Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (I)

I recently read Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell’s Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, in preparation for a book panel at the William Alanson White Institute commemorating its 40th anniversary. I was invited onto the panel as a discussant, and given the opportunity to ask Greenberg any questions I liked. (The co-author, Mitchell, died some years ago, and so he was not around either to complement or complicate Greenberg’s account of the book’s gestation, publication, and subsequent reception.) The event was recorded and I’m attaching a link to the video here:

In these entries, I would like to recount some of the reactions and questions I had while reading this important work — as influential as any in recent psychoanalytic intellectual history. And I will repeat some of the questions I posed directly to Greenberg.

First, though, I want to sketch some of the the book’s central claims. My procedure here will depart somewhat from precedent: the previous entries generally contain close readings, interpretations, and reconstructions, with a minimum of critical comment on my part. The objective has been to clarify, to grasp the material as best I can. In these entries, my approach is different in two respects. On the one hand, there is little “close” reading — I want rather to rehearse the rough movements of a book that runs over 400 pages, without much (or any) concern for the intricacies of argument. On the other hand, I want to share some open-ended questions, and critical reactions, to the book as a whole.

Object Relations is sometimes credited as the founding document — the proverbial “bible” — of relational psychoanalysis. To what does the book owe this reputation? In fact, Greenberg and Mitchell develop an idiosyncratic history of psychoanalytic theory, which — for partly heuristic purposes — they conceive as a persistent struggle between two metapsychological models or paradigms. From nearly the beginning, in Freud’s own writings, the discipline has been riven between two, profound, and (on the evidence) mutually-exclusive visions of the human mind, its motivation, and its development. These are designated (a) the “drive-structure” model and (b) the “relational-structure” model. Each provides comprehensive answers to a number of basic questions: What is the mind? Of what “stuff” is it compounded, and according to which principles does it function? What essentially motivates human thought and behavior, and how do these forces intersect with the mental and behavioral development of human beings from infancy to adulthood? And finally: what is the role, standing, and meaning of other persons — so-called “object relations” — in connection with each of these metapsychological questions?

“Accounting for the enormous clinical significance of object relations has been the central conceptual problem within the history of psychoanalytic ideas. Every major psychoanalytic author has had to address himself to this issue, and his manner of resolving it determines the basic approach and sets the foundation for subsequent theorizing” (4, italics in original)

Now, few of the theories canvassed in the book embody either of these two models in its “purity.” Only the Freud of “Drives and their Fates,” it seems, defends a metapsychology in which, to an extreme and uncompromising extent, all things human — the architecture, laws, motivations, and development of mind, as well as ostensibly “interpersonal” phenomena — are finally expressions solely of inner drives and their “discharge,” tension (unpleasure) and its reduction (pleasure). At the start, Freud dichotomizes drives into libidinal and self-preserving sorts; by the end, these give way to Eros and Thanatos, or libido (even more expansive than before) and destruction. But, so far as Greenberg and Mitchell let on, both the nature and limitations of Freud’s drive concept persist essentially unaltered throughout these “taxonomic” changes.

[At this place I would interpolate a first, critical reaction. As Hans Loewald demonstrates in his essay, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” Freud’s late concept of drive is essentially different from the early one. Its “mechanism” is, not discharge of tension as the psychic apparatus’s means to homeostasis, but the activity of unification (love and life) and dismemberment (death and aggression). Whether or not this observation would influence the authors’ considered judgment and classification of Freud is, of course, another question. But it is remarkable, I think, that such an important revision in the drive concept is barely registered — especially in light of the inclusion of Loewald’s piece in the bibliography, and a sympathetic (albeit brief) reference to it in the book’s final chapter.]

On the other hand, two figures qualify as especially “pure” representatives of the relational-structure model: Harry Stack Sullivan, innovator of “interpersonal psychiatry,” and Ronald Fairbairn, that “object relations” theorist who did the most to jettison the notion “drive” from his theory building. In the case of both, the human mind — its nature, lawfulness, motivation, and development — is grounded, not in drives pressing for discharge (in order to restore psychic equilibrium), but in the necessity of “relations" with others.

These two versions of the relational-structure model are presented in distinct vocabularies. In the case of Sullivan, who did not claim to by an “psychoanalytic” thinker and who kept analytic concepts at arm’s length, the “model” involved the “interpersonal” status of “personality.” A given item — a person, an action, a psychopathology, and so on — can be observed, understood, and treated only in its “interactions” and “integrations” with others. In the case of Fairbairn, by contrast, Freud’s thesis that the human being is essentially pleasure-seeking gives way to another, rival conception of the human conatus: we are essentially object-seeking. In both Sullivan’s and Fairbairn’s systems, though, and notwithstanding their different vocabularies, the nature, development, and motivation of human beings are inseparable from others.

By contrast, according to classical drive-theory, these “others” — despite their self-evident clinical and “phenomenological” significance for everyone — are demoted to secondary “vehicles” of drive discharge. Indeed, in Freud’s original formulations, the word “object” is evidently chosen for its neutrality in this connection. It so happens, that, in practice,  the “object” of one’s drives is another person, the mother. But this is only, Freud suggests,  because of all objects, she is best able to facilitate drive-discharge. Were a non-human object — animate or inanimate — equally or better-equipped for this function, then nothing would prevent it from bearing the full significance of a cathected “object.” In any case, it is finally the pursuit of pleasure, and avoidance of displeasure, that accounts for human mentality vis-à-vis its object — rather than integration, contact, attachment, or “object relations” per se.

I will say more about these contrasting “models” in the next entries.