Mitchell, Fairbairn, Loewald, Ghent
**I’ve been busy writing things for other venues and haven’t been able to post much or do much original writing in the last couple weeks. As such, I thought I would post excerpts from something I’ve been working on for an ongoing education/reading group I participate in. The below was written in response to readings in Stephen Mitchell’s “Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity”. Specifically the fifth chapter in that book, which is on the work of Fairbairn. I removed a bit in the middle related to applying this framework to a client I’ve worked with, but hopefully that doesn’t disrupt a sense of continuity or cohesion.**
Mitchell, Loewald, Fairbairn
It is always the same and always different. Them in their seat on the couch by the window. Me across them in the chair by my desk. The room colored with blues and greys, cool and calming, but not dispassionately so. Two small plants in the corner. Books lining the space behind me on the built-in shelfs. A touch of exposed brick. Sometimes it is more so different, in that they are coming to me through my computer screen, where many of us are now savvy enough with video conferencing platforms to know that we ought to transmit from in front of a neutral backdrop, with perhaps a small plant, picture, or some other unassuming ornament strung up in the background. The tops of colonial-era Cambridge homes announce themselves through the spaces between branches outside my window. Occasionally planes coming and going from Logan will traverse the expanse beyond the treetops. A steady stream of static rolls constantly through the acoustics of the space. The room is alternately illuminated by a small standing lamp or the harsh overhead light fixtures depending on time of day and season. This is the setting of my office. The “primal density” from which I conduct all my sessions. The undifferentiated ground from which the work always begins.
From within this primal density and the interactional matrixes of the therapeutic encounter, various emotional states and shared experiential phenomena emerge: loneliness, rejection, anger, boredom, tenderness, delight. Presences merge and become separate. Time and the boundaries between inside and outside blur and dissolve. Over the past few chapters, Mitchell has been trying to give us clues as to what may be occurring in these spaces and how to navigate them. In doing so, he introduced a series of “modes” meant to delineate an “interactional hierarchy…through which relationality operates” (p 58), which he hopes will set the groundwork for “exploring some of the choices clinicians make daily about what to say or not to say about what they are feeling and what they are doing” (p 59). I admittedly found Mitchell’s “modes” a bit contrived the first time reading through the early chapters in which they are introduced. Though after revisiting them a few times, I could at least see the utility in the categories. Now, as they continue to be mapped out through the later chapters of the book, we are left to trust that they are driving us towards some essential psychoanalytic dialectic between reticence and subjective expression.
Mitchell’s Mode 3, and the primary focus of Chapter 5, is that of self-object level of relational organization and harkens directly to the traditional object-relations theorists. About a year ago, after hearing their names often cited at various NECET meetings and in nearly every psychoanalytic paper of interest to me, I decided to jump head long into reading the work of Winnicott and Fairbairn directly, rather than through interpretation in secondary sources. Winnicott was inspiring, though somewhat gentle in his reevaluation of traditional psychoanalysis. Fairbairn was a revelation. Though dense and difficult to get through at times, the moments where his thought congeals is clearly so thoroughly intended to be a fundamental challenge to many of the accepted tenants of psychoanalysis during the time he was writing.
Mitchell brings the idea of the repetition compulsion into the fold on page 108 of the text where, in following up his analysis of Fairbairn’s major shift from libido as pleasure-seeking to object-seeking, he writes “This reordering of priorities is precisely what makes Fairbairn’s model such a powerful explanatory framework for just the sort of dynamics Freud’s hedonic model foundered on: masochism, negative therapeutic reactions, the repetition compulsion. If pleasure seeking is not available, people seek pain, because pain often provides the most direct, alternative channel to others.”
In our explorations of this desire for bad objects, as opposed to no objects, we’ve often paraphrased a quote from Fairbairn that I think is worth hearing in full and comes from his paper “Repression and the Return of Bad Objects”: “[I]t is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad; but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good—‘God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!’; and in any case there is always a hope of redemption. In a world ruled by the Devil the individual may escape the badness of being a sinner; but he is bad because the world around him is bad. Further, he can have no sense of security and no hope of redemption. The only prospect is one of death and destruction.”
The mechanics of this in Fairbairn involve a sophisticated splitting of the ego into a libidinal ego and a rejecting ego, which in their very structure offer the basis for a relational interpretation of the repetition compulsion. In the presence of imperfect caregivers (which to some extent describes all caregivers), we are repeatedly tantalized and abandoned, creating a cycle which leaves in its wake an internal aggression towards dependency, a consequence of what Fairbairn coined the internal saboteur, that part of our psyche which guards against exposing ourselves to, and this is Fairbairn’s term, the “intense humiliation” of these relational failures and the risk of being reduced “to a state of worthlessness”. The only perceived benefit of the internalization of these bad objects, is that it preserves the possibility of the caregiver as a good object. This, however, leads to a position which I’ve heard the analyst Martha Stark refer to as “the relentlessness of hope”. The power of the libidinal ego time and again directs us towards inadequate love objects as a means of (and you can choose your own preferred terminology here) “belated mastery”, “a desire to undo past injuries”, or simply, as Paul Russel points out, we do it because “that is the way things feel”. Stark and Russell both tell us that the only way out of these painful repetitive cycles is grief. So, in fact does Loewald, who has featured heavily in the text so far, in his paper on the repetition compulsion, where he states, “the dissolution (not repression) of the oedipal conflict, to the extent to which it succeeds, in its aspects of mourning …is a prime example of re-creative repetition in the psychic field.” We will come back to this idea of re-creative repetition later.
