Dr. Mahon is a Supervising and Training Analyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research.
Sceptre and crown must tumble down
and in the dust be equal made
with the poor crooked scythe and spade . . .
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, James Shirley
I hope the sense in which I am invoking this quotation will become clearer as I proceed. If, as Dr. Brenner argues, every psychological product, be it dream, parapraxis, or even structure, should be viewed as conflict triggered, compromise formation rather than isolated autonomous entity, it would seem to follow that this discussion, despite the purity of heart of its author, cannot be free of unwitting and even willful compromises. I hope I have not compromised the spirit of my remarks by endorsing this conflicted, guilt-ridden Brennerian point of view from the outset. In my defense, or is it offense, I invoke and distort J. F. K.'s celebrated remark in Berlin, "Ich bin ein Brennerliner," albeit with some reservations, as will be seen. But of course if a discussion like the mind itself is only an aesthetic compromise it is not the end point, the compromise itself alone, that is so impressive, so much as the struggle to reach it. If all things that are, are with more pleasure chased than enjoyed (to paraphrase Shakespeare a little), the developmental forepleasures of psychic turmoil and struggle are as important if not more important than the eventual compromises (endpleasures) they reach toward and attain.
I will return to this piece of existential sophistry later, but first a closer look at Dr. Brenner's text: Dr. Brenner's proposals are respectfully argued. He suggests, he does not dictate or command. He speaks of possibilities and revisions, not manifestos or faits accomplis. But even if we view Dr. Brenner as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary, and therefore believe that the nature of his scientific evolutions do not demand the intellectual violence or psychic coup d'etats of Kuhn's scientific revolution, still Dr. Brenner's revisions do shake up the staid and the solid in our self-satisfying theories of the mind. The shakeup and the details of the shakeup have been articulately described by Dr. Brenner. "The Mind as Conflict and Compromise" says it all, bluntly and succinctly. The sacred cows, superego, ego, id, lose their untouchable status and must rub shoulders with the other underprivileged aspects of the new democracy of mind. Dr. Brenner has been proclaiming this new democracy of mind for many years now, a couple of decades or so if I am not mistaken. His motto, plagiarizing Cyril Connolly a little, could be defined as "inside every sacred cow there is a profane one, a compromise formation dying to get out," or more succinctly, "whatever sacred was, profane shall be." I use profane here in the etymological sense pro fanum outside the temple. In that sense I believe that Brenner is as irreligious as Dylan Thomas's irreligious snow and does not encourage belief in any such temple of self-deception however seductive it may seem. Brenner's new democracy has stripped many theoretical upstarts of their status. A list of the disenfranchized not necessarily in order of their importance could read: (1) the untouchable status of the therapeutic alliance; (2) the classical concept of defense; (3) special consideration for dreams; (4) concepts such as the true transference neurosis or erotic transference; (5) biological as opposed to psychological drive theory. Those of us who nourished ourselves on this kind of intellectual junkfood for years were only ambivalently if not reluctantly grateful to Dr. Brenner for pointing us toward more nutritious fare.
Let me confine myself to Dr. Brenner's vision of the new democracy of mind as outlined by him in his paper. He believes revision of the structural theory is in order. Viewing the id, ego, superego as structures, the psychic traveler felt he was in possession of superior maps of the mind and better able to navigate than his ancestors who relied on topographic charts and instruments alone. In the revised edition, the traveler, structureless, may feel at sea at first, but the nautical advantages outweigh the initial anxieties according to Brenner. The advantages are impressive as listed by Brenner. One not only gets a fuller, more complex picture of passion, control, and morality, but one gets a more clinically testable view of the psychoanalytic process itself and the nature of its therapeutic actions and momentum, and a more humanistic and reasonable picture of the dividing line between mental health and mental illness. If the structural theory came into being to make up for shortcomings of the topographic model, Brenner now argues that a revised structural theory that emphasizes the ubiquity of conflict and compromise formation will further enrich our understanding of the mind and its workings. Brenner's new vision of the mind has a stark minimalist beauty that is appealing and affronting all at once. Theories of defense, structure, and instinct that seemed as settled as cornerstones have to be reshuffled, redefined, and for an instant the psyche doesn't seem to have a leg to stand on. Relax, Dr. Brenner says, as structures tumble all around him and boundaries vanish, the tightropes of conflict and compromise formation provide fine footholds once the new psyche gets the hang of it.
To switch metaphors from the circus to the music hall, one pictures Dr. Brenner as a Vladimir Horowitz of the mind, so clinically astute, so theoretically informed, his psychological pitch so perfect he can dispense with psychic scales and technical exercises, ignoring fingers, ivories, and hammers, reaching into the heart of the music until its very essence speaks through him and his transcendent instrument. In this vein one remembers the story of the great pianist, Josef Hoffman, who was asked by a listener how such music could be produced by such small hands. His reply: "Whatever made you think that one plays the piano with the hands?" In a similar vein one imagines Dr. Brenner chiding the critics of his new world of the mind: "Whatever made you think the complexity of the mind could be defined by walls or boundaries or defenses or the sum of its structures?" Dr. Brenner reminds me of Robert Frost and his once celebrated, now relatively forgotten, poem "Mending Wall" in which the poet chides his neighbor who believes blindly that good fences make good neighbors:
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,.
