Chapter 13 Commentary on Marohn's “Rage Without Content” and Ornstein's “Chronic Rage from Underground”

Marohn begins by reminding us of the problems in the conceptualizations of aggression that have vexed psychoanalysts since Freud. He reminds us that Kohut borrowed much from classical drive theory in his own conceptualization of aggression, in particular, the economic aspect of the concept and the idea that pleasure and unpleasure relate to discharge and inhibition, respectively. In one of his most famous and evocative works, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” Kohut (1972) described narcissistic rage as a psychoeconomic imbalance arising from “the noncompliance of the archaic self object” (p. 396). Marohn cites the continuity of this idea with Freud's concept of actual neurosis, although Freud did not link this imbalance with the particular failures of early caretakers.

Marohn's argument has two prominent threads: First, as did Kohut, Marohn relates the phenomenon of aggressive expression to disruption of the self, where the state of the self is dependent upon the quality of the selfobject environment. The parental selfobjects are understood as responsible, developmentally speaking, for the optimal structuralization of the child's psyche via their attentiveness to fundamental selfobject needs of the child. Failures in such caretaking are evidenced in rageful (or depressive or sexualized or whatever) breakthroughs, or “disintegration products,” related to the drives (Kohut, 1977). The second thread is about cure: In treatment these “inevitable” experiences—that is, the “empathic breaks”—are what gets treated, not the expression of the rage itself. In other words, a