What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

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Commentary on Paper by Neil Skolnick 31 ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ certain shortcomings, rather than that the analyst appear to be great and above personal struggle and limitation. The idea of an analyst’s greatness, Skolnick reminds us, belongs to Klein’s (1946) paranoidschizoid position and Kohut’s (1971) idealizing selfobject transference, not to reality and more mature forms of thinking. In contrast, Kohut (1971) was explicit about the need for certain narcissistic patients, if successful treatment is to be possible, to be allowed to have their idealizing (or mirroring or twinship) selfobject transferences run their courses, without interference by the analyst, until the patients become ready to let that transference go. Similarly, Balint (1968) wrote about the importance for patients functioning “in the area of the basic fault”—his descriptor for narcissistic states— to have the opportunity to experience, without challenge by the analyst, the kinds of object relationships they instinctively seek out in their analyses. The kinds of experiences he said patients might need were similar to Kohut’s selfobject transferences. Indeed, Balint believed that an analyst must take great care to protect these transference experiences for a patient by avoiding saying or doing anything that would refute the patient’s subjective experience. To sum up: according to Kohut and Balint, there are times when an analyst should not interfere with the patient’s seeing the analyst as, in Skolnick’s words, “a one-dimensional fiction.” As a rule, classical psychoanalysts—who are often less attentive than interpersonal and relational analysts to (or place less emphasis on) their own inevitable transparency to patients and to their own influence on patients (see Ferenczi, 1932, 1933; Hoffman, 1983, 1998)—try to create a situation where a patient’s transference can grow and become elaborated without the patient’s being confronted by the analyst’s contradictory realities, whether or not the patient is more narcissistic. Supporting this view, Greenberg (2001) has pointed out that an analyst’s explicit focus on the interaction between himself or herself and a patient may direct the patient’s attention “away from private experience” (p. 373) and interfere with “allowing whatever is happening [within the patient] to develop further and to deepen” (p. 372). Skolnick’s idea—that a crucial component of therapeutic action is that the analyst offer the patient access to the analyst’s own internal struggles—appears directly incompatible with Kohut’s idea that certain patients need, for some period of time, to be allowed to idealize their analysts as perfect or extraordinary, without being offered evidence
32 Jay Frankel ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ to the contrary; 1 and with the idea that patients generally need to be allowed to discover their analysts’ actual subjectivity (i.e., not what the patients project), including their analysts’ struggles and shortcomings, at their own pace. Indeed, an analyst’s actively directing a patient’s attention to the analyst’s own shortcomings may undermine these processes. The Patient’s Awareness of the Analyst’s Struggle, and the Question of Timing An objection from relational quarters to the Kohut/Balint idea of not interfering with a patient’s illusory perception of the analyst is that patients, especially the types Kohut and Balint worked with, are extremely perceptive about their analysts’ psychology, including its unconscious aspects—a discovery that dates back to Ferenczi (1932, 1933). According to this line of thinking, for an analyst to accept a patient’s illusory perception amounts to colluding in mystifying the patient and sets up a situation in which the patient may be likely to hold on to, for instance, an “idealized” perception of the analyst more as a kind of unconscious favor to an insecure analyst than because of the patient’s own inner need (see Frankel, 1993, 2002). 2 This objection provides an opportunity to clarify a point made by Skolnick and possibly to remove the apparent contradiction between Skolnick’s ideas about dynamic identification, as opposed to the ideas of Balint and Kohut, and Skolnick’s own discussion of the importance of empathic attunement to psychic organization. The unclarified issue is, What exactly is meant by offering the patient the opportunity to see the analyst’s struggle Skolnick says that patients “need to detect, ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ 1 Self psychology, contrary to a frequent misconception, does not advocate that analysts actively perpetuate a particular transference; rather, they must monitor their countertransference responses as the recipients of an idealized transference (for example) and try not to interfere out of their own discomfort with the idealized role (Kohut, 1971). The self-psychological position is not that analysts should attempt to play a role at all, but that they understand the significance of the role they have been assigned by the patient (Clement, 2005, personal communication). 2 On the patient’s side, such a move may be a reenactment of the role the patient played during childhood: protecting a vulnerable parent by “not seeing” the parent’s problems, as well as reflecting a wish to hold on to an idealized image of a parent whose flaws frightened the child.
Page 1 and 2: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16(1):1-2
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Page 29: 30 Jay Frankel ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Page 33 and 34: 34 Jay Frankel ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Page 35 and 36: 36 Jay Frankel ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Page 37 and 38: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16(1):39-
Page 39 and 40: Reply to Commentary 41 ⎯⎯⎯⎯
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What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

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