You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Comment on Dr. Sperling's Paper. Margaret Little. Pp. 261-262.
For the purpose of balance the ego can simultaneously mobilize feelings of guilt or of reward by the superego on the one hand, and id gratifications on the other. Where learning of tiresome material is concerned, the ego may arrange reward of the superego or id gratification through sexualization or through countering the suffering of learning with infliction of suffering on the teacher. In analysis the suffering from the treatment is often balanced by making the analyst suffer. Sperling thinks that this balancing is probably part of a wider balancing tendency of biological origin as seen, for instance, in an ape's or chimpanzee's tendency to leave a balanced pattern of marks and objects on a piece of paper, or in nervous system mechanisms for maintaining balance in the upright position, temperature constancy, etc. In contrast to the synthetic function of the ego, which involves integrated elements only separable by analysis, the balancing function involves clearly separate actions.
The suffering inflicted on the analyst by the patient is often an effort to cope with unconscious suffering in himself which, when presented to his awareness, enables him to look for other ways of dealing with it. According to Little, the patient needs the analyst's capacity to tolerate frustration just as at a very early level of development he needed the same capacity in mother. The pathological balancing described by Sperling appears to be an attempt at denial of disturbance, whereas synthesis is a healthy ego function which admits disturbance as part of acquiring a new equilibrium and enables experiences, such as learning, to be sublimation and secondary narcissism rather than direct gratification and primary narcissism.