University of Essex | Annual Freud Memorial Lecture 2012

the freud memorial lecture is very special to the center above all because of the quality of the speakers that we're very fortunate to have come and address us which we like to think reflect the quality of the work that goes on in the center but it's also very important to us because of when it takes place it happens at the end of the teaching year in the middle of our or at the end of our research student conference when our many postgraduate research students gather at the university from the various parts of the world where where they where many of them work and to take part in a a conference and and share their their work it's also important because it's a public event so serving not just our our own students and staff and the university community but also the public and there is a great public interest in in our area um and finally it's important to us because of the uh the fact that it's been sponsored uh for many years by the freud family through sigmund freud copyrights and now also by the institute of psychoanalysis so the lecture is um is is as it were supported by and has and gives us a connection to um the the um the the sort of origins and continuing carriers of our of our field um and uh this year we're especially pleased to have uh professor jan abram address us good evening thank you for coming and welcome to this the the 2012 freud memorial lecture i'm roderick maine the director of the center for psychoanalytic studies and in a moment i'm going to introduce this year's lecturer but first i'd like to say a few words about the event and about the center also could i kindly ask anyone who has not yet turned off their mobile phone to do so thank you the floyd memorial lecture celebrates the life and work of sigmund freud the founder of psychoanalysis freud's work has had a profound pervasive influence not only in the field of mental health but also on contemporary culture and society this is the case both at a popular level as w h oden famously wrote freud is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives and at an academic level where it has prompted the development of psychodynamic and psychotherapeutic approaches to analyzing culture and society this range of influence is reflected in our annual lectures which are given by eminent psychoanalytic clinicians academics and cultural commentators recent topics going back have included racism love child abuse filmic representations of virginity and so on the fraud memorial lecture is the center for psychoanalytic studies most public-facing annual event but it is by no means all we do many of you will already be aware of our doctoral masters and undergraduate programs our annual research conference held each november and our other activities i would encourage anyone not already in the loop to pick up some of the leaflets in the foyer and to look at our web pages also in the foyer you will find books by tonight's speaker as well as other books of related interest for about 15 years the fraud memorial lecture was generously supported by the freud family through the literary agency of the center's great friend and ally mark patterson from this year under a new arrangement it's being sponsored by the university's faculty of social science and by the institute of psychoanalysis in london who jointly support an annual visiting professorship in the center one of the main duties of the holder of this post is to deliver the annual freud memorial lecture i would like to thank these supporters past and present i would also like to thank both the center for psychoanalytic studies administrative team debbie stewart allison evans fiona gilles and julie harrison whose combined efforts have enabled this event to be organized and the staff of the lakeside theater who have helped in various ways with this venue i shall now introduce tonight's freud memorial lecturer professor jan abram jan is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a fellow of the institute of psychoanalysis she is the author of the language of winnicott a dictionary of winnicott's use of words published by karnak originally in 1996 but reprinted in a second edition in 2007 and the editor of donald winnicott today which will be published this july by routledge in the new library of psychoanalysis jan is also the first holder of our visiting professorship and in that capacity has among other things organized over the course of this year a very successful series of clinical workshops with eminent psychoanalysts both at the university here and in london in her lecture tonight jan will be speaking on the topic of winnicott's last word on the death instinct she'll speak for about 50 minutes or so and then we'll be happy to answer questions from the audience well thank you very much rodrick for your introduction and i also want to thank um the center for psychoanalytic studies and also the institute of psychoanalysis for um for this collaboration which has been a very exciting year and it's it's a great honor to be here and to share some of my work and some of my thinking over the over the past few years um so what i'm going to do is talk to this paper um but i'm also going to be reading parts of it because i think sometimes if you just read it it might be a bit tedious um so i'll come off the page every now and then in the early days of 1971 winnicott booked a room at the hotel sasha vienna for the last week of july he was planning to attend the 27th congress of the international psychoanalytical association which was to be held in vienna that year the the theme was on the psychoanalytical concept of aggression theoretical clinical and applied aspects winnicott had been invited to speak on a panel entitled the role of aggression in child analysis sadly it was a congress that he was destined not to attend because he died on january the 25th 1971 a few months before his 75th birthday in the winnicott archives in a file marked dw's notes for the vienna congress never given in the hand of his uh then widow claire winnecott who was his wife for 20 years there are a set of unpublished notes in winnicott's hand the notes comprise of handwritten sheets with instructions at the top left hand corner for his secretary joyce coles the typed pages correlate exactly with his instructions and offer a clear sequence of statements that were presumably to stir serve as his plan for the paper he would present on that panel an examination of the notes i was honorary archivist for nine years for the winnecock trust compared and contrasted with key papers of the previous two years i think show further clarification