“Oh I just don't know where to begin,” Elvis Costello (Costello, 1979) sang to begin “Accidents Will Happen,” the opening track of Armed Forces, and so it is with me in my attempt to comment on Trevor Pederson's lengthy essay on narcissism, echoism, perfectionism, and death. Pederson asked me for my comments in this controversial discussion, and I readily agreed, although not without some private reservation, if not trepidation. He and I have had many debates on professional listservs about some central ideas in psychoanalysis, debates that I have always felt usually generated little in the way of agreement. But when a colleague with a deep knowledge of Freud's work and of psychoanalytic theory asks for a commentary, a knowledge amply on display in Pederson's essay, then I feel a deep obligation to honor that collegial request and to honor it respectfully. Unfortunately, Pederson and I have such divergent understandings of psychoanalysis that I have despaired of our ever engaging in dialogue that leads to theoretical agreement, and his essay, although erudite and proposing an important revision to psychoanalytic theory (“echoism” as a complement to “narcissism”), does little, if anything, to change my initial impression. This is all the more the pity because Pederson and I share an interest in narcissism (Auerbach, 1990, 1993), one of the main terms under discussion in his paper. For the sake of honesty, I will acknowledge that I have read mainly Pederson's present essay and have only perused his main work (Pederson, 2015), The Economics of Libido (Pederson, 2015), and am deeply impressed by his knowledge of the Freudian corpus, as well as of Greek Classical literature and of modern Continental philosophy. Pederson's essay is not unreasonably described as an abbreviated version of that book, to which he has added some case material. Still, despite his extensive knowledge, we agree on surprisingly little. I will of course
note those areas of agreement when they occur, but better an honest disagreement than a superficial agreement, and so, to begin.
I suppose that there may be as many conceptualizations of psychoanalysis as there are individuals interested in psychoanalytic theory, but my view (Auerbach, 2014, 2019b) is that psychoanalysis is a hybrid discipline, a science in service of its hermeneutics. By this I mean that psychoanalysis is an interpretive or hermeneutic discipline, for it is clear that what we do when we sit with patients is to help them make sense of their psychological worlds, especially aspects of those worlds that are inadequately symbolized or excluded from shared or intersubjective discourse (my renderings of what might otherwise be labeled unconscious), but that psychoanalysis also needs investigation through scientific methods, something more rigorous than the highly processed case reports that dominate the psychoanalytic literature, to render the information it collects intersubjectively shareable and to ensure that its conclusions have the same empirical support as do other disciplines in the social or human sciences. I therefore think that all knowledge, even in the natural sciences, is to some considerable extent interpretive, the product of thought collectives or interpretive communities (Fleck, 1935/1978; Heelan, 1997, 1998; Toulmin, 2002), but that all knowledge requires intersubjectively shareable information and that interpreting human meanings is very different from interpreting, say, electron microscope tracings, meteorological data, tissue slides, or even the nonverbal behavior of nonhuman organisms, because of the complexity of meanings, some of them unconscious, that humans can create.
For this reason, I would not agree with the contention that psychoanalysis is a natural science, but I would argue that psychoanalytic knowledge is valid only to the extent that it is intersubjectively shareable, via appeal to shared texts (Siegel et al., 2002), and consilient with other pieces of knowledge (Wilson, 1999). This is a view I share with my Gainesville colleague Peter Rudnytsky (Rudnytsky, 2002, 2019), so much so that, with tongue only partially in cheek, the two of us have begun to call ourselves “the Gainesville School,” movements in psychoanalytic history having sometimes narcissistically started with groups smaller than a dyad, but it is striking that he and I have arrived at similar positions from divergent
educational backgrounds, mine in psychology and his in literature, a fact that I mention to indicate that this view of psychoanalysis really intends to establish a middle ground between those who view the discipline as entirely hermeneutic and those who view it as entirely scientific.
Nevertheless, as someone who believes that psychoanalytic knowledge must have consilience with all other knowledge, I also believe that every single psychoanalytic proposition or term is subject to revision in terms of developments in every surrounding discipline and, furthermore, because it is now more than 80 years since Freud's death, badly in need of such revision. For me, this is not just a matter of relatively minor changes like those which Pederson proposes—for example, whether the complement of narcissism (or excessive self-focus) is not masochism (the desire to have another inflict pain on the self) but echoism (or excessive focus on the other)—but wholesale ones involving reformulations of Freud's drive theory, structural and topographic models, theory of unconscious cognition, theory of gender and sexuality, and so on. I have three reasons for holding this position: First, what may have appeared modern in 1939, when Freud died, is antiquated in 2020, now that we have cognitive science, affective neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, computer science, modern developmental psychology, modern ethology and evolutionary psychology, modern gender theory, etc., some of these developing fields that would not be possible without Freud's pioneering work. Second, because psychoanalytic texts look increasingly antiquated—Freud's (Freud, 1905/1953) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality seems increasingly dated since the dawn of the feminist and queer revolutions about 50 years ago, a matter to which I shall return later, but The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953) seems, despite its problematic energic assumptions, to be doing rather better because of its implications for some aspects of cognitive science (Bucci, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Weinberger & Stoycheva, 2019)—people not only in surrounding disciplines but in the core mental health disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, social work) feel increasingly free to ignore us and to relegate us to irrelevance. Third, because of its extreme reluctance to revise its ideas on the basis of empirical tests, psychoanalysis perpetrated much harm against both individuals and society. The most obvious examples here would be Freud's psychology of women
and the general negative view of gays and lesbians, although this latter problem pertains more to writers who came after Freud than to Freud himself. And fourth, it is, to me anyway, a matter of intellectual honesty to say that psychoanalysis can meet the same evidentiary standards as everyone else in the community of scientists and scholars.
