved a book of Obata’s stunning watercolors of Yosemite (the first place, my mother reported, where she had finally felt at home in California). I was thrilled to see the originals. In the last few rooms of the exhibit, however, were drawings and paintings that I did not know. Here I found portrayals of the Tanforan Racetrack, a short drive from my childhood home on the San Francisco peninsula, which became, at the time of Obata’s drawings in 1941, a “transportation center” for Japanese-Americans. Obata, a well-known UC Berkeley professor, had first been interned there, along with other JapaneseAmericans. In this exhibit also were Obata’s renderings of Topaz, Utah, the internment camp to which he was sent, paintings of stunningly gorgeous sunsets, art classes Obata offered, and barbed wire and shootings. As on Omaha Beach, I wept and could not stop. Certain collective experiences demand psychological processing and response, yet this psychological processing and response will be individually created. My memories thus document the singularity of my historical and social experience while concomitantly reflecting patterns that result from belonging to the war baby generational cohort. In similar fashion, as readers of these narratives, our sense of the effect of being born during the war is decentered, such that generations are also not generations. The writers in Born into a World at War found themselves at the same college in the same period of history, but they otherwise have few common cultural or historical origins, and differences in background are as prominent as similarities. We find here those who most stand for the great destruction and genocide wrought by the Nazis—the children of German and East European Jews, born to parents who were in hiding, who had fled to other unsafe countries, or who had reached the United States. Other narratives remind us that war babies were born in countries invaded and occupied by the Japanese (in this volume, Malaysia and China), as well as that non-Jewish children were born into countries occupied

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by the Germans, children whose relatives likewise died in concentration camps. The son of a German war widow (Peter Katzlberger) gives us insight into the effects of the war on some German women and children, and a Japanese-born woman (Kazuko Iwasawa Ihara) describes what it was like to make do as a child in her native country. We do not, for political reasons and in cultural practice, call German and Japanese children born during World War II “survivors,” but, as children, they most certainly were. Robert Sakai calls our attention to the shameful American internment of U.S. citizens and immigrants of Japanese origin that Obata documents in his art. This Sansei son lived in an internment camp with his mother and other family members while his Nisei father served in a strategic role with the U.S. Army in the Pacific. Anthony Graham-White filters a childhood in a bombed-out English city through food shortages. Members of this generation, then, were born to Jewish refugees and to Jews in hiding. They were born in Germany and in countries invaded by the Japanese. They were born in England, Japan, and Slovenia, and their place of birth might or might not be the birthplace of their parents. They were born throughout the United States, where fathers were sometimes in the army and other fathers, like mine, did war work. Some mothers worked in Rosie the Riveter jobs, while others, whose husbands were in the armed services, went home with their children to form three-generation households with their own parents. Many experienced the effects of war through the mobility of their families, in flight throughout Europe and in parts of Asia. We find, over and over, accounts of displacement—relatively nontraumatic moves, such as mine across the United States, as well as accounts of refugees fleeing and hiding, moves from Ukraine to Uzbekistan to the United States. Our generation was not born during postwar prosperity to intact families with optimistic parents but to families in which parents were, more or less globally, affected by war. In the most tragic cases, families were torn apart and destroyed, leaving few survivors. In other families, fathers were far away when a child was born or for some time afterwards, and mothers, often far from home themselves, were worried and overwhelmed. When families first moved, it was often because of the dislocations of war and its aftermath and not, as it would be later, as part of a general pattern of American mobility or because of job transfers in a growing economy. Erikson might well have been able to externalize and extend his ideas about identity crisis with this migrant, refugee, mobile generation in mind. Psychoanalytic theory and listening are attuned to both individuality and commonality. Among the narratives, manifest content and personal and family uniqueness preserve individuality in all its contextual and internal richness and variation. At the same time, clinical listening, even to people from such widely varied backgrounds and experience, and including my own self-reflections, enabled me to find, as Mannheim would predict, common perspectives in affect, conflict, and fantasy. These included, especially, a depressive tonality, quiet, and sense of loss on the one side, and explosions and occasional defensive mania on the other. The writers of these memoirs are preoccupied with father-absence, and they take

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mothers for granted. I could also see the very different ways that history and culture are experienced: these writers filter conscious and unconscious parental transmissions, as well as culture and media, through reconstructions and memory, and through the immediate sense of being. World War II—the Shoah, the Japanese invasion of China and Indonesia— assumes decisive concreteness in the life of anyone born into it, affects everyone involved. But it is also a different war for each person. We can elucidate psychic and narrative themes that characterize many people’s experiences of these events, yet we can never predict their exact effect or outcome, even when it comes to how a family will react to losing members in the concentration camps. In each personal narrative, the war is folded into identity, feeling, family, and history, but we also see graphically documented, as psychoanalysis would predict, how the “same” event or experience—Kristallnacht, being the child of survivors, being a survivor oneself—can be undergone and handled in many different ways. The transmission of trauma and the telescoping of generations are both individualized and universal. People bring personal interpretations to parental fantasies and identity and to unconsciously as well as consciously transmitted cultural and historical circumstances. In each individual case such personal interpretations help generate identity—who someone is or becomes. Childhood does not determine life, but in childhood we are forming our selves. Among the children of survivors, for example, we find a range from ebullient optimism and a claim that all is right with the world, to simple relief at having survived, to emotional frozenness and painful depression. In some families, there is silence—an occlusion of losses too painful to acknowledge. By contrast, other families, rather than mourning their losses, celebrate survival and make cheerful, positive thinking a goal. A writer whose uncle was killed in Auschwitz, and whose parents endured ten years of separation, observes that his father called these the “happiest ten years” of his life, and he claims that his parents led a “charmed” existence (Stolper 2000, p. 80). Yet he also suggests that his parents may have displaced the intensity of their losses and fears onto preoccupied concern for an ill child. The personal filtering of history, through parents especially, is as likely to be nonverbal as verbal. It is therefore less able to be weighed and thought about than later learning or learning from less emotionally important people. The 1943–1944 birth cohort is made up of people whose direct experience of the war occurred while they were babies and toddlers. Their stories attest to the psychic weight of early childhood, the deep affective resonances of experience that cannot at the time and can only sometimes afterward be named. Howard Gardner (2000), one of this country’s leading psychologists, describes with great candor how he manages early feelings of terror and loss. He cannot sit through violence in movies, skips sections on violence in books, and has shied away from or avoided entirely the study of affect in his professional work. Nancy Blackmun (2000), American-born and not Jewish, discovers in mid-adulthood some of the origins of her obsession with the Holocaust and the death camps, as these resonate with her personal experience as a two-year-old of simultaneously losing both mother and father. Her mother left

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for several months to take care of her own mother, suddenly taken sick in another state, at which point her father retreated into work. She remembers wandering about the apartment, desolate, with World War II news and music, whose specificity she still remembers, on the radio. Others also find that particular pieces of music heard or played evoke childhood and feeling, and we might wonder how musical memory, before and beyond words, helps shape many individuals’ emotional being. When we begin from and refer to childhood, we are very much in the modality of the senses, not just in the mode of intellectual reflection. I note earlier that Anthony Graham-White focuses on the basics of daily life that matter to children. For him, “war’s end was associated with food” (2000, p. 108): you could get oranges and bananas. He ties current life experience to this period, wondering whether he is a light sleeper because of a childhood spent in one of the most bombed cities in England, and he contrasts “the” war with his war. His war was food shortages, two uncles missing in action, and German prisoners of war marched up the streets. He remembers the physical reality of rubble in the street and rooms open to the sky. Graham-White writes, “wartime in a child’s memory is not so easily stopped” (p. 108). A German contributor, Peter Katzlberger, also remembers the basics of food and hunger, “the everyday struggle to make do” (2000, p. 119) and find enough to eat. Psychoanalytic listening, Erikson teaches us, helps us to see how society and history assume decisive concreteness in the individual, in the form of specific transferences and resistances. It also, we can add, allows us to trace common affective and familial themes and salient patterns of subjectivity, themes that do not characterize all the contributions to Born into a World at War but are found in several. What I first noticed was an emotional tonality common to many of the narratives. Members of this war baby generation, at least those who contributed their reflections, experience the world through what we might consider, loosely, a depressive lens. Not everyone is sad, and no one is sad all the time, but an elegiac affective tonality pervades the volume. Sadness and depression, and in some cases a sense of emptiness and hopelessness, come, it is likely, from loss and mourning. Accordingly, what I am calling a depressive lens can be found especially in the accounts of those who left their native countries, not just the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors but also those who came from Asian countries or from countries taken over by the Soviet advance. These children were born to parents trying to make it through the war under terrible conditions or, in this country, born to parents who had relatives still in Europe. After the war ended, during their children’s early years, parents often learned more about personal and familial losses, as well as about the scale of devastation. A generalized sense of loss also seems to result from displacement. This is especially prominent in the narratives of those who, along with their parents, lost a native language, homeland, and culture, but we find it also in my own reactions, relived later in my reactions to New York and to the Obata exhibit, to a relatively benign postwar cross-country move with a mother who felt separated from

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her family of origin, even though she immediately developed many friendships. In addition to themes of loss that I infer to be filtered through parents, we read reports of the direct experience of paternal loss and separation from fathers in the accounts of children of soldiers—American soldiers, German and English soldiers, Slovenian soldiers. A few contributors describe a father’s disappearing for a period of months or even years, for political or work reasons. The reasons for these latter disappearances may not have been directly warrelated, but I mention them because of the general affective and transferential tone I find in them. There was, I infer, even for those born in the safety of the United States, a general cultural and psychological atmosphere of anxiety and fear about the present and future that simply hung over the world during the infancy of this group. Before these children could speak, this anxiety was communicated by parents. Narratives also describe puzzlement, about where fathers were, or why moves were happening, and we know that, especially for very young children, not knowing why things happen can lead to a sense of listless futility (as Schachtel [1947], another postwar cultural-psychoanalytic writer describes so well).10 A sense of horror and coping with horror—holocausts in the generic sense as well as the actual Holocaust—provide another tonal and affective theme, though one not found in as many narratives. Crashes and massacres reappear in stories and associations. The shattering glass of Kristallnacht or the murder of relatives is evoked in several accounts. Betty Chang Sun (2000) describes learning, first intuitively and then through being told, about the rageful devastation and torture of the Rape of Nanking, while a Malaysian describes learning of the brutal Japanese invasion of his homeland. Julie Coryell’s father worked on the Manhattan Project. Somehow, though as a girl she did not quite know how, her father was involved in the largest explosion of all time, which her mother then captured in poetry (Coryell 2000). At the other end of the spectrum from explosions and shattering glass, as I note, are silences. Especially, we see wide variation in how Holocaust and other survivor parents did or did not talk about their experience or about what happened to family members, and we assume that this not talking was not only a conscious choice to spare children, but also a way for parents to survive psychically. Ursula Oppens, a world-renowned pianist, titles her contribution “Silence.” During her childhood, “the most important family events could not be discussed” (2000, pp. 123–124). Others were told about successes and survival but not about those who did not survive. Christine Tanz says, “we never talked about the people who had disappeared, or sorrow or loss or thwarted ambitions or bitterness” (2000, p. 135). Only in adulthood, encountering particular facts in a book on the Holocaust, did Tanz, a developmental psycholinguist whose childhood required her to traverse many linguistic settings, learn what had happened to family members who disappeared on a particular day in 1942. Gardner describes his parents’ “route of silence” (2000, p. 202). We find similar silences described in the literature on the Holocaust and the intergenerational transmission of trauma, Guralnik (2014) uses the phrase “a loud hush” to describe her patient’s parents not talking

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about past trauma and cites Abraham and Torok’s writing of a “mute psychic zone filled with . . . proto-fantasies” (p. 130). Parents are filtered not only through emotional tone but found also in adult children’s mental representations. Here fathers and mothers appear very differently. Fathers loom large. Echoing Erikson’s “The Son of a Bombardier,” several accounts, especially those of sons, idealize soldier-fathers and their brave exploits, while other sons and daughters of soldier-fathers focus more on their father’s absence. Several writers describe the inability to connect emotionally with their father until late in life, or watching wistfully as he formed closer attachments to siblings born after the war or resumed solid attachments with those born before it. Mothers participated in idealizing soldier-fathers, as well as in protecting them upon return from young children’s liveliness and demands. One contribution is titled “Wartime Separation,” or “Why It Took My Father Fifty-five Years to Get Used to Me” (Hayler 2000), and the opening sentence in another reads: “My sister, my mother, my grandparents, a dog—all inhabit my earliest memories, but my father is not there” (Lewis 2000, p. 285). A German father sent his last letter in January 1945 and was presumably killed shortly thereafter. His son writes, “being ‘lost’ is worse than dead” (Katzlberger 2000, p. 118). Like the children of Jewish survivors, he describes his mother’s silence about the years in which she lost her husband, he a father, and life was a shambles. The end of the war figures also in father-absence, as life stories from both European- and American-born writers document how closely the experiences of the generation born during World War II could be tied to the Cold War that followed. Fathers might be stationed with the postwar occupying forces in Germany. One contributor remembers screaming in fear when she and her mother arrived after the war to join her father, who was part of the occupying forces in Germany (Falco 2000). In an especially painful narrative, Field (2000) describes the wrenching experience of his father simply disappearing. Shortly after the war, this father got on a plane in Warsaw and did not disembark, as expected, in Prague. Five years later he reappeared, released from a Polish jail. In another narrative, a Slovenian father fled during partisan fighting, disappearing for several months in 1944–1945 while fighting the Communists (Zebot 2000). It is no accident that psychological attention to “father-absence” peaked in the 1940s and 1950s. Not only during the war but afterwards, many fathers were not with their families. Other fathers returned home traumatized. Partly in reaction, the family culture that emerged in the postwar period radically accentuated differences between mothers and fathers and kept almost all middle-class mothers in the home, while fathers worked long hours or went back to school on the G.I. Bill. The phenomenon of father-absence even in physically present fathers, as well as the intensity of mother-presence, was certainly one of the roots of my own early interest in mother-daughter relationships and the emotional and substantive parental division of labor, an interest that resulted in The Reproduction of Mothering. Mothers loomed large in the postwar communities in which I and many others of

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my generation grew up. They not only ran the household, but, as volunteers, they created much of the community infrastructure (see Daniels 1988). In contrast to fathers, mothers appear in more varied guises, yet they are never a central focus in the way that fathers (in spite of “father-absence”) often are. Children of survivors tend to subsume mothers into a parental couple (“my parents”). Mothers may be mentioned in passing, taken-for-granted parts of an activity or event as someone describes what he or she and mother did, or where they went. Some describe mothers who were depressed, distracted, or found it difficult to cope, often mothers who were raising children on their own with husbands away at war, living with their own parents once again, suffering in reaction to separation from family and family losses, or trying to survive under conditions of siege. Yet in spite of these descriptions of maternal preoccupation, longing for the emotional presence of mothers is more implied than stated, less articulated than longing for fathers. Nor are mothers objects of curiosity and wonder. Among thirty narratives, only one woman describes the jobs held by her mother and other female relatives (Tymoczko 2000). One or two other mothers are focused on and portrayed as determinedly energetic, resilient, cheerful, or feisty (Berry 2000). It is an occupational hazard of clinical listening to magnify silences, shatterings, explosions, sadness, absence, and loss. And, in spite of the standard set by Erikson, it is also a dangerous temptation, or at least the challenge of a tightrope, to try to cut meaningfully through a social totality to elaborate shared psychological themes, or to cut through the psychic complexity of any individual to pick out patterns or elements in common among psyches, both of which I have just done. Thus, it seems important, even if self-evident, to remind readers (and myself), as did Erikson, in what sometimes seems like an overly buoyant optimism, that the often painful psychic patterns and conflicts that I am describing belong (as is also the case for many of the analysands whose psychic difficulties are the focus of attention in articles and presentations) to a very successful cohort. This cohort, born in all parts of the world and with all manner of childhood experience, managed to attend one of the best universities in the United States. Its members have for the most part taken their early childhoods and college education into rich and fulfilling lives. Contributors describe deep attachments to parents, and the stories told even by those from the most traumatized families include accounts of resilience and the capacity to move forward. Many describe anxiety-inducing, but ultimately accepted, lessons from parents about how to protect oneself from upheavals—to choose, for example, portable professions, to learn many languages, to have concern for the world in the face of nuclear and other global threats. In one memorable instance, an anxious Chinese immigrant father warns his daughter against political activity, because of the dangers that he envisions based on his own experiences in China. Yet, knowing that she is an American daughter, likely to do what she wants, he advises her that if she has to go to the demonstration, she should be sure to sit in the middle! (Chang Sun 2000). Scholars and writers wonder how to represent the Holocaust—the major cataclysmic and tragic event of the twentieth century—or indeed if it can be

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represented at all. Considering, as I have done, the narratives of a few people born into a world at war in no way holds in mind the totality of this war, with its all-engulfing horror. Rather, this chapter suggests, following Erikson, that psychoanalytically inflected attention to the particularities of individual lives in history, and to the patterns of affect and fantasy that these lives express, can give us a window into social and historical processes, even those on the scale of World War II. We do not, in so doing, “reduce” the historical and horrific to a set of individual experiences or psychologize it away. Rather, psychoanalytic listening gives depth and richness to what we analyze politically and historically. Earlier I quoted Erikson: “Men who share an ethnic area, a historical era, or an economic pursuit are guided by common images of good and evil. Infinitely varied, these images reflect the elusive nature of historical change; yet in the form of contemporary social models, of compelling prototypes of good and evil, they assume a decisive concreteness in every individual’s ego development” (1946, p. 17). These images and models, he later proposes, “appear in specific transferences and resistances” (p. 28). Erikson, with great modesty, once claimed, “I have nothing to offer except a way of looking at things” (1950, p. 403). The memories, associations, and dreams of my classmates and me give substance to Erikson’s way of looking, as he melded together Freud’s taken-for-granted locating of individual cases in history and culture and persistent, long-standing interest in the psychological concomitants of civilization and social process. My own responses, as well as my reactions to those of my classmates, suggest that historical and social processes, when they matter, always matter emotionally and unconsciously to individuals, even as they also register in consciousness and cognition. They document the individuality of each of our historical and social experiences while at the same time describing the consequences of belonging to a particular psychohistorical generation and age cohort. Common experiences, especially as they are powerful, demand psychological processing and response, and particular psychological processing and responses are both individually created and patterned in common. Individual lives, and the patterns of affect and fantasy that they express, give us a window into social and historical processes, as both social science and psychoanalysis now increasingly assume. As Freud and Erikson document, we do not, in paying attention to internal worlds of fantasy and affect, reduce the social to a set of individual experiences or psychologize it away. Conversely, as we follow Erikson in generalizing about the psychosocial, we do not lose clinical individuality. Erikson shows us that listening with a psychoanalytic ear gives depth and richness to what we see with a sociological eye, and that looking through a sociological eye gives depth and richness to what we hear. History assumes decisive concreteness in individual experience. During the summer of 1998, as I was reading the essays for Born into a World at War and preparing my epilogue, I went to the Bay Area Jewish Film Festival. There I saw 17 Rue St. Fiacre. This film described how two young Jewish-French children whose parents had been deported were saved and protected by a working-class Catholic

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woman in their small town. Like most of the audience, I was riveted and horrified. These were children, there were photos of these young French children, and I was also brought back to my own school year in Paris, spent when I was eleven and twelve. The film’s children reminded me of my French schoolmates, so much slighter and skinnier than I and my American friends, who had been well-fed from infancy. Yet for the most part, I also experienced myself as watching an historical film about longago events. As the film reaches its conclusion, however, the narrator describes and enumerates the deportation of the village’s Jews. “On January 20, 1944,” he says, “Charles Malmed was deported to Auschwitz. In his convoy, number 66, there were 1,115 Jews. Two hundred and six were children. None of the children survived.” January 20, 1944 was the day on which I was born into a world at war.

Notes 1 I suggest in “Analytic Listening and the Five Senses” (Chodorow 2012a) that each clinician brings particular sense propensities to her listening. Among others, those who pay attention to body sensations include Goldberg (1995, 2004), Jacobs (1991), McLaughlin (2005), and Parsons (2014). Nagel (2013) notices music. Analyst-poets hear the shapes, sounds, and evocative resonance of words (e.g., Hamer 2012; Jones 1997). Others “hear” visually (Palmer 2012). 2 I published a version of my Born into a World at War afterword in American Imago (Chodorow 2002) and drew from it in my contribution to a Festschrift for Neil Smelser (Alexander, Marx, and Williams 2004).The present chapter draws on all these sources: for better or worse, the topic is clearly of unfinished emotional importance for me. 3 Analysts increasingly turn their attention (though this attention varies by country and psychoanalytic approach) to the psychological concomitants and consequences of political and social persecution, trauma, violence and violation, genocide, racism, and ethnic conflict, as well as toward consideration of immigration, social trauma, and other sociopsychic phenomena. Here, the Shoah still remains clinically and phenomenologically central to psychoanalytic investigations, the originary site of social trauma, and its intergenerational transmission. 4 I note throughout this book that my attachment to Erikson is itself a psychohistorical product. I cut my undergraduate social scientific teeth in the Harvard Social Relations Department, home of Erikson and of psychological anthropology. 5 American war babies were not the only and probably not the most important source of developmental theorizing about this cohort. In England, Anna Freud’s war nurseries and Bowlby’s observations and theorizing about attachment and separation were foundational to many portrayals of development that are now taken for granted throughout much of the psychoanalytic, child developmental, and child care world. 6 Erikson, who changed his name several times, had his own personal concerns and lifelong preoccupation with identity (see Friedman 1998; Wallerstein 2014), one that he (like so many of us!) was able to draw from in his theory construction, case studies, and psychobiographies. Yet at the same time, a personal preoccupation is never enough in itself to bring a theory into prominence, or for its widespread utility and generativity to be recognized. Erikson’s conflicts resonated with those of many of us. 7 Another screen, dream, and defense: to this day, I do not really know how to describe my father’s scientific war work or exactly what he did. My images remain those of a toddler watching her father being collected from our Queens apartment by colleagues in order to be driven to work. 8 After she read my original “Born into a World at War” chapter, my mother volunteered a specific memory (or screen memory) from V-J Day, not V-E Day.We were at my cousin’s house, and she picked me up and said, “Nancy, listen to that noise! This is a great day!”

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9 This chapter was originally written for a volume published in 2000, when I lived and taught in Berkeley. Subsequently I gave up my fulfilling academic position, West Coast clinical practice, good friends, and colleagues, out of a not quite articulated sense that I belonged in what my family always called “the East.” 10 I notice in this context Harris (2009), who begins her keynote address to Division 39 of the American Psychological Association with memories of her father’s return from World War II and the immediate tensions that arose between her parents. Also of interest is a novel about the World War II period written by another member of the class of ’65 (Salzman 2013), inspired originally by a family photograph and family lore.

PART II

The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald

5 THE PSYCHOANALYTIC VISION OF HANS LOEWALD

Our present, current experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication (interplay) with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences. Loewald

Hans Loewald bequeaths us a vision of the psyche and psychic life, of the psychoanalytic process, and of the clinical and human goals of psychoanalysis. In all of these realms, he holds, without apparent contradiction, two doubled perspectives. First, he is emphatically ego psychological and emphatically object relational, and second, he maintains a doubled commitment, to both the first topography and the structural theory.1 His views throughout are undergirded by a bidirectional developmental perspective that centers on differentiation and integration.2 Those of us who are inspired by Loewald can remember how we found him and what he meant for us. My initial encounter came in the early 1970s. Later, in my introduction to Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, published early in my psychoanalytic training, I described the evolution of my theoretical commitments. During this period, when I was working to incorporate psychoanalyst, along with psychoanalytic feminist and psychoanalytic sociologist, as part of my professional identity, I regarded Horney and Klein as founding explorers of the psychology of gender. The general theories that then informed my theoretical and clinical work included the object relations theories of Fairbairn and Winnicott, important to me from my earliest writings. I cited Mahler as an influence and then spent several pages (this, I remind us, introducing a collection of papers on psychoanalytic feminism!) on the significance of Loewald: Loewald is certainly familiar to psychoanalysts, as he has been a consistently productive and wide-ranging psychoanalytic writer for several decades.

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He is highly respected within the profession but until recently has not been particularly lionized, adulated, or seen as a theoretical leader. He is not associated with a specific theoretical tradition and is not seen as an independent innovator, maverick, or rebel. There are no (at least not yet) “Loewaldians,” as there are Winnicottians, Kohutians, or Mahlerians. Indeed, he himself seems to be an insistent synthesizer rather than polarizer within psychoanalytic discourse, committed to and able to maintain himself as a drive theorist, ego psychologist, and object-relations theorist who respects self psychology, while also remaining fully enmeshed in the clinical situation that ultimately provides psychoanalysis its truths. (Chodorow 1989, p. 12)3 Hans Loewald, though perhaps the greatest and most wide-ranging contributor to American psychoanalysis, is known in the rest of the analytic world, if at all, only as the author of “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” (1960). He is virtually unknown in the psychoanalysis found in the academic humanities and social sciences. My own introduction to Loewald was not “Therapeutic Action” but “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (1962a), in which I noticed for the first time what I would come to call psychoanalytic “meaning of life” statements (Chodorow 1999a). Here is an example from that paper: “The deepest root of the ambivalence that appears to pervade all relationships, external as well as internal, seems to be the polarity inherent in individual existence of individuation and ‘primary narcissistic union’” (p. 264). My reflections here are an elaboration and documentation of my 1989 claim. They are an attempt to draw together the many facets of Loewaldian thinking, to remind those of us already familiar with Loewald of the range and depth of his contribution, and to introduce Loewald to those who do not know him well. Loewald, in looking at the “deepest root of the ambivalence that appears to pervade all relationships,” is talking not about this or that defense or part of psychic structure, but making an observation about human existence itself. I did not know then that a conception of psychic polarities and unions would characterize Loewald’s thinking more generally, or that he would be among the few analysts since Freud to make a broad humanistic vision of the goals of psychoanalysis central to their theoretical and clinical writing. Loewald is a radical and an innovator, but we have not noticed this until recently. Most of those who consider themselves psychoanalytic radicals or innovators have also been active in psychoanalytic politics, participating in institutional struggles and public debates, like the Kleinians in England and the interpersonal and relational psychoanalysts in the U.S. Alternatively, like Winnicott and Kohut, they have emphasized the originality and uniqueness of their views or, like Erikson, they have been institutionally marginalized. Loewald, by contrast, does not hesitate to say when he disagrees with Freud and other analysts, but as we read his writings, or learn about his role as an analyst, he does not seem to have been an institutional rebel or to have cared much about

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how theoretical struggle plays out in institutional politics. It is possible that, as some American analysts find themselves developing and identifying with the American independent tradition, an intersubjective ego psychology located between classical ego psychology and relational psychoanalysis that insists on the centrality of unconscious intrapsychic fantasy, conflict, and compromise formation and at the same time focuses on the analytic field, this expanding cadre of analysts will also come to acknowledge themselves as Loewaldians. They may be joined by British independents who wish to ground Winnicott in a more precise and articulated metapsychology and conceptualization of the analytic process and the transferencecountertransference dyad. Here I examine two intricately related aspects of Loewald’s vision. First, Loewald has a vision of the psyche and of psychic life. This vision has an elegant and complete wholeness: you do not find any pieces left out, as I think you do in the writings of every other major analytic contributor (except perhaps Freud), each of whom stresses and elaborates for us a part of the whole. Although I cannot document this here, I think we might be able to claim that most of Anglo-American psychoanalysis could be generated from different parts of the Loewaldian oeuvre: Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Hartmann, Erikson, Kohut, and the American relationalists;4 oneperson and two-person psychologies and conceptualizations of the analytic encounter; a metapsychology that does not seem incompatible with, or of a different order from, clinical theory; a theory of mind; and a developmental theory. In contrast to Freud, however, whose writings I sometimes liken to his description of the unconscious (it does not recognize contradiction or negation), there do not seem to be any contradictions within Loewald’s vision. Unlike Freud’s, Loewald’s writing does not require the reader to hold in mind several mutually incompatible definitions of the ego, several different drive theories that do and do not supersede one another, conceptions of primary process from earlier writings that do not seem to mesh with accounts of the functioning of the unconscious in later works. Loewald, remarkably, turns all of these tensions into a single complex and multifaceted vision. Second, Loewald is a visionary. As a visionary, he imagines what constitutes a meaningful life, and he has a conception of how we can help our patients and ourselves move toward such a life. Writing about Loewald, it must be admitted, feels like a personal project. Perhaps because he has not yet become a psychoanalytic icon or leader of a school, and because analysts do not call themselves Loewaldians (nor, apparently, did Loewald want there to be “Loewaldians”), he has been, for me, as he seems to have been for others who have written about his contribution, something of a private passion. For some (e.g., Leavy 1989; Lear 1990, 1996, 2000; Balsam 1997), admiration has grown from personal connection. Yet more generally, reactions to Loewald’s writings often have an immediate personal feel (see Fogel 1991a,b; Fogel et al. 1996; Friedman 1996; Kaywin 1993; Mitchell 2000), as I learned also while chairing a panel on “the Loewaldian legacy” (Chodorow 2008; Jacobs 2008; Friedman 2008; Balsam 2008; Pinsky 2008).

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It is a challenge to turn this private passion—experienced, as Loewald himself might describe it, in undifferentiated, magical-evocative, primary-process form— into public secondary-process reasoning, when its psychological roots are a bit murky and unclear. Winnicottians, who seem to share a similar experience, have done better at putting their enmeshment into writing, perhaps because Winnicott himself gave them a formulation, the transitional object, that could recursively apply to their appropriation of him. Correcting the classical analytic view that neutrality calls for the stance of an uninvolved scientific observer, Loewald claims that analytic work, rather, “requires an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and for individual development” (1960, p. 229). My task here, and the task of other Loewald interpreters, seems to be similar: how to have the scientific objectivity and neutrality necessary to communicate while also conveying love and respect.

Loewald’s doubled vision In both his view of the psyche and his imagining of psychic possibility, Loewald holds a doubled vision, a doubled initiating perspective on psychic life, both emphatically ego psychological and emphatically object relational. This holistic vision is in part enabled by Loewald’s great respect, though he is not a child analyst, for a developmental view of the psyche that goes from birth throughout life. Thus, from one point of view, beginning with his first paper, “Ego and Reality” (1951), continuing with his emphasis on transference as an intrapsychic integration of unconscious and preconscious (1960), and eventuating in his thinking on oedipal individuation (1979), Loewald is very much an ego psychologist in the vein of Hartmann. He is interested in the establishment of ego and reality from the point of view of a single ego, in the differentiation and development of psychic structure out of what Hartmann considered an ego-id matrix, and in different forms of thinking. In this context, Loewald, throughout his work, investigates how the individual psyche creates both itself and the world, whatever the givens of innate, cognitive, material, or interpersonal reality. In “Ego and Reality,” he tells us that he does not hold that objects and reality do not exist if we do not experience or create them. His account, he claims, “does not imply . . . that there is, for the observer, no world, no environment that sends stimuli to the organism. We are concerned here merely with the question how this world becomes psychologically constituted” (1951, p. 11). From this perspective, we could consider Loewald’s view of the psyche as radically subjectivist. By shifting perspective, however, Loewald is equally and emphatically an object relations theorist or intersubjectivist. Here he moves from his pristine ego psychology to the view that no subject exists outside of a relational matrix: “the primary datum for a genetic, psychoanalytic psychology,” he claims, “would be object relations. This relatedness is the psychic matrix out of which intrapsychic instincts and ego, and extrapsychic object, differentiate” (1978b, p. 216). The object world

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is, thus, both created through ego/object differentiation and there to begin with as part of primary relatedness. Loewald’s study of primary relatedness culminates in his account of transference-countertransference and the analytic process (1986). Here I elaborate on both aspects of Loewald’s doubled ego psychological and object-relational perspective, and I consider how these influence his vision of the psyche and psychoanalytic goals.

Primary undifferentiation and contemporary infant research Before developing my account, I address at some length a potential difficulty for contemporary readers.5 Loewald’s Mahlerian assumptions about primary oneness and symbiosis have been superseded by Stern (1985) and others and can no longer be regarded as empirically substantiated. My treatment here is more extensive than is perhaps warranted yet at the same time cannot do justice to the subject. Such a difficulty arises with all psychoanalytic theories that make assumptions about infant development and capacity, given that these assumptions begin as far back as Freud, and our empirical understanding of infant development has changed radically. A solution favored by some analysts is to argue against empirical approaches in general. These analysts claim either that all relevant psychoanalytic data emerge from the consulting room and that infancy research and child observation are therefore irrelevant, or that empirical research techniques cannot pick up the subtle unconscious infantile processes that psychoanalysis describes. By contrast, I personally am in favor of psychoanalysis recognizing and taking seriously all research from related fields that may bear on psychoanalytic claims, whether in neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology, attachment research, anthropology, or sociology. It can only harm and marginalize our field to dismiss such evidence.6 At the same time, we have to recognize and acknowledge that empirical researchers are themselves sometimes impatient with other criteria that we use to evaluate theory.7 These include coherence, consistency, elegance, internal logic, capacity to encompass many elements, place in the history of theory, and so forth. In the case of Loewald, we need to address specifically the extent to which his assumptions about primary unity, oneness, or undifferentiation in the infantile psyche (assumptions found in psychoanalytic writing beginning with Freud’s hypothesis of primary narcissism) vitiate his clinical and theoretical account. A full treatment of Loewaldian theory in relation to contemporary research would be a treatise in itself (one well worth writing), but that is not my goal here. What is needed, not only with Loewald but with any theory in relation to research, is to attend to the developmental, theoretical, and clinical understandings Loewald was trying to achieve. We need to consider the ways in which his multifaceted vision might be seen to be consonant with, or reconciled to, our current empirical understandings. Most important, if we understand what kind of theoretical and clinical work Loewald’s account of development is meant to do, we can evaluate the extent to which his empirically inaccurate assumptions affect

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these goals. Even if we can locate places where Loewald’s views do not accord with our current understanding, it does not seem useful to criticize Loewald for not knowing, in 1951 or 1978, what Stern wrote in 1985.8 Just as he does not question the objective existence of the life-world, Loewald does not claim expertise on cognitive differentiation or innate cognitive structures and capacities. He is in the realm of psychic reality and personal meaning, and he is using a developmental model to give an account of aspects of psychological functioning that he has found it necessary to keep in view clinically and in order to understand what we mean by psychic health. Following Freud and Mahler (Loewald [1978b] was presented at a symposium in honor of Mahler’s eightieth birthday), he uses the language of differentiation and makes the oscillation between an originary undifferentiation, or primary oneness, and differentiation central to human functioning. It would seem, moreover, that Loewald’s account could easily be modified to accord with a view that the newborn infant has some cognitive and emotional capacity to recognize otherness, and is neither “symbiotically fused” nor “narcissistically unrelated.”9 What I have called Loewald’s radical subjectivism presumes what I believe Stern and others describe: the ego (or self, as Stern would call it) comes into being only insofar as it experiences itself in relation to the object, and the object can be apprehended only in terms of the current (clinical or developmental) state of the ego. In clinical and theoretical terms, Loewald means to ground his observation that psychic life can dedifferentiate into narcissism, fragmentation, and other “primitive” states (including nonpathological “merger” experiences like religious and spiritual feelings, a mother’s sense of oneness with her infant, sexual union, and so forth) and then differentiate into the most highly developed capacities to relate to, or cognize, the complexity of different others, creative projects, culture, and the material world. In considering more specifically some of Loewald’s formulations, I think they are remarkably consistent with some of what we find in developmental psychology (moreover, it is worth noting that Loewald is one of a very few non-child analysts among major second- and third-generation English and American thinkers to take seriously a developmental view of the psyche in the first place). To begin, Loewald’s formulation has to presume the innate biological and cognitive capacities that enable differentiation to occur. There is nothing in it inconsistent with an innatist view that infants are predisposed to organize experience in cognitively and perceptually particular ways. Thus, when Stern claims that “preverbal existential senses of self” (1985, p. 6) start to form at birth, we would assume that, in Loewaldian terms, these senses are what enable the first experience of ego and reality, or drive and object, to occur. When Stern writes of the “organizing subjective experience of whatever it is that will later be verbally referenced as the ‘self’” (p. 7) and claims that “infants begin to experience a sense of emergent self from birth” (p. 10), this organizing subjective experience seems consonant with Loewald’s account of originary ego experiences in the matrix of relatedness. Primary nondifferentiation, as Loewald describes it, does not imply a “confusion of self and other” (p. 10). Stern claims that the first two months are “some

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kind of presocial, precognitive, preorganized life” (p. 37). Loewald’s description of the early development of sociality, cognition, and organization suggests that the self’s or ego’s experience of the other begins in what he calls the pre-stages of the object-world: “A more appropriate term for such pre-stages . . . might be the noun ‘shapes’; in the sense of configurations of an indeterminate degree and fluidity of organization” (1960, p. 236). Stern describes the coordinate development of a core self and core other (1985, p. 10), just as Loewald (1951) claims that ego and reality develop together. Loewald, thus, is not so much insisting on primal union or symbiotic unity as he is describing, like Stern, how greater and greater differentiation and organization of self and other (Stern’s terms) or ego and object (Loewald’s) develop. Stern makes the point, consonant not only with Loewald but with most ego psychologists, that “affective and cognitive processes cannot be readily separated” (p. 42). It is a viewpoint that Loewald has taken not only in his account of ego/object differentiation but also in his account of the development of language. Loewald’s goal, then, is to describe the developmental trajectory of increasing differentiation and organization, whether or not there is rudimentary cognitive differentiation and a propensity to organize to begin with. Here, Stern could be seen retrospectively to provide Loewald’s research grounding, as he suggests that the infant experiences “not only a sense of an organization . . . but the cominginto-being of organization as well as the result” (p. 45), and as he describes how, although the infant may have many different experiences, the capacity to relate these experiences one to the other is a developmental product. Loewald’s account of developing organization in terms of self-other differentiation and the oscillation of these issues throughout life seems, especially for a non-researcher and non-child analyst who was writing before the explosion of infancy research, remarkably prescient. Very much in the Loewaldian developmental vein, Stern’s emergent self is both the process and product of forming relations between isolated experiences. As Stern puts this, it is “the experience of organization-coming-into-being” (p. 47). Just as Loewald has, from his position as an analyst of adults, reached to describe in infants the “pre-stages” of the object world and claimed that “sensory perception in its initial stages is a global affair” (1978a, p. 185), so Stern describes the infant’s amodal perception and representation which enable the translation of experience from one sensory modality to another. Loewald writes of shapes and indeterminate and fluid configurations, and Stern claims that “the information is probably not experienced as belonging to any one particular sensory modality . . . these abstract representations that the infant experiences are not sights and sounds and touches and nameable objects, but rather shapes, intensities, and temporal patterns—the more ‘global’ qualities of experience” (1985, p. 51). Similarly, Loewald’s account of language development seems to describe in general terms what current research on mother-infant vocalizing and attunement has found. Loewald claims that language takes shape within the mother-child field, that language is learned through mother-child interaction and meaning, and that language is originally immersed in a particularized mother-child relationship

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and based on emotional, as much as syntactic, patterning. Current research also documents the fine-tuned vocal and visual interactions of mother and infant (e.g., Beebe and Lachmann 2002). Loewald could be describing research videotapes as he suggests that the infant is “bathed” in sound and rhythm and that “the emotional relationship to the person from whom the word is learned plays a significant, in fact crucial, part in how alive the link between thing and word turns out to be” (1978a, p. 197).

Loewald’s vision of the psyche Loewald’s vision of the psyche and psychic life begins from the premise that, in the psychic organization of the subject, there are initially no inner and outer, no ego in relation to reality, no recognizable drives, and no primary process differentiated from secondary process (Loewald, 1951, 1960, 1962a, 1978a,b). All these are progressively created out of a global structure, or differentiated out of an undifferentiated unity. From the psyche’s point of view, ego, objects, external reality, and drives all come into existence together. Development consists, then, not just in subjectively creating the affective and cognitive meanings of a self and objects whose existence are assumed as given, but in creating the psychological existence of particularized and differentiated self and object in the first place. Only after internal and external have been established can projection and introjection occur, can it be meaningful to speak of libido or aggression being directed toward an object or toward the self. Thus, in Loewald’s view the projective and introjective exchanges described by object relations theorists like Klein and Fairbairn, who assume the existence of ego and object from birth, can begin only after boundaries and structures have been created that set ego and object psychologically apart (for Loewald, this begins in the second month). Loewald claims here to follow the later Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, for whom, he argues, “ego (subject) and external reality . . . differentiate from and organize each other instead of being seen as accomplished facts ab initio” (1978a, p. 194). Boundary-creating processes thus create the existence and meaning, each in relation to the other, of self and object, internality and externality: primary externalization signifies that externality is being established; primary internalization signifies that internality is being constituted. On this level, then, we cannot speak of externalization (projection) and internalization as defenses (against inner conflict or external deprivation); we must speak of them as boundary-creating processes and as processes of differentiation of an undifferentiated state. It is true, nevertheless, that defenses against inner conflict and against outer deprivation promote and color such differentiation. (Loewald 1962a, p. 266) Internal and external reality, inner and outer are not qualities given in any direct empirical “for all time” sense. From the point of view of the psyche, the adaptation

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focused on by Freud and Hartmann can come into play only after the external world of reality has been psychically created. Ego and object differentiation go hand in hand, and inner and outer reality are continually reconstituted through externalization and internalization. Loewald’s language here, of externalization and internalization rather than the closely cognate projection and introjection, terms he also occasionally uses, reflects his formation within the ego psychological tradition. He is not as interested in stressing the unconscious fantasies that drive projection and introjection as in the structure formation and ego organization that include identifications, incorporations, fantasies, and the modifications and transformations of libidinal and aggressive drives. Internal and external are qualities elaborated by the subject, and their initial developmental creation sets off a lifelong process in which not only the meaning but also the constitution and organization of inner and outer are negotiated, as new meanings and objects are seen to be either within the person or in the outside world, and, if within, as internal self or internal other. “Reality becomes objective at last,” claims Loewald (1962a), but as process rather than as outcome, so that “objectivation” and “de-objectivation” of ego and reality can continue: without further differentiation of the inner world no further differentiation of the object world takes place . . . Internal and external relationships . . . continue to supplement and influence each other in various ways during adult life; there are more or less continuous shifts and exchanges between internal and external relationships. (pp. 267–268) Where the constitution of ego and objects is best seen from the point of view of the ego, the fully object-relational grounding of Loewald’s ego psychology is especially clear in his conceptualizations of the differentiation and creation of drives and of the development of secondary-process thought. Just as, in comparison to founding object relations theorists, Loewald does not posit the original existence of ego and object, so, in comparison to Freud, the founding drive theorist, Loewald does not start from the givenness of drives but from the premise that the developing person shapes what come to be his drives—his characteristic experiences and invocations of aggression and libido. Drives are created along with ego and object and help to give the object meaning. Cathexis, suggests Loewald, is not a “fuel-injection” notion, nor are drives innate energic forces seeking release. Rather, cathexis is “an organizing mental act” that helps to turn available material into a specific object in the first place (1978a, p. 195; for a cognate argument, see Jacobson 1964). The child’s emotionally laden interpersonal experiences influence the personal creation of drives: “instincts . . . are to be seen as relational phenomena from the beginning and not as autochthonous forces seeking discharge” (Loewald 1972, p. 322). Even that ultimately cognitive capacity, language, develops in and through object relations. The mother’s speech, though drawn from a pre-given common language, has the particular resonance for the child of the relational and affective context in which she speaks. Her words have not just consensual, linguistic meaning (Loewald is

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not a Lacanian) but what Loewald calls the “magical-evocative . . . aspect” of language (1978a, pp. 199–200). As Loewald puts it, “language is typically first conveyed to the child by the parental voice and in an all-pervasive way . . . In these situations [the mother’s] speech and voice are part and parcel of the global mother-child interaction” (p. 180). In these early experiences of language, the primary caretaker speaks with the infant not so much to communicate public, syntactic meanings, but to create a global sense of “we-ness,” or being with the infant: “The words of which her speaking is composed form undifferentiated ingredients of the total situation or event experienced by the infant. He . . . is immersed, embedded in a flow of speech that is part and parcel of a global experience within the mother-child field” (p. 185). Loewald notes that this form of experience and use of language express a primary-process, rather than secondary-process, global character and density: “Words here are . . . indistinguishable ingredients of global states of affairs. The mother’s flow of words does not convey meaning to or symbolize ‘things’ for the infant . . . but the sounds, tone of voice, and rhythm of speech are fused within the apprehended global event” (p. 187). These are the levels of language that, as Loewald also describes, are re-created in poetry and religious devotion.10 Ego and object organization, drives, and primary-process/secondary-process differentiation and elaboration all come together in Loewald’s account of oedipal development (1979). Preoedipal “pre-stages” of the ego/object world in a global matrix, without fully formed drives or secondary-process distinction among objects, precede oedipal objects, which in turn precede postoedipal object-attachments, each more differentiated and specified in the form of their cathexis in relation to the subject. Oedipal objects, Loewald argues, are themselves “intermediate, ambiguous” entities (1979, p. 397), embodying both primary configurations on the one hand and separateness as objects of sexual desire on the other. Postoedipal object attachments need to transcend these preoedipal and intermediate oedipal qualities. In structural terms, primary identifications are transformed into ego ideal and superego formation. Paralleling Klein’s description of reparation, Loewald claims that not only nonincestuous object choice but also atonement for moving beyond parents and destroying them in fantasy are central oedipal tasks. Centering psychic life and development in terms of developmental differentiation and organizational processes unifies a Loewaldian vision of the psyche. Ego and reality—an increasingly complex ego and object world—progressively differentiate out of a more globalized experience in which externality and internality are not fixed. Drive potentials become the ego’s drives, and these drives in turn organize and give bodily affective meaning—cathexis—to the object world. Language moves from global, affective density to the complexities of secondaryprocess thinking. Objects are, at first, pre-stages of objects, configurations with indeterminacy and fluidity, which move to oedipal intermediacy until they become postoedipal libidinal love objects. Equally significant from the point of view of psychic functioning, Loewald from his earliest writing insists that development is from the outset a bidirectional continuum rather than a progression of stages. From his tentative assertion that

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“the subject . . . of psychological survival of original stages beside the later stages of development” needs further study (1951, p. 10), he moves on to forcefully assert that “it is not merely a question of survival of former stages of ego-reality integration, but that people shift considerably, from day to day, at different periods in their lives, in different moods and situations, from one such level to other levels. In fact, it would seem that the more alive people are (though not necessarily the more stable), the broader their range of ego-reality levels” (p. 20). Throughout his work, then, Loewald points to lifelong oscillation between differentiated, oedipal and postoedipal, secondary-process, ego-autonomous forms of existence and thought, and merged, preoedipal, primary-process, nonlinguistic forms—what he calls “our psychotic core.”11 Development may originally proceed from one set of processes to the other but throughout life these are non-temporally distinct modes of being, ranges of psychic functioning available to the individual. Here is how Loewald concludes “Ego and Reality”: Perhaps the so-called fully developed, mature ego is not one that has become fixated at the presumably highest or latest stage of development, having left the others behind it, but is an ego that integrates its reality in such a way that the earlier and deeper levels of ego-reality integration remain alive as dynamic sources of higher organization. (1951, p. 20) It is this conception of continual integration that generates Loewald’s psychoanalytic vision.

Loewald’s vision of psychoanalytic goals All elements of Loewald’s vision of psychoanalytic goals are reflected in his conceptualization of the psyche. His developmental account, radically subjective from the point of view of the ego but always set within the mother-child, and later parent-child, matrix, informs his view of the psychoanalytic dyad and the psychoanalytic process. Loewald, finally, sees psychoanalysis in terms of individual intrapsychic goals—connecting unconscious with preconscious; individuation— but he conceptualizes psychoanalysis as a developmental process in the context of transference-countertransference and the special role of the analyst. His rethinking of transference and fantasy and his conception of individuation best capture this psychoanalytic vision. From the beginning, the analysis of the psyche and the clinical goals of psychoanalysis have been intertwined with psychoanalytic visions (Chodorow 1999a). From Freud we have the goal of making the unconscious conscious and ego coming to be where id was, as well as his less formal statements that we want to replace neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness or to enable our patients to love and work. Many analysts write, listen, and make day-to-day choices about appropriate interventions without revisiting these visions, but Loewald does not.

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Through his attention to the larger meaning of life, Loewald gives us a profound and powerful conception of analytic goals. In the ego psychological tradition that replaced the first topography with the structural theory, the goal of “making the unconscious conscious” was elided with or replaced by “where id was, there shall ego be,” implying that the unconscious, like the id, is best replaced. This strand of ego psychological thinking (exemplified best, perhaps, by Gray [1994] and those he influenced) seems to want to substitute the rational ego for the irrational and to downplay unconscious life in favor of consciousness. Similarly, transference was once (although it is, of course, no longer) seen as an impediment to psychoanalysis. But there is still sometimes a tendency to conflate analyzing the transference with modulating or overcoming it. From within the ego psychological tradition, Loewald develops an alternative interpretation of the relations of unconscious and conscious and of transference and reality, returning us to a view of the psyche and psychic change influenced by the first topography as much as by the structural theory. For Loewald, a meaningful human life is founded not on replacing unconscious life with consciousness or secondary-process thought, or on overcoming the influence of the unconscious, but on the infusion of unconscious life into, and its integration with, consciousness. Unconscious fantasies expressed in dreams and transferences enrich life and give it meaning. If, as Freud puts it, the psyche is composed of two records (the psychic reality of unconscious fantasy on the one side, and conscious, secondaryprocess thought on the other), then the classical ego psychological position seems to advocate replacing the former with the latter, whereas Loewald is in favor of constantly intertwining the two—conscious and unconscious, transference and reality—such that any single thought or feeling is in the best case multiply embedded in and creates both realities. In his most influential paper, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” Loewald points out that Freud used the term transference in three ways. In what was to become its common meaning, he used it to refer to the transfer of relations with infantile objects onto later objects.12 Yet Freud also wrote of the transfer of libido from ego onto objects. Finally, he uses the term to refer to the way unconscious ideas transfer their intensity onto preconscious and ultimately conscious ideas (as in dreams, when unconscious, intensely charged thoughts enter consciousness by being connected to day residues). For Loewald, transference in all three senses is normal and desirable, but it is the third meaning, the least object-related or interpersonal meaning, that most concerns him. Loewald implies that transference, in the sense of the transfer of intensity from unconscious to conscious (i.e., the same processes of attribution and affective casting that were originally seen as problematic in the psychoanalytic situation), gives conscious life its depth, texture, and richness. Psychoanalysis discovered how preconscious and unconscious interact through the study of neuroses and dreams, but the ways they do so “are only the more or less pathological, magnified, or distorted versions of normal mechanisms”

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(1960, p. 248). We live our conscious present most fully precisely when it is infused with our unconscious, as we have created it, and our past, as we have experienced it and made it ours. In taking issue with the distinction between the real relationship and the transference relationship that needs analysis and resolution, Loewald remarks that the integration of ego and reality consists in, and the continued integrity of ego and reality depends on, transference of unconscious processes and “contents” on to new experiences and objects of contemporary life . . . there is neither such a thing as reality nor a real relationship, without transference. Any “real relationship” involves transfer of unconscious images to present-day objects. In fact, present-day objects are objects, and thus real, in the full sense of the word . . . only to the extent to which this transference, in the sense of transformational interplay between unconscious and preconscious, is realized. (pp. 252, 254) In his famous analogy for the gains that come from the transferential integration of unconscious meanings with consciousness, Loewald describes the turning of ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts of the unconscious “taste blood” and waken when they find something familiar in conscious and preconscious life—the day residues that enable dream formation, for example. The analytic goal is to transform these ghosts that haunt conscious life into ancestors: Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life. Transference is pathological insofar as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts . . . [In analysis] ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defenses but haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. (1960, p. 249) But although transferences, like ghosts, need to be brought to light and analyzed, they are not something to be got over, something that interferes with the reality of daily life. Loewald makes a strong case for transference: far from being . . . “the enduring monument of man’s profound rebellion against reality and his stubborn persistence in the ways of immaturity,” transference is the “dynamism” by which the instinctual life of man, the id, becomes ego and by which reality becomes integrated and maturity is achieved. Without such transference—of the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life—to

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the preconscious and to present-day life and contemporary objects—without such transference, or to the extent to which such transference miscarries, human life become sterile and an empty shell. (p. 250) Loewald, then, makes our capacity for transference into a signal of aliveness. Transference, the psychological shifting between past and present or unconscious and conscious in which transference consists, gives life its vitality and vibrancy. Transference does not only limit, distort, or negatively shape experience—though the ways in which it does so are the particular focus of clinical psychoanalysis. Rather, transference also makes experience fuller, shaping and giving meaning to intrapsychic experience, interpersonal encounters, and encounters with culture and nature.13 What matters, claims Loewald, is not the presence of transference, but whether one lives one’s transferences or is lived by them. The unconscious does not have to become, and cannot entirely become, conscious, but it can nonetheless infuse being and relating, as analysts who now think in terms of psychoanalysis containing empathy, reverie, and unconscious communications between patient and analyst make clear. At the same time, Loewald does not idealize the unconscious and primaryprocess as opposed to secondary-process thinking (as many psychoanalytic social thinkers and critics have). He has clinical as well as visionary goals in mind when he says, “on the other hand, the unconscious needs present-day external reality (objects) and present-day psychic reality (the preconscious) for its own continuity, lest it be condemned to live the shadow life of ghosts or to destroy life” (p. 250). Loewald reconsiders fantasy as well as transference. According to all one-person psychologies, unconscious fantasy is most centrally what is expressed in transference, even if their ideas of correct interpretive technique and their conceptions of unconscious fantasy and its origins differ—for Kleinians, anxiety-driven constructions of ego, body ego, and object that we create through splitting, projection, and introjection; for ego psychologists, compromise formations instigated by drivederivative wishes that have met ego or superego resistance. In both views, an important goal of analysis is to reestablish the link between fantasy and reality. As Loewald puts it, “In the analytic process the infantile fantasies and memories, by being linked up with the present actuality of the analytic situation and the analyst, regain meaning and may be reinserted within the stream of the total mental life” (1975, pp. 362–363). In this context, Loewald argues that unconscious fantasy gives personal meaning to an otherwise meaningless reality, and that reestablishing linkages between fantasy and reality is not the same thing as substitution or replacement. Loewald asserts, “fantasy is unreal only insofar as its communication with present actuality is inhibited or severed. To that extent, however, present actuality is unreal too. Perhaps a better word than ‘unreal’ is ‘meaningless’” (p. 362). The point, therefore, is not to overcome fantasy any more than transference: “At the same time,

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as the present actuality of the analytic situation is being linked up with infantile fantasies, this present gains or regains meaning, i.e., that depth of experience which comes about by its live communication with the infantile roots of experience” (p. 363). Fantasy and reality come to resonate – fantasy, anchored as it is in primary process and affect, deepening and enriching reality and reality keeping us rooted and connected to the world. It is not unconscious fantasy per se, but split-off, repudiated unconscious fantasy that cannot inform creativity or other aspects of a full emotional life. In contrast to psychoanalysts (and psychoanalytic cultural thinkers) who suspect that reflecting on psychic health will lead to the replacement of analysis, the investigation of the mind for its own sake, by curative goals or social normativity, and those who prefer the pessimism of “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Loewald makes direct, optimistic claims: “psychic health has to do with an optimal, although by no means necessarily conscious, communication between unconscious and preconscious, between the infantile, archaic stages and structures of the psychic apparatus and its later stages and structures of organization” (1960, p. 254). Informed by his developmental understanding of the psyche, Loewald’s views of transference and fantasy point toward an integration, not only of unconscious and conscious, but also of past and present. In turn, intrapsychic integration of past and present begins to bring object relations back in. Loewald has reminded us that transference moves most significantly from unconscious to conscious rather than from past to present, but he also notes, anticipating later developments, that “the patient’s behavior, while importantly determined by transference displacements from his past, often is triggered by the analyst’s behavior or words, so that it represents also countertransference on the part of the patient” (1986, p. 279). In turn, transference-countertransference comes from both past and present; it “is a new rendition, shaped by these [past] origins, by later experiences and growth, and increasingly modified by the libidinally based transactions in the analytic encounter” (p. 286). Subjective past and present and, thus, past and current ego and object relations in the analytic encounter, are in the end mutually determinative and constitutive: reliving the past is apt to be influenced by novel present experience . . . Inasmuch as re-enactment is a form of remembering, memories may change under the impact of present experience . . . It is thus not only true that the present is influenced by the past, but also that the past—as a living force within the patient—is influenced by the present. (1975, p. 360) The ghosts of the unconscious may have arisen in the past, but it is their present haunting that is problematic. The “lost connections” (1960, p. 249) that psychoanalysis needs to unbury are as much between unconscious and preconscious as between past and present.

