Self and Other. Robert Rogers L.
Pine’s uncritical eclecticism may be contrasted to Gedo’s cautious holism. Gedo, who laments the failure of psychoanalysis “to produce a theoretical consensus with regard to the proper place of object relations in our conceptual armamentarium” (1979, 362), questions Kohut’s claim that scientific disciplines may legitimately utilize uncoordinated fragments of theory: “If we have a choice, a unitary theory is preferable to a patchwork, the components of which bear no discernible relation to each other” (364).
According to the perspective assumed in this chapter, the deficiencies of drive theory and ego psychology have long since overwhelmed their former usefulness. The functions they sought to explain, such as unconscious motivation and conflict, can be better understood along different lines. As for what is left of Pine’s four psychologies, object relations theory and what I call self theory (as distinguished from Kohut’s self psychology) overlap so much as to make their concerns virtually insepa rable within the territory of psychoanalysis, provided, of course, that one assumes that psychoanalysis is a special psychology, limited in scope, which entertains no ambitions to be a general psychology. When I say that the concerns of self theory and object relations theory are virtually inseparable, I naturally do not mean they are indistinguishable from each other as fields of investigation. As definable areas of knowledge they reflect different perspectives and priorities. The crucial task is to explore the overlap of these distinguishable realms of attention without becoming confused by the differences. One aspect of the problem is terminological. For example, use of the terms “self” and “object” propagates a measure of confusion by tending to reify abstract categories in a way that blurs the existential inseparability of self and other, a conceptual problem addressed by Winnicotfs famous dictum (1952, 97-100) that there is no such thing as a baby (in that babies never appear except as parts of the “nursing couple” dyad). Mitchell speaks to the same issue, the impossibility of dealing with self and other separately, when he writes, “To assign priority to sense of self, object ties, or patterns of interaction is like trying to decide whether it is the skin, the bones, or the musculature that preserves the body farm. . . . The intrapsychic and the interpersonal are continually interpenetrating realms, each with its own set of processes, mechanisms, and concerns” (1988, 35).
For the practical purposes of ordinary discussion, therefore, the present work handles self theory as an aspect of object relations theory, object relations theory as an aspect of self theory, and attachment theory as a special branch of both. The possibilities for consolidation seem endless. One has only to think, for instance, of Bowlby’s emphasis on children’s sense of security in the presence of attachment figures in conjunction with the attention Winnicott and Mahler give to children’s ability to play in the presence of their mothers to get a sense of how much attachment theory has in common with object relations theory. An instructive instance of a particular analyst whose work successfully utilizes the combined perspectives of classical psychoanalysis, object relations theory, attachment theory, interactionalist views (Bower, Brazelton), and self theory without ignoring the differences can be found in V. Hamilton’s Narcissus and Oedipus (1982). Stern speaks of his version of self theory as having much in common with psychoanalysis and attachment theory, though it differs from them in treating a subjective sense of self as its primary organizing principle (1985, 25). Eagle (1984) aligns his views of object relations theory with attachment theory. Though other examples of par rial integration of these theories could be mentioned, the task of systematically combining the most meaningful parts of the various perspectives in question (in a way that would meet Gedo’s standards for a unitary theory) remains so formidable as to be far beyond the scope of the present chapter, which aspires to do no more than peek through certain windows of opportunity in order to see what a unified theory of object relations might look like when seen from a contemporary vantage point.
POSITIONING ATTACHMENT THEORY
What should be the place of attachment theory in a person-oriented theory of object relations? The beginning of an answer can be glimpsed in the anecdote Guntrip relates concerning a question Fairbairn poses to a child whose mother has cruelly thrashed her: “Would you like me to find you a new, kind Mummy?” The child answers, “No. I want my own Mummy” (Guntrip 1975, 146). In the context of attachment theory, one can say that the strength of the child’s tie to a particular mother—however harsh she may be—infinitely outweighs the possible desirability of any substitute figure. As Guntrip glosses the situation, “The devil you know is better than the devil you do not, and better than no devil at all.” One can also say of this tie that it is instinctive, primary (not based on any secondary drive, such as the need for food), and, in Bowlby’s cybernetic terminology, the child’s behavior (in this instance, her answer to Fairbairn) “is a product of the activity of a number of behavioural systems that have proximity to mother as a predictable outcome” (1969, 179), so that in the presence of anxiety or difficulty (being thrashed) the child paradoxically needs the attacking object more than ever!
Attachment theory can be regarded as the cornerstone of a person oriented theory of object relations in part because it provides a meaningful substitute, as Bowlby intended it should, for the drive theory of human motivation. It has the potential for modeling both conflictful and harmonious (growth-inducing) relationships. It does not pretend to be a universal theory explaining all forms of human behavior, such as the kind denominated by Lichtenberg (1989) as “exploratory assertive,” but it does offer a suitable framework for understanding the range of behavior normally understood to be subsumed under the heading of object relations. As Rosenblatt and Thickstun remark, speaking of attachment theory, “The central importance of social relationships (in psychoanalytic terms, ‘object relations’) in shaping the person’s emotional and cognitive growth is the clinical essence of psychoanalysis” (1977, 122). Or as Greenberg and Mitchell put it, in person-oriented object relations theory “the unit of study of psychoanalysis is not the individual, but the relational matrix constituted by the individual in interaction with significant others” (1983, 220).
Bowlby himself rarely puts into play the conceptual vocabulary of object relations. Why is that, one may ask, and whatever happened, intellectually and emotionally, to Bowlby’s own analyst, Joan Riviere, and to Meianie Klein, one of Bowlby’s supervisors? Bowlby does not neglect to acknowledge his debt to them “for grounding me in the object-relations approach to psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on early relationships and the pathogenic potential of loss” (1969, xvii), yet most of his work departs radically from Klein’s. The necessary inference for those familiar with Bowlby’s methodology and cognitive style is that in rebelling against certain features of contemporary British object relations theory Bowlby bent over backwards to avoid any inferences not based on solid, empirical evidence. Yet his subject matter, as distinguished from his methodology, is entirely object relational. He himself declares that his most “central concepts” are “object relations, separation anxiety, mourning, defence, trauma, [and] sensitive periods in early life” (xv), a group of categories that can be lumped together without any distortion as “object relations.” Bowlby specifies that attachment theory derives from object relations theory and has much in common with the work of Meianie Klein, Fairbairn, Balint, and Winnicott (17).
Positioning attachment theory vis-à-vis object relations theory necessitates supplying what attachment theory leaves out, such as attention to particular individuals, and to internalized representations and their processing, while emphasizing those features of object relations theory, collectively considered, with which attachment theory is correlative and compatible, such as psychological responses to loss. When I say “object relations theory, collectively considered,” I refer as well to ideas deriving from self theory not hitherto part of earlier versions of object relations theory, such as the concept of intersubjectivity and the process Stern calls “affect attunement.” Within an expanded framework of self theory and object relations theory, attachment theory as we find it in Bowlby constitutes a special branch, one that continues to grow through his followers’ contributions.
After relating the anecdote about Fairbairn’s question to the abused child, Guntrip mentions that the story illustrates Fairbairn’s concern about the quality of parent-child relations. As a rule, Bowlby pays little direct attention to the quality of parenting. He speaks instead, along quantitative lines, of the presence, or temporary absence