Revisioning Fordham's ‘Defences of the self’ in light of modern relational theory and contemporary neuroscience

This paper explores the evolution of Michael Fordham's ideas concerning ‘defences of the self’, including his application of this concept to a group of ‘difficult’ adult patients in his famous 1974 paper by the same name. After tracing the relevance of Fordham's ideas to my own discovery of a ‘self‐care system’ in the psychological material of early trauma patients (Kalsched 1996 ), I describe how Fordham's seminal notions might be revisioned in light of contemporary relational theory as well as early attachment theory and affective neuroscience. These revisionings involve an awareness that the severe woundings of early unremembered trauma are not transformable through interpretation but will inevitably be repeated in the transference, leading to mutual ‘enactments’ between the analytic partners and, hopefully, to a new outcome. A clinical example of one such mutual enactment between the author and his patient is provided. The paper concludes with reflections on the clinical implications of this difficult case and what it means to become a ‘real person’ to our patients. Finally, Jung's alchemical views on transference are shown to be useful analogies in our understanding of the necessary mutuality in the healing process with these patients.     

The loss of the transitional object - Some thoughts about transitional and ‘pre-transitional’ phenomena

This paper examines the use made of the transitional object in order to construct a coherent sense of self. Examples are cited from both Freud's and Winnicott's work about the use of an object to manage separations and extend a sense of self. Then some current case material is presented to make sense of the meaning of a patient's strong attachment to a negative transitional object in childhood. Its influence on her current state of mind and relationships is explored. A theoretical term, ‘the existential object’, is introduced to make sense of her use of objects. Contemporary thinking about the loss of the mother in early childhood and its influence on the sense of self is explored with reference to Andre Green's work, which is then related to Freud's and Winnicott's earlier thinking on the subject.     

The social unconscious in persons,groups and societies,volume 1: Mainly theory,edited by Earl Hopper and Heim Weinberg

This paper looks at some instances of young children learning in a school setting, and suggests that ‘emotional learning’ is an integral part of the apparently ‘cognitive’ learning that takes place in school. The paper uses object relations psychoanalysis in order to explore some of the more-or-less hidden emotional states of mind that accompany difficulties and successes with school learning. Three extracts are presented from observations of young children coming to terms with reading and writing. Each of these is then discussed, with the aim of showing how learning always takes place in a dynamic, relational emotional context. From the theoretical perspective outlined in this article, all learning involves unconscious ‘object relating’. Things to be learnt about, and people requiring learning, or assisting with it, are the bearers of the learner's vivid unconscious ‘transferences’. Such transferences colour the learner's emotional experience of the people and things around him or her, constituting a dynamic, internally experienced, ‘emotional context’ for learning. While this emotional context may be partly subjective, it is also more or less affected by others' feeling states, pulling the learner into a shared learning environment which is emotionally complex and inter-subjective.     

From pilot fish to analyst: Finding a path between symbiotic and autistic defences

This paper presents the clinical case of a patient with autistic features. One of the main difficulties in his treatment was the particular rapid rhythm of his projections, introjections and re‐projections that constrained the analyst's capacity for reverie and hindered the use of effective projective identification processes. These alternating defensive constellations lead either to an expelling autistic barrier or to an engulfing symbiotic fusion. Their combination can be seen as the expression of a defence against an unintegrated and undifferentiated early experience of self that was in this way kept at bay to prevent it from invading his whole personality. Maintaining the symbiotic link, in which I kept included by staying partially fused to what was being projected and using my analytic function in a reduced way, helped to relate to what was in the patient's inside. Leaving this symbiotic link let my interpretations appear to ‘force’ their way through the autistic barrier. Yet as the process developed they allowed to show the patient how he ejected me and what was happening in his inside, behind his autistic barrier. So I found myself on the one hand accepting the symbiotic immobilization and on the other hand interpreting in a way that seemed forced to the patient, because it implied a breaking of the symbiotic position. The inordinate speed of projections and introjections could thus be interrupted, creating a space for awareness, reflection and transformation, and allowed the emergence of a connection between the patient's inside and outside. In the course of treatment I realized that this kind of dual defence system has been described by the late Argentinian analyst José Bleger. He assumes the existence of an early “agglutinated nucleus” that is held together by a psychic structure he calls the “glischro‐caric” position, in which projective identification cannot take place because there is no self/object differentiation. I have considered the rapid and fugitive use of projection and re‐introjection I met in my patient to be a manifestation of the dual defence system Bleger describes. Although he does not specifically mention this particular vicissitude of operative defences he does give hints about a rhythm in the patients’ projections and introjections.     

