What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

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40 Neil J. Skolnick ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ transference and holds them up in contradistinction to my idea of dynamic identification. Toward this end Frankel first refers to dynamic identification as the analyst’s actively directing the patient’s attention to the analyst’s own short comings. He holds that up as “contradicting” Kohut’s recommendation that the analyst should not interrupt a patient’s idealizing transference and that patients should be allowed to discover the analyst’s less than perfect subjectivity in their own time. This claim would indeed be correct if it accurately represents what I mean by dynamic identification. It does not. By dynamic identification, I am referring to all the activity that takes place between patient and analyst, of any nature, not just the analyst’s less than perfect subjectivity. This might include, but is not limited to, the analyst surviving a patient’s attack, an analyst making a mistake and demonstrating a (often unspoken) recovery with a patient, an analyst apologizing to a patient. These and countless other examples take place in the conscious and unconscious interacting arena between patient and analyst. I further hold that the patient, over time, internalizes these interactions, thereby expanding and strengthening his/her self. I derive this idea from Fairbairn’s (1946) concept of dynamic structure, probably one of his most central tenets. Briefly, Fairbairn proposed the idea that the stuff we have inside our psychic inner world is not a cornucopia of objects. Instead what we internalize and identify with, what gets built into our psychic structure, are object relationships, self and other dynamic configurations. So in fact, we do not offer up our struggles to a patient. We do not direct a patient to dynamic identifications. We offer up ourselves in all the ways that we interact with the patient, consciously and unconsciously, ably or ineptly, in struggle or not. Also, we do not allow patients to discover our subjectivities on their own. The dynamic identifications spring from the patient and analyst interactions, including interactions of our subjectivities. While patients do discover our inner life, as Kohut holds, they do so in the interaction and not on their own, as Frankel holds. These then are the dynamic interactions that get woven into a patient’s expanding self (or Fairbairn’s “central ego”) 1 during analysis. As such, it is but a short stretch to consider that when a patient is involved in identifying with the analyst, he or she is actually identifying with an ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ 1 See Rubens (1994) for a comparison between the ego and Fairbairn’s self.
Reply to Commentary 41 ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ active dynamic structure. Frankel appears to grasp this point when he appreciates that the patient is not acted upon to accept a dynamic identification, that dynamic identifications are not put in his or her face. Instead, in the way I conceive it, patients are inherently part of the process of dynamic identification when they interact with the analyst and internalize the interaction. When we engage patients repeatedly in a similar fashion, over similar issues, over periods of time, psychic structure is created in the patient through the accumulation of dynamic identifications. For example, when an analyst is attacked with vitriolic rage day after day and the patient experiences with the analyst that the analyst is not annihilated and maintains durability, the patient can gradually, through dynamic identification have greater confidence in the analyst’s strength as well as a more measured confidence in their own waning omnipotence. And similarly, they gain an increased confidence in their own survival strength and a diminution in the perception of the analyst’s omnipotence. The patient becomes identified with both subject and object of the interaction. Regarding the issue of diagnosis, I am largely in agreement with Frankel as he finds similarities between my concept of dynamic identification, “multiplicity of selves” (Mitchell, 1993; Bromberg, 1998), “multiple shifting diagnoses” (Davies, 2004), and “diagnosisof the-moment” (Frankel). Allow me to add one point and take issue with another. Melanie Klein (1935) took special pains to label her developmental phases or psychic organizations “positions” so as to emphasize their fluid, nonfixed nature. She argued further that the two basic modes of psychic organization (paranoid/schizoid and depressive) could shift back and forth, in bi-directional fashion. She and her subsequent followers held the goal of psychoanalytic treatment to be the enabling of a patient to exist and function relatively more of the time in depressive position functioning than in the paranoid/ schizoid position. Ogden (1986) pushed this idea a step further when he argued that the paranoid-schizoid position exists over the course our lifetimes in dialectic tension with the depressive position. Each position both defines and negates the other and, furthermore, the tension between the two follows us throughout life. Both Klein and Ogden posit a model of development that does not rely on a lock-step progression in which a person reaches a higher level of functioning only to put to rest earlier levels except during regression. Instead, “positions,” while reached sequentially in development, exist in tension with each other for a lifetime, with a “normal” person shifting between
Page 1 and 2: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16(1):1-2
Page 3 and 4: What’s a Good Object to Do 3 ⎯
Page 29 and 30: 30 Jay Frankel ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Page 37: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16(1):39-
Page 41: Reply to Commentary 43 ⎯⎯⎯⎯

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