Cultures of Fetishism (27 page)

The restraints on free associations come in various guises, many of them, such as Isakower’s analyzing instrument, masquerading as the sine qua non of freedom.

Moreover, since only analysts gifted with a special kind of empathy could communicate with patients in this way, Isakower’s analyzing instrument became a method of restricting analytic anointment to the gifted. Those who had this gift were in. Those who lacked this gift were out.

Jacob Arlow, who after the Isakower Age became one of the new leaders of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, claimed that the holy status accorded to the Isakower analyzing instrument was reminiscent of Jewish mysticism, or Caballah. The ability to understand “the true essence of existence, which was granted only to very special people” corresponded to “feelings of a special endowment which came from the possession of secret knowledge.”
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Isakower’s ideological platform for making the unconscious conscious through the encouragement of a regressed configuration of analysand-analyst communication, was seen by some of his detractors as a shabby remnant of

Freud’s outmoded topographical model, a supposedly “archaic” version of psychoanalysis, where associations were free to bypass the strictures and restric- tions of the conscious mind. At other times, the era was depicted as a hot-bed of rampant instinctual expression, of sexual and aggressive drives. Isakower’s analyzing instrument was said to be symptomatic of a breakdown of struc- tural restraints, a demonic Id Psychology that ran roughshod over the ego and the superego. While these are crude distortions of Isakower’s position, they represent what some analysts thought about him and his analyzing instrument, either publically or privately, and helps to explain why many of them might have been fearful of both the inventor and the cabalistic instru- ment he invented.

On the other hand, many present-day analysts, both older generation standard bearers and the so-called younger generation, assert that Kirsner’s story of Isakower’s sway over the New York Psychoanalytic Institute may have been an exaggeration. They barely acknowledge the influence of Isakower and his analyzing instrument, and instead trace the authoritarian regimes back to another analyst, Heinz Hartmann, the champion of Ego Psychology, who is said to be representative of all that went wrong with American psychoanalysis during its halcyon days—the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.

In contrast to Isakower’s alleged Id Psychology, Hartmann is said to be guilty of promulgating a narrow version of Ego Psychology that advanced such idealistic notions as “conflict free” areas of functioning, adaptation, and ego autonomy. It was the religion of Hartmann’s Ego Psychology that is said to have permeated the New York Psychoanalytic. He and his followers claimed as their banner Freud’s dictum “where id was, there ego shall be,” which many other analysts believe to be a mistranslated and therefore misun- derstood phrase that misrepresents the ego as dominating the id, when in fact it is the other way around, with the forces of the id shaping the ways in which the ego may respond; “ego shall be where id is.”

A few of the present-day advocates of Hartmann’s Ego Psychology like to claim that Hartmann’s status as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1951 to 1957 meant that he and his theories had world- wide respect and analytic influence. However, this claim evokes passionate and vociferous opposition, particularly from analysts outside the United States. The objection is not only about Hartmann’s purported worldwide influence but also about the validity of his proclamations on Ego Psychology. As French analyst Andre Green insisted, there was no “Hartmann era;” the very phrase is a symptom of the arrogance of the analysts who believe it to be true. Ego Psychology is now, and was then, totally absent “in Latin America, and in Europe its influence was limited to the agreement of Anna Freud and her group.”
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Furthermore, and even more seriously, “To say that we can put the ego on a par with the id is inconsistent because it is a major hypothesis of Freud that the id dominates the ego. . . . The whole construction of the psychic apparatus is built on the foundation of the id. If you disagree with

this principle, then you disagree with the whole description of Freud’s psychic apparatus.”
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Obviously, Green has his own authoritarian attitude. Anyone who disagrees with him is not a “real analyst.” Yet, there are many analysts through- out the world who applaud Green’s belittling portrayal of Ego Psychology. The considered opinion is that the phenomena of Ego Psychology was a tem- porary local manifestation, primarily in New York with a few pockets of Hartmania in New Haven and London.

Nevertheless, even though physically localized, Hartmann’s adherents did control the editorial policies of three of the major psychoanalytic journals in the United States, and these reflected the ego psychological thinking of the Hartmann “group.” In this sense, they did have some limited, but influential, power over the intellectual domains of psychoanalysis, at least on the Northeast coast of the United States. They were also sufficiently powerful to perpetrate some rather extraordinary abuses of power within the narrow limits of The New York Psychoanalytic Training Institute.

The Hartmann group had a doctrine, an intellectual agenda that became more and more out-of-step with the international psychoanalytic movement. This agenda entailed a major shift in focus from the unknowable;—the Id and concurrently the sexual and aggressive drives—to an emphasis on rationality, the conflict-free sphere, adaptation, a de-instinctualization or so-called neutralization of drive energies.
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Hartmann’s doctrine implied that there is an entire sphere of human existence that is free of instinctual demands, contradiction, irrationality.

In
The Hartmann Era
, a collection of essays published in 2000, the editor Martin Bergmann explained that Hartmann’s utopian version of the ego was “a reaction against Freud’s pessimism about the role of the ego in the process of cure.”
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Hartmann’s optimistic doctrine generated enormous conflict, despair, and paranoid fear among candidates. Ego Psychology could be viewed as a thirty first method for destroying psychoanalytic creativity. During the Hartmann era, there was a reification of ego psychological concepts and a party line that had to be followed if a candidate wanted to graduate or be published. As Anton Kris, the son of two Hartmann-era analysts, Marianna and Ernst Kris, recounts: “the astonishing number of casualties in our field, among our own colleagues, at the hands of their teach- ers and their Institutes (or the Institutes that would not have them or would have them only under demeaning conditions), has been a powerful influence on my development as an analyst and teacher.”
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Kernberg claimed that “The authoritarian quality of Hartmann and his group was enormous.”
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Or as Mortimer Ostow, who was a student during that era, reports, “the authoritarianism [of the Hartmann group] was really quite devastating.”
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“We were trained to be completely orthodox, completely compliant. If any student asked any question whatever, he was put down and told that he was resistant. It was really a religious orthodoxy complete with a scripture. And with ideas of heresy.”
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By the mid-sixties, the struggles and fights between those in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute who wanted reform and the Hartmann in-group could sometimes be emotionally violent and scary to those who witnessed them.

