Dr. Shapiro is Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
Charles Brenner is a friend and revered teacher, educator to mental health professionals, and expositor of psychoanalytic theory. He also has been a skeptic to new theoretical provocateurs. Nonetheless, he has contributed his fair share of theoretical revisions. This most recent recommendation for theoretic revision puts me, as commentator, in an odd position, where I will play conservative ego psychologist to Dr. Brenner's youthful new wave minimalist model. I will address three areas: (1) Dr. Brenner's position in the history of psychoanalytic ideas; (2) the logic of clinical theory and his revision; and (3) some developmental propositions that psychoanalytic theory must consider, even if they are not directly related to our daily practice.
From the standpoint of the history of ideas there is a constant trend toward entropy and simplification. We peel away Victorian tapestries and heavy velvets in favor of minimalist propositions to account for clinical behaviors. We also try to move from Freudian authority to empirical justification, and yet our methods of verification are not yet cultivated enough to decide between theories. To wit, the current trend to case presentation and debate about meaning has led to endless discussions between self psychologists, object relationists, ego psychologists, and preoedipalist and oedipal determinists leading only to a Scottish verdict (not proven).
There are many things in Dr. Brenner's paper that remind us of early Freud. He uses drive theory: Dr. Brenner's drive theory (though dual) is similar to that espoused by Freud in 1905, during the period of the topographic theory when he saw defense as a response to moral, social values, and conscience and shame as causing the censor to bar ideas from awareness. Freud and Brenner also seem to agree that every drive has a source, an aim, an object, and that we study drives through their derivatives. Since we never can observe the drives directly, we infer that the body causes the mind to work.
The advent of the structural theory, and what I consider along with Dr. Brenner to be Freud's landmark paper, "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), was an attempt to formalize his psychological conflict model into abstract interacting units. We moved away from prior hydraulic notions and began to study the signals to an executive agency, the ego, that dealt with developmental dangers and the institution of defense. With Anna Freud, we saw the beginnings of ego psychology; with Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (1946) the full flowering of ego psychology; and later on with Arlow and Brenner the emancipation of ego psychology from the earlier topographic theory (1964). I was present at the presentation of a paper when they suggested doing away with the preconscious--and now the ego itself is questioned. This minimalist vision is also a response to the overelaborative Baroque frills and curlicues that developed under Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein who, in order to preserve psychoanalysis as a general psychology, invented such "experience-far" ideas, as neutralized energy. Kris, however, reassuringly characterized psychoanalysis simply as "man viewed from the standpoint of conflict." Brenner continues in that tradition in his vocal espousal of "compromise formation" as ubiquitous--in normal as well as in pathological thought. I won't touch on the Mannerist variations of theory found in deficit psychologies such as self psychology and preoedipalist primitives, because they do not fit well into the mainstream that Dr. Brenner addresses. Now while Dr. Brenner clearly disavows association to the notion of self, he does invoke a person. An idea, by the way, that Ben Rubinstein put forth to this group many years ago. Similarly, before him, during the 1950s, Rado (1969) also wrote about doing away with the ego. "The concept of mental apparatus . . . is a product of mechanistic thought. . . . All 3 systems of the mental apparatus are personifications. . . . The entire conception depicts mental life as the interplay of these 3 homunculi" (p. 48). He recommended instead, "An Action Self." Occam's razor is also part of the grand tradition in our science. We should not multiply propositions beyond necessity. What, then, are the minimum set of rules or laws that we require to define any set of psychoanalytic phenomena? One central problem with our applying these guides to psychoanalysis is that the phenomenon we observe is human behavior and the unconscious mind. We should seek simplicity, but distrust it, as Whitehead said.