Not of woods only and the shade of trees,
He will not go behind his father's saying . .
It is clear that Dr. Brenner has trouble going behind his father's saying, but he goes behind it anyway, stripping himself of his earlier allegiance to the structural model in the interest of science, rediscovering in himself the "something there is that doesn't love a wall," thereby becoming a bad neighbor in the Frostian parochial sense but a good Freudian citizen of his own brave new world democracy of the mind. There is an irony, however, that creeps into Brenner's paper on page 482 as if the grand revisionist was in the grip of an atavistic nostalgia for things topographic!
Instead of positing "an ego," the new theory speaks simply of an individual, of a person, and of that person's mind. Not of "the self," in any such technical sense as many analysts use that word today, but simply of a person or individual in the ordinary, colloquial meaning of the words. When unpleasure arises in association with a drive derivative of childhood origin, a person's mind functions in such a way as to minimize the unpleasure while at the same time permitting as much gratification to the drive derivative as is compatible with not too much unpleasure.
I doubt that it was Dr. Brenner's intention, and I doubt that he will agree with my interpretation of it, my words in his mouth so to speak, but this passage has a decidedly topographic ring to it if one exchanges the word consciousness for the word person in the passage just cited. If theory is also a product of conflict and compromise, is it conceivable that Dr. Brenner felt he had been too hard on the topographic theory in structural days and now the poststructural self welcomes a return of the repressed theory to make peace with its guilt? This provocative critique of Brennerian theory building finds circumstantial support in the knowledge that others never despatched the topographic so absolutely to embrace the structural. I am thinking of Anna Freud who felt comfortable using the topographic model to explicate certain clinical situations while drawing on the structural model for others. Similarly, Martin Stein (1990, personal communication) comparing the topographic and the structural to the Newtonian and the Einsteinian remarked, and I paraphrase--Newtonian principles serve very well navigating from one earthly location to the next, whereas the Einsteinian relativistic compass is only necessary for space travel. The point seems clear: two models like two parents are better than one. Why choose if you can have both!
Does Brenner's new democracy of the mind exclude any citizens other than the sacred cows alluded to earlier? While Brenner, like most analysts, has little clinical use for Freud's death instinct theory, he does invoke what could be called a dual affect theory in which two affects, anxiety and depression, alert the gendarmes of the mind to keep the peace and restore psychic law and order. Are certain affects being excluded from the new democracy? Where do envy, jealousy, humiliation, shame and guilt fit in? If Freud's death instinct is to be relegated to the antique shop in the history of ideas, was not Freud courageous to take on death so to speak and place it at the center of his psychological Weltanschauung? If we dismiss Freud's embrace of death as too fanciful, have we any place for death at all in our new democracy of the mind? Since no psyche has ever experienced it and reported back on it, shall we proclaim that it does not exist? The emperor of death has no clothes if these psychoanalytic reasonings are pushed far enough. This kind of sophistry invites the conclusion that when the empire of death and the empire of psychoanalysis engage in intellectual arm wrestling, neither emperor has any clothes! I am not suggesting that a neurotic's death anxieties are the last word about the existential problem of death, but I am suggesting that a theory of the mind that does not clear some existential space for death is restrictive at best and embarrassingly naive at worst. If Freud's embrace of the death instinct was an enlightened scientist's last gasp of nineteenth century romanticism, let us not be accused of some twentieth century fin-de-sicle decadence that has lived through holocausts and world wars but has little room for death in its philosophy. I am not asking psychoanalysis to come to terms with death as an abstraction but with its tangible aspects, the evolution and involution of body and soul, an evolution as obvious as Darwin's for those who have eyes to see. If it is possible to see coronary artery disease microscopically in the arteries of children in statu nascendi, surely it is possible to find the psychological imprints of the obsolescence of body and brain in the mind. We have a theory of mourning for loss of the object. A similar theory is needed for loss of the self, the psychological correlative of what Robert Frost calls in Nature "the slow smokeless burning of decay." What else is being left out of the new democracy? Does Dr. Brenner's global concept of defense leave any room for microanalysis of discrete defenses as their contours become obvious in the psychoanalytic situation? It would be an unfortunate consequence of the new concept of defense if the uniqueness of defenses such as projection, displacement, reaction formation, to name a few, were to lose their specificity and never be delineated precisely in clinical sifting and deconstructing and discriminating. The Freudian insights that led to these discoveries were extraordinary epiphanies that only genius could stumble on in its struggles with the unknown. While I agree with the Brennerian notion that in the midst of clinical complexity one does not paint by numbers, so to speak, or analyze association by association or defense by defense, there are periods of intensity in analysis when the scrutiny of specificity as opposed to generality is the only way to effect what Freud called Nacherziehung, or reeducation, or what might now be called working through. Working through does have an old-fashioned economic, chimney-sweeping, prestructural ring to it, but should it be excluded from the new democracy of the mind simply because of its antiquated origins?