Anyway, what I am to make of a paper that begins, “The drive has always been connected to an object in Freud's work ….”, and that then proceeds to discuss the Freudian dual-drive theory, from the beginning of the essay to the end, as if the concepts of “drive” and “object” had not been subjected to rigorous challenge since Freud's death, both inside and outside psychoanalysis? One would never know that, outside of psychoanalysis, terms like drive and “instinct” have increasingly been supplanted by terms like “motivational system” and “behavioral system.” Bowlby (1982), for example, conceptualized attachment this way. Rather than review a large literature on this topic, I will simply make reference to Lichtenberg et al. (2011), the most recent and comprehensive attempt within psychoanalysis to update its motivational theory. I mention this work, however, because I think it no longer possible to shoehorn such various motivations as physiological regulation (or self-preservation), exploration and curiosity, mastery and assertiveness, sexuality, attachment, affiliation, caregiving, territoriality (or defensive aggression), and predation into a two-drive theory, whether we consider those two drives to be sexuality and self-preservation, or sexuality and aggression, or Eros and the death drive, but it is precisely this premise that Pederson asks us to accept as the foundation of his entire argument. This means that all of Pederson's argument here is on shaky ground, ready to be toppled by the next conceptual earthquake that comes along.
In contrast, my position would be that psychoanalysis always pertains to ways in which humans have conflicts over the representation and expression of certain basic motivations because such motivations often provide a psychological threat to our self-conceptions and to our emotional ties to valued others but that there are far more than two such motivational systems and that a modern psychoanalysis will have to account for potential conflicts between a multiplicity of, to use the older terminology, drives. Now my mentor Sidney Blatt (1974, 1995a, 2008) famously proposed a two-motivation model (relatedness and self-definition), and I always believed this model to be too simplistic, precisely because humans
have more than two psychologically important motivations, but also to be nonetheless a powerful first approximation for two reasons: first, much of human life is about the potential conflicts between establishing intimate relatedness on the one hand and establishing oneself as one's own person on the other, with good functioning involving the ability to balance these two vital needs; and second, with his theory, Blatt (2008) was able to unify a large body of clinical and research observations in developmental psychology, personality theory, personality assessment, psychopathology, and psychotherapy and to connect these findings to evolutionary theory and neurobiology (Guisinger & Blatt, 1994; Luyten & Blatt, 2013). For recent reviews of this literature, see Auerbach (2019a; Auerbach & Diamond, 2017), Luyten (2017; Luyten et al., 2019), Beebe and Lachmann (2017), Shahar and Mayes (2017), and Wachtel (2019).
What we have in Pederson's article are virtually no references to research evidence—in all fairness, there are references to de Waal (1995), and to Lewis (1971), and of course to Blatt (1998)—such that nearly all of the evidence presented comes from Pederson's extensive case examples, and these too are problematic, as I shall explain. But although no doubt Blatt would have agreed with Pederson's pairing of narcissism and echoism, as well as with the tension posited by Green (Green & Kohon, 2005), inspired by Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.E./1914), between Eros and Eris, love and strife, the problem remains that Pederson presents us with a sweeping grand theory that rests almost entirely, except for his case examples, on the psychoanalytic metapsychology, in particular the vicissitudes, to use the appropriate psychoanalytic word, of its very dated dual-drive theory.
So, having stated my concerns as to the foundations of Pederson's argument, I will venture a few comments here and there as to its details, but because of his paper's length, there is no way that I can be systematic in my exposition. Pederson begins with a discussion of aggression, of its importance not only to self-preservation but to sexuality, and with the major proviso, per above, that I think that there are multiple forms of aggression that cannot be subsumed under a single motivational system, I actually agree with him that aggressive motives are central to human life and that the concept of aggression is in need of a psychoanalytic reformulation. The problem, as always, is that Freud's initial language is outdated and obscures several important distinctions between various aggressive motivations, such as territoriality, competition, dominance,
and predation. Another problem is that Pederson's discussion of the “argument is war” metaphor, while highly relevant to the ways in which aggression pervades our everyday thought, is not original with him. Here a reference to Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), which provides an extended discussion of the “argument is war” metaphor, is relevant, and this not just a gotcha point. The work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), which explains how metaphor pervades everyday thought, connecting abstract concepts to basic sensorimotor schemas and highlighting some meanings while obscuring others, is essential to a reformulation of psychoanalytic cognitive psychology and provides a better grounding than Freud's energic theory for the psychoanalytic project of connecting bodily experience to complex thought. I will note in this context that, in an effort to contain my own aggression, I have eschewed the “argument is war” metaphor here in favor of the metaphor that an argument is a building, although perhaps an even better version of me would have used the metaphor that an argument is (or derives from) a conversation or a dialogue, for that is what Pederson and I are attempting to have.
Next Pederson turns to the superego and its links to perfectionism. Again, to my surprise, I agree with him that self-critical states involve much more than conscience, guilt, and remorse—that Freud's discussion of the ego ideal, as compared with the superego, is still relevant. I also, strangely enough, agree that the Oedipus complex remains a viable psychoanalytic concept because human sexual rivalry and jealousy are readily observable, perhaps universal, phenomena, even if this central psychoanalytic idea is in need of rigorous reformulation for a relational age (Josephs, 2006, 2010), an age that does not automatically assume heteronormativity in sexual development, and an age that recognizes the crucial importance of childhood relational and sexual trauma, not just fantasies of incest (Simon, 1992), in the development of adult psychopathology. Nevertheless, this section remains problematic because it is presented as if many telling critiques (Holt, 1989; G. S. Klein, 1976; Schafer, 1976) of the structural model, of the ego and therefore the superego, had never been written and as if there were no research literature on moral development, self-critical perfectionism, avoidant/dismissive attachment styles, differences between guilt and shame, etc. Although, of
course, I agree that self-evaluative and therefore self-critical states involve identifications with one's parents, please note that I have tried to formulate this idea here in experiential terms, rather than in terms of the concrete personifications that are everywhere in the structural model (Schafer, 1976)—as if the id, the ego, and the superego really had agency of their own—and that serve to obscure, despite the more phenomenological language of Freud's German (e.g., above-I or over-I, rather than superego), the lived experience of self-critical perfectionism, of failure to live up to one's ideals. In consequence, Pederson gives little indication of who is at risk to develop self-critical perfectionism and little indication of the implications that self-critical perfectionism has for clinical outcomes, even though there was already a growing literature on these matters more than a decade ago (Blatt, 2004).