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Loewald’s psychoanalytic vision includes an oedipal emancipation necessary to individuation, an emancipation that requires recognizing and taking responsibility for our lives as our own. Growing up involves, inevitably, destroying one’s internal parents, both as libidinal objects and as sources of authority, replacing the people who once had responsibility for us: It is no exaggeration to say that the assumption of responsibility for one’s own life and its conduct is in psychic reality tantamount to the murder of the parents, to the crime of parricide . . . Not only is parental authority destroyed by wresting authority from the parents and taking it over, but the parents, if the process were thoroughly carried out, are being destroyed as libidinal objects as well. (1979, p. 389) In this view, individuation, autonomy, and agency become forms of responsibility for self rather than rejection of dependence on or involvement with others: “Responsibility to oneself . . . is the essence of superego as internal agency . . . It involves appropriating or owning up to one’s needs and impulses as one’s own, impulses or desires we appear to have been born with or that seem to have taken shape in interaction with parents during infancy” (p. 392). Loewald’s view of self-recognition and responsibility, then, is very much in the realm of Klein’s depressive position, Winnicott’s gathering impingement into omnipotence, and Erikson’s ego integrity. As Loewald puts it, “Such appropriation . . . means to experience ourselves as agents, notwithstanding the fact that we were born without our informed consent and did not pick our parents” (p. 392). The crime of internal parricide generates guilt, and, in turn, a central part of agency is atoning for the damage we have done in separating and creating our own lives. In describing psychoanalytic visions, it is hard not to think in terms of fixed developmental or analytic achievements. However, Loewald’s visionary goals are not conceptualized as permanent. In analysis and in life, Loewald implies, what makes life meaningful—a desirable interchange between fantasy and reality, unconscious and conscious, differentiation and dedifferentiation, individuation and merger—is never a once-and-for-all achievement. We return again to Loewald’s felicitous use of the developmental model, in which his conceptions of psychic life stress continual activity—process rather than product. Loewald describes how externality and internality, and the boundaries between them, are continually re-created, oscillating between fusion and merger on the one side and oedipal individuation and difference on the other. He argues for moving beyond associating the one with regressive and the other with progressive moments in human development and psychological life. Against one-way developmental accounts, Loewald especially values what we get from the earliest period of development, when self and other are fluid and shifting. “Oedipal” projects of individuation and morality and “preoedipal” concerns with boundaries, separation, connection, and the transitional space continue throughout life.

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Psychoanalysis, then, holds a both-and view: It seems to stand and fall with the proposition that the emergence of a relatively autonomous individual is the culmination of human development . . . On the other hand, owing in part to analytic research, there is a growing awareness of the force and validity of another striving, that for unity, symbiosis, fusion, merging, or identification—whatever name we wish to give to this sense of and longing for nonseparateness and undifferentiation. (1979, pp. 401–402) From such psychoanalytic visions of undifferentiation and differentiation as primary ego processes, we are led back to psychoanalytic visions of object relations, intrinsic ego-object relatedness and the mutual constitution of ego and object. The story of object relations begins for Loewald, as I have suggested, in the motherinfant matrix. It proceeds through the complexity of oedipality, in which Loewald rethinks the character of oedipal objects to emphasize their ambiguous duality in subject-object differentiation in addition to their specific role in libidinal development. Oedipal objects, in their incestuous nature, must be moved beyond and hence are subject necessarily to parricide. But oedipal objects are also transitional. They inhabit a realm and space of being one with and different, like and unlike, part of the subject and yet also an object. This feature gives the oedipal constellation its intensity and intense love its charge. Oedipal objects are important because they are, at the same time, both extensions of the self, linked to the subject by preoedipal bonds of identification and oneness, and objects of sexual desire, as Loewald (whose intellect was first formed at a gymnasium and then through his studies in philosophy) puts it, both identificata and objecta. Loewald uses his insight into the ambiguity of the oedipal object to move us into the area in which subjectivity and objectivity are endlessly negotiated: “If we exclude the whole realm of identification and empathy from normality . . . we arrive at a normality that has little resemblance to actual life. Identification and empathy, where subject-object boundaries are temporarily suspended or inoperative, play a significant part in everyday interpersonal relations, not to mention the psychoanalyst’s and psychotherapist’s daily working life” (1979, p. 403). Identification and empathy on the one hand and oedipal individuality on the other enable the range of relatedness in which psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis can work. Loewald argues forcefully for a view of the analytic encounter shaped by transference and countertransference, filled with the analyst’s as well as the patient’s affect and fantasy: “the analyst’s emotional investment, acknowledged or not by either party, is a decisive factor in the curative process . . . If a capacity for transference . . . is a measure of the patient’s analyzability, the capacity for countertransference is a measure of the analyst’s ability to analyze” (1986, pp. 285–286). Loewald’s theorizing of transference and countertransference further emphasizes the object-relational strand fundamental to his thinking. These may be seen in terms of patient’s and analyst’s reactions to each other’s transference and

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countertransference or as any feeling about or reaction on the part of patient or analyst to their relationship or events within it. They may be conceptualized as patient’s or analyst’s transfer of unconscious to conscious or past to present in the analytic encounter and in the creation of the analytic space. In all these conceptualizations, and in the analytic consulting room, transference and countertransference are “two faces of the same dynamic, rooted in the inextricable intertwinings with others in which individual life originates and remains throughout the life of the individual in numberless elaborations, derivatives, and transformations” (1986, p. 276). At the same time, however, even as Loewald sees analyst and patient as “coactor[s] on the analytic stage” (1960, p. 223), he does not see them as playing the same roles. Loewald does not have trouble seeing the analyst as having skills and capacities not currently available to the patient. She must have the capacity for countertransference and empathy but, equally important, the capacity for analytic thinking. In this different role and way of thinking, the analyst represents the future, or a slightly more differentiated and integrated level of experiencing than the patient. And, just as the analyst’s capacity for countertransference is a measure of her ability to analyze, so also is her capacity to fluctuate between differentiation and primary connection. The analysand, for her part, needs to be bathed in the flow of affect and the music of words from the analyst, recalling the global features of early experiencing, but she also needs interpretation: “By an interpretation, both the unconscious experience and a higher organizational level of that experience are made available to the patient” (p. 242).

Conclusions As commentators increasingly recognize, there are many facets to the psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald—to Loewald’s vision of the psyche and his visionary thinking. Here I describe Loewald’s doubled perspective: a radically subjectivist ego psychology that begins entirely from the viewpoint of one psyche and an equally intrinsic object relations theory claiming that, from birth, no one and no experience exists outside of a matrix of relatedness. Second, I emphasize Loewald’s developmental view of the psyche. Third, I point to the ways in which Loewald shows how all aspects of psychic life can be conceptualized along axes of differentiationdedifferentiation. Loewald’s doubled vision emphasizes both the intensity and depth and the range of experience. Assessments of intensity and depth are found in Loewald’s conceptualizations of the integration of preconscious and unconscious and of fantasy or transference and reality. Range is found in his vision of the oscillation between subject-object unity and oneness, on the one hand, and oedipal differentiation and object love, on the other. Subject-object oneness is rooted in primary emotional and irrational ways of being that we also elaborate into religious feeling. It is reflected in an affectively charged and evocative language that we find in poetry. Oedipal differentiation enables scientific and other secondary-process thought, as well as adult sexual and parental relationships that recognize the individuality and distinction of the other.

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Intensity, depth, and range characterize experience as we conceive it both from a radical subjectivist position and from the point of view of object relations. Oedipal emancipation, necessary to full individuation and individuality, goes along with the irremediable continuity of the mother-child (and analyst-analysand) matrix, a relational setting that forms the basis from which experience grows. Loewald, as always, condenses his complex theoretical vision of the psyche and his psychoanalytic vision, as both life goals and analytic goals, in phenomenologically immediate terms: “Our present, current experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication (interplay) with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences” (1960, p. 251).

Notes 1 This duality can evoke different readings. At a conference on Loewald in the late 1990s at which I first presented these ideas, I called Loewald a radically subjectivist ego psychologist with some object-relational leanings. Stephen Mitchell, drawing on almost the same quotes and sources, claimed that Loewald was primarily a relational and object relations theorist, with leftover ego psychological leanings.We both referred to Loewald’s “vision” (see Mitchell 1998). At one point I discovered (and hopefully will refind) a 1996 letter from Mitchell, whom I’d not yet met, in which he wrote that he had had extensive correspondence with Loewald and was planning to write a book about him. 2 This is one of several chapters growing from articles about Loewald. As such, they include repetitions of phrasing and use of the same quotes. Hopefully, each brings a different angle, a slightly different point of view. 3 Since I wrote this, there has been, spurred, I hope by me along with major contributors like Fogel (1991a,b), Lear (1990, 1996, 2000), Mitchell (1998, 2000), Whitebook (2004, 2008), and a few others, a resurgence of interest in and attention to Loewald, at least within American psychoanalysis. Arnold Cooper’s classic paper (1988), published while my 1989 book was in press, was the first fully to explore the significance of Loewald’s work. New Haven, Loewald’s professional home, has always known and drawn from Loewald, as analyst, supervisor, teacher, writer, and colleague (see, e.g., Balsam 1997, 2008, 2018). Although I cannot be sure, I believe that Loewald’s absence in psychoanalytic academia continues. 4 Loewald acknowledges at various points all of these authors (except, of course, the relationalists, who came after him), although his main interlocutor throughout is Freud. 5 When I submitted an earlier version of this chapter for publication, one IJP reviewer took issue with my acceptance, seemingly without challenge or concern, of Loewald’s Mahlerian-grounded views of development, when they could no longer be seen as empirically supported. I developed the following long section in response, in the belief that such a criticism has to do not simply with empirical accuracy but with larger issues concerning the inevitable ambiguity of terms (differentiation and union, for example), problems of misplaced concreteness, and the uses and evaluation of theory and research in psychoanalysis. As the reader will see, in my view Loewald’s account is compatible with more contemporary views. 6 For an exemplary overview that includes academic research on infant development, see Erreich 2017. 7 I write as both psychoanalyst and sociologist. Throughout the social sciences, there is often skepticism about theory, generally. 8 I am grateful to my Berkeley colleague Loïc Wacquant for drawing my attention to and translating the following passage from Pierre Bourdieu (1980): “Those who today like to set themselves up as judges and to indulge, as we say, in assigning blame and praise among the sociologists and anthropologists of the colonial past would pursue a more useful task

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if they strove to understand why it is that the most perceptive and the best intentioned among those they castigate could not understand some of the things that have become obvious to the least perceptive and sometimes the most ill-intentioned: in the unthinkable of an era, there is everything that cannot be thought for lack of the ethical or political dispositions that incline one to take it into account and consideration but also that which one cannot think for lack of instruments of thought, such as problematics, concepts, methods, techniques” (p. 14). 9 Depending on when he was writing, Loewald had access to different psychoanalytic claims. In 1962 (1962a, p. 264), but not in 1951, he relies on the then current view that by the infant’s second month a distinction between “I” and “not-I” begins to develop. 10 In Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (1978c) and Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis (1988), Loewald took the opportunity to expand in more discursive and reflective form upon his thoughts, found sporadically in various papers, about the insights psychoanalysis brings to religion, culture, symbolism, morality, and other realms of general human existence. Nields (2003) discusses Loewaldian theory in relation to religious experience. 11 Here too Loewald resembles Stern, who claims that “clinical issues that have been viewed as the developmental tasks for specific epochs of infancy are seen here as issues for the lifespan rather than as developmental phases of life, operating at essentially the same levels at all points in development” (1985, p. 10). 12 Some of what follows will also be found in Chapter 7, written several years after the present chapter and published in a different journal. 13 Here we see a link with Winnicott’s potential space and true self and, elaborating on Winnicott, Bollas’s personal idiom and evocative objects.

6 REFLECTIONS ON LOEWALD’S “INTERNALIZATION, SEPARATION, MOURNING, AND THE SUPEREGO”

Whether separation from a love object is experienced as deprivation and loss or as emancipation and mastery will depend, in part, on the achievement of the work of internalization. Speaking in terms of affect, the road leads from depression through mourning to elation. Loewald

“Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego,” like many of Loewald’s papers, is ostensibly a modest contribution. Yet as with all of Loewald’s writings, the paper is brilliant and dense, warranting thinking and rethinking. It is the only paper of Loewald’s, beyond a few book reviews, to be published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Yet some forty-five years later it was republished, having been selected as one of two key articles published by that journal during the entire decade of the 1960s. The essay has particular personal meaning for me. It was the first paper by Loewald I ever read, when it was assigned in a 1971–1972 seminar for graduate students offered by the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. In that seminar I first learned about psychoanalysts other than Freud, Erikson, and the British object relations theorists. I was immediately taken with the paper—and with Loewald— as I have been with every rereading. Yet now I was surprised. Although Loewald published what may be the most important psychoanalytic paper, or one of the most important papers, of the decade of the 1960s in North America, one of a handful of the most influential papers of the second half of the twentieth century, neither the Quarterly nor any other American journal had published “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.” “Therapeutic Action” had to cross the Atlantic to be published.1 My commentary here focuses on the place of “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (hereafter, “Internalization”) in Loewald’s work and

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on the character of the article as “Loewaldian,” as well as on the key contributions of the article, including its relation, where relevant, to “Therapeutic Action.” More broadly, I suggest how “Internalization” locates itself in relation to other developments in psychoanalysis. Specifically, the paper is an important step in Loewald’s elaboration and creation of an American independent tradition and intersubjective ego psychology. Although all analysts from his day to ours cite Freud and consider their work in relation to his, Loewald, perhaps because of his deep enmeshment in German philosophy (and perhaps because he wanted to cover his radical tracks: Whitebook [2004] calls Loewald a “radical conservative”), seems particularly to have grounded his work in exegetical relation to Freud. “Internalization” draws explicitly from and is indeed almost a commentary on those key late writings by Freud that established both ego-structural and object relations theory. Loewald’s paper considers, following Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the identification of the ego with abandoned objects—how, in mourning and loss, the shadow of the object falls upon the ego. Drawing from “On Narcissism,” Loewald looks at how object investments or charges (cathexes) and narcissistic investments or charges follow and replace one another as psychic structure develops.2 Following The Ego and the Id, Loewald considers the relinquishment of and identification with oedipal objects in superego formation and the superego as a differentiating grade within the ego—all ordinary, well-worked-over psychoanalytic topics. To prepare for writing this consideration, I reread “Internalization” yet again (I don’t know how many times I had read it, all told), by now republished in Loewald’s Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980). We learn something about his assessment of the paper by considering its placement in this large collection. In Papers, Loewald divides his oeuvre somewhat idiosyncratically into two chronologically overlapping sections, “Concepts and Theory” and “The Psychoanalytic Process” (the categorical division of articles is idiosyncratic, not the naming of the sections). In this volume, “Internalization,” published in 1962, directly follows “Therapeutic Action,” published in 1960, and both are found in the section on the psychoanalytic process. By contrast, “Superego and Time” (1962b) and “On Internalization” (1973a), which address topics closely related to those of “Internalization,” are placed in the section on concepts and theory. I speculate, accordingly, that “Internalization” captures something fundamental that Loewald wanted to add to “Therapeutic Action.” Perhaps, after “Therapeutic Action,” a paper that brings back the first topography, object relations, and other radical innovations, Loewald wanted to reassert his grounding in ego-structural theory, specifically, a precisely articulated view of the individual mind, ego processes, and their development.3 From “Ego and Reality” (1951)—his first paper, still fresh, and original— through to the well-known “Waning of the Oedipus Complex” (1979), Loewald put forth a developmental view of the psyche in which there is always a focus on the complexity of the individual mind as it differentiates and integrates complex and ever changing relations between self and other self, inner and outer,

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drives and internal and external objects. In all these writings, Loewald goes back and forth between development and development in analysis, as he pictures the two processes in homologous ways: increasing internal structuralization, differentiation, and integration, along with ever more complex relations with actual others, who are themselves complex subjects. When we look at this relatively neglected developmental and intersubjective strain in Loewald’s writings, we might acknowledge that no one in the history of psychoanalysis since Freud has had more to say about these matters than Loewald. No one has a more carefully worked-out sense of how the mind develops. Though he was not nearly as prolific, his account is as complete and complex as those of Hartmann, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, or Bion. As noted in the previous chapter, what most stands out in “Ego and Reality” is Loewald’s radical argument that reality, from the point of view of the subject, is not given but rather is created: “The psychological constitution of ego and outer world go hand in hand . . . We are concerned here merely with the question how this world becomes psychologically constituted” (1951, pp. 5, 11). Further anticipating “Internalization,” Loewald goes on: “And we want to stress the point that the boundaries between ego and external reality develop out of an original state where, psychologically, there are no boundaries and therefore there is no distinction between the two” (p. 11). Loewald holds these views against Freud’s assumption that external reality is given, initially hostile, and threatening to the pleasure principle. In the Freudian view, the ego’s primary functions are defensive, first in relation to a demanding external reality and later in relation to other structures of the mind. By contrast to Freud, Loewald in “Ego and Reality” tells us that the psyche constructs inner and outer at the same time, from an undifferentiated unity. In this early paper, however, Loewald simply asserts that these processes happen: In the formation of the ego, the libido does not turn to objects that, so to speak, lie ready for it, waiting to be turned to. In the developmental process, reality, at first without boundaries against an ego, later in magical communication with it, becomes objective at last. As the ego goes through its transformations from primitive beginnings, so libido and reality go through stages of transformation, until the ego, to the extent to which it is “fully developed,” has an objective reality, detached from itself, before it, not in it, yet holding this reality to itself in the ego’s synthetic activity. Then the ego’s libido has become object relationship. Only then does the ego live in what we call an objective reality. In earlier stages of ego formation the ego does not experience reality as objective, but lives in and experiences the various stages of narcissistic and magical reality. (pp. 19–20) “Internalization” begins where “Ego and Reality” leaves off. Loewald’s goal here, however, is not simply to elaborate further how psychic structure and

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the mind develop. It is also, importantly, to remind his readers (and perhaps Loewald himself) that even as he has moved to the astonishingly original theory of therapeutic action that he has recently published (recall, two years before “Internalization”), the basic activities of this psyche that develops and changes through analysis—that is, its ego activities—should be kept in mind. In “Internalization,” as throughout the theoretical veins in his writing, Loewald describes the ego capacities and processes that enable us to turn ghosts into ancestors, as well as the necessary developmental achievements—in childhood and in analysis—through which an initially undifferentiated inside/outside becomes a relationship on the part of a cathecting subject with “objects which themselves cathect” (1962a, p. 258). In other words, intrapsychic, structure-building internalizations and differentiation, which are achievements of early development and of analysis, go hand in hand with experienced subject-subject relations, with intersubjectivity, the deeply interactive nature of the psychoanalytic process that Loewald makes so central to his views. As Loewald moved on to other writings on the mutual subject-subject constitutiveness of the analytic process and of transference and reality (see, e.g., Loewald 1970, 1975, 1986), he wanted his readers, I think, to keep in mind this second focus of his work: his careful attention, grounded in ego psychology, to how the individual mind develops and operates. In “Internalization,” Loewald’s topic is not so much the analyst as subject interacting with the patient’s ego, as it is the parent. Loewald stresses that parental projective fantasies go toward the child, just as infantile fantasies go toward the parent. Developmentally, as in the analytic relationship, two subjects interact. Intersubjectivity is constituted by two individual minds interacting, and any result of this interaction affects each in a way unique to him or her. As Loewald later puts it, “In the mutual interaction of the good analytic hour, patient and analyst—each in his own way and on his own mental level—become both artist and medium to each other” (1975, p. 369). Rather than working forward developmentally from infancy, as “Ego and Reality” does, “Internalization” works backwards. Loewald starts from the superego, developmentally the latest psychic agency, which, Freud has told us, is a product of identifications. These identifications seem to be located, Freud also implies, further from the ego core than earlier identifications formed through primary narcissism. Much of the paper is vintage Loewald, but a few elements stand out (actually, what perhaps most startlingly stands out, coming from nowhere, are Loewald’s sudden musings on the connections between the death of a love object, mourning, and internalization, on the one hand, and, on the other, the death of God, God’s reincarnation in Christ, identification with Christ and Christ’s passion, and the advent of Christianity).4 Most centrally for Loewald, internalization, broadly defined, is among the primary activities of the psyche. As with Freud, internalization certainly results from object loss and mourning, but it is much more.5 Fogel (1991a) stresses this point. For Loewald, he writes:

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Internalization is the organizing activity that is the very essence of, that defines and constructs, the human mind . . . He conceives of internalization broadly and derives it from nothing more “elemental,” nothing that precedes or “causes” it, and nothing that can be separated from its own dynamic actuality . . . Like psychic energy for Freud, internalization is a given for Loewald. (pp. 165–166) When we read Loewald from this perspective, we appreciate, I think, that Loewald is offering us a post-Freudian developmental theory as much in interaction with Klein as with Hartmann. If internalization, broadly, is the primary activity of the human mind, then by its very nature the human mind creates and assumes an other, a not-self or environment. Loewald’s fundamentally intersubjective view of therapeutic action and the analytic process here finds its counterpart in his view of the individual psyche, always constituted originally from within, through intrapsychically created and transformed relations with an internal other. What I find most compelling in this paper, and what I remember from my first reading, is Loewald’s view of how it all gets started. Loewald begins, innocently enough, by reminding us about the internalizations that go into superego formation and how these result from object loss or separation. Similarly, termination involves mourning the loss of the analyst and the analytic relationship. Termination, therefore, must also require an internalization in which, as with oedipal internalization, you get structural realignment, not only a new internal fantasy object or a relationship to an internal object but also an identification that has shifted the constitution of the ego—of the psyche—itself. Loewald indicates that in his reading of Freud, there are earlier “ego” identifications that seem to be immediate, that go into the ego proper rather than into the superego and its creation. But, he suggests, this must mean that there is less separateness from these objects. Loewald gradually unpacks the implication of Freud’s views in the context of a generalized clinical eye toward varieties of psychopathology, drawing on his experience with psychotic and borderline patients and his observation of patients who deny separateness or loss and cannot mourn. Loewald claims that when internalization takes place—when the shadow of the object falls upon the ego—drives are also specified and transformed. More basically and radically, and here Loewald differentiates himself from Freud and Klein, neither drive, object, nor internal differentiation were there to begin with. Rather, ego, object, and their relationship come into being through the process of organizing drive potentials—primary narcissism and primary aggression—into drives. Similarly, internalization and structure building are from the outset colored and shaped by, and help to reshape, particular drives. Object libido becomes narcissistic libido, and aggression turned outward turns against now differentiated internal parts of the self. As Loewald puts it: “Figuratively speaking, in the process of internalization the drives take aspects of the object with them into the ego. Neither drive nor object is the same as before, and the ego itself becomes further differentiated in the process. Internalization is structure building” (1962a, p. 265).

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Loewald’s views depend on a series of complex, interlocking claims. For Loewald, boundary creation goes along with internal and external differentiation, such that, before any differentiation of ego and object or of different parts of the mind can occur, before there can be defenses, there are, and must be, primary externalizations and internalizations. By contrast to what we ordinarily mean by externalization and internalization, which refer to secondary forms of these processes: The meaning of the terms externalization and internalization, when we speak of the primary forms, is different: primary externalization signifies that externality is being established; primary internalization signifies that internality is being constituted. On this level, then, we cannot speak of externalization (“projection”) and internalization as defenses (against inner conflict or external deprivation); we must speak of them as boundary-creating processes and as processes of differentiation of an undifferentiated state. (p. 266) Defenses, in this context, “promote and color” (p. 266) the forms of later differentiation and boundary creation, but they are not foundational. Differentiation of the outer world requires differentiation of the inner world, and internalization of a differentiated object assumes a coordinate differentiated ego. At the same time, however, this ego itself comes into being in reciprocal relation to that object, and structuralization is a process, not an outcome. All of these, Loewald argues, constitute the kinds of shifts we also observe in the processes and outcomes of analysis. Loewald thus seems to render Kleinian and Fairbairnian concepts—projection and introjection, externalization and internalization—in ego psychological terms, but he would also claim that the initiating processes of defensive projection and introjection postulated by Klein and later by Fairbairn cannot, because these processes assume a primary ego, occur from the beginning. In a later paper, Loewald (1973a) further clarifies that although he is in territory similar to that traversed by Klein and Fairbairn, he is looking at structures and identifications, not at an intrapsychic map of an unconscious, internal, ego-object world. I draw our attention to Klein and Fairbairn, but Loewald is concerned less with challenging British object relations theory than American ego-structural psychology (in this context, see Loewald’s critical, almost harsh, review [1966] of Arlow and Brenner). He begins this challenge in his rethinking of the superego. He reminds his readers of what is implied in Freud. For Freud (1921), the superego is originally “a differentiating grade in the ego,” not quite an afterthought but also not a rethinking of the structural theory. Borrowing Freud’s notion of the differentiating grade, Loewald extends Freud, introducing a clinically useful, as well as theoretically innovative, conception of shifting degrees of internalization and of distance from the ego core. Degree of internalization and distance from the ego core both indicate the extent to which an identification or injunction is felt to be part of the ego or something more ego-alien, either as identification

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or aspiration. Loewald also makes the intriguing suggestions, which he follows up in “Superego and Time,” that the temporal modality of the superego is the future and that we can think more generally of psychic structure as subjectively organized by time—past, present, and future—rather than found, metaphorically, in space or as structure. If the superego represents the future—hopes, expectations, ideals, and potentialities to look forward to—then there is also an unstated, further challenging implication, that all wishes do not come from the past, from infancy. Loewald pays lip service to the notion that the superego is a fixed structure with changing constitutive elements, but he implies that the more superego injunctions and identifications move into the ego core, the more the future becomes the present and the more integrated and active the psyche. It becomes a fine distinction: on the one hand, superego elements can move from the periphery of the ego system to its core; on the other, there is, nonetheless, a superego. I suggested earlier that Loewald intended “Internalization” to complement “Therapeutic Action” through its attention to classical ego psychological questions about psychic structure and the mind. At the same time, and perhaps as a result, Loewald’s clinical views and his picture of therapeutic action in “Internalization” seem to some extent less innovative than those found in the earlier paper. Loewald continues to put forth a picture of the analyst as akin to a parent, holding the child/patient’s future in mind, and he reminds us, as he does also in later writings like “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” (1979) that termination or oedipal resolution involves loss and mourning, but that both facilitate emancipation. At the same time, and perhaps because he is working in this more classical realm of internalization, loss, mourning, and termination, Loewald gives us a more classical picture of analysis. Unlike “Therapeutic Action,” “Internalization” implies that the analyst is totally created through transference and that termination, like the passing of the Oedipus complex, leads to relinquishment of the transferentially created analyst and to new, structurebuilding internalizations. In his description of how internal relationships are reexternalized onto the person of the analyst, who in turn stands in for figures of the past and can then be reinternalized in a different form, and in his assumption that the transference neurosis revives the infantile neurosis, the Loewald of “Internalization” stands in sharp contrast to the Loewald who, just two years earlier, had claimed that there was no real relationship without transference and that transference infuses all meaningful relationships. The Loewald of “Therapeutic Action” was the Loewald who wrote in evocative terms about turning ghosts into ancestors. That Loewald also insisted that making the unconscious conscious does not bring feeling and wish under the mantle of rational control, but rather, by enabling greater communication and interplay among different modes of being and feeling, gives greater “intensity and depth” to experience (1960, p. 251). When one lists toward the topographical metapsychology of unconscious-preconscious and primary and secondary process, as does Loewald in “Therapeutic Action,” one tends to hold a more fluid view of

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mental life. By contrast, greater focus on structuralization and internalization leads one toward the realm of absolutes—separation, loss, and termination. While radical in its postulation of primary undifferentiation-differentiation and internalization-externalization, “Internalization,” even compared to Loewald’s other structural-developmental writings, may be considered a cautious paper. I speculate earlier about whether another latent goal of the paper might have been to remind Loewald’s colleagues that he still held to basic tenets of American ego psychology-structural theory. He was an ego-structural analyst even though he had, two years earlier, staked his claim for an intersubjective, topographically infused, occasionally visionary, implicitly anti-ego-structural view of therapeutic action and process, with radically challenging views of the analyst’s therapeutic role and stance. In its specific argument, “Internalization” is about mourning and termination. Yet throughout Loewald’s work we find implied another kind of mourning, Loewald’s own. Loewald’s developmental account of internalization describes the loss of magic, as Loewald himself mourns—we could almost say yearns for—a more fluid and encompassing psychic experience.6 In “Ego and Reality,” Loewald writes of the initial “magical powers” of the ego in relation to reality and the “magical communication between them” (1951, p. 19). In “Superego and Time,” he writes of the ideal ego, based on primary narcissistic identification with the parent, as a “magical participation” (1962b, p. 47). And throughout “Primary Process, Secondary Process, and Language” (1978a), Loewald tells us that the “magical-evocative” powers of words—their potential immediate sensuality, as found in poetry, for example—arise because the earliest language experience, that between mother and child, is itself sensual and physical. In this developmental, emotional-intellectual, and clinical arena, Loewald’s account of individual development seems to descend directly from views of societal development put forth by the classical sociologist Max Weber, who points to the “disenchantment of the world” (1919, p. 155) that resulted from religious internalization and social and scientific rationalization. More generally, Loewald describes a density and saturation that characterize original mental process. Such an understanding underpins his account, in papers like “Therapeutic Action” and “Psychoanalysis as an Art,” of the many levels of communication that we find in clinical work, and of what we mean when we say of psychoanalysis that we listen to the music and not only the words.7 As I note elsewhere, in these papers Loewald emphasizes the desirable integration of fantasy and transference with reality. Especially in his later writings (1978a,b, 1979), Loewald mourns the loss entailed specifically by a psychoanalytic, scientific, and cultural ethos that privileges rationality over the irrational, separateness over oneness, and secondary-process language over language as magical-poetic evocation. By contrast, though we find in “Internalization” Loewald’s most precise account of how structuralization develops out of primary unity, and though there is mention in it of the great polarity inherent in human existence of individuation and union, this paper, in its sometimes obsessional precision, feels somewhat

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disenchanted. Many of the papers I cite were written after “Internalization,” and although it is no more legitimate to take Loewald to task for not knowing what he would write subsequently than (as I mention in the previous chapter) for not knowing what others would write, it is nonetheless striking that magical connection, primal density, and depth of experience, whether by name or by implication, do not find a place in this piece. Instead we find a more technical, even jargonish language of mutual cathexis, mutual projections, the child’s and the parent’s projective fantasies, and so forth. How do we use Loewald’s “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” clinically? According to Friedman (1991), whose opinion is certainly shared by others, “Therapeutic Action” is “one of two or three landmarks in the history of the theory of therapeutic action” (p. 93), yet this long paper contains no clinical material. “Primary Process, Secondary Process, and Language” is perhaps the most carefully elaborated description in our literature of exactly what happens in the mind of a patient when we make a good interpretation, one that is heard and used by her, yet this description is formulated in terms of the dynamic unconscious, the preconscious, thing-presentations, word-presentations, thing-cathexis, and hypercathexis. “Internalization,” equally characteristic of Loewald, describes in the briefest contours three patients’ differing ways of dealing with loss. Otherwise, the paper refers in the most general terms to “analysis,” “termination,” “the analyst,” and “the patient.” Like Hartmann, Loewald writes about the mind and not about particular minds and how they change. It is hard to draw on Loewald for specified, moment-to-moment technical recommendations or images of the psychoanalytic process. At the same time, I do not think we can work without a tacit as well as an explicit conceptualization of what is happening in an analysis as it develops and winds down—what, in a larger sense, constitutes the analytic process or psychic change, what the role of the analyst is and should be, and what is happening in the patient, in the analyst, and between them. These are all addressed in Loewald’s work. Perhaps, as Schafer (1991) implies, we can use Loewald’s insights not through remembering specific recommendations, but by, in the Loewaldian sense, “internalizing Loewald,” such that our working egos are fundamentally transformed through structure- and process-building internalizations. Implicit in “Internalization” is an image of analysis that involves the focus of analyst and patient on past, present, and future internalizations and externalizations, on identification, on how images of the future are held, on unpacking and making structure conscious. Although it is certainly the case that Loewald concentrated on conflict and defense in his work, one gets the sense in reading this paper and others that he would not accord the analysis of defense and conflict the near-exclusive or privileged attention given them by more classical ego psychologists. Specifically, Loewald focuses on termination. For Loewald, termination of necessity involves mourning, because there looms the loss of the analyst and of the analytic relationship (true for both analyst and patient, but, although elsewhere he focuses on the relationship from both sides, in this paper he addresses only the

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patient’s perspective).8 Preceding, constituting, and resulting from the mourning of termination are further internalizations and structuralizations in the patient (and in the analyst, which Loewald addresses elsewhere in his writings). Like the oedipal parent, the analyst is no longer a lost object imaged and cathected by the patient or child. She has, through internalization, become a constituent part of psychic structure. Loewald explains what is happening when the analyst listens in surprise as formerly struggled-with and rebelled-against interpretations or modes of thinking are—unnoticed and in passing—mentioned and used by a terminating patient as if they had always been known and always employed. How do we situate this work in Loewald’s oeuvre? I have noted that Loewald chose to place “Internalization” in his Papers on Psychoanalysis immediately following “Therapeutic Action.” The latter paper (here I anticipate Chapter 7) set the standard for a reconceptualization of psychoanalytic process, including views of analysis as the resumption of development at the place where it has internally been arrested, of the analyst as new object, of “an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and for individual development” (1960, p. 229), and of the analyst, like the parent, trying to sense through empathy exactly where the patient is and what kind of intervention is apt at that particular moment (Chodorow [2018] focuses on “love and respect”). “Therapeutic Action” also set the standard for a reconceptualization of the goals of analysis and of termination, through Loewald’s radical claim that “there is neither such a thing as reality nor a real relationship, without transference” (1960, p. 254). We are not, then, in the business of getting rid of, or curing, transference distortions, but of bringing unconscious transference meanings that have been repressed into live connection with present actuality. As we find throughout Loewald’s work, all of this directly and indirectly challenges both the image of the analyst as objective, scientific observer-researcher and (as I discuss further in the next chapter) the image of the analytic relationship and process as modeled on paradigms in the natural sciences. For Loewald, the analytic relationship is intrinsically intersubjective, consisting of two subjects who interact and affect one another: We become part and participant of and in the field as soon as we are present in our role as analysts . . . The mental processes and structures we study in our patients are essentially the same as our own and of the same order of reality (psychic reality), as well as of the same order as the processes and structures by means of which we study them. (1970, pp. 278–279) We cannot know Loewald’s intentions, but for me, “Internalization” is tacitly meant as a challenge, not, in this case to classical ego psychological conceptualizations of the analytic relationship, the analyst’s role, and the analytic process, as was the case with “Therapeutic Action” and Loewald’s later papers on the analytic process, but rather to another mainstay of ego psychology,: the structural

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theory. I mention earlier Loewald's critical review (1966) of Arlow and Brenner’s Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory. There, Loewald argues that one of Arlow and Brenner’s central tenets—that the structural theory can entirely replace the topographic—gives up crucially necessary elements in psychoanalysis, particularly the distinctions and interplay between unconscious and preconscious and between primary and secondary process. Loewald claims that Arlow and Brenner reify the three structures of the mind as sets of functions rather than conceptualizing them in terms of mode or process (here, internalization). In his view, these authors also give unwarranted primacy to defenses and intersystemic conflict over the equally, or perhaps more important, concept of identification, which, drawing from Freud, should be seen “not as one of the defense mechanisms, but as a crucial factor in the formation of ego and superego” (1966, p. 57). Identification, Loewald goes on to say, is also important in clinical psychoanalysis, because it is through identifications that structure is formed: The more we advance in our understanding of psychoanalytic problems, the more, I believe, we become impressed with the importance of the deeper problems of deficiency and deformation of the psychic structures themselves, over and above the problems of conflict between these structures and defenses against it. (p. 58)9 Loewald’s writing hovers between the topographic and the structural, and he does not want us to choose one over the other. “Therapeutic Action” seems to have as one goal a conceptualization of therapeutic action and psychoanalytic process that restores the topographic theory to its rightful place, implying an argument, elaborated in later Loewaldian writings, that we cannot understand the mind or conduct analysis without having a firm grasp of the topographic theory. By contrast, “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” advocates for structural theory, but for a structural theory that has different emphases than the structural theory of id, ego, and superego, intersystemic conflict and defense. For Loewald, internalization is the basis of structure formation, and structuralization is a psychic process, rather than an outcome. The three structures of the mind are differentiated not so much by how they interact intersystemically as by differences in quality and mode of functioning. In turn, these three structures can be understood only by considering them in terms of the mental processes that each exhibits— qualities and modes that include many elements best described by the topographic and drive theories. “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” does not have the word structuralization or structure in its title, but its project, here as elsewhere in Loewald’s writing, is the creation of an alternative intersubjective ego psychology and structural theory within American psychoanalysis. Loewald does not say that he wants to revolutionize the theory. He just does it.

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Notes 1 My chapters on Loewald follow the chronology of my own publications rather than the order of Loewald’s. My commentary on “Internalization,” published in 1962, preceded and indeed instigated my wanting to write about “Therapeutic Action.” I notice also the transatlantic publication crossing. I do not know the history of submission of “Therapeutic Action,” but I have some recollection, and perhaps somewhere in my files documentation (a copy of a letter?), that it was personally criticized by at least one leading ego psychologist, perhaps David Rapaport? I know also that I and others have published in less prestigious journals articles that would become well known and widely cited, despite having been rejected by the leading journals as “not psychoanalysis” (my “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation” is one example). Bob Wallerstein was always supportive in such matters, reminding me that Erikson had to fight the “not psychoanalysis” charge. 2 I follow Loewald here, who often retranslates Freud. Unlike Loewald, however, I do not make my own translations. In my 2007 BPSI seminar on Loewald, Professor Brigid Doherty of Princeton kindly explained to us the German “feel” of bezetzung (translated by Strachey as cathexis) and suggested that we might think of Freud’s bezetzung as akin to an electrical charge. 3 In possible opposition to my speculation about Loewald’s intention to link these two articles is the fact that, when invited by Gerald Fogel to contribute a paper to The Work of Hans Loewald complementary to “Therapeutic Action” (Fogel 1991b), Loewald chose “Superego and Time.”That paper, also published in 1962, was written somewhat later than “Internalization,” overlaps substantially with it in content, and could almost be said to be an extension of it. 4 As I note in Part I, a certain lineage and generation of psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, could not stay away from noticing how psychoanalysis informs and interacts with the sociocultural, including religion. 5 Loewald did not title his paper “Internalization, Loss, Mourning, and the Superego,” even though it deals more with loss than with separation, because he is interested in the oscillation between feelings of “primary narcissistic union,” whatever their developmental basis, and separation. In Mahler’s account of primary symbiosis, Loewald seems to have found, after the fact, a developmental account that fit his previous theorizing (see Loewald 1978a). 6 I am grateful to the members of my BPSI Loewald seminar for noticing Loewald’s references to magic. 7 Such understandings are reflected in a notable recent increase in analytic writings on psychoanalysis and poetry and psychoanalysis and music. 8 This noticing points to another link between Loewald and his German social science forebears. In Chapter 12, I discuss the sociologist Georg Simmel’s observations about what he calls the “feeling tone” of dyadic “termination” (1908, p. 124). 9 By contrast to his review of Arlow and Brenner, Loewald reviewed Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self quite favorably (Loewald 1973b). Here he expresses appreciation for Kohut’s attention to disturbances of narcissism and to his conceptualizations—formulated in a manner quite consonant with “Internalization”—of the idealized self-object and grandiose self. Loewald takes issue with aspects of metapsychology and theory in Kohut, and, in mirrored contrast to his critique of Arlow and Brenner’s overemphasis on conflict and resistance, he feels that Kohut does not sufficiently address these.

7 A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE Reading Loewald through “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis”

Transference is the “dynamism” by which the instinctual life of man, the id, becomes ego and by which reality becomes integrated and maturity is achieved. Without such transference—of the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life—to the preconscious and to present-day life and contemporary objects—without such transference, or to the extent to which such transference miscarries, human life become sterile and an empty shell. Loewald

Hans Loewald’s classic paper, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” remains one of our field’s most comprehensive and elegant accounts of the analytic attitude and stance required to enable a psychoanalytic process leading to psychic change, as well as a fine-tuned and original conceptualization of that change. Loewald, while not including technical or interpretive recommendations or claiming a new metapsychology, elaborates the multiple facets of the relationship between analyst and patient and gives us a subtly complex description of the epistemology of clinical work. He provides a unique synthesis, a comprehensive and original account that seamlessly integrates apparently contradictory claims and approaches, while at the same time moving beyond and transforming its initial components. His still fresh formulations prefigure contemporary psychoanalysis, as his paper describes, and in so doing help establish much that constitutes psychoanalysis today. “Therapeutic Action” stands alone, and it also serves as a filter through which to look back on earlier writings that anticipate Loewald’s account here, and to look ahead to the further development of his thinking. The paper’s prescience (though not its having been relatively neglected for so long) can lead us to forget how radical Loewald was in 1960 (in fact, Loewald presented parts of the paper

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even earlier). I extend here my reading of “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego,” which Loewald published shortly after “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.” My considerations on that paper were written in internal conversation with a tacitly imagined reading of “Therapeutic Action.” Loewald identifies himself as an ego psychologist. He writes about drives, including the death drive, and he makes internalization, structure building, and individuation, as well as ego functions like memory and the relation to reality, central in several key writings. But he is an ego psychologist who differs in several ways from what has come to be considered classical ego psychology. First, Loewald stresses the constitutive role of object relations in the psyche and in the psychic changes of analysis. This is a matter not only of an internal object-relational world but also of subject-subject relations—interaction, or intersubjectivity—between analyst and patient. Second, although he is not a child analyst, Loewald advocates, from his earliest paper to his last book, a developmental perspective. He pays careful attention to mother-child interaction in the unfolding of the psyche and to the analyst’s capacity to range responsively among different developmental levels of psychic functioning in the patient. He is as interested in preoedipal modes of being and the mother-child realm of primary communication as he is in differentiation and the Oedipus complex. Finally, his perspective preserves, and perhaps even privileges, a topographic point of view over an ego-structural focus. He argues that transference moves between unconscious and preconscious as much as it does from internal objects to external objects, and he focuses on the links between primary and secondary process. Loewald, then, parts ways with his ego psychology cohort members Arlow, Brenner, and Gray (though his attention to differentiation is recognizably Hartmannian).1 His focus on structure building is less about intersystemic conflict and structural-functional differentiation than about interchanges between inner and outer reality and the fluid and changing processes of differentiation and integration among the psychic structures that constitute psychological process (as I have noted, Loewald’s review of Arlow and Brenner is unabashedly critical, taking issue with what he considers fundamental misunderstandings and muddles in their conceptualization). Loewald assumes the analysis of resistance, defense, conflict, and compromise formation and clearly expects ego development to entail greater self-understanding, but he is critical of what he sees as an overemphasis on the rational ego and rationality in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis, as well as in the cultural and scientific world. As I describe in what follows, for Loewald, the goal of free association is not so much to bring mind under the purview of the rational ego as it is to open a window into two-way, affectively anchored, topographic pathways between preconscious and unconscious. My reading of “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” contributes to a conversation begun by Arnold Cooper thirty years ago, in a paper that is itself now a classic (and from which I take this chapter’s title). Cooper (1988) writes that Loewald’s view of therapeutic action “places therapy in a different universe from that dreamed of by Strachey” (p. 26). He points to Loewald’s radical shift away from

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Strachey’s focus on mutative, superego-modifying, transference-based interpretations, and toward Loewald’s claims for the centrality of object relations and interactional process—both in therapeutic action and in psychic formation more generally. Cooper highlights other themes in Loewald’s writing as well, many of which find echo in subsequent writing about Loewald. He notices, for example, Loewald’s “conservative style of revolution” (p. 15; see also McLaughlin, who calls Loewald a “quiet revolutionary” [in Fogel et al. 1996, p. 911], and Whitebook [2004], who calls him a “radical conservative”). He remarks on Loewald’s commitment to “the poetic rather than the scientific vision of psychoanalysis” (p. 16) and his implicit advocacy of a poetic, inexact, interactionally based language of interpretation over the exact interpretations favored by Strachey (p. 26; see also McLaughlin 1996). Loewald’s “vivid” language leads Cooper to “quote him extensively” (p. 19). As I observe below, all writers on Loewald “quote him extensively.” Bluntly and with wonderment, Cooper remarks that “the source for Loewald’s vision” is an intellectual mystery (p. 21). In his bibliography, Loewald mentions neither the Rado group and the Sullivanians nor the British object relations and Kleinian analysts. He describes infancy and particular qualities in the mother-infant relationship that were fully documented only much later, with the expansion of infancy research. Finally, Cooper points to a tension in Loewald’s work between a phenomenological, interactive view of clinical process and therapeutic action and a metapsychological description of goals (p. 26). Cooper’s paper initiated a groundswell of writing about Loewald, begun especially by Fogel (1991b; Fogel et  al. 1996; see also Balsam 1997; Bass 2000; Chodorow 1999a, 2003b, 2004a, 2007, 2008; Friedman 1991; Kaywin 1993; Lear 1990, 1996, 2003; Leavy 1989; Miller 2008; Mitchell 1998, 2000; Nields 2003; Ogden 2006; Schafer 1991; Simpson 2007; Teicholz 1999; White 1996; Whitebook 2004, 2008). These quiet conversations, of many writers in internal conversation with themselves, as well as with Loewald and those who have written about him, indirectly address and extend some of Cooper’s puzzlements. They have worked to articulate and expand Loewald’s clinical and theoretical legacy, to capture the different universe that was Loewald’s. As they wonder about or take a stand on Loewald’s analytic location, these writings about “the Loewald phenomenon” (Friedman 1996) have come increasingly to address, as I suggest in my introduction to the panel, “The Loewaldian legacy,” Loewald “as phenomenon” (Chodorow 2008, p. 1092). Adequate discussion of claims and arguments about Loewald as phenomenon would be a chapter in itself, but we can note, briefly, that while most writers focus more on Loewald’s writings on therapeutic action and analytic stance, the Loewald phenomenon for Bass (2000, 2003) is Loewald’s metapsychology. Bass draws mainly on Loewald’s metapsychological writings, in order to focus on his economic, energic formulations, his conceptualizations of ego functions like perception, memory, and the creation and distortion of reality, and his writings on sublimation. Meanwhile, Nields (2003) and Whitebook (2004, 2008) consult Loewald to rethink psychoanalytic understandings of religion and culture.

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In one notable divide, several writers claim Loewald for relational or selfpsychology (along with Greenberg [in Fogel et al. 1996], who also calls Loewald transitional and synthetic, Mitchell [1998, 2000], and Teicholz [1999]), while others (myself included) assert, justifying themselves partly by invoking Loewald’s own self-identification, that Loewald is a unique and innovative ego psychologist (see, e.g., Fogel 1991a; Fogel in Fogel et al. 1996; Friedman 2008). In Chapter 5, I mention that I experienced this custody war firsthand, at a conference on Loewald, where Stephen Mitchell and I each presented papers on what we had independently called Loewald’s “vision.” We drew upon many of the same quotations, Mitchell in order to claim that Loewald was fundamentally relational, and I to argue that Loewald was a radically subjectivist ego psychologist. Complicating matters further, this debate is itself historical. Some years ago, I observed—I think rightly at the time—that there were no “Loewaldians,” that Loewald, while widely respected for his innovative contributions, was not being “adulated, lionized, or seen as a theoretical leader” (Chodorow 1989, p. 12) by any group, implicitly including the ego psychologists among whom he counted himself. Many years later, Friedman (2008) notes, quite rightly, that analysts from several schools would like to claim Loewald as their own. Where all writers on Loewald would agree, however, is that he has not received recognition commensurate with his considerable achievement. My project here is exegetical and textual, staying close to Loewald’s writing and only indirectly entering these ownership debates. Most readers of Loewald, as of Freud, are drawn to the aliveness and engaged immediacy of Loewald’s writing. Articles about Loewald are almost always full of long quotations, as if the writer, recognizing that no one writes as clearly and eloquently about his ideas as does Loewald himself, is trying to convey something substantial about that writing—something of visceral-emotional as well as intellectual substance— through quotations. Loewald’s New Haven colleague Braxton McKee (2008) provides some insight about this. Just as Loewald claimed that Freud was, for him, a “living presence” (1980, p. ix), so Loewald, McKee suggests, makes himself a living presence for his own readers. Loewald’s theory of language, describing how emotionally alive language melds preverbal communicative affect and poetic tonality with linguistic meaning, explains this. McKee makes the startling—but on reflection, immediately compelling—observation that Loewald’s language itself does just what he says language in general does, bringing us, his readers, into those very “primordial,” primary-process experiences (McKee uses the words enlivening, experiential, and elemental) that Loewald is himself describing.2 I and others of his readers are met in our method by Loewald himself, who was an extremely careful reader and who wrote in close conversation with Freud. Loewald’s writing calls for careful textual analysis. We cannot, as we can with some writers (though also not so easily with Freud), skim for main ideas or take out key terms or phrases that characterize a theory of mind, a conception of clinical process, or a technical approach. Loewald, rather, requires the reader to get into his

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thinking and authorial goals sentence by sentence, article by article—to unpack, as best she can, his carefully articulated point of view, watching as themes, with slight variations, appear and reappear. He tacitly invites us to read him as he reads others (and, I will suggest, as he advocates that we listen to patients), by bringing an open mind and attending above all to specificities and patterns of meaning, rather than scanning for limitations or disagreements—by analogy, if we were thinking clinically, reaching for unconscious-preconscious, topographic resonances rather than for defense, conflict, and resistance. Through such reading, we better understand and appreciate Loewald’s (or any author’s) subjectivity. Beginning from the author’s point of view, as Loewald does with Freud, also enables us to understand how that author’s reasoning or argument may generate internal contradictions or lacunae that require further resolution. My own way of reading (I note in Chodorow 2008) grows indirectly out of the same soil as Loewald’s, a commonality that probably first drew me to his work. It comes not from my analytic identity but from my training in sociology, where my teachers were, like Loewald, German-Jewish refugee intellectuals with theoretical origins in phenomenology and social-philosophical thought. Loewald, reciprocally, was drawn to the sociologist Talcott Parsons’s writings on internalization and the relations between inner and outer life (as he told me the one time I met him, in 1984; see Loewald 1973a). Loewald’s readers cannot ground our understanding of this author in clinical case material. “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” contains no clinical material, and even those of Loewald’s papers that do describe patients or treatments do so in a few paragraphs, usually in conventional oedipal terms. Loewald writes of analysis, transference, countertransference, the analyst, the patient, the mind—not about particular minds and how they change, or about the particular analyst he was. He does not offer interpretive or other technical recommendations beyond attending closely to the patient, or descriptions of moment-to-moment process. In our day, when psychoanalytic writing, however theoretical, almost always finds an underpinning in accounts of on-the-ground clinical exchanges, we notice this. Yet in other eras—in the time of the late Freud, of Hartmann, of Loewald himself, or even thirty years ago—the absence of clinical material, or an exegetical or theoretical paper, would not be so noticed. Yet despite the absence of clinical material in his writing, Loewald’s ideas, for me as for others, sit preconsciously throughout everyday practice. Even without specific clinical material, Loewald gives us an immediately compelling account of the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic action—evocative descriptions of an analytic stance toward the patient and toward the analyst’s own mind and activity. He presents a detailed conceptualization of what is happening in an analysis as it develops and winds down; what, in a larger sense, constitutes psychoanalytic process and psychic change; what the role of the analyst is and should be; what is happening in the patient, in the analyst, and between them, and what constitutes the scientific epistemology of the analytic investigation. Loewald gives us general principles of attitude, being, and relating to the patient, and a conception of the

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patient’s unfolding core—a “listening to” rather than a “listening for” approach to process and technique (I anticipate Chapter 8) that reminds us more of those in the British independent tradition—Balint, Coltart, Milner, and Winnicott, and more recently, Bollas, Casement, and Parsons—than of close-process ego psychologists, Brennerians, or contemporary Kleinians (of course, this commonality helped lead me in the first place to conceptualize an American independent tradition, with Loewald at its center).

Loewald’s opening paragraphs: introducing everything We are forewarned in Loewald’s introduction to “Therapeutic Action” of the immense ambition of this paper. While staying within the ego psychological tradition, Loewald is going to make the analyst into a new object, a real internal and external object in the patient’s continuing development. He will describe a psychoanalytic process and psychological change that are deeply enmeshed in actual interactions, those between ego and environment or ego and objects, and he will show that ego formation develops intertwined with object relations. The analyst is more than an objective, neutral interpreter of the patient’s experience, whose correct interpretations of transference distortions and resistances lead to insight and change. Loewald is going to consider transference, drives, and ego. Loewald defines the psychoanalytic process in these opening paragraphs, at the outset slipping interaction, object relations, and development into his definition: “By psychoanalytic process I mean the significant interactions between patient and analyst that ultimately lead to structural changes in the patient’s personality” (1960, p. 221). Focusing also on development, he will contribute to our understanding of “the role that interaction with environment plays in the formation, development, and continued integrity of the psychic apparatus” (p. 221). Further, he will claim this interpersonal emphasis for ego psychology: Psychoanalytic ego psychology . . . has given us some tools to deal with the central problem of the relationship between the development of psychic structures, and of the connection between ego formation and object relations . . . Ego development is resumed in the therapeutic process in psychoanalysis. And this resumption of ego development is contingent on the relationship with a new object, the analyst. (p. 221) Loewald’s challenge will be to “correlate our understanding of the significance of object relations for the formation and development of the psychic apparatus with the dynamics of the therapeutic process” (p. 221). He will of necessity have to look at some “old problems” along the way, problems “concerning object relations, the phenomenon of transference, the relations between instinctual drives and ego, as well as concerning the function of the analyst in the analytic situation” (p. 222).3 In other words, Loewald undertakes to look at everything.

