All terms remain suspect. This chapter, which does not aspire to be a “balanced,” neutral account, or a systematic survey, endeavors to compare the two broad orientations in object relations theory already referred to as drive oriented and person oriented. Other writers employ different sets of terms to make a comparable distinction. Greenberg and Mitchell use “drive/structure model” and “relational/structure model” (20), phrasings that seem to me not only awkward but seriously problematic because of the way they imply a commitment to Freud’s structural theory, a difficulty Mitchell finesses later (1988, viii) by treating object relations as part of a “relational theory” that excludes drive theory and ego psychology. Eagle provides another instance of inconsistent terminology when he writes dichotomously of “Freudian instinct theory” as against “a psychology of object relations” (1984, 19)—as though there were no overlap. In one sense, of course, there is no middle ground here. Yet we need to make room, as Eagle does in his discussions, for elements of object-relational theory in Freud, a situation I try to account for by speaking of the “drive-oriented” object relations theory of Freud and some of his followers without excluding the possibility of the presence of traces of drive theory in the positions of figures who are fundamentally person-oriented, like Winnicott. A clearer, more precise sense of what the terms “drive-oriented” and “person-oriented” are meant to convey will unfold as discussion proceeds. Meanwhile these two categories are intended to provide a set of coordinates in terms of which to argue the claim that contemporary psychoanalysis needs to adopt a person-oriented theory of object relations, more unreservedly than it already has, in order to be free of the defects of Freud’s drive-oriented emphasis and to be responsive to empirical findings and clinical evidence concerning the formative role of interpersonal relationships in human development.
FREUD’S MIXED LEGACY
The origins of many of the intractable difficulties of Freud’s early theorizing can be located in the formulations of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905b). One of the most momentous of these derives from Freud’s insistence on isolating “the sexual aim” from “the sexual object” (1905b, 135-36). He argues that abnormal sexuality shows that “the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together” (148). He urges us to “loosen the bond” in our minds because “it seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object,” and shortly thereafter he stresses that under a great many circumstances “the nature and importance of the sexual object recedes into the background” (149). This emphasis allows Freud to valorize sexuality at the expense of object relations, such as when he remarks that children behave “as though their dependence on the people looking after them were in the nature of sexual love,” adding, “Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love” (224). Freud’s language also performs the maneuver of constituting all objects as sexual objects, by definition, with the paradoxical result that while sexuality can be discussed more or less independently from objects, objects themselves can never be divorced from sexuality, a position that soon hardens into doctrine. Further instances of Freud’s perspective can be found in the following statements, some of them from late in his career. After claiming that “sexual life does not begin only at puberty, but starts . . . soon after birth” (1940, 152), Freud goes on to characterize the child’s tie to his mother as an erotic one: “A child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it; love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment” (1940, 188). He adds, in the language of seduction theory, “By her care of the child’s body she becomes its first seducer” (188). Thus it is that Freud comes to regard all initial object relations as incestuous in their essential character, all subsequent relations as tainted by the lingering psychological influence of the earliest ones (1905b, 225-28), and he even goes so far as to think of “an excess of parental affection” (223) as potentially harmful.
Freud’s conceptualization of sexual behavior as instinctive does not, in itself, constitute a problem within the scope of the issues being considered here, though it should be noted that in place of speaking of “the sexual instinct,” as Freud does, I shall try to speak instead of “sexual behavior” in order to remain closer to the actualities of human experience and to avoid the common tendency in psychoanalysis to reify abstractions (as in the case of such nominative phrases as “the unconscious,” “the ego,” “the libido,” and so on). Neither does Freud’s construction of a general theory of the development of human sexuality from particular bodily zones and events and experiences and stages into the more complex design of adult sexuality constitute a stumbling block, though judgment may be reserved with regard to specific features of this developmental theory. Nature does not make jumps, as an ancient proverb reminds us, so adult sexuality cannot be supposed to blossom overnight out of nowhere. What do constitute major problems with Freud’s early theories are, first, his assumption that sexual experience, including fantasy, serves as a privileged arena of psychological conflict; and, second, his metapsychological suppositions known collectively as libido theory. I address the latter problem first.
An endless source of confusion in psychoanalysis results from the common practice of casually using “libidinal” as a synonym for “sexual.” Doing so effectively blurs two levels of discourse, the high level of abstraction belonging to libido theory and the clinical, everyday level of immediate observation and experience. Freud himself obscures the difference at the outset of Three Essays by equating the term libido, Latin for “pleasure,” with “sexual instinct” (1905b, 135). Later he calls it “the energy of the sexual instinct” (163). He thinks of this sexual energy as a psychic, or “mental” energy, a “force” (177). Freud’s inclination to describe the action of the libido in the naively concrete language of hydraulic flow has been a target of widespread criticism. Freud depicts “the libido” as flowing through “channels” that are like “inter-communicating pipes” (15In); these “mental forces” can be dammed up, and “diverted” (178), and of course “repressed”; in some cases “the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty” (170). Elsewhere Freud describes libido in highly abstract ways: “We have defined the concept of libido as a quantitatively variable force which could serve as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation” (217) and as “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work” (168). Freud explicitly distinguishes “libidinal and other forms of psychical energy” from the energy made available by metabolic processes (217), lest there be any question on that score. But the more one reads, the more difficult it becomes to decide just exacdy what Freud did have in mind by the concept of libido—quite apart from the problem of whether or not this concept can be found to correspond to anything in the real world, a problem to be addressed late in this chapter in idle context of considering various published critiques of libido theory. In any case, it becomes understandable that even those discriminating and indefatigable lexicographers, Laplanche and Pontalis, lamely concede that “the concept of libido itself has never been clearly defined” (1973, 239).
Although related ideas of Freud involving such distinctions as those between the sexual instincts and the ego instincts, and the distinction between ego-libido and object-libido, will be passed over for the time being, it will be useful to dwell for a moment on the comparison Freud makes between the sexual instinct and what he refers to as “the herd instinct” (1923, 257). Freud doubts the innateness of any social instinct, but he believes that even if it were innate it could probably “be traced