Aggression and Psychoanalysis: Some Personal Reflections1

I

Looking back on the 20^th century it is difficult not to wonder about the role of violence and aggression in the human psyche. The mass destruction of two world wars, countless regional conflicts and conflagrations, the Holocaust and other attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing, the threat of nuclear war with its specter of ‘mutual assured destruction’, the brutality of totalitarian regimes all serve as incontrovertible evidence of man's propensity for violence, aggression and inhumanity to his fellow men. Indeed, it is often said that while other creatures tend to direct their aggression towards other species in their battles for survival, humans are unique in our wantonly destructive attitudes and actions towards our own kind. Noting this propensity, Erik Erikson (1979) coined the term, ‘pseudospeciation’ to describe the tendency, which is unprecedented in other animal species, to treat fellow humans as if they were inhuman,

alien or ‘other’ as a prelude to and justification for acts of destruction and violence against our own kind.

The recurrence of this behavior, made ever more horrible by technological advances in the capacity for mass destruction, presents an urgent challenge to any science such as ours that seeks to understand the functioning of the mind. The problem this presents us with today is no less immediate than it was for Freud. It was only after the horror and devastation of the First World War, a war in which he suffered personal losses and then had to live through the severe economic hardships that followed, that Freud revised his views about the inherent, instinctual nature of mankind, and raised aggression in psychoanalytic theory from a component aspect of ego survival or an adjunct to the pursuit of sexual and reproductive needs to a category of drive equivalent to that of sexuality. That is, he revised his dual instinct theory shifting his emphasis from the pair, libido/ego instincts, to sexuality and aggression, began to theorize about the existence of the death instinct and turned his attention to the insistent dynamic processes called the repetition compulsion, that lay ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (Freud 1920).

Freud elaborated his views on the social and cultural aspects of human aggression in “Moses and Monotheism” (Freud, 1939), “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud, 1930) and in his correspondence with Albert Einstein, which is collected in the Standard Edition under the title, “Why War?” (Freud, 1933). The latter, written in 1933, just after Hitler had come to power in Germany and with the ravages of the First World War still clearly in mind, contained the famous exchange in which, noting the presence among most ruling classes of political power hunger, mercenary economic self-interest and general indifference to the general welfare, Einstein asked Freud:

“How is it… [they] succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm [for war and hatred], even to sacrifice their lives?” (p. 201)

Einstein then tentatively conjectured:

“Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps the crux of all the complex factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.” (p. 201).

Freud responded:

“I can only express my entire agreement (…) there is something at work in (…) [mankind] – an instinct for hatred and destruction – which goes halfway to meet the efforts of the warmongers.” (p. 209, italics added)

Freud then noted that this “aggressive or destructive instinct (…) which seek[s] to destroy and kill” (p. 209):

“(…) is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to it original condition of inanimate matter. Thus, it quite seriously deserves to be called a death instinct, while the erotic instincts represent the effort to live. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one. Some portion of the death instinct, however, remains operative within the organism…. We have even been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to this diversion inwards of aggressiveness.” (p. 211, original italics)

This last statement, linking ‘conscience’ or superego with the death instinct or ‘aggressiveness turned inwards’ is of the greatest importance. Earlier, in his reply to Einstein, Freud had implied that even in the struggle of right vs. might, the rule of law was in part derived from these destructive instincts – i.e., violence and power projected outward and ceded to the state.

In Freud's view, the only hope to counteract our innate destructive tendencies rested with Eros, which “encourages the growth of emotional ties between men” (1933, p. 212). In so doing, Eros fosters affiliation, community, identification and recognition that the ‘others’ are like ourselves. It is precisely because pseudo-speciation works to oppose these binding forces that the conviction that the hated enemy is alien or less than human has proven so demonically successful in undoing the common ties of humanity (‘love thy neighbor as thyself‘) and furnishing rationalizations for the unleashing of forces

that can be unbridled in their cruelty and destruction.

In addition to Freud's shock at the horrors of the First World War, however, the revision of the dual instinct theory and the formulation of the death instinct were also prompted by his clinical experiences and those of his colleagues. Studies of depression, traumatic dreams, war neuroses and the clinical phenomena encountered in the areas of narcissism, masochism, negative therapeutic reaction and other expressions of primitive, self-destruction all called attention to aggression and its vicissitudes.

