Attachment, Volume 1, March 2007
Editorial
Joseph Schwartz, Editor
Psychoanalysis, as the science of the human inner world of
subjective experience, has had an unusually troubled history
in the history of Western science. Freud’s innovation
of the invention of the analytic hour as an instrument analogous
to the telescope and the microscope, with the fact that listening
instead of seeing was the way it was used, guaranteed a hostile
reception from scientific quarters. Even today, when all else
fails, psychoanalysis is slated by professors of English no
less, as not being scientific.
Similarly, the fact that attention to human emotional life
was denigrated as ‘women’s work’ guaranteed
a hostile reception in the larger culture. In the context
of Western patriarchy, women’s “intuition”
was recognised patronisingly as a property only women have,
an utterly mysterious ability to know what some else is feeling,
in a culture where feelings are like dirty laundry, to be
cleaned up in private thank you very much. Meanwhile so-called
rationality and objectivity were elevated in Western culture
to be the highest form of human mental life, indubitably male.
In our culture facts are objective and certain, feelings are
subjective and uncertain. Thinking proceeds best when devoid
of feeling.
Some years ago CLR James traced the origin of emotionless
“rationality” to the rise of the Bristol-based
slave trade in the early 19th century. There was a pounds
and pence reality to the so-called golden triangle. Manufactured
cotton goods from the Lancashire mills were shipped to West
Africa where imprisoned Africans were taken on board in shackles
and chains, transported to plantations in the US South where
raw cotton was taken on board for shipment back to Bristol.
The profits were an astronomical 300%. Emerald Davis’
article in this issue shows the endemic racism in our society,
a continuing painful and criminal legacy of the slave trade.
Rationality involved the sacrificing of human feeling at the
crime of the slave trade in favour of the’ rational’
appreciation of the profits to be had. Our cultural obsession
with the idea of emotionless thought has only recently been
shown to be the fantasy that it always was as the brain imaging
techniques of the 1990s have shown that thinking is impossible
without affect.
All clinicians will recognise the continuing stigma attached
to counselling and psychotherapy. In spite of the recognition
of the usefulness of disaster counselling and of the use of
cognitive behaviour therapy as a barely tolerated short cut
treatment, the fact of 100 years of successes in the healing
of mental pain in the therapeutic relationship is treated
with dismissal at best and a continuing contempt for our clients
for seeking help at worst.
There is the story of Freud’s encounter with the Viennese
taxman. Questioning Freud’s lack of income the taxman
said “but surely there must be more. After all Professor
Freud’s reputation hardly ends at the borders of Austria”.
Freud replied, “No, it begins at the borders of Austria”.
In a climate of hostility it is not surprising that a rigidity
and fragility characterises the historical development of
psychoanalysis. As the interviews with Peter Fonagy and Richard
Bowlby in this issue show, Bowlby was excoriated for taking
seriously and theorising the child’s attachment to its
mother. “Not psychoanalysis” was the cry from
his community. It is this fragility that has prevented psychoanalysis
from having a more robust, confident, flexible awareness of
its strengths as our one and only science of the inner world,
with confidence in its very real achievements to its credit.
.
Consider for example a comparison of developments in the
history of physics to developments in the history of psychoanalysis.
The parallels may be surprising to those accustomed to the
denigration of psychoanalysis as “not scientific”
as well as to those accustomed to denigration of innovations
in psychoanalysis as “not psychoanalytic”.
Let us take physics as the way we have understood our experience
of the natural world and take psychoanalysis as the way we
have understood our experience of the human inner world as
the basic parallel. The historical parallels of the major
figures then become clear. Newton is paired with Freud, Faraday
and Maxwell pair with Fairbairn and Einstein pairs with Bowlby.
This is how it works. Newton was the first theorist of the
motion of the heavenly bodies as revealed by the telescope.
Freud was the first theorist of the human inner world as revealed
by the analytic hour. Among the things that Newton got wrong
was his assumption that forces acted instantaneously across
a distance. Among the things that Freud got wrong was his
assumption that human beings, in the first instance, were
pleasure seeking.