Equally important is that Pederson emerges in this section as an intrapsychic, rather than relational, thinker. It is here that he begins to discuss projective identification, and like M. Klein (1946), he appears to think of projective identification as something that happens mainly inside the head of the person engaging in this process, rather than as involving an interactive pressure on the other to conform with contents of the projected material (Bion, 1961/1989; Ogden, 1979). He says, specifically, “When one becomes the parental imago, one will make an object, even intrapsychically, feel the ego injury which originally caused the ego defense.” Now there are many problems with the projective identification concept, chief among them that the idea of putting disavowed material “into” another person is essentially a Cartesian fantasy, a belief that a mind inside one body puts material into a mind inside another body, but it is through this concept, and through Bion's (1962, 1967) metaphor of the container and the contained, that Kleinian theory became relational, rather than just intrapsychic (Aron, 1996). Pederson's formulation of projective identification is a surprisingly intrapsychic one, at least as I read the quotation I have cited, even if we leave out the comments about becoming a parental imago and about making an object, which in Pederson's system I never seem to read as an independent other or subject, feel a psychological injury, but there is no mention of the interactive pressure and the boundary blurring between self and other that are really the two fundamental elements of projective identification, if it is an intelligible concept at all (Auerbach & Blatt, 2001). I mention this
matter now not just because it is in this section that Pederson first details his ideas about projective identification but because there is evidence throughout the paper, more on this later, that Pederson has a primarily intrapsychic understanding of psychoanalytic thought. Of course, it is fair to say that I may have misunderstood him and also fair to say that psychoanalysis must be both intrapsychic and relational, rather than either-or, but throughout this paper there is precious little discussion of the dialogic aspect of psychotherapy and its relationship to Pederson's understanding of psychoanalysis and a great deal of what seem to me to be internal transformations in the psyche.
Next comes Pederson's thoughts on Freud's concept of psychic bisexuality, and here again he is, I believe, on shaky ground or, alternatively, missing essential aspects of the psychoanalytic conversation. Psychic bisexuality is perhaps the only intellectual remnant of his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess that Freud carried forward throughout his life (Gay, 1988), and the psychological reasons for this might be a topic for deeper discussion in some other context. In the present context, it is fair to say that the idea of psychic bisexuality, that men have feminine identifications and that women have masculine ones and that all of us have the potential for same-gender sexual attractions, would have been revolutionary in the early 1900s, but it is equally fair to say, given the modern changes in gender identity, such that we now have people coming out not only as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, etc., but also as nonbinary, that this concept is showing its intellectual age. Pederson notes Freud's own longstanding confusion whether psychic bisexuality is a psychological construct, a biological one, or a sociological one because, after all, it is hard to define exactly what a “masculine” or “feminine” characteristic is and harder still to ascertain its specific origin. Freud's own confusion should render the concept of psychic bisexuality suspect in and of itself, but to my reading, Pederson seems to deal with Freud's confusion, quite reductively, by equating masculinity with activity and assertiveness and femininity with passivity and submissiveness.
Perhaps I have misread Pederson on this score or have misunderstood his points throughout the paper about psychological passivity because toward the very end of the essay, almost as an afterthought, he states
that passivity can have a egoistic or assertive expression and that activity can have an altruistic or echoistic expression, and also because his discussion appears to be better articulated elsewhere (Pederson, 2015), but either way, he writes as if activity equals masculinity and passivity equals femininity and also as if no psychoanalytic writing on gender identity has occurred since Freud, never mind since the beginning of the feminist and queer revolutions. Such psychoanalytic classics as The Bonds of Love (Benjamin, 1988), The Reproduction of Mothering (Chodorow, 1999), Gender as Soft Assembly (Harris, 2005), Being Gay (Isay, 1989), and Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities (O'Connor & Ryan, 1993/2019), among others, are of course not cited, although Horney's work is referenced, as is Chasseguet-Smirgel's, but this matter aside, it is a simple point that there is much that is anything other than passive about bearing and giving birth to children, the one activity in which men absolutely cannot engage, so any equation between the activity-passivity dimension and gender should always be treated with care. As I read him, Pederson understands that there is no easy equation between activity-passivity and masculinity-femininity, but in his attempt to preserve Freud's theories of sexuality intact despite considerable growth in our understanding of both sex and gender since Freud's death, he has much oversimplified something we think of very differently today than we would have in 1939, to say nothing of 1905.
These same oversimplifications pervade Pederson's discussion of Eros and sexuality as well. To be clear about the matter, just as, on the basis of modern developments in ethology, comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, and related fields, we cannot collapse territoriality, competition, dominance, predation, etc. under the all-purpose heading of Aggression, we also cannot collapse sexuality, attachment, affiliation, caregiving, etc. under the all-purpose heading of Eros, as Bowlby's (1982) work demonstrates. Love and sexuality, I think it uncontroversial to say, are intimately related, and I agree with Pederson's later comment that attachment or tenderness has, or can have, an erotic or sexual component (Koziej, 2019), but Freud's (and therefore Pederson's) reduction of love to aim-inhibited sexuality simply is no longer tenable. Attachment really is not derivative of sexuality; instead, sexuality, although by no means derivative of attachment, is anaclitic upon it, an idea that is strangely consistent with Freud's (1905/1953) original formulation that libido
leans on the self-preservative drives. Here Pederson attempts to shore up his argument that love is aim-inhibited sexuality through an appeal to the scientific literature (de Waal, 1995) on the pansexual behavior of bonobos, the primate species most closely related genetically to humans, and to argue (a) that human culture must have been similar at some point and (b) that “it is likely that human culture or ethical life stepped in to enforce the renunciation of it, which forced sublimation.”