on winnicott's late formulations the trajectory of the notes passed through several of winnicott's major themes especially aggression related to his concept late concept the use of an object and this is why i'm suggesting that the notes of this unwritten paper stand as winnicott's last word and offer a consolidatory advance to his final theoretical conclusions on the psychoanalytic concept of aggression mindful of this being a freud memorial lecture in this talk i aim to show that while winnicott's work as a whole creates a distinctive new paradigm in the history of psychoanalysis it doesn't negate freudian principles his disagreement with freud's concept of the death instinct was related to what he perceived as the clinical evidence of his analytic work in my clinical example at the end of this paper i aim to illustrate how freud's edipul matrix complements and functions with winnicott's parent infant matrix i'm just going to now i'd like to spend just a few minutes on on a slight excursion because i one of the chapters in donald winnecock today is by um a philosopher called gelco le parikh who lives in lives and works in brazil who i met over 15 years ago and i think his way of applying thomas kuhn's scientific structure of scientific revolutions is very helpful to think about the different paradigms so um forgive me if some of you are very very familiar with this work but i understand that some of you might be a bit like me who've just come across this as a way of thinking about different paradigms in sci in the scientific methodologies i want to just quote something that winnecock said at the end of his life he said the reader should know that i'm a product of the freudian school then he says this does not mean that i take for granted everything freud said or wrote and in any case that would be absurd since freud was developing that is to say changing his views right up to his death in 1939. my main aim throughout my work on winnicott from the language of winnicott in 1996 and onwards demonstrates i try to demonstrate the extent to which winnicott's approach to psychoanalysis was absolutely in line with freud's i.e he understood psychoanalysis as a scientific method while it's beyond the scope of this talk to go into detail about what constitutes scientific let me direct you to this chapter and make use of le parrick's work who helps us to condense the work of thomas kuhn who defines scientific according to his argument especially in the second edition of the structure of scientific revolutions which is 1970. kun's view of empirical science is that it's a problem-solving activity socially important problems become scientific only after they've been reduced to puzzles and their solution depends on practitioners trained in a paradigm there are two types of paradigms the first is the accepted example of practice which provides models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research kuhn refers to these as exemplars which he means by which he means the concrete problem solutions that students encounter from the start in their scientific education the second kind of paradigms are conceptual theoretical and instrumental and methodological commitments that guide the scientific research the second kind of paradigm carries main components which are guiding empirical generalizations exemplars and constellation of commitments taken together constitute the disciplinary matrix of any given scientific discipline for freud the oedipus complex became the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood freud says with the progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance of the oedipus complex has become more and more clearly evident its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherence of psychoanalysis from its opponents by making a shibboleth of the oedipus complex i.e an identification sign freud was specifying what kun named the exemplar that serves to establish the community of psychoanalysts thus the oedipus complex remains the main freudian exemplar and as its guiding generalization constitutes a central part of the new constellation of commitments freud's theory of infantile sexuality became the solution to understanding edible conflict in the normal process of scientific discovery exemplars will change resembling gestalt switches which happen suddenly involuntarily and over which we have no control according to kun these switches are at the heart of the revolutionary process following a paradigm change there is necessarily a communication breakdown i think the notable examples are between jung and freud concerning infantile sexuality the early stages of psychoanalysis and adler and freud concerning aggression the controversial discussions between 1941 and 1945 at the british society british psychoanalytical society focused i think on the paradigms that were emerging and the discussions were aimed at examining examining the scientific differences so to summarize in normal science scientists restrict their efforts to solve three kinds of problem to determine significant facts to match facts with theory and to articulate existing theories which is part of what i'll be trying to do here why does a paradigm change occur says kun asks the answer is when a crisis occurs i.e when there's a pronounced failure of the old theory in the problem-solving activity if we apply the kunian argument to view what has happened in the history of psychoanalysis i think it's clear that winnicott melanie klein and to a certain extent fairban began to create create scientific revolutions which brought about distinctive paradigm changes in psychoanalysis so to conclude this brief excursion freud made normal psychoanalytical research possible by demonstrating through his work with the hysteric that all psychopath psychopathological situations relate to edible conflicts and by interpreting this situation in terms of his theory of sexual sexuality winnicott beginning his study of psychoanalysis in the 1920s found that he could not see things exclusively in that way he concluded his work by viewing the mother baby situation as the exemplar a result which in turn forced him to develop a theory of emotional growth that is of nature and nurture this is in essence the paradigm change which accounts for the difference between the freudian edible triangular or three-body psychoanalysis and winnicott's mother baby dual or two-body psychoanalysis but um i'm going to come back to this too this because there's there's a convergence of opinion in donald winnicott today between andre greene and la la parrick concerning the um three-body psychoanalysis and the two-body