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Part I: Analytic stance Loewald opens the substance of his paper with an investigation of the nature of the object relation that constitutes the analytic relationship. In “Ego and Reality” (1951) and “The Problem of Defense and the Neurotic Interpretation of Reality” (1952), Loewald has argued that ego development happens from birth and throughout life, in processes of differentiation and dedifferentiation, integration and disintegration. In those papers he describes how, whatever the givens of actual reality out there, we create reality as meaningful initially from within. In fact, at around the time of these first papers, we can notice a zeitgeist of attention to the subtly complex relations between inner and outer in development and treatment. Contemporaneous contributions include Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950), Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951), and a number of pioneering papers on countertransference (e.g., Cohen 1952; Heimann 1950; Little 1951; Racker 1953; Winnicott 1949). According to Loewald, we are not born with drives. Rather, we create them from drive potentials, and these drives create or shape cathectically, via our psychic investment, our objects. Through this intertwined development of ego and reality (the point of view of the reality principle: ego and cognition) and of drives and objects (the point of view of the pleasure principle: drives and affects), reality and the object world are constituted and gain meaning for the individual. Defenses and defense mechanisms are, similarly, brought forth only under particular conditions of ego-reality differentiation and integration. There is no single trajectory here, because aliveness and health are not about always having a differentiated ego—ego from reality, ego from drives, ego from objects—but about the capacity to range freely among different levels of ego-reality integration. As Loewald brings these understandings to “Therapeutic Action,” he says that analysis gives us the opportunity to observe anew, as we could do originally with the developing ego in relation to the mother, how “interactions between patient and analyst . . . lead to or form steps in ego integration and disintegration.” Analytic writers have missed this because of a “theoretical bias,” namely, “the view of the psychic apparatus as a closed system” (1960, p. 223). The analyst enters as an actual object into the patient’s world, an object/subject who comes to participate in the further development of ego, objects, and drives. He is a “co-actor on the analytic stage” and not a “reflecting mirror . . . characterized by scrupulous neutrality” (p. 223). Seeing the analyst as neutral reflecting mirror, Loewald implies, would be like assuming that the actual relation to the parent and the parent’s particularized personhood had no part in child development. The relationship to the analyst will include resistance, and analytic work includes interpreting transference distortions, but unless it also includes a relation to the analyst as a new object, the analysis won’t work: “The patient . . . can take the plunge into the regressive crisis of the transference neurosis which brings him face to face again with his childhood anxieties and conflicts, if he can hold on to the potentiality of a new object-relationship, represented by the analyst” (p. 224).

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In much of his writing, Loewald is reaching for ways to conceptualize the specificity of the analyst-patient relationship. He is drawn intuitively to a parentchild analogy: I noted earlier that Loewald has a sense that there is something “magical”—beyond words but including words—in mother-child communication. When their work becomes available to him, Loewald draws on Mahler and Winnicott. In “Therapeutic Action,” Loewald more specifically views the analyst’s role as helping the patient discover and expand upon “rudiments at least of the core of himself and ‘objects’ that has been distorted” (p. 229; here we have echoes of Winnicott’s “true self”). The analyst’s focus on the unfolding of this rudimentary core goes beyond interpretation and insight, requiring, in Loewald’s oft-cited phrase, “an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and for individual development” (p. 229). Loewald closes the first section of the paper with a beginning investigation of this parent-child relationship as prototype. On the parental side, we find “an empathic relationship of understanding the child’s particular stage in development, yet ahead in his vision of the child’s future and mediating that vision to the child. This . . . is, ideally, a more articulate and more integrated version of the core of being that the child presents to the parent” (p. 229). Reciprocating, the child, through affect, body, and mind, takes in the mother’s vision: The child . . . internalizes the parent’s image of the child—an image that is mediated to the child in the thousand different ways of being handled, bodily and emotionally. Early identification as part of ego development, built up through introjection of maternal aspects, includes introjection of the mother’s image of the child . . . the child as seen, felt, smelled, heard, touched by the mother . . . The child begins to experience himself as a centered unit by being centered upon. (pp. 229–230)4 We can see how this formulation, demonstrating rare understanding for Loewald’s psychoanalytic era, finds resonance and confirmation in later observational research that documents the subtleties of moment-to-moment mother-infant communication, recognition, and responsiveness in affect attunement and emotional interchange.5 The ego in analysis develops, as in childhood, in relationship. Analytic development is like early development, and the analyst is in some ways like a parent, both in that there is an affective and cognitive relationship with the patient, and in that—very much in the Bionian and Winnicottian mode—the analyst holds in mind the patient’s present and, through recognition and anticipation, his future (in a 2008 panel publication in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted to Loewald, Balsam, Jacobs, and Pinsky all notice his conception of holding the future and the patient’s potential and provide clinical examples from their own work). The child begins to experience himself as a centered unit by being centered upon.

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In looking at the analyst’s participation here, Loewald introduces a theme he will develop in later writings. A view that the analyst is a neutral, objective, external scientific observer does not capture the constitutive intersubjective nature of the psychoanalytic endeavor. Nor does a portrayal of the analyst as a tabula rasa—a “reflecting mirror . . . characterized by scrupulous neutrality” (p. 223)—capture how analysis as a science works. Rather, the analyst is a scientific observer only to the extent to which he “is able to observe objectively the patient and himself in interaction” (p. 226; italics mine). Loewald does not mince words. He tells us that the hegemonic, American midcentury (but also Freudian) epistemological model of objectivity and neutrality, drawn from natural science, “has its origin in propositions which I believe to be untenable” (p. 227). Instead, he argues, analyst and patient are “associate[s] . . . in the research work,” and they “identify to an increasing degree . . . in their ego activity of scientifically guided self-scrutiny” (p. 227). This identificatory collaboration, “a necessary requirement for a successful analysis . . . has nothing to do with scientific detachment and the neutrality of a mirror. This identification does have to do with the development of a new object-relationship” (p. 227). In his elaboration of analyst-analysand roles, Loewald is making direct claims about psychoanalysis as a science, its method of inquiry and discovery, and its epistemology. Many analysts in the past referred to “our science”—a locution, I have always felt, that served as a way to skirt the rueful recognition that clinical psychoanalysis is not a classical observer-observed or hypothesis-testing science, even though many wish it were. This fact remains, even as we have a rich legacy of process and developmental research, and even as some psychoanalytic claims about mind and brain can be investigated through cognitive and neuroscientific research. “Therapeutic Action” begins to develop Loewald’s argument that analyst and analysand are a particular kind of scientific collaborator, and it gives us a lively picture of the constitutive role of that collaboration in the patient’s development. In several of Loewald’s later writings, we find fully spelled out the implication of the view that both patient and analyst are the same kind of being, whose egos are shaped, whose transferences and resistances are enacted, in and through interaction. Psychoanalysis in Loewald’s portrayal is the science of individual subjectivity, and its epistemology, as well as its method of investigation of this subjectivity, is intersubjective—based on the relations between two individual subjects. Classically, intersubjectivity refers to two subjects, two autonomous subjectivities, each of whom perceives or recognizes the self and the other, her own subjectivity and the subjectivity, and/or objectivity, of the object world. Like Loewald, Benjamin (1988, 1995, 1998) follows this usage, and I do not know a better way to refer to the interaction and mutual engagement of two separate subjects (Poland’s “two-person separate” psychoanalysis). In contemporary psychoanalysis more generally, however, due especially to the work of Stolorow and his colleagues (e.g., Stolorow and Atwood 2002), intersubjective has often come to mean

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relational or co-created—to refer to the analytic third, to Winnicott’s transitional space and transitional phenomena, and/or to other more-than-the-sum-of-theparts, two-person creations. Especially in “Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process” (1970), Loewald further develops his argument that psychoanalysis is an intersubjective science, not a classical science in which subjects study objects. The objects of study in psychoanalysis, he notes, are themselves subjects, and the whole process of investigation involves interactions between subjects in which both participants engage in the same kinds of psychic processes, are the same kinds of organizations, mutually influence one another, and change. As Loewald describes it, then, psychoanalysis is methodologically and epistemologically more akin to the qualitative social sciences, those intersubjective disciplines in which subjects study subjects and must be continually mindful of their own personhood and impact, and where the quality of interaction matters to what is found (as I note elsewhere, however, in sharp contrast to the social sciences, psychoanalysis takes individuality—the individual mind—as its objectsubject of investigation). No social scientist or philosopher of social science has better expressed a reflexive, participant-observer, methodological-epistemological stance than Loewald: The scientific fiction . . . of a field of study to which we are in the relation of extraneous observers cannot be maintained in psychoanalysis. We become part and participant of and in the field as soon as we are present in our roles as analysts. The unit of psychoanalytic investigation is the individual human mind or personality. We single it out—for reasons deeply rooted in that human mind of which we ourselves are specimens—as a subject worthy of study, as a universe in its own right . . . . . . The object of investigation, the analysand, as well as the investigator, the analyst, although each has a considerable degree of internal psychic organization and relative autonomy in respect to the other, can enter a psychoanalytic investigation only by virtue of their being relatively open systems, and open to each other. (1970, p. 278) In “Psychoanalysis as an Art and the Fantasy Character of the Psychoanalytic Situation” (1975) and in “Transference-Countertransference” (1986), Loewald further spells out, in richly evocative language, the foundations of an intersubjective ego psychology as analytic stance. In “Psychoanalysis as an Art,” he says, “In the mutual interaction of the good analytic hour, patient and analyst—each in his own way and on his own mental level—become both artist and medium for each other” (1975, p. 369). In “Transference-Countertransference” he puts it even more simply: “If a capacity for transference . . . is a measure of the patient’s analyzability, the capacity for countertransference is a measure of the analyst’s ability to analyze” (1986, pp. 285–286).

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The sociology of psychoanalytic knowledge that has led to Loewald’s formulations being noticed or not noticed, even within American psychoanalysis, is interesting in itself. “Psychoanalysis as an Art” and “Transference-Countertransference” are more remarked on and cited than “Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process.” In the case of “Psychoanalysis as an Art,” this is perhaps because it is so gorgeously written, but also perhaps because these papers refer to analysis as an art or transitional space, or, as in “Transference-Countertransference,” to a core clinical relationship. As I observe elsewhere, such formulations may be more congenial to many analysts than are formulations closer to those of social science. More generally, I have suggested, it would seem that along with the writings of Loewald’s New Haven colleagues (I include Schafer, who spent time in New Haven), the writings of American independents Jacobs, McLaughlin, and Poland, along with Fogel, extend the Loewaldian clinical intersubjective ego psychology lineage.6 “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” then, opens by laying the foundation for a significant theme in Loewald’s work, as well as a significant portrayal for us as practitioners, concerning the epistemology of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is an intersubjective human science that studies individuality in the patient, and each person’s ego development is intrinsically object relational. In the room are two separate beings, both of whose minds are involved in the transferencecountertransference relationship, both of whose minds work the same way. Yet these two people, “co-actors on the analytic stage,” play different roles, have different observational stances and different relations to the focus of inquiry. One person’s—the patient’s—transferences, resistances, and fantasies are the focus of joint inquiry, whereas the analyst is a full participant, but not, except to herself, a full object of scrutiny. Of course, Loewald does not address today’s relational or Kleinian perspectives, given the era and context in which he was writing, but we would have to infer, I think, that he would be wary of the analyst’s claiming center stage or seeming to steal the show, by repeatedly casting himself as the patient’s primary object, by focusing on the countertransference and the analyst’s mind almost more than on the transference and the mind of the patient, or by framing everything in terms of the here-and-now relationship in the room.

Part II: Interlude on the psychic apparatus After the expansive opening section of “Therapeutic Action,” Loewald gives us a short interlude, only a few pages, meant to solve a self-created challenge. Specifically, although Loewald puts forth a view of therapeutic action that is interactional and object relational at heart, the psychic changes he envisions are predominantly intrapsychic, often best described in the terms of classical metapsychology.7 Thus, before proceeding with his argument, Loewald steps back to remind us of the metapsychological view of the psychic apparatus elaborated in his early papers, the psychic apparatus that is engaged in the treatment. No part of that apparatus is a closed system. The psychic apparatus creates and gives meaning to the

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environment through drives and affect and relates cognitively and affectively to the environment through different levels of ego-reality integration and differentiation. Loewald emphasizes his view of the psychic apparatus in order to establish grounds for an argument about the analytic relationship and therapeutic action that portrays the analyst not just as a passive mirror or an object of drives, but as someone who, over the course of treatment, connects to the patient and is connected to by him across different ranges of relatedness, drive organization, and defense. He reminds us of how the psyche operates and who the two people are, as subjects and psyches in the room, so that he can extend his account of what the analyst does. Having made this point, Loewald resumes his developing argument.

Part III: Analytic activity, the language of interpretation, and reintroducing the topographic Loewald now returns to his opening themes. Beginning with the mother-child analogy and his critique of the classical mirror model, Loewald describes the constitutive importance to subjectivity of maternal recognition and processing of what comes from the infant: “recognition of the infant’s need on the part of the mother represents a gathering together of as yet undifferentiated urges of the infant, urges that in the acts of recognition and fulfilment by the mother undergo a first organization into some directed drive . . . the mediating environment conveys structure and direction” (pp. 237–238). Loewald here does not mean “containment” or “holding,” but recognition, an affective-cognitive organizing function that responds to both cognitive and affective-relational capacities. Here he is very much in the Hartmannian tradition that elaborates from Freud an inextricable interdependence of cognition and affect. Specifically, Loewald’s developmental theory enables us to conceptualize how cognitive and affective modalities go hand in hand in analysis, as the analyst is both cognitive-affective interactant and interpreter in relation to every ego-object stage in the patient. As Loewald later puts it, he is talking about “empathic objectivity . . . neither insight in the abstract, nor any special display of benevolent or warm attitude on the part of the analyst” (1975, p. 360).8 Anticipating Bion’s description (1962) of the mother’s and analyst’s metabolizing beta into alpha elements, here in “Therapeutic Action” Loewald specifies the actual transformational activity that enables the interlocutor (analyst or mother) to help someone with this metabolizing. Thus, Loewald’s formulation echoes Bion and Winnicott, but to my mind his ego psychological explication of ego-reality and drive-object integration in both patient/child and analyst/mother may give him an advantage in precision. These latter analysts write in more metaphorical and intuitive modes, but their traditions, it seems to me, do not enable as clearly as does ego psychology a conceptual specification of the cognitive or structuralizing capacities of the ego, in either patient or analyst. Given these Hartmannian resonances in Loewald’s interactive and developmental conceptualization of analytic activity, we might surmise that a stronger Loewaldian

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presence in contemporary psychoanalysis, both in the United States and elsewhere, could help to resolve challenging polarizations that have tended to follow from trying to put together or contrast some post-Freudian theories and techniques— relational, self psychological, Winnicottian—with more classical approaches (see, e.g., Treurniet 1993). For Loewald, in his specific conceptualization, maternal recognition is a prototype for what the analyst offers. The analyst, in his view, does not oscillate or choose between oedipal interpreter and preoedipal, metabolizing, mirroring, or environmental primary-object/mother status. He is active as separate, thinking subject and intentional agent even in relation to the earliest developmental states, while also, and at the same time, shifting his ego stance in relation to different levels of ego-reality integration in the patient. Now, having given us an account of how development works, what psychic change is, and what founds the analytic relationship, Loewald can spell out how different analytic interventions all help the patient to elaborate and specify what he or she presents. An interpretation, specifically, comprises two inseparable elements. First, it “takes with the patient a step toward true regression, as against the neurotic compromise formation” (p. 240), thus helping the patient see the regressive level on which she is really operating, covered by her defenses and defensive structures. Second, by so doing, the interpretation opens for the patient the possibility of a different integration and organization: The analyst operates on various levels of understanding. Whether he verbalizes his understanding to the patient on the level of clarifications of unconscious material, whether he indicates or reiterates his intent of understanding, restates the procedure to be followed, or whether he interprets unconscious, verbal or other, material, and especially if he interprets transference and resistance—the analyst structures and articulates, or works toward structuring and articulating, the material and the productions offered by the patient. If an interpretation of unconscious meaning is timely, the words by which this meaning is expressed are recognizable to the patient as expressions of what he experiences. They organize for him what was previously less organized and thus give him the distance from himself that enables him to understand, to see, to put into words and to “handle” what was previously not visible, understandable, speakable, tangible. A higher stage of organization, of both himself and his environment, is thus reached by way of the organizing understanding which the analyst provides. (pp. 238–239) As Loewald describes what an interpretation is, we begin to see how he will introduce the topographic back into his ego psychology. What the defensive structures and operations cover over, in Loewald’s view, are unconscious-preconscious ruptures generated not so much by repressed or primal drives or libidinal wishes as by primal intensities of meaning (as I have noted, Loewald [1951], has already told us that drives are not autochthonous but come into being in relation to, and as they create, objects):

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The interpretation thus creates the possibility for freer interplay between the unconscious and the preconscious systems, whereby the preconscious regains its originality and intensity, lost to the unconscious in the repression, and the unconscious regains access to and capacity for progression in the direction of higher organization . . . With an interpretation, both the unconscious experience and a higher organizational level of that experience are made available to the patient: unconscious and preconscious are joined together in the act of interpretation. (pp. 240, 242) Interpretations are given in language. In “Therapeutic Action,” Loewald anticipates reflections he will elaborate in his remarkable “Primary Process, Secondary Process, and Language,” here putting matters subtly but simply: “Language, in its most specific function in analysis, an interpretation, is thus a creative act similar to that in poetry, where language is found for phenomena, contexts, connections, experiences not previously known and speakable” (1978b, p. 242). Drawing on this early insight, Loewald will later tell us precisely how a good interpretation works—how it makes a link between what has been an unthought known (a “thing-cathexis”) and a tacitly imagined (a “word-cathexis”), how an interpretation reaches from secondary to primary process, where genuine psychic change happens. Language is not, as we usually think of it, simply a cognitive, communicative process. Rather, words, things, and affects are from the beginning melded together in mother-infant communication, “composed from undifferentiated ingredients of the total situation or event experienced by the infant,” who is “immersed, embedded in a flow of speech that is part and parcel of a global experience within the mother-child field” (1978b, p. 185). Because of this constitutive, interactive context, says Loewald, “the emotional relationship to the person from whom the word is learned plays a significant, in fact crucial, part in how alive the link between thing and word turns out to be” (1978b, p. 197). This form of experience, he goes on to say, colors and shapes communication in an analysis—the patient’s ability to hear and his emotional filtering of an interpretation.

Part IV: Ghosts into ancestors Loewald’s concluding section provides the stunning emotional and intellectual heart of “Therapeutic Action.” In his opening, Loewald has challenged the view of analysis that portrays the analyst as an objective, scientific observer who corrects the distortions of transference—a view implying that termination would mean that “no further transference occurs, no projections are thrown on the mirror” (1960, p. 225). Later, he has hinted that a good interpretation brings in something desirable and intense from the unconscious. Loewald now elaborates these points, keeping in mind everything he has thus far argued, specifically, his careful documentation of the constitutive role of object relations in ego formation, his pointing

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toward intersubjectivity in the analytic relationship, and his tacit claim that we need the topographic metapsychologies of unconscious and preconscious and of primary and secondary process, along with a structural metapsychology, if we are to understand interpretation and change. Having radically expanded our view of interpretation, the analyst’s role, the analytic relationship, development, language, and psychoanalysis as an intersubjective science and practice, Loewald now returns directly to what changes for the patient. Loewald begins with a rethinking of transference. Freud pointed to libido transferred from ego to objects, necessary for the formation of a transference neurosis (and therefore for analyzability) in the first place, and from infantile to later objects—those past to present transferences classically thought to require interpretation. These object-relational two-person formulations, Loewald suggests, are what we generally mean by transference, but he wants to remind us of topographic and intrapsychic, one-person, meanings also found in Freud. Just as in The Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud describes how the day residue provides a hook for unconscious wishes and thoughts expressed in dreams, so also an unconscious proto-idea can transfer its intensity to the preconscious and find expression through being covered by a preconscious thought. Unconscious ideas have force and intensity, and the preconscious is the point of attachment for these intensities. Such transferences are also brought to analysis and are the goal of expression and interpretation. Loewald claims that there is a striving, a “compulsion,” to associate unconscious complexes with conscious ones, not only in dreams but throughout psychic life: “it has to do with the indestructibility of all mental acts which are truly unconscious” (p. 248).9 These unconscious mentalizations, like the ghosts in Hades, become emotionally enlivened, specified, and accessible through the “blood of recognition” (p. 248), when they can connect to current objects and to preconscious and conscious life. Analysis is about helping the patient gain access to these unconscious mental acts. In an evocative phrase that echoes religions and kinships systems throughout the world, and that has found its way even into novels (Hustvedt 2008, p. 196), analysis is about turning ghosts into ancestors: Transference is pathological insofar as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts, and this is the beginning of the transference neurosis in analysis: ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defenses but haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects. (Loewald 1960, p. 249) We see here the consequences of a topographic, in contrast to a structural, point of view. Fully in the topographic mode of unconscious-preconscious and the poetic mode of light and darkness, Loewald here is not talking about doing away with transferences or “resolving” the transference neurosis and substituting

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for it reality and a real relationship. In the structural mode, even in Loewald’s own writings (e.g., 1962a, 1979), the resolution of the transference neurosis and termination lead to structuralizing internalizations and greater individuation, whereas in the topographic mode, leading ghosts to rest as ancestors does not mean moving beyond the ancestors or the unconscious. Here the purpose of interpretation is to retain the unconscious, but with a “higher organization” leading “unconscious activity . . . into preconscious organization” (1960, p. 249). Elaborating this vision, the last several pages of “Therapeutic Action” put forth a strong argument for the centrality of transference and unconscious life to life in general. The analyst’s work of interpretation of transference and resistance, her recognition of the patient’s psychic potential, her helping the patient with dream interpretation, with the recovery of memories, and with reconstructing the past, these are all in the service of reestablishing “the lost connections, the buried interplay, between the unconscious and the preconscious” (p. 249), of making these links live and available. In another of his tell-it-straight critiques, Loewald says, “There is no greater misunderstanding of the full meaning of transference than one [that portrays transference as] ‘a mark of man’s immaturity, and . . . the enduring monument of man’s profound rebellion against reality’” (Loewald 1960, pp. 249–250, quoting William Silverberg). For Loewald, by contrast: transference is the “dynamism” by which the instinctual life of man, the id, becomes ego and by which reality becomes integrated and maturity is achieved. Without such transference—of the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life—to the preconscious and to present-day life and contemporary objects— . . . human life becomes sterile and an empty shell . . . Our present, current experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication (interplay) with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences. (pp. 250, 251) Both unconscious and preconscious suffer from repression. The unconscious finds outlets through neurotic transformations that are not integrated into the rest of psychic life, and the preconscious is left without those “unconscious intensities . . . which give current experiences their full meaning and emotional depth” (p. 251). Just in case we miss how strongly Loewald feels about this, and how much he differentiates himself from colleagues who focus on transference as a resistance, or who imply that making the unconscious conscious means overcoming the unconscious, he reminds us once again that he refers to “psychic health, [which] has to do with an optimal, although by no means necessarily conscious, communication between the infantile, archaic stages and structures of the psychic apparatus and its later stages and structures of organization. And further, that the unconscious is capable of change” (p. 254).

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In concluding, Loewald turns back to the analytic relationship and to the ego and object relations with which he began. He will be a one-person, topographic, ego-structural analyst and a two-person, ego and object-relational, intersubjective analyst at the same time. It is through interaction with the analyst that the relinkage of unconscious and preconscious can come to pass. The analyst is both a source of interpretation and observation and an engaged object of attachment and transference, one who recognizes through his own subjectivity and observation the particular level at which the patient is living. The external (transference-imbued) analytic relationship, sustained by an “objectivity and neutrality which is love and respect,” allows internal transference between unconscious and preconscious in the patient. Emerging out of the analytic relationship, the integration of unconscious and preconscious thereby ties back to ego and object relations: We postulate thus internalization of an interaction process, not simply internalization of objects, as an essential element in ego development as well as in the resumption of it in analysis. The double aspect of transference, the fact that transference refers to the interaction between psychic apparatus and object-world as well as to the interplay between the unconscious and the preconscious within the psychic apparatus, thus becomes clarified. (p. 251) Anticipating his later work elaborating the full subjectivity of both analyst and patient, and the intersubjectivity that is basic to the analytic encounter, Loewald ends by looking at the “real relationship” of analyst and patient: I hope to have made the point . . . that there is neither such a thing as reality nor a real relationship without transference. Any “real” relationship involves transfer of unconscious images to present-day objects. In fact, present-day objects are objects, and thus real, in the full sense of the word only . . . to the extent to which this transference, in the sense of transformational interplay between unconscious and preconscious, is realized. (p. 254) Thus, even at the end of an analysis, when the “transference neurosis” is supposedly resolved, and even as the patient (and the analyst, as Loewald will later tell us) has relinked unconscious and preconscious and been able, through new internalizations, to mourn and make her internal ego-object world more complex, even then her relationship to the analyst and the analyst’s to the patient, if still worthy of living and remembering, are not without transference.

Recapitulation A close reading of “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” shows how this paper, in its careful and elegant construction, unfolds a comprehensive and richly

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detailed account of all elements in the psychoanalytic process that together create therapeutic action. The paper opens a window into Loewald’s work and into the history of psychoanalysis, providing a multifaceted prism through which the reader can further shape an analytic identity and stance. I have tried to show that Loewald integrates, in noncontradictory ways, many positions that we have historically polarized. He is an ego psychologist who advocates for unconscious-preconscious linkages and primary process, by implication retaining the topographical perspective. He shows that ego and object, as well as ego development and the development of object relations, go hand in hand. Finally, his emphasis on object relations and interaction underpins a fully subject-subject view of the analytic encounter and of analytic change. Loewald conceptualizes the analyst as a new object and as a co-actor on the analytic stage. He provides a carefully honed account of exactly how the mother recognizes her infant and thereby enables the child’s development, forming a basis for his description of how the analyst needs to recognize and interpret to the patient in cognate ways. He advocates a third, nonpathologizing meaning of transference and of the integration of unconscious and preconscious in order to give life an intensity and richness. All these together form a prescient integrative vision. They create a different universe within which we can understand the psychoanalytic process, therapeutic action, and the analyst’s stance, as we also seek to understand that “universe in its own right,” the individual mind.

Notes 1 I note earlier Loewald’s cohort position. Born in 1906 and bringing European intellectual origins to his American training, Loewald falls exactly between the Europeans Hartmann (born in 1894), Loewenstein (1898), and Kris (1900), on the one hand, and the Americans Arlow (1912), Brenner (1913), and Gray (1918), on the other. 2 Emotionally textured linguistic readings of Loewald that further substantiate McKee’s proposal can be found in Lang (2007) and Pinsky (2008). 3 Here also, echoing Fairbairn’s and Guntrip’s focus on object relations, we find a link to the British independent tradition. 4 Loewald here is thinking, in traditional terms, of the ordinary, taken-for-granted mother, but he also uses the word “parent,” and, astonishingly and presciently, is also describing (“maternal aspects”) what some analytic traditions might now call the maternal function, engaged by whomever is an involved primary parent. It would take us far afield to explore this further, but it is worth noting, along with Loewald’s choice of “parricide” over “patricide” in “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex” (for this latter usage, see Chodorow 2018). 5 I think of the work of Beebe, Emde, Fonagy, Harrison, Sander, Stern, Trevarthen, Tronick, and many others—a vast literature whose individual citations would themselves amount to a chapter-length document. 6 American independent Dale Boesky is a close colleague of these writers, and his Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context (2008; see also Boesky 1990) elaborates, in ways consonant with Loewaldian formulations, the epistemologically complex role of the analyst as interactant, hermeneutic interpreter, and scientific investigator. Boesky describes psychoanalysis as “a two-person/interpersonal domain combined with the traditional intrapsychic methods of contextualizing” (2008, p. 81). Yet Loewald does not seem to have influenced Boesky, who observes that he, like other American psychoanalysts, had no

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avenue for understanding the emotional and interactive participation of the analyst until the 1980s, when he came to appreciate countertransference theorists like Paula Heimann from the U.K. and Heinrich Racker from Argentina. 7 I mention earlier that Cooper (1988) first noticed this contradiction. In a similar vein, I suggest in Chapter 6 that Loewald may have written “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” partly to remind readers of “Therapeutic Action” that he still held to a structural ego psychology. 8 McLaughlin follows Loewald: “I wish . . . to emphasize that working in this fashion is not an effort to be empathetic . . . The analyst’s empathy rests most legitimately in his efforts to enhance his sense of resonance with the patient through intuitive openness. Its use is always to be questioned when the analyst tries to convey empathy” (1996, p. 221; see also Chapter 9). 9 Here as elsewhere we find a resonance between Freud and contemporaneous social thought. The idea of compulsion, what Freud (1900) calls the “need for transference” (pp. 563, 564) resonates with the line of German social thought put forth by Dilthey, Weber, and others that implicitly points to what might be considered a drive to create meaning (see also Obeyesekere 1990).

PART III

American independence: theory and practice

8 FROM BEHIND THE COUCH Uncertainty and indeterminacy in psychoanalytic theory and practice

“Know thyself ” Inscription at Temple of Apollo, Delphi1

Psychoanalysis is directed toward self-understanding, yet its basic premise is that most of mental life is not available to consciousness. This foundational paradox, that the self-knowledge gained in psychoanalysis is based on the acceptance of notknowing, has tacitly faced both analyst and patient since the beginning, but it is more in the current intellectual and cultural climate that we notice it and address its implications for theory and practice. Freud, of course, had pointed to this paradox when he noted that psychoanalysis was the third of three major challenges to human narcissism. Following Galileo’s sun-centered, rather than earth-centered, universe and Darwin’s evolutionary theory, we find the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious mental functioning. Yet Freud was himself actually very certain about his discoveries and about psychoanalysis as a science. If we believe his case accounts, moreover, he was also certain about the psychic meanings of his patients’ symptoms and dreams.2 Unlike the situation in Freud’s time, today it is almost a truism that the analyst must be able to tolerate uncertainty, whether we call it paradox, indeterminacy, or narrative as opposed to historical truth. Analysts of all persuasions cite Bion’s call to be “without memory or desire” (whether they mean what they say is another matter). In this view, the analyst has to hold the tensions of not knowing or the fear of being surprised, rather than fleeing to memory (what the patient has already said or done; what happened in the last session; what one’s supervisor or teachers told one about how things develop in treatment) or desire (what the analyst wishes the patient would do or how he would act; waiting for the patient to conform to and confirm a theory). Casement, in a related vein, titles his books Learning from the Patient (1985) and Learning from Our Mistakes (2002).

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The self-knowledge gained in psychoanalysis, then, is based on the acceptance of not-knowing. Analyst and patient differ from others not so much in greater self-understanding as in acknowledgment of self-understanding’s limits. Such challenges can seem to borrow from postmodern skepticism, yet they do not begin with the epistemological climate shifts of the postmodern era. They reflect a fundamental contradiction, a foundational paradox present, if not always recognized, since the beginnings of psychoanalysis. That is, we know much more about ourselves as humans because of Freud and his successors, and individuals know more about themselves after participating in an analysis, but our theories of the dynamic unconscious and primary-process thought assume that we cannot know most of what goes on in our minds and affects our lives. In this chapter, I suggest that we can elaborate this fundamental paradox and describe its basic features not so much as technical challenges as everyday problems brought forward for both analyst and patient by the clinical encounter. On the one side, uncertainty and indeterminacy challenge narcissism. On the other, the inevitability of loss and finitude challenge depression. I begin with the challenges of uncertainty for the analyst, suggesting that we flee to established theories and techniques to assuage our uncertainties. I then turn to the challenges of uncertainty for the patient. I move next to inevitable loss, beginning with the patient, whose challenge I describe as rueful recognition. Finally, I turn to the challenges of depression and loss for the analyst. These matters of uncertainty and loss are not only what the analyst must bear in mind. They are also what she hopes that the patient too might keep in mind, as both of them work to mitigate suffering by bringing the patient’s unconscious to consciousness.

Paradoxes of psychoanalytic self-knowledge As Freud was the first to acknowledge, he did not discover the existence of unconscious mental processes. He did, however, systematize the theory of the dynamic unconscious, and he described its modes of operation. He showed that psychic reality has a life of its own, and he documented how our capacity to drive unacceptable thoughts from consciousness operates, either through repression of our more fully formed thoughts or else through dissociation, as when thoughts and proto-thoughts get disconnected one from the other, pushed into the body or put into another aspect of self. Listening to himself and his patients, who helped to create psycho­ analysis, Freud discovered in the primary process of the mind a capacity to contain contradictions, to know and not know something at the same time, to reverse and stop time, to have events happen simultaneously that could not do so in “real” life, to have an image in the mind represent more than one person, event, or thing. By 1905, Freud came to argue that not only symptoms, but also dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue have meanings that are partly concealed or revealed indirectly, and that there are both motives for and processes of engaging in such half-concealments. This foundational paradox only deepens as psychoanalysis develops. Although we know much more about ourselves as humans because of Freud and his successors,

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and any individual knows much more about herself after participating in an analysis, our knowledge of the dynamic unconscious and our theories about primary process both assume that we cannot know most of what goes on in our minds and affects our lives. Freud’s later revisions, especially his id, ego, and superego structural theory, emphasize that all aspects of the psyche—not just unacceptable wishes and drives, but structures of mind that regard these as unacceptable, and the structures that institute the processes that keep unacceptable matters out of awareness—all these are largely unconscious. The structural theory thus makes an even more radical claim than the first topography of unconscious, conscious, and preconscious about the limitations on what we can know. Each subsequent addition to our theoretical repertoire—Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, Bion’s beta function, Ogden’s autistic-contiguous position—deals less with cognition and more with saturated affect. As psychoanalysis turned its attention to infancy (and as it has borrowed findings about implicit and procedural memory and experience from psychology and neuroscience), we become increasingly aware of how unrepresented and nonlinguistic early modes of being shape our experience both of ourselves and of the world. Bollas’s felicitously named “unthought known” still serves well to cover these various tonal, neuroanatomical, unrepresented phenomena, and we find similar recognitions earlier in Loewald, Winnicott, and others. And finally, as we learn more about countertransference (what Parsons [2014] calls the “internal analytic setting” and “raiding the inarticulate”), we come to know that such experiences are found in the analyst as well as in the patient. In other words, the goal of self-discovery in psychoanalysis has always included— and increasingly it ever more deeply includes—an acceptance of how much cannot be discovered about our minds. We cannot know ourselves fully because the mind is divided within itself. Parts of it are repressed or split off, and our resistances and defenses work to exclude these threatening elements of thought and feeling from our awareness. Moreover, the mind operates according to the laws of primary process that Freud first described, in terms of the implicit memory that contemporary researchers document, and in other ways unavailable to secondary-process thinking.3 Yet the clinical method of psychoanalysis does enable us to learn about the operation of the unconscious—about the unconscious in general, but also and especially about the operation of an individual’s own unconscious. In analysis, individuals gain, we hope, personal knowledge about how their minds in particular work or, as I put it in The Power of Feelings, to know about the power of their own particular feelings in shaping their own personal meanings. Along with its recognition of the limitations of self-knowledge, psychoanalysis gives us both general understanding of the self and an inextricably intertwined method for self-investigation. According to psychoanalysis, everything we say and do has meaning, even if we can never know those meanings fully. They inhere not in our cognitive or rational beliefs and conscious knowledge about our actions and intentions, nor in the language we use, but in affects embedded in unconscious stories. Freud argued that who we are and the affectively charged stories we tell about ourselves, our bodies, and the world are first shaped by childhood passions, fears, and desires—

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by the psychosexual and psychosocial givens of human childhood (psychoanalysis calls them preoedipal and oedipal developmental challenges). He directed us to the ways that bodily experiences—the drives, sexuality, comforting or painful feeding and holding—come to be psychically represented and to give meaning to the self and to others. As Loewald describes so eloquently, it is especially in the concept of transference that psychoanalysis shows how we give personal meaning to the world. We come to our transferential reactions through early experiences of body and self and through early experiences with others, as these are transformed through unconscious fantasy and sedimented in implicit memory. We then bring these internal meanings to later experience—we transfer, as Loewald reminds us, not just past to present, but unconscious to conscious, and primary process to secondary process. This search for meaning, which includes the hope that understanding will help cure, developed in the context of what we today call a one-person psychology. This one-person psychology—its complex understanding of individual subjectivity and the method it has developed to help people recognize and expand their subjectivity—is the core contribution of psychoanalysis (in Chapters. 13 and 14, I propose that we categorize psychoanalysis, contradictorily or paradoxically, as the intersubjective social science of individuality). Analytic goals, analytic visions of subjectivity (Chodorow 1999a), begin with Freud’s wish to make the unconscious conscious and to enable ego to be where id was. Following Freud, we find perhaps especially in the independent traditions— in the foundational writings of Loewald, Milner, and Winnicott, along with later members of both traditions—further elaborated and developed visions of individual subjectivity. As I suggested earlier, Loewald in particular reformulates the psychoanalytic view of transference and fantasy. For Freud and some later analysts, transference was a picture from the past imposed inaccurately on the reality of the analyst. Fantasy, for them, was usually counterpoised to reality and said to be driven by a childhood wish or an internal filtering and emotional casting of experiences of both self and other. Loewald argues, by contrast, that transference does more than distort and restrict. Infusing conscious experience with unconscious thoughts and feelings, transference is for him what gives life its depth and richness. Similarly, fantasy is what makes reality meaningful instead of meaningless, though Loewald would still say that fantasy out of touch with reality means living in a psychotic world. He writes of “the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life,” and claims that “our present, current experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication . . . with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences” (1960, pp. 250–251). From Winnicott, I add to Loewald’s view of fantasy and transference an attention to the privacy of the self—what Winnicott calls the true self—and thus an image of the potential self-uniqueness of each person. Winnicott offers us as well a forthright sense of what it means to be psychically alive (as opposed to psychically dead).

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The paradox of self and other For Freud, there was no paradox in a one-person psychology. He and other early psychoanalysts, most of them medical doctors, intuitively saw themselves as engaged in curing the sick and, simultaneously, as objective scientists observing and interpreting the minds of others. When the patient developed transference feelings and fantasies or exhibited resistances and defenses, the analyst, as a neutral observer, could point these out and thus help the patient see what she was doing and the distortions in her fantasies. Freud by and large assumed the analyst’s authority and knowledge, as well as the patient’s lack of self-knowledge. The analyst—and this is still very useful advice from Freud—was meant to listen neutrally with evenly hovering attention to all parts of the patient’s psyche and not to take sides, say, with the superego against the ego or with one fantasy against another. If the person of the analyst affected the treatment, or fantasies and feelings were stirred up in the analyst, there was a problem—a problem of countertransference resulting from insufficient analysis of the analyst. In such cases, the analyst was expected to recognize and assess the problem, then return to acting as an objective scientific observer.4 Today, however, analysts no longer possess the unquestioned professional authority of their predecessors, and many practitioners no longer see themselves as objective scientists. Yet there is a more crucial difference between Freud’s time and ours. Our contemporary understanding that human development happens only in relationship, a finding that infant research confirms to be the case from the beginning of life, confronts even those analysts who hold in the clinical consulting room to a one-person view of the patient. Innate structures and potentials for language, for emotional assessment of objects, people, and interactions, for processes and forms of self, sexuality, and gender, all these unfold and gain their particular form in the context of an active relationship with caretakers. Unformulated primary experience—Bion’s beta elements, or what researchers now call implicit or procedural memory—becomes labeled and thus known (transformed into alpha elements) only through the containing and processing of the interlocutor—the parent or psychoanalyst. Both development and change have come to be modeled in terms of the motherchild relationship, and affective connection is also located on the terrain of mother and child, where global experience, attunement, and undifferentiation are located. Mother-child relatedness, Loewald wrote, “is the psychic matrix out of which intrapsychic instincts and ego, and extrapsychic object, differentiate” (1978b, p. 216). As I have said, for Loewald, as for Edith Jacobson before him (1964), even libido and aggression are not inborn energic charges but rather evolve out of the mother-child matrix, in which emotionally laden experiences influence their personal creation: “Instincts . . . are to be seen as relational phenomena from the beginning and not as autochthonous forces seeking discharge” (Loewald 1972, p. 322). Language too—the medium in which the analytic interchange takes place— is personal and relational. In Loewald’s view, the infant “is immersed, embedded in a flow of speech that is part and parcel of a global experience within the

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mother-child field” (1978a, p. 185). From the beginning and throughout life, language has both the affective density of the primary process and the symbolic meaning of secondary-process thought: “The mother’s flow of words does not convey meaning to or symbolize ‘things’ for the infant . . . but the sounds, tone of voice, and rhythm of speech are fused within the apprehended global event” (1978a, p. 187). Separateness itself is created out of relationship: “In one and the same act—I am tempted to say, in the same breath and the same sucking of milk— drive direction and organization of environment into shapes or configurations begin, and they are continued into ego organization and object organization, by methods such as identification, introjection, projection” (1960, p. 238). This paradoxical view of development, in which separateness and selfhood are constituted in relationship, has created a paradox for treatment as well. Selfknowledge and change cannot come solely from within, and we cannot own our own psyches exclusively. Even psychic reality and unconscious fantasy—indisputably one-person experiences—are shaped in the clinical situation by transference and countertransference. In the process, the patient sees that self-knowledge requires recognizing that self-knowledge depends on another. Many contemporary analysts, unlike those of Freud’s generation, look to the mother-child matrix as a model of the analytic process, but even those who do not recognize that all processes that matter clinically—language, the emotional assessment of objects, people and interactions, processes and forms of self, sexuality and gender, unconscious fantasies and transferences, defenses, nonverbal behaviors—all unfold and gain their particular form in relational contexts. Thus, intersubjective understanding and the self-knowledge and self-experience of both patient and analyst are ever shifting and dependent on the transference-countertransference constellation of the moment. In a radical change from the classical view, the analyst is thus no longer regarded as an objective outside observer but instead is seen as a participant whose personhood and subjectivity continuously affect the patient’s life and mind. Once thought a symptom of poor analytic technique, the analyst’s countertransference, though conceptualized in various ways, has become universally central to treatment.5 In an ego psychological vein and in accord with the original Freudian view, the analyst’s countertransference may be seen to come primarily from her own intrapsychic life and object-relational past.6 For Kleinians and many in the British independent tradition (see, e.g., Bollas 1987; Kohon 1986; Parsons 2014), by contrast, countertransference results from patients projectively putting their own feelings into the analyst; thus, countertransference is thought to be a direct response to what is going on in the patient (the ego psychologist Joseph Sandler’s idea of role-responsiveness [1976] also shares this listing toward seeing the countertransference as initiated by the patient). Finally, in American relational psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Aron 1996; Hoffman 1998; Mitchell and Aron 1999), countertransference expresses neither the analyst’s internal life and past nor the patient’s internal life put into the analyst. Rather, it is a “co-construction” of analyst and patient. Some American independents also take such a view (e.g., Boesky 1990), as does the intersubjective Kleinian Ogden (e.g., 1994a).

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Psychoanalytic theory and method, then, rest on two apparently contradictory claims, apparently both true, about human subjectivity. On the one hand is a radically individualist and subjectivist view: we create meaning from within and come to know, through analysis, ourselves and the unconscious fantasies and fears that are there to be discovered. On the other hand is a radically intersubjectivist view: from birth, we form ourselves, develop our unconscious inner worlds, and create new understandings of ourselves during analysis, only in and through our relationship with another or others. All contemporary analysts find themselves needing to take sides in this debate or else to locate themselves along the continuum between the most radically exclusive one-person and two-person views. Some, especially those in the Loewaldian and Winnicottian lineages (the American and British independent traditions) try to resolve the conflict by holding both to the essential oneness and separateness of people and, at the same time, to their essential interrelatedness. For these analysts, the field’s insistent subjectivism and equally insistent intersubjectivism intertwine and complement each other. Recall Poland’s eloquently precise query (1996): “How can it be that no man is an island and that at the same time every man is an island?” (p. 33). A related debate about self and other likewise calls for analysts to take sides or locate themselves on a continuum between extremes. All analysts now confront the recognition that the emergent analytic encounter, based as it is in transference and countertransference, creates a recursive relativity. Analyst and patient participate in a relationship they have mutually created, and hence neither can be exclusively outside looking in. Any claim or attempt to stand outside is a further participation, one that itself needs to be analyzed. But the epistemological status of the patient’s self-observation, the analyst’s observation of the patient, and the analyst’s own self-observation or self-knowledge, as well as the degree of their interdependence, are subjects on which differing positions are taken.7 Turning from changes in theory to observations on technique and process, we see the same dilemmas from a different angle. Each analysis involves the quest of an individual for self-understanding—for making her unconscious conscious—yet each analysis requires both patient and analyst to recognize the existence of processes and communications that are unconscious and will remain so. Each analysis assumes a patient’s (and an analyst’s) unique individuality and has as a goal the discovery of this individuality in the patient, yet the process unfolds entirely in relationship. Finally, the analyst brings to this relationship techniques of analysis and theories about human functioning that are meant to apply generally rather than uniquely to the people and relationship at hand. These dualities affect both analyst and analysand.

The analyst’s viewpoint I begin with the analyst. I note earlier that many contemporary analytic writers emphasize that a psychoanalyst must be able to tolerate uncertainty (see, e.g., Ogden 1989; Chodorow 1999a; Parsons 2000; Hoffman 1998). Formerly (and still,

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in many places) wherever the analyst trained, she was trained in one theory—in classical American settings, ego psychology, while in the interpersonal institutes, interpersonal theory and technique. In England, trainees chose among the Kleinian “A” group, the Anna Freud “B” group, and a hybrid middle group that became the British independent tradition. The acknowledgment of multiple theories went along with requiring the trainee to choose one. Each group thought their theory was the correct one, and thought, further (this also in classical American and probably in the interpersonal institutes when I was in training) that a beginning analyst, or even a senior one, might become confused, knowing that she could listen from more than one perspective. Today, by contrast, American trainees, and perhaps trainees in other parts of the psychoanalytic world, take courses in several different theoretical traditions (although certainty may have migrated to clinical and technique courses, case conferences, and supervision, where, in my observation of both classical and relational institutes, there can be a hovery, pretheoretical concern about noticing “the” transference and “the” countertransference, or “the” relationship, and translating whatever the patient is saying into something about “the” transference or relationship).8 We find certainty also in the early psychoanalytic cases. Here the reader senses that the analyst is waiting to discover—is looking for—her male patients’ castration anxiety and Oedipus complex, or his female patients’ penis envy and falling in love with the analyst. Such expectations went along with clinical conviction. The analyst knew what the patient was feeling and what his fantasies and wishes were, and he was either waiting until the expected universal fantasies, wishes, and conflicts emerged, or assertively told the patient what was there. Freud’s treatment of Dora stands out here and fittingly became a feminist cause célébre, but such certainty of expectation and interpretation (which was, let us not forget, often right) can be found in early analytic work from most schools of analysis. In her interpretation of resistances and defenses, we must remember, the classical psychoanalyst undeniably wanted to help her patients understand themselves, their warded-off wishes and fantasies, and their conflicts. Yet there is always the sense that, finally, everyone is the same. Everyone struggles with penis envy or castration anxiety, the resolution or nonresolution of the Oedipus complex, childhood psychosexual stages, and so forth. Freud’s understanding of individuality assumed that individuals develop and exist within a fairly predictable matrix. Other classical theories, too, seem to hold that people develop and operate according to fixed templates. Kleinian analysts expect to find splitting, projective identification, envy, manic defenses, fantasies of omnipotence, and layerings of paranoid-schizoid and depressive position functioning. Self psychologists notice and expect to find mirroring and idealizing transferences; relational analysts, ruptures, repairs, and co-constructions between analyst and patient. In earlier times, Rankians looked for the trauma of birth and Jungians for the animus and anima. Given what I call in The Power of Feelings the “anxieties of uncertainty,” we can understand the appeal of theoretical and technical universalisms.

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Now we are in a world in which multiple theories can’t be avoided, in which everyone knows, and candidates are taught, that there are multiple theories. In this world, valuation of the analyst’s authority and knowledge has given way to notions of collaboration, co-construction, the influence of the analyst’s subjectivity, self, and feeling, the patient as interpreter of the analyst’s experience, the analyst’s countertransference, and arguments for self-disclosure—all ways of acknowledging the analyst’s limits (or at least similar personhood to that of the patient). But we still find conflict and disagreement about this among analysts, some of whom continue to argue that one theory is right, while others argue that another is, or that several are. Still others claim to work without theory. As they might claim, they “listen to the patient” (à la Casement) and to their own intuition. All of these trends of course generate internal conflict and uncertainty within any analyst: how can she decide what is right at a particular moment? How should he believe or not believe the different advice he gets about self-disclosure or throwing away the book? Because of training, temperament, and analytic geography, one analyst might tend to hear a patient with an ego psychological ear, while another might listen with an ear attuned to Kleinian, British object-relational, Bionian, American relational, or Kohutian themes. Classically trained Americans like me learned to recognize and analyze resistances and defenses, to work from the surface, and to think structurally—to assume that conflict and compromise formation are central to psychic life. Our theoretically and clinically trained ears may notice such matters first, even as, during a particular hour, or with a particular patient, we may find ourselves thinking in predominantly Kleinian terms about splitting and projective identification, or, reminded of Kohut, of narcissistic selfobject appeals and mirroring transferences. Similarly, the British independents Parsons and Bollas, though emphatically non-Kleinian, nonetheless list toward noticing projective identification and projection-introjection exchanges in their writing and in listening to clinical material and group process. Every analyst today, then, works in the context of a large repertoire of theories about psychic functioning and about what may precipitate change or constitute a mutative process. Some contemporary analysts are wedded to one or another of the theories available. But there is such a crossing of, and often convergence among, theories by now that many have come to regard analytic theories as, taken together, a tool kit rather than as constituting, each independently, a self-sufficient set of claims. Understanding theories— even vehemently exclusive theories—as a tool kit, all of whose implements are in one situation or another useful, is a practical way of reconciling a one-person subjectivism with a two-person intersubjectivism and of reconciling our premise of individuality with our (inevitably) universalizing theories (like other psychologies, psychoanalysis purports to understand the human mind in general). Parsons (2000, front matter) wonders how analysis can be “deeply personal, subjective and intuitive” yet require ”objectivity, theory-building and technical discipline.” He continues, “The objective quality of psychoanalytic knowledge is paradoxically dependent on the personal engagement of the knower with what is known.”

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Of course, psychoanalysts still want to help patients understand their sexual wishes and fears, their anxieties about bodily integrity, and the toxic effects of envy and omnipotence. We still focus on a patient’s fantasies about self in relation to parents whom we conceive in oedipal terms. But it does seem that contemporary respect for “the patient as a unique other” (Poland 1996, p. 6) may signal a shift in the history of psychoanalysis and also a point of variance among psychoanalytic practitioners. We need, as usual, to have it both ways. We respect and marvel at the contribution made by Freud and his colleagues (as well as by analysts of today who hold to one universal theory) but, at the same time, we appreciate that later practitioners and theorists may have a fuller recognition of individuality, psychological diversity, and personal meaning.