Race,power and intimacy in the intersubjective field: the intersection of racialised cultural complexes and personal complexes

This paper presents work with a biracial young woman, in the context of a predominantly white Jungian training organisation. The patient's relational difficulties and her struggle to integrate different aspects of her personality are understood in terms of the overlapping influences of developmental trauma, transgenerational trauma relating to the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, conflictual racial identities, internalised racism, and the British black/white racial cultural complex. The author presents her understanding of an unfolding dynamic in the analytic relationship in which the black slave/white master schema was apparently reversed between them, with the white analyst becoming subservient to the black patient. The paper tracks the process through which trust was built alongside the development of this joint defence against intimacy ‐ which eventually had to be relinquished by both partners in the dyad. A white on black ‘rescue fantasy’, identified by the patient as a self‐serving part of her father's personality, is explored in relation to the analytic relationship and the training context.     

Working with chronic and relentless self‐hatred,self‐harm,and existential shame: a clinical study and reflections (Paper 2 of 2)

This second of two papers focuses on the shame which emerged in the first 14 years of analysis of a woman who was bulimic, self‐harmed, and repeatedly described herself as ‘feeling like a piece of shit’. To explore this intense and pervasive shame I draw on Jung's and Laplanche's emphasis on experiences of unresolvable, non‐pathological ‘foreignness’ or ‘otherness’ at the heart of the psyche. Images, metaphors, elements of clinical experience, and working hypotheses from a number of analytic traditions are used to flesh out this exploration. These include Kilborne's use of Pirandello's image of shame as like a ‘hole in the paper sky’ which, I suggest, points to a crack in subjectivity, and reveals our belief in the efficacy of the self to be illusory. Hultberg's observations on shame as having an existential mode (function) are also explored, as is the nature of analytic truth. Using these ideas I describe my patient's process of finding some small but freeing space in relation to her shame and self‐hatred. Through enduring and learning from her shame in analysis she realized that it was part of a desperate unconscious attempt to draw close to her troubled father and so to ‘love him better’.     

CHARACTER,PSYCHOANALYTIC IDENTIFICATION,AND NUMERICAL IDENTITY

Identification figures prominently in moral psychological explanations. I argue that in identification the subject has an ‘identity‐thought’, which is a thought about her numerical identity with the figure she identifies with. In Freud's psychoanalytic psychology character is founded on unconscious identification with parental figures. Moral philosophers have drawn on psychoanalysis to explain how undesirable or disadvantageous character dispositions are resistant to insight through being unconscious. According to Richard Wollheim's analysis of Freud's theory, identification is the subject's disposition to imagine, unconsciously, her bodily merging with the figure she identifies with. I argue that this explanation of identification is not adequate. Human character is held to be capable of change when self‐reflection brings unconscious identifications to conscious self‐knowledge. I argue that for self‐knowledge these identifications must be an intelligible part of the subject's self‐conception, and that Wollheim's ‘merging phantasy’ is not intelligible to the subject in this way. By contrast, the subject's thought that she is numerically identical to the figure she identifies with does provide an intelligible starting‐point for reflecting on this identification. This psychoanalytic account provides a clear conception of identification with which to investigate puzzle cases in the moral psychology of character.     

Are waves of relational assumptions eroding traditional analysis?