psychoanalysis which i'll come on to later on i now there was so much that i wanted to talk about today but i think i had to go straight to um the crux of um the the argument that winnicott is getting at in the use of an object which the notes refer back to the notes as i say were written i think in 1970 and the use of an object was a paper that he gave in 1968 here's winnicott again to use an object the subject must have developed a capacity to use objects this capacity cannot be said to be inborn nor can its development in an individual be taken for granted the development of a capacity to use an object is another example of the maturational process as something that depends on a facilitating environment so in 1968 at the beginning of 1968 winnicott had an exchange with the scientific program of the new york psychoanalytic society um again in donald winnecock today i go into much more detail about what was happening why he was taking a paper um that was really criticizing instinct theory without really saying that it was a criticism of instinct theory hopefully we'll come to that in the discussion too the reason i think he wanted to go to new york is because he was familiar with the work of chris and phyllis greenacre and other analysts who were originally from vienna who had arrived in new york um before the second world war and who were also looking at the very earliest stages of the parent infant relationship i mean this is one of my hypothesis really from a deduction of discussing um this point with a colleague of mine in new york so before he went he he gave the paper in november he sent along a summary of the paper object relating in this paper he says object relating can be described in terms of the experience of the subject description of object usage involves consideration of the nature of the object i'm referring i'm offering for discussion the reasons why in my opinion a capacity to use an object is more sophisticated than a capacity to relate to objects and relating may be to a subjective object but usage implies that the object is part of external reality and he gives a sequence subject relates to object object is in process of being found instead of placed by the subject in the world three subject destroys object four objects survives destruction five subject can use object the object he says is always being destroyed this destruction becomes the unconscious back cloth for love of a real object that is an object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control a study of this problem involves a statement of the positive value of destructiveness i'm still quoting winnicott the destructiveness plus the object's survival of the destruction places the object outside the area in which projective mental mechanisms operate so that a world of shared reality is created which the subject can use and which can feed back into the subject how this usage develops naturally out of play with the object is the theme of this talk now by this time winnicott had been working for 35 years as a psychoanalyst in 40 years as a pediatrician and his work as a pediatrician and as a child analyst and an adult psychoanalyst while the experiences were obviously feeding his ideas um he goes on to in in this summary to um assume or he says it would be helpful if i could take for granted that the following papers can be read one of one of them was the location of cultural experience the second one was eggo integration in child development the third was the capacity to be alone and the fourth on playing its theoretical status in the clinical situation so from this summary reproduced it would seem that winnicott hoped his audience would have already accepted or at least understood many of his previous arguments and these previous arguments were really leading up to this new formulation because he felt he'd resolved the problem of defining the fate of the primitive love impulse now i never quite understood what he meant by that um when he writes about that and then i came across a footnote in 1970 it was a footnote that he wrote in 1970 just before he died where he says it's in the manuscript of his book human nature he says something to the effect that the issue of the recognition of the destructive element in the crude primitive excited idea was resolved when he wrote the use of an object and this footnote i suggest indicates that it was the notion of the object's psychic survival that had answered his question on how the infant moved from a perception to perception from pre-ruth to ruth winnicott's thesis was that the baby is born into the world with a primitive love impulse and this was very distinct from freud and melanie klein in melanie klein the baby is born with the innate death instinct and the manifestation of the death instinct is hate envy and sadism which in her work she says is is innate willikot said it was a developmental achievement to hate and to envy and to become sadistic the newborn baby had to acquire those affects and had to find a way of understanding what those affects meant he felt that the primitive love impulse was really a bit like freud's self-preservative instinct so that's what he means by the primitive love impulse now if we take a quick look at his formulations preceding 1968 these papers that i've just referred to um i want to highlight the salient concept salient concepts of each paper in an attempt to track his trajectory up to that point all these concepts in my view are intrinsically related to his theory of psychic survival in the location of cultural experience winnicott posits a potential space for which the baby the baby is located in between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived he says from the beginning the baby has maximally intense experiences in the potential space between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived between me extensions and the not me this is the newborn infant at the very beginning who cannot perceive the other as separate and different in winnicott's language the baby is merged with the mother earlier winnicott had offered a departure from freud by stating that the newborn's ego distinct from the self was provided by the mother in her state of primary maternal preoccupation this is why he states there's no id before ego therefore at the very beginning instinctual life can be ignored because the infant is not yet an entity having experiences a self has to be in place before the infant is able to experience otherwise he can only react and the reaction is constitutes trauma the primary maternal preoccupation is a concept that he came to in the late 50s where he talks about the holding