Much though I appreciate Pederson's willingness at last to appeal to evidence other than clinical case studies, this argument is problematic for several reasons, the most important one being that chimpanzees, although nearly as closely related genetically to modern humans as are bonobos, have a very different social structure that emphasizes male dominance, competition, and aggression, rather than female dominance, egalitarianism, and the frequent sexual encounters of bonobos. It reasonable to speculate as to the genetic and behavioral connections between the genus Homo and the genus Pan but to do so ever so carefully. The Darwinians of the 19th century focused mainly on natural selection and on aggression (Gay, 1993); the Darwinians of the 20th and 21st centuries, Bowlby among them but also Hrdy (2009), who relies heavily on attachment theory and relational psychoanalysis for her views, have focused more on sexual selection and therefore on mating, reproduction, and caregiving; the differentiations that primatologists make between chimpanzees and bonobos would certainly be consistent with this shift. This shift in Darwinian anthropology seems also to have been driven in the last 50 years by the influx of women into the field (Hrdy, 2013). Thus, Pederson's argument that human sexuality is a modification of bonobo sexuality that is based on the human evolution of morality is very thin reed, especially when we consider the complexities of natural selection pressures that created three species (humans, bonobos, chimpanzees) with highly overlapping genomes (Fischer et al., 2011; Polavarapu et al., 2011; Prüfer et al., 2012), with bonobos and chimpanzees having differentiated from each other several million years after the split between hominids on the one hand and these two ape species on the other.
We simply do not know enough about the behavioral characteristics of the genus Pan some two million years ago, before the two species in that genus diverged, to be certain as to why these two species have such different social adaptations (Gruber & Clay, 2016), although one
suggestion is that competition for food was greater for chimpanzees as they were forced from the trees to the ground than it was for the bonobos, who could therefore remain more cooperative and less aggressive in their social adaptation (Hare et al., 2012; White & Wrangham, 1988). Additionally, because psychoanalysis traditionally has focused so heavily on issues of sexuality and aggression, two obvious markers of difference between bonobos and chimpanzees, it is easy for us to overlook that other key differences between the two species might be that bonobos seem to have a greater capacity for empathy and social cognition but that chimpanzees are much more likely to engage, at least in natural or wild settings, in tool use (Gruber & Clay, 2016; Herrmann et al., 2010; Koops et al., 2015; Rilling et al., 2012), a differentiation more suggestive of the distinction between relatedness and self-definition than that between sexuality and aggression.
If we return, however, to the terms of Pederson's argument regarding the activity-passivity dimension with regard to love and sexuality, then I think it highly questionable to assume that altruism and various other-directed motivations are necessarily passive while egoism and narcissism—like Pederson, I agree with Freud's (1914/1957) distinction here between self-preservation (or self-interest) and self-inflation, otherwise known narcissism, if only because people will get themselves killed to preserve their narcissism or, alternatively, their honor or pride—are necessarily active. If I understand Pederson properly, he thinks of activity in terms of power and of passivity in terms of belongingness. Now as a Blattian, I happen to like the idea that humans have self-definitional motives and relatedness motives (Blatt, 1995a, 2008), but these are seen, especially in Blatt's later work and in the work of theorists who descend from Leary's (1957) interpersonal circumplex, as two separate, interacting dimensions. Blatt, especially in his earlier work, would often collapse them into one dimension, anaclitic-introjective, but his writings from the early 1990s onward increasingly consider relatedness and self-definition to be separate and interacting. I mention all this because, if Pederson is arguing that activity mainly pertains to power and that passivity mainly pertains to belongingness, he is in fact arguing, as I am, that the activity-passivity dimension is too simple and that we are better served by something like Leary's system and its intellectual descendants, which have an axis of dominance and an axis of affiliation. Pederson says as
much, as an afterthought, toward the end of the paper. As I have argued, even Blatt's two-configurations model is too simple for understanding the complex interactions between the various human motivational systems, but I am arguing the point here that the attempt by Pederson to uphold certain binary distinctions made by Freud that were helpful and clarifying in their time is unsustainable today, especially when we start to apply them, for example, the complexities of human gender identification and sexuality.
Alternatively, Winnicott's (1971) doing and being, like Bakan's (1966) agency and communion, refer to differing modes of living and experiencing that interact complexly and cannot be ordered on a single dimension. Would it not make more sense to speak of interacting dimensions of (a) agency vs. lack of agency and (b) communion vs. isolation to make clearer the ways in which either motivation can lead to human growth, can deepen human experience, or can oppose these things? This appears what Pederson was trying to say, but I could not discern his meaning because of his insistence on preserving the vocabulary of the Freudian metapsychology and because of his saying very little about passive egoism and active altruism until the last few pages of his paper. Again, if I have misunderstood him, I stand corrected.
Next comes Pederson's lengthy section on echoism and death, probably the central issue of the paper but made overlong by case material that, as again I shall discuss, actually gives very little in the way of useful evidence for Pederson's theory. As noted, I agree that echoism, the overinvestment in others, not masochism, is the complement of narcissism, the overinvestment in self, although I (Auerbach, 1990, 1993) have argued elsewhere, on the basis of the work of Bach (1985) and Benjamin (1990), that these concepts should be understood representationally, phenomenologically, experientially, and intersubjectively—that Freud's drive theories, especially their economic and energic assumptions, obscure more than they reveal about narcissistic states. Thus, despite my terminological agreement, I find problematic much in Pederson's analysis of these phenomena. I will note, first, that I agree with Pederson's contention that both narcissism and echoism are connected to death anxiety—that both overvaluation of the self, with suppression of investment in others,
and overvaluation of the other, with suppression of investment in self, are connected to our general wish to avoid awareness of mortality. For purposes of brevity, and because I agree here with Pederson, I will leave the details of this argument aside. Instead, my concern is with, as I read him, uncritical acceptance of Freud's claims that death anxiety is indirect, that humans cannot imagine their own deaths, and that the unconscious does not know its own death. Well maybe, but maybe not.
