No More Learning

Here naturally I point first to the observations made by James Robertson (1953) and confirmed later by Christoph Heinicke and Ilse Westheimer (1965) on how children between the ages of 12 and 36 months behave when removed from home to the care of strange people in a strange place, such as a residential nursery or hospital, with no one person to act as a mother-substitute. In such conditions a child comes in time to act as if neither mothering nor contact with humans has much significance for him. As his caretakers come and go he ceases to attach himself to any- one and after his return home stays remote from
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? ? ? his parents for days, and perhaps for much longer if he is treated unsympathetically.
There is reason to believe, moreover, that a young child can develop this kind of defensive numbing in response to a mother who rejects him and without any major separation. Examples of this sequence are to be found in observations re- corded by Mahler (1971). More definitive findings are reported by Mary Main (1977), a colleague of Mary Ainsworth's, who has made a special study of a group of children in the age-range 12 to 20 months, each of whom not only failed to greet his mother after she had left him with a stranger for a few minutes but deliberately avoided her. View- ing some of Main's videotaped records I was as- tonished to see to what lengths some of these children went. One approached her mother briefly but with head averted and then retreated from her. Another, instead of approaching his mother, placed himself facing into the corner of the room, as though complying with a punish- ment, and then knelt down with his face to the floor. In every case videotaped records of these mothers playing with their toddlers during a later session showed them to differ from the mothers of non-avoidant toddlers: they appeared 'angry,
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? ? ? inexpressive and disliking of physical contact with the infant'. Some scolded in angry tones, some mocked, others spoke sarcastically to or about their child. An obvious possibility is that by keeping away from his mother in this way a child is avoiding being treated in a hostile way again.
Thus, so far as the cross-checks provided by direct observations of young children and their mothers go, they tend to support a Winnicott- type theory. Put briefly, and in my own words, the child, and later the adult, becomes afraid to allow himself to become attached to anyone for fear of a further rejection with all the agony, the anxiety, and the anger to which that would lead. As a result there is a massive block against his ex- pressing or even feeling his natural desire for a close trusting relationship, for care, comfort, and love--which I regard as the subjective manifesta- tions of a major system of instinctive behaviour.
An explanation of this kind, although much less complex than some proposed in the literat- ure, accounts well for how these people behave both in the world at large and with ourselves as analysts. Inevitably they bring their fear of enter- ing into a trusting relationship with them to ana- lysis, which we experience as a massive
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? ? ? resistance. Then, when at length their feelings are recovered, they more than half expect that we shall treat them as they recall being treated by their parents. In consequence they live in dread of being rejected and become intensely angry should they suspect us of deserting them. Not in- frequently, moreover, the way they treat us--with abuse and rejection--is found to be a version of the treatment to which they recall having them- selves been subjected as children.
You will see that in the explanation of how these patients behave during analysis I have ad- vanced a number of interlocking hypotheses. In a research programme each requires scrutiny and testing in the light of further data. Among the many methods that I would expect to prove of value is the study, in a therapeutic setting, of par- ents and children interacting with one another. In addition, there remains an important place for further observations to be made during the ana- lysis of individual patients; though I believe that, if clinical research is to yield its full potential, it has to be pursued in a far more systematic and directed way than hitherto.
To give an example: it would be of value were a detailed record to be kept of the responses of one
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? ? ? or more of these patients before and after each successive weekend, each vacation, and each un- expected interruption of the sessions, with an equally detailed record of how the analyst dealt with them. This would enable us to know the rep- ertoire of responses a given patient presents on these occasions, and also the changes in response he presents over time. It would also be especially valuable if we were to have a detailed account of the conditions in which a major therapeutic change occurs. If, perhaps in a collaborative pro- gramme, records could be kept on a number of such patients, it might be possible to discover whether a frank and detailed discussion of the painful experiences a patient recalls having had in his relationships with his parents and the ef- fects these appear to have had and still to be hav- ing on the ways he treats other people, including of course ourselves, promotes therapeutic change, as I predict, or hinders it, as is believed by some analysts.
Naturally, in embarking on this or any other research programme an analyst must bear in mind his professional responsibilities; for with patients who present a false self these can be very onerous. Winnicott describes the 'period of
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? ? ? extreme dependence' through which such pa- tients go during therapy and gives warning that 'analysts who are not prepared to go and meet the heavy needs of patients who become dependent in this way must be careful so to choose their cases that they do not include false self types'.