environment and the mother's capacity at a very very deep level to identify with her infants experience of helplessness and absolute dependency winnecott had introduced the term ego relatedness in 1956 to describe the phase of absolute dependence in his paper on the capacity to be alone he'd stated that this capacity was based on the introjection of an ego-supportive environment a consequence of the early good enough mother's attention and adaptation he says in klein's theory this indicated the existence of a good internal object and in freud's theory it indicated an ability to tolerate the feelings aroused by the primal scene but winnicott's emphasis is that the introjection of the good internal object and the resolution of the oedipus complex could not occur without the interjection of an ego-supportive environment having already occurred from the start the capacity to be alone is based on the paradox of being alone in the presence of mother in the theory of playing winnicott discovered and i i i think it must have come out of his own creativity and his playfulness that in the 30s he used a spatula game as a way of diagnosing the infant's internal world this is an infant between five months and probably 14 or 15 months who was sitting on the mother's lap they were both dr winnicott and the mother were sitting facing each other at the corner of a table and on the corner of the table he would place a spatula now in the 1920s and 30s these were right angled silver silver shiny objects and he would just ask the mother not to do anything and see what the infant would do and the way in which the infant approached the spatula because of course most babies wanted to reach out and pick it up he noticed there were three particular stages there was the moment of what he originally called the moment of hesitation at the moment of suspicion and later on he called it hesitation which was to get away from value judgments and then the baby once the baby felt that there was a possibility that he wasn't going to be told off or that there was a there was a potential space to reach out and and and take the spatula he would take the spatula and then there would be a mouthing of the spatula and then a repudiation and this was when winnicott was making use of this spatula game to diagnose the relationship uh in the family and the early internal relationships of the mother-baby relationship he was at that time working with melanie klein so deeply influenced by her work on going back to very early states of mind and to think about edible constellations at the very beginning of life and melanie klein's now the i think the work is that the oedipus complex has moved much earlier in the baby's life it's not at the classical freudian age of four or five whilst winnicott accepted a lot of this in terms of edible constellations he never accepted that the oedipus complex starts earlier so whilst he was saying that he did see edible constellations he felt that that was very different from the oedipus complex and that the in that sense he remained more of a classical freudian so i think these four papers i really condensed um the ideas in these papers show how winnicott's reformulations were moving towards a paradigm shift in psychoanalysis but it doesn't imply that instinct theory is irrelevant in winnicott's formulations but rather that from the infant's point of view the instinctual biological impulse might just as well be an external clap of thunder before the sense of self could develop and a sense of self will only come about through a psychic environment capable of meeting the infant's biological and emotional needs so the crisis winnicott's crisis was that he felt whilst he said he was astounded in his pediatric work the way in which freudian theory could be demonstrated and how it could be applied he was also feeling that something was wrong somewhere he says there's a phase prior to that which makes sense of the concept of fusion in his original thesis aggression in the infant was primary as i've already said simply muscle erotism and he calls it a symptom of being alive it's a normal to reach out is a normal a zest for life from what he described later on as the spontaneous gesture and he felt the spontaneous gesture comes from the true self and it's about zest and being alive it had nothing to do with anger let alone hate sadism and envy by the last decade of his work he used the term destructive but both words aggression and destruction signify a benign force in the infant at the beginning argued that freud took for granted the early good enough environment and that freud's work with neurotics therefore meant that he didn't have the clinical data that analysts with borderline patients discover after some criticism from him giving the use of an object he wrote a paper called the use of an object in the context of moses and monotheism and he reiterates this point stating that this is the reason that freud did not theorize about the pre-fusion stage and the question of how the infant develops a capacity to think symbolically it's in this very late paper that winnecon introduces a new thought when he suggests that the father has an important role at this pre-fusion stage of the subject's psychic life the father's imago he suggests starts off as a whole object in the infant psyche as a presence in mother's mind it seems to me that this notion advances his concept of primary maternal preoccupation because as he states the father as a whole object at the beginning constitutes an integrative force in the infant it's a clear suggestion i think that the father in mother's mind during her state of primary maternal preoccupation is transmitted and internalized by the infant which leads to an ego capacity indeed it seems clear that without the father in mother's mind there's no such thing as survival of the object in winnicott's theory and this is a this is a sort of new idea really that i'm still trying to uh develop and it's certainly influenced by the work of andre greene who's whose work on winnicott is very interesting indeed there's another long chapter in donald winnicot today by andre greene but what andre green says in that paper is there's no such thing as a as a mother and baby because you have to include the father so this brings the divergence between loparak who says that winnicott's work represents a dual um body psychoanalysis and green that says you can never have a baby without a mother and a father and in his work on thirdness the mother who negates the father um actually it does fail that there is a failure of the survival of the object and it doesn't all go well for the infant so it's