II

When I began psychoanalytic training in the US in 1972, aggression was a problematic concept. As a clinical matter, it was impossible not to recognize the fact that many patients suffered from conflicts produced by unconscious hostile and destructive wishes that they felt towards others or directed towards themselves in various manifestations of guilt, self-hatred, self-loathing and depression. The latter, based on Freud's classic paper of 1917, “Mourning and Melancholia”, was thought of predominantly in terms of aggression towards the lost object turned inwards upon the self. Throughout the US, ego psychology was dominant and Kleinian thinking was, for the most part, not well regarded or was even dismissed as incomprehensible or irrelevant. Hartmann's (1964) theoretical interest in such concepts as ‘autonomous ego functions,’ ‘neutralization of energy’ and the ‘conflict–free sphere of the ego’ directed attention to metapsychological problems of instinctual and psychic energy and its deployment and neutralization.

These concerns, which were also a part of Freud's theorizing, seemed – at least to me – to be hard to understand or apply and distant from clinical psychoanalytic experience. The term, ‘aggression,’ was used to refer to feelings and actions on the one hand and a form of hypothesized psychic energy and cathexis on the other. Did every aggressive thought or act derive from an underlying cathexis of the object with aggressive energy? Could such cathexes exist without producing aggressive acts, fantasies or wishes? Was the energy produced by the sublimation of aggressive energy different from that produced by the sublimation of libidinal energy? In retrospect, it seems that Ego Psychology – or at least my understanding, perhaps misunderstanding, of it – went through a period in which it was constrained by an overly concrete interpretation of its own metaphors, as it searched for a theoretical explanation of how the unruly ‘psychic energy’ of the instincts could be transformed so as to ‘fuel’ the rational, adaptive processes of the ego.

An essay on “Aggression and Symptom Formation” by Samuel Lipton (1961) summarized some of these problems:

“(…) the term aggression is commonly used to mean several different concepts. (a) It is used to describe a form of psychic energy, as contrasted with libido. In this context are described intrapsychic cathectic changes such as the investment of an object representation with aggressive energy. (b) It is used to describe ideas or behavior, or both, which are angry, hateful, or destructive… (c) The term is used to describe action or activity [, including a sense of assertiveness or forcefulness in pursuit of one's aims].” (p. 585).

The last usage, which ultimately was broadened by various authors to include mastery, ambition, assertiveness, forcefulness in the pursuit of one's aims or desires and even activity pursued in the service of separation-individuation and differentiation is of historical interest, because in a sense it marked a return to Freud's earlier formulations, in which ego instincts were contrasted to libido as the fundamental drives and aggression, rather than being thought of as a fundamental drive was a component or quality that could be applied to many situations. It was perhaps ironic that Freud's elevation of aggression to a position equal to that of libido resulted in a relative de-emphasis of some its more positive aspects, which had initially been taken into consideration, and then later had to be ‘rediscovered.’

Thus, for example, in 1982, Rochlin argued for the centrality of aggression in mastery and the creative process:

“It is naive to conceive of aggression as mobilized principally for defense against an opposing world that demands its restraint. When it is not urgently called upon directly for defenses against feared or actual narcissistic injury, it is freely engaged in a variety of functions, such as the mastery of skills, invention, and creativity.” (p. 121).

And as recently as 2006, in a review of a book by Rizzutto, Meissner and Buie entitled “The Dynamics of Human Aggression”, Rosenblum wrote:

“(…) while [in the authors' view] aggression no longer drives the behavior, it remains a biologically grounded capacity of the mind. However, it is mobilized by the self only for the purpose of overcoming obstacles to the attainment of a goal. It is thus a given capacity called into play only under appropriate stimulus or motivational conditions. From this perspective it is not the action that identifies and determines the aggressive nature of the activity, but rather its motivation, the overcoming of an obstacle. In this theory, aggression is not inherently destructive, and destructive activity is not deemed aggressive because of its destructiveness.” (pp. 299-300).

Another problem with making aggression the theoretical equivalent of libido was that unlike the latter, aggression was not clearly associated with a particular set of bodily organs. That is, there is “no specific anatomico-physiological apparatus devoted exclusively or even primarily to its specific purposes” – (e.g., genitals, mouth, anus; although for some authors the musculoskeletal system which is necessary for motor action was proposed as aggression's bodily source) – “no conclusive evidence of a universally occurring and discrete pattern of spontaneous urgency ”… [and it lacks] one of the most important criteria for instinctual drives stated by Freud in 1915, – operation as a constant force“ (Stone 1971, p. 195).