In 1963, Charles Brenner, an analyst who had once sought to ameliorate the authoritarian structure of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, co- authored with Jacob Arlow,
Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory
, a monograph whose principles would soon become the foundation of a new orthodoxy, a new way of bringing psychoanalysis under house arrest. While the monograph was a more or less straightforward explication of the superiority of Freud’s later structural model, a dividing of the mind into the mental structures of id-ego-superego, over Freud’s earlier topographical model that divided the mind into unconscious, pre-conscious, and conscious, the principles enunciated in that monograph evolved into the next orthodoxy of American psychoanalysis, at least in the New York Psychoanalytic. As the editors of the structural theory monograph stated:

the authors [Arlow and Brenner] certainly leave no room for any misunderstand- ing of their unequivocal statement that, since the topographic and structural models are incompatible with each other, the former should be discarded. They treat the models as forthright dichotomies and, in detailing the inconsistencies between them, have no trouble in deciding in favor of the structural model. They do not feel that much is to be gained by an attempt to integrate the two.
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In other words, anyone who still believes in the topographical model, or even thinks they might integrate it with the structural model, is not a “real analyst.” And, since the effects of this change in theory has had enormous impact on psychoanalytic treatment techniques, the problem of not being a “real analyst” could have real and serious consequences for candidates. Brenner claimed he was upholding the Freudian tradition.

At first, it seemed that Brenner was following, almost to the letter, the principles that Freud had laid out in
The Ego and the Id
. However, in Brenner’s later writings, he made it clear that his version of structural theory represented a revision of some of the fundamental premises of Freud’s the- ory, principally his convictions about the biological underpinnings of the libidinal and aggressive drives. For Brenner, however, everything in human psychology, whether normal or pathological, is the result of
mental
(itals. mine) activity; a mind never free of conflict, a mind always bent on achieving a compromise between all parties in the conflict—id, ego and superego. Most significantly, both mental conflict and the efforts of the mind toward com- promise give rise to unpleasant affects such as guilt, depression and anxiety, which means that these affects are also the outcome of mental activity.

Paradoxically, over the years, as the Brenner doctrine became more and more formulaic and uncompromising, it came to be known as the theory of “compromise formation.” Nowadays most recent graduates and younger gen- eration members of the New York Psychoanalytic have been indoctrinated into compromise formation theory, which purports to be all one needs to know to

be anointed as a “real psychoanalyst.” Indeed, if a candidate or member analyst questions the centrality of compromise formation or tries to introduce an idea generated by the “fancy” new designer imports from England, France, or South America or even suggests the idea of integrating
one or two
of the basic notions from Freud’s earlier topographical model, the challenger will run up against the minimalist dogmas of the compromise formation bible, Brenner’s 1982
The Mind in Conflict
, which he and his followers can recite and re-iterate on command and in exacting detail whenever one of its premises is challenged.
The Mind in Conflict
argues that, “The very fabric of psychic life is woven”
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of derivatives of our childhood impulses and wishes, of the conflicts they give rise to, of the anxiety and depressive affects connected with these conflicts, of the defenses erected to control, direct, and divert these deriva- tives, and of the manifestations of the superego—(itself a compromise formation), that are reflective of these drives and conflicts that arouse guilt and other painful affects. Nothing that anyone thinks or says is ever free from repression and other defenses. Every thought, every “association” is necessarily a compromise formation among the various tendencies of the mind. All of human life, and every human undertaking, is an outcome of one

compromise formation or another.
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The problems with compromise formation theory are not that it is lacking in psychoanalytic wisdom. The problems are the narrowness of its focus; the arrogant tone of its proclamations; the authoritarian manner of limiting and excluding any other approach to understanding psychic life. By implication anyone who does not heed the strictures of compromise formation theory is not a “real analyst.”

The minimalist design of Brenner’s compromise formation version of structural theory has created an architecture that has the effect of erecting an unassailable wall around itself, as if to ward off those potentially contaminat- ing thoughts, fantasies, or ideas that might disrupt and complicate things. I am not opposed to compromise formation theory, but to the fetishistic quality of the intellectual edifice that enshrouds it.

A long time ago, nearly three decades before Kernberg drew up his thirty methods for killing creativity, Wilfred Bion, a British analyst with a interna- tional reputation as a champion of therapeutic creativity, famously declared that the psychoanalyst should come to the clinical situation in a state of igno- rance, “free of memory and desire.”
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In other words, we should approach each clinical encounter as a more or less blank slate that can be written on without the impediments of previous associations or past and present strivings and longings. If we are aware of our temptations to express such associations, strivings, and longings by prematurely interpreting, impulsively acting, or compulsively not-acting, or knowing too much too soon, we should be alert to the possibility of a (fetishistic) need to smother the creative sparks that might otherwise disrupt and question our analytic certainties.

Does this mean that analysts should never interpret? Does it mean that analysts should suppress all desires and longings? Or, that we never should employ the memories of past sessions to guide us in the present? Of course,

these suppressions would simply be another version of stifling, this time of the analyst’s freely ranging free associations that allow for creative under- standings of what is transpiring in the therapeutic situation. One way or another, it seems that an analyst’s creative potentials are always in danger of being bound by the fetishism strategy. The unpredictable, the unknowables that transpire between analyst and patient seem to be a minefield of potential conflagration and explosion.