Freud's theory of the unconscious, the primary process, and other related concepts, while unsurpassed in 1915, has many problems today (Bucci, 1997; Weinberger & Stoycheva, 2019), among them that, pace Freud (1915/1957), it is unlikely that the unconscious aspects of our minds can know nothing of death because these parts of our minds contain only representations of drives and know nothing about negation (Hoffman, 1979), but of course Pederson writes of the unconscious as if there had been no developments in cognitive psychology since Freud's death. To my mind, since it is quite clear that humans can imagine both their own deaths and the deaths of their loved ones, a more defensible psychoanalytic account of how humans maintain simultaneous awareness and lack of awareness of things like death and loss involves Freud's (1926/1959) theory of signal affects, the unconscious or barely conscious internal signals that tell us that something psychologically dangerous, such as death or loss, is about to be present. But this theory presupposes that some unconscious awareness of death or loss must be present if anxiety connected to it is to be warded off (Hoffman, 1979).
It is troubling, therefore, that Pederson quotes Freud's statements about the inability of the mind to know death and that he does so without, as far as I can see, any criticism and then goes on to construct a complex theory that involves his ideas on parental imagos, passivity, echoism, and masochism that does little to describe the lived experience of the very problem, death anxiety, that he is attempting to explicate. This means that important critics of Freud's ideas on death anxiety are not cited, so names not encountered would include Martin Heidegger (1927/1962), Ernest Becker (1973), and Norman O. Brown (1985), all of whose ideas are relevant to Freud's specific understanding of this problem and all of them writers with whom Pederson would appear to have more than passing familiarity. Also not cited is Hoffman's (1979) trenchant reading, reprinted in Hoffman (1998) of the contradictions in Freud's text
regarding the understanding of mortality, specifically the ways in which Freud elides the problem of what the mind can and cannot know about its own finitude. But most important is that there is actually empirical research on this matter in the form of terror management theory (Landau et al., 2007; Pyszczynski et al., 1999; Solomon et al., 2015), rooted in the work of Becker, Freud, and existentialism, more generally, and although like all scientific perspectives, it is subject to critique, the research findings in favor of its mixed evolutionary-existential account of defenses against the emergence of death anxiety, through both sadistic (or aggressive) and self-defeating, sometimes masochistic behaviors, both narcissism and echoism, are considerable. Psychoanalytic clinicians and thinkers would be far better served by understanding this body of research than by Pederson's metapsychological speculations about these issues.
Particularly confusing to me was what a death imago is and how it is a complement to the ideal of perfection. Presumably this refers to patients so deeply traumatized that, despite the death anxiety that is a normal part of the human psyche, they find identification with death safer or more comforting than being alive—or that they find self-hatred safer or more comforting that self-acceptance or self-love—and I certainly agree with Pederson, as with Freud (1917/1957) and Blatt (1974, 1995b, 2004), that some depressive states, the introjective or self-critical ones, involve identification with the hated aspects of ambivalently loved objects. Still there had to be a simpler, more experiential way for Pederson to have said this than the one that he chose.
I will also note that I could not readily tell whether Pederson also meant to connect death anxiety and the death imago to the operations of a hypothetical death drive (Freud, 1920/1955), so for the record, I will state that the death drive is one of the most problematic of Freud's concepts from any scientific standpoint. For a good discussion of the poor scientific status of Freud's drive concepts, especially their energic aspects, there is always Holt's (1989) work, which is consistent with the motivational systems approach (Lichtenberg et al., 2011) I mentioned earlier, but I will note that any reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920/1955) finds it to be full of poor biological speculations, even for the 1910s and 1920s, when the modern synthesis (Huxley, 1942) of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian natural selection was just coming
into being, and that its most important psychological concept, the compulsion to repeat, can stand alone, without any hypothetical drive for organisms or organic matter to self-destruct, simply by virtue of its connection to two crucial psychological needs—(a) the feeling of security, by recreating relationships that, however problematic, are based on early attachments, and (b) the need for mastery of the problematic aspects of those relationships, with likely neurobiological correlates of both of these motivations (van der Kolk, 1989).
Also problematic is the Pederson's use of generic feminine pronouns to designate what he seems to be describing as the generic passive-altruist or echoist. Even if we leave aside my previously mentioned concerns about equating passivity with altruism, this particular usage of feminine pronouns reeks of sexism. Blatt's (2008; Luyten & Blatt, 2013) research would indicate that men are more likely to be self-definitional in orientation than women are and that women are more likely to be relational than men are, but his theory holds that good functioning involves a balance between these two motivational lines, in both men and women, such that the “active-egoist” and the “passive-altruist,” if these pure types actually exist, are likely to be pathological expressions. Although I believe that this is what Pederson actually means—that these pure types are rare and likely to be pathological—and that he reserves terms likes sadism and masochism for these pure types when they become involved in abusive relationships, I thought I should mention that designations like the active-egoist and the passive-altruist, not to mention the narcissist and the echoist, the sadist and the masochist, are examples of the pathologizing language that nowadays we are supposed to avoid. Additionally, I found the use of feminine pronouns for the ideal type of the passive-altruist to be particularly troubling as I read this paper but also consistent, again if I have read him correctly, with Pederson's equally problematic earlier discussion of the links between the passive and the feminine.