We were also taught that although aggression was one of the two fundamental entities in the dual instinct theory, the death instinct was ‘only’ a theoretical construct and did not have direct clinical applications or relevance. To be sure, this last view was derived in part from Freud's own suggestion that theory was a ‘scaffolding’ that could later be abandoned if need be. Nevertheless, these arguments and confusions left me with an uneasy sense of what to make of the place of aggression in our overall theory. It was certainly observable – or at least inferable – as a central factor in most, if not all, psychic conflicts, but I was uncertain as to what to make of the ideas of ‘aggressive energy’ or ‘aggressive cathexis’ and I was agnostic at best when it came to understanding or believing in the death instinct, if it meant each living being's – or cell's! – tendency or ‘wish’ to escape from existence and return to an inanimate state.

The difference between aggression as instinct and aggression as a consequence of the death instinct was considered by Gillespie (1971).

“[T]wo independent hypotheses are contained in Freud's last instinct theory: first, that aggression is an instinct, equal and opposite to the sexual instinct; and second, that aggression originally takes the form of a self-directed death instinct derived ultimately, on the homeostatic principle, from the fact that living organisms developed out of inorganic matter…. [M]ost analysts have compromised with the death instinct by accepting the theory of a primary instinct of aggression, but rejecting or at least ignoring the self-directed death instinct theory. But this was by no means true of Melanie Klein. Although it is doubtful if Freud appreciated this fact, she was in this matter more royalist than the king, in that she took the death instinct as a vitally important fact in the psychology of the individual, rather than seeing it as a cosmological concept. Not only did she follow Freud in conceiving of manifest aggression as a turning outwards of the immediately life-threatening death instinct; she also conceived of the infant as feeling persecuted in consequence of the internal threat, and then in turn persecuted from outside, following the externalization of the death instinct. The use that she made in this connection of the adjectives ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is interesting; the ‘bad’ object, of course, is the one on to or into which the aggression has been projected. Seen from this point of view, the ultimate ‘badness’ is the death instinct which is an integral part of the infant himself—a sort of original sin. Of course, Klein was also perfectly well aware that the object experienced as good is the one that satisfies, and that the bad object is the frustrating one, which arouses an aggressive response, destructive fantasies, etc. But the explanatory use she makes of the death instinct theory inevitably gives the impression that ultimately it is this inherent ‘bad’ element in the infant that gives rise to trouble, rather than, for example, any failure in mothering. I think that for some analysts it is this acceptance of the death instinct and its clinical application as an explanatory concept which constitutes a very serious stumbling block, separating them from the Kleinian approach and making it difficult for them to profit from the very real and valuable contributions that have been made by many adherents of the Kleinian school.” (pp. 157-8).

Although he allowed that they had made valuable contributions, Gillespie was not a Kleinian and his views fit comfortably into the often bitter, sectarian quarrels that originated between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud and that still reverberated in the US in the 70's and 80's. Like many other analysts with whom I was surrounded, I put aside the death instinct as puzzling or unhelpful, at least for what proved to be a period of time, and remained impressed by the arguments of mainstream American authors such as Brenner (1971), who was a leading thinker in the US in what was known as ‘classical conflict theory.‘ His position, which is captured in the following quote, gained traction among American analysts in part, because it emphasized clinical theory based on observable psychoanalytic data and downplayed abstract metapsychological considerations:

“The practical consequences of relating the discharge of aggression to the pleasure principle concern the role of the aggressive drive in psychical conflict and symptom formation. For some time it was the prevalent view that the sexual and aggressive drives play different roles in these phenomena. The former was believed to account for neurotic symptom formation, the latter for self-punitive and self-destructive trends (Freud, 1930, p. 139). This formulation served the useful purpose of emphasizing the great role which aggression plays in superego functioning. The bulk of what we can identify as self-directed aggression in mental life seems to be related to the superego. However, most analysts are agreed that derivatives of aggression play a role in psychical conflict which is at least comparable to that played by derivatives of the libidinal drive. Some, indeed, have gone so far as to consider aggression to be the prime source of anxiety (Klein, 1948). It seems to accord more closely with observable clinical data to place aggression and libido on an approximately equal footing in this respect. Certainly those childhood instinctual conflicts which persist into adult life and which are accessible to scrutiny by the application of the psychoanalytical method always relate in part to frightening aggressive wishes which give rise to the familiar variety of defensive reactions and compromise formations. One can hardly escape the conclusion, which is generally accepted at present, that the aggressive drive plays an important role in psychical conflict and in the consequences of conflict which are of particular interest to us: symptoms and character traits.” (p. 139).