Mitchell heads the last section of the chapter “Guilt” in keeping with the resonance Fairbairn gives the term in his own writing, but for those wanting to see it, the section could just as easily be labeled “Grief”. In fact, in my reading, the thing that Mitchell’s client Will needed to learn to grieve more than anything is the way he had developed in his relationship to guilt. Mitchell highlights the powerful idealizing perspective Will maintained with regards to the sacrifices of his parents, while upholding his sense of his own badness as part of a desire to win over their love and affection. Will carries on in this manner through much of his work with Mitchell, claiming insurmountable feelings of guilt and responsibility for the undoing of his relationship with his first wife, insisting those feelings may never be worked through. That is, until Mitchell does exactly the thing he needed to do and as is likely the case, was always going to do, whether he wanted to or not. We could call it projective identification, or just the inevitable consequence of long enough work with any given client. Regardless, he did the thing that Will was going to need if anyone was seemingly ever going to get through to him, despite the fact that it is almost a given that Will would have told you this was the last thing he needed if he was ever going to “get better”. Mitchell, seemingly, made him feel guilty.
Of course, it’s not just that Mitchell aroused such a feeling in him, but that Mitchell was able to be aware he was doing it and open up the possibility that Will might be able to form some new relationship to experiencing and metabolizing a potentially justified criticism from another person, a person whose opinion he had come to care about. In reenacting the self-other configuration of Will’s guilt inducing parents, and finding new modes of exploration of this emotional state in the context of a caring other, Will was seemingly able to be in his guilt with more intention and awareness. This, subsequently, provided the opportunity to explore and ultimately grieve the various beliefs that had kept him in a self-punitive relationship, that is, tethered to the masochistic tendencies of the rejecting object. Taken this way, grieving allows us to recognize that in not needing to be what it already was, we have the potential to be with our compulsion to repeat in ways that are not merely different, but can in fact be generative in their ability to deliver us over to novel experiences.
A Bit on Ghent
Emmanuel Ghent was a New York based psychoanalyst and, along with Philip Bromberg, was part of the generation that came slightly before Mitchell, whom Mitchell elected to draw in when originally crafting the relational program that emerged out of NYU’s doctoral program in psychoanalysis. Ghent’s published work is scarce, a half dozen or so papers in total, but two of them “Paradox and Process” and “Masochism, Submission, Surrender” I have returned to often. In the latter paper, Ghent draws a distinction between the idea of surrender and submission, with surrender being the “obverse of resistance” and submission being something that maintains the illusion of letting go while all the while preserving the resistance. If we want to think back to the case of Will presented by Mitchell in this chapter, think of the guilt he was already experiencing as a kind of masochistic submission, while what came after the guilt inducing moment with Mitchell, was a long process of learning how to surrender.
In both papers, Ghent is interested in the interactive matrix between object usage and object relatedness, as well as that between need and neediness or demandingness. Ghent brings us back into the enclave of dependency and its role in the self-other configurations of Mitchell’s Mode 3. For Ghent, neediness operates in the same territory as submission. Neediness is a misdirected or false expression of real need, while the expression of genuine need serves as the process of surrendering to the realization of our dependency on others. In this framework, submission/neediness becomes the mode of conflicted or deficient modes of self-other configuration, those that operate by means of defensive structures like denial, avoidance, rationalization, passive-aggression, or—in the Fairbairnian mode—splitting. Surrender, seems to me akin to grief, and the ways in which we often discuss finding another way of “being-with” one’s repetitions, a genuine kind of relatedness. Or, in the Loewaldian sense, surrender is the process of recreating (or active experiencing of the repetition) rather than the more submissive recollecting (passive experiencing of the repetition).
What I think Ghent does remarkably well is his capacity to stay in the paradoxical nature of all of this and express the ways in which surrender and submission; need and neediness; or recollecting and recreating, share both an origin and a destination. In fact, Ghent refers in his paper to the compulsion to repeat as a “distorted representation [of] the wish to surrender” as a way of trying to “take in…the unthinkable destructiveness of a significant other”. That the expression of one is always, by virtue of our own complex ambiguity and constantly being positioned between various dialectics, the expression of the other. Submission and surrender then both become ways of responding to the repetition compulsion, which framed in the language of Heidegger, could be seen as ways of describing the inauthentic and authentic response, as ways of moving us towards an exploration of intentionality and presence.