only in the conceptualizing of the use of an object that i think winnicott clearly states that the survival of the object is a new feature in his formulations in other words the capacity to think symbolically and to reach a position in which the other is perceived as truly separate not just a bundle of projections is entirely contingent on the survival of the object from the very beginning when the baby is not able to differentiate between me and not me the capacity to discern is contingent on the original survival of the object the theoretical beginning as winnicott calls it he refers to the summation of beginnings which he describes as an accumulation of beginnings that go to make up a theoretical beginning perhaps we could say the pinnacle of development at the point of death if still psychically alive we could think of as the summation of endings to elaborate a little bit further before i get on to the clinical work winnecock's formulations on the stage of pre-fusion i want to briefly look at three key related concepts that he'd already outlined before 1968. primary creativity the theoretical first feed and creating the object as we saw above for winnicott the freudian theory of fusion of the instincts could only occur after the establishment of what he describes as unit status or or the unit itself this stage cannot occur in the infant before the age of around three or four months and as we have seen the establishment of herself was contingent on the mother's survival of her infant's ruthless destructive love winnicott emphasizes that it's the biological need in the baby that has to be attended to by the emotionality of the mother psychic environment and it's this attending to the infant's biological need through the mother's emotional response that will constitute what winnicott describes as the theoretical first feed the theoretical first feed is represented in real life by the summation of the early experiences of many feeds countless feeds but after the theoretical first feed the baby begins to have material with which to create following freud winnicott sees that the baby is born into the world equipped with a creative potential and this inherited tendency described as a predisposition to grow is bound up with the sensations in the body and the baby's absolute dependence the mother's ability to recognize her baby's predicament enables her to adapt to his needs and winnicott stresses that the mother's adaptation has to involve the mother's desire and enjoyment in order to provide what the baby needs through her deep primary maternal preoccupation this very first contact between mother and infant is the beginning of a gradual building up of the baby's illusion of omnipotence which means that from the baby's point of view his need creates the breast winnecock sees this as a crucial moment that constitutes the foundations for all further development the mother's ability to adapt to her baby's needs facilitates in the baby the illusion of omnipotence he says at least until we know more i must assume that there is a creative potential and that at the theoretical first feed the baby has a personal contribution to make if the baby adapts well enough the baby assumes the nipple and the milk are the results of a gesture that arose out of need the result of an idea that rode in on a crest of a wave of instinctual tension the wave of instinctual tension is for example the sensation of hunger hunger that is met through the mother's adaptation means that she's able to provide the theoretical first feed and there are many more essential ingredients of course involved in the good enough mother's ability to feed her infant but in winnicott's final formulations of the mother infant relationship he focuses on the process of mother's adaptation to the infant's needs and suggests that these ingredients culminate and constitute her survival now i'm now going to go on to my own attempt at or my understanding of extending this idea of psychic survival with winnicott's notion of the first theoretical feed in mind i propose that the surviving object the intra-psychic surviving object it comes about as the result of the first theoretical feed i'd like to call it first symbolic feed that in turn facilitates the infant to create the object the notion of winnicott's first theoretical feed is clinically useful i think as it refers to the initiation of symbolic thinking if we accept this idea we could think of subsequent theoretical feeds at each stage of development in other words the inter-psychic environment mother infant father infant continues to be crucial for the intra-psychic surviving object to grow and take shape at each stage of development late adolescence could be seen as the final stage of this journey and i've posited the notion of a whole surviving object that comes into being once the specific tasks of that phase are completed the notion of a whole surviving object means that the subject is able to live creatively and feel real these were also very important notions in winnicott's work moreover it continues to grow and develop through each stage of adult life until death through the nourishment that emanates from the intra-psychic into psychic and interpersonal relationships of individuals families and groups the non-survival of the object results in the birth of a non-surviving object which impoverishes and depletes the sense of self in severe cases there is only psychic deadness while in the less severe case the subject has to live through a false self i suggest that a sense of desire dominated by an intra-psychic non-surviving object inhibits growth and lies at the root of transference resistance in contrast desire in the context of a surviving object unfolds a capacity to love it will be noticed that following winnicott i suggest a linear development of both a surviving and non-surviving object that grow in relation to the primary objects survival and non-survival throughout childhood but i want to emphasize that in the sequence from object relating to object usage a continuous dynamic process gradually builds up in the psyche and at each stage of development the surviving and non-surviving objects contain particular configurations of memories at each phase along a developmental line these multi-layered configurations and constellations are sets of dynamic object relationships related to a continuous relationship to time and space repression and the unconscious clinical examples it seemed to me throughout the literature illustrate how the analytics setting offers an opportunity for an undeveloped surviving object to grow through the specialized analytic relationship within