The author designates as ‘traditional’ those elements of psychoanalytic presumption and practice that have, in the wake of Fordham's legacy, helped to inform analytical psychology and expand our capacity to integrate the shadow. It is argued that this element of the broad spectrum of Jungian practice is in danger of erosion by the underlying assumptions of the relational approach, which is fast becoming the new establishment. If the maps of the traditional landscape of symbolic reference (primal scene, Oedipus et al.) are disregarded, analysts are left with only their own self‐appointed authority with which to orientate themselves. This self‐centric epistemological basis of the relationalists leads to a revision of ‘analytic attitude’ that may be therapeutic but is not essentially analytic. This theme is linked to the perennial challenge of balancing differentiation and merger and traced back, through Chasseguet‐Smirgel, to its roots in Genesis. An endeavour is made to illustrate this within the Journal convention of clinically based discussion through a commentary on Colman's (2013) avowedly relational treatment of the case material presented in his recent Journal paper ‘Reflections on knowledge and experience’ and through an assessment of Jessica Benjamin's (2004) relational critique of Ron Britton's (1989) transference embodied approach.     

The deconstruction of primary narcissism

The author examines Winnicott ’s contribution to Freud ’s concept of primary narcissism. In Mourning and melancholia, Freud laid the foundations for this contribution, but it was Winnicott who turned it into a clinically useful concept. There are three of Winnicott’s ideas that can be seen as preliminary stages to his theory of transitional phenomena and illusion. They serve as an introduction to thinking about the analysis of the analysand ’s primary narcissism and the theoretical prerequisites that make the interpretation of primary narcissism possible. Through the exploration of three main points in Winnicott’s writings the author shows how Winnicott’s conceptualizations are both new and a continuation of Freud ’s thinking. His ideas are thus part of the overall theoretical pattern of Freud ’s metapsychology. The three main points are as follows: 1. In bringing maternal care and the presence of the psychic environment into the construction of primary narcissism, Winnicott made it possible to analyse narcissism. His ideas enable us to stand back from the characteristic solipsism of narcissism, which holds that everything comes from the self and only from the self. The latter concept tends to eliminate the role of the object and environment in the construction of the self. At the same time, by deconstructing the way in which the self is infiltrated by a certain number of narcissistic postulates, Winnicott made it possible to interpret the theory of narcissism itself. 2. Between the individual and the sense of self, Winnicott inserted the maternal object and her function as a mirror of affects who acts as a medium for the organization of self-identity. Primary identity is established through the construction and elimination of a narcissistic identification that becomes meaningful in the context of a primary homosexual relationship functioning as a ‘double’. 3. A process of differentiation that governs the discovery of the object is in a dialectical relationship with narcissistic identification. That process can be understood only in terms of the responses made by the primary psychic environment to the baby’s primary aggression.     

Tactics and empathy: Defences against projective identification

In this paper the author argues that interpretations made when the analyst has not done the emotional work of recognising and bearing what kind of object she has become in the patient's psychic reality will be experienced as empty tactics – even lies – rather than interpretations of integrity. However, interpreting from a position of bearing the truth of the patient's perception will be technically difficult and indicate turmoil as the analyst struggles to take in the patient's view of her. If the analyst avoids integrating her own picture of herself with the patient's picture (despite giving voice to the patient's picture) the split inside the analyst will be felt and intensify the patient's need to split. Vignettes demonstrate how the analyst, believing she is trying to understand, may become a projective‐identification‐refusing object and the issue of the analyst's disclosure of her countertransference is examined. Ultimately, the author argues, a capacity to receive and bear projective identification requires empathy with both patient and analyst‐as‐patient's object, engaged in a process about which both are ambivalent.     

Self psychology and projective identification—whither shall they meet? a reply to the editors (1995)