This brings me back to the art of therapy. To provide, by being ourselves, the conditions in which a patient of this kind can discover and re- cover what Winnicott calls his real self, and I call his attachment desires and feelings, is not easy. On the one hand, we have really to be trustworthy and we have also genuinely to respect all those yearnings for affection and intimacy that each of us has but which in these patients have become lost. On the other, we must not offer more than we can give and we must not move faster than the patient can bear. To achieve this balance requires all the intuition, imagination, and empathy of which we are capable. But it also requires a firm grasp of what the patient's problems are and what we are trying to do. This is why it is so very important that the problems of aetiology and psy- chopathology should be clarified as far as the ap- plication of scientific method makes possible and, further, that analysts should be thoroughly
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? ? ? informed about the whole range of family experi- ences, from birth on through adolescence, that, increasing evidence shows, affect how a child's emotional life develops. Only when we become armed with that and much further knowledge shall we be in a position to meet the exacting de- mand that Freud makes in one of the last papers he wrote, in which he draws attention to 'the ker- nel of truth' in a patient's symptoms and to the therapeutic value of constructions in analysis (1937). In it he writes: 'What we are in search of is a picture of the patient's forgotten years that shall be alike trustworthy and in all essential re- spects complete. '
1 Efron (1977) has discussed the circumstances in which Freud's abrupt change of mind took place.
4
PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A NATURAL SCIENCE
In the autumn of 1980 I was appointed Freud Memorial Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College, London. In my inaugural lecture I returned to the theme I had spoken on in Canada two years previously. Having always believed that the body of knowledge labelled psychoanalysis should become a part of natural science, I was distressed by the pressure of the opposition. To accept that psychoanalysis should abandon its aim of becoming a natural science and instead should regard itself as a hermeneut- ic discipline has seemed to me to be not only a result of obsolete ideas about science but also a counsel of despair; because, in a hermeneutic discipline, there are no criteria by the applica- tion of which it is ever possible to resolve disagreement.
A problem encountered by every analyst who has proposed new theoretical ideas is the
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? ? ? criticism that the new theory is 'not psychoana- lysis'. Such criticism turns, of course, on how we define psychoanalysis. Most unfortunately, de- fining it in terms of Freud's theories is all too common. This is in contrast to the definitions ad- opted by academic disciplines which are always in terms of the phenomena to be studied and the problems to be solved. In such disciplines pro- gress is frequently signalled by changes of the- ory, sometimes of a revolutionary kind. So long as analysts continue to define psychoanalysis in terms of any particular theory, they must not complain that their discipline is cold-shouldered by academics. Furthermore by so defining it they are condemning it to frozen inertia.
The following version of this lecture differs in a number of ways from the original, in particu- lar by abbreviating the discussion of issues already dealt with in the preceding lectures.
From 1895, when Freud made his first attempt to sketch a theoretical framework for psychoanalys- is, until 1938, the year before he died, Freud was determined that his new discipline should con- form to the requirements of a natural science. Thus, in the opening sentence of his Project he writes: 'The intention is to furnish a psychology
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? ? ? that shall be a natural science. . . . ' (Freud, 1950, 295); whilst in the Outline we find a passage in which he asserts that, once the concept of psych- ical processes being unconscious is granted, 'psy- chology is enabled to take its place as a natural science like any other' (Freud, 1940, 158).
Admittedly during the intervening years Freud's ideas about the scope of his science had changed considerably from his early ambition 'to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles' (1950, written in 1895) to his later definition of psychoanalysis as 'the science of un- conscious mental processes' (1925). But from first to last there can be no doubt what sort of discipline Freud intended psychoanalysis to be.
Nevertheless, despite Freud's unwavering in- tention, the scientific status of psychoanalysis re- mains equivocal. On the one hand philosophers of science have dubbed it a pseudoscience on the grounds that, however large a measure of truth they may contain, psychoanalytic theories are cast in so elastic a form that they are unfalsifi- able. On the other many psychoanalysts, disillu- sioned by the inadequacies of Freud's metapsy- chology and preoccupied with the personal
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? ? ? perspective which is unquestionably required in clinical work, have abandoned Freud's aims and claims and have declared that psychoanalysis is miscast as a science and should be conceived in- stead as one of the humanities, e. g. Home (1966), Ricoeur (1970), and others in Europe. Both Schafer (1976) and George Klein (1976), espous- ing this view, have advanced proposals alternat- ive to Freud's: but each of their reformulations, different though they be, seems a version of Hamlet without the Prince. Gone are all concepts of causality and theories of biologically rooted impulse and, in Schafer's version, gone also are concepts of repression and unconscious mental activity.
Melanie Klein has made very different propos- als, ones which certainly do not suffer from these defects; but it would be difficult to claim that the form they take or the research they have en- gendered meet scientific requirements.