Listening to and listening for My own tentative assessment and ethnographic observation, in these matters of theory and technique, is that the challenge of uncertainty has led to a divide in the contemporary clinical world between those who are likelier to listen for and those more likely to listen to.9 In his influential presidential address to the International Psychoanalytical Association, “Psychoanalysis: The Common Ground,” Robert Wallerstein (1990) suggested that analysts possess theoretical diversity but clinical commonality. My suggestion here is that we might equally make a case for theoretical commonality and a clinical divide. Entangled as we are in our internal debates, analysts can miss this theoretical commonality. In contrast to other psychological theories and theories of clinical treatment, as well as to socially determinist theories, all psychoanalytic theories find common ground in the assumption that much of psychic life is unconscious and that our minds operate in terms of unconscious fantasies and defenses. They assume that anxiety and other unpleasant affects are the driving forces in shaping psychic life and in giving unconscious meaning to the world. All analytic theories presuppose the importance of bodily and sexual experience, the existence of a structured psyche and an internal world, and the determining effects of infant and developmental experience. Another way to say this, lest I seem to polarize unnecessarily, is to observe that there is a contradiction, or a spectrum of choice, at any clinical moment, or in terms of general stance, between listening for and listening to, and that excellent analysts tend to range themselves all across the spectrum. Any analyst will prefer some theories of mind and theories of technique to others, but for some analysts, a theory of mind (and a theory of how to discover this mind) seems to take priority and lead to technique, while for other analysts, the reverse seems more the case. Listening for unites those from very different theoretical perspectives and crosses the divide between “one-person” and “two-person” analysts. Among the former, those who tend to listen for include American close-process ego psychologists, British (and other) contemporary Kleinians and Klein-Bion hybrids, Italian and (some) Latin American Bionians, Lacanians, French and other European analysts

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for whom the early psychosexual theory is central, and Kohutians. “Two-person” American relational and interpersonal analysts, especially when they are focused on making a case against “one-person” views, also listen for. Of course, none of these analysts imposes a fixed template on every patient, yet the listener’s, reader’s, or supervisee’s impression (when one is in supervision) is that for these analysts, listening to is secondary.10 The listening-for group, it seems, are more theory-driven. They seem to know what they are going to find, and you hear and read them making more recognizable interventions. When analysts listen for, the reader or listener is not so surprised at what they say or do. We observe, then, close-process ego psychologists (e.g., Gray 1994) listening for defense and resistance and paying near exclusive attention to the patient’s words, as defenses, anxiety, and conflicts are thought to be signaled by gaps and hesitancies in free association and contradictions between affect and word in what is being said. The Kleinian radar, meanwhile, picks up envy, manic defenses, fantasies of omnipotence, and what the patient is doing, through splitting and projective identification, to the analyst. This analyst (and the more recently self-identified Klein-Bion analyst) does not much notice and seems relatively uninterested in history, either the genetic point of view or the history of the treatment: everything the analyst needs to notice emerges in the hour itself (we find a different version of this in the Italian Bionians Civitarese and Ferro). Lacanians follow the signifier, listening for the name of the father or the missing father in the still psychotic mother-child psyche. They, along with their non-Lacanian French colleagues, expect the unfolding of a gender-and-generation differentiated Oedipus complex and listen for triadic functioning that emerges from a paternal third. Kohutians listen for mirroring and idealizing transferences and look for shifts from one to the other. Listening for may emerge defensively, against a presumed orthodoxy. Self psychologists notice zealous overinterpretation and failures of empathy. “Twoperson” relational and interpersonal analysts repeatedly document how everything that happens in the hour and in the mind is a co-creation (a word that by now has almost lost its hyphen). Their listening for in turn leads to a special focus on empathic ruptures and repairs in the analytic relationship. When relational analysts listen to presentations of analyses conducted using “one-person” models, they notice failures in adequate self-disclosure and lack of acknowledgment of the analyst’s participation and subjectivity. Because disputes over cases and technical approaches throughout the history of psychoanalysis often seem to portray the other side as purposely misguided, or even malevolent (similarly, my account here threatens to spill over into caricature), it seems worth remembering that all psychoanalytic theories and schools were developed by well-meaning clinicians hoping to understand and help their patients (whatever other motivations they might have had). No one is trying to get it wrong or be misguided. As far as we know, these different approaches all help. I generalize and exaggerate to make a point, but I remind myself and others that members of these various groups themselves vary individually in the extent to which they listen for. They can surprise the listener or reader.11

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There is no question, moreover, that, as each analyst faces the continuous flow of words and affect in any clinical hour, we have to divide these up in a meaningful way.12 Where does our radar go? What do we pick up on and what do we not notice? Different theories divide up the continuous action, feelings, observations, and interactions differently, and the analyst could not do her work if she did not use these theories as guides. There must be something right in each theory and theory of technique. Still, as one reads clinicians or hears them present cases, one sometimes gets the impression of a fixed theoretical auditory filter, of an ego psychological, Kleinian, Lacanian, Bionian, self psychological, or relational vulture behind the couch, listening for and ready to swoop down on resistances, gaps in the process of free association, the patient’s attempted omnipotent control over the analyst, selfobject transferences, waking-dreaming, relational ruptures, or the analyst’s central and coequal participation in whatever thought or feeling the patient may express. I adapt the term “listening to” from Faimberg (1996). Like her French colleagues, Faimberg is committed to and works from Freud’s first topography and early psychosexual theories, and she is interested in history, both the patient’s developmental history and the psychohistorical “telescoping of generations” (Faimberg 2005). She admonishes the analyst seeking to uncover the unconscious to “listen to listening.” According to Faimberg, the analyst cannot know the meaning of what she has said until she investigates and understands how the patient has heard it. For both patient and analyst, this listening and hearing give some clue to what is going on for the patient—to the unconscious fantasy and transference that filters through for the patient to hear.13 Analysts who listen to (and keep the process of listening for in the background) constitute another group of strange theoretical bedfellows. Evelyn Schwaber’s (1983) listening stance, her emphasis on empathy, and her interest in Kohut put her in the vicinity of self psychology, yet Schwaber does not formulate patients’ psyches or analytic process in self psychological terms like idealizing or mirroring transferences. Rather, she claims that the patient’s reality—his beliefs, conscious or just-made-conscious self-understandings and understandings of the world—rather than the analyst’s countertransferential reality or theoretical understanding of reality, must be considered primary in any analysis and at any given analytic moment.14 Others who listen to patients, more than they listen for expected psychological phenomena and “the” transference, include intersubjective ego psychologists in the Loewaldian tradition.15 Boesky (1990) claims that unless the analyst finds himself emotionally involved in unexpected ways, a treatment is not alive and cannot succeed. Jacobs (1991) describes the analyst listening with all parts of himself, mind and body, in order to tune into the patient’s unconscious, yet he admonishes the analyst who plays a “particular kind of detective game called ‘locate the transference’” (p. 153). Poland guides his clinical work with regard for “the marvel of otherness” (1996, p. 246). McLaughlin (to anticipate Chapter 10), perhaps more than any other intersubjective ego psychologist, expands methodologically on listening to. Like Schwaber, he

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insists on the primacy of the patient’s reality over the analyst’s, and he recommends that the analyst focus on helping the patient find how she discovers rather than what is discovered or why that is the case. In perhaps our most felicitous extended description of a “not-knowing” listening to, McLaughlin says, “I will listen to whatever you may wish to say, with the intent to understand your meaning and viewpoint, and with the least imposition of my own view or meaning as I can manage” (2005, p. 48). Another group who listen to rather than for are British independents in the Winnicottian tradition, who believe that patients need to unfold and thereby find their true selves in the unintrusive presence of the analyst. I think in this context of Marion Milner, whose early writings on psychic and creative form emerging from formlessness may have influenced Winnicott as much as he influenced her (Milner 1936, 1957). Another British independent who listens to is Nina Coltart (1992), who was willing to sit in silence for months waiting for her patient to speak, and who likened the patient’s self-discovery through analysis to the rough beast coming into being (resentfully and reluctantly) as it slouches toward Bethlehem. In the contemporary period, we find Bollas (see, e.g., 1987, 2008), for whom analysis consists in helping patients discover their personal idiom and “unthought known,” and Parsons (2014), who, as he describes British independent technique, notes that independent analysts “organize their analytic identities . . . around underlying intellectual and human values rather than particular analytic doctrines” (p. 187). In contrast to what he considers to be the universalizing theories (what I would call the listening-for theories) of both the Anna Freud group and the Kleinians, Parsons describes “a non-universalising attitude whose emphasis is on what differentiates human beings and makes them unique, rather than on how they typify general principles” (p. 187). These analysts seem to thrive on, or are willing to tolerate, uncertainty and the patient’s coming alive from deadness, and, they would insist, you can’t know what form that aliveness will take. A range of other analysts can be placed in the listening to camp. In the United States, the maverick classical/relational Irving Hoffman (1998) insists on spontaneity and uncertainty being central to the analytic process. He was among the first to argue that a patient’s observations of the analyst’s behavior and intuitions about the analyst’s personality should be taken seriously. In France, Joyce McDougall (1986) holds that analysis helps patients discover their own “theatres of the mind.” In Italy and the Rio de la Plata triangle, Bionians distinguish between “saturated” interpretations—interpretations according to a theoretical model, often intrusive, leaving little to the patient’s own thinking—and “unsaturated” interpretations, which lead to greater possibility of growth in the patient and transformation in the analytic field.16 At stake in the listening to/listening for distinction is the extent to which theory is to be regarded as a scaffolding or a final structure—the extent to which analysis uncovers something the analyst expects to be there, something there already but not predictable, or something emerging simultaneously with its being discovered. Probably all these alternatives are true, yet unless the analyst puts theory aside and

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listens to her patients’ claims about themselves, she cannot know which particular theory will be apt or what kinds of interpretive or noninterpretive action will be helpful. On the other side, if she has no theory at all, she is clueless and cannot help. The analyst has to have theory in mind and not in mind at the same time, both the general theoretical principles that all analysts hold and the specific and detailed theories about the psyche and technique that are subjects of contestation and debate. Ideally, listening to and listening for exist in a complex feedback loop. At one moment, the analyst may find himself thinking in classical Freudian terms: a patient’s transference is a new edition of an old relationship. At another, the transference as a total situation may command attention—a pervasive affective and relational moment that seems entirely a projection of the patient’s, the analyst’s, or both. Or the analyst may become extremely anxious at something a patient is relating, while the patient himself is completely calm. Yet throughout, we notice the pull of listening for and the ease with which some theoretical approaches, more than others, seem to facilitate it. Analysts, of course, are ranged across the spectrum, and each analyst will prefer some theories of mind and technique, whether of the listening-to or listening-for variety, to others. Ideally, each clinician does her work both listening to and listening for: we cannot do without theory. Yet at every moment each analyst faces the personal risk and challenge of listening to, and the coordinate temptation to flee to listening for (often, as many of us will recognize, we disguise listening for as listening to). How does it happen, for example, that our evenly hovering attention has a tropism for, translates everything into, references to the analyst, what the patient is doing to the analyst, selfobject appeals, ruptures or bulwarks, or defenses against drive derivatives? Our anxieties of uncertainty (Chodorow 1999a) may make it hard to listen to our patients’ claims about themselves, but unless we do, we cannot know what particular theory will be apt or what kinds of interpretive or noninterpretive actions helpful. My observations imply that there is good reason to be theoretically (and technically) pluralistic and not close oneself off. Somewhere, someone found each theory of mind, technique, and psychic change useful. Moreover, it must be the case that different theories and technical approaches are right for different patients, or for the same patient during different hours and at different points in a treatment. When it comes to theory and technique, then, every clinician faces a challenge. On the one side, how do we have theories at hand without being overly conscious of them? On the other, if we are not somewhat conscious of them, are we not more likely to use them without being aware of doing so, or to use them inappropriately at moments of uncertainty, at the cost of seeing the new, the surprising, the patient’s reality, or the fact that each person is a unique individual? Here we encounter what McLaughlin calls the analyst’s “hard spots”—our tendency to rely unthinkingly on theories and techniques we were taught. Alternatively, we may not see how our listening, responses, and choices of theory and technique are shaped by our own deep, often unconscious, reactions and feelings (McLaughlin’s “blind spots”).17

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I have come to think that curiosity is an undertheorized technical requisite for doing clinical work, as well as, perhaps, an underutilized stance in the development of psychoanalytic theory, where practitioners and theorists find themselves too often defending what they already think and theories to which they are already committed.18 Curiosity implies uncertainty and a recognition that one does not yet know—that one’s stock of theory and technique does not provide automatic understanding of the person or clinical material at hand. In my experience, simple curiosity can be an effective intervention, hovering between the interpretive and noninterpretive aspects of the clinical encounter. To be curious is not to interpret unconscious fantasy, resistance or defense, what the patient is doing to the treatment or the analyst, projection or introjection, oedipal or preoedipal themes. It is not mirroring, empathy, containing, or noticing the relationship, whether rupture or entanglement. But it is some sort of interpretation when the analyst, more or less, simply points, or says something like “This is interesting; this is something we can puzzle out together,” or when she asks direct questions, like “How does this go?” “How is it that you think of yourself as destructive?” “What do you think you do (or did) that makes you destructive?” “Why are you disappointed?” “What are you disappointed about?” Or simply, “Tell me more.” Curiosity may also grow from observing and remarking on nonverbal communications and expressions. Some analysts argue that there is never a point in asking questions, because the answers you want—what you want to know about the patient and the patient to know about himself—are not conscious. My sense, by contrast, is that questioning conveys something else. It conveys that we are beginning from the patient’s thoughts and feelings, that we are trying together to understand and to give him self-knowledge. We inquire about how he sees matters, whether or not he has insight into his unconscious fantasies. It gives the patient agency and implies that the analyst is able to recognize her own uncertainty, curiosity, and not knowing. Asking permits discovery and surprise.

From analyst to patient Curiosity and uncertainty are also requisites for being a patient in analysis. Being curious and uncertain fosters self-observation, encouraging at least a bit of the self to stand outside (if only temporarily) and notice. More significantly, curiosity and uncertainty enable or imply a recognition that things are not necessarily as they seem, that the analysand’s current self-understanding or current ways of feeling may not be inevitable. All patients come to treatment because they are suffering, but only some begin with curiosity about themselves, the sense that there is more going on than they fully understand. Others know that they suffer, but they feel that investigating beyond the psychic surface means that the thoughts and feelings they are able to report are not being taken seriously. Yet by the end of treatment, attitudes of uncertainty and curiosity have to be acquired or, if already present, extended.

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Patients must be interested in trying to know what they unconsciously think, feel, and desire and to acknowledge this something more than conscious, even as they also recognize that they cannot know their minds entirely. Successful treatment includes wanting to know and the acknowledgment of not knowing. Acknowledgment of unconscious processes and thoughts is the challenge to narcissism for the patient, and for some it is especially difficult. These patients sense that such acknowledgment intimates that their conscious thoughts and feelings are not genuine. And indeed, to be curious about thoughts and feelings is not the same as taking their conscious expressions as final. The patient, like the analyst, has to be able to accept that consciousness is not all there is to mind. Analysis, Freud told us, is about making the unconscious conscious, but it is also about coming to terms with the disturbing idea that everything, and not just the psychic elements and patterns of emotion or behavior that create or express neurosis and prevent a fulfilled life, has unconscious meaning for each of us. I try at some point early in treatment to convey to each patient what I take to be a Loewaldian point, that finding meaning is not the same as finding fault, and that transference—bringing meaning from the past or from unconscious life to the present and to conscious awareness—is a basic, ubiquitous, and indeed miraculous part of human functioning. We each of us filter the world, or those parts of it that matter to us, through a transferential lens of which we can be only partially aware. These unconscious meanings potentially give our experiences richness, depth, and vitality, even as they may also limit and constrain us and keep us from full selfknowledge. I use Loewaldian metaphors about ghosts and ancestors, and words like prism, filter, and lens. The dependence of analysis on the patient’s curiosity, on his ability to tolerate not knowing, and on his capacity to accept that the analyst may at times know or see more, means that analysis necessarily levels blows at the patient’s narcissism, just as the necessity to listen to rather than listening for levels blows at the analyst’s narcissism (I am in the Freudian terrain of that third blow to human narcissism). If a patient’s narcissistic vulnerability is too great, or the drive for omnipotence is too powerful, there cannot be a requisite curiosity, humor, and self-observation. At the same time, and in contradiction, the analytic enterprise demands of the patient a sense of her importance and effectance that goes with accepting that she has created her own life and is responsible for change. In addition, despite the heightening of individual subjectivity that comes with self-knowledge and insight, psychoanalysis itself proceeds through a radically involving relationship. The analysand’s self-understanding is possible only if she can accept dependence without feeling too humiliated. In another blow to narcissism, she needs to accept that, even while she is unique, she is also like other people. Psychoanalysis leads to the discovery of individual uniqueness partly in terms that make one not at all unique. Much clinical writing describes the threat that this awareness can pose. Kleinians, who have done the most to help us understand aggression and hate, describe spoiling, contempt, and attacks on the connections between interpretive

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ideas as expressions of patients’ envy of their analyst’s capacity to come up with good interpretations and as ways of trying to undermine the analyst’s capacity to think. In the context of narcissism, we may note also the potential humiliation and dependence that can come from the analysand’s thinking that the analyst has thoughts about him that he himself did not already have. Such dilemmas have been particularly vivid for several of my patients. I describe them as one case, whom I will call Ms. G.19 One of Ms. G’s main concerns was her great wish to be thought brilliant. Another was her sense that distress and unhappiness were her bottom line. She wanted to feel better, but was certain that was impossible. Ms. G expressed with particular clarity a common dilemma. She felt that to be curious, interested, or self-observant was somehow an admission that she could step away from her unhappiness, and she needed to experience this unhappiness as desperate. To be true to her feelings, she could not query them. If I expressed curiosity about a particular thought or feeling that Ms. G was describing, she felt that I was not taking her thoughts and feelings seriously, or that I was impugning her clever way of expressing herself. If I enlisted her help in trying to find the meaning of something she was saying or made an interpretation, these interventions were taken to mean that I considered her self-understanding and powers of mind inadequate, or that the feelings she knew she was feeling were not genuine. For Ms. G, the basic premises of psychoanalytic theory and practice were a threat. Curiosity, interpretation, finding meaning, all meant that conscious understanding was not enough. Ms. G was reluctant to report dreams, and when she did so she did not want me to find meanings beneath the surface or beyond what she herself, with her sophisticated literary interpretive skills, could find. Similarly, free association—reporting whatever occurred to her—meant that Ms. G would have to give up deciding in advance which of her thoughts were “important.” She would risk reporting something humiliatingly trivial. Thus, the intersubjective character of analytic discovery and self-expansion was itself a narcissistic blow to Ms. G and sometimes made her feel desperately dependent. It was humiliating that I could think thoughts about her that she had not already thought. Treatment for someone like Ms. G may be on the edge for years and may or may not resolve successfully. Such a person may go in and out of being able to listen when the therapist suggests exploring a particular feeling or thought. Ms. G made substantial progress in work, finishing a dissertation and learning to work more collegially and collaboratively. She became calm enough to stay in a relationship and gained some control of overwhelming rages, competitiveness, and other driven behavior. Yet internal freedom and self-understanding remained elusive. I have worked with patients who could overcome such blows to narcissism and others who have resisted to the end and have felt undermined by the notion that their feelings, conscious thoughts, and reactions to people and experiences might not be the full story. Another patient, Mr. J, resolved a conflictual relationship with his parents, consolidated a career identity, developed a meaningful relationship, and understood much more deeply his personal vulnerabilities. Yet he still needed

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to monitor what he said and knew that his “free association” was always shaped by trying to anticipate what I would say before I said it. He had been an excellent soccer goalie in his youth, playing defense, but he could not be a forward. On the other side from Ms. G and patients like her are those who, even as they at times feel narcissistically threatened or humiliated by dependency or need, and even if they are, like Ms. G, invested in their self-understanding, nonetheless find the basic premises of psychoanalytic exploration helpful. Talking about painful feelings of despair and needy desperation, my patient Mr. C said, “It’s reassuring to look at meanings.” Mr. C did not feel that investigation of his feelings and thoughts, or my having ideas that he had not already had, in any way impugned their seriousness. And although he certainly had his moments of anger or contempt for me and my thinking, especially when he was reacting against his feelings of dependency or felt that his insight wasn’t bringing about desired change, his basic stance toward my listening and interpreting was that I was a trustworthy person in a holding environment who was trying to be helpful. My capacity to think, and to think about him or about us, did not detract from these same capacities in himself. Mr. C could be curious about himself and even—this too required selfobservation—amused when his fantasies and experiences matched what he knew to be classic psychoanalytic patterns (his wanting, for instance, to protect his mother from his evil father). For Mr. C, discovering the power of feelings and of personal meaning— discovering how much he was driven by unconscious feelings, stories, and repeated patterns of behavior, even when these accompanied painful memories and portrayed desperate needs and hateful aspects of self—brought relief and sometimes wonder at how his mind worked. “What’s so great about being in analysis,” he once said, “is that you get to be neurotic and it’s interesting.” The foundational paradoxical claims of psychoanalytic theory and the character of the psychoanalytic process, then—that self-knowledge is based on not-knowing and that the unconscious is unconscious—challenge the narcissism of both patient and analyst. Equally, analysis entails a paradox or dilemma that challenges depression. On the patient’s side, analysis potentially involves great gains, but it always entails recognizing and accepting the loss of the life that could have been but was not. For the analyst, it involves the parallel recognition that one is not able to change the patient’s (or one’s own) past, that an intense relationship will inevitably end, and that one’s own life, like the patient’s, involves the acceptance of limits and constraints. Both patient and analyst face mourning and rueful recognition.20 Several analytic formulations speak to a recognition of the loss that comes with insight and change. From a Kleinian perspective, the depressive position involves reparation and thus recognition that one has hurt someone. Loewald (1979) writes of internally killing off one’s parents and atoning for it as a necessary oedipal and, by implication, analytic goal. For him, mourning is a necessary concomitant of internalization, individuation, and structure formation. Shengold (2002) says simply, “change means loss.” Termination demands not needing the analyst and moving beyond her. As I note in The Power of Feelings and elsewhere, I have found Erikson’s concept of “ego integrity” particularly helpful, and, in somewhat the same vein, Winnicott’s

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notion of “gathering impingement into omnipotence.” Both of these formulations describe the depressive tonality, what I have come to think of as the rueful recognition, that accompanies the understanding that both omnipotence and impotence are necessary for the self-knowledge that analysis requires. Torges, Stewart, and Nolen-Hoeksema (2008) call the same process “regret resolution.” Erikson locates the stage of ego integrity at the end of life, but ego integrity is also an accomplishment, a marker of termination and the end of analysis. Along the way, many moments of insight require rueful recognition—an acknowledgment of what was, and thus what, in a sense, had to be. It is worth lingering over these formulations. Winnicott writes: In psycho-analysis as we know it there is no trauma that is outside the individual’s omnipotence . . . The patient is not helped if the analyst says: ‘Your mother was not good enough’ . . . ‘your father really seduced you’ . . . ‘your aunt dropped you.’ Changes come in an analysis when the traumatic factors enter the psycho-analytic material in the patient’s own way, and within the patient’s omnipotence. (1960, p. 37) Moving beyond infancy, Erikson (1950) says, “an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history” (p. 268). Thus, he notes, ego integrity involves accepting a contradiction: “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions: it thus means a new, a different love of one’s parents” (p. 268). Says Loewald (1979), in a similar vein, “Such appropriation, in the course of which we begin to develop a sense of self-identity, means to experience ourselves as agents, notwithstanding the fact that we were born without our informed consent and did not pick our parents” (p. 392). Winnicott, Erikson, and Loewald here are all dealing with the need to challenge depression, a dilemma intrinsic to analysis (seen also in Klein’s depressive position). Helping the patient accept this challenge is among the most difficult clinical tasks. Somehow, patient and therapist must recognize that however painful the patient’s life has been, whether because of mistreatment or her own internal conflicts, inhibitions, and neuroses, however much it is not the life she wishes to have had, it is nevertheless her own. She has certainly not caused every facet of her life to be as it has been, but she needs to experience this life as if, in some sense, she has. The challenge is the same for those who have been traumatized from without as it is for those whose difficulties seem more of their own making. Erikson, Loewald, Winnicott, and other analysts are certainly aware of the social and individual evils that can befall a person, but self-recognition based in ego integrity and owning projection requires seeing oneself as an agent. Here is where narcissism and depression meet. The analytic enterprise demands of the patient a narcissistic sense of his own importance and effectance that goes with accepting that he has created his own life and is responsible for change. Helping a patient (helping oneself, as both analyst and person) accept this is, as

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I have said, among the most difficult challenges of any treatment and is often a deeply held internal barrier to change. For those who feel they have colluded in their mistreatment or misfortune, rueful recognition is often most difficult of all. The rueful self-recognition of ego integrity, and the owning of one’s history and projections, requires seeing oneself as an agent, coming to acknowledge that one has oneself lived the difficult experiences and traumas of one’s past and present. The patient must also recognize that, although she cannot alter the lived past, she can hope to alter her understanding, and thus her experience, of that past. The crisis of ego integrity revolves around wisdom and despair. Wisdom is the recognition that the life we have lived, although it could have been otherwise, could also not have been, that one’s life has been historically contingent and necessary at the same time. Ego integrity makes an intersubjective process into an internal one. The analyst’s recognition and empathy—recognition and empathy by others—are internalized as self-recognition and self-acceptance. Ego integrity, owning projection, oedipal emancipation, the depressive position, all these have a depressive—rueful—tonality, because they entail accepting the loss of what could or should have been or what was wanted. But there is also a sobering omnipotence in claiming responsibility and agency for the life one has lived, even though it was not entirely a matter of one’s own doing. Ideally, just as analytic treatment can temper but not eliminate narcissism (nor does it aspire to) by acknowledging uncertainty and the limits to self-knowledge, so also can it temper depression by encouraging a self-acceptance that precludes self-punishment for having created a life with so many limitations. Ego integrity expresses mourning but not melancholia. A major achievement of Mr. B’s analysis was his turning self-blame for hate-filled and envious fantasies (and fantasized harm done to others) into selfacceptance. Mr. B did not suffer humiliation or blows to his narcissism as we discovered the anger and resentment in his feelings about his father, siblings, coworkers, and me, or as we found the meanings of what seemed to be inhibitions and difficulties in relating to other people. Rather, each discovery led to increasingly virulent self-criticism and self-punishment. Anger felt toward me for even a moment was immediately redirected inward. Self-knowledge did not at first free Mr. B. Each new insight made him feel worse about himself. But slowly, as I seemed not to condemn or hate him for his fantasies, as I indeed expressed curiosity about indications that there might be more to them than his self-critical thoughts had so far allowed, Mr. B was able to accept that he had inhibited his life in many ways and became able to feel some empathy about and sympathetic distance from the pain and difficulties he had caused himself. Mr. B turned his melancholia into mourning. Classically, analysts take the patient’s insight and a decrease in anxiety, depression, and conflict to signal progress in analysis. I use in addition what I call the ego integrity criterion—the patient’s coming to acknowledge as his own, in a way that is not self-punitive, the life he has lived internally and externally. Toward the end of his analysis, Mr. B described and defined ego integrity:

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When I think of termination, what comes up first is sadness. But at this point, it’s grieving, instead of blaming others or myself. I have to give up that sense that my life was caused by someone else. But the thing is, I can’t change how I lived my life, or my past. I’m about to terminate, and I’m realizing I didn’t allow myself to have the career I wanted—no one else had a part in that. And I need to move on. For every patient who comes to terms with loss and gains the hard-won wisdom of ego integrity, another cannot, and of course most people are somewhere in the middle. In “Too Late: The Reproduction and Non-Reproduction of Mothering” (Chodorow 2003d), whose original title was “‘Too Late’: Ambivalence about Motherhood, Choice, and Time,” I describe Ms. J, who could not come to terms with having sabotaged her fertility and, in some ways, her life. Ms. J once said: “The problem with finding out about my unconscious is that I should have known. It makes you regret—what if you’d only known before—what you shouldn’t have done. It’s better not to know, because what you come to know, if you’d known before, would have prevented things.” Ms. J was struggling with melancholia and self-blame. She found it hard to understand or accept that it was on the one hand true that, had she known, she would have done things differently, and on the other, also true, that she could not have done otherwise. Just as in mourning an actual death, so the mourning or rueful recognition required at each step of a treatment, and at its end, cannot restore or change the past, nor can it make everything all right. The analyst cannot restore fertility to a woman patient who has ignored or sabotaged it until too late. Thus, we return from the patient’s to the analyst’s own rueful recognition—the analyst’s own need to accept depression, finitude, time, and the immutability of what has occurred. The clinician has many tools—observation, empathy, interpretation, witnessing, listening, emotional connection through transference-countertransference—but she can only treat. She cannot make everything all right. Yet most clinicians went into the field because they wanted to help others (McLaughlin’s “healer’s bent”), and the patient went into treatment with conscious and unconscious hopes (and fears) of feeling better and changing. The analyst, as we each learn repeatedly, cannot remake a past that has been painful, traumatic, or unsatisfactory for her patient, and we learn early on that it is not helpful to reassure patients that their inhibitions and conflicts were not their own responsibility. What the clinician can do is to help patients see that their subjective experience of their past is part of what they have made into their present. She can help a patient not to deny the passage of time but also not to think there is no time left, and therefore no time for the treatment to unfold and deepen (both of these are powerful, sometimes conscious, resistances that evade the mourning required to achieve ego integrity). Mr. B knew that he had not solved his difficulties forever, and that he needed to live with some regret. But he recognized who he was and how he had lived.

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I have suggested that as both theory and practice, analysis bases itself on challenges and paradoxes that rest on uncertainty, indeterminacy, and loss. To the extent that analyst and patient can live with these challenges, analysis enables greater freedom of thought and feeling, possibilities of greater complexity in relationships, and greater internal peace. First, analysis begins from a foundational paradox. Our hypothesis of the dynamic unconscious entails that the self-knowledge gained in analysis is based on the recognition of not-knowing and not being able to know. Even as the goal of analysis is to help patients attain greater self-understanding, the very understanding that we gain, as both analysts and patients, is that our self-understanding is limited. We have thoughts, wishes, and ideas that we cannot be aware of and personal meanings and understandings that come from the power of unconscious feelings and states. I call this paradox, following Freud, the challenge to narcissism, and I have suggested that it requires that both analyst and patient accept uncertainty, indeterminacy, and a loss of omniscience. A second cluster of challenges grows from our understanding that analysis promises change, but that insight and self-understanding cannot undo the past. Here we find the challenge to ego integrity and the threat of depression. Analysis asks patient and analyst to live with rueful recognition and loss of possibility. Each needs to acknowledge that any person’s life is both contingent and necessary—that it could have been, but also could not have been, other than it was, including the analysis itself. Where the hypothesis of the dynamic unconscious challenges selfknowledge and narcissism, the fact of the past as past challenges depression. Third, psychoanalysis in both theory and practice links autonomy and dependence, individuality and relationship. On the one side, individuality, character, and the self form from birth and throughout life in relationships and dependence on others. Similarly, the effectance, sense of individual responsibility, and knowledge of one’s mind gained in psychoanalysis are achieved through and within the clinical relationship. On the other side, despite the limitations to self-knowledge posed by unconscious forces, despite rueful recognition, and despite mutual involvement and the complexities of independence and dependence, the gains in self-awareness achieved in analysis give the analysand, finally, a heightened sense of what only the individual self can experience. These gains include awareness of fantasies and id forces, peak experiences of connection and intimacy, fears and anxieties, and a heightened sense of individual agency. As Milner notes, the life one has made, out of whatever psychobiological propensities and relational and situational ingredients, is “a life of one’s own.”

Notes 1 According to legend, the Delphic oracle told one of Socrates’ disciples that Socrates was the wisest of men. Socrates responded that he knew only one thing for certain, that he knew nothing. This legend serves as vehicle for my noticing the foundational paradox of psychoanalysis: by definition, we cannot know what is unconscious.

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2 Questions about psychoanalysis as a science, an interpretive practice, and a theory of meaning open out into every academic use of the discipline and every controversy about it. On the one side, we have more neuropsychoanalytic and psychoanalytic process researchers than can be named (e.g., Hartvig Dahl, Robert Emde, Glen Gabbard, Robert Galatzer-Levy, Enrico Jones, Lester Luborsky, Howard Shevrin, Mark Solms, Robert Wallerstein, Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson, and Drew Westen). We also find child researchers past and present (e.g., Beatrice Beebe, Peter Fonagy, Alexandra Harrison, Margaret Mahler, Mary Main, and Edward Tronick). On the interpretive side, in addition to every clinician who writes about patients and process, we have psychoanalytically inspired writing throughout the humanities and previously in the social sciences. In the academic humanities, we find that psychoanalysis is thought to begin and end (with the exception of Lacan and related theorists) with Freud. As a result of militant opposition to ego psychology, moreover, academics often write as though Freud’s contribution ended in 1922, just after the death drives but before the structural theory, which has been of central importance to most approaches to clinical practice. I have always found this selective ending of history puzzling. A contemporary anthropologist would not end her reading with Malinowski, a sociologist with Durkheim and Weber, or a Marxist with Das Kapital. Cognitive-developmental psychology has moved well beyond Piaget. Though in awe of the foundational contributions of Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Dirac, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, no physicist thinks the contributions of these men are the final word (though the cosmic physics of 2019 could prove that there is nothing beyond Einstein!). So it should be with psychoanalysis and its founder. 3 At the 2014 Joseph Sandler Research Conference in Frankfurt, I listened to a series of researchers who showed neuroanatomical imaging of the brain's unconscious processing, diagrams of the unconsciously sensing parts of the brain, and comparative evidence of different brain functioning by people with different psychosocial and brain traumas. 4 Though Kohon (1986, p. 52) points out that Freud also theorized the analyst’s personal presence, in his suggestion that the analyst’s unconscious needed to work like a telephone receiver, receiving messages from the unconscious of the patient. 5 Classic statements include Heimann (1950), Racker (1953, 1968), and Tower (1956). Reviews that allow us to contrast the United States, Britain, and Latin America can be found in Jacobs (1999a), Hinshelwood (1999), and de León de Bernardi (2000). 6 For example, although Jacobs (1991), McLaughlin (2005), and Renik (1993) part company with their American teachers, by valorizing the self and the analyst’s irreducible subjectivity, their accounts imply a metapsychology in which affects and memories that arise in the analyst, expressions of self, and unavoidable countertransference enactments all come from the analyst’s own intrapsychic and personal past and present. They may be elicited, as McLaughlin describes so beautifully, by what is being said or felt by the patient, but the feelings and images themselves arise from the analyst’s internal world of past and present. They are not projectively put into him by the patient. 7 In Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s play about Werner Heisenberg’s 1941 visit to Niels Bohr, Margarete Bohr puts this dilemma clearly. She notices that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, asserting the effect of the observer on the observed, puts the observer (in our case, the analyst), rather than the observed, back in the center of the universe, as the observer shapes what is reported as seen. But uncertainty applies to the observer himself:“ If it’s Heisenberg at the centre of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can’t see is Heisenberg.” Heisenberg asks, “So . . . ?” and Margarete replies: “So it’s no good asking him why he came to Copenhagen in 1941. He doesn’t know!” (Frayn 1998; italics mine). 8 I know less about training in institutes outside of North America, but my guess from reading the literature and hearing colleagues is that my observations, with modification for the specific content of directives for listening, would hold. 9 My account here makes a general point that still holds, but the spectrum of listening for and listening to is more complicated than in the early 2000s when I first made this distinction. Debates have shifted, and theoretical and clinical players have changed.

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To update the specifics of these changes would be a book in itself. It would require, especially, documenting the growing international hegemony of Bion, the further decline of ego psychology, and an even greater, now near-universal focus on the unconscious analytic interaction in the room and, at times it seems, on what is happening in the analyst’s mind even more than what is happening in the room. This hegemonic listening for comes especially from Italian Bionians who hear, as they listen as much or more to their own minds as to their patients’ words, everything the patient says, whether about past or present, life in the world or in the analysis, as about the immediate analytic relationship and unconscious analytic situation.Today also, unlike the early 2000s, you could not write about the psychoanalytic spectrum without recognition of Latin American psychoanalysis, especially the Rio de la Plata contribution. It may be this commonality that led many Americans for some time to embrace the contemporary Kleinians and to be much less interested in, say, British object relations analysts. Schafer, a listening-to analyst in The Analytic Attitude who became a contemporary Kleinian, has argued (1994) that the contemporary Kleinian approach is close to (what in my view is also a listening-for) ego psychology. I found myself doing “ethnographic” observation at an IARPP conference that took place shortly after I published the first version of this chapter.This 2004 conference was organized around panels in which members of the “same” theoretical group responded to the same case. It turned out that some Kleinians are more Kleinian than others, while others, more eclectically, listen to. The same for Kohutians, relationalists, and ego psychologists. I am reminded of a long-ago presentation by the linguist Robin Lakoff at the University of California Psychology Clinic, where I did an informal internship preparatory to beginning analytic training. Lakoff told us that a typical analytic “hour,” one we are used to reading or hearing presented in 3–5 pages, when transcribed runs actually 25–30 pages or so. This would be words only, no affect, no clinician’s thoughts, no observations of physical presence and movement. Faimberg’s point, that the analyst needs to know what the patient has heard in what the analyst has said, also applies to interviewing (open-ended or not) and other interactional qualitative research. I always assigned “Listening to Listening” when teaching undergraduate and graduate students about interviewing. I have noted that Bion’s precept that the analyst should be without memory and desire points also toward a stance of not knowing, curiosity, and openness, but that in my experience, both reading and listening to presentations, it has seemed to me that those who use Bion often fold him into a Klein-Bion listening for, or a mandate to listen to the analyst’s mind more than to that of the patient. Trained in a classical institute, Schwaber in her early articles mainly takes on treatment driven by ego psychology, leading to a famous feud with Jacob Arlow (1995). Yet her general critique of theory-driven listening and her insistence on paying attention to the patient’s experience and inner psychic reality, as well as to the experience of that experience, would apply equally to self psychological listening for mirroring and idealizing transferences. During the period leading up to the publication of an early version of this chapter (Chodorow 2003a), I had not yet given intersubjective ego psychology its name and identified it as an American independent tradition. A footnote in that version reads: “This non-self-identified group does not have a name. Lewis Aron calls them ‘Freudian interactionists’; they might also be called ‘one-person intersubjectivists.’” As I have made clear, my thoughts about the Italian Bionians (and perhaps their thinking itself) have changed over the years. At one time, I noticed Ferro’s lively curiosity and interest in whatever association, personal or cultural, that a patient brought, looking with the patient at this association as both day residue, interesting in its own narrative and emotional right, and as dream.Yet for Ferro and his colleagues, this worthy admonition, to be without memory or desire, while it may once have been directed against interpretations of content, does not in recent years seem to have prevented these same analysts

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from thinking that everything the patient says, no matter its ostensible content, refers to the immediate moment in the hour.There is no room for the patient’s inner or outer life. For me, this is listening for. Hard spots and blind spots may come together, as readers of this volume will note. My own immersion in psychoanalysis began with Erikson and moved to the British object relations theorists. My training was exclusively ego psychological, but I soon became immersed in a study group with Betty Joseph and felt myself a Kleinian, until this single-minded approach seemed too narrow and I swung back to ego psychology via Loewald and was attracted again to the British independent tradition. My blind and hard spot throughout is my commitment to some version of a one-person psychology (or, pace Poland, to two-person separate). This certainly comes from my own psyche, but it is fueled by my beginning in social science, where meaning and experience are always seen to come from without, from the relational to the global. In 2013, I presented a paper titled “Focusing on the Patient: Has Our Attention to the Relationship and the Transference Gone Too Far?”. This chapter grew out of a variety of “occasional” invitations. Even less than in my usual, not comprehensive, selective reading, I did not “review the literature.” Had I done so, I doubt that my curiosity about curiosity would have been very generative. But I wish to acknowledge Lawrence Friedman (1997), who, in his plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association, says of Breuer and Freud’s experiences resulting in Studies on Hysteria, “If the historical path to treatment is any clue to its nature, then curiosity must certainly lie at its heart” (p. 23). Friedman notes some basics of the analytic attitude—a wish to help, commitment and curative intent, and so forth—and then continues: “And perhaps I would be wise to end my inventory of analytic attitudes right here, having mentioned curiosity, respectful sympathy, and a desire to help” (p. 24). See also Boesky (1989). Ms. G and the other cases in this chapter are composites. Everything I quote was said in so many words by all the patients I have in mind. The utterances of a particular patient may thus come from various people. In Chapter 12, I point to Simmel’s (1908) claim that termination and the inevitability of loss are intrinsic to the social psychology (and pathos) of dyads.

9 LISTENING TO JAMES MCLAUGHLIN Tribute to an American independent

The insights that I have had in my own analyses, that I have encountered in my patients and in myself in the day-to-day analytic work over the past forty years, have been fitful happenstance, nothing that I set out deliberately to achieve. They have been as firef lies: elusive on the wing and enigmatic in the grasp; illuminating in the moment seen, rather dull and diminished when closely scrutinized. Was the guiding glow really there, or imagined in my head? Once in hand, how to keep it glowing? James McLaughlin

Sometimes recognition comes late in life. The Pittsburgh analyst James McLaughlin began his prolific publishing career in the 1960s, and from the early 1980s, beginning with “Transference, Psychic Reality, and Countertransference,” he produced cutting-edge work about the analyst’s stance and subjectivity. His papers were collected in The Healer’s Bent (2005), allowing readers to appreciate McLaughlin’s ways of working and thinking and making them available to future generations. Earlier, I mentioned that McLaughlin once called Loewald a “quiet revolutionary,” and perhaps we can apply that very epithet to McLaughlin himself. Discovered, or fully appreciated, by many of us rather late in our professional lives, McLaughlin was indeed a quiet revolutionary, a sleeper. I read “Transference, Psychic Reality, and Countertransference” while I was in training, amazed but still too much the novice to see what McLaughlin was about. I was fortunate, then, to find his book later in life. While serving as Book Review Editor for North America for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, I would madly skim the dozens of books that came in, trying to decide which were reviewworthy. Very occasionally, I would begin this skimming, stop, reread, and drop everything while I read a book cover to cover. Such was my experience with The Healer’s Bent. Later, I advocated for The Healer’s Bent with the Program Committee

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of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and just a few weeks before he died, McLaughlin was featured at a “Meet the Author.”1 The Healer’s Bent draws together several of the wonderful papers James McLaughlin wrote over the years, as well as including much that is new. These writings are both radical and rooted in the earliest Freud. They were original and cutting-edge when written, and they were also prescient. They remain relevant and fresh today. Each rereading, which I undertake yearly for teaching purposes, brings new insights. In discussing McLaughlin’s work, we pay homage to an American original. As I have ref lected in an earlier chapter, it seems that as psychoanalysts in the United States wanted to move beyond the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s and the straitjacket of classical ego psychology, we looked across the Atlantic, to the contemporary Kleinians or British independents if we wished to retain a depth psychology, and to Bion if we wanted the viewpoint of someone who begins with the analyst’s not knowing. This has been, and continues to be, a welcome development, in contrast to the xenophobia and suspicion (cast equally on the American interpersonal tradition) that characterized psychoanalysis in the United States after the psychoanalytic diaspora. Often, however, our transatlantic focus has been accompanied by insufficient attention to those toiling in our own fields—in McLaughlin’s case, as he describes himself, those cultivating their own gardens and working in their own woodshops. When staying on native grounds, moreover, critical analysts and revisionists in the United States have tended to caricature and dismiss anything that smacked of ego psychology by turning to relational psychoanalysis or self psychology, not noticing our quiet revolutionaries and thereby obscuring the great understanding of personhood and subjectivity offered by the classical one-person depth psychologies. In this vein, we can see McLaughlin as an American independent, an intersubjective ego psychologist who was classically trained and who, while retaining important elements of what we might call a one-person psychology, along with certain ego psychological technical approaches like working from the surface, also radically refocused his attention onto what goes on between patient and analyst. Much as the British independent tradition situated itself between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, the American independent tradition took an approach to transference and technique that falls between Hartmann and Sullivan, one-person and two-person at the same time. Among those who have elaborated the post-Loewaldian American independent tradition, McLaughlin stands out.2 He is quintessentially American—an outdoorsy, active Irish-American from Pittsburgh who enjoyed working in his woodshop and garden, who skied, played tennis, even hunted, and who, in his youth, learned carpentry, plumbing, and how to keep up a rural homestead. McLaughlin is also quintessentially independent. In his work, he moved bravely beyond his training, challenging, rethinking, and taking issue, from his earliest paper until his final contribution. And he writes in a jargon-free, direct prose that is stunning in its eloquence and delicacy.

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McLaughlin’s approach epitomizes American independence. He focuses on what goes on between patient and analyst, but his is not a more-than-the-sum-ofthe-parts co-construction view, nor does he focus on the analytic third or potential space. The subtitle of McLaughlin’s book, Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter, is emphatically what we would call two-person separate rather than two-person unified, emphasizing solitude and implying that analysis is a feelingful and hard-won dialogue between two solitudes. What most stands out in McLaughlin’s complex and multifaceted conceptualization is the very delicate middle ground that he describes carving out in his use of countertransference. He gives substance and specificity to the notion of the analyzing instrument. It is an abstraction to say, with Freud, that the unconscious of the analyst tries to tune into the unconscious of the patient, that the analyst brings her analyzing instrument to the work. What is left out in this abstraction is specificity. Each analyst has a specific unconscious, as beset by idiosyncratic complexity as the patient’s. It is this specific unconscious, and not the unconscious, that the analyst brings to listening and responding. In his chapter, “What Was Brought,” McLaughlin speaks of the analyst’s blind spots, the conf licts and feelings, the analyzed and unanalyzed psychic vulnerabilities and tendencies that the analyst brings to his work, and he shows us just how challenging these blind spots can be. In “Transference, Psychic Reality, and Countertransference” (1981), he describes transference-countertransference as the interplay of two transferences, telling us, radically, that he prefers not to use the term “countertransference” at all, because it implies that the analyst’s unconscious constructions are different in kind and origin than the patient’s. Transferencecountertransference is, rather, a total situation in which two persons have two psychic realities: “the psychic reality of patient and analyst in an ambiguous and relativistic relationship of opposition” (p. 50). There is bravery here. McLaughlin shares with his readers self-revealing conflicts, shames, and vulnerabilities. He describes the struggles that arise for him in his work and that he feels both contribute to and obstruct his focus on the patient’s reality. I cannot think of another analyst, classical or relational, who has written so openly and extensively about what is going on inside himself—what he brings from childhood losses and shame, from sexual anxieties and uncertainties, from other experiences and conflicts—to his work with patients. Even as he has wanted, ever since writing “Transference, Psychic Reality, and Countertransference,” to lay the word “countertransference” to rest, there is no psychoanalytic writer who more fully explores what constitutes a countertransference that arises from within. McLaughlin describes these emotions and memories in great detail—how they originate in the character of his earliest relationships and in powerful early experiences, beginning from birth, that shaped the emotional fabric of his life. He examines in similar detail precisely how his early affective being in the world—shame, loss, a mother’s sticky closeness—has become entangled with his reactions to and understandings of his patients. For many in my 1980s psychoanalytic training generation, reading McLaughlin was a memorable experience (I don’t recall which of my teachers allowed him to

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slip by!). It was startling to read arguments for the ubiquity of transference in both patient and analyst, claims that transference does not go away when you are well analyzed, and assertions that transference is not a distortion but a transfer of intensity that gives meaning to and personalizes anyone’s psychic reality. Quoting Loewald’s claim “that there is neither such a thing as reality nor a real relationship, without transference,” McLaughlin adds: “all we feel we know or can ever come to know about ourselves and the reality in which we exist can be ours only through psychic structuring shaped by transference, that this psychic reality is what we live with” (1981, p. 59). McLaughlin does not like the word “countertransference.” The analyst is a person just like the patient, a person who has just as many fantasies, reactions, and emotions stirred up both in the hour and by the vicissitudes of life. These transferences are evoked not only by what the patient is saying or doing to the analyst, not through projective infusion, but rather because the analyst is herself human, with her own personal history of unresolved and challenging conf licts, and because it is fundamental to being human that one person inevitably evokes something in another if the other is truly engaged: “The analyst’s transferences, like the patient’s, are central to all he is or does and . . . determine the psychic reality he lives in and brings to the analytic task . . . Transference is a matter of equal rights, both on and behind the couch” (1981, p. 56). In this context, it is hard to forget McLaughlin’s description in “The Analyst’s Insights” of drifting during a clinical hour into a reverie in which he has images of a living tube—perhaps a clam siphon—barely surfacing to breathe from under the sand. He finds himself feeling bleak, sad, and filled with dread, only to have the patient immediately associate to someone buried alive! This startlingly synchronous image leads McLaughlin to a piece of self-analysis that furthers the treatment generatively, a piece of self-analysis conducted “while doing some mindless woodworking—some hand-sanding chore” (1988, p. 92), in what he will later call a “transference sanctuary” (and, we remind ourselves, not a countertransference sanctuary). Who will not be moved and grateful for the candor in the chapter “Through the Glass Darkly: On Inf luencing and Being Inf luenced” (1996)? Here McLaughlin describes his work with Mr. F, a cold, vigilant, depressed, bisexual man who has essentially no feeling for any of his sexual partners. McLaughlin is quite open. He has come to know his own vulnerabilities to sexual arousal and disgust in the consulting room, but now he experiences and has to manage new shock, going back into his past, trying to put together new feelings and reactions, addressing attractions to and fears of passive homosexual longings and acts that disgust him. I do not know of a work that is as candid and honest about the homosexual fears, fantasies, and identifications aroused in a heterosexual male analyst by a male patient. In spite of his claims for the constitutive nature of the analyst’s transferences in the analytic dialogue and for the analyst’s inevitable subjectivity, and in spite of his remarkable self-disclosure, McLaughlin is very much a classical analyst in one important sense. The analyst’s self-analysis and self-discovery, conducted during sessions and especially outside of them, in the solitude of woodshop and garden, are not meant to be shared with the patient. Indeed, such self-analysis, in transference

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sanctuaries, takes place in the service of not being preoccupied inappropriately while with the patient. It is when such emotions and reactions are insufficiently subjected to self-analysis in the analyst’s solitude that they spill over into the analytic dialogue. McLaughlin tells his readers about this inner turmoil because he hopes it will help us in clinical work, as such knowledge has helped him, to realize that self-investigation and self-understanding in the analyst must be continuously engaged. McLaughlin’s work, then, stands as a constant reminder of the distinction between self-understanding and self-disclosure. Even for this analyst who does as much as anyone to document the importance of the analyst’s exploring and acknowledging his deepest private reactions, the use of countertransference does not mean sharing (except now, with the reader). As a two-person separate analyst, McLaughlin is constantly aware that there are two unique, jaggedly complex subjectivities in the room, each of which, at the appropriate time and place, needs to be analyzed. This view of the analyst’s psychic reality generates a challenge and contradiction fundamental to analytic work. In chapters titled “What Was Taught” (2005) and “Dumb, Blind, and Hard: Can the Analyst Change His Spots?” (1991), McLaughlin describes how difficult it has been, how challenging it is for any analyst, to address his dumb, blind, and hard spots—McLaughlin’s shorthand for the spectrum of enactment. Dumb spots revolve around what we do not yet know. Intrapsychic conflict, as McLaughlin documents extensively, can generate blind spots. McLaughlin then describes in particular how he has wrestled to get away from what he calls the analyst’s hard spots—an adherence to theory and technique that leads to what I earlier call listening for rather than listening to. How, then, to focus on the patient’s psychic reality in the context of a fundamental challenge, the analyst’s always present subjectivity? McLaughlin suggests that it is only by the analyst’s focusing on her own blind and hard spots, as well as trying to address dumb spots concerning things she does not know now, but that if she stays open she may yet discover, can the analyst make the patient’s reality primary. Here is how McLaughlin (2005) describes his listening to stance and his use of the analysis of transference as a means to self-understanding, not as an end in itself, for the patient: I will listen to whatever you may wish to say, with the intent to understand your meaning and viewpoint, and with the least imposition of my own view or meaning as I can manage. As I do not presume to know, I shall need often to question and to ask for illumination. I will be alert to and inquire about your nonverbal behaviors and shifts of affect, particularly as I listen for allusions to how you perceive and react to my behaviors. My aim there and always will be to help you articulate the validity and logic of how you see your world, and me in it. Through looking at how you see me, I will try to help you to see yourself, hoping thereby to strengthen your capacities to find even more of yourself to authenticate and own. (p. 48)

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In discussing blind spots, McLaughlin readily acknowledges having undertaken a second analysis when he felt that some of his work had not gone well. Less conventionally, he gives a physically substantial sense of how he embeds his analytic work in his life, and especially of how time spent outside the consulting room is crucial to this work. His garden and woodshop, he claims, are his “transference sanctuaries” (p. 51). These are places where he needs to go, it seems daily, to allow the sense of his clinical work and his patients to be reacted to, to settle in. They are spaces of free-f loating attention to his patients and, equally important, to himself: “The serene grounding of the weeding or wood shaping and crafting gave me the context in which to do these bits of self-analysis” (p. 44). They provide that necessary “solitude” that helps sustain “the healer’s bent.” McLaughlin does not hold the view that transference is, for patient or analyst, primarily a distortion of reality that must be corrected. With Loewald, he points to Freud’s 1900 view of transference as a general principle of psychic functioning, the mode through which preconscious experiences and ideas gain their intensity. Transference is a necessity, as McLaughlin, echoing Loewald, beautifully puts it: “Without such intensity, whereby intrapsychic conf lict in one or both can be ‘really’ brought into the light, there is little psychic growth and structural change— and precious few felt insights. With such intensities, the patient has the chance to experience old matters in new variations” (p. 89). That the analyst is so continually involved in processing and self-analysis does not mean that McLaughlin presents as a self-involved analyst. Rather, it is the very fact of his self-analysis that enables him to be emotionally available to the patient, for the patient. He describes how crucial connection is, how intimate, how both parties are changed by it, how essential, how important, from the earliest relationship of mother and baby and throughout life, this inf luence of the other is to living. Describing one case in which an impasse was finally resolved, he says: We both came out of this piece of analytic work with our own deep sense of having been changed by the impact of an intimacy with an other that was novel and disturbing, then acceptable and enhancing to us both. I suspect that this is an inevitable consequence of working in the intensities of the analytic dyad, and, indeed for both, a major gratification that rewards the quest . . . As I have experienced it, the analyst’s feeling and timely acknowledgment of the impact of the patient on him, and of the analyst’s impact on the patient, can evoke in both parties powerful resonances of those oscillations of mutual inf luence and conf luence that were central to our earliest relating. Such evocations lend particular intensities of immediacy and realness to the experiences of being touched and touching, seen and seeing, moved and moving, inf luenced and inf luencing in the analytic dyad. (pp. 220–221) In writing about The Healer’s Bent, it is hard not to focus on McLaughlin himself as a palpable presence. It should be clear, however, that his self-described way of

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working does not focus mainly on the analyst, nor does he eschew the analyst’s interpretive function or trained understanding. “I wish to be clear,” he writes, “that this search for the patient’s psychic reality is not all that I find I must do,” and he proclaims his “right, at times, to assert my knowing” (p. 50). McLaughlin’s technical stance, I think, can be thought of as close-surface listening. As he describes it, even as an analysis progresses, and as more interpretation and confrontation become possible, McLaughlin works continually “to ensure contact with the patient’s surface” before he feels right “about bringing in an agenda of [his] own” (p. 50). Thus, he works as an ego psychologist, from the surface, but he doesn’t focus as much on defenses, resistances, or conf lict-generated gaps in the associative process, nor does he assume that the analyst knows what the patient really means—what the “underlying” conf licts, wishes, and defenses are. For McLaughlin, such attention would filter listening through the hard spots of “what was taught,” toward listening for and away from listening to the patient. McLaughlin wants us to know what he does (besides trying to make sure that he does not get in the way) to help his patients discover their own reality, and his close-surface listening, as he describes it, is closest to the patient’s reality, the tip of the preconscious iceberg. Concentrating on it, he hopes, can lead to a recognition of the depths of the unconscious, but only when this depth is available to patient as well as to analyst. By helping to counter hard spots and blind spots, then, close-surface listening keeps the analyst honest. McLaughlin notes that even when he can “still see, beneath the manifest concerns that are the patient’s ‘surface,’ many possible motives and dynamic configurations.” He prefers, rather than interpreting, to think of these latter elements as “richness of context” (p. 203). McLaughlin makes his listening to explicit, as he expects surprise, nonconfirmation of theory, perhaps multiple theories that might apply at one time or another: A central effort in my writing has been to articulate a more truly collaborative clinical stance of knowing less and seeking to be more informed of and understanding regarding how each in the pair, patient and analyst, come to perceive and comprehend things . . . The fundamental task of the analyst . . . is . . . [to] use his powers primarily to lead and guide the patient toward how rather than to what—how the patient can contemplate himself and others rather than what he will find when he does so. (pp. 202–203) Like many analysts, McLaughlin seeks confirmation for his approach in Freud. Freud, he notes, made two differing claims about psychoanalysis. In one, the analyst is seen as having more accurate and complete knowledge on which to base interpretations and lead the patient away from transference distortions. In the second, Freud wants the analyst to be completely open to the patient’s point of view and to not know. McLaughlin quotes Freud’s warning that the analyst is otherwise “in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows

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his inclinations he will certainly falsify what he may perceive” (1912b, p. 112; in McLaughlin 2005, p. 36). But Freud, McLaughlin ruefully notes, ultimately came down on the wrong side: “This specific deployment of the analyst’s inf luence, toward how rather than what, guided Freud in his early discoveries, before his wondering gaze narrowed under the curse of creeping certainty about his discoveries. It was there initially in his invitation to the patient to associate freely. But invitation became insistence as the analyst’s privileged position prevailed” (p. 202). Consonant with his continual reaching for depth of resonance between two psychic realities, McLaughlin in his listening to does not, as do many in the contemporary analytic world, privilege the here and now, nor does he follow the narrative turn. For him, the intensities of both patient’s and analyst’s transferences are rooted in the past, especially, in his view, in the shame of rejection, in old and deep wounds, which he describes in himself as well as in his patients, that are brought painstakingly to light: For me, the analytic quest is more than a story constructed for the comfort of two participants. It is a quest for the stuff of prior experience in each of us that pumps through and from the roots and trunks of our separate developmental pasts. These insistent pressures give individual shape, color, and vitality to the unique experiential present that patient and analyst shape between us, separate at first but now conjoined. (p. 48) Yet, even as transferences for both patient and analyst are ubiquitous and pull us each toward our own developmental past, there is a difference. The analyst, although his transferences have no greater purchase on truth and reality, has, hopefully, more self-knowledge: “The analyst uses his more developed transferential capacities to sound, with the patient, the latter’s depth of transferences” (p. 56). I have my own blind spots and hard spots (dumb spots as well, I am sure), and one of these concerns gender and sexuality. Yet it is unusual that I can bring these blind, hard, and dumb spots, or simply, these interests, together with my long-standing theoretical-clinical passions. In concluding this tribute, I note the subtle, sustained, and fine-tuned sensitivity and attention that McLaughlin gives, throughout his work, to his own subjective, vulnerable sexuality and gender, a perceptiveness and candor especially rare, I believe, in analysts who are male and heterosexual. It was striking to me to discover this self-description and identity when reading through The Healer’s Bent and feeling that McLaughlin’s writings resonated so closely with how I wished to see myself as an analyst. Throughout, we find in McLaughlin a willingness to discuss his own development, along with its puzzlements and humiliations, as well as the uncomfortable erotic feelings and fears evoked in him by his patients. He is candid about early maternal rejection, the absoluteness of his fears of abandonment, and shame and shaming as motivational experiences in his life—and, he believes, in any life.