In the next two sections of the paper, Pederson gives his speculations regarding the positive aspects of passivity and altruism, how these are connected to benevolence and to what Pederson describes as restoration, a term he prefers over M. Klein's reparation because he sees the former term as involving the possibility of love, gratitude, and loyalty and the
latter as involving mainly attempts to repair damage and to decrease guilt. Although I agree with him on his terminological revision of restoration for reparation and although I found these sections a psychological relief in their discussion of the crucial importance of relatedness, this after I had read pages of what I regard as unjustified equations of passivity and altruism with negation and death, I was struck by how Pederson referenced virtually nothing from the relational literature, the attachment literature, or the mother-infant research literature, all of which (a) would have had something to say to him about what benevolent and restorative relationships are about, (b) might have said it in a much more experiential, rather than speculative, manner, and (c) might have given him more substantive evidence than his clinical material for his conclusions. Beebe and Lachmann (2014) do a very good job of presenting research evidence for how we can tell the difference between mother-infant dyads involving benevolence, care, and mutuality and those which involve misattunement and sometimes, sadly, mutual psychological attack, doer and done-to relatedness (Benjamin, 2004).
The final section of Pederson's paper pertains to the moral and political implications of his ideas, and this section too proved problematic. Mind you, psychoanalysis has a venerable tradition of social theory, the most important examples of which, in my opinion, come from the Frankfurt School and its intellectual descendants (Jay, 1973). Pederson cites none of this historical work, none of the modern feminist work in psychoanalysis, and none of the more modern work on prejudice, power, privilege, and multiculturalism (Fors, 2018; Tummala-Narra, 2016; Young-Bruehl, 1996, 2013). In consequence, Pederson presents us with all kinds of speculations about the potential political ideologies and affiliations of the various character types in his model, but he presents no research evidence to back his speculations, and the sociology of political affiliation is an important empirical discipline, as any political consultant can tell you. From the standpoint of a psychoanalytic perspective that emphasizes identifications, the first place to start would be the longstanding finding that parental party affiliation predicts a child's party affiliation about 70% of the time (Achen, 2002), although a more complex model that would be consistent with a relational psychoanalytic view includes such relationship variables as supportiveness of the parent-child relationship and the accuracy of the child's perception of the
parent's or parents' political views (Ojeda & Hatemi, 2015). Other findings point (a) to differences in brain structure (Schreiber et al., 2013) that suggest that conservatives are more responsive to fear than are liberals and (b) to underlying metaphors for leadership, strong father for conservatism, nurturing parent for liberalism (Feinberg & Wehling, 2018; Lakoff, 2002), these findings in some way echoing the pioneering Frankfurt School work on the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al., 1950). Westen , one of our leading psychoanalytic researchers, provides an extensive summary of the research on emotions and politics. None of this seems to concern Pederson, and to my mind, there are important real-life consequences at stake, well beyond what implications Pederson thinks there may be for the hypothesized political beliefs of active-egoists, passive-altruists, and the like, given our country's current political crisis.
Worst of all in this section, however, is Pederson's recounting of Freud's views on the supposed transition in societies from animism to religion to science, each stage supposedly an advance in the relinquishing of narcissistic omnipotence and each stage paralleling in Freud's view the development of the individual. In no way here can I discuss all of the problems with these ideas, in which the individual, like society, progresses from primitivity to rationality or, like the embryo in Haeckel's law, recapitulates phylogenetic development. For this purpose, I will refer interested readers to Rizzolo (2017), who provides the most extensive critique I have encountered of this conceptual problem in psychoanalysis. In the interest of intellectual honesty, I will note that Blatt (Blatt & Blatt, 1984) also fell prey to this mode of thought in his analysis of representation in art—I always regarded this as an overvalued idea of his—and I suspect that the actual psychodynamic issue here is not that so-called primitive peoples have more narcissistic omnipotence than we supposedly rational moderns and postmoderns but rather that it flatters our narcissistic self-inflation to think ourselves better or more advanced than those who preceded us. Nevertheless, Pederson presents this aspect of Freud's thinking—the progression of societies and individuals from primitive (or irrational or animistic) to advanced (or rational or scientific) without any reference to what modern anthropologists or developmental psychologists might have to say about these ideas, so I sincerely hope he reconsiders this matter in future writings.
Finally, I must say something about the lengthy clinical case material Pederson presents as evidence of his theoretical views. I had hoped for something interesting here because of Pederson's interest in bilateral stimulation from Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (Shapiro, 2018). I am actually favorably disposed toward EMDR, even though I find its underlying model, with its emphasis on strangulated affect and its lack of conceptualization of the transference-countertransference matrix in treatment, to be eerily similar to the ideas of psychopathology and treatment put forth by Breuer and Freud (1895/1953), because I believe EMDR rapidly reaches unconscious processes and material not readily accessible to psychoanalysis or other standard verbal psychotherapies, so I salute Pederson for using one of its methods, bilateral stimulation, even if he does not use its entire protocol. This said, I found his case examples very difficult, even tedious, to read, mainly because they seemed, to me anyway, to lack a relational dynamic—specifically, the patient's enactment of psychological material in the therapeutic relationship and the therapist's counterenactment—such that the examples presented really had the feeling of being almost purely intrapsychic events, much as Pederson's account of projective identification seemed to lack the interpersonal or relational dimension, the manipulation to play a part in another's phantasy, that has been essential to the concept since the writings of Bion (Bion, 1961/1989; Ogden, 1979). Simply put, there was virtually no relational drama in his case material—no sense of how he struggled with his patients and how his patients struggled with him. Most modern psychoanalytic case studies focus intensively on the transference-countertransference matrix, and in my view, because in my day job I have an abundance of cognitive-behavioral colleagues, it is the moment-by-moment focus on the relational dynamics in the consulting room that differentiates a psychodynamic approach to treatment from all others. It is surprising, therefore, that Pederson presents such extensive clinical material with so little focus on how his patients enact their clinical issues with him and on what he enacts in return.