Yet by no means do all analysts despair of de- veloping their discipline as a natural science. Alive to the deficiencies of Freud's metapsycho- logy, especially his concepts of psychic energy and drive, a few are attempting to replace it with a new conceptual framework consistent with
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? ? ? current scientific thinking. Central to these new proposals are ideas drawn from systems theory and the study of human information processing. Those active in this enterprise include Rubinstein (1967), Peterfreund (1971, 1982), Rosenblatt and Thickstun (1977), Gedo (1979), and myself (1969, 1980). Meanwhile there are also a number of analysts who have been seeking to extend the dis- cipline's database by studying children's social and emotional development using direct observa- tions. Some of these studies have been atheoretic- al, e. g. Offer (1969). The authors of others have attempted to put new empirical wine into the old theoretical bottles, e. g. Spitz (1957), Mahler (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975); whilst others again, e. g. Sander (1964, 1980), Stern (1977), and myself (1958, 1969, 1973), have searched for new theoretical models. My own search has led not only to control theory and information pro- cessing but also to the biologically rooted discip- lines of ethology and comparative psychology. Thus there is no lack of new initiatives and it will take time to see which of them, or perhaps which combination of them, proves most productive of scientific advance. Here my aim is to describe one
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? ? ? such initiative, my own, and why I think it promising.
In the preceding lecture I described the cir- cumstances which led me to choose as a field of research the responses of a young child to being removed from his or her mother and placed for a time in a strange place with strange people, and how these observations led on to the formulation of attachment theory. Among essential features of this are that the human infant comes into the world genetically biased to develop a set of beha- vioural patterns that, given an appropriate envir- onment, will result in his keeping more or less close proximity to whomever cares for him, and that this tendency to maintain proximity serves the function of protecting the mobile infant and growing child from a number of dangers, amongst which in man's environment of evolu- tionary adaptedness the danger of predation is likely to have been paramount.
A concept that emerged early from ethologic- ally oriented studies of mother-child relation- ships (Ainsworth, 1967) and which has proved of great clinical value is that of a mother, or mother- substitute, providing a child with a secure base from which he can explore. By the last months of
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? ? ? the first year of life an infant brought up in an or- dinary affectionate home is very clear whom he prefers to care for him, a preference especially evident should he be tired, frightened, or sick. Whoever that may be, and it is usually his moth- er, is then able by her very presence, or ready ac- cessibility, to create the conditions which enable him to explore his world in a confident way. At the time of his second birthday, for example, a healthy child whose mother is resting on a garden seat will make a series of excursions away from her, each time returning to her before making the next excursion. On some occasions, when he re- turns, he simply smiles and makes his number; on others he leans against her knee; on yet others he wants to climb on her lap. But never does he stay for long unless he is frightened or tired or thinks she is about to leave. Anderson (1972), who made a study of this sort in a London park, observed that during the second and third years it is very rare for a child to go further than two hundred feet before returning. Should he lose sight of his mother, exploration is forgotten. His top priority then is to regain her, in an older child by searching and in a younger one by howling.
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? ? ? It is evident that there is no way of explaining this type of behaviour in terms of a build-up of psychic energy which is then discharged. An al- ternative model (already described in earlier lec- tures) is to think of the proximity-keeping of a child as being mediated by a set of behavioural systems organized cybernetically. Activation is intensified in conditions of pain, fatigue, and anything frightening; and reduced by proximity to or contact with the mother-figure. We can then postulate that the behaviour that takes him away from his mother into the wide world, which is conveniently termed exploratory behaviour, is in- compatible with attachment behaviour and has a lower priority. It is thus only when attachment behaviour is relatively inactive that exploration occurs.
As an individual grows older his life continues to be organized in the same kind of way though his excursions become steadily longer both in time and space. On entering school they will last for hours and later for days. During adolescence they may last for weeks or months, and new at- tachment figures are likely to be sought. Throughout adult life the availability of a re- sponsive attachment figure remains the source of
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? ? ? a person's feeling secure. All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is or- ganized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure(s).
In terms of the theoretical model proposed, the pronounced changes in the organization of at- tachment behaviour that occur during individual development are regarded as being due, in part, to the threshold for its activation being raised (perhaps through changes in endocrine levels) and, in part, to the control systems becoming in- creasingly sophisticated, in particular by their coming to incorporate representational models of the environment and important people in it and also of the self as a living active person.
The development during ontogeny of a set of systems of the kind described in humans, as well as in individuals of many other species, is attrib- uted to the action of natural selection, namely to individuals well endowed with the potential to develop such systems having survived and bred more successfully than those less well endowed, in other words to Darwinian evolution. Since a disposition to show attachment behaviour in cer- tain circumstances is regarded as an intrinsic
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? ? ? part of human nature, reference to it as 'depend- ency' is not only misleading but seriously inap- propriate because of the word's pejorative overtones.