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He describes the gendered context of his upbringing and his difficulties as husband and father, and he shares with us the kinds of childhood experiences, especially the entanglements and tragedies of paternal loss and maternal depression and rejection, that, he thinks, helped make him an analyst and healer, childhood experiences that, he believes, may have led many of us toward analytic work. McLaughlin suggests that those who become healers and analysts are in general motivated by identifications with maternality. Whatever our gender, we have “womanly virtues” (p. 19). We have undergone “struggles of reparation and defense around early maternal identifications that shaped our character style and signature in the blending mix of our bisexual nature” (p. 27). McLaughlin specifically acknowledges his identification with women analysts and the special importance of his second analyst, Charlotte Babcock, in helping him address issues his first analysis had left unexamined. He remarks further upon the general importance of women analysts in leading the way in analytic self-examination and investigation and in the theorizing of countertransference.3 For McLaughlin, becoming a doctor and analyst requires—and is attractive precisely because it requires—the dampening of phallic sexuality, of “sexual thrust and narcissistic claims for reward and recognition” (p. 27). His phrase “the healer’s bent,” he notes, draws some of its multilayered semantic meaning from receptive, passive homosexuality. When we write about or discuss an analytic author, we usually write as if we are in fact writing or speaking about the analyst himself, the clinical work and theories that the analyst-author represents. But in writing about McLaughlin, as with a few other colleagues (often, it would seem, also independents), we cannot ignore that we are writing about an author as well as an analyst.4 Accordingly, I end not with listening to as an analytic stance, nor with McLaughlin’s self-analysis, but with listening to McLaughlin himself. As any reader knows, McLaughlin writes evocatively and in gorgeous cadences. As with Freud, such writing deserves notice. We are first alerted to McLaughlin’s writing in his preliminary acknowledgments, Irish-inflected and a bit elegiac, in keeping with his sense of time flowing on: About the quiet chorus of voices always in me, you my patients and my fellows: you gave me the words to anchor my analytic knowing. Yours was the background music that challenged and beckoned me to find a lilt and phrasing for my own piping. Your words grow ever more anonymous as memory dims, but still convey strength and sustenance for me. One ponderous old phrase you taught me I still see in capitals: AIM-INHIBITED LOVE. It is now rarely spoken. Yet this kind of love infuses what we therapists can be when we are at our best. It lights up what altruism is about: to give that f lame not soon spent in the gust of primary passion, but as a steady breathing-on. It is the reliable inspiration that invites the uncertain f licker of the other to grow to a glow of its own when it is ready. (p. viii) Enlightenment and darkness, permanence and evanescence—these are the challenges in psychoanalysis:

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Was the guiding glow really there, or imagined in my head? Once in hand, how to keep it glowing? Rather than encountering dramatic enlightenment, I learned to expect the insights of my patients, and my own about me, to be small-scale, scattered glimmers, extinguished almost as often as sustained. (p. 88) James McLaughlin’s guiding glow will not fade.

Notes 1 This chapter contains my remarks, which became a memorial statement for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. American Imago published a series of memorial tributes, including the “Meet the Author” presentations of Theodore Jacobs (2010) and Evelyne Albrecht Schwaber (2010). 2 It is not surprising that American independents Jacobs (2010) and Poland (2010) also felt close to McLaughlin and were asked to contribute to the American Imago memorial section, or that the other contributors, Harris (2010), Schwaber (2010), Cornell (2010), and Wallerstein (2010), each in his or her own way, is an autonomous thinker who respects classical psychoanalysis even while criticizing it. 3 As an interviewee in my study of early women psychoanalysts put it,“analysts are passive men [because of how you have to sit and sit and wait and wait] and aggressive women [because of the drive it takes to become a woman professional]” (quoted in Chodorow 1991). 4 We turn again and again, for the pleasures of reading as well as for what is said, to Freud and Loewald, and (among others) to British independents like Enid Balint, Coltart, Milner, Parsons, and Sharpe and to American independents like McLaughlin, Jacobs, and Poland.

10 REGARD FOR OTHERNESS Reading Warren Poland

The goal of psychoanalysis is the exploration of the mind of the patient. Attention to the dyadic aspects of the development of insight does not imply alteration of that goal. Warren Poland

As analysts, we meet our patients in the consulting room, but we often meet our colleagues and forebears, beginning with Freud, through their writings.1 I first met Warren Poland through his writings—highly theoretical, deeply clinical, straightforwardly personal, pervasively ethical, and flat-out gorgeous—and I return to them again and again. As we read Poland, we are bathed in the language of the patient, in his empathy for his patients, and in what he says to them and feels about and for them, so eloquently and to the point. We are bathed in Poland’s always pertinent self-reflection and self-observation but never inundated by the analyst’s subjectivity. Warren Poland is among our most elegant, sophisticated, and right-as-you-canbe contemporary writers about the simple and straightforward (you listen to the patient), yet complex and amazing (you listen to the patient) work that is psychoanalysis. He gives us clear concepts and rich case descriptions that seem to provide in themselves guidance to how we want to work. His clinical sensitivity, the cases he describes, Poland’s own feelings as he works, these all come alive, as he creates narratives about the deepest feelings, meanings, and histories of his patients, about their work together, about change and the internal and external impediments to change. “Vignette” does not do justice to Poland’s case writing, and “theory” does not do justice to his seamlessly grounded accounts of the clinical consulting room and the goals of analytic work. We wonder, as we also wonder about our other great writers, beginning with Freud (and for each of us a select additional few), whether they are separable—being an analyst and being a writer. For Poland, they seem inextricably intertwined.

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Poland describes a taken-for-granted, deeply ethical internal stance toward the other, an analytic identity as, above all, an ethical human being, for whom all theory, all technical precepts, all rules—work from the surface, interpret, work in the transference, analyze the resistance, explain free association—are “in the service of the other.” The other is the patient. In Melting the Darkness, Poland (1996) muses: How can it be that no man is an island and that at the same time every man is an island? . . . It is misleading to speak glibly of one-person psychology versus two-person psychology. No single person exists outside a human, object-connected field; the analytic space colors how such a single person comes to understanding by the other and to insight. At the same time, the mind of any individual can be engaged by another yet is always crucially apart, a private universe of inner experience. (p. 33) In that same work, he later adds, “The goal of psychoanalysis is the exploration of the mind of the patient. Attention to the dyadic aspects of the development of insight does not imply alteration of that goal or of customary technique” (p. 57). In these statements, the reader finds an insistence on the patient’s essential, separate humanity and individual uniqueness and, by implication, an ethical and clinical conception of the analyst’s role that grows from the essential and separate humanity of the analyst. Since Melting the Darkness, Poland has been elaborating these core understandings and commitments in a series of articles, presentations, and reflections, now collected in Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis (2017), establishing what he has felicitously called a “two-person separate” perspective in psychoanalytic methodology and epistemology. “Two-person separate” bears a family resemblance to Loewald’s view, just as Poland’s “private universe of inner experience” reminds us of Loewald’s human mind as “a universe in its own right.”2 Through these writings, Poland defines and elaborates a foundational psychoanalytic attitude and pragmatic. This taken-for-granted, deeply ethical internal stance toward the other, and the actions that such an ethic entails, epitomize the practice that Poland advocates and elaborates throughout his work, focused always on what he has called “regard for otherness.” Poland has written that he sees philosophy as the lectures and psychoanalysis as the lab (perhaps, in medical training, the clinic). If so, I think we could see Poland himself, who moves so gracefully between the two, as somewhere in between. He has become, for psychoanalysis, a leading ordinary language psychoanalyst and ordinary language ethicist. Just as ordinary language philosophers do not tell us to use a different language, but that we can learn about meaning and reality by looking at how we already use words, and pragmatists and social phenomenologists do not tell us what we should be doing but what we are, in fact, doing, so also Poland unpacks for us the full meaning, the full implication for practice, for the internal analytic setting, and for the analyst’s subjectivity as analyst, of our taken-for-granteds—what we already do, if we are focusing on the patient.

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Poland’s reader will find that there is no jargon in his formulations, no terms that any educated person would not understand, even as this writer-analyst gets right to the heart of the matter. Poland’s writing contrasts sharply with my own drive to theorize and with that of so many of our colleagues—our pull toward the abstract and theoretical. Poland’s ordinary English, completely straightforward “two-person separate,” distinguished from “one-person” and “two-person unified,” for example, contrasts with (while also helping to inspire) my own formulation, “intersubjective ego psychology,” with which I identify and name a theoretical tradition and epistemological perspective. “Two-person unified” condenses succinctly my own “more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts” description of two-person theory and technique. Ordinary language, a focus on the patient, and a focus on what we do, or try to do, for him or her. From Poland, we get some of our most felicitous concepts and clinical admonitions, all in plain, everyday English: “the patient as a unique other” (1996, p. 6); we serve as a “recognizing other” for the patient (2000); the patient is a “private universe of inner experience” (1996, p. 33); “witnessing” and serving as witness (2000); “regard for otherness” and “the marvel of otherness” (1996, p. 246); the “interpretive attitude” (2002). Reminding us of Freud’s “powerful curiosity about meaning,” Poland points again and again to the centrality of curiosity for both patient and analyst. Regard for otherness is Poland’s fundamental rule for the analyst. This rule, he implies, is of much more importance than whatever “fundamental rule”—changing over the years and according to location and tradition—that we impose, or do not, on our patients. Such regard affirms the individual selfhood of the patient and his or her otherness to the analyst, which is at the same time the patient's (potential) selfness to him- or herself: the capacity to think, to self-observe, to have a mind of one’s own. Recognizing the patient’s specific selfhood (to the analyst, the patient’s otherness), we hope to give patients tools to elaborate their own self-recognition and self-understanding. Poland chooses to open Intimacy and Separateness, his recent book, with “Regarding the Other,” a short contribution that sums up this psychoanalytic credo. Regarding the other entails what Poland sets out as “three foundational principles,” his foundational ethic, we might say: individuality, otherness, and outsiderness (2011b, p. 355). In the context of our field’s pervasive shift toward a focus on the analytic dyad, transference-countertransference in the room, the relationship, and the analyst’s mind, Poland’s is a cautionary tale. He finds it necessary to remind colleagues and readers that “the analysand is the central person in any analysis.” The analyst, far from being co-creator, co-author, or psychological subject equivalent to the patient, is the patient’s other. The analytic field consists of a “total field of intersubjective engagement between the clinical partners,” but at the same time “the patient comes to analysis for the sake of personal growth, and the analyst works therein to further that patient’s personal analysis.” Poland reminds us that the analyst is “engaged to be a professional assistant” and that “it is the patient

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and the patient’s life that are the priority” (pp. 356–358). In this context, Poland, ever the pragmatist, asks, what can the patient use after termination?3 Regard for otherness requires what Poland has called, in his foundational epistemological formulation, a “two-person separate” view of the analytic encounter. “Two-person separate” provides for two distinct people, two subjects, in interaction, an intersubjectivity that is not a fusion or unity, not the “two-person unified” (also Poland’s term) of relational psychoanalysis, field theory, co-creation, or the bipersonal field, and not the one-person of classical analysis. “Two-person separate” describes the epistemology and methodology that underpin regard for otherness, curiosity, interpretation, and all of the analyst’s other provisions for the patient. It recognizes also the separate and unique individual selfhood of the patient, whose mind and experience go beyond the consulting room. “Two-person separate” was first coined in “The Analyst’s Witnessing and Otherness,” Poland’s 1997 plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association (Poland 2000). Poland came to speak of witnessing as he wished to recognize his patient’s personal trauma—the trauma of a young woman who reported that she must undergo a hysterectomy and would be unable to bear children. He suggests that we witness suffering: we cannot always interpret or “empathize.” In witnessing our patients, according to Poland, the analyst accompanies them as a guide. We are “in attendance to hear,” we “serve as other,” we “stand by,” we “travel with.” This concept of witnessing, I have found, gives trainees and young clinicians (and the rest of us) guidance in working with patients who have experienced trauma from without—political trauma, torture, forced migration, economic disaster, racism, and all the “external” events and experiences that so affect internal lives and worlds. Here interpretation is often beside the point, whereas witnessing is emphatically (and empathically) very much what is needed. Throughout his writings, Poland (like McLaughlin) also witnesses himself, with all his commitments and all his foibles, as analyst, as citizen, as parent, child, and husband, as colleague and friend. He bears witness to the trajectory of the analytic profession, to what we should be and represent, and to what we do. And he measures himself against regard for otherness—for him, the analyst’s primary goal or mode of being. For me (and perhaps for others), all of Poland’s writing is inspiration and companion as I work, but “The Analyst’s Witnessing and Otherness,” along with “two-person separate,” especially transformed my conceptualization of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Witnessing of self and other draws Poland toward another facet of intersubjective ego psychology: its developmental perspective. Here we think of Erikson’s explicit theorization of development and Loewald’s consistent attunement to it across the life cycle and to developmental identity as a feature of unconscious and conscious inner life. Beginning with “The Analyst’s Witnessing and Otherness” and his witnessing of his patient’s truncated fertility, Poland has contributed movingly

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to a conceptualization of development and its interruptions as a lifelong process. Increasingly throughout his writings, culminating with reflections like “Endings in Poetry, Psychoanalysis, and Life” (Poland 2017), we find reflective, illuminating, sympathetic, in-the-room accounts of Poland himself as someone traversing the life cycle along with his patients. Like McLaughlin, Poland reflects on his previous analyses, not so much to tell us about himself and his inner life as to develop his thoughts about experiences that affect us all: aging, the life span, and the cycle of generations. In Intimacy and Separateness, choosing a word that points at vulnerability, he does not shy away from talking directly about the fundamental “transience” of human existence, of life and death. In our field, such a focus is rare. We can forget, but Poland does not, that Oedipus is as much about generation as about gender. We are in the vicinity of ego integrity, and “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” along with a few other writings (see especially Orgel 2000). In several writings, Poland describes his own life cycle and its impact on his work and his work ego. As with McLaughlin, we learn of his relation to his father and to his son, of himself going from youth, to middle age, to what he describes as the fading of old age (perhaps we could include ripening here and the deepening of maturity, in addition to inevitable loss, all of which we take so abundantly from Poland’s writing presence). “The Analyst’s Witnessing and Otherness” opens with recognition of the disruption of generation and generativity: Poland’s patient will not be able to contribute biologically to the ongoingness of the generations. Poland, male, of a different generation, already a father, gets it. He understands that in the face of this radical tragedy in the life of a young woman, he can only witness. He cannot comfort, explore, or analyze. In “The Analyst’s Fears,” Poland becomes developmental other to his own other, developmental subject-object to himself. In his youth, he notices, he could focus clinically (and, one infers, personally) on one pole of the oedipal conflict: sexuality and gender. Rich echoes of these interests are also found in Poland’s playful writings about—and brilliant naming of—“polymorphously normal,” “ungendered” sex and protean gender in Shakespeare’s comedies (we think here, and Poland [2006b] thinks, of Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, the latter with its tragic off-center in Malvolio). Now he describes a dying patient who wishes Poland to meet, once, with his son after he is gone, to give the son another way of connecting to his father, and another patient whom Poland sits with from diagnosis of a fatal illness through to fading and death.4 Expanding on ego integrity and rueful regret, Poland titles two short writings “Ephemera” and “Slouching towards Mortality” (these conclude Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis). He writes movingly and with palpable emotional immediacy on a topic rare in our literature, that is, how the analyst’s place (Poland’s place) in his own aging has affected his sense of self and his clinical life experience.5 Here we find a facing of mortality and death in both patients and analyst, a facing of the personal and professional life that Poland has lived and will live in, to echo Erikson, his “one and only life cycle.” He has discovered, Poland tells us, that fears and dangers have shifted across his life span:

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that brings me to one other experience that I want to acknowledge candidly as having a personal truth, one that I believe at least some others must share. . . . It has to do with my personal sense of increasing vulnerability to the contagion of fear. I believe that my clinical skill has for the most part increased with years of practice. Yet my growing experience and possibly my growing skill have either led to or permitted me more openness to more deeply felt dread and sadness. Pleasures have also grown, even greater appreciation of the delight of very small pleasures, but the awareness of more freely feeling fear has brought with it a sense of poignancy that I did not know when I was younger . . . Something about aging in a life immersed in other people’s analyses has been incredibly enriching but has changed me so that I feel more open to anguish. (2006a, p. 79) For many years, Poland wrote a short “Clinician’s Corner” column for American Imago, three to five pages of personal-professional reflection. Here is how he left his readers in his good-bye contribution, titled “Regarding the Other”: The analyst’s desire to work in the psychoanalytic service of the other is manifested in an underlying regard for the uniqueness of the patient’s individuality, the authenticity of the patient’s otherness, and the vulnerability of the patient’s sense of essential outsiderness. No two people are the same. Knowing an other is always partial and somewhat askew. Each person is inherently vulnerable in the presence of an other person whose life and experience the first one cannot ever fully know. (Poland 2011a, p. 358) Regard for otherness.

Notes 1 My personal tone in this chapter grows partly from its original occasion of presentation, a “Meet the Author” that became a book preface (in Poland 2017), but it is also appropriate to Poland’s own style, which is highly theoretical, deeply clinical, and straightforwardly personal. The sociologist Howard Becker (1986) describes how writing in sociology ranges from the ponderously scholarly and esoteric (Talcott Parsons) to his own ordinary English, first-person pronoun style, a style that also describes Poland’s writing. 2 As I quote Loewald in Chapter 7: “The object of investigation, the analysand, as well as the investigator, the analyst, although each has a considerable degree of internal psychic organization and relative autonomy in respect to the other, can enter a psychoanalytic investigation only by virtue of their being relatively open systems, and open to each other” (1970, p. 278). 3 I have noted in Chapter 1 the pragmatic emphasis in American psychoanalysis, particularly in the American independent tradition. 4 We cannot help noticing here how good analysis can sometimes clash with McLaughlin’s “what was taught” about what counts as “good analysis.” 5 For a recent example, see Kantrowitz (2017).

PART IV

Individuality as bedrock in the consulting room and beyond

11 TOWARD AN AMERICAN INDEPENDENT TRADITION Recapitulation

In the United States, psychoanalysis has not claimed an independent tradition. Yet my observations and analytic identification led to a rethinking of the matter. Loewald and Erikson seemed to represent a doubled American psychoanalytic heritage, an American independent tradition. I have given the name intersubjective ego psychology to this synthesizing theory and clinical epistemology. Intersubjective ego psychology remains committed to ego psychological understandings and technique—the complexity and clinical centrality of individual subjectivity—while also claiming, without identifying as interpersonal or relational, the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, transference-countertransference fields. Over the years, the idea of an American independent tradition seems to have appealed to a number of colleagues, allowing them to recognize, as Erikson might have put it, their own psychoanalytic identity and theoretical and clinical place. Loewald and Erikson both see themselves as ego psychologists, attentive and attuned to the intrapsychic and to the development of self and ego capacities, yet each makes central the relationship to the other. Loewald offers an intersubjective conceptualization of development and analytic process, attending to the asymmetrical mother-child pair and analytic dyad and to the role of each in individual development and psychic change. Erikson’s eight stages constitute a developmental model of the life cycle in both one- and two-person terms. Basic trust, intimacy, and generativity especially point to ways of intrapsychic being and intersubjective being with the other and of the other being with the self. Ego integrity, the last stage, becomes an internal relationship with the self. Complementing this emphasis in Erikson, ego integrity reverberates in Loewald’s “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex.” Ever attendant to internalization, here Loewald argues that oedipal resolution involves accepting one’s parents, and hence one’s life, as the only parents one could have had, even as one’s life history has also been emergent and accidental.

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Loewald and Erikson, then, each in his own way portrays in himself and his work a fine-tuned psychoanalytic ear that listens to and theorizes clinical individuality, along with an always attentive intersubjective-interpersonal observing ego. At the same time, for Loewald and Erikson, the eye observes the clinical space and attends to how any individual creates her intrapsychic self-location—her sense of internal place in the familial, sociocultural, and historico-generational world. Here the American independent tradition expresses its double legacy, its descent not only from classical ego psychology but also from interpersonal psychoanalysis. Especially for Erikson, the relationship with the other extends beyond the twoperson. From Childhood and Society forward, Erikson attends to the intertwining of ego, psyche, and development with culture and history, to the effects, as these are filtered intrapsychically, of culture and history on the psyche, and to the psychohistories of those, like Luther and Gandhi, who shaped and reshaped history and culture themselves. But as I have remarked elsewhere, Loewald too extended his attention to life history, culture, and history, notably in his Yale lectures, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual, and in his invitation to the sociologist Talcott Parsons to participate in a conference on internalization. I remark on this reach outward also in my title. Just as the psychoanalyst observes affect and conflict in the individual, so also, Everett Hughes, who wrote The Sociological Eye, is one of sociology’s most insightful and astute observers of affect and conflict in everyday sociocultural life. As we notice this double legacy—ego psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis—we see that such a doubled focus also characterizes the British independent tradition. There we find attachment as relationship and inner need, objects and object relations as internal and external, true self and transitional phenomena, and a putting together of two opposing national traditions. We may not find cultural psychoanalysis, but we do find, at the Hampstead and Tavistock Clinics, in Winnicott’s and Bowlby’s writings, and elsewhere, attention to the social conditions affecting psyche and development. Just as British analysts eventually came to see independence not only as a concomitant of middleness but also as family resemblance, so too we can describe the American independent tradition both as a product of middleness and as an expression of clinical and theoretical integration. And just as the British independent tradition was first called the Middle Group—in the middle and caught in the middle, incorporating elements from both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and criticized from both sides—so too the American independent tradition is located between American ego psychology and American interpersonal-cultural-relational psychoanalysis. Yet even as both the British and the American independent traditions have several features in common, the origins of the American hybrid in taken-for-granted ego psychological assumptions about mind and working from the surface, as well as in ego psychologically and interpersonally-relationally derived forms of attention to the analytic interaction, give this tradition a unique cast. Independence, I have suggested, speaks not only to synthesis, compromise, and in-between, but also to positive distinguishing features. In the American independent tradition, as in the British, I notice a special awareness of individuality.

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Independent psychoanalysts do not seem to have a ready-made sense of what they will find in the patient—universals of how we develop and function—as, for example, Freudian psychosexual developmental assumptions; for a Kleinian, oscillations between paranoid-schizoid and depressive position functioning or primary envy; for an interpersonalist or relational psychoanalyst, mind created and understood through co-construction (indeed, what is hegemonic has shifted, in the now almost twenty years since I began thinking about the American independent tradition). Nor do American independents seem to have a universalized sense of how and to what end the analyst uses her own mind—observing interactive ruptures, in dreaming or reverie, or focusing on particular contents in what is said or kinds of feelings within the analyst. In contradistinction to trends found across the analytic world in recent years, the focus seems to remain on the patient’s more than on the analyst’s mind. Independence thus puts together particular attitudinal-technical approaches to the analytic interaction with a theory of mind that makes individuality central. Therapeutic action has to do with elaborating, deepening, and unfolding this individuality. I have suggested that intersubjective ego psychology promises a beginning descriptive formulation. This formulation draws attention to a conceptualization of the analytic situation as that of two individualities in an interaction that preserves each. It reminds us of our dual American psychoanalytic roots: Hartmann and classical ego psychology on the one hand, Sullivan and interpersonal psychoanalysis on the other. I would note as well that intersubjectivity points, as it has also in more social science-informed usages, toward attention to the sociocultural, to the ways that intersubjectivity requires attention to the full subjectivity of the other and the self: gender, racial-ethnicity, culture, place in family and history (for me and my cohort, born into a world at war). I note also that the interpersonal tradition was a cultural school of psychoanalysis. Sullivan, Thompson, Horney, Fromm, and Fromm-Reichman were close to Benedict, Kardiner, Mead, and Sapir, and other anthropologists from the culture and personality tradition, and culture and personality anthropology was in turn shaped by this homegrown American psychoanalysis. Given this heritage, intersubjective ego psychology too is a cultural ego psychology, instantiated in and through the clinically specified, internally meaningful sociocultural. Both Loewald and Erikson, then, reflect, through an ego psychological lens, long-standing attention in American psychoanalysis and universities to culture and psyche, to the ways that culture and social practices interact with individual experiences of psyche and identity. Intersubjective ego psychology begins from ego psychology itself, with its deep commitment to the complexity of individuality and one-personness, especially in a world that is today so anti-ego psychological (often part of being anti-American— and Americans, it seems, play along) and so two-person/two-mind. At the same time, intersubjective ego psychology provides a both/and formulation, like the British independent tradition focusing on how subject and subject, psyche and other, patient, analyst, and analytic dyad, analytic dyad and analytic culture, and, finally, individual psychology and social world, work together.

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Intersubjective (and sociocultural) ego psychology comprise a family of resemblances (I allude to Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” here) among themes found in psychoanalysis from Freud to the present. These themes range on the one side from private personhood and intrapsychic self to, on the other, the largest connections among society, culture, and psyche. The American independent tradition holds that we need one-person psychologies, but that relationship and the sociocultural are also fundamental. I use the concept of intersubjectivity in its classical sense: two individual subjectivities that relate one to the other. This understanding contrasts with a usage that has become increasingly hegemonic within psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity as interchangeable with co-creation and the idea that minds are always part of (cannot be conceptualized, do not exist, apart from) a relational field. Stolorow and Atwood (1996) claim specifically that the concept of intersubjectivity precludes separate individuality: “the concept of an individual mind or psyche is itself a psychological product crystallizing from within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness and serving specific psychological purposes” (p. 182). Running counter to this idea, Loewald always keeps the individual subject in view, even as his developmental and clinical conception comprises two people (patient and analyst, child and mother). He thus combines an interpersonal perspective with one that recognizes the psychic integrity of the individual, writing, as we have seen, of “the role that interaction with environment plays in the formation, development, and continued integrity of the psychic apparatus” (1960, p. 221). We see here a contrast both to the classical one-person ego psychology of Arlow, Brenner, and Gray and to the more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts conception of intersubjectivity expressed by Stolorow and Atwood and throughout relational psychoanalysis. Intersubjective ego psychology. I name Erikson as cofounder of the American independent tradition. Trained in the classical child analytic ego psychology of Anna Freud and fostered in his early writings by David Rapaport, Erikson’s eight stages of development all include changing forms of relationship of ego to other, changing forms of intersubjectivity over the life cycle. Like American cultural school psychoanalysts and psychological anthropologists, Erikson also points toward the cultural in individual clinical vignettes, in theoretical and clinical attention to the ego’s appropriation of conscious and unconscious subjective culture (the ego’s usages of objective culture), and in using an ego psychological developmental approach to understand the individual in history, including world-shaping individuals like Luther and Gandhi. In Parts I and IV, I suggest that Freudian and Eriksonian (and Loewaldian) curiosity about society, culture, and history has, to the detriment of both psychoanalysis and the university, largely been lost.1 As I describe it, the American independent tradition emerges from ego psychology. Its practitioners were classically trained and assume, broadly, an ego psychological metapsychology. They take for granted the ego and its defenses, conflict and compromise formation, and working from the surface. Along with ego

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psychology and most classical theories, they retain self-understanding, or insight, as a primary analytic goal, and curiosity as a central analytic attitude. While classical in analytic goals, however, American independents are not classical in their attitude toward the patient or toward the analytic interaction. They veer away from a portrayal of the analyst as observer, interpreter, and expert vis-à-vis the patient’s psyche. And the individual analyst’s presence matters, as if American independent practitioners have absorbed something of the relationalinterpersonal tradition. At the same time, American independents are not relational in their metapsychology, in their attitude toward and use of the countertransference, or in their accounts of clinical work. Nor are they (as we find often among Kleinians and Bionians) certain of the nature and origins of their countertransference, or, more generally, of what goes through the analyst’s mind. Their theory does not presume that the analyst’s affect, thoughts, and associations indicate, in the main, the contradictions in the analytic field or in the mind of the patient. My formulation of an American independent tradition emerged partly from my observation of an intrinsic and inevitable tension I describe in The Power of Feelings: that between clinical individuality, the particularity and uniqueness of each person, on the one hand, and, on the other, the generalizations and universalizations that of necessity form the basis of all psychoanalytic metapsychologies or theories of mind and that have led historically to universalistic prescriptions for analytic activity and technique. The independent choice in this dilemma has been to go with individuality. The defining theoretical feature of the American independent tradition as I have described it is a theory of mind that makes central the particularity and uniqueness of the individual, rather than general principles of mental functioning or psychic structure. Analyst and patient are in a relationship, but the patient is front and center. The relationship supersedes neither unique selfness and otherness nor the analyst’s consistent asymmetrical focus on the patient. Following from this, an American independent conceptualization of analytic activity and technique begins from a portrayal of two separate individualities engaged in the work. The analyst’s central focus, and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, revolve around helping the patient elaborate, deepen, unfold, and expand his or her individuality, which includes of necessity self-knowledge, and working to mitigate impediments to this expansion and unfolding. We find echoes in several writers. Modell (1993) describes “the private self.” I write of “the powers of personal meaning and feeling” (Chodorow 1999a). Poland (2000) describes his own formulation of intersubjective engagement as referring to the “communicative emotional flow between two different parties.” He claims that “this usage of ‘intersubjectivity’ can be contrasted with the use of the same word to refer to a unified field” (p. 25). Alluding to Melting the Darkness, Poland asks: “How are we to integrate our sense of no man’s being an island, our concern for intersubjectivity, with our sensitivity to each man’s being an island, our valuing of the individual? Also, are not separate people, cognizant of their separateness, even so still part of the same intersubjective field?” (p. 25).

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McLaughlin, I quote again, elaborates: “I will listen to whatever you may wish to say, with the intent to understand your meaning and viewpoint, and with the least imposition of my own view or meaning as I can manage. As I do not presume to know, I shall need often to question and to ask for illumination . . . My aim there and always will be to help you articulate the validity and logic of how you see your world, and me in it. Through looking at how you see me, I will try to help you to see yourself, hoping thereby to strengthen your capacities to find even more of yourself to authenticate and own.” We hear a “one-person” metapsychology and an engaged, yet differentiated, “one-person” clinician. We turn to the British independent tradition for cognate affirmations of individuality: Winnicott’s “true self,” Milner’s “form from formlessness,” Bollas’s “unthought known” and “personal idiom.” From behind the couch, we remember Coltart’s rough beast waiting to be born and her sitting for months with a silent patient, and Parsons (2014), following Enid Balint, emphasizing the analyst’s “willingness to wait” as a central feature of British independent technique.2 All of these, like Poland’s and McLaughlin’s formulations, focus on the patient’s, and not the analyst’s, mind. We do not hear an imperative to “bring the material into the transference.” Following from an assumption of individuality, American independents do not seem to have a ready-made theoretical or pretheoretical sense of what they will find or are looking for. We do not read or hear case descriptions in terms of universals of development or psychic functioning like “the” Oedipus complex or other psychosexual developmental assumptions. Nor do we sense pretheoretical expectations of defenses against and repression of drive derivatives; paranoidschizoid functioning, projective identification, and envious attacks on the analyst’s mind; mirroring transferences; or the analyst’s metabolizing the patient’s beta elements into alpha functioning. What the patient brings, in this view, comes principally from within the patient, not from the patient’s unconscious apprehending of the analyst, his relationship to the analyst, or the intersubjective field. Nor is the intrapsychic field of the analyst’s mind a primary focus of attention. Emotional immediacy and aliveness, wherever these are found, are more central than whether that aliveness is directly about patient and analyst “in” the transference (even, as Goldberg, Ogden, Winnicott, and others describe it, if what is immediately alive is deadness). The analyst’s focal attention lists more consciously toward the patient herself, rather than toward her own mind, feelings, position, and waking dreaming, or toward the interaction and its co-constructed enactments and ruptures. In this context, any single focus—analysis of defense, resistance, transference—is situational, a means to an end that is observed in the moment to be useful. These are not universal technical precepts or ends in themselves. Herbert Schlesinger (2003) cautions the analyst eager to point out resistances that “the patient is doing the best he can, even though he is frightened” (p. 82). Resistance tells us that “something important is going on” (p. 82) and that “the best reaction is something you don’t see” (p. 87). Roy Schafer (1983) encourages the analyst to regard resisting as an

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activity, rather than seeing resistance (as would the classical ego psychologist he was or the contemporary Kleinian he became) as an act—an attack on the analyst or the analysis. An American independent analyst hopes to facilitate the development of an individualized psyche and self that unfold over the course of the treatment as much as treatment discovering what is already there. I have quoted Loewald writing of the individual mind “as a universe in its own right” and Poland of the patient as a “unique other” and “private universe of inner experience.” For Loewald, the goal of analysis is to bring fantasy, transference, a depth and richness of primary-process experiencing, and unconscious mentation into preconscious and conscious psychic life. It is not to substitute for them reality, secondaryprocess thinking, conscious, rational thought, and self-observation, or the overcoming of transference in favor of “reality.” Reciprocally, the analyst’s goal is to help the patient express, articulate, structure, and organize herself and her self-understanding. Nor is the analyst’s individuality—except her individuality as an analyst— brought forcefully into the consulting room, say, in self-disclosure, focused and extended talk about a specific enactment, or attention to the analyst’s experience of the patient. Chused’s “evocative power of enactments” and noticing of the “patient’s perception of the analyst,” Jacobs’s “use of the self,” and McLaughlin’s “analyst’s insights” all evolve from internal and silent self-reflection on the part of these active, alive, and present analysts. McLaughlin describes his “transference sanctuaries”—daily activities like gardening or “woodshedding,” in which, outside of the hour, feelings and thoughts evoked in his work with patients can be recognized, felt, and worked through. The American independent tradition thus preserves its origins in ego psychology but also takes from two-person developments. We remember Poland’s felicitous “two-person separate” and Boesky’s “enactment theory in the conflict model” and “two-person/interpersonal domain combined with the traditional intrapsychic methods of contextualizing.” We recall Loewald’s advocacy of recognition: “the analyst structures and articulates, or works towards structuring and articulating, the material and the productions offered by the patient. If an interpretation of unconscious meaning is timely, the words by which this meaning is expressed are recognizable to the patient as expressions of what he experiences. They organize for him what was previously less organized” (1960, p. 238). Even as the analyst’s individuality is actively present, and the interaction of conscious and unconscious minds is important, then, the American independent tradition tends to part ways from an emphasis on how these two individual presences create a co-constructed third—Poland’s “two-person unified,” my “more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts,” or Stolorow and Atwood’s claim that the very concept and experience of individuality is itself an intersubjective product. In the American independent view, there is a reciprocity to individual uniqueness, but the analyst’s activity and stance emerge from the analyst’s individuality and

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individuality as analyst—even as, in a fundamental contradiction, the work can be done only through relationship. This portrayal of the analyst’s separate subjectivity descends from an ego psychological view that countertransference comes from the analyst. It may be triggered by the patient’s current behavior, and its recognition by the analyst is essential to the work. It may involve what Boesky (1990) calls a counterresistance that is necessary for analytic progress. But it is not constituted primarily by a projective identification of the patient’s, a co-creation, a bulwark, or by what the analyst observes about his own mind.3 Yet whereas a classical analyst would find fault with strong countertransference feelings and thoughts, American independent analysts portray their reactions, thoughts, feelings, and evoked memories as central to their capacity to understand and reach the patient. The mind of the analyst is thus both separate and involved in the analytic encounter. As in all analytic traditions, then, the analytic interaction is important, but the analyst is a separate subject with his or her own unique internal past and present. These are, along with the patient’s, live presences to be reckoned with in the room, but not necessarily through discussion with the patient, special technical attention to rupture and repair, and so forth. Loewald, the original theorist of intersubjective ego psychology and American independent theory and practice, founds this perspective. We remind ourselves of Loewald’s fundamental epistemological observation: “The object of investigation, the analysand, as well as the investigator, the analyst, although each has a considerable degree of internal psychic organization and relative autonomy in respect to the other, can enter a psychoanalytic investigation only by virtue of their being relatively open systems, and open to each other.” I have noticed especially Poland’s articulation of American independent formulations, not only “two-person separate” but also an emphatic assertion of the individuality of both patient and analyst. Poland points to “powerful meanings that arise from the deep” (2000, p. 17), along with our “essential aloneness” and “essential otherness” (p. 16). Noting that the patient is “a distinctly separate person” (p. 18), he describes the analyst’s “position of separated otherness” (p. 18) and “firm respect for self and otherness” (p. 19), as well as its complement, the patient’s “intact otherness” and “distinct integrity” (p. 21). The analyst as “other” is “in attendance” or “travels with” the patient; he is a “sensitively respectful other who witnesses,” who “helps the patient to see himself as a unique one in a world filled with unique and interacting others.” I have called the theory underpinning the American independent tradition “intersubjective ego psychology.” In so doing, I emphasize that the American independent tradition has ego psychological roots and an ego psychological identity, as do its original theorists, Loewald and Erikson. I mention other American colleagues whose writings led me to my formulation, a beginning core including Boesky, Chused, Jacobs, McLaughlin, and Poland, some but not all of whom might embrace an identity as “Loewaldian” (Boesky, for example, never mentions Loewald). I also quote Modell, and anyone who knows Loewald has read Arnold

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Cooper, who wrote the classic paper on Loewald. Fogel, also an ego psychologist, edited a collection on Loewald, and philosopher-analyst Lear oversaw the reissue of Loewald’s collected papers, as well as elaborating on Loewald in Love and Its Place in Nature (1990). Since my naming and describing an American independent tradition—for example, at a panel at the 2008 meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association, “Independent Traditions and Middle Groups”—I have found that colleagues from Loewald’s own institute, Western New England, when they give Loewald a second look, find an American independent psychoanalytic tradition congenial, just as colleagues from Pittsburgh recognize themselves as American independents through a special kinship with and descent from James McLaughlin. Indeed, my formulation and description of American independence—intersubjective ego psychology, neither ego psychological nor relational—has seemed, over the years, appealing to some ego psychologically trained American colleagues who seek a more congenial psychoanalytic identity but have not been swept away by North American psychoanalysts’ widespread attention to and incorporation of Italian and Latin American ways of being and working as an analyst, as previously they had flocked to the French (so psychoanalytic fashion shifts). Just as, among British independents, we find variation,4 so too we see a range of theoretical and clinical perspectives among American independents. Gabbard, I think, would see himself as an American independent (see, e.g., Gabbard 2007), but having spent much of his professional career in Topeka, he brings a more Kleinian, British object-relational, and Latin American flavor to his American intersubjective ego psychology (Ganzarain and Kernberg both spent time at the Menninger Foundation, and Sutherland was a regular visitor). Stephen Mitchell’s first papers were ego psychological, and he names Loewald as a theoretical forebear of relational psychoanalysis and a formative influence on his thought. The American independent tradition, then, is only a beginning formulation, promising to hold, just as the British independent tradition, a decentralized, overlapping spectrum in the approaches and self-identities of practitioners. Moreover, in contrast to Britain, where the psychoanalytic center and most practitioners are in London (Fairbairn was an exception), in the United States, with its many psychoanalytic communities, each locality has spawned analysts and teachers who, though not always widely known, have made their own influential, if local, individual mark. I point out earlier that of the two locales I know best, Elvin Semrad stands out among non-European names in Boston, as someone who influenced an entire generation of psychiatrist-psychoanalysts (all psychiatrists, actually). Semrad’s admonition, “Share, bear, and put in perspective,” is widely and frequently quoted. We find also that Helen Tartakoff, Elizabeth Zetzel, Robert Gardiner, and Leston Havens have made their mark. Of émigré women analysts, Grete Bibring is remembered and revered (the Boston Institute has published a charming compendium of her recipes and dinner party menus [D. Jacobs and Umansky 2015]), while Helene Deutsch and Beata Rank are barely mentioned. Among all these, only a few Europeans would have name recognition in other institutes.

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In San Francisco, by contrast, there were Norman Reider, Victor Calef, and Edward Weinshel, as well as Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson (Wallerstein became such an overridingly important international figure that we can forget his equal local prominence). Of European founders, Siegfried Bernfeld and Emanuel Windholz are still remembered, but Bernard Berliner, Anna Maenchen, and even Erikson hardly at all.5 In the consulting room, I have suggested, there is a fundamental contradiction between a presumption of unique individuality and theory-driven listening, yet both individual analysts and theories vary in their recognition of this fact. The British and American independent assumption of clinical individuality, I suggest, fosters uncertainty, along with waiting, as an attitudinal stance. In turn, uncertainty and waiting grow from and lead to curiosity. Earlier, I call curiosity an “undertheorized technical requisite” of analytic work, and notice that Friedman considers “endless curiosity” one of the “founding attitudes of psychoanalytic treatment” and that Poland claims, “the crucial and essential quality that shaped Freud’s contributions was . . . a powerful curiosity about meaning” (2011a, p. 109, in Poland 2017). For him, an “atmosphere of essential safety while addressing curiosity with unremitting honesty may be the most important quality an analyst’s attitude has to offer a patient in analysis” (Poland 2011c, p. 996). I describe McLaughlin’s claim that the analyst should guide the patient toward “how rather than what” and how, for him, “blind spots” and “hard spots” preclude curiosity in the analyst. For Parsons, curiosity is central to British independent technique. In this view, the analyst’s recognition (another concept from the intersubjective lexicon) of the patient, the patient’s being recognized, helps this patient’s selfrecognition and consolidation of self. Interpretation becomes directed toward helping to create and observe an unfolding, hoping to discover, through noticing with the patient, the tip of the patient’s unconscious iceberg, what might help to expand unconscious-preconscious linkages or make implicit meaning explicit. For Loewald, the analyst centers on the patient so that the patient can become a center to herself; holds an image of the patient’s future until the patient can make that future her own. Poland writes of the witnessing that alternates with interpretation: the analyst, finally, is separate from the patient and can sometimes only stand as witness. Curiosity, waiting, and uncertainty work toward preserving and respecting individuality. They feel less analyst-centered and less adversarial than some theorydriven approaches, as well as less likely to imply that the analyst knows more than the patient about what the patient feels, thinks, or is doing, intrapsychically or interactively to or with the analyst. They do not make the analyst as frontand-center than the patient, as do, in my observation, a variety of contemporary analytic approaches. If we assume intersubjectivity, two separate people in the room who create their relationship, then the analyst’s attention will be drawn to what is transpiring between patient and analyst because at that particular moment this seems the best route to helping the patient understand himself. Here, the analyst does not have a

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pretheoretical assumption that such a focus is necessarily more alive for the patient or that it is, a priori, a privileged technical choice to focus on “the” transference. What is going on at the moment for the patient? What of the past can be discovered now? What personal proto-stories have been sedimented and reified into being? What can we discover of the patient’s powers of feeling and powers of personal meaning? What I have called close-surface listening leads the analyst to remark less on what the patient doesn’t know he is doing or saying than on what he is doing or saying, until not-knowing becomes the surface activity of the moment (the patient, like the analyst, needs to be curious). By contrast, it has seemed to me that over the years, analytic case presentations and writings have moved away from the patient: first to what the patient is saying about or doing to the analyst; then to coconstruction, rupture, and impasse; and, more recently, to preferential attention to the analyst’s mind itself. In Poland’s formulation, by contrast, the analyst uses her mind “in the service of the other.” Colleagues may feel (not without cause) that I am too driven by these views. I am less likely to want to “bring the work into the transference” or to think that a treatment is more “alive” if we do so. Nor do I necessarily focus on what a patient might be doing to or with me, or to translate what is being said into a statement about me or us. For a Bionian field theorist or relational analyst, I may not pay enough attention to my own mind. I find I want to follow the patient to where his or her most felt, powerful emotional meanings seem to go, which is often beyond the dyad—to experiences with and feelings about others, or to the past (patients often come to me about mothers, a concern that must include the past and the other). The independent path, both American and British, follows the patient. The analyst may develop a particular idiom with each patient, an individualized way of interacting that seems to match what the patient, uniquely, brings, whether specific formulations or shorthands that describe ways of being, the use or non-use of a sense of humor, an emphasis on one or another of the senses, the extent to which the patient, and therefore the analyst, draws on metaphor or other funds of cultural or intellectual knowledge. Part of this idiom must include ranging fully into a patient’s developmental past and present. From Erikson (though also from Loewald), we learn that the expanding of individuality includes of necessity a sense of one’s life cycle, a developmental past lived both then and now, of time having unfolded and continuing to unfold over the stages of life, through, hopefully, to the ego integrity and inner resolution of termination (for Loewald, the internalization and owning of one’s parents). The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, and Toward an American Independent Tradition: Title and subtitle express my dual professional origins and hybrid psychoanalytic identity, and both call for a necessary mutual recognition between psychoanalysis and social science, as between the ego psychological and relationalinterpersonal-cultural traditions. I came to psychoanalysis out of a fascination with, a passion about, individuality. This for me was a necessary corrective to the

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sociocultural determinisms and lack of recognition of, theorizing about, or basic interest in individuality found in the social sciences. Yet from the beginning, I was also eager to find some place, in my clinical work and writing, in my listening to the work of others, and in psychoanalysis in general, for recognition of the fundamentally social and relational concomitants of psychic life and individual subjectivity. The question of a weltanschauung: Where do we find Civilization and Its Discontents, Erikson, and Loewaldian subjectivity and intersubjectivity? This book centers theoretically on the American independent tradition, intersubjective ego psychology, yet its introductory and concluding chapters return us to Freud’s sociological passions, to Erikson, and to the missing connections between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Psychoanalysis as a profession and psychoanalytic theory, I observe, suffer from not knowing or engaging the social sciences, just as the social sciences are fundamentally limited by a thin understanding of the individual and individuality. Sociology has entered into my experience of psychoanalysis as a profession and my observation of taken-for-granted features of psychoanalytic institutes and training. The following chapter notices the disconnection and difference in these from the norms and practices of professional education in the university, including arts and sciences, law, medicine, and business, indeed from all other institutions of professional higher education, and the seeming indifference, within psychoanalytic institutes, to these differences.6 Attention to culture and the social turns us from Loewald to Erikson. Erikson calls upon the analyst to try to live emotionally with a patient in his or her past and in particularized geographical and cultural locales, in a context that we might call, borrowing a formulation from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1983), local knowledge. Here and then, there and now. Local knowledge may be shared by patient and analyst, or it may not. When it is not, analysts, whatever their curiosity, vary in the extent to which they invite elaboration (or, perhaps, acknowledge so doing), about childhood community, neighborhood, schools, holidays, relatives, vacations, and perhaps in the extent to which they themselves engage in fantasies about these in the lives of their patients. Antonino Ferro’s early writings (e.g., 2002) were filled with local knowledge, with cultural-transitional space, and the patient in local context. His patients described cultural events, books, and ideas, and Ferro himself shared rich cultural-psychological associations with readers. I once encountered a patient while I was attending the opera—with my mother. After that encounter, the Queen of the Night, especially, but also other operatic references, entered my patient’s associations and our dialogue. Our chance mother-daughter and cultural meeting gave us an evocative language, a transformational symbol that, by having an independent existence in Mozart, provided a shared generative symbolic and psychological range. For another everyday countertransferential cultural, but also personal, example, I am sure that I listen to patients talking about music with an attuned ear and with my own musical associations in a way that I do not so readily picture patients’

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associations to art or myself associate to art and the visual during a clinical hour. As Nagel (2013) would put it, I have “music on my mind.” It is no accident that I proposed and chaired a panel called “Analytic Listening and the Five Senses” (Chodorow 2012a). I have found since that panel that I am even more attuned to (I do not “picture”) varied everyday sensual modalities in patients. I remember lyrics that a patient has passed over and may ask for elaboration. In a session with a classic focus-on-your-work businessman, such curiosity elicits “As Time Goes By” and “If I Had Wings, Like Noah’s Dove.” I wonder, silently or with a patient, about the details of various instruments. I may ask, “What composer did you play most recently?” or “Tell me exactly about your violin.” I then hear about a new bow, bowing, vibrato, or a particular piece of music. I notice that I have been curious (sometimes aloud) when someone says “I went to see music,” but that I do not notice “I went to hear music.” I do not tell patients, as I have told listeners to presentations (and now readers), that I love the mountains. Yet it is clear, I think, as skiing comes up with patients, that I am familiar with skiing and its strategies, along with differences between skiing in the East and the West. By contrast, with sailing, I am clueless. In a similar vein, I am certain that metaphors and associations to sports (“playing defense,” for example) arose, or were attended to, more frequently when my children were in school and active on sports teams, and I was spending time watching basketball, baseball, volleyball, and soccer. Erikson and Loewald, along with Milner and Winnicott, notice how life history and individuality expand out from primary relationships to transitional phenomena and culture. Local knowledge returns us to Freud. As I noted in “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (Chapter 3), Freud assumes that setting and context are relevant. We picture Anna O. trapped in her family, class, and, because she’s a girl, limited education; Emmy von R. managing her estate; Little Hans going off for summer vacation, or in his family’s apartment (and, thanks to Balsam [2017], sitting on his chamber pot, his girl cousins on theirs, as they chat about purses and sausages). We imagine young Dora on that fateful holiday with her family and the K.s. We know about the Rat Man’s nanny and army service, about sleeping arrangements and parental sex in the Wolf Man’s infancy, and the walnut trees on his family estate. These are people with full lives, not just minds in the consulting room. Freud’s case reports, saturated with observations about family, education, parenting, cultural and social surround, could as easily be read in courses on family, gender, and class in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as in psychoanalytic training. Reciprocally, we ourselves perhaps resist acknowledging the extent to which we are known in cultural and historical context, the extent to which we cannot be mainly a mind in relation to another mind. Freud’s office, like that of most European doctors of his generation, was in his home. In the United States, psychoanalytic communities vary (there has perhaps also been an historical shift) in the prevalence of home offices. With a home office (with any office, but it’s different), we notice how much is “given from without” in the transitional space of the treatment, how much

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we are taken beyond two separate yet interconnected minds, to neighborhood, class, culture, and taste. Occasionally, case reports describe humorous mishaps—a patient seeing children playing in the snow, contractors making noise, the family leaving as the patient arrives. But serious attention seems not to be paid to this actuality of cultural context and knowledge that invests the treatment, except perhaps with tragedy, when a clinician has died and a patient arrives at the door. When I first moved to the Boston area, I had, as I had never had before, a home office, and my kitchen was close to my consulting room. The smell of toast during one early morning hour was the focus of several sessions for one patient, and there were echoes for weeks and months. We looked at feelings about the smell of toast, the comfort it could bring, memories of who made toast for him and his sister and brothers and who didn’t, which extended to when he did and did not feel cared for growing up. We noticed feelings about being a parent or a visitor in another household: who makes the toast? Over several months, my patient described how his relationship to making breakfast changed. He noticed especially what it felt like to make toast and to watch his young daughter learn to butter her own toast. If each person’s unique self is embedded in her history, as Erikson told us, then powerful and meaningful moments will draw each participant in an analytic dyad, even as they are also interacting, into their own internal past and present, to their own deepest roots of conflict, affect, and fantasy. We find evocative descriptions of this resonant concordant countertransference, often to universal but also to particularized, developmental and family experiences, in the writings of American independents like Jacobs, McLaughlin, and Poland. In Faimberg, we find it as it reaches out to cultural and historical tragedy (perhaps also in Erikson’s claim about those “who were not allowed to join us in migration, the dead”). By contrast, an a priori preference for, attention to, or commenting on the immediate analytic interaction, projective identifications, and transference, or an intensive focal attention to the analyst’s mind, works against the major goals of the American (or British) independent traditions, goals directed toward the unfolding of the patient’s particularity and individuality, the expanding of her internal world, and the linkage of past and present into a larger, continuous whole. Here and then, there and now. Here or now, I will note in “Beyond the Dyad,” tracks affective immediacy and aliveness in the room. There or then preserves attention to the patient as a separate being, ensuring that analysis is about the patient’s unique history, inner life, self-understanding, and well-being. Here or now enhances witnessing and interpretation, analyst and patient in different roles, focused asymmetrically rather than symmetrically. Analyzing transference (as also, when it is called for, countertransference) is a means, not an end. To recapitulate, I have identified several provisional features of an American independent tradition. To begin, the founding American independents Erikson and Loewald, along with others I have mentioned and those who have later identified as American independent, tend to come from ego psychology. The imprint of these ego psychological origins is found throughout American independent theorizing and descriptions of clinical work. We find a one-person (American individualist?)

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flavor to their approach to patients, an assumption, brought vividly alive in case reports, that patients are individuals above all else. Second, American independents, like their British counterparts, though each is influenced by their analytic culture of origin, tend to listen to more than listen for, to be less single-theory or single-technique driven in their listening. A corollary to listening to is a willingness to be multitheoretical and technically creative. Both of these qualities may have helped generate the originary middleness of independent traditions, including the American independent tradition, as they draw from diverse, sometimes opposing, theoretical and clinical camps (as I claim earlier, every theory and theory of technique was developed by someone who thought it would help patients, and most theories help us understand some of our patients some of the time).7 Third, the American independent tradition holds that analysts, like their patients, are individuals who need to understand themselves and their ways of working, but this does not mean that they should make themselves, or the patient’s relationship with them, from whatever viewpoint—focused on transference and projective identification, attentive to mirroring or idealizing transferences, noticing coconstruction or rupture, focusing on the analyst’s mind, feelings, or dreaming— front and center in the analysis. Fourth, the American independent tradition, as it emerges especially from Erikson’s cultural and intersubjective ego psychology, represents long-standing American attention to culture in the psyche and the transferential and fantasy creation of identity. These roots facilitate attention to gender, including a cultural attention to sex-gender first found in Freud, and have led to the emergence, among both ego psychologists and relational analysts, of American feminist psychoanalysis. This Eriksonian rooting also presages and provides grounding for recent American attention to the psychic meanings of race, racism, and other psychosocial forms of identity and living in a sociocultural world. Loewald claims that the analyst is “co-actor on the analytic stage.” Such a formulation might seem to describe relational attention to co-construction, rupture and repair, the unconscious bipersonal patient-analyst field, or the view that it is always better to be working in the transference, whether in terms of projectionintrojection, the Kleinian belief that everything the patient says or does is about the analytic relationship and the analyst, or the analyst’s intensive focus on her countertransference. It might describe an intensive focus on the analyst’s mind and waking-dreaming. By contrast, I have suggested that it is possible to be co-actor without claiming center stage or being co-star, and that such claims are often at the expense of the patient. As I sometimes put it to beginning trainees, observing the transference (and countertransference) are ongoing necessities, but this does not always require telling the patient what you observe. The American independent tradition portrays the therapeutic action and goal of analysis as “two-person separate,” an intersubjective experience of two individuals who attend especially to one. Both concentrate on helping that one to understand herself as an individual, to mitigate destructive

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patterns, and to expand upon her range of experiencing. Further, the American independent tradition suggests that in order to pay full attention to individuality, psychoanalysis needs to attend to the social, the cultural, local knowledge, psyche and culture currently and in the past, so that these become more actively appropriated and integrated into the inner world, whether in the making of toast, playing an instrument, skiing, sports, or being born into a world at war. For good historical reasons, American individualism can have a bad name. Yet the American independent tradition, like the British, draws strength and identity from respect for the individual and individuality in developmental, historical, and cultural context. Loewald, Erikson, and those who came after; a setting of person and relationship in sociohistorical context; and a pragmatic wish to listen to and work differently with different people—all these help describe an American independent tradition. In turn, full recognition of individuality requires both psychoanalytic ear and sociological eye—an understanding of the sociology of the dyad and the social and professional beyond. Reciprocally, the study of individuality and the individual should be a field in academic life.

Notes 1 In retrospect, I see that my characterization of the American independent tradition as a hybrid that grew from ego psychology and interpersonal-cultural school psychoanalysis applies also to some psychoanalytic feminism (and probably to some socio-psychoanalytic approaches to race, ethnicity, and so forth). In the work of ego psychologically trained medical analysts like Almond, Balsam, Nadelson, Notman, and Person, psychoanalytic feminism reflects a cultural (because feminist) ego psychology along with attention to development and the body. Such an approach echoes Erikson's child analytic attention to the body and Horney’s and Thompson’s descriptions of how cultural factors have shaped female and male psychology and psychoanalytic theories about both. Nonmedical analysts like Harris, Dimen, Goldner, Benjamin, and myself began from development more generally and came, each in her own way, to notice the intrapsychic body and sexuality. 2 In “An Independent Theory of Clinical Technique” (2009), Parsons suggests that he recognizes some commonality with a “Loewaldian” American independent tradition. He would include as American independents Thomas Ogden and Harold Searles. In a similar vein, I claim in The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Chodorow 2016) that Ogden and Roy Schafer are American independents just by being who they are. 3 We notice a contrast here with British independent views of countertransference. Bollas (1987) and Parsons (2014), for example, seem to be influenced by Kleinian assumptions that accord attention to the direct impact on the analyst of what the patient brings, and they intuitively draw on what a Kleinian would call projective identification. Bollas’s “unthought known” is discovered (he references Heimann) through the analyst’s countertransference. 4 Some are more object relational, like Fairbairn (whose diagram of endopsychic structure portrays a Freudian ego psychology with each part of the ego in relation to a coordinate Kleinian object). Some, via Michael Balint, are more Ferenczian. Some, like Milner, Little, Winnicott, Enid Balint, and Coltart, and in a later generation Bollas and Parsons, seem to emphasize innate creation of self and transitional phenomena. I am not sure about calling Fairbairn an independent, though he was certainly a founder of object relations theory and part of the British middle group. You do not, from reading Fairbairn, or Guntrip on his analyses with Winnicott and Fairbairn, sense a different way of being with the patient, of the analyst’s activity or role, or a different theory of therapeutic action.

