Hanna Segal
I very much regret that I am unable to be in San Francisco, and therefore shall not have the opportunity to take part in the discussion of Charles Brenner s interesting and stimulating paper. Nevertheless, encouraged by the organisers of the Symposium, I am sending to you my short position paper, both because I wish to present a certain point of view and because I hope that it may contribute something to your discussions.
In answer to the question whether we agree with Charles's views as presented in this paper, my answer is that I have large areas of agreement and of disagreement with him. To begin with, I am in complete agreement with his view that Freud's structural theory of mind was a very major development in psychoanalytical theory. From my point of view, the structural theory is a great step forward, because it defines as the major conflict within the ego: ambivalence. It is contemporaneous, and related to, Freud's last theory of instincts, in which he treats as central the conflict between the life and death drives, and its accompanying anxieties, and the defences mobilised by them.
Secondly, it emphasises the importance of an internal object, the superego, and the importance of its being a phantasy object rather than a straight introjection of a real external figure. It is an internal object set up in the inner world as a result of ambivalence. It is a pity, I think, that, later, Freud described the id, the ego and the object as instances in the mind -- robbing the concept, in a way, of its full emotional meaning.
I have a large area of agreement with Charles Brenner's view that the concept of the id is redundant. A lot hinges on Freud s description of the ego. Freud attributes to the ego many and varied functions: it is first of all a bodily ego; yet it is an organ of perception, not only of external realities but also inner realities. It is the seat of anxiety, an agency that produces defences, and, in Freud s view, presides over the conflicts between the id and reality. But what Freud does not attribute to the ego is needs, instincts, desires, and wishes. All that is separated off as the id. I think making a separate agency of one s instincts and unconscious phantasies is a way of disowning it. It is not me; it is it.
I agree with Charles Brenner's view that the ego, or whatever you call it, is an I, a Me. I would say that the ego is the I, the infant him-/herself, at birth. It does not evolve from the id. It is an I, with conflicting desires and perceptions, the perceptions being, to begin with, distorted by desires; and when perceptions are distorted by desires they become delusions. And this I is naturally an immature I, which develops gradually. And my disagreement with Charles Brenner is about that aspect of the structural theory which has to do with the superego; because this I matures physiologically, but it also develops psychically and that development happens in the interaction with an object or later object.
Klein's view was that there is more ego at birth than Freud assumed. If Charles Brenner's view, and mine, is correct -- that the ego is the infant, then of course it is present from birth, at least. And in Klein's view, that ego or infant has from the beginning a need and a capacity to form object-relationships, in phantasy and reality. And its evolution is linked with the evolution of its relationship to the reality of objects. The infant, this immature ego, has to cope with life, with its own wish to live or abolish life, and with its experience of the objects, on which it depends and with which it has to contend. Those objects, through a series of projections and introjections, set up an internal phantasy world of internal objects, sometimes remaining separate and sometimes identified with. (Freud also described the ego as a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.)
I seldom speak of the self, since there are so many different views of what the self is, but the way I see it is that the self is the ego-plus-the-internal-objects, which become structuralised in the mind. And the structure does evolve, for instance, from original primitive states, in which omnipotence rules and splitting leads to idealised and persecutory objects which are the primitive roots of the superego, to a more mature perception, in which we recognise our own ambivalence, withdraw our projections into the objects, and increasingly differentiate between our feelings and phantasies and external perceptions, with the internalisation of the more realistically perceived objects and more awareness of our own feelings -- a change in structure which Klein called a shift from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position.
I agree with Charles Brenner that conflicts do not disappear. Ambivalence is always with us in our interaction with an object or objects. It is crucial that ambivalence should be recognised and acknowledged, or we live in a delusional world. I also agree with Charles Brenner that one cannot attribute all the guilt feelings to the superego. The guilt feelings arising out of the superego have the persecutory pressure due to our projections of aggression into the internal object. But if the ego is an organ of perception of psychic and external realities then it is capable of perceiving the damage done in reality, or in phantasy, and that perception is realistic guilt, a guilt which is proportional to intentions and appropriate to the damage done. Freud said "Where id was there ego shall be." I would rather say "Where superego was there ego shall be."
The last point I wish to make has to do with the ego having the attributes of thinking, judging, etc. I agree with Charles Brenner that these are faculties which develop gradually, but I do not think of this in terms of millennia of the development of the human race; I think of them as they evolve individually in each individual s maturation as ways of dealing with object-relationships, particularly with the absence of a needed and desired object. Wilfred Bion said: No breast; therefore thought.
In conclusion, I agree with Charles Brenner that the structural theory needs revising, I think in two ways:
(1) The concept of the id is redundant; the I -- the ego -- has instincts and desires.
(2) On the other hand, the role of the superego in mental structure I think is not redundant, but should be revised and enlarged. Our mental structure does not contain one object, internalised at one moment of development, the heir of the Oedipus complex. There is a whole internal phantasy world of object-relationships which get structuralised within the ego. But this structure is not static: it develops and changes as part-and-parcel of the development of the ego.