The logic of clinical theory is a step away from experience-far metapsychology. It derives from the need to explain clinical behavior. It was not so long ago that physicists reminded us that the table of physics is largely intermolecular empty space and could be contrasted to the table on which we eat. Similarly, Waelder's (1962) distinction was invoked in order to account both for the abstract underpinnings of the mind and the explanatory constructs of clinical behavior. Well what phenomenon are we asked to explain? According to Brenner the phenomenon to be understood is "compromise formation." Parenthetically, I am not certain that this is the only phenomenon with which psychoanalysts work. Nonetheless, let us see how he approaches his task. He preserves a pair of drives, and then a person, who suffers varying "injunctions against the expression of drives" enlisting some inhibiting and disguising action yielding a compromise. Curiously, many modern psychoanalysts ignore drive theory as they do economics and instead offer the history of object relations as the source of wishes. Even a drive theorist such as Anna Freud noted, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), that we only see the id through its manifestation in the ego. We infer the id, but we see the ego. At the same time, Glover (1961) called for a "society for the preservation of the Id" as he thought that the ego had outgrown its breeches. That was in the 1960s.
Be that as it may, Brenner suggests that even normal thought is a compromise formation, and if that is so, why do we need to postulate an ego. Any idea can be used as a defense against any other thought. This very simple scheme would certainly make our work less taxing theoretically. (By the way, his ideas are close to schemas introduced by Joe Slap [Slap and Saykin, 1983], and used also by Mardi Horowitz [Horowitz, Fridhandler, and Stinson, 1992]. In that sense, Dr. Brenner would be coupled with bedfellows that he might otherwise reject.) Dr. Brenner also asserts there are no special defense mechanisms, but espouses specific developmental calamities and notes that shame and guilt are related to parental disapproval and that reality testing and synthetic function are operative in all percepts, making them compromises. He uses the example of counterphobic behavior as denial of affect and avers that the need for logic is an acculturation. I share with Dr. Brenner his frustration at an ego which is a unity, and at the same time is the sum of its functions. He also emphasizes that what we seem to mean by ego is but a substitute for defense. However, my impression of Freud's move to postulating the ego of structural theory came from his discovery that fixation and regression could not account for specificity in symptom formation (e.g., anal conflict for obsessives; oedipal conflicts for hysterics). Instead, what differentiated us as normal or disordered persons was not our drives, but the way we warded off or thwarted desires. Indeed, it is the outer layer that differentiates behavior. The "deeper" thoughts remain relatively universal. Unconscious fantasies should be more limited and related to life's basics. Birth, copulation, and death occupy our unconscious themes and are less different in all of us than the great variety of personal styles and surface characteristics that make for our fantasies. Indeed, there may be stronger clinical argument to postulate an ego than an id. As Dr. Brenner has noted, we still have to account for reality distortion, synthetic function, healthy and maladaptive personality organization, and we can add to that masochistic organizations, dissociations, and psychoses, to name a few. How does a theory without mechanisms or operative rules work to account for these surface appearances?
I would also like to introduce a class of symptoms that may not be compromise formations. I will not say that there may not be a component that is colored by compromise, but the basic flaw in the maladaptation in these symptoms is due to a deficit; for example, organic impulse disorders, object hunger on the basis of inadequate parenting, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorders, and post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In accord with these, there is a line of thought that suggests that various ego organizations define psychotic, borderline, and neurotic behaviors which may be the resultant of drives in interaction with deficient ego structures. What about identity--and gender identity--are these to be discarded as only compromises? These too may have conflictual components, but are they not better described as structural? I fear that without a postulated ego, we will fall into a French facultative psychology with a laundry list of separate agencies to account for the behaviors noted. I also find myself wondering how Dr. Brenner can opt for an egoless psychology if we are to consider the data of memory, and what has been called the autonomous ego functions. They must be relatively untouched by compromise formation for us to learn. I am not here postulating memories totally untinged by conflict, but less so. Or is his egoless psychoanalysis a theory that only accounts for clinical data?