Does Dr. Brenner's elegant minimalist emphasis on the mind as conflict and compromise formation tend to exclude the body? Developmentally speaking doesn't body antedate mind? One does not learn the abstraction of number concepts, for instance, without counting on fingers first. In certain cultures the number six gets its meaning from the act of jumping to the other hand after one has used up all five fingers of the first hand. Similarly one can argue that concepts such as conflict and compromise formation are developmental sophisticates that do not arrive on the psychological scene fully formed but must be constructed piece meal from complex aggregates of preconflictual components. These components may not be easy to identify given the preverbal context that most infancy research is faced with, but nonetheless cannot be ignored by any serious scientist of the genetic blue prints of the mind. Conflict and compromise formation are inconceivable prior to sufficient internalizations that allow the psyche to focus intrapsychically on what would undoubtedly have been experienced interactionally at a more immature stage of development. I believe Anna Freud would have referred to this as preconflict or conflict with the environment as opposed to bona fide intrapsychic conflict. The point I am stressing is that the actual body of the infant in contact with the actual body of his mother or the other bodies around him, father, siblings, has a bearing and leaves an imprint on what may later be conceived of only in intrapsychic terms. This is so obvious that one is tempted not to state it, but sometimes the obvious has to be tripped over or its presence is taken for granted and ignored. I am reminded of a letter of Winnicott to Benjamin Spock in which Winnicott describes his exasperation with psychoanalysis in the thirties and forties because it was virtually impossible to find a conceptual space for the actual mother and her quality of mothering in psychoanalytic theory so focused was the profession on orality, drives, and structures. An extreme example of the importance of the body of the infant and the quality of the mothering would be the cases of oesophagial atresia described by Dowling (1977). In these cases it is almost impossible to get the mind to wean itself from early experience and construct an intrapsychic climate in which conflict and compromise formation would dominate rather than preconflictual interactional codependencies. In less extreme cases where trauma and developmental insult are not so disorganizing, and the mind seems capable of building a proscenium for its dramas of conflict and compromise, are the preconflictual ghosts not waiting in the wings to inform the nonverbal transferences and uncanny enactments that prevail in every analysis when words alone cannot convey all meaning?
I am not a propagandist of reductionism, a pitfall some infancy researchers seem unable to avoid. Infancy research can irritate when it claims to have discovered the true genetic god, or if not the god at least the wheel that turns all meaning from beginning to end. One has to be careful when studying His Royal Highness the Baby lest some of the royalty rub off on the researcher and compromise his perspective and objectivity. But while rabid reductionism is to be deplored, throwing the baby watchers out with the bathwater would be imprudent. The real task is one that Freud endorsed: to alloy retrospective and prospective psychoanalytic studies the better to paint a scientific portrait of the mind.
Does the emphasis on conflict and compromise tend to ignore the apparatus, the constitutional skeleton of the ego that will bring to each conflict its own unique point of view? Conflict may be ubiquitous but the conflicts of the blind or the color blind or the dyslexic must be qualitatively different than the conflicts of better endowed egos. If Dr. Brenner agrees that it is the drive derivative rather than the more conceptual drive that gives each human conflict its uniquely existential stamp and signature, could it not be argued that it is the inimitable mold of each particular ego with its constitutional quirks and temperamental givens that adds a formal dimension to conflict that may be as fundamental as the content of conflict itself?
As stated earlier, Dr. Brenner's new democracy of mind tends to denounce any special interest groups and expose the narcissistic hubris that would grant them privileges above their psychological peers. While there is considerable merit to this approach which strips self-deception of its smugness, perhaps it can be carried too far. I am thinking of two psychic products that warrant special attention and perhaps privileged status--dreams and screen memories. In the course of an analysis, which analysand will not consider dreams and screen memories as such unusual condensations of the current and the archaic as to make them if not royal roads, then at least uncanny debris that daylight manages to salvage from unconscious darkness and the ruins of memory. This is a personal bias, of course, an outcome of conflict and compromise no doubt that must be submitted to scientific scrutiny. Pruned of prejudice and propaganda it may have little to stand on other than a very personal point of view, a solitary conviction, one vote only in the new democracy of mind. If scepter and crown must tumble down and in the new Brennerian dust of conflict and compromise be equal made with the poor crooked scythe and spade, can this new democracy stripped of all illusion and self-deception survive? Yes, one is emboldened to say, as long as conflict and compromise formation do not succumb to the mindless illusion that mind itself is some immaculate conception, that the sublime is not a sibling of the ridiculous, and that without the Shakespearean notion of an infant's mewling and puking there could be no further unfolding of the seven ages of man.
Dowling, S. (1977), Seven infants with esophageal atresia. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 32:215-256. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Eugene J. Mahon, M.D.