Once attachment behaviour and other forms of biologically determined behaviour are conceived in forms of control theory, the problem of the purposiveness of behaviour is solved without abandoning the concept of causation. Further- more the distinction between causation and func- tion, sadly neglected in traditional psychoanalytic theory, becomes explicit. Activation, in which emotional arousal and expression play a critical part, and subsequently termination and change of emotional state are caused when a system con- structed in a particular way receives information of particular sorts. Of the various consequences to which activation leads, the one postulated as its biological function is the one that, evidence suggests, has led to the system having evolved during phylogeny. In the case of attachment be- haviour the function postulated is that of dimin- ishing the risk of the individual coming to harm.
At this level of analysis the question of whether an individual is aware of what he is doing, let alone why he is doing it, has no relevance, in fact
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? ? ? no more relevance than has the question of whether an individual is aware that he is breath- ing and, if so, realizes why he should be doing so. Biological systems serving vital functions, wheth- er at a behavioural or a physiological level, must be capable of operating automatically. Neverthe- less in the case of a human child awareness of what he is doing, and more particularly aware- ness of the conditions that will terminate his be- haviour, soon emerges, certainly by the end of his first year, and is a factor of great importance. For, once it is clear that a child is aware of the condi- tions that will terminate his behaviour, we begin speaking of intention, of his desire to achieve a certain goal, of his being satisfied and happy when he does so and frustrated, anxious, or angry when he fails, of satisfaction bringing pleasure and frustration the reverse.
At this point I wish to emphasize the sharp dis- tinction between conditions necessary to termin- ate a certain form of behaviour, commonly re- ferred to as its goal, and the biological function the behaviour serves. In the case of attachment behaviour in childhood, whereas we commonly expect both mother and child to be aware of the conditions necessary to terminate it, for example,
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? ? ? a certain degree of proximity, we do not expect awareness of function. The same holds in the case of eating and sexual behaviour. Most of us are aware that eating food will assuage our hunger and we find pleasure in eating; but only the soph- isticated are concerned with its nutritional func- tion. Similarly sexual desire can be assuaged without awareness of reproductive function. In both cases all but the sophisticated are concerned only with an urge to behave in a certain way and with the pleasure anticipated and received on reaching the terminating conditions (or goal), not with the biological function that the behaviour may serve. Often, in fact, when we feel emotion- ally impelled to act in a certain way that is readily explicable in terms of biological function, we con- coct 'reasons' for doing so that bear little or no re- lation to the causes of our behaviour. For ex- ample, a child or adult, who in order to reduce risk is biologically disposed to respond to strange sounds in the dark by seeking his attachment fig- ure, gives as his reason that he is afraid of ghosts. This is analogous to the 'reasons' for his beha- viour concocted by someone who is, without knowing it, acting on a post-hypnotic suggestion.
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? ? ? The distinction I have drawn between the func- tion served by a certain form of behaviour and our knowledge of, and our striving to reach, the conditions that will terminate that behaviour is one of the criteria that distinguish the biological realm from the psychological. Another is the dis- tinction between, on the one hand, the behavi- oural system, postulated as a biological given, to- gether with some (though not all) of the condi- tions that activate and terminate it, and, on the other, our awareness of the urge to reach a cer- tain goal and our effort to find means to do so.
Earlier I remarked that, in understanding indi- vidual development, it is as necessary to consider the environment in which each individual devel- ops as the genetic potentials with which he is en- dowed. The theoretical framework best suited to this purpose is that of developmental pathways proposed by the biologist, C. H. Waddington (1957).
Within this framework human personality is conceived as a structure that develops unceas- ingly along one or another of an array of possible and discrete pathways. All pathways are thought to start close together so that, at conception, an individual has access to a large range of pathways
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? ? ? along any one of which he might travel. The one chosen, it is held, turns at each and every stage on an interaction between the organism as it has developed up to that moment and the environ- ment in which it then finds itself. Thus at concep- tion development turns on interaction between the newly formed genome and the intrauterine environment; at birth it turns on interaction between the biological constitution of the neonate, including his germinal mental structure, and the family, or non-family, into which he is born; and at each age successively it turns on the personality structures then present and the fam- ily and later the wider social environment then current.
At conception the total array of pathways po- tentially open to an individual is determined by the make-up of the genome. As development pro- ceeds and structures progressively differentiate, the number of pathways that remain open diminishes.
A principal variable in the development of each individual personality is, I believe, the pathway along which his attachment behaviour comes to be organized and further that that pathway is de- termined in high degree by the way his parent-
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? ? ? figures treat him, not only during his infancy but throughout his childhood and adolescence as well.
