On the Psychoanalysis of Developmental Arrest

I would like to contribute this critical note with regard to Robert D. Stolorow and Frank M. Lachmann's book, Psychoanalysis of Developmental Arrests. Overall this admirable book tries to situate contemporary self theory and classical oedipal theory within a phenomenological psychoanalytic viewpoint which gives each its due. Since this work is reviewed in this issue of the Review, I wish to confine my comments to two main cautions.

First, the simplicity, ease and apparent clarity with which Stolorow and Lachmann develop their viewpoint can be misleading. They tend to place self and oedipal psychology in a before-after scheme. First comes problems of the self and developmental arrests, then oedipal conflicts. However, in my clinical experience I have never seen a patient who did not have profound conflicts, nor one without profound developmental arrests. I do not believe it is enough to cover this issue by saying both are always present with a difference of emphasis, although this may be so. I think the issue more radical, and one that is still unsolved and open.

It may well turn out that conflict and developmental arrest are co-constitutive, that they create and feed each other. Perhaps a simplified way of pointing to this is by delineating conflict and developmental arrest in terms of areas of the self, as different sorts of experience, function and structure which require one another.

The authors' wish to make things come out too neatly can obscure difficult clinical realities, the very realities they hope to illuminate. For example, the case of Reginald (pp. 74-87), who is given as an example of oedipal work, may be more accurately viewed in terms of schizoid-obsessive use of conflict which masks profound arrests. The authors graphically portray his precocious methods of self-insulation to cover felt deficiencies. In my reading Jane (pp. 65-74) presents a complementary picture, an addictive use of “selfobjects” to bolster a false self system, wherein f