the transference counter transference it is the analyst psychic survival that potentially facilitates the subject's stunted surviving object to grow which in turn strengthens and facilitates the development of the sense of self the incremental buildup of an object that survives in the analytic encounter in a way that the object did not survive hitherto offers the patient a reinforcement for the undeveloped intra-psychic surviving object in a good enough analysis the surviving object can overcome and eclipse the non-surviving object this does not infer that the analyst is internalized as a new object for the patient but rather it is the new experience of object survival in the transference that reinforces the original experience of the primary object that had once survived the surviving object gains power within the matrix of the apricoo that potentially leads to the working through thus traumata can subsequently be relegated to the past and a different level of psychic work will subsequently lead to a deeper and more authentic morning of the lost object i'm now going to be giving a clinical example well thank you very much jan for that uh wonderful paper um very rich both in in theory and and uh and then with that very fine clinical example with which you you concluded it um we've got quite a bit of time still for for discussion and questions so there are two roving mics going around and uh so if you um when you ask your question if you could wait until a mic finds you and um i'd just like to say as well that this this you may have noticed is being filmed if you've got any concerns about uh your question uh being being sort of included in any final version of this that appears don't worry if you contact debbie or administrator from whom you would have got your ticket she will she will sort of not not pixelate you but but totally edit you out so so feel free to ask whatever questions you really have and don't don't feel concerned about the way in which you ask them um okay would anybody like to start questions or comments um uh that was a marvelous paper by the way thank you for that what i was going to ask was when you were talking about the spatula my impression was so maybe i've misread this isn't there a phase you see the three phases that when it got talks about in terms of the spatula wasn't a phase where the baby looks at the spatula looks away and then dribbles and then it's clear the baby wants the spatula before the three phases that you're talking about or is it is that i've misread that somewhere i you might be absolutely right i can't remember um i know there's a dribbling at some point i i i don't i don't remember the exact yeah i just i was just thinking about it what i was getting at was the was was the uh the parents and the response to the parents i'm not i can't remember when the dribbling comes i thought it was when the spatula had been was taken to the mouth but maybe you're right i'll have to look at that again didn't the dribbling represent the baby wanting internalizing the spatula and then knowing that it wanted it i thought it but i thought it was when the baby was mouthing the spatula but you might be right and what i would what i would think is that it's probably different for each baby depending on what age they are but i will look at that again thank you thank you very much indeed i found when you were talking about primary maternal preoccupation i found myself thinking about andre green and the dead mother and i don't remember it exactly but i found myself asking how does that fail then so terribly at that point could you say something about that about how you understand that happens yes um yes the thing the thing about the dead mother complex from what i've understood um and having discussed it with andre green on several occasions actually if we think of winnicott's developmental model of absolute dependence relative dependence and then what he describes as towards independence the dead mother complex comes at the time of relative dependence so in other words there has been a good enough primary maternal preoccupation and there's been some achievement between mother and infant and then as the infant is developing and moving away um from mother but needing to come back the mother there is a sudden disconnect from the from the mother and um he made it very he felt that um andre greene that the dead mother complex was being used and applied rather broadly but he he did specify that it really was the mother's depression but that that and that this is what gets experienced by the infant but there's there's a great overlap obviously between the theories does that clarify it a bit more here thank you i i was um intrigued by the very fine sort of brinkmanship about something that is almost not going to survive but but does just at the last minute or just makes it through the relation between that and the way you set the paper up about when it caught its own death and these notes kind of just making it through um but you didn't comment on that and i was wondering while working on this material self was this a factor in your thinking about it about these thoughts emerging from winnicott when he is on the brink of um you know his own mortality and perhaps considering somewhere what what the nature of survival is in a rather different way than if that paper had been written earlier on can can you say a little bit more because um uh about specifically what what you're asking i suppose just whether um whether you felt either that this thought was emerging at a certain point in winnicott's life i wouldn't have otherwise and also whether your awareness of winnicott's own facing of death might in any way come into your mind while working on this material it made it more sort of poignant in some way yeah yeah thank you um this uh what i've presented is um the theoretical part of it is a very condensed um uh presentation of quite a long chapter in donald winnecock today where i go into much more detail about about the notes that i found and my free association to the notes and um and bringing in his theories and trying to look at the evolution of his work on the death instinct because i was just i was fascinated that he'd he gave the use of an object and didn't say this is actually about the death this is my argument against he didn't say that he but i think he didn't say that because in a way he was much more um focusing on what happens he didn't really want to get into that academic um he didn't want to do what i'm doing that's why i did a dictionary on his work because i wanted to pin him down and he he wasn't interested he was evolving his idea but when he