The concept of projective identification continues to be viewed as alien, even dangerous, by self psychologists. Six aspects of self‐psychology/intersubjectivity theory are explored in an attempt to understand the presumed incompatibility of self psychology and projective identification: 1) the empathic vantage point; 2) the focus on subjective reality; 3) the emphasis on the analyst's personal contribution; 4) the focus on selfobject experience; 5) the disruption—restoration process; and 6) the defining of transference and countertransference as “organizing activity.”; The self‐psychological/intersubjective concepts that come closest to describing the phenomenon of projective identification—that is, empathic immersion, affect resonance, and reciprocal mutual influence—fail to capture at least three of its essential elements 1) the patient's persistent, unconscious intent to communicate certain unformulated aspects of self through the other; 2) the analyst's sense of being “taken over”; by the patient's experience; and 3) the intensely visceral quality of the analyst's experience. It is argued that self psychology ignores this important form of patient communication to its own detriment and that the concept of projective identification needs to be reformulated in terms that are more experience near to self psychologists. It is suggested that there exists a normal, developmental need, a selfobject need, to communicate intolerable, unsymbolized affective experience through the other's experience—a need that remains more pervasive and intense in some of us than in others—and that the longed‐for selfobject response is to have one's communication received, contained, and given back in such a way that one knows the other has “gotten”; it from the inside out.     

Living with obsessive-compulsive disorder: A case study of a woman's construction of self

This qualitative case study employed social constructionist theory and a discursive or language-based approach to examine aspects of identity and subjectivity in one woman's account of living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Two, 2-hour semi-structured interviews were conducted, 6 weeks apart. In the first interview, the participant was asked to tell her ‘story’ of what her life with OCD was like. A discursive analysis focusing on the woman's construction of self was conducted on her narrative. During the second interveiw, the participant was asked to give her reactions to the analysis and to provide further interpretations and/or explanations which were then discussed. The results indicate how different ‘voices’ in the woman's narrative represent the power relations involved in her self-presentation of life with OCD within a particular social and discursive context. A key discourse involving religion as a metaphor was also identified as a way of representing the woman's experience of OCD and understanding her perception of control. The study illustrates how a discursive approach involving reflexivity can be used to explore identity and subjectivity with an OCD respondent/client.     

End notes: two unpublished presentations by Michael Fordham

Following the publication in this journal of two of Fordham's unpublished papers selected by James Astor (2010, 55, 5), the editors have asked me to select a further two. I have chosen two clinical pieces, one clinical notes and the other notes that refine his previous thinking, which Fordham wrote at the end of his life. Both are examples of the way Fordham continued throughout his analytic work to turn to patients as his primary source of learning. Fordham presented the first piece, ‘A case study’, to Parkside Clinic in 1988. Its subject is his last child patient, a nine‐year‐old boy with behaviour problems that destroyed the analytic frame. The second is clearly for an SAP (Society of Analytical Psychology) audience and written probably around 1992–93. It is titled ‘Some comments on transference and countertransference’ and contains material from the patient who has become known through papers in this journal as ‘K’. The two pieces are presented together within a commentary rather than separately with footnotes, in order to provide some context for Fordham's thinking in his late years.     

‘With healing in her wings…’: Integration and repair in a self-destructive adolescent

This paper describes certain Jungian concepts related to integration and repair. Fundamental to this is Jung's concept of the self, which Fordham has made the basis of his model of development. To Jung's notion of the self as an integrator and organizer of experience, Fordham has added the idea that the self divides up, or deintegrates. Three corollaries of Fordham's model, pertaining to whole and part objects and the depressive position, are amplified through infant studies.

Clinical material from the treatment of a pigeon-phobic adolescent is presented, which attempts to demonstrate that a significant part of what the phobia represented was an infantile state of projective and introjective identification with an anxious mother. Treatment facilitated actions of the self that contributed to the integration of the experiences represented by the pigeons, so that what had been split off became a deintegrate capable of being reintegrated.

The focus of this paper is on the developmental as well as the pathological. Both are conceived in relation to the treatment.     

Projective identification: A theoretical investigation of the concept starting from ’Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’1

This paper submits passages from four papers‐‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Klein); ‘On identification’ (Klein); ‘Analysis of a schizophrenic state with depersonalization’ (Rosenfeld); and ‘Remarks on the relation of male homosexuality to paranoia, paranoid anxiety and narcissism’ (Rosenfeld)‐to a critical reading, enabling the theoretical premises which have produced the current, differing views on projective identification to be traced. These views revolve both around the role assigned to identification in the process and around the meaning of the expression‘to identify oneself with’ which in ‘On identification’ goes from ‘to feel similar to, or identical to the other’ to ‘to take another person as a model’. This legitimizes the inclusion of very different phenomena into the concept of projective identification. The author describes some uses of the term ‘projective identification’ and proposes the hypothesis that the process constitutes a way for managing otherness and the separateness of the object (be it external or internal, real or imaginary) that can compromise its reality to a greater or lesser degree. Covering a large set of phenomena, the author poses the question of whether it is useful to retain the term ‘projective identification’. She proposes an answer in the last part of the paper.     