Ielieve, as Brenner says, that we are never rid of our fantasies, we only render them less poignant, as Kris said, or less toxic. We permit them into consciousness, we undo repression--that is part of the work of psychoanalysis. What portion of the mind renders the toxins less worrisome? Can the agency be easily designated as a person? Can we cast aside the mind as an organized structural entity? Even the Piagetian developmental theory uses functional continuity with supercedent structural stages--the structures being the mental organizations that are observed in the cognitive work the person can do. Since the writings of Schur (1966), Arlow and Brenner (1964), and others, our concepts about the id have changed. There are not unformed elements wafting around in an empty timeless ether of mobile cathexes. We need to postulate structures that tell us about how we organize our thoughts; that is, how we make compromises between what we wish and what we believe reality demands. By boiling the principles of development down to the pleasure-unpleasure principle, Dr. Brenner introduces yet another factor that may spoil the logic of an egoless mind. Namely, why do things that were once pleasurable become unpleasurable? Something is going on developmentally that requires progressive organization and changes in inner monitoring. If we are to have a complete psychology that includes developmental propositions, that is also related to clinical theory, we must account for what Hartmann called the "change of sign." The joys of infancy and childhood later require inhibition or repression, what Brenner calls calamities are the signal for change. The ego has always been an agency that permits the expression of drives within the context of what is reasonable, and within the constraints of a "learned about" world. I also believe that the superego (you should excuse the expression) is not only formed by experiences of parental inhibition and restraint. We rarely find parents who were as restrictive as an adult's fantasy states. While repression was the first defense, displacement and isolation, among others, were introduced to explain other phenomena. While Brenner may decry these as mechanisms, I don't think we can dispense with them as explanatory of "the way in which we pit one thought against the other." These "mechanisms," as they are called, are associated with different symptoms and surface appearances that need differentiated explanation. They are differentiated from the top down, not the bottom up. Defenses are the hows of conflict and compromise.
While we are trying to get rid of the homunculus in the machine, and a reified ego, I am not sure that the person provides a more satisfying agency. The developmental point of view suggests that only wishes that undergo later internal scrutiny are then rejected from expression. Scrutiny by whom, or by what mental agency and on what grounds? A psychology of compromise needs to account for the developing capacity to make judgments of unacceptability. This is not egoless. Similarly, primary process is a fiction. Our fantasies are only more or less obedient to rules of logic; that is, the relative abundance of illogic dictated by our desires is what distorts our fantasies. But the need to distort and protect derives from developing superordinate mental structures that measure, judge, and synthesize--all have been compositized as ego functions. Call them Irving, if you will, but it is not enough to say they are the person. The person is a social concoction. The ego is a postulated mental agency--the latter should be further specified in regard to how it develops and what kinds of behaviors and thoughts become manifest under its aegis rather than dispensed with.
"Where there was Id, there shall Ego be" must be seen in relation to what in the beginning was the fear of the loss of the object later becoming fear of the loss of the love of the object. That change signals that we function on a more abstract level than earlier; we can consider the symbolic as well as the concrete. That symbolic capacity is based on yet another human faculty that cannot be accounted for by an egoless psychoanalysis.
Thank you, Dr. Brenner, for making me reach farther than I had before.
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Horowitz, M., Fridhandler, B., & Stinson, C. (1992), Person schemas and emotion. In: Affect: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. T. Shapiro & R. Emde. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, pp. 173-208.
Rado, S. (1969), The action self. In: Adaptational Psychodynamics: Motivation and Control, ed. J. Jameson & H. Klein. New York: Science House.
Schur, M. (1966), The Id and the Regulatory Principle of Mental Functioning. New York: International Universities Press.
Slap, J. W., & Saykin, A. J. (1983), The schema: Basic concept in a nonmetapsychological model of mind. Psychoanal. & Contemp. Thought, 6:305-329.
Waelder, R. (1962), Psychoanalysis, scientific method, and philosophy. In: Psychoanalysis: Observation, Theory, Appreciation, ed. S. A. Guttman. New York: International Universities Press, 1976.
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Theodore Shapiro, M.D.