III

A further complication regarding the theory of aggression – and perhaps a major stimulus towards reorienting North American views on the subject – came from the work of Kohut in his theory of Self Psychology. In an important paper on narcissistic rage published in 1972, he allowed that:

“a tendency to kill is deeply rooted in man's psychobiological makeup and stems from his animal past—the assumption, in other words, of man's inherent propensity toward aggression (and the correlated conceptualization of aggression as a drive) protects us against the lure of the comforting illusion that human pugnacity could be easily abolished if only our material needs were satisfied.” (p. 360).

However, he then argued that in the clinical situation, this tendency was not the crucial issue at stake:

“But these broad formulations contribute little to the understanding of aggression as a psychological phenomenon. It is obviously not enough to say that such phenomena as warfare, intolerance, and persecution are due to man's regression toward the undisguised expression of a drive. And the often-heard complaint that it is the thinness of the civilized layer of the human personality which is responsible for the evils wrought by human aggression is appealing in its simplicity but misses the mark.” (p. 377, italics added).

What Kohut (1972) went on to propose was that the motivations behind the rage and destructiveness that we encounter in warfare, intolerance, persecution and in the treatment situation are essentially variations on the theme of vengeance:

“Narcissistic rage occurs in many forms; they all share, however, a specific psychological flavor which gives them a distinct position within the wide realm of human aggressions. The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury – these

Page 25

are features which are characteristic for the phenomenon of narcissistic rage in all its forms and which set it apart from other kinds of aggression.” (p. 380).

In his view, narcissistic rage is the consequence of circumstances in which the patient's endangered sense of self is made more precarious by a failure of empathy on the part of key objects. In other words, Kohut proposed that the narcissistic rage that we see clinically is reactive rather than the discharge or expression of an in-born wishful instinct and, to the extent that the patient's self-cohesion and psychic equilibrium are adversely affected by the empathic failure, it's origin is potentially traumatic.

Although Kohut's theories produced much opposition and triggered many fierce debates, his explanation seemed to fit well with a great deal of clinical data. Patients became enraged in defense of something and because of the ways in which they felt they were being treated and mistreated by the important people in their lives. Their rage was mobilized in order to overcome or reverse what they felt, rightly or wrongly, to be an adverse or threatening situation or, as described by Anna Freud (1936) and many others, it was an attempt to turn passive into active, eliminate feelings of helplessness and vulnerability and restore a sense of control over their emotional worlds and objects.

While I do not consider myself a Self Psychologist, I do appreciate that Kohut's contributions increased clinical awareness about the proximal causes of narcissistic rage and helped move the balance of theoretical discourse about aggression in the US back towards a greater sensitivity to and recognition of disturbing and traumatic external events as causal factors in rage reactions. That is, we no longer had to think theoretically in convoluted ‘epicycles’ in order to ‘explain’ why certain things made our patients so angry. This line of reasoning fit, for example, with Winnicott's views of impingement, maternal deprivation and other environmental failures that began to enter American psychoanalytic discourse, and was given further support in the 80's and 90's by the re-examination of the place of attachment, childhood sexual abuse and other severe forms of trauma in the process of pathogenesis. Through these and similar developments, American analysts were in effect ‘given permission’ to create hypotheses about aggression that referred not only to instinctual endowment and the like, but were built around external reality factors, particularly traumatic and other failures of external objects.

I found this level of theory much more conducive to clinical thinking than the ‘energics’ of the ego psychologists. However, the more my thinking became taken up with clinical theory and the pragmatic issues of treatment, my ‘agnosticism’ about the existence and value of the drive concept itself deepened and I found the drives and the utility of the drive concept fading more and more into the background of my thought.

IV

The next development in my thinking, mirroring that which was taking place in general on the American analytic scene, reversed the trend of de-emphasizing drives. We began to re-engage and study in depth the work of the contemporary Kleinians. In terms of understanding aggression, I would call your attention to Hanna Segal's (1993) paper “On the Clinical Usefulness of the Concept of Death Instinct”. I had invited Segal to speak at a 1986 Symposium that I had organized in Boston on the Psychology of the Nuclear Threat and since she was the first Kleinian to speak in Boston since the 1950's, I also arranged to have her give a clinical paper to the Boston Psychoanalytic Society.

