Self and Other. Robert Rogers L.
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an ontogenetic theory of experience as fantasy, not of experience as reality” (1985, 254). Arguing that “current findings from infancy studies fly against the notion that the pleasure principle develop-mentally precedes the reality principle,” (254-55) Stern contends that what infants experience, from the very beginning, is mainly reality, and that subjective experiences involving distortions of reality derive from later stages of development: “This position is far closer to Kohut’s and Bowlby’s contention that pre-Oedipal pathology is due to deficits or reality-based events—rather than to conflicts, in the psychodynamic sense” (255). In contrast, Laplanche and Pontalis speak of the danger of regarding real relations with others “as the chief determining factor. This is a deviation that must be rejected by every analyst for whom the object-relationship has to be studied essentially in terms of phantasy (though of course phantasies can modify the apprehension of reality and actions directed towards reality)” (1973, 280).
What I always wonder about while reading Klein’s interpretations of the fantasies of her patients’ in-session play is not the reality of the fantasies as reported but rather the extent to which these fantasies may be joint productions of analyst and patient, sometimes with more input from analyst than patient, especially in the matter of cueing the patient about the value of sexual elements. Here again is the fantasy, quoted in chapter 1, of an infant attacking its mother (presented in generalized form, with Klein’s comment): “The idea of an infant of from six to twelve months trying to destroy its mother by every method at the disposal of its sadistic tendencies—with its teeth, nails, and excreta and with the whole of its body, transformed in imagination into all kinds of dangerous weapons—presents a horrifying, not to say unbelievable, picture to our minds” (Klein 1932, 187). Yet even if one elects to argue, siding with Stern, that the evidence of infant research does not corroborate the likelihood that an infant (of six to twelve months) could have experienced such a fantasy, one can nevertheless scarcely deny the extraordinary resemblance of this fantasy to the one depicted in Ted Hughes’s poem called “Crow and Mama”:
When Crow cried his mother’s ear
Scorched to a stump.
When he laughed she wept
Blood her breasts her palms her brow all wept blood.
He tried a step, then a step, and again a step—
Every one scarred her face forever.
When he burst out in rage
She fell back with an awful gash and a fearful cry.
When he stopped she closed on him like a book
On a bookmark, he had to get going.
Then, after futile attempts by Crow to escape from his mother’s clutches by jumping successively into a car and a plane,
He jumped into the rocket and its trajectory
Drilled clean through her heart he kept on
And it was cosy in the rocket, he could not see much But he peered out through the portholes at Creation
And saw the stars millions of miles away
And saw the future and the universe
Opening and opening
And kept on and slept and at last
Crashed on the moon awoke and crawled out
Under his mother’s buttocks.
(T. Hughes 1971, 5)
In the words of a discussion on the nature of fantasy, what we may be said to have in hand “is not an object [of desire] that the subject imagines and aims at, so to speak, but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 318). Infants may not have such fantasies, but adult poets obviously can, and do, and it is equally obvious that in reading such a poem adult readers can re-experience elements of their own infantile omnipotent rage—as well as a certain Winnicottian satisfaction at the indestructibility of the subjective object. What we may also be said to witness in such a poem, beyond all controversy, is the essential innerness of all literary fantasy, and the emotional reality of it, so that even if Klein’s theory and clinical practice may have contaminated the evidence she presents, we can look to the fantasies of literature and other forms of art with at least as much confidence as Freud looked to dreams for wondrous instances of the workings of the mind, especially in the field of object relations.
As for the location of self and other, it will be assumed throughout the present study that figures in a text may be treated as temporary introjects by readers. When I read that Crow’s catastrophic mother—to borrow a phrase from Rheingold (1967)—closes in on him “like a book / On a bookmark,” I, too, have to get going. And when Crow’s activity scars his mother’s face forever, I, as reader, may be said to have momentarily internalized Crow-hero’s behavior according to the model of the Introjecting Reader (Holland 1968). Presumably an elaborate matching takes place during the reading process in which, hypothetically, a perceived or imagined aspect of Hughes’s real mother becomes internalized by Hughes, then eventually projected onto Crow’s Mama, an attribution that I as reader subsequently introject, match with internalizations of my own, and then respond to—or not, as the case may be—cognitively and affectively, at both conscious and unconscious levels.
CONCEPTUALIZING SELFHOOD
The nature of selfhood is at least as problematic as its location. While the word self does not accumulate much resonance in Freud’s works, the latent importance of the term can easily be seen reflected in such concepts as the ego (a specialized aspect of self), the superego (the internalized other as part of self-structure), narcissism (self-love), guilt (self-reproach), and self-observation in dreams (Freud’s dream censor). The rise of ego psychology and identity theory, and the reactivation of the theory of narcissism in self psychology, may be regarded in some respects as precursors of the development of self theory. Self theory as represented by (but not confined to) Peterfreund (1971), Rosenblatt and Thickstun (1977), Stern (1985), Basch (1988), and Lichtenberg (1989) should probably be regarded as far from fully developed. Even so, and even granting the difficulty of defining selfhood, viable models of self—and the relation of self to other—are now available.
Freud worked with at least three models of selfhood: the layered, or topographical, model (conscious, preconscious, unconscious), a developmental model (oral, anal, phallic, oedipal, etc.), and the structural model (id, ego, superego). Various post-Freudian models of self, in the order of increasing capacity to reflect complexity, treat the self as a container of forces (libido, aggression), a container of representations (e.g., memories, wishes, fantasies), a structure of representations (id, ego, superego; internalized others), and a system of systems (including such systemic functions as were hitherto attributed to the Freudian ego).
Aspects of these ways of modeling self may be glimpsed in the following selection of observations and definitions. Hartmann makes a point of distinguishing ego from self (1964, 127). Jacobson follows Hartmann in using “selP’ to refer to the whole person (including the individual, his body, body parts, psychic organization). She remarks, “The self. . . points to the person as a subject in distinction from the surrounding world of objects” (1964, 6). Greenberg and Mitchell observe that for Hartmann the self is an object as distinct from the subject of experience (1983, 299) and that for Mahler the self is “less a functional unit than a critical developmental achievement” (300). Winnicott postulates the existence of a spectrum of selfhood integrity. He represents this spectrum in the form of dichotomous selves: the spontaneous True Self and the compliant False Self (1960, 140-52). Erikson’s (1950) identity theory, drawing heavily on Freud’s structural and epigenetic models, presents us with a picture of the self functioning to provide continuity through change. Lichtenstein, who postulates that identity maintenance “has priority over any other principle determining human behavior” (1961, 189), offers a transformational model of self as “the sum total of all transformations which are possible functions of an