A principal means by which such experi- ences influence personality development is held to be through their effects on how a person con- strues the world about him and on how he ex- pects persons to whom he might become attached to behave, both of which are derivatives of the representational models of his parents that he has built up during his childhood. Evidence sug- gests that these models tend to persist relatively unmodified at an unconscious level and to be far more accurate reflections of how his parents have really treated him than traditional opinion has supposed. Within this framework aberrations of behaviour and neurotic symptoms are conceived as due to the interactions that have occurred and that may still be occurring between an individu- al's personality as it has so far developed and the situation in which that individual now finds himself.
Let us pause here for a moment. In thus far sketching the conceptual framework I favour, I have doubtless said enough for you to see a num- ber of points at which it differs from the tradi- tional one. For example, the theory of motivation
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? ? ? advanced differs radically from Freud's theory of psychic energy and drive, and the theory of devel- opmental pathways differs in similar degree from his theories of libidinal phases, fixation, and re- gression. Furthermore the concept of attachment behaviour sees it as distinct from and of a status equal to that of eating and sexual behaviour, and as a characteristic present throughout life. Where lie the origins of these differences?
During the formative period of Freud's thought he was deeply interested in biology and con- cerned to formulate psychological theory in terms consistent with current biological thinking. This led him to explore the ideas of Darwin and other evolutionists of the period. At that time, the turn of the century, Darwin's theory of variation and natural selection as the agents of evolution was far from being the dominant theory it is today. On the contrary, Lamarck's theories regarding the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the influence that an animal's 'inner feeling of need' was thought to have on its structure were popular. So also was Haeckel's biogenetic law which, claiming that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, overlooks the fact that selection pres- sures operate at all phases of the life cycle and
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? ? ? that new species often spring from the immature forms of earlier ones (neoteny). Freud, we know, was deeply influenced by both Lamarck and Haeckel and he commends their ideas repeatedly to his students. 1 The outcome was that much of his metapsychology and all his developmental psychology came to be founded on principles long since abandoned by biologists.
If, therefore, psychoanalysis is to become the natural science based on sound biological prin- ciples that Freud intended, there are compelling reasons for drastic changes in some at least of its basic assumptions. The framework I am advan- cing, based on neo-Darwinian principles and cur- rent work in developmental psychology and hu- man information processing, is one such attempt.
Although psychoanalysis is avowedly a devel- opmental discipline, it is nowhere weaker, I be- lieve, than in its concepts of development. Many of the most influential of them, for example, that of libidinal phases, stem straight from Haeckel. Thus in his Introductory Lectures of 1916-17, Freud emphasizes that the development of both ego and libido are to be understood as 'abbrevi- ated recapitulations of the development which all mankind passed through from its primeval days'
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? ? ? (Freud, 1917, 354), whilst the development of the libido is also seen in terms of phylogeny and the various forms taken by the genital apparatus in animals. In a case study published about the same time, he attributes a person's ideas of 'ob- serving parental inter-course, of being seduced in childhood and of being threatened with castra- tion . . . [to] an inherited endowment, a phylogen- etic heritage'; and he claims also that the Oedipus complex is among the 'phylogenetically inherited schemata' (Freud, 1918, 97 and 119). All these ideas are repeated in his final work, e. g. Freud, 1939, 99.
Now it may be that few analysts today would subscribe to Freud's original formulations; yet there can be no doubt of their pervasive influence not only on what is taught but on the prevailing assumptions of how our understanding of emo- tional and social development is best furthered. Thus pride of place continues to be given to re- constructions based on what is observed and in- ferred during treatment sessions, coupled with a persisting, if weakening, reluctance to give seri- ous attention to the enormously important work now going on in the field of developmental psy- chology. Since in many previous publications I
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? ? ? have drawn attention to the relevance of this work, I need say only that I believe all the devel- opmental concepts of psychoanalysis will have to be re-examined, and that most of them will in due course be replaced by concepts now current among those who are studying the development of affectional bonds in infants and young children by means of direct observation. The understand- able reserve with which many clinicians have viewed this type of work in the past would, I be- lieve, be dispelled, were they to become familiar with the observations and ideas of such present leaders in the field as, for example, Mary Ainsworth (1977), John and Elizabeth Newson (1977), and Colwyn Trevarthen (1979).
Ignorant though many analytic theorists ap- pear still to be of the value or even the very exist- ence of these studies, there are, I am glad to say, an increasing number of analytic therapists who draw on them in their treatment of patients. Let us turn therefore to the clinical field and consider the account given by a Californian analyst of his treatment of a woman patient, many of whose problems he attributes, I believe rightly, to events following her parents' divorce and the long peri- od during her fifth and sixth years when she was
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? ? ? in an institution. This account2 not only illus- trates the kinds of distressing personal problem to which experiences of these sorts give rise, in- cluding intense ambivalence, but serves also to pose questions of how issues of defence and affect are answered within the conceptual framework I am proposing.