The paper that she delivered asserted that the Death Instinct was not just a metapsychological hypothesis, but was readily observable in the various manifestations of envy, as described by Melanie Klein (1957). Segal's ideas were extremely useful clinically – the idea that we sometimes hate the very people and things that we depend upon most precisely because we need them so, even if they are not disappointing to us, and sometimes especially if they are good to us, because recognizing our need for them offends the grandiosity of our own narcissism and our presumed wishes to be invulnerable and self-sufficient.

For me, Segal's paper restored a sense of ‘drive’ to the clinical setting, one that was palpable and immediately applicable and led me deeper into Kleinian thinking, where the understanding of envy as a cardinal expression of the death instinct was matched with the mediating value of gratitude, as its libidinal counterpart that might free us from an endless cycle of hatred and destruction. (In another lecture given years later in Boston, Elizabeth Spillius described how Klein, in teaching technique to candidates, always emphasized that in order for patients to tolerate the exploration and interpretation

of their destructive wishes and fantasies, one first had to make clear that you understood the ways in which they were also capable of feeling and expressing love and gratitude for their objects. Otherwise, the confrontation with their destructive wishes and actions would feel persecutory and intolerable).

My Kleinian studies also brought me into contact with the work of Herbert Rosenfeld and back to Wilfred Bion, who had been an early interest, but whose work I had not yet integrated into my overall thinking about analysis and, relevant to our topic of aggression, to the subject of the superego.

In contemporary analytic theory, the normal conscience or superego contains both prohibitions (incest is forbidden; thou shalt not kill; etc.) and ideals (‘this is the kind of person you should aspire to be’) and, in addition to a threatening and forbidding side, has an encouraging and rewarding side – (Roy Schafer's, 1960 ‘Loving and beloved super ego’). The affects most closely related to superego functioning are guilt, often seen as depressive concern over damage done to one's beloved inner objects, shame and variations in self-esteem that run the gamut from positive (rewards for living up to and approaching or reaching one's ideals) to negative. In Freud's (e.g., 1923) thinking, the superego was closely connected to the reality principle and, since it had to do with delay of impulse, awareness of the consequences of one's actions and a guide for behavior, Freud (1930) argued that the superego was the very foundation on which civilization was built.

In many of our patients, however, the problem of the superego is that rather than being helpful or constructive, it is inconstant in its operation – narcissistically driven actions and sexual or aggressive impulses often take place with utter disregard for consequences – it is at times overly constricting and, at its most extreme, ‘ego destructive.‘ The ego destructive superego is a term coined by Bion (1962) and described as follows:

“It is an envious assertion of moral superiority without any morals… an envious stripping or denudation of all good… till [there is] hardly more than an empty superiority-inferiority that in turn degenerates [into nothingness].” (p. 97).

He further called it a:

“…completely immoral conscience”, [whose characteristics, when personified, can be described as] “violent, greedy and envious, ruthless, murderous, and predatory, without respect for the truth, persons, or things. (…) This force is dominated by an envious determination to possess everything that objects that exist possess including existence itself.” (Bion, , p. 102).

Years later, Bion referred to the ego destructive superego as ‘primitive conscience,‘ characterizing it as a pathological and destructive force that prompted the individual to:

“turn away from life, to dissociate itself from its objects and ultimately to destroy itself.” (O'Shaughnessy, 2009, p. 173).

Klein (1958) had described something similar in her concept of a cruel or archaic ‘early superego’ that formed in the face of maternal failure or trauma, stood apart from the more normally developing conscience and remained relatively unmodified by processes of growth. This was tied to the splitting of frightening figures and the de-fusion of the life and death instincts. While Bion was no doubt influenced by Klein's view, he ultimately suggested that the ego destructive superego or primitive conscience was an aspect of what he called ‘the primordial mind’ and even speculated that it may have roots in the pre-natal period. Clinically, it's hallmark was a conscience that never told one what to do, but only what not to do, and its origin was essentially traumatic, in that it reflected the absence of a suitable container for the contents and experiences of the primordial mind. It was a moral scourge and not a beacon of orientation towards constructive action and behavior in the real world

When Britton (2003) discussed Bion's concept, he emphasized that the ego destructive superego was derived from an actual parental constellation in which the parents' capacity to provide love to the infant in the latter's earliest phases of life was disrupted by their envy of the child's emerging creativity, separateness and personal capacities. As a result, the child internalized an envious object that: (1) is opposed to its independence, creativity and development; (2) produces an anti-object relational propensity, which seeks to obliterate all that intrudes upon the self that is not-self (Britton 2003, p. 126) and (3) displaces the functioning of the potentially more benign and helpful normal superego. Britton's emphasis on envy, which he defined operationally as a combination

of covetousness and xenocide – “The desire to possess the attributes of the object… combined with the urge to destroy the object as the source of disturbing feelings ” (p. 127) – underlines the close connection between pathological superego manifestations and the Kleinian view of the death instinct.

