Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East

DISCUSSION: Dr. Gerald Stechler supported Dr. Pine's attempt to integrate several different psychoanalytic schools of thought in a manner useful to clinicians. He suggested that we should sharpen our views of motivation and of aggression. He pointed out that we not only need to clarify whether there is an inner motive for mastery or whether mastery and assertion are derivatives of pro-active and reactive aggression, but that we also need to explain the range of individual differences in the manifestations of these phenomena. He proposed his own model which states that narcissistic injury (the stifling of assertive aims) creates a contamination between assertion and aggression, and that aggression becomes pro-active by taking on properties of assertion. Reactive aggression therefore becomes pro-active through injury. The more one has been injured, the more likely it is that one will exhibit pro-active aggression. Dr. Stechler noted the potential harm of a theoretical position that teaches patients, "through the analyst's eyes," that each time they reach out and try to make an assertion in the transference or in life, such behavior is a derivative of aggression and not free-standing.

Dr. Ana-Maria Rizzuto asked how the unconscious is formulated in Dr. Pine's model. He answered that all the phenomena described and the ideational systems connected to them may exist in consciousness or unconsciousness. He did not feel it was necessary to address that question now, because he saw his model as having no particular implications for the unconscious. Dr. Samuel Silverman asked Dr. Pine to elaborate on the potential clinical value of his theoretical model. Dr. Pine gave three clinical examples in which he showed an interplay of oedipal and self (boundary) issues in a female patient, a painful "self" state and its relation to repetitive object relations patterns in a male patient, and a "wounded" self and related repetitive, vengeful reversal of early object relations