had the flack as it were the criticism from the american discussants he did then write and did say well actually yes let me tell you what i think about the instinct instinct theory but your question is um is very interesting and i'll have to um think about it um because it is i think it's very striking how all of us choose our clinicians and it must be because we're working something through for us for ourselves um and i think doing archive work especially when i found the archives uh they were in you know they they're in a very bad state and they needed uh mark knows a lot about this um because mark patterson was on the winnicott truss board when when i was honorary archivist and now fortunately they're all very well preserved in in the welcome institute but um at the time i felt terribly sad and it was a bit like going through um my father's mater you know uh some there was a neglect it felt to me there was a neglect and there was something terribly important there and there's something about winnicott's work that obviously speaks to me that i um yes i can't say much more than that but i think you're talking about the personal and the public and and the way in which one finds oneself doing something um i'm not sure i've particularly answered your question but thank you yeah it's a very good point can i ask just a quick question about uh something you said you said winnicott had this this sort of concept of the theoretical first feed um but you would prefer to call it the symbolic first feed or that you change the word can you say a little bit about why what what was implied in that change for you maybe maybe there's something i i missed in what you said or what was implied in that and why do you think i just think theoretical is a bit of a i think he i think he was talking about the moment of the initiation of imagination and in that sense it's the moment of symbolism and being able to discern the object as separate and different be but also the beginnings of imagination so i thought i think symbolic was was a better word i didn't answer i've just remembered i didn't really answer your point about winnicott's awareness of his own body i think um sorry can i just go back to that because i um you see i think that it's true that he was surviving i mean he had lots of heart attacks and so he must have been incredibly aware of his body and what was what was happening to his body i think it was five and when he gave this paper the use of an object he was ill and then he was hospitalized and nearly died in new york so this paper has taken on a mythology of its own um but i still think that despite that there's something completely fundamental about survival in all human beings and so um i think it's still it's not i don't think he came to that just because he was surviving but he might have done i mean it could be that it was about his own survival certainly many people thought that had he not married claire winnecott he wouldn't have survived for those 20 years and then what would we have lost we wouldn't have got any of this work so it's um it's something to think about very much um you've answered this a little bit and i also feel that maybe i missed something early on because it's been so much rich material since then um but a lot of what you've been talking about is the use of the object and and that paper and i've i've kind of lost track of what was he going to add in vienna what was he going to then say you know these notes that you found and that had the as it were some suggestions as to what was to come what was he actually going to add or what was he going to how is he going to present those ideas that were different from what was in the earlier paper because it feels like you've got some real thoughts about those those very last words that we never actually heard um yes i think as i as i said earlier on it was the consolidation i think it was the consolidation of this new feature i just felt that in the notes that that he was then quite convinced more convinced than he was in 1968 that it was this new feature and that was the footnote you remember i mentioned the footnote where i think he felt that was there was something about the theoretical first feed as he called it and the mother's psychic survival in the um adaptation to the infant's needs and if all had gone well enough and that that had worked that was really what led to development to emotional development and um there isn't there there is more that i i did um uh develop in that pit but i to be quite honest i'm still developing my ideas around that it's that new feature it is about psychic survival but then where does it go and that's what i'm trying to move on to jonathan thanks so much that was very interesting um and i'm very struck by what you said about the um uh him not being explicit about the death instinct towards the end of his life when he was feeling very fragile do you do you think that any of that was to do with a kind of unresolved mourning about the split with melanie klein that he couldn't be explicit about it this this in this paper um i think that the reason he took yes i think one of the i mean because if he's criticizing the death instinct of course maybe he couldn't take take this to the british society although of course by 1968 melanie klein had already died she died in 1960. um i'm sure there must be biographical things that we would we would we would um that we could apply to to that paper but i kind of feel that it slightly and and i think it's interesting um in and of itself but i do think it might detract from something that i think he's on to about this that actually it's it's you see what i the the the use i make of it in the consulting room is that i never really understand what people are talking about when they talk about the death instinct um in a patient with a lot of death instinct um i i feel that it's a shorthand way of understanding something that freud described as the negative therapeutic reaction but i tend to think of it using this theory as non-survival that something has not something feels that it's not surviving inside rather than something that and that is attacking it is internally attacking but it's got and and it's it's nasty and it's malicious and as as i try to show in in the clinical material um so i um yes i mean what what thoughts did you have maybe you you felt you you feel that there's something specific there i just never thought of it before so sorry i'd not thought of it before so i've not i've not right yes thanks john thanks um i was just wondering when you talk about good enough transference and the analyst's survival as the object which sort of