In physics 150 years after Newton, Faraday and Maxwell showed
that Newton was wrong: the electric force – wireless
telegraphy – did not act instantaneously across a
distance. Further they showed that the electric force travelled
at the speed of light. In psychoanalysis, 50 years after Freud,
Fairbairn showed that Freud was wrong. Human beings were not
pleasure seeking they were object (relational) seeking. Further,
Fairbairn showed that pleasure seeking was a deterioration
of object seeking, a last resort to release the tension of
unmet relational needs. .
Finally, twenty years after Maxwell, Einstein worked out
the fundamental implications of no instantaneous interactions
across a distance. This was the theory of relativity. Einstein
recognised that if there were no instantaneous interactions
in nature there had to be a maximum possible velocity in nature,
nothing can go faster than the velocity of light, a fact that
still astonishes to this day. And finally twenty years after
Fairbairn, Bowlby worked out the fundamental implications
of human beings as object seeking, not pleasure seeking. This
was attachment theory. Bowlby recognised that human beings
cannot become human without being in human relationships,
a fact that still astonishes to this day.
Recall that 50 years ago the dominant thinking was that
it didn’t matter who a child was with as long as they
were kind. And in physics, fifty years ago there was still
resistance to the theory of relativity notably in the person
of the British physicist Herbert Dingle who in the pages of
the respected journal Nature, published repeated articles
challenging the existence of a maximum possible speed, while
at the same time other physicists amused themselves by publishing
their fantasies about so-called tachyons, presumed particles
that never travelled less than the speed of light. Engaging
with the world as it really is is difficult, even for physicists.
Thomas Kuhn theorised this difficulty in his famous introduction
of the concept of the paradigm shift. Psychoanalysis is going
through just such a paradigm shift from drive theory to attachment
and relationality, from a one person psychology to a two and
many person psychology from the blank screen to the intersubjective
space. Here are a dozen markers of the ongoing paradigm shift
in our science of the human inner world.
Vienna 1898: Freud argues with himself
about biology versus psychology:
I am not at all in disagreement with you, not at all
inclined to leave the psychology hanging in the air without
an organic basis. But apart from this I do not know how
to go on, neither theoretically nor therapeutically and
therefore must behave as if only the psychological were
under consideration (Freud to Fliess 22 September 1898).
Washington, 1919: William Alanson White
on individuality versus relationality:
… the smallest society conceivable would be composed
of two individuals, but there is another element that enters
that is of great importance and that is the relationship
between the two individuals, and that relationship is a
higher state than either one of the individuals alone and
contains possibilities which are not resident in either
one. (Jelliffe papers,
5 November 1919)
Vienna, 1927: Freud tries to bring
rules of argument into the Anna Freud-Klein dispute:
I only became angry when Jones in a private letter and public
ally in the symposium ascribed Anna’s views to the
fact that she was insufficiently analysed. This is plain
indecent and should not have been allowed to occur (Hughes
1992; 9 October 1927)
Washington, 1937: William
Alanson White on separation anxiety as basic:
…when the individual is separated as it were from
those whom he loves or upon whom he is dependent or to whom
he looks for guidance, then there develops the separation
anxiety which is at the bottom of neuroses and psychoses
(White, 1937: p.127)
London, 1940: Bowlby enters the lists
on the centrality of separation anxiety:
If it became a tradition that small children were never
subjected to complete or prolonged separation from their
parents in the same way that regular sleep and orange juice
have become nursery traditions, I believe that many cases
of neurotic character development would be avoided (Holmes,1993
p.21).