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5 Erikson was also a founding member of the Western New England Institute, and Loewald arrived there shortly after. Thus, Western New England can be seen as an early home of the American independent tradition. Coming from academia when I did research on early women psychoanalysts, I chose interviewees on the basis of publication records.Through that research I learned that in psychoanalysis one’s local role, especially as a training and supervising analyst, was a much more accurate indicator of prominence and influence than writing or academic appointment. 6 I am grateful for a recent (2018) conversation with Michael Parsons, who also pointed me to a chapter to which I allude earlier, his “Forming an Identity: Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training” (2014). My criticism does not apply to training within the British Society, which recognizes the tension between institutional responsibility and analysis but also the necessity for the training analyst to participate as a member of the training faculty in the candidate’s training and progression. Becoming a training analyst in the British Society includes participation in a seminar that addresses these sometimes contradictory clinical and institutional-didactic identities, which exist in tension. I was also pleased (but not surprised) to find that in his chapter Parsons draws on Erikson. 7 It is impossible to keep abreast of everything being published, especially while one is writing, but I want to cite here Steven Cooper’s recent article (2017), “The Analyst’s ‘Use’ of Theory or Theories.” Cooper suggests that Strachey’s concept of the point of affective urgency can be usefully applied to “several different surfaces.” He goes on: “In this approach, a point of urgency may refer to the patient’s current affective states or to internalized object experiences that the patient returns to repeatedly in unconscious communications. Sometimes the analyst experiences the patient’s affective urgency through the patient’s projections and projective identification . . . I try to find what might be unconsciously operating, slightly outside the patient’s awareness, in taking up these nodal affective expressions.We work with affective urgency across temporal zones: present experience with objects in the patient’s life, here-and-now experiences with the analyst, and internalized experiences with earlier objects . . .” (p. 861). Cooper writes that “the use of different theories expands the metaphorical language with which I try to make contact with my patient’s unconscious life” (p. 862). Echoing my claim in Chapter 8 that if the analyst “has no theory at all, she is clueless and cannot help,” Cooper says,“Without theory, the analyst is indeed in a desultory, unsettled state” (p. 862). Employing a local knowledge metaphor, he writes of “the ‘best fit’ path” (p. 862).

12 BEYOND THE DYAD Individual psychology, social world

This dependence of the dyad upon its two individual members causes the thought of its existence to be accompanied by the thought of its termination . . . It makes the dyad into a group that feels itself both endangered and irreplaceable, and thus into the real locus not only of authentic sociological tragedy, but also of sentimentalism and elegiac problems. Georg Simmel

In recent years analytic writing, presenting, and clinical discussion almost universally accord attention to the analytic dyad. My reflections here propose two kinds of reservation about this ubiquitous focus. On the one hand, it leads us away from the richness and complexity of the patient’s intrapsychic life—her clinical individuality—which psychoanalysis alone among the therapies works to expand. On the other hand, we err in thinking that the dyad is isolated, when in fact it is always situated beyond itself. Our lack of attention to the sociality and social context of the dyad has been costly. My subject brings together my identity and personal passions as a psychoanalyst and my origins in sociology. We can trace the history of this global march toward the dyad. First, our understanding of therapeutic action changed. Freud had discovered transference and argued that it was inevitable and indeed a resource. Remembering requires repeating, and you cannot destroy someone in effigy (Freud 1912a, 1914b). Over time, anchored by Strachey (1934), analysts extended Freud to think that unless you were analyzing the transference in the here and now, real change could not happen. Working in the transference became a sine qua non of analytic action and the real work of analysis. This view attended to the patient’s mind alone. In the world of classical ego psychology, in which many American psychoanalysts grew up, clinical theory and

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the theory of technique taught that the analyst was an objective interpreter of the patient’s psyche, through reconstruction, dream interpretation, pointing to conflict, resistances, and defenses, and especially through observing and interpreting the transference, which the patient brought from the there and then to the here and now. Attending to the transference and to the patient’s mind came together, as interpreting resistance to the transference and transference resistance were central to analytic work. Such precepts had special force in the U.S., where émigré analysts worked to preserve Freud’s legacy against the interpersonal school. In other settings, various one-person approaches to the transference were taught. In Kleinian England, for instance, the analyst was an observer interpreting defensive and projective manifestations of an internal fantasy world. Here the object relations-independent tradition made room for the analyst’s presence. These and other approaches centered on the interpretation of transference, but this did not mean that the analyst’s person was involved, except as an observer noting its expression in the patient’s psyche. Over time, such views were challenged, and our epistemology changed. Analysts attended to their own participation in the analytic encounter, and countertransference, from being considered an obstacle, became a resource for investigation and understanding, to be attended to and recognized as present at every moment. In the United States, Loewald was an early and articulate ego psychological spokesman for the analyst’s place in the analytic encounter. The analyst, he wrote, is “co-actor on the analytic stage,” not a “reflecting mirror . . . characterized by scrupulous neutrality” (1960, p. 223). Later he argued that “the scientific fiction . . . of a field of study to which we are in the relation of extraneous observers cannot be maintained in psychoanalysis. We become part and participant of and in the field as soon as we are present in our role as analysts” (1970, p. 278). Yet, at the same time, Loewald stresses the separateness and asymmetry, while in relationship, of analyst and analysand—their “considerable degree of internal psychic organization and relative autonomy in respect to the other,” along with “their being relatively open systems, and open to each other” (1970, p. 278). Contemporaneously in Latin America, Madeleine and Willy Baranger articulated a Kleinian-Bionian approach that conceptualized a “bipersonal field” created by the patient’s and analyst’s unconscious fantasies together. In contrast to Loewald, and more like relational analysts, the Barangers were explicit about co-construction in what they call the analytic couple: “the analytic situation . . . is something created between the two, within the unit that they form in the moment of the session, something radically different from what each of them is separately” (Baranger and Baranger 1961–1962, p. 806).1 Meanwhile, British independent analysts drew on Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena to characterize an analytic space that operated in the realm of two-person illusion, which Ogden (1994) would call the analytic third. Across the analytic world, a focus on the dyad became intertwined with attention to the analyst—the analyst’s activity, mind, personhood, and subjectivity,

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which are always present in the analytic encounter. British and American independents and Italian Bionians attended to feelings, images, and experiences that float to the surface of the analyst’s mind, enabling her to get some purchase on what the patient is transmitting unconsciously, at the same time modeling listening to the self.2 Kleinians and Kleinian Bionians held that the patient’s projective identifications put disavowed feelings and thoughts into the analyst, who could, by observing these foreign entities, know more about the patient and share this knowledge with him. Relational analysts, self psychologists, and ego psychologists who endorsed the analyst’s subjectivity or who put enactment or the co-creation of the analytic situation front and center, all these had theoretically based assumptions, confirmed, in their view, by their clinical experience, holding that the truest and most alive expressions of the patient’s inner life could be best observed and discussed in terms of the relationship and the patient’s thoughts and feelings about the analyst in the consulting room. Today these developments are taken for granted, as dyadic portrayals of analysis range between the poles of unconscious communication on the one side and interaction on the other. Jacobs (1997) suggests that the consulting room contains “two minds, two hearts, two life histories in dynamic interaction . . . unconscious communications transmitted from both participants” (p. 1034). Gabbard describes analysis as “two people thinking what either alone cannot think . . . to some extent, analyst and analysand lose themselves as separate individuals” (2009, pp. 581, 587). Harris says “interpretation is always a site of action . . . We are never outside transference, never outside relational matrices of many interlocking types” (2009, p. 17). You would think that as a social scientist as well as an analyst, I would welcome these changes. First, they portray accurately the psychoanalytic situation. There are, after all, two people in the room. It is the case that the analyst is present as a person as he analyzes the patient, and that a dyad is more than two monads. This is a social view. The old view, that the patient’s psyche was lived separately and could be analyzed as an entity in its own right, is incompatible with our knowledge that people form themselves and are formed through conscious and unconscious interaction. Second, the methodologies that have been congenial to me—those of ethnography and qualitative and interpretive sociology—stress the role, presence, and impact of the observer and the reflexive influence of observational interaction on what is thought to be observed. Like the engaged analyst, the researcher in these fields is not conceptualized as a natural scientist studying objects, a scribe, a blank slate, or a tape recorder. Third, and this is important, my own writing could be the subject of my remarks. Well before mainstream American psychoanalysis moved beyond classical ego psychology, I argued against a view of the psyche as created mainly from within through innately unfolding drive organizations and ego-structural development. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I drew on British object relations theory to describe connections between the intrapsychic world and self-other relations

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and to claim that subjectivity requires relation to and recognition of the other, originally the mother, as a subject (Chodorow 1978, 1979, 1986a). As I then put it, separateness is defined relationally; differentiation occurs in relationship: ‘I’ am ‘not-you’ . . . adequate separation, or differentiation, involves not merely perceiving the separateness, or otherness, of the other. It involves perceiving the person’s subjectivity and selfhood as well . . . true differentiation, true separateness . . . must . . . involve two selves, two presences, two subjects . . . adequate separation-individuation, or differentiation, involves not simply perceiving the otherness of the other, but her or his selfhood/subjectivity as well. (1979, pp. 102, 104) Not yet a clinician, I was on board with a two-person model, and I may even have helped to create it. For all these reasons, I would welcome the developments I describe. What, then, are my hesitations? As I elaborate them, I hope we keep in mind all the good reasons for our attention to the analytic dyad, the intersubjective contexts of internal life, and the analyst’s subjectivity. Partly, the context changed. Unlike the situation in the 1970s and 1980s, when one-person views were dominant, psychoanalysts no longer needed to be convinced of their own presence in the consulting room. Partly, I had become an analyst myself, with on-the-ground knowledge of the complexity of individuality and mind. Psychoanalysis, alone among all modes of therapy and thought, is based on a premise and valorization of internal life—our patients, in Poland’s words, as “unique other[s]” (1996, p. 6). Psychoanalysis is the only field to have developed a method for the investigation, deepening, and expansion of this internal individuality. Unless you have spent a good part of your life in the academy—in the world of social science, where all psychic life is thought to be created in and through the social, or in the humanities, where there is often not even a self, but only a subject created discursively through power—you may take for granted psychoanalytic understandings of inner life. You assume the potency and insistence of the drives, the role of the past in shaping the present, the ubiquity of intrapsychic conflict and resistance to self-awareness, the intractable forces of envy, guilt, and shame, and the power of our inner world to endow experience with personal meaning and to enable dreaming and creativity. Psychoanalysis is the only field to have developed a method for the investigation, deepening, and expansion of internal individuality.3 Our job, as I see it, is to help our patients discover and understand this internal life and to live it more fully, with less inhibition, conflict, and self-undermining. We use ourselves in so doing, but I do not want to substitute, for this goal that we have for our patients, a focus on the relationship. Indeed, some who advocate selfanalysis, self-observation, and attending to interactional processes assume that such processes go on silently, addressed to apprehending, through noticing unconscious resonances, the patient’s internal world. Too often, however, permission to use the

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self seems to have led away from the psychology of the patient and toward a focus on the dyadic process or on the analyst himself. One of my patients was startled and uncomprehending when I used, in passing, words drawn from my everyday vocabulary, but not, as it turned out, from hers. Inner life. She was, as she put it, “stymied” by the phrase. I might just as well have said “disavowed and encapsulated combined parental introjects,” for all she knew what I was talking about. But we could then watch, over the next weeks and months, as she became, almost, an ethnographer of the mind, and of her own mind. She was amazed when she drifted off for three seconds into a dream while in my waiting room. She observed that others, as she put it, sometimes “take that little step” of noticing and remarking on someone else’s feelings, saying things like “You must be unhappy about that.” Her own mode was to squelch any thoughts about something that she, or the person she was talking to, couldn’t do anything about. Thoughts were judged as bad or good; they required immediate action or immediate sharing. Thoughts did not just occur. Such an experience reminds us of what we, as analysts, take for granted. People have inner experience, inner lives that go beyond what comes from two people together. My patient observed that attending to thoughts that were not about her day, or her to-do list, was for her like thinking, as she walked, “Okay, first the left foot goes forward, now the right.” This was how difficult and tangled the smallest spontaneous thought was for her. In this context, I reconsidered my scornful reaction to what I had previously thought one of the silliest sociology articles ever written, “Notes on the Art of Walking” (Ryave and Schenkein 1974). This article observes that you do not walk on the tops of cars, through people holding hands, or down the middle of the street. These now absolutely obvious, taken-for-granted processes had originally to be learned. Feelings, meanwhile, were even less accessible to my patient. Over the years, she and I continued to notice not only inner prohibitions on feelings that she thought she shouldn’t have but also what Schachtel (1947) calls the “starvation” that precedes repression, when the child is kept from having feelings in the first place. Similarly, my patient could not name feelings beyond “happy,” which was good, and “angry” or “sad,” which were bad. She was shocked when I used the word “anxious” and had managed to know the word “angry” but not “resentful.” Loewald (1960) describes the analyst’s role as that of helping the patient become a “centered unit by being centered upon” (p. 230). My patient came to refer to what she called “this ‘I’ business.” Our attention to what goes on between two people in the consulting room has, I fear, confused the means with the end, our method of inquiry—of necessity a two-person venture, because what are we, if not persons?—with our goals. We want to help our patients overcome conflicts and internal impoverishment, through self-observation, self-understanding, and new experience with an other, the analyst, but we are helping people who are individuals with separate lives and internal worlds, ideally now freer and more enriched through their work with us. I might tell a patient that we don’t know—that I, particularly, cannot

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know—what his unconscious thoughts are, but maybe we can notice, drawing on his associations (along with my mindfulness about patterns of fantasy and thought that I have seen to hang together in others, and my use of theory, technique, and my own feelings and associations), what is creeping into consciousness, hovering in the wings. Development, both in childhood and in analysis, happens in and through relationship, but in our current analytic world it seems that we have forgotten the asymmetry in both of these arenas. We employ metaphors like the mother-child realm of illusion or transitional realm, but we pass over the fact that the mother in this originary experience lives in two worlds, in the transitional world of illusion and in the world that observes and thoughtfully creates, with conscious and unconscious intention, her participation. We draw on ideas of maternal reverie, or theorize the mother’s processing infantile beta into alpha elements, without noticing the mother’s self-observation and her location outside of reverie as well as within it.4 As we made the analytic dyad a prominent focus of our attention and recognized the analyst’s ubiquitous participation and subjectivity, did we sometimes make the analyst’s mind and activity, as well as the analyst’s role in the patient’s mind, the more continuously and actively engaged focus of our work? Did these become as important, perhaps more important, than the minds of our patients themselves? A few years ago I found myself at a clinical workshop in which one colleague presented material to analysts from different analytic locations. Rather late in the day, one of the panelists said, as another was focusing on a patient’s fantasies, “The patient! The patient! What about the analyst?” You have perhaps read an article by Steiner (2008), “Transference to the Analyst as an Excluded Observer.” This article is ambiguous, implying simultaneously that it is universally a difficulty for an analysis when the analyst is not the patient’s primary object, that it is a countertransference difficulty for the analyst, who has to manage and struggle with intolerable feelings of narcissistic injury, and that it is a problem for the patient. As to this last, however, Steiner is less clear about why. The reader’s puzzlement about the patient increases, because Steiner reports the analyst’s feelings and actions in the first person, whereas he renders the patient’s feelings and actions in more generalized descriptions, often in the passive voice, of the mood of the session. We need to notice, I think, when our theories of therapeutic action and technique lead us to treat as problematic a panelist, or a patient, who does not make the analyst the center of analytic attention. We pay attention these days to what the patient is doing to the analyst, to how whatever the patient is saying refers directly or metaphorically to his observation of the analyst and the analysis, to how every moment in the analysis is co-created by analyst and patient or is a continuous, recursive process of enactments involving both. And we imply that the therapeutic action of analysis, and therefore the focus of analytic activity, comes from keeping these processes in the forefront of both the analyst’s and the patient’s attention. Betty Joseph (1975) worries that analysis with some patients can become too intellectual—two

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analysts talking about someone who is the patient. My worry is the converse, that in the present period, analysis threatens to become two people—two patients? two analysts?—talking about the analyst.5 Along with an increased focus on the analyst, these portrayals of therapeutic action inevitably involve a decreased focus on the patient’s mind, as, in Loewald’s formulation, a “universe in its own right.” When the analyst always brings herself into the hour and focuses persistently on the dyadic relationship, it is harder to imagine silences, observation of nonverbal communication, or room for waking dreaming.6 How, we might wonder, can the patient come to develop an internal dialogue with herself, or a registering of experience that does not primarily involve words? How can she come to be in touch with the psychosexual, the physical body, all the senses, that Freud made so central?7 Advocates argue, correctly, that our emphasis on the analyst, the analyst’s activity, and the irreducible subjectivity of the analyst is merely empirical. We are, after all, working in a dyad. The analyst is inevitably an equal participant with the patient. We have only ourselves to employ in order to understand our patients, and what we see and hear of them is filtered through interaction and our own sensory and verbal capacities. In writing, presenting, and teaching, we have no choice but to take the analyst’s point of view. This is the unavoidable perspective from which we work and write. I am criticizing an unavoidable epistemological conundrum, since the analyst cannot be “a reflecting mirror characterized by scrupulous neutrality.” I suggest, however, that we now insist too forcefully that an accurately reflecting mirror has always to include the analyst. Perhaps, as we came enthusiastically to acknowledge a point made by Sullivan (1953) over sixty years ago—that the analyst is a participant as well as an observer—we are now in danger of forgetting that a participant observer remains an observer as well.8 I have often thought that, insofar as we observe the transferential enlivening of experience through unconscious fantasies and meanings, we might be wise to float with our patients in the here and then or the there and now, where they can come to sense an internal and external world and history of their own. I am advocating listening, observing, waiting, witnessing, and unconscious tuning as deserving of equal or perhaps more importance in the analytic attitude and the analyst’s action than interpreting, showing, noticing, and pointing out.9 For some time, I have thought about the tendencies I am describing, in which both analyst and patient focus on the analytic dyad and the analyst’s role in the patient’s mind, as the problem of the Runaway Bunny’s mother.10 The Runaway Bunny is a separation-individuation story by Margaret Wise Brown (1942), who later wrote Goodnight Moon (1947). A little bunny wants to run away, but his mother tells him that she will run after him: he is her little bunny. Does she love him and want to protect him, or is she so intrusive that he will never be allowed to develop a separate self? He imagines escape scenarios, but she is always there in his tracks. “If you run after me,” he says, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.” She says, “If you become a fish in a trout

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stream,. . . I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.” He says, “If you become a fisherman . . . I will become a rock on the mountain, high above you.” “If you become a rock on the mountain . . . I will be a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are.” He will become a bird, she a tree on which he will alight, he a sailboat, she the wind. And so on. He gives up: “Shucks, I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.” Have we forgotten the Goodnight Moon part of the psyche—the internal, perhaps dreamy or nightmarish, primary process world that endows objects and the surround with unconscious meaning, that has conflict or fear about change and about being left alone with itself, as in sleep? This internal world enables transferences that go between unconscious and preconscious rather than from self to other. Unlike The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon only hints at the presence of the other: “a quiet old lady who was whispering ‘Hush.’”11 In this chapter, I reach toward individual psychology, toward our patients’ intrapsychic lives as the privileged focus of our work and our thinking, inside and outside the consulting room. The analyst’s psyche is certainly just like the patient’s, a personal subjectivity with inevitable and ubiquitous transferences to the patient and to the work, and the analyst uses her psyche to guide her understanding. But she has a different role, and her reactions should neither be privileged in her own mind nor made the center of her thinking and action. Loewald tells us that analyst and patient are “co-actor[s] on the psychoanalytic stage,” but this does not mean (as I put it elsewhere) that the analyst should steal the show. The phrase “beyond the dyad” takes us not only toward the individual but also toward the social. In what follows, I focus on two aspects of the sociality of the analytic dyad: first, its actual social constitution and, second, some of the dangers in our current conceptualization (which, recursively, is itself a social phenomenon). My thinking is inspired by psychoanalytic sociology, ethnomethodology, and sociological phenomenology—the sociologist Alfred Schutz drawing from Husserl to ask, What is the constitutive phenomenology of everyday life, “the world known in common and taken for granted” (quoted in Garfinkel 1967, p. 37).12 Ethnomethodology investigates the unstated assumptions, the tacit presuppositions, that participants hold at every moment in particular settings and that enable these settings to go on being. If these assumptions were articulated, the activity would be impossible to accomplish: the art of walking, for example, or, when you are in a conversation, taking turns speaking. You acknowledge tacit assumptions about these practices occasionally, as when you say, “Hey, look where you’re going!” or “You interrupted me!” Even though it is not mentioned in the written rules, you do not throw all the checkers or chess pieces on the floor and reassemble them before making your move. When your child does, she might well say, “But the rules don’t say you can’t!” Garfinkel, who coined the term ethnomethodology, suggests that if we can observe participants as they comment on and produce their participation, we can infer what they assume and from that what the constitutive features of settings are.13 As analysis makes the unconscious conscious, so ethnomethodology makes the implicit explicit.14

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My suggestion here is that our current emphasis on the dyad, rather than simply reflecting empirical reality more accurately, is itself part of a set of practices and tacit assumptions that go beyond and produce that reality. Our discussions with one another, our writings, and, as far as we can infer, we in our consulting rooms, all assume that the analytic dyad exists as a thing apart. There is a self-contained unit whose private, unique interaction produces and constitutes the analytic process. Fantasies, wishes, and theory, along with the physical privacy of the consulting room, come together to lead us to this assumption, which is further supported (and created) by the experiences and writings I have described. These experiences and writings suggest that the analyst is just as present, just as active, as the patient, and is not a passive instrument of objective listening and interpretation.15 Various conceptualizations of the analytic process reflect this image of a selfcontained dyad in the room, exemplifying both a global trend and putting each analyst into a particular geographic and institutional world of colleagues, theory, and assumptions about what the analyst does. We think of transference as a total situation and of analytic interaction as a continual process of enactment, or a setting in which all talk and action are co-created by relationally intertwined participants. Analysis might be a transference-countertransference matrix, a bipersonal field, a meeting of two unconscious minds, or a place where everything that goes on between patient and analyst, the analytic couple, forms an encapsulated and selfcontained analytic third. Analysis is conceptualized as reverie and waking-dreaming within each participant or as the analyst listening to himself in a way that fosters the patient’s observing and listening. This specific sociality of the dyad begins in training, where the training analysis is not simply a matter of two individuals, analyst and candidate, but a process developing in a local or national context of assumptions about how an analysis should be conducted. Preparing for a clinical workshop that I was to chair, which in 2009 featured Paul Denis of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, I read in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis an invited commentary that Denis (2004) wrote in response to a clinical hour described by the London analyst Peter Fonagy. Noticing, it would seem, the British taken-for-granted, perhaps originally Kleinian, approach that continually responds, queries, and interprets, Denis noted that Fonagy gave his patient more interpretations in a single hour than he, Denis, had received from his training analyst in over ten years. When I began training in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I had certainly read as much in the analytic literature as my fellow candidates, and probably more. But I had not read, did not know that I should have memorized, Kubie’s “Say You’re Sorry” (1955), Weiss’s “Crying at the Happy Ending” (1952), and, especially, Bernfeld’s “The Facts of Observation in Psychoanalysis” (1941). That was San Francisco in the 1980s.16 I am now in Boston, where all psychiatrists of a particular extended generation, analyst and nonanalyst alike, remember and quote Elvin Semrad. Semrad is with them in the consulting room, beyond the dyad. Freud once told us that there are at least six people in the bedroom. Similarly, the analyst, like the patient, brings professional and personal presences into his office.

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Yet we minimize the centrality of this basic way in which, at every moment of the here and now, we listen, intervene, hear, and observe the most minute analytic events through preconscious filters that locate us simultaneously in the there and then of our professional location and training.17 Our professional meetings provide some of the best evidence for our awareness of the always present social character of the analytic dyad. Our panels are implicitly comparative, featuring analysts from different locations who look at the “same” clinical material or who present clinical material about the “same” phenomena—dreams, impasses, countertransference enactments, the analyst’s use of developmental thinking. We assume, that is, that the analyst is not only not the center of the analytic dyad, but that he is also a participant in an analytic community, the product of a particular, local, or national analytic culture that influences his work. I have been looking at empirical reality. It simply is the case that the analytic dyad, including the analyst’s and the patient’s observations and interpretations of the unconscious, is constituted socially, even as it consists of two individuals. Now I turn from the actual to the necessary. This very social constitution, insofar as the analyst keeps it in mind, protects the dyad and the individuals—particularly the patient—within it. I suggest that we have ignored this fact to our detriment. Within sociology, the dyad is as understudied as the individual. But Georg Simmel, a contemporary of Freud who wanted to build a picture of society outward from the individual, and Philip Slater, a mid-twentieth century sociologist interested in the psychoanalysis-sociology nexus, address dyads directly. Their formulations apply to many features of the analytic dyad and to potential problems intrinsic to a too exclusive focus on it. They illuminate as well areas of crisis and rupture that we as a profession address. Simmel (1908) reminds us of the ab initio sociality of the dyad (in German, a “union of two”). In a description with remarkable applicability to the psychoanalytic dyad, he notes several characteristics that make the dyad potentially anxious, vulnerable, self-protective, and defensive. Foundational to the dyad is that variation neither in the individuality of the participants nor in their motives alters the dyad’s basic structural form and function (in the psychoanalytic case, the analytic frame). Dyads involve a “mixture of ingredients,” some that its members “contribute to it alone . . . and [others] that are not characteristic of it exclusively” (p. 126), yet both members tend to be pulled toward features that they see as exclusive and to resist seeing themselves in a super-dyadic context. The dyad prefers that “its whole affective structure is based on what each of the two participants gives or shows only to the one or other person and to nobody else” (p. 126). As part of this effort, dyads foster secrets that tie them together and that those not in the dyad do not know. As a result, dyads are fragile, as each member is aware that “the secession of either would destroy the whole” (p. 123). To protect themselves, they promote “exclusive dependency . . . and hopelessness that cohesion might come from anywhere but immediate interaction” (p. 136). Finally, according to Simmel, both members of a dyad know that built into the dyad’s formation is the certainty of its eventual “termination” (this, at least in Wolff’s

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translation, is Simmel’s word). This knowledge of future termination colors the life and imagination of each participant and of the two together. Because the dyad depends on each member and needs both, dyads often feel “both endangered and irreplaceable,” making them, says Simmel, “into the real locus not only of . . . sociological tragedy, but also of sentimentalism and elegiac problems” (pp. 123–124). In a Loewaldian vein (we think of “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego”), Simmel adds, “this feeling tone appears whenever the end of the union has become an organic part of its structure” (p. 124). As a “union of two,” the members of the dyad together define and agree upon reality, thus creating their own exclusive world. They want to “see only one another, and do not see, at the same time, an objective, super-individual structure which they feel exists and operates on its own” (p. 127). Imagining or acknowledging a third element of this sort “interferes with the most intimate nature of the dyad” (p. 127). In the analytic dyad, such objective, supraindividual elements that might be ignored include, for example, all the features of analytic practice, analytic institutions, and the analytic community that are part of the knowledge and identity of both participants, but that both might ignore, plus each participant’s own history and relational world. Dyads may protect themselves against the threat of dilution or intrusion by what Simmel calls triviality—in the case of analysis, perhaps, mutually recognized and repeated interactional or transference-countertransference patterns, shared metaphors and formulations, and the like. Dyads employ and overvalue such exclusive, self-defining practices and relational patterns, yet the very fact of repeating them, in order to establish the dyad’s specialness, trivializes them. The dyad’s need to maintain specialness and to defend against seeing itself as part of a larger unit “frequently becomes desperate and fatal” (p. 125). The psychoanalytic sociologist Philip Slater follows Simmel in pointing to the dyad’s inbuilt tendency to be a world unto itself. In his classic and original contribution, “On Social Regression” (1963), Slater notices that Freud, as he turns to aggression midway through Civilization and Its Discontents, leaves behind the social threats posed by libido and the dyad. Drawing from the first half of this work, as well as from “On Narcissism” and other Freudian writings, Slater suggests that libidinal contraction, with both narcissistic and object-libidinal components, more specifically than pleasure and the turn from reality, constitutes libido’s social threat. Psychological tension-points in social life occur especially when libidinal contraction, a pull away from what Freud (1933a) called “ever greater unities” (p. 107), threatens the libidinal diffusion required for social continuity. The dyad, with its satisfying cathectic intensity, along with its inbuilt tendency to want to be a world unto itself, is particularly threatening. The dangers of dyads lie in dyadic withdrawal, a potential antisocial narcissism of two. This narcissism, according to Slater (and Simmel), arises from several sources. These include gratification from mutual admiration of self, other, and the couple; the setting of private rules that apply to the two alone; lack of regard for the outside world and its institutions and rules; and an exclusivity and mutual

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gratification that come from emotional, intellectual, or sexual bonding. The dyad has no internal incentive to dissolve itself. Finally, Slater notes, just as we are attracted to narcissistic leaders who may threaten society but seem impervious to guilt and shame (Slater alludes here to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), so also we are attracted to, though threatened by, the mutual involvement of dyads. He points out that most of the great lovers in literature and culture are guilty of enormous social and family disloyalty, are attractive to us for just this reason, and yet, by story’s end, are often destroyed. Slater closes his essay with a reading of Thomas Mann’s “The Blood of the Walsungs.” In Mann’s story, the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde return home in their family coach from seeing Die Walküre. Die Walküre, Slater notices that Mann notices, centers on disasters of dyadic and individual narcissism. In this opera, the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, instigated by their father, the god Wotan, who has fathered them with a mortal, consummate their sexual passion, produce a child, and thereby bring down the realm of the gods. After the opera, settled into velvet, cushions, and satin in their carriage and enveloped in exclusive dyadic self-involvement, Siegmund and Sieglinde, named for Wagner’s twins, engage in a rapturous incestuous sexual encounter.18 Simmel and Slater, when they write about dyads and point to the dangers of narcissistic withdrawal and private rule-setting, are considering dyads composed of equals. But the analytic dyad, though both members are fully participant, complex human beings, is fundamentally asymmetrical and unequal. Yet our recent conceptualizations of this dyad often do not notice—and only occasionally allude to—these fundamental asymmetries, of dependence, of knowledge, of authority, of self-revelation vs. restraint, of the capacity to set or break the rules. Ironically, these are the very hierarchical inequalities between patient and analyst that many who advocated a focus on the dyadic relationship and interaction, or recognition of the analyst’s participant subjectivity, meant to address. Moreover, while the patient brings himself to only this one meeting of conscious and unconscious minds, this one interaction, the analyst, promiscuous, brings herself to several such relationships. The dyad is exclusive for the patient in a way that it is not for the analyst. When I notice us paying so much attention to interaction in the analytic dyad, I think of Simmel’s description of dyadic secrets, of the setting of private rules and communication, of compelled exclusivity and the potential desperation of dyadic self-maintenance, I think of Slater’s suggestion that when the dyad breaks down, it regresses toward narcissism—the narcissism of both participants together and of each as individuals in a self-enclosed world. When I read accounts that focus on the analyst’s subjectivity as much as on that of the patient, or that advocate that the analysis be conducted as exclusively as possible in the here and now, as if the patient’s internal life and life outside, lives apart from the analyst, are less important, I am reminded of Slater’s descriptions of the attractions of the narcissistic leader who sets his own rules and of the social and individual threat, and seductive appeal, of dyadic withdrawal. The analytic setting of necessity requires two individuals, but the dyad’s

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intrinsic vulnerabilities could be mitigated through our recognition of the social setting, the location in practice and profession, of the analytic dyad on the one side, and of the internal life and history of the patient on the other. Freud (1933b) reminds us that we learn of the crystal’s structure when it shatters. Spending much of my life in the Bay Area, I think also of those tectonic faults that we discover from earthquakes. I conclude by reminding us of two lines of professional fracture, one that has been polarizing but in some aspects is taken for granted, the other consensually seen as problematic. These lines of fracture, I suggest, reflect among other sources difficulties arising from our assumptions that privilege the analytic dyad over and against, on the one hand, our patients as separate others and, on the other, our recognition that the analytic dyad itself, and we as practitioners, are located in an analytic world. It is hardly a surprising coincidence that our increasing attention to the analytic dyad has accompanied an increased attention (a welcome addition to our earlier exclusive focus on the oedipal triad) to the preoedipal mother-infant dyad and its developmental significance. But Freud also reminds us of the oedipal father’s necessary intrusion into and containment of this dyad (his reminder was extended by Lacan), an observation we seem to have forgotten. Such a reminder might be useful in the two contexts to which I now turn. I begin with a fault line in the training analysis system and, I will suggest, in our training arrangements more generally. I suggest that some of our tensions, contention, and inability to put things to rest in these matters have to do with our overreaching conceptions of the analytic dyad, and that some of the passion and anger in our debates comes from our tacit recognition that the arrangements in our current system are contradictory. We are arguing in displacement. I would note a feature of our training system that applies to all alternatives currently on the table, national or local, that retain some institutional oversight (reporting number of hours, for example, or having to choose among those with training analyst or certification status). My account of the instabilities and dangers of dyads at the same time suggests the wisdom and desirability of institutional involvement in the frame of the training analysis.19 Further, this feature of analytic training sets us apart from all other processes and institutions of professional training in this country. Everything I point to applies with equal force to supervision.20 Specifically, the appointment of training and supervising analysts is completely compatible with the clinical privacy of the training dyad and with the candidate’s freedom, within a training setting, to choose.21 There is, by contrast, a contradiction between an institutionally required training analysis (which includes many universalized intrusions into the dyad—on the couch, three or four times a week, candidates should not be in classes with their training analyst, non-reporting, and so forth) and an institutional stepping back in favor of nontransparent dyadic negotiations about the financial arrangements of and private payment for this analysis.22 In all other education and training systems and institutions, including those within which both analytic teachers and candidates previously trained, all participants in training—trainers and trainees, teachers and students—are seen as part

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of the training institution. The personal training relationship may be negotiated between a trainee and someone who is part of the system (students choose mentors and dissertation advisors; psychology interns and postdocs may ask to work with particular supervisors; faculty with research grants help to select graduate students who will work on their project and hence be supported by their grants), but fees that affect the trainer’s income are never, at least not legally, involved. In most educational settings, students pay different amounts of money for their training (we assume scholarships and fellowships), but those who teach and train, those who work in a training clinic or a lab, do not have, potentially or in theory, a personal financial investment in how this is negotiated, neither for students in general nor for those who work specifically with them. They do not make—it would be an major ethical breach for them to make—private and potentially very different personal financial arrangements with those in the same training relationship with them, as if each pair were a private and autonomous dyad. Nor do they stand to benefit financially, even theoretically, by choosing to work with one trainee rather than another. That training analysts often make a financial sacrifice when they treat candidates, usually at reduced fees, in no way vitiates the substance of these observations, which concern the ethical structure and organization of analytic training.23 We claim that negotiating the fee (or the entire relationship) privately is necessary to bring out a candidate’s own particular conflicts, resistances, and fantasies. We imply, even, that money has special privilege in generating these. Any other arrangement would interfere with the privacy of the dyad and with the analysis itself. But if we hold that anything that happens between analyst and patient, all analytic arrangements, are infused with unconscious and transferential meaning for each individual and for the dyad, then it cannot also be the case that our current arrangement provides more grist for the mill than any other, that there is a privileged relationship between privately negotiated training analysis fees, on the one hand, and unconscious communication and fantasy on the other. We know intuitively, I believe, that in these matters we are misusing our conception of dyadic privacy. We know there is a contradiction between a candidate’s being trained in our analytic institutes, on the one hand, and negotiating financial arrangements for her analysis (and in some institutes supervisions) privately, especially given other universalized requirements about how the training dyad will operate. It is our cultural fiction, reproduced as dyadic fiction, that analyst and patient (in this case, training analyst and candidate) are not part of a social and institutional setting in which their dyad lives.24 Our difficulty in thinking about how and what in the analytic dyad is private; our lack of knowledge concerning the vulnerabilities of unions of two that create their own reality; our inattention to the asymmetries intrinsic to the analytic dyad; our minimizing of the individuality of the patient and of the location of the analyst in a professional world—these all contribute to a collective misconstrual about the privacy of something that is structurally and institutionally part of a social process. What needs to be private and between the two is what goes on in the analysis,

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whatever is brought for observation, understanding, and change by the candidate, and the analyst’s response. Our current arrangement fosters the assumption that the frame of the training relationship rather than its content, the frame of the analysis rather than its content, is dyadically private and even secret. Which brings me, by way of secrecy and asymmetry, to another place where angels fear to tread. My argument applies to a second crystal-shattering tectonic fault: sexual boundary violations. A prevalent factor in boundary violations, it seems to me, is the fantasy that the analytic dyad is private and exclusive, a world unto itself. This fantasy, I have suggested, is not only private or dyadic but also part of our current taken-for-granted culture. To the extent that the analyst does not see herself first as part of a community of practitioners, but as a participant in a unique, bounded union of two, the fantasy that these two constitute an exclusive world is more likely. Our history of boundary violations is another reason for us to be careful about our assumptions regarding the analytic dyad. Dyadic secrets, exclusive and exclusionary communication patterns, the potential desperation of dyadic self-maintenance, dyadic breakdowns that regress toward narcissism: we see all of these in boundary violations. When the dyad is asymmetrical, when one of its members has authority or power, when both are operating in a taken-for-granted professional context that fosters the belief in dyadic apartness, then the more powerful, putatively more authoritative member’s narcissism and lack of judgment are likely to have priority. On the one side, we assume that our work involves, as much as possible, keeping everything in the relationship in the room, rather than focusing principally on the patient as a person located internally and externally in her own world. On the other, we forget our own professional location when we focus so intensively on both participants’ psyches and actions and assume and act as if we are doing our work in a privately co-created dyad (Gabbard [2000] points out that the use of consultants is one of our most successful interventions in boundary violations, precisely because it introduces a third into the dyad). To recapitulate, I have suggested that when we put the dyad at the center of our work, we err, potentially, in two directions. On the one side, such an emphasis can shift our focus away from the psychology of the patient—from the patient’s affects, conflicts, and defenses and the unfolding and expanding of the patient’s inner life and her unconscious past and present—and from our understanding of intrapsychic individuality in our theory. It makes the analytic dyad, rather than the analysand, the center of attention. In recent years, it has threatened to shift our attention even further away from the patient and toward the analyst him- or herself. Beyond the dyad toward individual psychology is one side of my exposition. On the other side, we have obscured the analytic dyad’s social location and constitution. The analyst’s activities are shaped by her training, her professional identity, her taken-for-granted assumptions and reflexive location as analyst, and by her conscious and preconscious ideas about what being an analyst is. Like the patient, the analyst is every moment beyond the dyad, not only in her own private world and history, which has in recent years been recognized and brought into our understanding, but also in the social-institutional-cultural world of analysis.

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Individual psychology and social world come together. Our emphasis on the dyad and on the analyst, rather than on our patients as separate individuals with inner lives, along with our inadequate recognition of the sociality of the analytic dyad and our lack of understanding of the tensions and vulnerabilities of dyads that sociology has described—all these have undermined our ability to think clearly and act optimally in two of the most contentious and problematic areas of our professional life: the training analyst system and boundary violations. As we teach our candidates about what constitutes analysis, as we do our work and participate in our organizations, we should be mindful of our personal and professional pull toward protecting the exclusivity of the dyad. Patients are individuals above all, and should not be regarded first as partners in a relationship with the analyst. We as analysts are not, nor should we be, psychologically or in terms of analytic identity, alone in the room with the analysand, in a self-enclosed, not-tobe-intruded-upon relationship. Ongoing recognition of the sociology, setting, and vulnerabilities of the dyad, and of the location of each member beyond the dyad, protects the freedom of each in the analytic work itself.

Notes 1 A two-part section of Psychoanalytic Dialogues on field theory investigates the similarities and differences between Latin American/Italian Bionian field theory and contemporary interpersonal psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Donnel Stern 2013), with commentaries from Ferro and Civitarese (2013), Foehl (2013), and Peltz and Goldberg (2013). 2 As the present volume attests, the American independent tradition, like the British, focuses (though of course not exclusively) on the internal and silent, rather than interpretive, interactive, and relational use of the self. 3 In Chapter 14, I extend this observation, advocating for individuology as an academic discipline. 4 I am adapting a point about maternal subjectivity made by Alice Balint (1939), who wrote that, from the point of view of the child, “the ideal mother has no interests of her own” (p. 93). My focus on what I am calling the mother’s location outside of reverie, the extent to which maternal subjectivity is noticed and theorized, may have something do with my own personal preference for Loewald over Winnicott or Bion. Loewald focuses on these active maternal ego capacities, as well as on role difference. 5 My concerns are not only my own. In the course of claiming that the analyst needs to pay attention to how her internal world participates in the analytic process, Harris (2009) notes that “this vision of the clinical dyad does not center on symmetry or equivalence or some exclusive narcissistic focus on analytic subjectivity . . . intersubjective space is always also filled with distinction, difference, and otherness” (p. 6; see also Kantrowitz n.d., Parsons 2014). 6 A 2013 panel at the American Psychoanalytic Association, “Silence Now,” varied radically in how presenters considered silence, whether a necessary developmental space for the patient, a Trappist space where “silence is golden,” or a space for the analyst to focus on herself and notice her countertransference. 7 When you sing Beethoven’s Ninth, you learn the German words and their lexical English meaning, but the human and instrumental voices that inflect this text—the music that expresses, like the psyche, dynamics, rhythms, and tonalities—convey the experiential meaning of the piece. Such meanings, moreover, are personally enlivened by each performer and listener. 8 This tangle about the epistemological impact of the observer crosses fields. Considering those in her profession who claim that cultures cannot be studied apart from the impact

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of the ethnographer’s presence, or that traditional cultures can be studied only as products of Western cultural imperialism and colonialism, the anthropologist Sherry Ortner writes, “To such a position we can only respond: try” (1984, p. 143). 9 I am in the vicinity of listening to and listening for, but here I am looking at what the analyst does with what she hears. I am also in Parsons’s terrain of waiting and Poland’s of witnessing. Schlesinger (2003) likens the analyst’s technique to that of the musician who influences through emotional contact with the listener (see also Nagel 2013). 10 Historically, it has been problematic (or perhaps only misguided) when we have likened ourselves too closely to mothers, and in our thinking aligned the analytic dyad and the mother-child dyad. Phillips (1998) has called this “playing mothers.”Yet I and others have found the analogy useful, even if we must be mindful that, in the case of adult analysis, there are always two adults in the room, with similarly constituted psyches that have developed apart from one other. 11 To draw from more scientific mother-child realms: perhaps, in our concern not to be what we might call (following Tronick 2007) still-face analysts, we have become instead (drawing from Beebe and Lachmann 1998) hyper-contingent and overintrusive. 12 I am not the first to use these fields (or the related approaches of sociological ethnography, symbolic interactionism, and grounded theory) to study taken-for-granted, pretheoretical assumptions underlying clinicians’ work. Indeed, my impression is that qualitative sociology as a whole for a certain period focused disproportionately (in the context of the wide range of possible sociological phenomena and institutions in the world) on medical and psychiatric settings. Researchers did field work in mental hospitals, wrote ethnographies about psychiatric and medical training, studied psychiatric clinic records, and looked at decisions in outpatient and inpatient settings, for example, how psychiatrists predict suicidality, and how institutions decide whether to grant sexchange operations (see, e.g., Becker et al. 1961; Coser 1979; Garfinkel 1967; Glaser and Strauss 1967; Goffman 1961; Hughes 1971; Light 1982; Stanton and Schwartz 1955). 13 The generative grammarians thought similarly about how we produce language. By noticing, for example, which apparently grammatical sentences of real words made sense and which ones did not (Chomsky’s famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”), they could begin to elucidate not only the structure of particular languages, but also the implicit knowledge that speakers of that language must have to speak it. 14 Jiménez’s plenary address to the International Psychoanalytical Association, “Grasping Psychoanalysts’ Practice in Its Own Merits” (2009), is to my knowledge the only psychoanalytic paper to have used ethnomethodological-phenomenological methods to study psychoanalytic practice. Boesky’s Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context (2008) addresses similar issues about the underpinning of psychoanalytic disagreements from a philosophy of science-epistemology perspective, though I don’t know if he would agree with the ethnomethodologists that the differentiating rules he hopes practitioners can articulate can in fact be articulated only in retrospect. 15 Analysts have always been alone in the consulting room with just one other person, but as we turn to the sociological, we might note (though it is not directly germane to the question of dyads) that attention to the analyst’s experience and action has increased as the status of psychoanalysis has declined. 16 It was also assumed, though this was probably not empirically the case, that the modal candidate was a psychiatrist who had to unlearn psychiatric nosology and that, whatever our professional origin, we had probably trained with Norman Reider and Bob Wallerstein at Mount Zion Hospital. Another Boston legend, though it does not seem that his influence on future analysts was as great, was Leston Havens. 17 I am in the terrain of Richard Almond’s “Roles in the Psychoanalytic Relationship” (2008). Almond claims that “analyzing provides a special social structure for the personal relation” (p. 71). In contrast to Almond, I am not focused on how we (and our patients) move in (as analyst) and out (as two people in a unique meeting of two unconsciouses) of role and a role relationship. An ethnomethodological perspective on psychoanalysis

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18

19 20 21

22

23

24

would claim that whether we are “in” or “out” of role, we are always reflexively producing a dyad whose features include what goes beyond and helps constitute it. Discussion of Wotan is well beyond the scope of this chapter. We note, briefly, that the Ring Cycle pits Wotan’s narcissistic advocacy of incestuous love, and his history of numerous affairs, against his wife Freya’s stolid (and poignant) insistence on the social and cultural importance of the marriage bond. Elsewhere in his article, Slater notices that marriage, ostensibly the epitome of the private dyad, in fact protects against dyadic withdrawal and the dangers of dyads, by drawing the dyad, beginning with the wedding and wedding planning, into the social and familial community. Parsons (2014) describes a British system that allows for such involvement. For a cautionary tale about a system with private choice of personal analyst and supervisors, see François-Poncet (2009). Our current debates, posing local autonomy and control against centralization, have social-historical precedent. From the beginning, there were tensions between Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest (originally Zurich, as well and, later, London) that we can see as we trace back geographically most post-Freudian dissidence and challenges. I am in territory traveled by others, both before and after the presentation from which this chapter is drawn (see, e.g., Wallerstein 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015; Levy 2009; and especially Kernberg 2016; Kernberg and Michels 2016).Yet what I point to specifically, that is, the financial privatization of our training analyst system, seems not to be noticed by these eminent university-based colleagues, all of whom would, I imagine, be shocked if such a system were to become part of university medical or psychiatric training. In terms of academic accountability, I note also that some colleagues (again, the British institute contrasts sharply with this position) argue that it is even a violation of the privacy of the dyad if candidate or training analyst is required to report number of hours of treatment, up to a certain number (i.e., to report whether basic training requirements have been met). Arguments for what training analysts give up, in terms of lost income, by treating candidates at lower fees, are not relevant here. It is worth noting in this context that researchers and teachers in all educational settings (in medicine, law, and business, in engineering schools and academic science departments) earn less than their counterparts in private or corporate practice. They have forgone income in favor of forms of prestige and respect, and the opportunity to train their profession’s future practitioners. I do not know the history of our arrangements, but I am guessing that one factor is that analysis was excluded from the university, especially from medical schools but also from the arts and sciences. Unanchored in a traditional educational institution, training arrangements were invented along the way, these conscious decisions underpinned by the anxieties and vulnerabilities of dyads as well as by preconscious and conscious assumptions that the training dyad needed private fee arrangements in order to be private clinically. Our solution has now become one of those taken-for-granted behaviors that reflexively index our assumptions. We think and act as if, and thereby produce, the training (or personal) analysis relationship as an exclusive dyad, a union of two that makes its own rules. I leave aside here the potential tensions, secrecy, and unease among candidates who may or may not know what they and their colleagues are paying to the same or different training and supervising analysts for what should be equivalent treatment and supervision. The training analyst-candidate frame, of fees, frequency, potential self-disclosure, and social openness, is not as private or dyadic as we would like to think. Nor, given my argument, would we improve this situation by taking the analytic training dyad entirely out of the institute’s purview. Barbour (2018) provides a complex discussion of the financial and psychological-financial costs, challenges, and contradictions of psychoanalytic training from the viewpoint of a recent graduate.

13 WHY IS IT EASY TO BE A PSYCHOANALYST AND A FEMINIST BUT NOT A PSYCHOANALYST AND A SOCIOLOGIST?

All of the feminists are in the humanities, except you, and all the social scientists except you are men. Karin Martin, graduate student in sociology

Why is it easy to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist but not a psychoanalyst and a sociologist? My title and thinking were sparked by Paul Schwaber. In “Pleasures of Mind” (2005), Paul Schwaber, a psychoanalyst and humanities professor, describes the happy combination—the “pleasures of mind”—that he has been able to make of psychoanalysis and literature.1 Here I describe what I have found to be, from both sides, a not-so-happy combination. I write as psychoanalyst, feminist, and sociologist. In this context, it is important to notice that, as with all expressions and behaviors, my way of seeing—calling myself a hybrid and describing how difficult it is to have a dual identity, psychoanalytic and social scientific—is overdetermined and early-determined. Several of my writings have “hybrid,” “margin,” or “cusp” in their titles. An intellectual autobiography completed around the same time as my remarks here (2004b, now the introductory chapter of Individualizing Gender and Sexuality [2012b]) is called “Psychoanalysis and Women from Margin to Center.” Earlier I coined the phrase “relational individualism” (1986a). More recently, as this volume attests, I created the hybrid formulation “intersubjective ego psychology,” not two-person relational, not one-person classical, to define my own psychoanalytic location. I have located myself as a feminist psychoanalyst on the “modern-postmodern and classical-relational divide” (2005). The Power of Feelings advocates for “both/and” rather than “either/or” when it comes to competing psychoanalytic theories, past versus present determinism, meaning as cultural or personal, life as psychically or socially created, and academia or psychoanalysis.