The problems for which Mrs G came for analysis were that she felt irrit- able and depressed and filled, as she put it, with hate and evil. In addition she found herself frigid with her husband, emotionally detached, and wondering whether she was capable of loving anyone.
Mrs G had been 3 years old when her parents divorced. Her father left home and her mother, who began working long hours, had little time for her daughter. A year later, when Mrs G was 4, her mother placed her in an orphanage where she remained for 18 long months. Thereafter, although she was back with her mother, family relationships continued to be dis- turbed and unhappy. As a result Mrs G left home during her teens and, before she was 21, had already been married and divorced twice. Her present husband was her third.
In the early phases of the analysis Mrs G was extremely reluctant to re- call the painful events of her childhood; and when she did so she broke down into tears and sobbing. Nevertheless her analyst encouraged her to reflect on them further and to do so in minute detail since he believed this would help her. At the same time he paid at least equal attention to her re- lationship with himself in which, as would be expected, all the interper- sonal difficulties she had had in other close relationships recurred.
Amongst much else in her childhood that was painful, Mrs G recalled how sad she had felt on being parted from her pets when she was sent away to the orphanage. Sometimes she dreamed about her time there with feelings of being overwhelmed. She recalled feeling very small among the many children, how there were no toys, the harsh treatment meted out and how she had sometimes misbehaved deliberately in order to get smacked [which at least meant she was given some attention--J B].
After four years of analysis Mrs G's financial difficulties led to the de- cision to end treatment in six months' time. Inevitably the emotional con- flicts she had in her relationship with her analyst became more acute. She now dreamed and daydreamed more openly of him. From the first she had
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? ? ? realized that parting would be painful. Separations had always made her angry and, as she put it now, 'anger makes me sad because it means the end. . . . I'm afraid you'll leave me or kick me out or put me away. ' The ana- lyst reminded her of how she had felt when sent to the orphanage. Strug- gling to think of herself as self-sufficient, she explained: 'I'm clinging on to me . . . I'm taking care of me all by myself. '
A few months later, as termination approached, she linked how she felt about her analyst with how she had felt earlier about her mother: 'I don't want to release my mother--I don't want to let her go--she's not going to get rid of me. ' By this stage of her analysis her active yearning for love and care had returned together with her anger at those who had denied it her.
The radical change that had occurred in this woman was confirmed in other episodes. For example, during the early days of the analysis her cat had died but she had felt indifferent about it. As she had then explained: 'If I let it hurt me, I'd be saddened by everything. One will trigger off the rest. ' But now, towards the end of the analysis, when another cat died, she wept.
Although therapy had restored this patient's feeling life and had resul- ted in her becoming able to make improved relationships, including that with her mother, a follow-up five years later showed, as would be expec- ted, that she remained vulnerable to situations that arouse anxiety and sadness, such as separation and loss.
Let us examine the change that had occurred in this woman, whose condition might be described clinically as schizoid (Fairbairn, 1940), or as false self (Winnicott, 1960, 1974), or as narcissistic (Kohut, 1971). Before the analysis she had felt emotionally detached and had wondered whether she was capable of loving anyone; a loss left her feeling indifferent. Now she had become aware how deeply she longed for love and care, and how angry she felt at not being given it; and a loss led to tears. Thus, in situations where they were
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? ? ? missing before, responses laden with deep affect now appeared.
To account for such a change traditional ex- planations tend to use an hydraulic metaphor: af- fect has been dammed up and has now been dis- charged. The dam is regarded as a defence against an exessive quantity of excitation that is in danger of overwhelming the ego. Other explan- ations invoke processes postulated to occur in earliest infancy, for example, fixation in a phase of narcissism or a split in the ego resulting from the projection of a death instinct.
An explanation of this woman's condition that I believe to be much closer to our present know- ledge of the early development of affectional bonds and consistent with what we know about human information processing runs as follows: as a result of the intense pain caused her during her early years by the prolonged and probably re- peated frustration of her attachment behaviour, experienced as frustration of her urgent desire for love and care, the behavioural system(s) govern- ing her attachment behaviour had become deac- tivated and had remained so despite her wishes to the contrary. As a result the desires, thoughts, and feeling that are part and parcel of attachment
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? ? ? behaviour were absent from her awareness. The deactivation itself can be understood as due to the selective exclusion from processing of any in- formation that, when processed, would lead to activation of the system.
The selective exclusion postulated, which, as recent experimental work shows, is well within the capabilities of our cognitive apparatus (Dixon, 1971; Erdelyi, 1974) and which I term de- fensive exclusion, requires constant cognitive activity at an unconscious level. The fact that the behavioural systems remain intact and capable in principle of being activated, and so may on occa- sion show brief or incipient activation, can ac- count for all those phenomena that led Freud to his ideas about a dynamic unconscious and re- pression. In fact, the defensive exclusion that I postulate is no more than repression under an- other name, a name more in keeping with the conceptual framework adopted here.