There is of course no requirement that Pederson do this, and if he is getting good clinical results—e.g., access to clinical material he could not easily access in other ways—through EMDR-like bilateral stimulation, then he is. The current state of our knowledge is that therapeutic
relationship is far more important in therapeutic outcome than is therapeutic approach in any case (Wampold & Imel, 2015). But his case examples, unfortunately, have a deeper problem, and that problem, as I (Auerbach, 2014, 2019b) have argued previously, is that it is a requirement of all scholarly, not just scientific, evidence that it be intersubjectively shareable. In the case of psychoanalysis, this means that the community of scholars needs access not only to case reports, which are all, really, that Pederson has given us, but also to session recordings or transcripts, such that this same community of scholars can share its reactions to something that actually happened in the consulting room, not just to the clinician's highly selective reports of those events. This is a problem throughout the psychoanalytic literature and a major reason that people outside the psychoanalytic community feel justified in dismissing the approach out of hand. They can point to research studies while we point to, “A patient once told me” or “I once had a patient that said.” A good example of how case material evidence should be presented can be found in Kächele's discussion of the case of Amalia X, which he terms his specimen case for psychoanalysis (Kächele et al., 2012; Levy et al., 2012). Here one gets to read a full session transcript to understand Kächele's therapeutic responsiveness to his patient and also to see how research measures can be applied to this same information. Pederson, like nearly everyone else in psychoanalysis, gives us nothing like that.
A still deeper point is that without such intersubjectively shareable material, it would be as if we were holding a literature class in which we discussed only our impressions of texts, without reference to the actual works themselves (Siegel et al., 2002), and although in this postmodern age, it is reasonable to assert, contra Freud's belief that he was unraveling or decoding the true meaning of a patient's dream, that patient utterances, like literary texts, do not have fixed meanings, we still want to be arguing, at some point, over the meanings of the utterances or texts themselves or, perhaps more accurately for both clinical cases and literary works, over the meaning of the combination of the utterances or texts and the interpretive community's response to them, not just the interpreter's report of the original communications, no matter how brilliant that interpretive report might eventually prove to be. And without recourse to some record of the original therapeutic transactions, we really have no rational basis for choosing between, among others,
Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Kohutian, Lacanian, or relational readings of a given clinical encounter, a circumstance that should be of much greater embarrassment to the field than it appears to be. The old saw that Freudian patients produce Freudian dreams and that Jungian patients produce Jungian dreams simply will not do, even if it contains the kernel of truth that the meanings that an individual speaks are always partially constituted by her or his interlocutor. My Gainesville school colleague (Rudnytsky, 2019) has recently articulated a similar position regarding the importance of the discussion of shared texts or communications if we are to arrive at something beyond a purely constructivist view of psychoanalysis, some shared understanding of an author's or patient's meaning, and Pederson (2015), as far as I can tell, is equally skeptical of purely constructivist epistemologies, even though he asks us repeatedly to take on faith his reporting of what his patients say to him.
The decline of psychoanalysis is due in no small part, although by no means only, to its failure to provide intersubjectively shareable information. The actual function of case reports in most psychoanalytic papers, because those case reports almost always lack connection to a transcript or a recording, is not to provide proof for the author's views but to provide an illustration of how the author might conceptualize and work with the material and issues that the patient presents. That is not an unworthy function, but it is far less than Freud's hope for his case studies that they would prove his ideas correct. As for Pederson's very lengthy paper, I think that his article would have been improved greatly with (a) far less case material that, as far as I can see, gives us very little support for Pederson's ideas, material that, oddly enough, does surprisingly little to engage the reader with either the patient's reenactment of emotional difficulties and the therapist's emotional reaction to the patient's actions, and (b) with far more discussion, on the basis of knowledge developments in other fields, of how to create a psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytic metapsychology for the 21st century.
So, I did not know where to begin this discussion of Pederson's contribution but I do know how to end. In his lengthy paper, there are many interesting points made—most importantly, Pederson's discussion of echoism as a complement to narcissism—and although I have serious
disagreements with him over nearly every aspect of psychoanalysis, I must acknowledge that Pederson is an erudite and thorough commentator on Freud's work. His views, therefore, cannot be cast aside lightly. Still, I feel as if I am damning with faint praise and that perhaps it would have been more honest to say, in paraphrase of Sid Ziff, not Dorothy Parker, that they should be thrown aside with great force (Quote Investigator, 2013). Pederson concludes his essay as follows:
Freudian structural theory still remains the most comprehensive vision of the mind and I hope that by returning to it that there is a possibility to overcome the tribalism of the fractured schools of psychoanalysis. What is radical in Freud's theories— how much we are determined by the unconscious— still remains radical today. The question is how much an analyst wants to borrow from other disciplines vs. how much she wants to let the psyche speak for itself.
Much though I agree that psychoanalysis, or some version of it, remains the most comprehensive approach to the mind available, I cannot agree that Freud's structural model should remain the instantiation of psychoanalytic thinking that we want to uphold, no matter how deep and thorough Pederson's presentation of it might be, for the basic reason that all theories are always subject to revision and critique in light of new information, information that Peterson sedulously avoids throughout this paper. A more defensible presentation of general psychoanalytic knowledge might be found in the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (2nd ed.; PDM-2) (Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2017), a work that Pederson also does not cite, perhaps because, and here I admit to outright speculation as to his motives, that volume's attempt at a grand psychoanalytic synthesis nevertheless relies heavily on research evidence to determine what is useful in psychoanalysis and what is not, and is therefore necessarily revisionist. I agree that Freud's core propositions are radical. Among them, I would list the following:
that most of mental functioning is unconscious, this in the sense of a system unconscious, what we would now call a procedural unconscious, and is not capable of becoming conscious in any direct or introspective way;
that some mental contents or emotional concerns are excluded from consciousness or shared discourses, are dynamically unconscious, because of the psychological threat that they pose to a subject that has language and self-reflection;
that the mental contents or emotional concerns most likely to be subject to dynamic exclusion are those which are connected to basic motivational systems because of their potential threats to an individual's self-conception and valued relationships;
that these dynamically excluded or poorly symbolized concerns are enacted or repeated in new contexts and hence in the transference;
that psychological growth involves reworking old relational patterns in new contexts, such as psychotherapy; and
that some version of what happens in the patient (transference) also happens in the therapist or analyst (countertransference).