Reflections on research and learning from the patient: the art and science of what we do

Over three decades ago, John Bowlby argued for psychoanalysis to seek beyond its own parameters if it was to maintain its claim to be a science. Since then there has been a wealth of relevant research from various fields. While this has been instrumental in the development of my own work, this paper concerns learning from the patient. The paper begins with a premise: interpretative analytic work requires three‐dimensionality (self, other and object). Although interpretative work may be ingrained in our professional identity, this triangulation may or may not exist in our patients in any stable way. The paper continues with a brief developmental account of how early archetypally‐shaped shifts in the infant's field of interest establish the experiential components of three‐dimensionality. From there, observational and clinical material with a toddler and a young boy describe how early relational deficits hindered their capacities for three‐dimensionality. Yet both were able to engage with the therapist and to become active in the creation of three‐dimensionality within their own minds. Implied in this work are considerations for working with patients for whom interpretations do not work. Michael Fordham's comments on ‘working out of the self’ are linked with the art of what we do.     

Overcoming Arlie Hochschild's concepts of the ‘real’ and ‘false’ self by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus

This article theoretically discusses Arlie Hochschild's (1983, 1998) concept of the ‘real’ and ‘false’ self (1983: 194) and how this holds together her model about how it is we manage our emotions. Hochschild draws on ideas about surface acting, deep acting and authenticity to support her theory of emotion management. In this discussion I argue that these ideas undermine the clarity of the theoretical model Hochschild tries to develop to explain emotion management. The first aim here is to demonstrate that this concept of the real and false self acts as an unnecessary conceptual linchpin making Hochschild's ideas about emotion management opaque. The second aim in this article is to theoretically engage with Pierre Bourdieu's (1984, 1990) concept of habitus as a way of overcoming Hochschild's idea of the real and false self.     

Sense data and logical relations: Karin Costelloe-Stephen and Russell’s critique of Bergson

ABSTRACT

Though scholarship has explored Karin Costelloe-Stephen’s contributions to the history of psychoanalysis, as well as her relations to the Bloomsbury Group, her philosophical work has been almost completely ignored. This paper will examine her debate with Bertrand Russell over his criticism of Bergson. Costelloe-Stephen had employed the terminology of early analytic philosophy in presenting a number of arguments in defence of Bergson’s views. Costelloe-Stephen would object, among other things, to Russell’s use of an experiment which, as she points out, was first conducted by Carl Stumpf. Russell appeals to Stumpf's experiment in his attempt to prove that sense data are terms in logical relations, a thesis presupposed by the project of logical analysis outlined in Our Knowledge of the External World. A reformulated version of Costelloe-Stephen's argument put forth by this paper shows that Russell's argument fails to provide adequate proof for his thesis. Further modifications of the argument can also address a reconstruction (based on contemporary reports) of Russell's reply to Costelloe-Stephen. In his reply, Russell would use, already in 1914, the term ‘analytic philosophy’ in contrasting his and Moore’s approach to a continental one, exemplified by Bergson and Costelloe-Stephen.     

Working in the borderland: early relational trauma and Fordham's analysis of ‘K’

This paper outlines a view of early relational trauma as underlying borderline states of mind, and argues that Knox's 1999 paper on internal working models and the complex provides a basis for understanding such states of mind. The author argues that in addition to internal working models, the complex also embodies and contains primitive defences of the core self. He outlines how these apply on the objective, subjective, transference and archetypal levels, and in direct and reversed forms and applies this to the account of Fordham's analysis of his patient ‘K’, which ended in impasse. The paper explores the dynamic that emerged in that analysis and suggests that it could be helpfully accounted for in terms of the co‐construction and re‐construction of early relational trauma in the analytic relationship.