London 1942: Marjorie Brierley frames
the paradigm conflict:
One way of stating the problem before us is to ask the question:
Is a theory of mental development in terms of infant object
relationships compatible with theory in terms of instinct
vicissitudes? (King and Steiner, 1991; 18 February 1942)
Zurich, 1946: Jung on the importance
of subjectivity for the therapy relationship:
The doctor must go to the limit of his subjective possibilities,
otherwise the patient will be unable to follow suit. (Jung,
1946)
London 1946: Fairbairn’s first
principle of relational psychoanalysis:
…the general proposition [is] that libido is not primarily
pleasure seeking but object seeking. The clinical material
on which this proposition is based may be summarised in
the protesting cry of a patient to this effect - 'You're
always talking about my wanting this or that desire satisfied;
but what I really want is a father’ (Fairbairn, 1946;
p.137).
New York, 1953: Sullivan states the
interpersonal principle of relationality:
Nothing matters except that the analyst permit the patient
to feel comfortable and secure enough to give up his defensive
narcissistic isolation and to use the physician for resuming
contact with the world (Sullivan, 1953; p.245).
London 1956: Winnicott reformulates Klein
relationally:
The 'good breast' is not a thing. It is a name given
to a technique. It is the name given to the presentation
of the breast (or bottle) to the infant, a most delicate
affair and one which can only be done well enough at the
beginning if the mother is in a most curious state of sensitivity
which I for the time-being call the State of Primary Maternal
Preoccupation. Unless she can identify very closely with
the infant at the beginning she cannot have a good breast
because just having the thing means nothing whatever to
the infant (Newman, 1995; p.182)
London, 1962. Guntrip summarises his
relational perspective:
Psychodynamic theory is an independent discipline whose
subject matter is the personal motivated life of human beings
in their mutual relationships. Any attempt to construct
such a psychological science on the pattern of physiological
thinking involves a depersonalisation and falsification
of the subject matter (Guntrip, 1962; p.75)
London 1974. Anna Freud acknowledges
the passing of drive theory:
Psychoanalysis is above all a drive psychology. But
for some reason people do not want to have that. (Young-Bruehl,
1988)
Psychoanalysis has always been plagued by a certain elitism.
Freud himself referred to only “worthwhile persons”
as being suitable for the talking cure. And there still is
today a tendency to make class biased judgments about who
is and who is not suitable for the talking cure. Attachment
theory is far more democratic in its outlook than many aspects
of classical psychoanalysis. Attachment categories –
disorganised, dismissing and preoccupied are exceptionally
useful aetiological/diagnostic descriptions as opposed to
the scientistic language of the Standard Edition. Motivated
by the insecurity caused by the marginalisation of psychoanalysis
in the larger culture, James Strachey and his colleagues have
given us a desiccated, humourless and rigid Freud, impervious
to innovation and development. Thus we stand across from Freud
in awe rather than shoulder to shoulder with him as colleagues
looking at our joint project together.
Attachment is now in the air as the framework of choice informing
the treatment of mental pain. This journal is dedicated to
its further clinical development. We invite all colleagues
who share our values to contribute to the continuing development
of a humane, effective treatment of mental distress.
References
Ferenczi, Sandor (1932), Confusion of Tongues between Adults
and Child. (Original title: The Language of Tenderness and
the Language
of Passion). In, Michael Balint, ed. Sandor Ferneczi Number,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, v.30, No.4., 1949.
Fairbairn, W. Ronald D. (1946), Object-Relationships and
Dynamic Structure. In, Fairbairn, W. Ronald D.(1952),
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London:Routledge
& Kegan, pp.137-151.
Guntrip, Harry (1961), Personality Structure and Human Interaction.
The
Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory. London:Karnac
Holmes, Jeremy (1993), John Bowlby and Attachment Theory.
London: Routledge.
Jelliffe papers, US Library of Congress.
Jung, Carl Gustav (1946), The Psychology of the Transference.
Translated by R.F.C. Hull, 1954. Ark Edition, 1983.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
King, Pearl & Steiner, Riccardo eds.(1991), The Freud-Klein
Controversies 1941-1945. London:Routledge
.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussieff trans. & ed .(1985), The Complete
Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Newman, Alexander(1995), Non-Compliance in Winnicott's Words.
A Companion to the Work of Donald Winnicott.
London:Free Association.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (1988), Anna Freud. A Biography.
New York:Summit.
|
