Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, began with a common starting point, “a conviction that classical drive theory was fundamentally wrong in its basic premises concerning human motivation,” and shared in common the belief “that classical Freudian theory underemphasized the larger social and cultural context” (80). Greenberg and Mitchell mention Sullivan’s claim that every major aspect of Freudian drive theory can be understood better in the context of interpersonal and social processes (87), in which connection they quote this passage: “A personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives and has his being” (90). Sullivan’s pair of theorems concerning what he refers to as “the tension of anxiety,” which I quote because of their parallel to the assumptions of attachment theory, constitute an illustration of his interpersonal emphasis. The first theorem reads, “The observed activity of the infant arising from the tension of needs induces tension in the mothering one, which tension is experienced as tenderness and as an impulsion to activities toward the relief of the infant’s needs” (1953, 39). The second one reads, “The tension of anxiety, when present in the mothering one, induces anxiety in the infant” (41).
The enlargement of a person oriented theory of object relations so as to include attachment theory is so substantial a task that discussion of the work of Bowlby and his followers will be reserved until chapter 2, except to say in passing that the concept of attachment provides a broad, fundamentally sound, empirically well-substantiated explanation of a realm of behavior crucial to the concerns of psychoanalysis.
Still to be considered are two important figures on the American scene: Margaret Mahler and Heinz Kohut. The work of both figures leans in the direction of person-oriented object relations while harking back, in various ways and to differing degrees, to a drive-oriented position. Green-berg and Mitchell shrewdly point in this connection to the dual referents of Mahler’s concept of symbiosis, which denotes an actual relationship, that between infant and mother, and an intrapsychic event, a fantasy: “It is at once a description of the behavior of two people and a metapsychol-ogical explanation of the behavior of one of them” (1983, 286). Thus Mahler creates “an interface between a developmental theory of object relations and a drive-model metapsychology” (286)—or at least tries to. Greenberg and Mitchell call into question “the extent to which she has integrated her observations into the explanatory framework of drive theory” (294). For his part, Eagle believes that Mahler’s concepts of “symbiotic gratification and particularly separation-individuation are most meaningfully understood, not in terms of (sexual and aggressive) drive gratification, but in terms of attachment behavior” (1984, 25). As for Kohut, his early work utilizes libido theory pervasively. He refers, for example, to the self itself as a structure “cathected with instinctual energy” (1971, xv), and speaks of “idealizing narcissistic libido” as “the main source of libidinal fuel” (40) for culturally valued activity (Freud’s concept of sublimation, in essence). Kohufs later work (1977) radically qualifies his reliance on drive theory in a way that makes many of his formulations seem not all that different from British object relations theory (which he seldom refers to; he employs the term “self-object” in those situations in which non-Kohutians would simply use “object”). Kohut writes that drive experiences are “subordinated to the child’s experience of the relation between the self and the self-objects” (1977, 80; italics added). “The infantile sexual drive in isolation is not the primary psychological configuration. . . . The primary psychological configuration (of which the drive is only a constituent) is the experience of the relation between the self and the empathic self-object” (1977, 122). Yet the incidence of Kohufs references to drive theory remains high in his later work. Another complication lies in the way Freud’s concept of narcissism, itself born of libido theory, constitutes the cornerstone of Kohut’s self psychology. Mahler and Kohut may both be read, if one is so inclined, as important figures in the inexorable advance of person-oriented object relations theory, even though their loyalties to drive-oriented theory proved more than mildly intractable.
DRIVE THEORY: CRITIQUES AND DEFENSES
Most of the discussion in the previous section concerning the relative merits of drive-oriented and person-oriented object relations theories proceeded without the benefit of considering various frontal attacks on drive theory that have been launched during recent decades from within the pale of psychoanalysis. Critiques by Holt, Rubinstein, G. S. Klein, Bowlby, Rosenblatt and Thickstun, Peterfreund, and Breger will be treated as representative. These figures belong to no easily definable psychoanalytic school. With the notable exception of Bowlby, their critiques do not arise in the immediate context of object relations theory. Because of the length and complexity of these studies, only a sampling of the views put forth can be mentioned here.
Holt (1965) examines the biological assumptions of Freud’s theory deriving from his teachers (all of the school of Helmholtz: against vitalism and preaching the doctrine of physicalistic physiology), in particular Freud’s adoption of Brucke’s reflex-arc model of brain activity. At one point Holt lists a number of “biological facts” Freud would have deemed significant had he known them: the fact that “the nervous system is perpetually active”; the fact that “the effect of stimulation is primarily to modulate the activity of the nervous system”; the fact that “the nervous system does not transmit energy” but propagates it instead; and the fact that “the tiny energies of the nerves bear encoded information and are quantitatively negligible (108-9). One of the most interesting points Holt makes concerns the inadequacy of Freud’s drive-discharge theory in accounting for “enduring object-relations” (118). In a later, less guarded paper, Holt says that the theory of instinctual drives “is so riddled with philosophical and factual errors and fallacies that nothing less than discarding the concept of drive or instinct will do” (1976, 159). He proposes, in lieu of it, to focus on Freud’s concept of wish. In his paper on the psychoanalytic theory of motivation, Rubinstein proposes that the explanatory purpose of psychic energy can be taken over by the concept of information: “In current descriptions of nervous functioning the concept of information plays a much more prominent role than the concept of energy” (1967, 73). In G. S. Klein’s analysis of what he refers to as Freud’s two theories of sexuality (metapsychological and clinical), he denounces libido theory but does not make a clean break with Freud’s emphasis on the importance of sexuality. He regards it as more important than other sources of motivation. He writes, in particular, of “the unique conflict-inducing potential of sexual experience compared with other motivational sources” (1976, 114). Eagle remarks in this connection, “Klein believed he could separate libido theory from the general Freudian position regarding the centrality of sexuality in behavior, but, in fact, they are too intimately linked for that to be easily accomplished” (1984, 89).
The next four figures, all influenced by general systems theory, have in common a strong commitment to the perspectives of science. In his critique of libido theory, Bowlby claims that the model of psychical energy is unrelated, logically, to the concepts that psychoanalysts since Freud regard as central to psychoanalysis: “the role of unconscious mental processes, repression as a process actively keeping them unconscious, transference as a main determinant of behaviour, the origin of neurosis in childhood trauma” (1969, 16). What multiplies the power of Bowlby’s critique is the cogency of what he substitutes for drive theory, namely, attachment theory, a theory of object-relational behavior that he grounds on empirical data and elaborates on within a framework of general systems theory, especially the branch known as cybernetics. Independendy and at about the same time Peterfreund (1971) reconceptualized virtually all aspects of psychoanalysis along similar lines, paying particular attention, among other things, to the deficiencies of Freud’s theory of psychic energy. Also at about the same time Rosenblatt and Thickstun (1970) published a critique of the concept of psychic energy, criticizing it, among other reasons, for its mind-body dualism and for its inability to explain the phenomenon of pleasurable tension. “It is our belief,” they conclude, “that the theory of psychic energy should be abandoned, and that the elements for substitute paradigms are now available” (272). In Modern