The death instinct, too, has evolved as a concept, as it has accumulated more nuance and sense of subtlety of expression. Feldman (2000), for example, wrote that:

“What is ‘deadly’ [in the Death Instinct] is the way in which meaning, specificity and differences are attacked, and any developmental processes retarded or undermined. The vitality is taken out of the patient himself as well as his objects, and although in an important sense these drives are ‘anti-life’, … their aim is not literally to kill or to annihilate, but that the patient feels compelled to maintain a link with the object that often has an evidently tormenting [and deadening] quality.” (p. 53).

He further noted that:

“…the gratification of this psychological drive does not lie in the annihilation of the perceiving and experiencing self, or indeed in literal death or annihilation. On the contrary, what is often clinically more compelling is the extent to which certain patients, rather than seeking to annihilate their perceiving selves, attack and distort their capacities for perception and judgment, incorporating their distorted perceptions into ways of structuring their experience that gratify deep destructive impulses. A precondition for the gratification of this drive is the survival of both the patient and his object, but severely reduced and undermined. The aim seems to be largely, but not entirely, to eliminate anything that gives rise to admiration, dependence, rivalry, and particularly envy.” (p. 54).

V

Feldman's stress on the death instinct's de-vitalization and suffocation of life forces is reminiscent of the ideas of Andre Green (2005), whose understanding of borderline conditions and non-neurotic states is closely allied to Freud's final reformulation of his drive theory (Eros versus death instinct). What Green emphasizes, more than the vicissitudes of conflicts over aggression turned inward or outward, is the opposition between investment of objects, (self-) representations and psychic processes and functions (Eros) and the withdrawal of those investments (death instinct). Following Freud, Green describes Eros as generating linking, investing processes and movements that connect the ego and psychic representations with life, pleasure, objects, words, symbols, and meaning. In contrast, he views the death instinct as moving toward stasis, withdrawal of investment, disconnection from internal and external objects and representations, disconnection from psychic processes and functions, and abandonment of the search for satisfaction.

Conceptually, Green links the clinical effects of the death instinct to a set of defenses—repression, negation, disavowal, foreclosure, and splitting—that tend toward and support a general disengagement or subjective emotional withdrawal, places them in context, each with the other, and designates their relation to and effect upon the perception of reality as the work of the negative. This “work” is often:

“(…) sustained by a more or less omnipotent phantasy of self-sufficiency on the part of the ego…[that aims toward] escaping the object's control, asserting the ego's freedom through its quasi-all powerful capacity to undo its ties with the object and, if necessary, with itself.” (Green, 2005, p. 217)

At the heart of these processes and this disengagement is a negative hallucination of thought:

“the non-perception of an object or of a perceptible psychical phenomenon… the erasure of what should be perceived” (Green, 2005, p. 218, italics in original).

Clinically, this erasure may present as a mind gone blank or an attitude of minimization, denial or profound and even structural disregard of the analyst's interpretations, each of which Green is careful to distinguish from the forgetting of an idea (repression).

“It is as though there is a real dissociation between the sonority of words and their conscious meaning, on the one hand, and their unconscious meaning as it has been presented by the interpretation, on the other. It is this meaning that is neither perceptible nor recognized.” (Green, 2005, p. 220)

These views call to mind Bion's (1967, 1970) description of attacks on linking, anti-thought and minus-K phenomena. At its most extreme, the withdrawal described by Green may produce a “destruction through disinvestment” (p. 222), which in turn may reflect a last-ditch defense against annihilation anxiety, fear of breakdown, and the unleashing of instinctual chaos. All of these may result from an early, overwhelmingly traumatic physical separation from the mother or her severe emotional unavailability, which Green (1999) examined at length in his work on the dead mother syndrome. There, he described a constellation marked by frustration intolerance and an

“…internal reorganization…in which the subject who has experienced distress, negligence and an absence of interest (this, at least, is what he complains of consciously) considers his mother as a child whom he has to take care of. The mother's presence-absence is such that, if the subject tries to think about the maternal object itself, he feels he is faced with a void or a hole.” [Green 2005, p. 223]

It is in these instances that the patient's speech may seem empty and the analyst's speech futile, neither able to make contact with the other or with the relevant conflicts. At such moments, sexuality,

“frequently assumes traumatic or perverse forms, discharging itself frenetically, giving the impression that it consists less of pleasure than of furious aggression” (Green, 2005, p. 224).