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As I describe in “Born into a World at War,” itself an Eriksonian psycheculture-society hybrid, I always feel like an outsider. There I describe myself (it was true, but there are other identifications I could have noticed) as “a Jewish New Yorker who grew up in California and who as a preschooler wanted to be a cowgirl (or cowboy).” I was Jewish not Gentile in postwar California, yet even this distinction was not fine enough for me. In the self-reflective component of my application to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (to the amusement, I later learned, of some of those on the admissions committee), I pointed out that I was an Eastern European rather than German Jew. Virginia Goldner, the relational psychoanalyst and gender theorist, was in my “consciousness-raising group” in the late 1960s and early 1970s: she has known me a long time. Recently she observed that I am driven to locate myself on the margins, that I am a person who walks a perfect tightrope of conflicting identities and ambivalence without ever losing her balance. Goldner is right. I see myself as in-between and had almost titled my remarks on being a psychoanalyst, feminist, and sociologist “From margin to margin and back again.” As we know to be true of most professional experiences that matter, what follows has both psychodynamic and substantive origins. My sense of marginality, or insider-outsiderness, receives empirical support (or defensive rationalization). In 1992 or 1993, I attended one of the first yearly meetings of the now more than twenty-five-year-old University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, a consortium organized originally by the UCLA historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg, the UC San Diego psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Robert Nemiroff, and myself. This yearly meeting brings together at Lake Arrowhead, a lovely UCLA mountaintop retreat, psychoanalytically interested faculty and graduate students from throughout the University of California system. It attracts people from well over fifteen academic disciplines, many of whom have trained as CORST analysts. All find a welcoming intellectual setting where everyone takes psychoanalysis seriously. Karin Martin, now Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, was among the few student attendees. Martin had herself worked (and continues to work) on the psyche-sociology boundary. Now, at this meeting, Karin observed, with amusement, “Nancy, have you noticed? All of the feminists at this meeting are in the humanities, except you, and all the social scientists except you are men.”2 We find a second example some ten years later. In May 2004, a month before I first presented these thoughts, the psychoanalyst-sociologist hyphen had snapped (or so I thought!). After thirty years of teaching, I was planning to leave arts and sciences academia and my professorship, to enable a cross-country move. I would henceforth focus on clinical work, analytic teaching, and writing. As a gift and an honor, my then department chair, Peter Evans (whose own fields, far from my own, are globalization, social movements, and development), suggested that my final course in the department be a graduate seminar on my own work. In the fall of 2005, I would teach “Chodorow on Chodorow: Theorizing and Theory.”3 For many years, I had taught what might be seen in sociology as somewhat insurgent,

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certainly not mainstream, graduate courses (I expand on these in the following chapter). In classical and contemporary theory, I taught “Freud and Beyond” and “Feminist Theory.” Among methodology courses, I taught interviewing, with the descriptively specific title “Clinical Interviewing for Social Scientists,” as well as a seminar on feminist methodology (reflexive, paying attention to identity and the intersubjective research relationship). Undergraduate courses included “Feminism and Psychoanalysis,” “Individuality and Society,” and “Psyche, Culture, and Society.” Neither mainstream sociology nor narrow or irrelevant. At a department reception, I chatted with the staff administrator of our graduate program. Knowing of my upcoming course plan and retirement, she said, “I hear you’re going to be teaching next fall. I hope you’re doing something that the students want, and not just Freud!” I told her about my plans for “Chodorow on Chodorow.” Over the course of the semester, we would, through reading my work, be talking about feminist theory, sexuality, gender, the nature of theory construction, and the history of theory. Among the substantive issues we would be addressing were mothering, homophobia, the relations between terrorism and masculinity, and other matters. She listened and responded: “Yes, but I hope it will be broad and interesting to our students, and not just Freud and analysis!” Why it is not easy to be a psychoanalyst and a social scientist takes us back to the beginning of my career. In 1979 I was newly tenured, having been, upon finishing my degree five years earlier, unable to get a tenure track job. At the meetings of the American Sociological Association, I was honored as co-recipient of the first Jessie Bernard Award, an award given for contributions to our understanding of women and society. At these meetings, there was also a symposium on The Reproduction of Mothering, later published in its entirety in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the premier women’s studies journal of the time. At that symposium, the sociologist Judith Lorber said, “When I read The Reproduction of Mothering, I found to my disappointment that it is primarily an exegesis of psychoanalytic theory and therefore, in my eyes, a lesser contribution to the sociology of gender than Nancy Chodorow’s earlier, short pieces” (Lorber et al. 1981, p. 482).4 Similarly, Alice Rossi noted: “I was not prepared for so extended an exegesis of psychoanalytic theory, past and present, or for the nearly total embeddedness of her theory in psychodynamic terms . . . What constitutes ‘evidence’ in Chodorow’s book? . . . does her central insight require the burden of so much psychoanalytic theory and so harsh a rejection of theories in biology and developmental psychology?” (Lorber et al., p. 493)5 By contrast, Rose Coser, the third discussant, was a great supporter of The Reproduction of Mothering and of me. Coser, who co-wrote the chapter on émigré psychoanalysts in Lewis Coser’s Refugee Scholars in America (1984), as well as having written Training in Ambiguity (1979), an ethnographic study of psychiatric training, did not take issue with The Reproduction of Mothering’s psychoanalytic underpinnings. Moreover, she found the book easy to read in the context of her interests in family structure and process (see R. Coser 1964). For many years thereafter (until, discouraged, I finally stopped going to sociology meetings), I found myself

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wandering into session after session on topics that interested me—family, gender roles, mothering, feminist theory, socialization. As I entered the room, I would often hear, mid-sentence, someone declaiming, “we can take seriously five different understandings of women’s mothering [or some other topic about women], but Chodorow’s individualistic psychology is not one of them!” Meanwhile, even as sociological colleagues were excoriating my “individualistic psychology,” colleagues in the humanities, philosophy, and political theory were writing books and articles, and their graduate students were taking my courses, asking me to serve on orals committees, and writing dissertations, based on my work. My focus on the internal mother-daughter world and the mother in the male psyche opened for them new vistas for understanding women authors, characters, and patterns of interaction depicted in women’s novels, and imagery, metaphor, and other features of women’s writing. It enabled scholars to identify and understand fear of women and the feminine in writings by men. My first mother-daughter article even found its way into a classics collection, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Foley 1994). My characterization of the female psyche as based in relation and connection, articulated in 1971 and 1974 and expanded in 1978, anticipated Gilligan (1982) and self-in-relation theory (e.g., Jordan et  al. 1991), while my theorizing about the defensive denial of connection and dependency in men served as a basis for thinking in moral philosophy and epistemology and for critiques of normal science and classical political theory. In anthropology, an idiographic discipline that studies people as well as structures and organizations, the work served as underpinning for several ethnographic investigations. Even as it was strongly criticized in my own field, then, my work was taken very seriously in other precincts of the academy. I became “famous.”6 I note, though I won’t address further, another contribution to the comparative ease of being a psychoanalytic feminist in contrast to a psychoanalytic sociologist. In those pre-postmodern, pre-poststructuralist times in which I wrote, all feminists had to acknowledge that Freud, along with Lévi-Strauss, was one of only two classical grand theorists to take gender seriously (I am thinking here very generally of the one-time grand theory canon, from Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, to Marx, Weber, and Durkheim). Several second-wave feminist books excoriated Freud, but none could ignore the fact that he wrote about women, that he noticed gender and sexuality. Within the academic humanities and in feminist anthropology, then, at least until the poststructural turn, my work was seen as foundational and was almost idealized (except when it was being criticized for its purported psychoanalytically inspired “difference feminism” and “universalizing and essentializing”). In short, it was universally considered a founding feminist theory. I turn from it is easy to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist to “all the social scientists except you are men.” My early academic training, and first intellectual home, was in psychological anthropology. This discipline had been at the forefront of American anthropology in the 1930s through the 1950s, influencing and influenced by our native-grown Sullivanian and Eriksonian psychoanalysis. Not negligibly, anthropology in general, and psychological anthropology in particular,

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had, like psychoanalysis, many leading women practitioners (in this country, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, of course, and at Harvard alone, around the time that I was a student, Cora DuBois, Beatrice Whiting, and Dorothy Lee, and in archaeology Emily Vermeule). In the 1930s through the 1950s, there was also a vision found throughout the social sciences, given institutional expression in the Harvard Department of Social Relations, but found also at universities like Chicago, Columbia, and Berkeley, of an integrated social science. This synthesizing field (or family of fields) incorporated the macro-societal questions and methodology of sociology, the on-the-ground ethnography of cultures, the study of psychological anthropology, and clinical and personality psychology. We find the legacy of such integrative thinking—a familiarity with Freud, along with more sociocultural, political economic thinkers like Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Smith, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, George Herbert Mead, Malinowski, and Boas—in the writings of anthropologists and sociologists like Lewis and Rose Coser, Clifford Geertz, Robert Merton, Neil Smelser, Robert Bellah, and Victor Turner, political scientists like Gabriel Almond and historians like Richard Hofstadter, and in other leading thinkers of a certain social science generation. You find it in many of those, like myself, who studied as undergraduates and graduate students in the 1950s and 1960s in departments of sociology and anthropology. By my time, however, even when I was an undergraduate, psychological anthropology was on the margins of anthropology, where it has remained. Much of the discipline has reframed itself as a postmodern, postcolonial field in the humanities. or as a critical political economics. It is extremely antipsychological, and some anthropologists think of cultures as texts. Yet it is important to acknowledge that psychoanalytic anthropology has always been, within anthropology, an extremely strong margin. I remind us of Chapter 2: when we turn to the perspective from psychoanalysis, concerning why it is hard to be a social scientist and a psychoanalyst, that is also part of my story. These fields, psychological and psychoanalytic anthropology, and ethnography more generally, that are as close epistemologically, theoretically, methodologically and substantively as any discipline to psychoanalysis, and that include several analysts, go mainly unnoticed by psychoanalysts. My “field,” then, has always been, basically, psychoanalysis, or psychoanalysis hyphenated. I have always been interested in the complexities of individuality and by extension in intersubjective epistemologies and methodologies—ethnography, the qualitative sociologies, and the analytic encounter. I am a sociologist who has never studied groups, organizations, stratification, collective behavior, or institutions beyond the family, who has only once done empirical research (on early women psychoanalysts!). Moreover, as psychoanalyst as well as sociologist, in my writing I am basically a theorist, interested in the complexities of theory, in writing about others’ theories, and in creating my own. In this context (I anticipate individuology), I think of psychoanalysis as the human science of individuality or subjectivity. It is the only field that studies and theorizes about how we constitute ourselves as whole beings, through our innate constitutional

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givens, our relationships, our material and social reality, and our history of psychic reactions, defenses, and compromise formations. Its methodology is intersubjective. Given my passions and subsequent history, I have sometimes wondered why I didn’t follow some of my closest undergraduate friends straight into clinical psychology. Like most of our choices, mine was certainly overdetermined. I had grown up in an academic world, was a very good student, loved anthropology and then theory (social and psychoanalytic theory), and have always been, for personal psychodynamic reasons, quite autonomous when it comes to my thinking. Though I found it of course challenging, I simply assumed, over those early years, that I could incorporate psychoanalytic theory, ethnography, Marxism, the study of gender, and so forth, and that I could be a theorist. I used to tell graduate students (I would say the same thing to anyone who wants to become a psychoanalyst) that they should not bother to become an academic unless they were passionate about the work and could not imagine doing anything else. I was completely fortunate to get away with this, to end up (after initially being academically unemployable) in one of the few leading sociology departments in the country to take theory seriously, and in a department where there was already Neil Smelser, who had himself trained as an analyst and who had encouraged me in my interests and pursuits well before I met him. Moving from the personal and autobiographical to the ethnographic, my contribution to a Festschrift for Neil Smelser (Chodorow 2004c) expresses at some length my substantive observations and reflections about the incompatibilities between sociology and psychoanalysis and therefore my own tensions living within these two fields: To take an example specifically from sociology: sociologists usually interest themselves in structures, practices, processes, and social relations that characterize groups, organizations and other supra-individual entities. They tend to think that individual experience is created, shaped, or structured through these social dynamics and structures and to see sociological actors in terms of a single dimension of action, for example, rational choice, impression management, measured and scaled attitudes, political or economic actor. When sociology theorizes individuals, it is in terms of social categories, according to their race, class, gender, ethnicity, and so forth. Sociology envisions both individual and collective agency through the lens of these social categories and socially oriented action, so that both individual and collective behavior are portrayed in terms of their relations to institutions and social processes rather than in terms of individually idiosyncratic goals or beliefs. Similarly, agency and resistance are evaluated not in terms of personal goals or interpretations, but in relation to structures of inequality or domination, and intersectionality theory leads us to conceive not of unique individuals who internally experience and help to shape their lives but of individuals only as joint products of race, gender, and class forces. Practice theory describes culturally- and situationally-embedded, goal-oriented enactment.

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Sociologists are trapped by a legacy that separated individual experience, subjectivity, and action from structures and institutions and that construed the former as determined by the latter. This legacy began with structural-functionalism but continued with most Marxisms. Postmodernism-poststructuralism argues against cultural holism and for the complexity, contingency, and historicity of cultures, as well as for the multiple contradictions, rather than functional interrelations, among cultural elements. But at the same time, these theories agree with traditional structuralism about the autonomy of the cultural. Poststructuralism may have made central to its critique of structuralism the absence of a subject, but it argues that subjectivity is constructed discursively and politically from without. The “structure-agency” problem is itself an artifact of this construction of theoretical reality: if traditions like symbolic interactionism or pragmatism had been more hegemonic, if Mead, Cooley, Simmel, and Freud had been as canonical as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, social scientists would not need to look for a connection between structure and individual or collective action. Like sociology, although with more apparent tension, anthropology has also minimized individual selfhood. This tension develops because, while the ethnographic encounter makes the individuality of informants palpable, such that from its earliest moments anthropology has described individuals, the goal of most ethnography has been to make generalized claims about particular cultures, even if these claims are based on information observed and gathered in particularized interactional moments. Like most accounts in qualitative sociology, contemporary anthropological accounts that portray a person in relation to culture may or may not have a complex view of culture, but they often have an unelaborated concept of the person—of an internally differentiated self, an inner world, and complex unconscious mental processes. By looking only at elements of meaning that are culturally shared and not those that are individually particular, anthropologists and qualitative sociologists abstract out of how meaning is personally experienced, skimming off one part of experience, so that experience becomes less rich than it actually is. They lose understanding of how individual psychologies enact or express cultural forms and give these forms emotional force, depth, and complexity. I believe that the core of individuality is in the realm of personal meaning. As with social determinism, thinkers from a variety of fields have tended to assume that cultural meanings have determinative priority in shaping experience and the self. Even those who think in a more constructionist vein claim that actors create meaning by drawing upon available tangles or webs of cultural meaning. Meanings still come entirely from a cultural corpus or stock. I suggest that people create and experience social processes and cultural meanings psychodynamically—in unconscious, affect-laden, nonlinguistic, immediately felt images and fantasies that everyone creates from birth, about self, self and other, body, and the world—as well as linguistically, discursively, or in terms of a cultural lexicon. Social processes are

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given, and they may lead to some patterns of experiencing in common, but this experiencing will be as much affective and non-linguistic as cognitive. All social and cultural experiences are filtered, shaped, and transformed through a transferential lens. In order fully to understand human social life, we need to theorize and investigate personal meaning. I am suggesting, then, that people are historically and biographically changing individuals who create psychodynamically their own multilayered sense of meaning and self, that consciousness determines life just as much as life determines consciousness. Individuals are interesting and complex in themselves and worthy of study for this reason alone. All the people we study have inner lives and selves that affect and shape how they act and feel. They may not always be aware of this inner life, which is experienced unconsciously as well as consciously, but you cannot understand or interpret what they are telling you if you think that they always say what they mean—as I tell my students, whom I try to help to see themselves not as tape-recorders of interviews but as listeners and interpreters of meanings communicated through affect and transference as much as through language (of course, it is also difficult to get clinical student supervisees not to rely on tape recorded sessions or note taking in the hour). Also, we as researchers have complex inner lives. As one of my students in a course on feminist methodology put it, reflecting upon a field experience in which she had tried to study shop floor labor process according to the precepts of Marxist ethnography, “the difficulty was that I had beliefs and a personality.” In addition to its being interesting in its own right, studying individual subjectivities gives us an enriched and fuller understanding of society and culture. All social scientists whose theories and findings make assumptions about human nature and human motivation need to address individual experience and agency, and one major component of that experience and agency is psychodynamic. Approaches to agency and practice that assume only conscious, rational, strategic goals and maneuvers do not comprehend the action they purport to explain. Personal meaning is a central organizing experience for each individual, and society or culture do not precede or determine these lives. Rather, there are complex relations between personal meaning and cultural meaning and between individual lives and society. In any individual life, many different social and cultural elements interact. Also, each person herself or himself puts together these elements and elements of self and identity in idiosyncratic, conflictual, contradictory, changing, personalized ways. It is a revelation to sociology students to try to account for a single life in all its social, historical, and familial context and personal uniqueness. Individuality is important in any social science context that involves interaction with others or observation of them. Even those few social scientists who do study the emotions, conceptions of self, and unconscious life seem suspicious of and do not tend to pay attention theoretically and ethnographically to psychological individuality.

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These scholars tend to turn emotions and self into something else. Anthropologists of self and feeling claim that emotions are pragmatic, linguistic, and discursive, employed for cultural communication and practice. Their investigations ask how the web of cultural emotion-and-self meanings interrelates with, gives further meaning to, and gains meaning from, other cultural webs of meaning or meaning-imbued practices, but not with other webs of personal meaning. Sociologists of emotion focus on the feelings rules that are imposed by the culture and that people react to. But if you read the sociologists of emotion and the anthropologists of self and feeling, the striking palpable anxiety, pain, and confusion of people engaged in cultural emotions and feelings is not theorized—the “I” of the experiencer, if you will, rather than the “me” whose emotional life is being shaped and reshaped according to cultural patterns. Finally, being a psychoanalyst as well as a sociologist, I would suggest that the psyche itself plays a part here. In many cases thinking in terms of individual action and fantasy is, simply, terrifying. If we keep things impersonal, call something “racism,” or “nationalism,” or “misogyny,” or “homophobia,” we do not need to keep in the front of our minds that individuals, with conscious and unconscious intentions, with, indeed, conscious reasons and rationalizations that make such behaviors all right, engage, in specific instances, in lynching, mass murder or genocide, rape (or, in the case of the intersection of “nationalism” and “misogyny,” mass rape of women and girls), or the murder of homosexuals. Moreover, I speculate that people attracted to the social sciences have a pretheoretical, emotional predilection to feel and believe that things come from society or from culture. This unquestioned belief is reinforced through studying the social sciences, but the social sciences resonate in turn with an already present inner sense of truth. For people who naturally look at the world like this, it is very difficult and anxiety-provoking fully to consider that we also create our psychological life and consciousness, rather than this life and consciousness being determined by external conditions, or to consider that our consciousness, psyches, and modes of being, and social and cultural conditions, may be mutually shaping. As I once put it, “By character, perhaps, those who become social scientists tend intuitively to be paranoid externalizers who projectively see troubles and opportunities as coming from without; those who become analysts tend intuitively to be omnipotent (or depressive) narcissists who see the world as created from within.” (Chodorow 2004c, pp. 24–28) This long extract addresses my subject here, as I compare the difficulty of being a psychoanalyst and sociologist with the comparative ease of being a psychoanalyst and feminist (and, pace Schwaber, with being a psychoanalyst and a humanist). Psychoanalysis was not welcomed by sociologists in general or by feminist sociologists in particular. I turn now to the comparatively welcoming psychoanalytic

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reaction to psychoanalytic feminism. I describe this reaction briefly and conclude by returning to my first dyad, in order to explore (reprising Chapter 3) the reciprocated ignoring of and blindness toward the social sciences on the part of psychoanalysis. From both sides, why is it easier to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist than a psychoanalyst and a social scientist? When I published my first articles and book, I of course wanted to get the same rewards and recognition from psychoanalysis as from parts of the academy. I wanted, contradictorily, instant acclaim for work that in fact posed a fundamental challenge to many elements in psychoanalysis. With hindsight, knowing now with what glacial speed new ideas, especially those from outsiders (but also those from within) receive acceptance in psychoanalysis, I would say that psychoanalysts took up my work relatively quickly and drew upon it with extreme seriousness. It was not, after all, simply that I was an outsider, and, moreover, an outsider with absolutist second-wave feminist notions about the nonexistence of the psychic body and sexuality. I also located myself psychoanalytically as a British object relations theorist and drew upon Klein during the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, when American psychoanalysis was still steeped in classical ego psychology and not open to Kleinian or Winnicottian thinking.7 Yet as a feminist and thinker about gender and sexuality, I quickly became, along with several other people, central in the psychoanalytic revaluation of the theory of femininity. On my side, from the moment that I finished The Reproduction of Mothering, I knew that if I wanted to go any more deeply into the understanding of psychic life, I needed psychoanalytic training (I was enough of a social scientist to have some respect for the empirical bases of theory!). By the mid-1970s, and largely, I believe, in response to second-wave feminism, psychoanalysis slowly began to reappraise the theory of femininity (I discuss this in Chodorow 2004b). We might recall a bit of history here. After active consideration and debate about female sexuality and femininity in the 1920s and 1930s, there followed what Fliegel (1986) noticed as a repression of memory—a “quiescent interval” of lack of investigation of or interest in femininity. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, a very few psychoanalysts—Chasseguet-Smirgel (1964), Kestenberg (1956a,b), and Stoller (1965, 1966)—explored femininity, and in the 1950s, Benedek (e.g., 1952, 1959, 1960) and Bibring (1959, Bibring et al. 1961) wrote about pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause, which, ironically, had never been central to psychoanalytic thinking (on this history, see Balsam 2012, 2013, 2017; Chodorow 2017). For the sociologist of knowledge, it is not surprising that the reemergence of psychoanalytic interest in the psychology of women did not arise simply from within psychoanalysis, through the processes of “normal science.” Rather, theorizing and critique mainly from without came slowly to generate rethinking from within, spurring major breakthroughs in understandings of gender and sexuality that generated changes in psychoanalytic attitudes toward mothers, increased attention to, revaluation, and depathologization of “preoedipal” levels of functioning, and probably greater American acceptance of relational theories—both the native-grown

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Sullivanian and Horneyan schools that preceded relational psychoanalysis and British object relations thinking, especially as found in Winnicott. I am looking back here on the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, when the feminist critique moved into the center of psychoanalysis. Of course I cannot even begin to name the large number of important contributors who made gender and a critique of classical psychoanalysis central to their work. They included classically trained American analysts like Nadelson, Notman, Person, Tyson, Balsam, Kulish, Holtzman and others, all of whom did extensive writing and thinking about women. Unlike the classical analysts of a previous generation, these analysts, without giving up their commitments to the intrapsychic world and the centrality of the psychic sexual body, thought that culture played a part in the psychology of gender and in psychoanalytic understandings of gender and sexuality (earlier, I locate them as “cultural school ego psychologists”). Similarly, all the contributors to the 1976 special issue on women of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association were aware, explicitly or implicitly, of the feminist ferment going on around them. Soon, feminism as a social and political force propelled greater numbers of women into the professions, and psychoanalytic institutes began accepting more women candidates. Eventually the field refeminized: in the 1920s and 1930s, a large proportion of psychoanalysts had been women (on psychoanalysis, see Chodorow 1986b, 1991; on the feminization of psychotherapy, see Philipson 1993). As a psychoanalyst and a feminist, then, I have always found myself at the heart of things. I am sometimes in disagreement with my colleagues but always in overlapping dialogue, central rather than peripheral, feeling that there is much to learn from each and every one of them and feeling, in turn, appreciated by them. This welcoming of me and other psychoanalytic feminists by feminist psychoanalysts stands in sharp contrast to what I have observed (in Chapter 3) to be the impact upon psychoanalysis of, and interest of psychoanalysts in, the social sciences.8 I conclude with some observations and speculation about this divide, about psychoanalysts’ reciprocated suspicion of and simple disinterest in social science. In my extended quotation from my contribution to the Smelser Festschrift, I have suggested why social scientists are so critical of psychoanalysis. Simply put, the basic premise of psychoanalysis is antagonistic to the social sciences. Among social scientists there is, as I put it in Chapter 3, “suspicion, ambivalence, and even antipathy toward personal individuality and toward any suggestion that the individual is not a tabula rasa affected by social and cultural forces.” Perhaps reciprocating psychoanalysts’ fears, social scientists have felt that consideration of psychological factors in experience and behavior psychologizes away the institutional and sociohistorical forces of globalization, sexism, racism, homophobia, and so forth, and that such considerations blame the victim. Economics is the only social science that has a theory of individual motivation from within, rational choice theory, yet this theory is itself universalistic, dealing with individuals who all have the same ways of thinking and goals rather than with individuality itself.9

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What about the reverse: psychoanalysts’ interests in the social sciences? In Chapter 3, I observe that psychoanalysts since Freud have spent time writing about and discussing topics from the humanities. We are interested in Shakespeare, of course, along with other literature, philosophy, and the arts (our “pleasures of mind”).10 As I put it earlier: “Psychoanalysts, it seems, have had and continue to have a love affair with (or crush on) many disciplines and fields of inquiry—on the scientific side, psychiatry, medicine, and more recently, neuroscience; on the side of the humanities, philosophy, literature, biography, opera, music, painting, sculpture.” We notice that psychoanalysts study not only primary works (literature, paintings, and so forth), as did Freud, but that they try to familiarize themselves with the academic canon as well. These interests are reflected in discussion groups and lectures at meetings of local and national psychoanalytic organizations, in “Off the Couch” programs (on opera, film, drama, etc.) and in art exhibits that feature collections owned by members or work by institute members and their families, and in the details (disguised or not) of reported clinical material alluding to the arts and humanities and related associations of analysts to this material. By contrast, we do not find, outside of (and in spite of the existence of) anthropologist-analysts themselves, interest in anthropology, neither in its epistemological and methodological family relation to psychoanalysis and related empirical substance nor in the psychoanalytically inspired anthropological debates and field research of the last century (on the universality of the Oedipus complex, universals and variation in mother-infant relationships, child care and development, masculinities and femininities, and so forth). We do not find familiarity with or attention to the writings of contemporary psychoanalyst-anthropologists, while Totem and Taboo, and even Civilization and Its Discontents, have disappeared from institute syllabi and journal articles.11 Among psychoanalysts, we do not find notice of the sociology of emotions (Hochschild 1983, 1989), even as this field provides recognizable extension and corroboration of what we hear in the consulting room and as, more recently, we try in particular to understand the psychodynamic underpinnings of a contemporary politics that seems alien to many psychoanalysts. I note earlier that in Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild’s study of a Bayou community in Louisiana, this founding sociologist of emotions attends to what we can only call her countertransference. She organizes her study around her own attempts to climb, or at least see over, what she calls the “empathy wall” that separates her from the politically rightwing, emphatically human and sympathetic community members with whom she shares meals, attends church, learns about losses and hopes, and much more.12 You do not find fields as epistemologically, methodologically, and substantively near to psychoanalysis as ethnography and qualitative sociology. Indeed, all of the reflexive social sciences are close methodologically and epistemologically to psychoanalysis (especially to the intersubjective and relational-interpersonal versions currently in the forefront). In anthropology, specifically, we see not only reflexive methods but also direct interest in psychoanalysis.13 I remind us of a quote from the psychoanalytic anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere that could,

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with a few word changes, have been written by an analyst about psychoanalysis: “Ethnography highlights, more than any other human science, the intersubjective relationship between the scholar and the subject of his study, by focusing on a single individual, or a couple at most, hopelessly trying to make do in an alienating field situation” (1990, p. 225). In “Beyond the Dyad,” I suggest that analysts for the most part do not notice, beyond occasional empirical observation (they are uncurious about underlying theory or methodology) that the clinical consulting room is always a psychodynamically inflected instantiation of particular social, cultural, and political assumptions that vary and have varied cross-culturally and historically. Earlier I noted the many historical links (and links of contestation) between psychoanalysis and anthropology, links going back to the 1920s. Even now, as we have become more interested (as we have been forced to become more interested) in the socioeconomic, the cultural, and the political, and as we find a few discussion groups and panels on these topics at our meetings, we do not find much attention to or acknowledgment of those in academic fields that have knowledge about such matters, or even acknowledgment that such fields exist.14 There are, of course, exceptions, and I am sure I am guilty of sins of omission and distortion. History, like ethnography and some qualitative interviewing, often draws on a case methodology and creates a narrative rather than looking for general theories. Historical biography has been influenced by psychoanalysis, just as many psychoanalysts have tried their hand at psychobiography. A few psychoanalysts are social and political activists and occasionally write books about their work, for example, on analysts in the “inner city” (Altman 2004) or in the “trenches” (Sklarew, Twemlow, and Wilkinson 2004), ethnic and sectarian violence, immigration, and refugees (Volkan 1997, 2013), prejudice (Young-Bruehl 1996), and war-making (Harris and Botticelli 2010).15 These colleagues (few and far between) may draw on studies of race and poverty, political science, small group theory, and international relations. Yet to my mind, the sense of kinship with related academic fields, the citation of and attempt to bring in academic colleagues to psychoanalysis, is a weak echo of what we find when we turn to the humanities. When it comes to sociopolitical issues, analysts seem to put themselves forward more as educated citizens than as people who recognize and draw from the fields that study such matters. We return again to the other side of this curious cognitive-professional-cultural divide. What are the dynamics and prejudices within psychoanalysis that distance it from fields that seem to have so much in common with it methodologically, epistemologically, and substantively and that, in their topics of inquiry, bear at almost every moment upon psychoanalytic work? Social scientists, I note earlier, want to generalize. They are suspicious of personal individuality and the idea that meaning comes from within. Reciprocally, is there among analysts suspicion of, ambivalence or antipathy toward, or perhaps, more simply, a lack of interest in, the systematically studied social, political, historical, or cultural? Is there a diffidence that turns into scotoma, because psychoanalysts cannot study other cultures

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or historical periods on the ground, because it is time-consuming and you need professional training to do a valid and reliable qualitative interview study with multiple interviews, because is it difficult to do systematic research without an institutional base? By contrast, cultural artifacts and experiences are available to all. We can all (I am as guilty as the next person here!) read a novel, watch a movie, or go to an opera, have strong opinions about these, and think about our experience in dynamic and emotional terms. We can also feel sure, whatever anyone says, that we are right: after all, chacun à son goût! I return here also to the simple snob appeal of cultural knowledge and interests (what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital”). My concluding speculations, reprising “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” take me back to my initial question. Why is it easy to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist but not a psychoanalyst and a social scientist? For me, discovering social science, originally anthropology, was a great relief. I found a home. Nowadays I know that I have a good ear and a lot of knowledge about music and opera, and I have a confidence in my literary and artistic taste that I lacked in my youth (another way to put this is that I no longer care whether that taste accords with hegemonic culture, with a reviewer’s opinion in the next day’s paper, or with the views of my companion at the opera or at an art exhibit). Likewise, I recognize that I am a good theorist: when I do not understand something, as is inevitable (and often the case, especially with postmodernism, philosophy, or Lacan), I assume either that if I wanted to train myself to understand it, I could, or that there is something wrong with the clarity and coherence of the writing itself. And as is obvious, given my professional trajectory and writings, that I am myself ambivalent about the social sciences. To return again to “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” I continue to notice that psychoanalysts seem to operate as if the social sciences did not exist and did not have a contribution to make either to psychoanalysis itself or to our lives as intellectuals and citizens. And I notice that sociology seems to reciprocate in kind, to operate as if psychoanalysis either does not exist or is a suspect theory and practice, to be dismissed, disparaged, and ignored. It is easy to be a psychoanalyst and a feminist, but not a psychoanalyst and a sociologist.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally my presentation upon the occasion of my being honored by the American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) in 2004. Melvin Lansky, then chair of the committee, had decided to devote the CORST discussion group day to a distinguished CORST psychoanalyst. The day consisted of a morning discussion group on my work and a lunch, followed by the presentation of a paper. Schwaber had been similarly honored at the previous year’s meeting, and “Pleasures of Mind” was his presentation, as this chapter was mine. As it was given the same year as my Liebert Memorial Lecture, developed into “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (Chapter 3), there is overlap between the two chapters. Reflecting its hybrid nature, the paper has been published in earlier forms both in a collection

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called True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories out of School (Gubar 2011) and in The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis (Chancer and Andrews 2014). 2 “All” was not a lot: another sociologist, one or two political scientists, a few anthropologists, and a few historians (sometimes counted as social scientists). 3 More than ten years later, I look back on the course with fondness. There is nothing like using one’s own writing to enable a teacher fully to dig into what may be brilliant or original but is at the same time wrong, misguided, created by sleight-of-pen, and so forth. 4 Quotes here come from the more or less verbatim publication of that symposium. 5 As I acknowledge in the foreword to the book’s second edition (Chodorow 1999b), I am in agreement with Rossi on her last point (about biology, not about psychoanalysis). In the 1970s, it felt (and may have been) imperative for feminists and social scientists to distance ourselves from any hint of biological determinism. A book that argues, however persuasively, that there is no biological contribution to maternal feelings and maternality has itself a psychopolitical agenda. 6 Paying attention to same-generation colleagues and a general sociological suspicion of psychoanalysis in the 2004 presentation that has become this chapter, I did not note (or even notice) that a next generation of sociologists—perhaps especially students at UC Berkeley, where my colleagues included the sociologist of emotions Arlie Hochschild, the everyday life ethnographer Barrie Thorne, Kristin Luker, who wrote several books on abortion, and Raka Ray, who writes about gender and women’s movements in India—were drawing extensively upon my work. In 2015, when I was invited to give a keynote address to a conference, “Motherhood and Culture,” at Maynooth University in Ireland, I also learned, to my amazement and delight, that throughout the Western academic world (in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia, Eastern and Western Europe—indeed, it seemed, everywhere but in the United States), there is a thriving cross-disciplinary field of motherhood studies in the social sciences and humanities (see, e.g., Bueskens 2014; O’Reilly 2016, and other publications of Demeter Press). 7 During my years of course work at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, now a center of theoretical diversity and interest in contemporary Klein, British independents, Bion, and Italian and Latin American psychoanalysis, we had three weeks, at the end of our four years, on Klein. We also read one or two papers by Winnicott in our course on infancy (then called “preoedipal development”). 8 Much of the following section of this chapter, discussing psychoanalysts’ lack of interest in the social sciences, found its way into “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” written specifically for this volume, but the present chapter does not do its job without it. 9 In like vein, Kahneman and Tversky’s work on system 1 and system 2 thinking (Kahneman 2011), for which Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics, also exemplifies my claim about individual minds but not individuality. Their theory of how individuals think (fast and slow) applies universally, so you can’t use it to study individuality and individual variation. 10 As I and others have noticed (2012a; Nagel 2013), Freud was not as attentive to music as to art and literature, and later analysts followed suit. 11 Over the years, several American anthropologists have received full training as analysts, and several others have drawn extensively and with great understanding upon psychoanalytically inspired methods and theory. We can add to them the British analyst Elizabeth Bott Spillius, who, having published a landmark urban ethnography, Family and Social Network (Bott 1957), did not seem to allude to or draw on this background in her psychoanalytic writing or self-presentation. By contrast, according to my perhaps partial knowledge, within the American Psychoanalytic Association there have been only three CORST sociologists (we know from Chancer and Andrews [2014] that there are several other sociologist-analysts trained in other psychoanalytic programs). I know further of one historian and one economist. 12 My remarks reframe themselves as I write. Between my last draft and this one, I received an announcement of a presentation by Hochschild at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and an inquiry from a colleague here in Boston about inviting Hochschild to speak.

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13 As I notice in “Beyond the Dyad” (Chapter 12), foundational studies in sociological ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnography overlap with psychoanalytic interests—studying mental hospitals, psychiatric clinic records and decision making, definitions of mental illness, and medical and psychiatric training. 14 Stoute (2017), I note, is an exception here. Similarly, with the exception of some contemporary infancy studies, I do not think we find, in our public forums at least, crossover interest or knowledge expressed regarding kindred fields in psychology—cognitive or social psychology, psycholinguistics, and so forth (for an exception, see Erreich 2017). 15 I have mentioned recent interest in race and racism. In addition, analysts since the 1940s have attended (unavoidably, given the history of psychoanalysis and the Jewishness, whether chosen identity or not, of most of its prewar European practitioners) to psychological concomitants of the Holocaust. They have noticed the shame or guilt of survival, have learned from clinical work about the Holocaust experiences of a victim or victimizer parent, and so forth (see, e.g., Bergmann and Jucovy 1982; Kestenberg 1980; Kestenberg and Brenner 1996; Kestenberg and Kahn 1998; Bohleber 2010; Kogan 2007). I take these (very important) writings to be in a different category, since they are bringing historical knowledge to bear upon clinical treatment, rather than using psychoanalysis to ask more sociohistorical questions. The 2013 meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association, thanks to chair Sverre Varvin, a psychoanalyst who has worked with torture victims and has done mediation work in Gaza and elsewhere, were titled “Facing the Pain.” Those meetings focused on political trauma and violence as well as on the personal. My observations, however, address not only interest in the social and political but also interest in the research and theory about such matters found in the social sciences themselves.

AFTERWORD

Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?

14 “COULD YOU DIRECT ME TO THE INDIVIDUOLOGY DEPARTMENT?” Psychoanalysis, the academy, and the self

I never thought about Freud having patients! Graduate student in English The difficulty was, I had feelings and a personality. Graduate student in sociology We are reading and talking about what every one of us thinks about 24/7! Undergraduate student in sociology

I begin with an office hour. A brilliant, engaging Chicano undergraduate had enrolled in my senior seminar, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism.” Several weeks earlier, he had become so anxious, at what he felt to be a repeated onslaught of female sexuality, that he had tried to drop the course. We had by then read Freud, Horney, some writings of mine, Jessica Benjamin, and, the most recent, Luce Irigaray’s “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other.” Irigaray’s visceral descriptions of women’s sexually tinged body boundary diffusion, the two lips speaking together, had been the final straw. I’d convinced him to stay with it, and now, further on, we’d also read Person on sexual desire and men’s fantasies about lesbian sex, Mayer on primary female genital anxiety, Riviere on gender as a masquerade, and Goldner on gender identity as a defense. He was mesmerized and engaged. “Do you know,” he said, as he leaned across the small café table that separated us, “that we are reading and talking about what every one of us thinks about 24/7?!” “Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?” I use an ironic title, but I am very serious. Of course you can’t. There isn’t one. There is no academic field or department in which the main focus is the individual and the complexity of individuality, no field that asks how to conceptualize the individual and

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the nature and constitution of selfhood, no field that theorizes, or is organized to study empirically, the components of individuality, no field that asks how individuality develops and changes. When I spoke at my UC Berkeley retirement celebration, after thirty years of teaching, I remarked that if I had another thirty years, if this were the beginning, rather than the end, of my academic career, I would advocate for and work to create this missing discipline and department, probably located in the social sciences, that would be called individuology. I noticed that my own passion and intellectual focus had always been the individual, in all of his or her complexity. The absence of individuology in the academy, of a direct way to study individual selves, is a great lacuna, a missing piece, in our conception of what should be studied, learned about and taught and in our conception of academic knowledge. Just as we want to study and understand societies in all their fullness, polities in all their fullness, economic laws and processes, institutions and social processes, moral reasoning, ethics, conceptions of justice, literature, art, music (I take for granted also the ever changing sciences), so also we need a field that directs its attention to the individual human being. We need theories, methodologies, and epistemologies for studying how each person constructs and experiences herself and to give substance to assumptions we make about individuals and individuality throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In the current period, psychoanalysis provides our most comprehensive, onthe-ground theory of individuality and the experience of self—selfhood in the emotional flesh, as it were—as well as our most elaborated account of how to study individuals. It may not be the only theory of individuality that we have, but it is, I believe, the major field that theorizes individuality, that focuses centrally on what constitutes individuality and that studies individuals in all their complexity. Psychoanalysis would be a basis of individuology, but I would hope that this field would expand, attract neighboring fields, and spur the development of new ones. Such developments could in turn be brought back to clinical psychoanalysis and approaches to treatment, helping to rescue psychoanalysis itself from its current academic and professional isolation. How might we bring such study to the university, create this new field and department? Within the academy as it is currently organized, a department whose subject matter is the study of individuals and the theorizing of individuality would most appropriately be located within the social sciences. Individuology would provide understandings of human life complementary to those now offered by sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and of course, psychology (all of these fields tacitly hold a theory of the individual). More specifically, individuology would share epistemological and methodological terrain with the qualitative social sciences. In these fields we find the interactive and intersubjective methodologies that are appropriate—as that core psychoanalytic focus on how the analyst is with the patient also affirms—to the study of individuals, of people by people. As psychoanalytic theory has been extensively brought to bear across the humanities, in the study of literary characters, style, and poetry, and as it has been

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taken up by some philosophers of mind, individuology would provide a bridge to these fields as well. I am advocating, it is clear, for my own intellectual focus and passion and describing my own intellectual history, yet in another era my proposal would not seem odd. In the mid-twentieth century, interdisciplinary social science departments and professional collaborations incorporated sociology, anthropology, and social and personality psychology, one or another of these fields often influenced by psychoanalysis. The Harvard Social Relations Department stands out institutionally in this context, but as I note earlier, you could find the same overlapping interests and crossdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Chicago, Columbia, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere. In smaller colleges and universities, sociology-anthropology departments were often one, and many anthropologists and sociologists were interested in psychoanalysis. Personology, the psychology of personality, taught and relied in its research on projective tests and other instruments that implied, or inferred, unconscious mental processes. Feminists of my generation found Freud in our search for how the personal was political. Adrienne Harris, Jessica Benjamin, Muriel Dimen, Jane Flax, Virginia Goldner, Juliet Mitchell, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, and others (all of us but Goldner without clinical Ph.D.s) somehow knew that what mattered to gendered selfhood were ways of being and relating that were not conscious but vaguely felt. We found psychoanalysis, this field that describes (as I put it in 1999) the power of feelings—people’s creation of their individuality and personal meaning. Just as other branches of psychology tell us about innate structures of language or cognition, or the innate contours and specificities of development, so psychoanalysis suggests that our innate psychic makeup includes the capacity and cognitive/emotional need to infuse experience with unconscious meaning. We locate ourselves in relation to others, originally to family and parents. We bring emotional orientations—fear, shame, guilt, hope, wariness, suspiciousness, anger (at ourselves or at others)—to experience. What for one person seems an innocuous or even positive encounter may, for another, feel fraught, threatening, or charged, with anger, with inappropriate seduction, with mockery. Individuals, psychoanalysis tells us, create their subjective lives. We draw upon internal, biologically given capacities for unconscious and conscious meaning making, our temperament, our developmental experiences in particular families, our fantasies and wishes from within, all contextualized by the fact that we live, basically, an emotional life, a life steeped in affect and charged with unconscious meaning. Each person has his own pattern of defensive choices. One may deny what she experiences: “My friend just didn’t see me; she didn’t purposefully snub me.” Another turns anger or aggression inward, becomes depressed and self-blaming for what happened to him: “I shouldn’t have been walking there”; “I don’t belong in this country.” Another turns passive into active, aggressing against someone felt to be weak in the way she feels weak: “I’ll take out my rage against that person on my spouse, my children, my younger sibling.”

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These are everyday experiences our students have, yet they have no place academically where they can come to name and begin to understand them. Could we teach about how these patterns of experiencing and reacting develop, about how inborn psychobiological propensities of personality, temperament, and character contribute, about how family experience is internalized? Was a parent hovering and anxious? Was he quick to anger or seriously abusive? Was her temperament attuned more to that of one child than to another? What happened to parental fear and rage, whether at the parents’ parents or at the world at large? Some transfer their reactions of fear or rage to their children and others do not. It makes a big difference how we are treated, how those taking care of a child are faring in the world and at home, and an even bigger difference how they are faring internally and emotionally. Our students have recently emerged from such experiences, but unless they are in therapy, they lack the categories to explore them. Social and historical location, culture, class, ethnicity, gender—these all affect internal life, yet how someone reacts to these external challenges is not predictable (or is predictable only statistically, not individually). But you would not know this if you were taking a social science course. At its core, psychoanalysis puts the person’s selfhood or subjectivity front and center, and its theory is directed to understanding that subjectivity in detail. In each case, of parent, of child, of each of us, it is not only what comes from without but also what comes from within. I was an undergraduate, the age of the students who concern me, when I discovered psychoanalysis. Serendipitously, I found on my parents’ bookshelves a book, now sadly neglected, Childhood and Society (and what was it doing there? and what kind of screen memory is this?). This book, you could say, affected every part of my career and intellectual trajectory for fifty years or more, right up to the present. It was for me what Bollas (1987, 2008) would call a transformational or evocative object, something that echoed, unconsciously, something from deep within and from the long-ago past. When I became interested, through feminism, in women and (through my own internal and external reality) in the mother-daughter relationship, it seemed that the only way really to understand how women are—how we feel as much as think about ourselves as sexed and gendered selves, as mothers to daughters and daughters to mothers—was through psychoanalysis. Mothers and daughters gets right to the heart of the personal and the emotional, and the personal and emotional get right to the heart of psychoanalysis. At the time, the mother-daughter relationship went largely unnoticed. In The Reproduction of Mothering, I generalized, as had every theorist of femininity since Freud. I know now as a clinician that every mother-daughter pair is unique—individuality and individuology again—but you also find commonalities, patterns, and family resemblances that I, then barely thirty, somehow uncannily managed to describe with some accuracy, based on my reading of psychoanalytic theory and case material, an understanding that becoming a clinician allowed me to expand. I could then notice and name the passions and tragedies of mother-daughterhood—“weeping for the mother” (Chodorow 1999a) and

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being “too late” to have children (Chodorow 2003d)—as well as the everyday: women patients remembering snuggly evenings home alone with mother and having grilled cheese and tomato soup for dinner. One of the challenges of individuology would be finding ways to generalize while recognizing individuality, devising categories and criteria of generalization, just as we have general or universal categories for describing and analyzing particular social formations, economic processes, cultures, and historical phenomena. I became a psychoanalyst, along with a very few other academics,1 so I could understand such processes from the inside and on the ground, initially (consciously, that is) to understand gendered subjectivity and selfhood. I am a social scientist, and even the most theoretical social scientist believes that her claims should have some empirical grounding. Of course, from the moment we see our first patient, we realize, in an immediate way, how, miraculously, we might be able to help them, to be part of the psychoanalytic clinical project. Like other trainees, I learned to listen and to focus on the immediate here and now of transference—unspoken but sensed emotional communications from patients to me—and countertransference—my own feelings that I learned to observe and interpret. Most important, I learned to listen to affect. And my psychoanalytic academic colleagues and I also brought our experiences back to the academy: we came to realize that the emotional atmosphere in the room, our students’ anxiety or lack thereof, was as crucial to teaching and learning as was the content of what was taught. The Power of Feelings makes my first implicit argument for individuology. There I make the point that psychoanalysis, in contrast to the social sciences, documents an irreducible realm of psychological life in which we create personal meaning. It affirms individual subjectivity and selfhood, the insistent, relentless, uniqueness of each person and the fact that each person actively creates his or her psychic reality, against the generalizing and abstracting tendencies, and the social and cultural determinisms, of the social sciences and of poststructuralpostcolonial theory. As a theory describing the active creation of an inner world, psychoanalysis helps elucidate the intertwining of the social (relationships and social forms) and the cultural (language, consensual meanings, collective practices) with individually created meaning—sense of self, unconscious fantasy, transferential filtering. Such an account substantiates a view we want to share with students. As we talk about gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and postcolonial relations, immigration and poverty, these are certainly historical products, socially, politically, and culturally created and imposed. They are in some cases bodily and biological as well. But they are also individually experienced—psychic creations. Individuology would help us expand such observations and deepen their empirical basis. Any experience, of racial, ethnic, or personal identity, our relationships, our work, mountain-climbing, meditation, or reading a favorite novel, poet, or theorist, any experience that matters to us, is psychically inflected—has emotional casting and unconscious as well as conscious meaning. Feelings with stories, and stories with feelings. We filter and give personal meaning to our social and historical location,

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our place in culture, class, and ethnicity, our gender and sexuality, our reading of literature and participation in music or politics. This is our selfhood, and students should be able to study such matters. The psychoanalytic premise, and therefore the necessary premise of all psychoanalytic scholars, is that selfhood and subjectivity are not created from without. They are not created by cultural, political, or structural conditions, by those discursive tropes that we find described in the contemporary humanities, nor are they caused by experiences of race, class, ethnicity, culture, and gender that sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and ethnic studies describe. From psychoanalysis, we learn how meaning is created from within, by innate capacities that bring unconscious feelings and fantasies to observed and experienced external realities. As I put it in The Power of Feelings, and as we want to convey to students, “Transference is the hypothesis and demonstration that our inner world of psychic reality helps to create, shape, and give meaning to the intersubjective, social, and cultural worlds we inhabit” (1999a, p. 14). Analysts and their patients notice that everyday experiences—therapist or patient being late, a new picture in the office, a patient’s reluctance to give the therapist his new address, the therapist forgetting about a change of hours—all these can be, in the unconscious, grand passions and personal crises. For the clinician, and for individuology, it is important to keep in mind at the same time both patterns—what we know in general about individuals, about people from particular backgrounds or historical periods, or of particular genders, races, or ethnicities—and individuality: each person’s uniqueness. You cannot think psychologically without some general, perhaps even statistical, sense of how human beings construct themselves—what might go wrong, what happens with trauma, maltreatment, or tragic accident, as well as with the slings and arrows of ordinary life. But you also cannot think psychoanalytically unless you believe, firmly and deeply, that none of these experiences causes a particular reaction. People shape and create their psychic lives from within. To understand what it is to be a particular woman, a particular man, a particular mother-daughter pair, a particular person of a specific ethnicity or culture, you need psychoanalytically informed, individualizing, modes of inquiry. Even as theory and as a form of treatment emphasizing individuality, psychoanalysis puts forth grand theory, what I call in The Power of Feelings “psychoanalytic visions of subjectivity.” Such visions—images of emotional possibility, ideas about the nature of fantasy and mind, personal meaning and selfhood—underlie most psychoanalytic theories and conceptions of process, of what is happening, and what is desired, in therapy. They are in the back of the clinician’s mind, for each clinician some individual and some shared, as she works. These forthright claims about what makes a meaningful life and selfhood would provide one foundation for individuology.2 Within the academic world, such visions stand out against postmodern skepticism about humanistic universalizing and inner life, against the more cognitive and neuroscientific interests of contemporary psychology, and against the determinisms of the social sciences and poststructuralism, that claim that mind comes from

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social experience and location or from cultural hegemony. They are consonant with traditional clinical psychology but not so much with the “clinical science” that has replaced it in major universities, as clinical psychology has moved to Psy.D. programs in professional schools of psychology. Psychoanalysis focuses us on individuality and personal meaning, in psychoanalytic terms, on fantasy and transference. How do we experience ourselves in relation to the other? How do we create the experiential immediacy of the present? Personal meaning involves the creation of ego (our I) and our experience and delineation of reality out there. If something is important to us, it is important because we bring meaning to it from within. A simple example comes from my own emotional and transferential selfhood and is available to any undergraduate (here, I return to the Eriksonian side of things, to development in a specific time and culture). I love the mountains, while others love the ocean. By preference, I have spent time in the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, the Berkshires, and, when I can, the Jura and Berner Oberland. Yosemite is one of my favorite places in the world. Others love the ocean and prefer to vacation on the Pacific or Atlantic coasts, to go to Florida or the Caribbean, and for special trips, perhaps to the Mediterranean or Adriatic coasts. I can begin to understand this. As I describe in Chapter 4, I was as a small child transplanted from the East to the West, to a Stanford and San Francisco Peninsula that few would recognize in today’s Silicon Valley. My homesick mother’s six brothers and sisters and all my cousins remained three thousand miles away. My mother apparently said, when I was three (she told me the story later), that she first felt at home in California when we visited Yosemite. This is certainly part of the story. Yet my love for the mountains feels innate and ineffable; something about the air, the blue sky, and the massive granite formations moves me in a way that waves crashing and sand do not—they are beautiful, but I am not transported. Any teacher can easily explain this in everyday terms and ask students to think of examples for themselves. I am transferring something, something from my unconscious to my conscious and from myself to my surround as much as from past to present, and more (not every East-West migrant has my experience). I am creating the external world from within. In teaching, we can bring such insights also to the intersubjective realm, to the relations between our inner and outer relational world, as well as to our passions and sexuality. That psychoanalysis, not negligibly, is about sex brings it to the concerns and interests of anyone, but especially, as my student noted, to concerns and interests in the forefront in late adolescence. As I wonder in “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation” (Chodorow 1992), why, if you are straight, do only some people of the other gender attract you and not others, and if you are gay, similarly? (This question may seem obvious today, but in 1992 no one had thought to ask it.) We live in an inner world, bring from early childhood internal templates of passion, fear, body smell, and tone of voice, all, in complex ways, affecting our adult attractions (including, as students recognize immediately, our capacity to get involved over and over with the same kind of wrong person).

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Finally, and not negligibly, in the realm of individuality and selfhood, analysis describes fundamental senses of aliveness and deadness.3 Someone very much biologically alive can be psychically dead, without the capacity to dream, create, or play, without an inner sense of vibrancy or agency or of a cohesive or continuous internal self. Clinicians talk about—and talk to—patients who, we could say, are not alive, in spite of their ability to walk into the consulting room. And we all have moments—not more than moments if we’re fortunate—of not feeling alive. For the clinician, the goal is to find the impediments to being alive, and the particular form of deadness in an individual. For my imagined individuologist, the goal is to theorize and investigate aliveness, what it consists in to be psychically alive, to be an individual, to have a self (or, as we often find in the consulting room, not to feel like an individual, or not to have a cohesive or continuous self), and to think about how we might study these, through systematic case studies or other methods, including self-reflection (here, literature and philosophy might be particularly helpful). In teaching, the individuologist’s goal would be to convey what psychoanalysts (think we) know, very much in complement to the insights and research of other branches of psychology and of sociology, anthropology, economics, and philosophy. Our emotions are not raw, psychobiological affects but feelings with stories—about our self, our body, the other and the other’s body, about self with other, and so forth. These internal stories create us (or, we create ourselves through them). Analytic writers conceptualize affects and affiliated beliefs like anxiety and depression, envy and gratitude, lust and desire, love and hate, hope and dread, feeling alive or feeling dead. And any experience of these emotions has its own unconscious story, often a passionate one with dire consequences. Different psychoanalytic formulations describe destroying the self or the other and atoning for or repairing the results of one’s destructiveness. They describe patricide and matricide (you can extend this to fratricide), and you can think of these in individuals and how they play out socially and culturally. Feelings with stories include merging with or invading an other, feeling dead or alive. They may involve an unrealistic holding out for unattainable goals, or a belief that a particular relationship will solve all problems forever. Psychoanalysis documents how fantasies shape our internal life and are brought through transference to interpersonal relationships, work, and our experience of the social and cultural world. I am describing a subjectivist vision, which is central to individuality and selfhood but which we find only tangentially, on the margins or assumed, in the academic fields of today. We create our experience of the world through our personal affective and transferential lens. From the point of view of the individual, both internal and external have emotional and physical-perceptual meaning. They are not given for all time. To help students name and know this from within, and study it, is the goal of individuology. Philosophy, too, studies subjectivity. In philosophy (as I understand this complex field in which I am not trained), scholars theorize about how minds work. They create suppositional problems and moral reasoning situations and ask how

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ordinary reasoners think. If they are on the scientific end of philosophy, they inform themselves about research on the brain. Cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, do systematic research to observe cognitive processes as directly as possible and to make inferences about them, while neuroscientists and neuropsychologists examine brain functioning directly. In all these fields, we are considering emotions and feelings. Yet it would seem that in addition to a finer-tuned philosophy, or a differently focused cognitive psychology or neuroscience, individuology would help us in a different way to understand our minds. Such a field would investigate, through qualitative, intersubjective methods, the complex subjectivity of individuals. It would investigate the developmental history that informs individuality, the conscious and unconscious senses of self, emotions, and “personality,” psychosexuality and psychological gender, race, and ethnicity, and the particular passions, preoccupations, and defenses that each person creates. As in psychoanalysis, transference would be a key theoretical concept in individuology: the idea that we bring internal meanings to the external world, including ourselves, and unconscious meanings to the shaping and coloring of conscious experience. As those of us who have taught psychoanalysis in the university, both theory and clinical cases, know, students can appreciate and understand experientially, if they do not initially have the words to say so, the Loewaldian observation that without transference and fantasy there would be no personal meaning and no individual selfhood, that the capacity for transference is one of the great human capacities and a foundation of a meaningful life. They recognize the power of feelings in themselves and in others, and they want to know more. They choose one major over another, love Dickens and are indifferent to Trollope, or vice versa. It may or may not feel essential to them, in order to go on being, to know why they have particular passions, as it is for someone who goes into therapy because of their particular passions (or their lack of passion and their sense that life is meaningless). In the university, nonetheless, we should be interested in such questions, in theorizing and doing research on them, and in providing opportunities for our students to consider them. Individuology would of necessity focus not only on personal meaning and selfknowledge, but also on recognition as method and epistemology: the intersubjective process through which we learn about self and other. We also find this domain of recognition and self-recognition in qualitative sociology, anthropology, life history, and elsewhere. In psychoanalysis, we talk about making the unconscious conscious as a first form of self-recognition—recognizing and knowing elements of oneself that were heretofore unknown. Recognition comes through self-reflection and also from the other. Many psychoanalysts contribute to our understanding of recognition, using terms and formulations that can be intuitively understood by the lay reader, including undergraduates and graduate students. Bollas (1987) coined the term the unthought known, a person’s basic way of being and relating that arises so early it is not in any way cognized or conscious. For Bollas, it can come to be known

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with the help of the therapist, who senses feelings in himself that complement or reproduce those coming from the patient—a deadness in the room, excitement, a great sadness or sleepiness. Benjamin (1995, 1998) draws on Frankfurt theory to explore this domain. Erikson’s conception of identity, that must include being seen in one’s identity by another, and Loewald’s “the child begins to experience himself as a centered unit by being centered upon” also describe, in accessible terms, the domains of recognition and self-recognition, the move from one to the other, and the necessity for both. I am mindful of a challenge. Psychoanalysis suggests that much of selfhood, much of what matters most to people (not just thoughts and feelings, but psychic processes themselves), is unconscious. How can we study what is unconscious? Yet, as analysts and their patients can themselves only infer unconscious meaning, so also many of the social sciences infer meaning from interviews, ethnography, and surveys. In fact, all sciences and social sciences need to make inferences from what can be observed. Psychologists and neuroscientists, even with the development of brain scanning, infer cognitive capacities and developmental patterns from research studies. Philosophy infers moral and other forms of reasoning. So also, the methodologies and epistemology of individuology would have family resemblance to clinical inference. Moreover, for most academics most of the time, including most students, we are in any field learning about something from what others have found, not only from studying it directly. Where, academically, would individuology reside? Today, psychoanalysis is widely drawn on in the humanities.4 It provides a basis for literary and film criticism and thinking about literary characters and style, in studies of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, in poststructural thinking, and for reflexive writings describing reader response. Psychoanalysis is occasionally drawn on in philosophy of mind. Yet my impression is that academic appropriations of psychoanalysis often entail a loss of that central, basic, psychoanalytic insight: meaning, individuality, and selfhood—our transferential emotional prisms—come from within. Psychoanalytic understandings go against postmodern-poststructural claims that selfhood and identity are fictions or constructions from without, that they emerge from the enactment of cultural discourse, that destabilized, fragmented, multiply shifting split psyches without a center are not only our inevitable lot but perhaps are even desirable. Postmodernism has drawn support from Freud, who was indeed an original theorist and observer of the decentering and possible destabilization of individual selfhood, but Freud was also a practitioner of psychic healing and wholeness. More important, the humanities are directed toward the study of texts, creative works, theory, and ideas, rather than toward the study of people. Humanists have been insightful readers of Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts. Their observations about character, affect, and style and their textual analyses have made major contributions. They notice the human experiences that go into reading, listening to music, and looking at art. But there remains a challenge: how to study people directly. One of the greatest pleasures of my many years of teaching was a seminar on literature and psychoanalysis that I co-taught with the late Shakespeare scholar and

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great teacher Janet Adelman. “Mourning and Melancholia” was our only Freud reading, after which our three-part seminar paired Melanie Klein with King Lear, Winnicott with The Winter’s Tale, and Hans Loewald with Beloved. During our first seminar, I introduced “Mourning and Melancholia” by suggesting, just as I had always done with clinical trainees and social science students, that students picture a very depressed man walking, dragging himself, into Freud’s office, telling Freud how worthless and terrible he was, that he did not deserve to live, and Freud listening and trying to puzzle him out. A graduate student in English burst out: he had never, ever pictured Freud seeing patients! It had never occurred to him! While first writing this chapter, I was in conversation with a young college graduate working in the administrative office of my psychoanalytic institute. As a film and literature major, she remarked, she had read psychoanalysis extensively, yet until her current job she had not thought of psychoanalysis as a clinical treatment or a profession for which people trained. What about psychology? Freud told us that psychoanalysis should be a general psychology, and so it should. Personality psychology traditionally offered ways to study individuals and individual differences and could be an important component of individuology. In the current period, however, psychology, located at one time among the social sciences, has moved methodologically and theoretically closer to brain and biobehavioral science and has sometimes redefined itself as one. We find that “affective science” has often replaced personality psychology or that personality and social psychology have merged. Developmental psychology is increasingly cognitive and neurocognitive, and clinical psychology has become clinical science. Even research into the nature and construction of autobiographical memory is not focused on the complexities of individuality or on specific individual subjectivities themselves. In direct contrast to psychoanalysis, finally, psychology conducts controlled-variable research in which the researcher’s personal presence is as far as possible eliminated or made exactly the same for each subject. Let us turn now to the social sciences. Almost by definition, the social sciences view personhood as coming from without, from culture, society, politics, the economy. Ironically, it is within that most objective and quantitative social science, economics, that we find underlying assumptions about subjectivity, motivation, and reasoning from within. We find rational choice theory, studies of and hypotheses about preference structures based on innate human goals, cost-benefit analysis, and utility maximization. We find the psychologist Daniel Kahneman winning the Nobel Prize in economics for theoretical and research work done with Amos Tversky showing that we are governed not by a rational self but largely by an unconscious part of our brain.5 Provisionally, I would locate a field whose subject matter is the study of individuals and the theorizing of individuality alongside ethnography, open-ended interviewing, and narrative and life history—that is, among the qualitative and intersubjective social sciences. In these fields, findings unfold in situ, and the influence of the researcher and the relationship of researcher and researched are seen as factors to be understood. In these fields, the relationship is integral to the finding.