somehow resurrects a more primary object what do you think about if there's a change in perception towards the mother or of the internal mother do you think there's a change in perception towards the environment towards the father that was in the mother's mind that's now been that has been internalized could you shed some light on that um well what what i meant by the analyst psychics of as you know in the in the transference counter transference and what i was trying to show in that last piece of of the clinical work i felt that i did go through a phase of non-survival i i felt myself collapsing um whilst i was waiting to see you know there was about 10 minutes left of the session and this was before the patient had this memory of the photograph and um but as an analyst you're trained to stay with it and to watch your feelings and to recognize them you know it's what winnicott referred to as the observing eggo um and all the the as you can imagine the exchanges that i shared with you are a minuscule amount of many years work um i'm very inter with with the patient who's unbelievably resistant and i i think because of her as i see it non-surviving object so i felt that the incremental success is that i had managed to stay in the analytic mode which was in and of itself psychic survival but then you have to be able to think in that and so the thinking and the possibility of interpretation and obviously the patient's use of the interpretation then starts to what i was trying to get out was she already had a surviving object that surviving object i think gets reinforced with the analytic encounter and i think the analyst has to be both mother and father as well as sibling in the transference so that all always has to be um monitored and um thought about and worked through does that answer what you were getting at yeah i think it does i was just trying to get at a change in perception perhaps and that towards you as the analyst or the mother but also consequent change in the patients changing the perception yes yes yes um that yes because as you would i mean if we're using winnecock's language i was a subjective object to her and that's right and and the working through is gradually becoming the um the object that is objectively perceived yes that takes a great deal of time though and that's that's a hard one yeah but that's obviously it's it's not a conscious aim but one hopes that through the analytic work that's where the patient will arrive thank you well if another one more question jan thanks very much um it was a masterly summary of winnicott's ideas and i feel stimulated to read winnicott again whom i haven't read for a very long time and was struck by you know the immense subtlety of his thought and yet i'm left with the question that you raised at the beginning of your paper that one or two others have referred to as well which is really how does this dispense with the idea of the death instinct because what you seem to be describing in uh and winnicott seems to be describing in in the object surviving is is a process which in itself is very life seeking and we can actually see that in your patient the way she made use of you know just the six weeks at the beginning there was something in that that was reaching for an object and how she might use the object and yet there's something else that one can meet in the consulting room which is very very different which is much more kind of anti-life anti-thought in the way that freud in beyond the pleasure principle he tries to get hold of he tries to link it biologically with entropy and so it doesn't quite work and it's very difficult to see where it can fit in infant development and yet we recognize i think most of us something which um you know as freud is talking about how eros creates greater and greater complexity and the death instinct decomposes is anti-thought and i i don't i fundamentally don't understand how winnicott uh deals with that aspect of what freud is trying to address with the death incident yes he uh in um his paper on moses and monitor thank you um he he he says that he wants to go back to him potter please and think of the instinct as being one it's it's a drive and he says we could think of it like fire and that it's one drive and that it gets gradually separated but his point was that it's not you you can't describe psychic um phenomena by using a meta psychological biological theory i think that was his and i i haven't come across a paper yet that convinces me that the death instinct which is really essentially in freud biological he was making use of but and it becomes part of his meta psychological theory and he's very ambivalent about it as you know um and and anna freud did not in in that congress in 1971 there were five papers commissioned and three of the papers were arguing against the death instinct because they were arguing against it being a biological it's it's not something that can be made use of by psychoanalysts including anna freud and rosenfeld interestingly herbert rosenfeld said that he certainly did believe in the death instinct but he didn't find it clinically useful it's quite interesting i thought and that that's it that was one of the commissioned papers for that congress i think there's a there's a debate to be had still um and i find it very interesting because everything that you're talking about i absolutely understand what you mean there's no analyst that can sit in the consulting room without that terrible feeling and sometimes i think it must be the death instinct but the way in which i think of it is it's it's feels like this is what has been done to the to the infant i feel that the infant at that um the infant this this is an experience of a mother who's not with the infant if i think of it in that way i'm i can think of it more i can understand what's happened with the patient much more it helps me go back to the next session well jen thank you very much i'm i'm sure these thoughts um after a a paper of such sort of richness and and complexity and depth will continue to to sort of work in people and and other ideas will occur to them but uh um i think uh we're sort of already in extra time so so we'll uh stop so we should we should stop and i'd just like to to to conclude by thanking you very much again um for your your marvelous presentation and uh and uh and for um for and take the occasion to thank you also for your other work as uh you

Channel: University of Essex

Views: 9,750

Keywords: freud, lecture, memorial, psychoanalysis, univeristy, essex, academic

Id: rOIDAmI99wo

Length: 75min 7sec (4507 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2012