Green describes these movements (which he call the disobjectalizing function), as in essence divesting not only objects and their substitutes of meaning, but also divesting psychic processes of meaning – and in extreme cases, divesting the ego of a connection to itself.

Two things that Green's work emphasizes and that are worth taking note of are: (1) the way in which the death instinct is seen not simply as aggressive action or discharge, but as an isolating, stultifying, de-vitalizing set of processes and tendencies meant to empty thought, feeling, relationships and life itself of any pleasure, vitality, creativity and meaningfulness; (2) that the blind, peremptory eruption of anger, destructiveness or rage may reflect the presence of weakly or unrepresented mental states that are independent of underlying organized unconscious fantasies or wishes. In this sense, these eruptions, while often colloquially referred to as “impulsive,” are not actually the consequence of organized instinctual impulse (i.e., desire). They are rather seen as economic ‘overflow phenomena,’ which reflect a failure of representation and containment rather than the product of motivational wish. Thus, the patients who commits these acts and harbor these feelings are what de M'Uzan (2003) called ‘slaves of quantity’ rather than deliberate, albeit unconscious actors with intent.

The difference between the two assumptions: unconscious wishful motivation vs. passive on-looker to an eruptive event becomes important in the analyst's interpretations, where an insistence upon intention can often lead an overwhelmed and bewildered patient to feel persecuted and misunderstood. In attempting to distinguish the two situations, the recognition and exploration of sadistic pleasure attached to the aggressive discharge – e.g., fantasies of manic triumphalism or omnipotent control – may be of help, but the differential diagnosis is often difficult to make and may require much time and exploration.

VI

I have covered a great deal of ground today, much of it in a theoretical or conceptual frame, rather than a clinically illustrated context. I shall be very interested in my readers' reactions and thoughts. Our field has undergone many changes compared to when I began my formation. It is a different analytic culture, as well as political, historical and social milieu. I cannot be certain of the extent to which my preoccupations are frozen in historical time and, if so, what they have been replaced by as the concerns of the current generation of analytic teachers and therapists.

In trying to draw these remarks to some conclusion, I would like to emphasize three points. The first point is that while we may, outside of the consulting room, step back and try to consider aggression and destructiveness as entities in and of themselves, in the clinical situation, one cannot isolate them from all of the usual relational concerns with which we and our patients must continually struggle: narcissism, transference and countertransference, defense, residues of past early or overwhelming trauma, etc. Aggression and destructiveness may take center stage in various treatments or at certain times, but they must always be considered in the larger context and examined from multiple perspectives if they are to be worked with

effectively at any given moment within a treatment.

The second point is that out of respect for the signals from the analytic field (Ferro 2002), we must always try to sustain or oscillate between various perspectives on the patient's material in which it is seen simultaneously as a reflection of true external reality, the patient's unconscious phantasies and internal world, the transferencecountertransference situation and a commentary on the here-and-now situation of the relationship between the patient and analyst's minds and emotional contact. From the latter perspective, that of the analytic field, the ‘story’ of the patient's aggressive thoughts, feelings and actions – and the analyst's counter-responses – in addition to being cruel, hostile or defensive or destructive acts, may reflect attempts to force notice and connection, to demand to be responded to and understood, etc.

The third point is that I have attempted, in a way in which I hope has been helpful, to present a ‘smorgasbord’ of the major ways that aggression and destructiveness have been seen within psychoanalysis. My hope is that with this in mind, readers will feel free to let yourselves pick and choose the various manifestations and meanings of these entities as they emerge within a given clinical situation and not be bound to a more limited set of stereotyped implications or meanings. In this way, with this smorgasbord as background, you may encounter your patients with an informed freedom of attention and association, without memory, desire or preconceived ideas as Bion has taught us to do and so let your imaginations roam freely across the widest and most spontaneous inner regions and landscapes in your attempts to make contact with, understand and help your patients.