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Individuology would provide understandings complementary to those we find in sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and psychology (again, all of these fields tacitly assume a theory of the individual). It would also provide substantive grounding for the widespread use of psychoanalysis throughout the humanities to study texts, without reference to the actual people whose experiences ground psychoanalytic claims. Like gender and ethnic studies, individuology could bridge the social sciences and humanities. In this context, we recall the development of the social science-natural science divide, growing from the nineteenth-century German division of Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften: the sciences that study mind or spirit, what we now think of as the humanities, and the sciences that study nature. The Geisteswissenschaften came to include the social sciences, a natural progression if you begin not only from philosophy, history, literature, and other cultural fields but also from German social theorists like Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim (you might also include Durkheim). Yet as the social sciences developed, as they came predominantly to focus on the study of collectivities, organizations, institutions, and groups, and as they generalized about behavior and practices, the study of the Geist itself got lost. Our inherited translation, comparing the social to the natural sciences, excludes the Geist—mind or spirit—by fiat (or by intellectual scotoma). A view of the Geisteswissenschaften that gave us the human sciences would of necessity include the study of individuality, subjectivity, selfhood. Individuology. The Geisteswissenschaften/Naturwissenschaften divide points toward other features of a possible individuology. These include a more idiographic, case-based methodology and epistemology rather than a listing toward statistics, generalization, and universal laws and processes. It would look to meaning and understanding rather than cause. The study of individuals, selfhood, and individual subjectivity would be, like psychoanalysis, a field epistemologically, empirically, and methodologically based in cases. Similarly, the anthropologist studies a single culture at a time but has a general theory of culture, and a qualitative sociologist studies an individual institution or community, members of a particular profession, or an ethnic or gender group, but also has a general theory of institutions, community, professions, race-ethnicity, or gender. Similarities continue when we turn to the research relationship. Throughout these human sciences, subjects study subjects, and thus matters of intersubjectivity enter in. Ethnographer, interviewer, sociologist of emotions, all must be continually mindful of their own personhood and impact and remember that the quality of interaction helps determine what is found. Psychoanalysis, similarly, describes the clinical interaction, conscious and unconscious, tacit and spoken, between two individuals, and the psychoanalyst attends to her own countertransference in ways we recognize as cognate with the intersubjective and reflexive methodologies and epistemologies of the Geisteswissenschaften. In looking to psychoanalysis as a foundational theory of individuality, self, and meaning, and as the basis for an academic field, I am skirting a serious challenge. Psychoanalysis tells us that much of selfhood and subjectivity is unconscious—not

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just thoughts and feelings but psychic processes themselves. Much of individuality is not even subjectively construed—for example, what both psychoanalysis and we in colloquial parlance call “defenses.” Anna Freud tells us that some people turn passive to active, doing to others what they felt was done to them. Others repress, deny, or split—know one thing with one part of their mind and something contradictory with another, or push thoughts and feelings from consciousness, though they are still there in the unconscious. How can we study these unconscious processes outside of the consulting room? This challenge, however, also faces clinicians and their patients. If what matters is unconscious, clinician and patient can only make inferences. We look at repeated mistakes, repeated patterns of relationship, a prolonged personal or professional stasis. We infer from dreams, transference, and the relationship in the room. Individuology, likewise, would often have to be content with inference. It might borrow a page from psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice in so doing, and perhaps draw also from literary interpretation. In this context, it is important to remember that all research that goes beyond straight description—all sciences from astrophysics to microbiology, most subfields of academic psychology, and most of the social sciences—are inferential. We might think here of dark matter, black holes, collapsing or colliding galaxies, and the origins of the universe, confirmed in one instance by synchronized vibrations of two laser interferometers. Cognitive psychologists design experiments that allow the researcher to gather enough data to infer, reliably, that children, or babies, have certain innate capacities; fMRI studies do not show capacities themselves but brain functions that, we infer, enable these capacities. Sociologists and economists gather statistics that generalize and summarize reality and from which they infer motivation and reasoning, or they do surveys in which they assume that they know what people mean when they say yes or no to a question. You might study the self or individual subjectivity through texts. How do different novelists portray selfhood? How does a poet describe her self? In advocating for individuology, I am mindful that you cannot get the same depth of understanding of a particular individual, of the unconscious—and of course, of yourself—outside the clinical setting. (Or is this my pretheoretical assumption? I certainly lack systematic comparative evidence.) In that setting you are working with and talking to a therapist or analyst and focusing on your own particularity, your own selfhood (or you are the therapist or analyst, doing the same with your own therapist, supervisor, or peer group, and through your own self-analysis). What do you bring to different situations? What are your triggers? What has been the effect of your previous experience? What have you taken from parents? How do you see yourself, your terrors, and your challenges? What psychoanalysis, crucially, adds is that much of this, much of what goes on in our minds, is unconscious. Through the clinical interaction, patient and therapist can make some of it more available to consciousness, but we need always keep in mind that, when it comes to the unconscious—thoughts, feelings, wishes, beliefs about self and other, modes of being in the world (paranoid-schizoid splitting, living

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as a false self or false body, engaging defenses, participating in a co-constructed bulwark, transference and countertransference)—all of these can only be inferred. They are unconscious. In the university, students and faculty cannot study a particular individual in the depth that is possible in a therapy (note, though, that neither therapist nor patient can know herself fully). You can, however, as I know from my own teaching and that of my psychoanalytic academic colleagues, convey a lot about what individuality is, and students, as psychobiographers and other nonclinical researchers, can study individuals. They can interview. They can immerse themselves in interpersonal and ethnographic settings with an eye, ear, and body-mind attunement, to evidences of individual expression and individual selfhood. They can report and think about their dreams. They can read (and write) memoirs, autobiography, life history, psychohistory, and do case studies of individuals. They can listen to literature with a psychoanalytic ear. Moreover, there is a lot about individuality, individual subjectivity, and individuals that isn’t unconscious, even as we know that all consciousness is intertwined with unconscious underpinnings. I conclude by describing some of my own pedagogical gestures toward individuology. In a course titled “Psyche, Culture, and Society,” we looked, through reading Freud, Erikson, Klein, Loewald, Schachtel, and Winnicott, at the psychic and psychosocial edges of everyday experience—dreams, anxiety, gender, family, aggression and war, culture and memory, childhood and identity. We attended throughout to clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis and what it can contribute to social understanding. Occasionally a student would exclaim, “I always wanted to learn about Freud!” When students are learning about the psyche, they can ground readings in personal reflection. Invited to remember their dreams, students nod dreamily. Asked to share a dream with a neighbor, they talk with great animation. Everyone agrees about how confusing it can be when we are dreaming or trying to reconstruct dreams. Dreams are created in a different state, and they often contain contradictory elements, wavering identities and impossible happenings. Flying is a common example, or being in one place or time and then another, without going from here to there. It is a great gift of understanding and self-understanding to learn that, for Freud, dreaming is basic to being a self. It is thrilling to learn about primary-process mentation, that can so easily make substitutions, condensations, and displacements, and that in the unconscious one thing can easily turn into another, something can become its opposite, and one symbol can stand for many different wishes or experiences. We discuss Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951). Delivering remarkable news to students, this famous psychoanalyst writes of the ordinary teddy bear. He tells how, for the developing child, the transitional object bridges me and not-me, self and other. The teddy bear is created from within—in the baby’s mind, it is alive and real—and it is given from without, a palpable object placed in the crib that helps the baby become a subject in the world, a subject who is both related and individuated.

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Students remember transitional objects in their own past or in that of their siblings, and they are eager to share memories and family stories about their own transitional objects and what became of them. Recall here Winnicott’s claim that transitional objects and phenomena participate in a “neutral area of experience which will not be challenged,” in which it will never be asked, “Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?” Still close to childhood, students disagree. They remember themselves as victim or torturer, taunted by siblings about the live reality of their own cuddly or torturing younger siblings. This “neutral,” “not to be challenged,” area, they point out, is routinely challenged, often with great glee, by siblings.6 Winnicott says, radically, that transitional objects and phenomena expand into the realm of culture. Here psychoanalysis ties directly to the sociocultural, and everyday examples make immediate sense. For the musician, the instrument is created (for the artist, paint and paintbrush, clay, stone, or metal). The violin or guitar is made of wood and has gut or metal strings; brass instruments are, well, made of brass. But the musician, in playing, also creates her instrument from within. It is part of her self, and, in a chamber group, orchestra, or jam session, she creates a transitional space with other players. An instrument (or paintbrush) extends and is part of the self and the self’s creativity, creates a connection to others, and is out there and separate. Me and not me. In a graduate interviewing seminar informally retitled “Clinical Listening for Social Scientists,” we began from the basic psychoanalytic premise that meaning is emotional as well as cognitive, and thus from a radical challenge to social science research: to paraphrase Stanley Cavell (1969), people don’t say what they mean. Communication is often tacit and unspoken, unconscious as well as conscious, and conveyed through affect. It depends on relational context. Like the clinician, the interviewer has to interpret, to try to understand meaning rather than simply transcribe. Otherwise, you end up with words, not meanings.7 Like the clinician, the researcher has to “listen to listening” and use her self to understand the other. We paid attention to students’ feelings during their research and thought about how to listen to affect and transference.8 I suggested that finding individual variation and individuality among research subjects was as worthy as finding commonalities about which to generalize.9 We read Casement, Faimberg, Schwaber, Jacobs, McLaughlin, Poland, and Loewald, marveling (as do clinical trainees) at how these analysts can be so self-aware and so focused on the other at the same time, and wondering how analysts tolerate the anxiety of listening to the patient, while holding theory in abeyance. One student reconsidered interviews with high-tech workers. He discovered that workplace behavior that on the surface seemed explainable in terms of the company’s incentive system and economic and organizational rationality, revealed, when given a second, more individuated look, a number of underlying motivational systems and a range of affects and fantasies. Workers’ accounts referenced relations to parents and specific personal anxieties and fears, in one case the feelings of a little boy judged by his mother/wife, and in another, fantasies about losing a primary identity as craftsman and musician.

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The concept of countertransference transformed another student’s understanding of puzzling patterns of interaction in her research in a former Iron Curtain country (Baranger, Baranger, and Mom [1983] would call this her “second look”). She could see how her own feelings, identifications, conflicts, and defenses had shaped how she interacted and what she heard. She could notice retrospectively how and when interviewees became anxious, shut down, or defensive and when they seemed able to think. With relief, another student described the difficulty of staying neutral, not judging or preferring some co-workers to others, as she looked back on her fieldwork in Silicon Valley: “The difficulty was, I had feelings and a personality.” In an undergraduate seminar, “Individuality and Society,” each student chose one person to study, whether through interviews, biography, memoir, or other documentary sources. I hoped to convey that you can understand a lot about someone when you know their race, family, ethnicity, gender, and social and historical location—this would be the social science perspective. Yet, however fine-tuned this sociocultural or intersectional analysis, you can never predict individual subjectivity. People bring emotion, temperament, fantasy and wish—give transferential meaning—to whatever comes from without. One year the class included identical twins. These twins helped, empirically, to make my point, for their classmates and themselves. You can come from the same culture, the same family, the same egg, and you still, finally, create your individuality from within. I return to “Psychoanalysis and Feminism.” Opening our discussion of Joan Riviere’s 1929 paper, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” a class member exclaimed, “That’s my life!” She was referring to this statement by Riviere: “The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing” (p. 306). Similarly, several students recognized themselves in Contratto’s “Father Presence in Female Development” (1987), which describes how large the father looms and is longed for in a young girl’s development. For feminists of my generation, Freud’s “A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men” (1910) was an object of virulent critique. It was sexist and objectifying of women. Yet now, a Korean-American student burst with excitement, “That’s exactly what a Korean man does! Freud describes it perfectly! The man marries a woman so he can bring a baby son home to his mother!” Several Asian American classmates agreed enthusiastically. These courses met the sense among students that there is something missing, in the abstractions of philosophy or learning about “the subject” through texts and theory in English and other fields in the humanities, between the sociocultural determinisms of the social sciences on the one side and the controlled experiments of psychology on the other. Where can students address the intense wonder and curiosity they feel about people? About themselves? When I undertook psychoanalytic training, I knew that I wanted to have a psychoanalytic practice and that I’d gone as far as possible in my writing without clinical experience. But I was unprepared for the effects of this training on my teaching. I gained a much deeper understanding of how affect and fantasy help

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shape cognition and perception and enable or prevent thinking, of the fact that students cannot learn when they are too anxious. My professorial task, as I and others who met yearly at the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium often discussed, came to feel as much clinical as pedagogic, containing anxiety and helping students to be curious and see the other’s point of view. In some courses I reminded students early on that we would be studying emotionally charged topics. If they felt that a topic would be too upsetting or close to home, they could come to that week’s classes or not, read the assignment or not. If they felt they could do so, they could let me know about their decision. I came to think that academic training—in which students are often taught to read for faults and problems, and discourse can be adversarial—creates an atmosphere that makes it hard to think. Reading rebounds into conscious and unconscious worry about being criticized or superego attacks on the self. I hoped students could notice how a writer’s mind works, even if they also felt critical or thought that an author was completely wrong.10 I came to see students, especially undergraduates, not as abstract learners but more in terms of their particular developmental place and its attendant forms of relationship, with characteristic conflicts, tasks, and anxieties. My theoretical stance before training, that meaning and experience are created from within as much as from without, gained a clinically based certainty that seems to have been communicated to students. They welcomed recognition of the intense wonder and curiosity they feel about the marvel of unique individuality, and, in thinking about research, they were drawn to the idea of listening not driven by theory—the idea that one can “listen to” rather than “listen for.” In Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear remarks: Everyone has his or her own version of “if I had a dime for every time . . . I’d be rich.” My version is . . . for every time a student came to my office hours and said, “I tried taking a course in psychology, but it didn’t seem to be about psychology.” The students can never clearly articulate their sense of what is missing but they are filled with longing. (1998, p. 8) I generalize this longing. Individuology, a field that studies the self and individuality, is a missing field in the academy. Such a field would address a scotoma within the social sciences, fields that presume to explain individual motivation, feeling, and behavior without a theory or methodology for investigating them. It would complement, with empirical and epistemological grounding, the psychoanalytic interpretation of human motivation and meaning in the humanities. It would address concerns that interest everyone and ways of being that, without sufficient attention, lead us personally, socially, and politically astray. Currently, psychoanalysis more than any other field describes individuality, the self and selfhood, in their full complexity. It provides theories and clinical descriptions of how individuality develops and how to think about flaws, difficulties, and emptiness in individual selfhood. It models potential methodologies for studying

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individuals and an epistemology for such study, one that enables individuals to study and understand themselves at the same time. I return to my student. Who wouldn’t be uncomfortable at graphic description and discussion of female and male sexuality, genital anxiety, and the fluid uncertainty of gender identity? Yet, this wise young man put it well. These matters of individuality, self, and sexuality are what “every one of us thinks about 24/7!”

Notes 1 Until the publication of The Unhappy Divorce of Psychoanalysis and Sociology, I knew only two other sociologists, Jeffrey Prager and Neil Smelser, both University of California colleagues who trained, as I did, at institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association. My own self-distancing from professional sociology surely fueled my ignorance, but the socio-ethnography of psychoanalysis itself, in which “mainstream” analysts like myself now know colleagues from “mainstream” relational and interpersonal institutes but not others, also contributed. 2 Freud begins this project, as he described wanting to help patients to make their unconscious conscious, to love and to work, or to replace neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness. As he also put it, where id was, there ego shall be. 3 Conceptualizations in the following paragraphs are drawn from The Power of Feelings. 4 This very chapter was conceived and written originally for presentation in a series on the self organized by the Scripps College Humanities Center. I subsequently presented versions to an intercollegiate psychoanalytic consortium composed mainly of academics from the humanities and to the Modern Language Association, at a yearly lecture cosponsored with the American Psychoanalytic Association (a jointly sponsored psychoanalytic lecture with the American Sociological Association, and I imagine with any other social science professional organization, is unimaginable—as actually taking place, that is). 5 Nobel Prizes are awarded only to the living. Kahneman emphasizes that this would have been a joint prize, had Tversky not died. 6 Well along in years, I still remember a childhood argument with my younger sister. “Raggedy Ann is on her own!” she claimed, along with two-thirds of the back seat. 7 Clinical supervisors and teachers run into similar problems when a trainee is required to or wants to record, and then transcribe, a clinical session. It becomes even more challenging than the usual challenge to get beyond words, to what the patient means, to what might be going on in the mind of the clinician, or to what is going on between them. 8 Colleagues close to hand modeled such attention to self and other. I have described Hochschild’s sociology of emotions and “empathy wall.” Describing her ethnographic school playground research, Thorne (1993) reports her own fascination with “popular girls.” Discussion of the history of reflexive sociology is well beyond my scope here. 9 Such techniques and forms of attention have been common practice in psychoanalytic anthropology, and indeed are to some extent required in all ethnography and much qualitative research. Yet with the exceptions of psychological-psychoanalytic ethnography and the sociology of emotions, attention to unconscious communication, relational patterns, and forms of experiencing has not been prominent. 10 I am indebted to the late Adrienne Applegarth for this pedagogic model. Applegarth, who also had a Ph.D. in physiology, was charged with teaching, at the very beginning of my training, Freud’s nearly incomprehensible Project for a Scientific Psychology. She said, at one point, “You know, Freud is completely wrong here, but it is so interesting to see how his mind works!” I think also of Herbert Schlesinger (2003), who says the patient is not resisting but doing the best he can.

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INDEX

17 Rue St. Fiacre 87–88 Adelman, Janet 254–255 adolescence, and identity 75–76 affect: of patient and analyst 72; and war baby generation 81, 82, 83–84; see also emotions aggression 17, 234; Freud on 23–27, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40–41, 42, 44–45, 49, 218; identification with the aggressor 27; Klein on 27–28, 28–29, 31–32, 33–34; and paranoid-schizoid functioning 29, 30, 33–34, 35–37, 38, 40, 44; postFreud theory 27–31 Akhtar, Salman 62 aliveness, sense of 252 Almond, Barbara 4 Almond, Gabriel 230 Almond, Richard 224 alpha elements 73, 136, 151, 196, 213 American Academy of Psychoanalysis xiii American independent tradition ix, xi, xii, xvi, 95, 114, 210; introduction and overview 1–18; national and cultural characteristics xii, 3; provisional features of 204–205; range of clinical/theoretical perspectives in 199; recapitulation 191–206 American Middle School 18n4 American psychoanalysis: criticisms of 15–18; history and development of 6–8, 173 American Psychoanalytic Association xiv, xix, xx, 5, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68n4, 173,

185; Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) 227, 239n1, 240n11 American Sociological Association 228 analysts: and curiosity 161; emphasis on in the analytic dryad 209–210, 214; home offices 203–204; loss and depression 148; mortality and death of 186–187; neutrality of 3, 151; perspectives of xv, 153–156; training of 216, 220–222; and uncertainty 147–148, 153, 155, 156, 160; see also analytic dyad; countertransference “Analyst’s fears, The” (Poland) 186 “Analyst’s witnessing and otherness, The” (Poland) 185–186 analytic dyad ix, 208, 210–211, 222–223; history of as a concept 208–210; and the individual 211–215; and narcissism 218–219; sexual boundary violations 222; sociality of 215–218; and training 220–222 analytic process: analysts’ perspectives 153–161; and narcissism 148, 162, 163, 164, 165–166, 168; patients’ perspectives 161–168; self and other paradoxes 151–153; self-knowledge paradoxes 147–150; and uncertainty 147–148; see also analytic dyad analytic relationship: Loewald on 121–122, 125, 129–130, 131–135, 132, 141 analyzing instrument, the 174 ancestors, turning of ghosts of the unconscious into 105, 107, 119, 138–141

282 Index

annihilation anxiety 24, 27, 28, 38 anthropology 229–230, 232, 237–238, 239, 246, 247, 252, 253, 256 anti-Semitism 33, 46n2, 46n6, 47n7, 60 Applegarth, Adrienne 262n10 Argentina xiv, 67 Arlow, Jacob xviii, 50, 118, 123, 126, 170n14, 194 Atwood, G.E. 194, 197 Austria, post-World War I generation 35

Breuer, Josef 44, 45, 49 Briggs, Jean 63 British independent tradition/Middle Group x, xi, xiii, xviii, 1, 3, 4–5, 18, 95, 130, 142n3, 152, 154, 159, 173, 192, 193, 196, 199, 206n3, 209, 210 British object relations theory x, xi, 7, 118, 210–211, 235, 236 Brown, Margaret Wise 214–215 Brown, Norman O. 6, 16

Babcock, Charlotte 180 “baby boomer” generation 77, 78 Balint, Alice x, xi, xiii, 223n4 Balint, Enid 4, 196, 206n4 Balint, Michael x, xi, xiii, 4, 5, 28, 206n4 Balsam, Rosemary 4, 20n17, 206n1, 235, 236 Baranger, Madeleine 209 Baranger, Willy 209 basic trust (Erikson’s developmental stage) x, 1, 9, 12, 33 Bass, Anthony 127 Bellah, Robert 230 Benedek, Therese 235 Benedict, Ruth 2, 35, 193, 230 Benjamin, Jessica 4, 33, 44, 133, 245, 247, 254 Berliner, Bernard 200 Bernfeld, Siegfried 200, 216 beta elements 73, 136, 149, 151, 196, 213 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 24 Bibring, Grete 199, 235 Bion, W./Bionians xi, xv, xix, 17, 30, 59, 136, 147, 149, 157, 159, 170n9, 170n13, 173, 210 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 36 Blackmun, Nancy 72, 73, 77–78, 80, 82–83, 87 “Blood of the Walsings, The” (Mann) 219 Boas, Franz 230 Boesky, Dale 4, 10, 142n6, 158, 197, 198 Bollas, Christopher 68n3, 112n13, 149, 155, 159, 196, 206n3, 206n4, 211–212, 248, 253 Bolshevism, Freud on 55, 56, 60, 67 Born into a World at War (Tymoczko and Blackmun) 72, 73, 77–78, 80, 83, 87; see also war baby generation boundary creation 118 boundary violations 222, 223 Bourdieu, Pierre 111n8, 239 Bowlby, John xi, 12, 88n5, 192 Brazil 67, 70n20 Brenner, Charles x, xvii, 50, 59, 118, 123, 126, 171n18, 194

Calef, Victor 200 Casement, Patrick 147, 155, 259 cathexis 101, 102, 124n2 Cavell, Stanley 62, 259 change, loss and mourning resulting from 164–165, 166 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 235 Childhood and Society (Erikson) x, 2, 11, 17, 74, 131, 192, 211–212, 248 children: childhood, and generations 74; contemporary infant research 97–100; infant development, and Loewald 97–100; need for intersubjective recognition 30; threat and danger experiences 29–30; see also mother-child relationship; war baby generation “chosen trauma” 39 Chused, Judith 4, 10, 197, 198 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) xvi, xviii, 23–27, 36, 39, 40–41, 42, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 67, 73, 100, 202, 218, 237 “‘Civilized’ sexual morality and modern nervous illness” (Freud) 40, 44, 50, 60 Civitarese, Guiseppe 70n17, 157 clinical psychology 66, 251 clinical science 66, 251 close-process ego psychology 157 close-surface listening 178, 201 cognitive psychology 253, 257 Cold War, and the war baby generation 85 collective violence see aggression Coltart, Nina 159, 196, 206n4 concordant countertransference xv container 30 containment 136 Contratto, Susan 260 Controversial Discussions x Cooley, Charles Horton 232 Cooper, Arnold 126–127, 198–199 Cooper, Steven 207n7 CORST (American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Research and Special Training) 227, 239n1, 240n11

Index  283

D-Day 78–79 deadness, sense of 252 death drive 28, 50, 52, 61, 126 defenses/defense mechanisms 131, 154, 155, 257 Denis, Paul 216 depression, and the analytic process 165–166, 168 depressive position 29, 30, 38, 108, 154, 164, 165, 166, 193 derealization 29 Derrida, Jacques 62 Deutsch, Helene 199 developmental psychology 97, 98, 228, 255 differentiation xi–xii, xviii, 5, 7, 8, 13, 27, 37, 39, 93, 96, 101, 102, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 126, 131, 211; primary 97–100 Dimen, Muriel 4, 247 displacement of people, by World War II 80–81, 83–84 disrupted identities 33 drive theory 8, 23–24, 27, 32, 39–40, 101, 131 dual drive theory 24, 45, 50, 52, 61 Du Bois, Cora 19n9, 230 Durkheim, Emile xviii, 23, 229, 230, 232, 256

ego integrity criterion 166–167 ego psychology ix, x–xi, xv, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 17, 95, 96, 104, 126, 130, 154, 156, 170n9, 173, 178, 192, 193, 208–209, 210; see also intersubjective ego psychology Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (Hartmann) 6 ego synthesis (Erikson) 75 Einstein, Albert 60–61 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The (Durkheim) 23 emotions 253; sociology of 234, 237; see also affect enactment xv, 3, 9, 10, 176, 197, 216, 217 “Endings in poetry, psychoanalysis, and life” (Poland) 186 epistemological relativism 54–55 Erikson, Erik ix–x, x–xi, xii, xiii, xvi, xviii, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 38, 50, 51, 67, 71, 79, 94, 95, 108, 131, 164, 165, 254, 258; and cultural and personality anthropology x, 11; eight-stage developmental theory ix, x, 1, 9, 12, 16, 185, 191, 194, 201; on ethnicity 13, 42; on generations 71, 74, 87; on identity and ego identity 12–13, 24, 33, 74–76, 81; identity crisis 75–76, 81; on inner and outer lives 73; on the mother-child relationship 9, 12; overview of 12–13, 16–17; on the psyche ix–x, 12, 51, 73, 74, 75, 192, 227; recapitulation on the American independent tradition 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206; Sam case 11; spoiled identities 13, 33; subjected identities 33 Erikson Institute for Education and Research at Austin Riggs x, 19n15 ethnic and racial violence 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 42, 44, 45 ethnicity: Erikson on 13, 42; Freud on 50 ethnography 62–63, 230, 238, 255–256 ethnomethodology 215 European psychoanalysis 4, 5, 7, 157 externalization 8, 100, 101, 118, 120, 121

economics 236, 246, 252, 256, 257 “Ego and reality” (Loewald) 96, 99, 103, 114, 115, 116, 120, 131 “Ego and the id, The” (Freud) 24, 114 ego identity 33, 74–75 ego integrity (Erikson’s developmental stage) x, 1, 9, 16, 108, 164, 165, 166–167, 168, 186, 191, 201

Faimberg, Haydée 73, 158, 204, 259 Fairbairn, W.R.D. x, xi, 5, 8, 28, 93, 100, 115, 118, 199, 206n4 family, as middle ground between the outer and the inner 71 Fanon, Franz 36 fantasy: internal 5, 30, 117, 209; Loewald on 106–107, 110, 120, 150

Coryell, Julie 84 Coser, Lewis 228, 230 Coser, Rose 228, 230 counterresistance 198 countertransference xv, 1, 3, 8, 9–10, 15, 63–64, 149, 151, 152, 153, 197, 209, 216, 249, 260; Loewald on 9, 10, 104–106, 109–110, 116, 119, 120, 150; McLaughlin on 174–175, 176–177, 179, 180; see also transference cultural capital 239 cultural ego psychology 4 cultural violence 37–39 culture and personality theory 2, 8, 11, 13, 193 cultures, and aggression 38–39 curiosity 161, 162, 164, 194, 200, 201

284 Index

“Father presence in female development” (Contratto) 260 fathers, and the war baby generation 81, 84, 85, 86 female aggression 41 feminism 247–248; feminist psychoanalysis 205, 206n1; first-wave 229; and psychoanalysis 229, 234–236, 245; second-wave 235, 247 Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (Chodorow) 93–94 Ferenczi, Sandor 11, 19 Ferro, Antonino 70n17, 157, 170n6, 202 Field, Hugh 78, 85 “flapper” generation 77 Flax, Jane 247 Fliegel, Zenia O. 235 Fogel, GeraId I. 116–117, 127, 135 Foley, Helena P. 229 Fonagy, Peter 30–31, 43, 216 France: French psychoanalysis 6, 7, 156, 159; nineteenth-century history 44 Frankfurt Institute/Frankfurt School 46n4, 55, 62, 64, 254 free association 126, 157, 158, 163, 164, 183 Freud, Anna 1, 5, 6, 7, 12, 27, 88n5, 154, 159, 173, 192, 194, 220, 257 Freud, Sigmund x, xii, xvi, 6, 7, 8, 9, 67, 72, 73, 87, 94, 95, 100, 101, 114, 115, 117, 128, 129, 136, 139, 148, 149, 154, 156, 171n18, 202, 232, 254, 258, 262n10; on aggression 23–27, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40–41, 42, 44–45, 49, 218; case reports 49, 203; on gender 229, 245, 247, 260; on Jewishness and antiSemitism 19n16, 25, 60; on Marxism and Bolshevism 55–56, 56–57, 60, 67; McLaughlin on 178–179; and meanings 149–150; on men and masculinity 40, 43–44; on penis envy and castration anxiety 41, 154; on the psyche 23, 56, 149, 151; psychoanalytic vision of 103; psychosexual stages 12–13; on religion 54; on sexual culture and education 50; on transference 104, 150, 151, 176, 208; on the weltanschauung xvii, 23, 48, 52–55, 56–58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67–68, 203, 239 “Freud’s conception of the negative therapeutic reaction, with some comments on instinct theory” (Loewald) 101 Friedman, Lawrence 128, 171n18, 200 Fromm, Erich xiv, 2, 28, 64, 193

Fromm-Reichman, Frieda 3, 193 “Future of an illusion, The” (Freud) 45, 50, 54, 56, 60, 67, 73 Gabbard, Glen O. 9, 199, 210 Gardiner, Robert 199 Gardner, Howard 82, 84 Garfinkel, Harold 215 Geertz, Clifford xix, 202, 230 Geisteswissenschaften 256 gender 205; Freud on 229, 245, 247, 260; and identity 42; McLaughlin on 180; in psychoanalysis 12–13, 40–41; psychology of 93 “Gender, relation and difference in psychoanalytic perspective” (Chodorow) xi–xii, 211 generations 71, 73–74, 76, 186; Erikson on 71, 74, 87; Mannheim on 77; psychological impact of 74–75 generativity (Erikson’s developmental stage) 1 genocidal violence 25, 33, 34, 44, 45 Germany: national humiliation after World War I 34, 37; post-World War I generation 35; see also Nazi Germany ghosts into ancestors 105, 107, 119, 138–141 G.I. Bill 77, 85 Gill, Merton 19n8 Gilligan, Carol 229 Gilligan, James 43 Goldner, Virginia 4, 227, 245, 247 Goodnight Moon (Brown) 214, 215 Graham-White, Anthony 81, 83 Gray, Paul x, xvii, 104, 126, 157, 194 Great Depression 77 “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego” (Freud) 36, 40, 50, 60, 67, 219 guilt, as aggression turned inwards 26, 29 Guntrip, Harry x, 5, 28, 206n4 Guralnik, O. 84–85 Hampstead Clinic 68n1, 192 Harris, Adrienne ix, x, 2, 4, 210, 247 Hartmann, Heinz x, xviii, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 50, 95, 96, 101, 129, 136, 173, 193 “Hate, humiliation, and masculinity” (Chodorow) 41 Havens, Leston 199 Healer’s Bent, The (McLaughlin) 172–173, 174, 176, 177–178, 179 Heidegger, Martin 17, 62 Hertz, N. 44

Index  285

“Heterosexuality as a compromise formation” (Chodorow) 251 history 238 Hobbes, Thomas 229, 230 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 63–64, 237, 240n6 Hoffman, Irving Z. 10, 15, 159 Hofstadter, Richard 230 Holmes, Dorothy 68n4 Holocaust, the xiv, 25, 44, 80–81, 82, 83, 84, 86–87, 241n15 Holtzman, D. 4, 236 home offices 203–204 Homeric hymn to Demeter, The (Foley) 229 homosexuality 175, 180 Horkheimer, Max 36 Horney, Karen 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 42–43, 44, 93, 193, 245 Hughes, Everett 192 humanities 254, 256 humiliation, and aggression 34, 38, 42, 45 Husserl, Edmund 215 identity: and aggression 33–35, 40; Erikson on 12–13, 24, 33, 74–76, 81; and gender 42; and humiliation 42–43; identity crisis 75–76, 81; identity fragments 13; psychosocial nature of 38; racial-ethniccultural 13; spoiled and outcast identities 13, 33; subjected identities 33 “Identity and uprootedness in our time” (Erikson) 74–75 identity crisis (Erikson) 75–76, 81 Ihara, Kazuko Iwasawa 81 illness and health, Loewald on 9 immigrants/immigration: aggression towards in United States 36; Erikson on 16; identities 33, 75; psychological impact of 74 implicit memory 149, 150, 151 indeterminacy, and the analytic process 11, 147, 148, 168 indigenous people, genocidal violence against 25 individual subjectivity xi, xiii, xx, 35, 133, 150, 162, 191, 202, 249, 256, 257, 258, 260 individual, the, and the analytic dyad 211–215 individuality xv, 3 Individualizing Gender and Sexuality (Chodorow) 226 individuation 5, 9, 126 individuology xx, 245, 246, 250, 252–254, 256, 258

infants see children; mother-child relationship inference 76, 253, 254, 257 inner life, of patients 211–212, 248, 251 “Instinct theory, object relations and psychic structure formation” (Loewald) 96, 98 internal fantasy 5, 30, 117, 209 internalization 116–117, 123, 126, 129 “Internalization, separation, mourning, and the superego” (Loewald) 94, 100, 101, 113–114, 115–123, 126, 218 interpersonal and cultural school psychoanalysis 2, 6, 7, 11, 12, 19n9, 206n1 interpersonal psychoanalysis xv, 1, 3, 14, 157, 192, 193 interpersonal-cultural psychoanalysis 2, 6 “Interpretation of dreams, The” (Freud) 50, 139 interpretation 3, 7, 14, 19n14, 137–138, 139, 140, 141, 154, 157, 167, 178, 200 intersubjective ego psychology ix, xi, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14–15, 95, 114, 158, 173, 184, 226; and countertransference 9–10; recapitulation on 191, 193, 194, 198, 199; see also ego psychology intersubjective-cultural field 12 intersubjectivity 116, 117, 126, 133–134, 153, 194, 200–201 intimacy (Erikson’s developmental stage) 1 Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis (Poland) xix, 183, 184–185, 186 IPA/International Psychoanalytical Association xix, xxiii, 68n3, 70n16, 70n17, 70n20, 199, 224n14, 241n15 Irigaray, Luce 245 Israel 36, 46n2, 46n6 Italian psychoanalysis 156, 159, 199, 210 Jacobs, Theodore J. 4, 10, 135, 158, 197, 198, 204, 210, 259 Jacobson, Edith 151 Japan, and World War II 80, 81, 84 Japanese-Americans 80, 81 Jessie Bernard Award 228 Jewishness/Jewish identity 79–80, 241n15; Freud on 50, 60 Jews: in Freud 25–26; and the Holocaust xiv, 44, 80–81, 82, 83, 84, 86–87, 241n15 Joseph, Betty 59, 213–214 Jung, C.G./Jungians 59, 154 Kahneman, Daniel 240n9, 255 Kakar, Sudhir 62

286 Index

Kardiner, Abram 2, 11, 193 Katzlberger, Peter 81, 83 Kestenberg, J.S. 235 Klein, Melanie/Kleinians xi, xv, xix, 1, 3, 5, 17, 93, 95, 100, 108, 117, 118, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 162–163, 173, 192, 209, 210, 255, 258; on aggression 27–32, 33–34; on countertransference 152; drive theory 24, 40; on good breast/good object 27–29, 31; on the psyche 24, 28, 29 Kohut, H./Kohutians xi, 33, 94, 95, 124n9, 155, 157, 158 Kosovo 34 Kris, Ernst xviii, 142n1 Kubie, L.S. 216 Kulish, N. 4, 236 Lacan, Jacques/Lacanians xi, 17, 102, 156, 157, 158, 169n2, 220, 239, 254 Lakoff, Robin 170n11 language 72; Loewald on 99–100, 101–102, 138, 151–152 Latin American psychoanalysis xix, 5, 7, 156, 170n9, 199, 209 League of Nations 60, 61 Lear, Jonathan 199, 261 Lee, Dorothy 230 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 229 libido 9, 13, 17, 100, 101, 104, 115, 117, 139, 151, 218 listening for 156, 157, 158, 159–160, 176, 205, 261 listening to 156–157, 159–160, 176, 178, 205, 261 Little, Margaret xiii, 4, 206n4 local knowledge 202–203 Locke, John 229, 230 Loewald, Hans ix, x–xi, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii–xviii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 61, 71, 93–96, 110–111, 128–129, 149, 153, 164, 165, 183, 185, 209, 212, 215, 254, 255, 258, 259; on the analytic relationship 121–122, 125, 129–130, 131–135, 132, 141; doubled vision of 96–97, 110; on fantasy 106–107, 110, 120, 150; ghosts into ancestors 105, 107, 119, 138–141; on illness and health 9; on interpretation 14, 110, 121, 127, 132, 136–137, 138, 139, 140, 141; on language 99–100, 101–102, 138, 151–152; and meanings 150; on the mother-child relationship ix, 13, 99–100, 103, 109, 111, 126, 127, 132, 136, 138, 142, 151; on the Oedipus

complex 102, 108, 109, 110, 111, 119, 126; overview of 13–14, 17; on the primary process 17, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 119, 128, 138, 142, 150, 197; primary undifferentiation and contemporary infant research 97–100; on the psyche 16, 93, 95, 96, 100–103, 114–115, 126, 136; on psychic apparatus 135–136; recapitulation on the American independent tradition 191, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206; on the secondary process 13, 17, 96, 100, 101, 102–103, 104, 106, 110, 119, 120, 123, 126, 139, 197; on the superego 116, 118–119, 120; training 11; on transference and countertransference 9, 10, 104–106, 109–110, 116, 119, 120, 150; on the unconscious 104–107, 140; vision of psychoanalytic goals 103–110 Loewenberg, Peter; on World War I generation 34–35; University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium co-founder 227 Loewenstein, Rudolph xviii Lorber, Judith 228 loss: and aggression 37; and the psychoanalytic process 148, 164 Luker, Kristin 240n6 Lyotard, J.-F. 62 Maenchen, Anna 200 Mahler, Margaret 12, 93–94, 97, 98, 132 Malinowski, Bronislaw 230 Mann, Thomas 219 Mannheim, Karl 61, 77, 81, 256 Marcuse, Herbert 6 Martin, Karin 227 Marx, Karl 229, 232 Marxism, Freud on 55–56, 56–57, 60, 67 maternality 180 Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd 245 McDougall, Joyce 159 McKee, Braxton 128 McLaughlin, James T. xix, 4, 10, 88n1, 135, 160, 172–181, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 259; dumb, blind and hard spots 160, 168, 171n17, 174, 176, 177, 178, 200; on listening to 158–159; on transference-countertransference 174–175, 176–177, 179, 180 Mead, George Herbert xv, 193, 230, 232 Mead, Margaret 2, 230 meanings 149–150, 162, 164, 249–250; emotional element of 259; Freud on 149–150; and individuality 232–233

Index  287

Melting the Darkness (Poland) 183, 195 men and masculinity: castration anxiety 41, 154; Freud on 40, 43–44; paternal third 43; and violence 24, 39–44, 45; see also gender Merton, Robert 230 Middle Group/British independent tradition x, xi, xiii, xviii, 1, 3, 4–5, 18, 95, 130, 142n3, 152, 154, 159, 173, 192, 193, 196, 199, 206n3, 209, 210 migrants see immigrants/immigration Milner, Marion xiii, 4, 150, 159, 168, 196, 203, 206n4 mirroring 137, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 196, 205 Mitchell, Juliet 247 Mitchell, Stephen A. ix, x, 2, 28, 30, 111n1, 128, 199 Mitscherlich, A. 36 Modell, Arnold H. 195, 198 morality, weakening of 26 Moran, G.S. 30–31, 43 “Moses and monotheism” (Freud) 40, 58, 60 mother-child relationship 151–152, 212, 213, 220, 248–249; Erikson on 9, 12; Loewald on ix, 13, 99–100, 103, 109, 111, 126, 127, 132, 136, 138, 142, 151; mother-daughter relationship 229; and the war baby generation 84–85 motherhood studies 240n6 mourning 116; and aggression 37; and the psychoanalytic process 164 “Mourning and melancholia” (Freud) 114, 255 music 202–203 Nadelson, Carol 4 Nadelson, T. 236 Nagel, J.J. 203 narcissism 28, 155; and aggression 34; and the analytic dyad 218–219; and the analytic process 148, 162, 163, 164, 165–166, 168; and patients 162, 163, 164, 165–166, 168 “narcissism of minor differences, the” (Freud) 25, 26, 39, 42, 65 nationalism, and aggression 23, 33, 36, 45 Native Americans 16, 33 Naturwissenschaften 256 Nazi Germany 17, 27, 34, 67, 80 Nemiroff, Robert 227 neuroscience 62, 63, 65, 66, 97, 149, 237, 253, 254 neutrality, of analysts 3, 151

“New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis” (Freud) 48, 60; Lecture XXIX 48; Lecture XXX 48; Lecture XXXI 26–27, 48, 53; Lecture XXXII 48, 53; Lecture XXXIII 48, 52, 53; Lecture XXXIV 48; Lecture XXXV (see “Question of a Weltanschauung, The” (Freud)) Nields, J.A. 127 Nolen-Hoeksema, S. 165 non-recognition, emotional impact of 33; see also recognition Notman, Malkah 236 Obata, Chiura 80 Obeyesekere, Gananath 35, 37, 63, 237–238 object loss 116, 117 object relations theory 100, 126; British x, xi, 7, 118, 210–211, 235, 236 object, the, aggression against 27–28 Oedipus complex 27, 154, 156, 157, 186, 220; Loewald on 102, 108, 109, 110, 111, 119, 126; oedipal emancipation 166 Ogden, T.H. 149, 152, 209 omnipotence 108, 154, 156, 157, 162, 166, and impotence 165 “On internalization” (Loewald) 114, 118 “On narcissism” (Freud) 26, 114, 218 “On social regression” (Slater) 218 “On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis” (Loewald) 13–14, 94, 96, 99, 104–106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125–127, 129, 130, 141–142; analytic stance 131–135; analytical activity, interpretation and the topographic 136–138; psychic apparatus 135–136 “On the use of an object and relating through identifications” (Winnicott) 28 “one-person” psychology ix, xi, xiii, 3, 7, 8, 9, 14–15, 150, 151, 156–157, 173, 183, 191, 193, 194, 196, 204–205, 209, 211, 226 Open minded: working out the logic of the soul (Lear) 261 Oppens, Ursula 84 other, the, Poland’s regard for 184–185, 187 “Outline of psycho-analysis, an” (Freud) 58 Palestine 34, 46n2, 46n6 Papers on Psychoanalysis (Loewald) 13, 114, 122 paranoid-schizoid functioning 45, 149, 154; and aggression 29, 30, 33–34, 35–37, 38, 40, 44

288 Index

Paris Psychoanalytic Society 216 Parsons, Michael 130, 149, 155, 159, 196, 200, 206n3, 206n4, 207n6 Parsons, Talcott xvii, 62, 64, 65, 129, 192 paternal third 43 patients: inner life of 211–212, 248, 251; and narcissism 162, 163, 164, 165–166, 168; perspectives on the analytic process 161–168; and uncertainty 148; see also analytic dyad Patterns of Culture (Benedict) 2 persecutory anxiety 27, 28, 29 Person, Ethel S. 4, 41, 42–43, 236, 245 personality psychology 255 personology 247 phallic narcissism 42–43 philosophy 252–253, 254 Pinsky, Ellen xv, 132 “Pleasures of mind” (Schwaber) 226, 239n1 Poland, Warren xiii, xix, 4, 8, 15, 133, 135, 153, 158, 182–187, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 204, 211, 259 political anarchism 54–55 political science 246, 256 postmodernism/poststructuralism 232, 254 Power of Feelings, The (Chodorow) xiii, 149, 154, 164, 195, 226, 249, 250 Prager, J. 37, 262n1 primary process 72, 148, 149, 152, 258; Loewald on 17, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 119, 128, 138, 142, 150, 197 “Primary process, secondary process, and language” (Loewald) 99, 100, 101, 102, 120, 121, 138 primary undifferentiation 97–100 “Problem of defense and the neurotic interpretation of reality, The” (Loewald) 131 procedural memory 149, 151 Project for a scientific psychology (Freud) 262n10 projection 24, 27, 28, 29, 33–34, 38, 39, 44, 106; owning of 165, 166 projection-introjection 155, 205 projective identification xv, 24, 27, 33–34, 154, 155, 157, 210 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber) 23 psyche, the xii, 10, 30–31, 32, 33, 160, 193–194, 195, 209, 210, 234, 258; Erikson on ix–x, 12, 51, 73, 74, 75, 192, 227; Freud on 23, 56, 149, 151; Klein on 24, 28, 29; Loewald on 16, 93, 95, 96, 100–103, 114–115, 126, 136

psychic apparatus, in Loewald 16, 107, 130–131, 135–136, 140, 141, 194 psychoanalysis: and individuology 247, 256–257, 261; sex and gender 12–13, 40–41; and the social sciences xvi, 49, 50, 53, 58, 60, 61, 62–66, 67, 202, 226, 227, 228–235, 236–239; and sociology 64–65, 226, 228–229, 231–235; weltanschauung of 48, 53–54, 58, 59, 60, 61; see also analytic dyad; analytic process “Psychoanalysis and science” (Brenner) 50 Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (Loewald) xvii, 192 “Psychoanalysis as an art and the fantasy character of the psychoanalytic situation” (Loewald) 106, 107, 120, 134, 135 psychoanalytic anthropology 62–63 psychoanalytic diaspora 4, 6, 7 psychoanalytic sociology 64–65, 215 “Psychoanalytic theory and the psychoanalytic process” (Loewald) 134, 135 “Psychoanalytic visions and personal meaning” (Chodorow) xiii–xiv psychological anthropology 229–230 psychology in the university 246, 247, 252, 254, 255, 256 psychosexual developmental perspective 7–8 “Question of a Weltanschauung, The” (Freud) xviii, 23, 48, 52–55, 56–58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67–68, 203, 239 race and racism xiv, 68n4, 205, 241n15 Racker, Heinrich xv Rapaport, David 194 rational choice theory in economics 236 Ray, Raka 240n6 “Reality and actuality: An address” (Erikson) 79 recognition 33, 136, 197, 200; and individuology 253–254 Refugee Scholars in America (Coser) 228 refugees, psychological impact on 74, 81, 238 “Regarding the other” (Poland) 187 Reider, Norman 200 “relational individualism” 5, 226 relational psychoanalysis xv, 3, 95, 152, 154, 157, 173, 210 religion: Freud on 50, 56, 59; Loewald on 9; religious violence 25, 33, 44 Renik, Owen 4, 10

Index  289

repairs 154, 157, 198, 205 reparation 29, 38, 43, 102, 164, 180 repression 26, 140, 212, 257 Reproduction of Mothering, The (Chodorow) x, xi, xvi, 85, 228, 235, 248–249 resistances 154, 155, 196 Rio de la Plata psychoanalysis 159, 170n9; see also Latin American psychoanalysis Riviere, Joan 245, 260 Róheim, Géza 11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 229, 230 Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Elliott and Prager) xi Runaway Bunny, The (Brown) 214–215 ruptures 137, 154, 157, 158, 160, 193, 196 Sagan, E. 26, 27 Sakai, Robert 81 Sampson, Harold 200 San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute 227 Sandler, Joseph 152 Sapir, Edward xv, 2, 193 Schachtel, E.G. 212, 258 Schafer, Roy 121, 135, 196–197 Schlesinger, Herbert 196, 262n10 Schutz, Alfred 61, 215 Schwaber, Evelyn 158 Schwaber, Paul 226, 239n1, 259 secondary process 72, 149, 150, 152; Loewald on 13, 17, 96, 100, 101, 102–103, 104, 106, 110, 119, 120, 123, 126, 139, 197 sectarian violence 25, 33, 35, 44 Segal, H. 37 self and other, paradox of 151–153 self psychology xi, 94, 128, 158, 173, 210 self-expression, and aggression 29–30 self-knowledge, paradoxes of 147–150 self-recognition 253–254 Semrad, Elvin 199, 216 sex and gender in psychoanalysis 12–13, 40–41 sexual boundary violations 222 Shakespeare, William 254–255 Shengold, L. 164 silence 223n6; and the war baby generation 84–85 Simmel, Georg xviii, 23, 61, 217–218, 219, 230, 232, 256 Slater, Philip 44, 218, 219 Smelser, Neil 62, 230, 231, 262n1 Smith, Adam 230 social psychology 255

social sciences, the 211–212, 246, 247, 248, 254, 255–256; and psychoanalysis xvi, 49, 50, 53, 58, 60, 61, 62–66, 67, 202, 226, 227, 228–235, 236–239 “Sociological eye and the psychoanalytic ear, The” (Chodorow) 231–234, 236 sociological phenomenology 215 sociology 192, 202, 246, 247, 252, 253, 256, 257; of emotions 234, 237; and psychoanalysis 64–65, 226, 228–229, 231–235 South Africa, post-apartheid era 39 “Special type of object choice made by men, A” (Freud) 260 Spezzano, C. 18n4 Spillius, Elizabeth Bott 68n1, 240n11 splitting 24, 27, 28–29, 34, 38, 39, 44, 45, 106, 154, 155, 157, 257 Steiner, J. 213 Stern, D.B. 97, 98–99 Stewart, A.J. 165 Stoller, R.S. 41, 44, 235 Stolorow, R.D. 133, 194, 197 Strachey, J. 127, 208 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild) 63–64, 237 structural theory 6–7, 24, 27, 50, 93, 104, 118, 123, 149 structural-functionalism 232 “Studies on hysteria” (Breuer and Freud) 40, 45, 49–50, 58, 171n18 Suicide (Durkheim) 23 Sullivan, Harry Stack xv, xviii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 67, 173, 193, 214 Sun, Betty Chang 84 “Superego and time” (Loewald) 114, 119, 120 superego, the 50; Loewald on 116, 118–119, 120; and repression 26–27 symbolization, and paranoid-schizoid functioning 36–37 Tanz, Christine 84 Target, M. 30–31, 43 Tartakoff, Helen 199 Tavistock Clinic 68n1, 192 termination 217–218; loss and mourning 120, 121–122, 164–165, 167 terrorism 25, 33 third, presence of 43 Thompson, Clara 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 193 Thorne, Barrie 240n6 “Thoughts for the times on war and death” (Freud) 51–52, 67 threats, and aggression 29–30, 45

290 Index

“Too late: the reproduction and non-reproduction of mothering” (Chodorow) 167 Torges, C.M. 165 torture 25, 33, 44, 45 “Totem and taboo” (Freud) 40, 45, 50, 57, 60, 67, 237 “Toward a relational individualism” (Chodorow) xii Training in ambiguity (Coser) 228 training of analysts 216, 220–222 transference xv, 1, 3, 8, 15, 104, 152, 153, 162, 208–209, 216, 249, 250; Freud on 104, 150, 151, 176, 208; and individuology 253; Loewald on 9, 10, 104–106, 109–110, 116, 119, 120, 125, 126, 134, 135, 139–140, 141, 142, 150, 177; McLaughlin on 174–175, 176–177, 179, 180; as a resistance 5; see also countertransference “Transference and counter-transference” (Loewald) 107, 109–110, 134, 135 “Transference, psychic reality, and countertransference” (McLaughlin) 172, 174 “Transference to the analyst as an excluded observer” (Steiner) 213 “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena” (Winnicott) 131, 258–259 trauma: “chosen trauma” 39; collective 39; political and social xiv tribal violence 25, 33, 44 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa 39 Turner, Victor 230 Tversky, Amos 240n9, 255 “Twentieth-century American psychoanalysis” (Chodorow) xi “two-person” psychology ix, xi, 3, 8, 15, 133, 156, 157, 173, 174, 176, 183, 191, 192, 197, 211, 226; “two-person separate” perspective xiii, 14, 133, 174, 176, 183, 184, 185, 197, 198; “twoperson unified” perspective xiii, 8, 174, 184, 185, 197 Tymoczko, M. 72, 73, 77–78, 80, 83, 87 uncertainty 200; and the analytic process 147–148 unconscious, the 149, 254, 257–258; and American psychoanalysis 17; ghosts into ancestors 105, 107, 119, 138–141; Loewald on 104–107, 140 Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis, The (Chancer and Andrews) xx, 64–65, 262n1

United States: aggression towards immigrants 36; gun violence 46n2; see also American independent tradition; American psychoanalysis University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium 227, 260 Varvin, Sverre 241n15 V-E Day 79 Vermeule, Emily 230 Vietnam War student protests 78 violence see aggression Volkan, Vamik 39 Wacquant, Loïc 111n8 Wallerstein, Immanuel 70n16 Wallerstein, Robert xix, 70n16, 70n20, 156, 200 “Waning of the Oedipus complex, The” (Loewald) 71, 96, 102, 108, 109, 114, 119, 186, 191 war baby generation 72–73, 74, 75, 76, 77–88 Weber, Max xviii, 23, 61, 120, 229, 230, 232, 256 Weinshel, Edward 200 Weiss, Joseph 200, 216 weltanschauung, the, Freud on xvii, 23, 48, 52–55, 56–58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67–68 Whitebook, J. 127 Whiting, Beatrice 230 Whiting, John W.M. 44 “Why war?” (Freud) 60–61, 67, 73 Windholz, Emanuel 200 Winnicott, D.W. x, xi, xiii, 4, 5, 8, 14, 28, 29, 30, 33, 37, 94, 95, 108, 112n13, 131, 132, 134, 136, 149, 150, 153, 164–165, 192, 196, 203, 206n4, 209, 255, 258–259 wisdom and ego integrity 166 witnessing, Poland’s concept of 185 “Womanliness as a masquerade” (Riviere) 260 women: female aggression 41; and psychoanalysis 235–236; self-mutilation 43; see also gender World War I: and Freud 51–52; psychological impact of 74 World War II 80–81; D-Day 78–79; psychological impact of 74; V-E Day 79; see also war baby generation Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 247 Zetzel, Elizabeth 199