The process of therapeutic change in this pa- tient can then be understood as due to the pa- tient, thanks to the relatively secure base provided by the analyst, developing sufficient courage to permit some of the information hitherto excluded to go forward for processing.
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? ? ? This includes both information stemming from the present situation, for example, evidence of the analyst's genuine concern to help his patient and the conflicting thoughts, feelings, and beha- viour that that arouses, and also information stored in memory, for example, memories of the very painful events of childhood and the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour aroused by them. As a rule information from the two sources is recovered as a chain in which information from the present, especially the transference, altern- ates with information from the past, with each link leading on to the next. Once the relevant in- formation becomes accepted, of course, attach- ment behaviour is reactivated, together with the urges and desires, thoughts, and feeling that go with it. In traditional terms, the unconscious has been made conscious and the repressed urges and affects released.
Not infrequently, as with this patient, an ana- lyst has the task of drawing a patient's attention to memories he believes of importance and en- couraging her to reflect on them instead of turn- ing her back on them. In doing this an analyst is guided, of course, by whatever theories of person- ality development and psychopathology he may
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? ? ? espouse. This is a point at which analysts of dif- ferent schools diverge. For some the events thought to be important might refer to feeding and weaning and fantasies about them during the earliest months of life; for others to toilet training or witnessing the primal scene during the second year; for others again to Oedipal situations and wishes during the third or fourth. In the case of Mrs G the analyst drew on his knowledge of re- sponses of young children to events surrounding a prolonged separation from mother during sev- eral of the early years.
It is well recognized that not every child who has been in an institution for 18 months during his fifth and sixth years develops psychologically along the kind of pathway followed by Mrs G. In her case other factors almost certainly entered in. In considering what they might have been, I am influenced by remarks Mrs G made during the fi- nal phases of the analysis, for example, her fear lest her analyst should 'kick her out' or 'put her away' and her memory of how determined she had been that her mother should not 'get rid' of her. This suggests that as a method of disciplin- ing her daughter the mother may have repeatedly used threats to send her back to the institution,
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? ? ? threats we know from other evidence are far from rare and that not only have a terrifying effect on a young child but are likely also to generate intense hatred in him. The better an analyst's knowledge of childhood conditions likely to lead to disturbed development, the better can he understand and help his patients.
Inevitably a patient's spontaneous or guided recollections of his childhood are of only suggest- ive value as evidence bearing on theories of per- sonality development. What a patient tells us about his childhood and especially what an ana- lyst subsequently reports his patient to have said are probably influenced as much or more by the analyst's preconceptions as by anything the pa- tient may in fact have said or done; this is why I regard the systematic study by direct observation of children developing within different patterns of family care as indispensable for progress. Yet I also believe that observations made during ther- apy still have considerable research potential, al- though that potential will not be realized unless studies are conducted along far more systematic lines than have hitherto been usual and data ob- tained during therapy are constantly compared with data derived from other sources.
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? ? ? The research strength of the therapeutic situ- ation lies not in what it tells us about the patient's past but in what it tells us about disturbances of personality functioning in the present, especially, I would claim, disturbances in a person's capacit- ies to make secure attachments and the condi- tions in which these disturbances become ameli- orated. The case of Mrs G can be used as an intro- duction to a research proposal, since there is much both in the personality disturbance she presents and in the course of her analysis that we have reason to believe are fairly typical.
Drawing on case reports already in the literat- ure it would be possible to make a number of generalizations which could then be treated as predictions to be tested in further therapeutic work with patients showing similar clinical fea- tures. All such predictions, which would be con- ditional on the particular pattern of therapy to be followed,3 could be couched in terms of what can be observed at first hand. They would include statements about how a patient would be expec- ted to behave towards the analyst, the topics he would be expected to talk about or, in particular, avoid talking about, the affect he would be expec- ted to show or not to show, and in what
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? ? ? situations. Of special interest would be changes in behaviour, topic, and affect that would be ex- pected to occur in relation to certain types of cur- rent event, both those occurring in the patient's everyday life and those occurring within the ana- lysis. Events of the latter sort would include how the analyst behaves, what he says, and how he says it, with particular reference to interruptions in the analysis due to holidays, sickness, or other circumstances. Tape recording of sessions to avoid biased reporting would, of course, be necessary.
By following the procedures proposed it would be possible over a period of time to gather com- parable bodies of data from two sources. One body of data would be gathered by means of dir- ect observation of the development and pattern- ing of affectional bonds during infancy and child- hood in children experiencing different types of care. The other would be gathered, also by direct observation of changes in the patterning of affec- tional bonds, during the course of a certain type of therapy. Provided that the conceptual frame- works used in making both sets of observations and the questions each set addresses are the
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? ? ? same, findings could be compared and develop- mental hypotheses tested.
