the element, or process, of attachment—even conflicted ones. Normally, of course, the term “attachment,” when unmodified by such words as “anxious,” has only positive connotations—unlike “object relations,” an affectively neutral phrase. Thus expanded, the concept of attachment behavior—roughly the equivalent of Fairbairn’s “object-seeking”—functions as the motivational foundation of the entire spectrum of object-relational behavior, including mentational activity such as fantasy. Even masochistic behavior makes a kind of sense within this explanatory framework. It becomes a compromised form of attachment behavior—the perpetuation, or recreation, of the modality of an important earlier relationship—rather than a perverse search for unpleasure, sexual or otherwise.
WHERE, IN REALITY, ARE SELF AND OTHER?
One of the issues that persists in psychoanalysis has to do with the comparative reality of what goes on inside and outside of the domain of mental processing. Where, in this connection, can self and other be said to be located? In defiance of common sense, object relations theory situates others both outside, in “real” space, and inside, in the equally real yet imaginary space of the mind, in the form of residues, or internalizations, of outside others. In similar defiance of common sense, aspects of the self may seem to reside within but may unconsciously be projected onto outside others, or invested, by identification, in some outside per son, such as a religious or political leader (Freud 1921). And, to complicate the situation, what was once outside, the other, may, after internali-zation, be temporarily relocated in outside others (transference), such as one’s analyst. Yet as Schafer reminds us, there are no mental places (1976, 158). A solution to the problem of avoiding the dangers of the convenient fiction of “mental places” is to locate representations of self and other systemically, as stored information, that is, as conceptual and behavioral programs: “All long-term relationships—including mother-and-child, husband-and-wife, and patient-and-analyst relationships—can be profitably studied as feedback-regulated, information-processing systems”(Peterfreund 1971, 159).
Then where does reality come in? Are real events involving real, outside others more real, or more important psychologically, than the undeniably real (really occurring) inner events involving the imagined others of fantasy? This issue has been troublesome for psychoanalysis. Bowlby, in the course of criticizing Klein’s position that anxiety derives from the operation of the death instinct, argues that this position has led to clinical practice that tends to ignore “a person’s real experiences, past or present,” and to treat him “almost as though he were a closed system little influenced by his environment” (1973, 173). Bowlby himself has gone to the opposite extreme of virtually ignoring fantasy activity in the process of favoring conventionally observable behavior, a practice suiting his methodology but disenfranchising denizens of the inner world of memory and desire. Stern addresses the issue of fantasy versus reality by reminding us that Freud’s conception of fantasy as experience distorted by defenses and wishes “resulted in 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