On the last of these propositions, I would of course go beyond Freud to Racker (1968) and to Fromm-Reichmann (1950), not to mention modern relational thinking, in recognizing the essential equality of the analyst and the patient when it comes to the capacity to be captured by our deepest unresolved psychological concerns. But these basic principles articulated, I see no reason that the best way to render these propositions is necessarily in Freud's specific language, not when there is good empirical warrant for changing it. On this matter, I will stand with the following sentiment of Freud's (1916/1957):
It may thus be said that the theory of psycho-analysis is an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and of resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting-point of its work has a right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own. (p. 16)
I would revise this statement to note that resistance, like transference, is a relational construct, the patient's way of being with the analyst or the
therapist, and that good treatment is always about turning resistance into collaboration, into working alliance, but even without these emendations, I think of this statement as Freud at his best.
In any case, it follows that I believe that neither Freud's structural model nor Pederson's specific rendering is likely to undo the tribalism of the fractured schools of psychoanalysis. The reasons for the tribalism of psychoanalysis are complex, and here I would start with the work of Kirsner (2009) on unfree associations and Breger's (2001) critical but balanced biography of Freud, before I then moved on to the psychoanalytic arrogance that scientific research is somehow irrelevant to its truth claims, but a return to Freud, whether Pederson's or, to cite a more famous one, Lacan's, is unlikely to produce the results for which Pederson hopes, perhaps because some of us (me, for example) think that Freud's theories, however brilliant and radical they are, are products of their time, the same as might be said for Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, and countless others, not just Dead White European Males, but also for the multicultural, multiracial, and multigendered theorists of today, such as the writers I have listed earlier who have taken on problems of gender, race, and culture in psychoanalysis, and therefore always in need of revision on the basis of new knowledge and new social concerns. It will please me greatly if 100 years from now people can write about how wrongheaded my ideas were because of how much we now know that we could not have possibly known when humans were so benighted. My historical prediction is that it will still be more worthwhile to read Freud than to read either Pederson or me because of the brilliance, despite all of its problems, of Freud's insight into the human condition, just as we will continue to read, for example, Descartes, who remains the originator of modern Western thought, no matter how easily refuted some of his ideas are, but that if anything like psychoanalysis is to survive outside its own little ghetto, to have intellectual relevance for the culture as a whole, it will need to transform itself in accordance with growth in the knowledge of the next century.
And speaking of that broader cultural relevance, perhaps there is a deeper problem with Pederson's paper, specifically, the fundamental intrapsychic assumptions that Pederson unwittingly reveals in his final sentence but that I thought were present, given the extensive case material that pertained very little to the transference-countertransference
matrix and given also the lengthy theoretical discussions that seemed to say very little about actual interpersonal relationships, throughout the essay. Pederson wants the analyst to eschew information from other disciplines and simply to let the psyche speak for itself, as if the psyche's speech were somehow independent of and not constituted by its relationship to another psyche who hears, understands, and above all recognizes it (Hegel, 1807/1977), and as if the speech, the hearing, and the recognition of both psyches were somehow not constituted by the many other discourses that they at the same time help to construct. All of this seems particularly odd, given that I am certain that Pederson, by virtue of his broad reading (he certainly knows much more about Classical sources than I do), is probably also more conversant than I with the intersubjectivist thinking that begins with Hegel, that still dominates Continental philosophy, even in a postmodern age, and that is a prominent strand of relational psychoanalysis, given also that Pederson (2018) says, on this web post: “The psychoanalytic model holds that we are primarily related to others; whether driven to be more competitive or more cooperative with them. Whether we love them romantically or as friends. The primacy of the rational self, is replaced by a primacy of the parental Other (the basis of the ideal).” Equally striking is that the web post is entitled “Psychoanalysis as Science,” even though, to my reading, there are no scientific findings cited, so he and I really do have a very different idea of what science is despite our having a broad agreement, again per the argument on his web post, on the necessity of a complex, dynamic understanding of human motivation, as opposed to the superficial rationalism and the biological reductionism that dominate the current intellectual landscape. Still, his web post says very little about actual relationships or attachments to actual others, the others to whom he says we are “primarily related.”
Also intriguing is that Pederson began his paper with this famous statement by Freud (1921/1955):
…individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a
Page 326helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (p. 69).
To my mind, this is actually a tricky passage, with the most crucial phrase in it being “individual's mental life” because that is a very different thing from an individual's life. Although the passage sounds relational, I think that it can plausibly be read as more consistent with a one-person psychology (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). As I read him, Pederson, like Freud, is interested in others as they appear in our mental lives, not as they actually appear in our lives, with the capacity to be independent subjects whom we need for recognition precisely because recognition is what they might chose not to bestow (Benjamin, 1995; Fonagy et al., 2002; Ogden, 1994). This capacity to withdraw recognition, in essence to leave a relationship, is the very thing in which I am most interested because it, just as much as sexuality, is necessary to anything we might plausibly describe as adult love.
So to return to Pederson's final paragraph, I believe that the psyche speaks, and is constituted, only in social, relational, and intersubjective contexts—that we become psyches because other psyches speak to and recognize us. A thinker as erudite and articulate as Pederson can surely cite these intersubjectivist ideas just as well as, if not better than, I, and in all fairness, I have only skimmed his main published work to understand better his theoretical presuppositions, but his references section in Pederson (2015) would certainly indicate his broad knowledge. Still I was hoping, in his essay, for something that would draw me in to a more constructive dialogue about theoretical difference, however difficult such dialogue is to accomplish, and I found instead a system that to me felt closed, one that was turned inward toward the psychoanalysis of 80 years ago, not outward toward what the next 80 years might tell psychoanalysis.