This is but one way in which psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge about personality develop- ment and psychopathology might move towards becoming the natural science Freud always inten- ded it to be.
The conceptual framework sketched here serves, I believe, to accommodate a substantial proportion of the data that psychoanalysis has se- lected as within its domain and already guides productive research programmes (e. g. Parkes and Stevenson-Hinde, 1982). The framework has the advantage of being compatible with evolutionary biology and neurophysiology and promises great- er economy and internal consistency than do tra- ditional ones. Nevertheless what its strengths and weaknesses will prove to be cannot be known without extensive testing of its powers to solve problems not yet studied, which include, for ex- ample, those of sexual development and devi- ation, and a far more intensive examination than has yet been possible of its usefulness in solving the problems already given attention.
Finally let us consider the issues raised by those who maintain that psychoanalysis is not
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? ? ? and never can be a natural science. Their argu- ment, we find, stems from the belief that scientif- ic method is inseparable from logical positivism and reductionism. Although confidently and of- ten dogmatically held earlier this century, this model of science is now discarded and its place taken by a philosophy of evolutionary epistemo- logy (Popper, 1972; Latakos, 1974). This holds that all knowledge is conjectural and that science progresses through new theories coming to re- place older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and ex- plained by an older one and is able also to predict new phenomenena more accurately. 4 This same method is held to be applicable in all theoretical or generalizing sciences, whether they deal with physical, biological, or social phenomena. Fur- thermore, since to understand phenomena at any one level of complexity demands concepts appro- priate to that level, the notion that complex phe- nomena must be explained in terms of concepts appropriate to a lower level of complexity, namely reductionism, is now recognized as falla- cious. How these new ideas apply to our field is
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? ? ? ably discussed by Holt (1981), Blight (1981), and Radford (1983).
Invaluable though scientific method is as a way of obtaining relatively reliable knowledge, resolv- ing differences of opinion and making useful pre- dictions, its limitations are nonetheless consider- able. One is that science deals in generalities but has little to say about singular specific events. This is a vital distinction, as the physicist, Weis- skopf (1981), points out. In the physical sciences it does not matter since physicists and engineers have no interest in the future of any particular atom or molecule. Once we move to the biological sciences, however, it does matter because biolo- gists are frequently interested in individual or- ganisms, all of which differ. In certain of the hu- man sciences, moreover, the individual example is the very essence of the case. History, for in- stance, whether it deals with societies or persons or ideas, is always concerned with an appallingly complex sequence of highly specific interacting events which no amount of science can enable us to explain adequately, let alone predict. Thus the distinction between the natural sciences and the historical sciences is not that they use a different method of obtaining knowledge but that the
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? ? ? problems that they strive to understand and the criteria they adopt are quite different. One is con- cerned to formulate general laws in terms of probabilities, the other to understand singular specific events in as much detail as possible. The distinction is central to the whole argument.
Under the label 'psychoanalysis', it is clear, two complementary disciplines are striving to live and develop. In so far as we are trying to under- stand the general principles accounting for per- sonality development and psychopathology, ne- cessary, for example, if we are to know what forms of child care tend to produce what sorts of personality formation, we adopt the criteria of the natural sciences. And we do the same when we are trying to understand the essential features of effective therapy. In these fields we are dealing with statistical probabilities. In so far as we are concerned to understand the personal problems of a given individual and what events may have contributed to their development, necessary if we are to help him (though far from sufficient), we adopt the criteria of the historical sciences. Each approach contributes to our understanding; but, as I have pointed out in the previous lecture, only
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? ? ? if we are clear-headed about what belongs to each, shall we be able to make progress.
1 For Freud's adherence to Lamarckian ideas see volume 3, chapter 10, of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud (Jones, 1957). For the influence of Haeckel's bio- genetic law see James Strachey's long editorial foot- note to his translation of Freud's Moses and Monothe- ism (SE 23,102) and especially Frank Sulloway's en- quiry into the origins of Freud's metapsychology (Sul- loway, 1979).
2 The account given here is derived from the contribu- tion by Thomas Mintz to a symposium organized by the American Psychoanalytic Association on the effects on adults of object loss during the first five years of life (Mintz, 1976).
3 The technique of analysis adopted by Mintz appears to have much in com-mon with that adopted in the Un- ited Kingdom by Donald Winnicott; see the account by Guntrip (1975).
4 The criterion of falsifiability on which Popper formerly laid great emphasis is no longer given so much prominence; though the constant comparison of theoretically derived predictions with an ever increas- ing array of observed data remains central.