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Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self
and Literature
Ernest S. Wolf
What then has remained interesting?
Again those moments of being.
Virginia Woolf
IVE
DECADE
after Freud's last major statement about
the mother leaves the room, this child will suddenly feel restless,
tense, begin to act awkwardly, and may soon manifest signs of psych-
ological distress such as anxiety or depression. Stated in terms of a
psychology of the self, one can say that the formerly cohesive self of
the child is now fragmented, and the self is in a state of impaired
structure and impaired functioning with a subjectively experienced
disturbed sense of well-being due to the absence of the selfobject.
Indeed, the mother, though present, may somehow communicate a
relative lack of concern for the child, which may be experienced by
the latter as the functional absence of the selfobject and result in
similar distress to the child's self.
The selfobject responses needed for the emergence and mainte-
nance of a strong, cohesive, and balanced self are of two types: (1)
The child needs to be assured of its value, importance, and even its
illusionary grandiosity by the selfobject's mirroring and echoing af-
firmation. Kohut has termed these the responses of a mirroring self-
object. (2) The child needs the availability of a calm, strong, wise,
beautiful, and idealizable selfobject into which he can feel merged and
thus make these admired qualities its own. Kohut has termed this a
need for an available idealized selfobject. The emergent self of the
child, according to Kohut, can be conceptualized as a bipolar struc-
ture: mirroring selfobject responses evoke the pole of ambition, while
the availability of an idealized selfobject crystallizes in the pole of
ideals. Innate talents and learned skills are arrayed along a tension arc
between the two poles. The particular configuration of these con-
stituents of the self of an individual are unique and strive for fulfill-
ment of the unique life curve entailed by this individual configura-
tion. The maintenance and fulfillment of the self becomes the strong-
est motivating force behind the activities of the self. Threats to its
cohesion are experienced with the greatest anxiety as if they were
threats to life itself, and these threats evoke the most strenuous re-
parative efforts (e.g., delinquency, addiction, perversions, etc.), often
at great social cost to the self.
The selfobject concept thus bridges the inner world of the self and
the outer world of the environment. It conceptualizes not a social
psychology of relations of objects to each other but a true depth
psychology of intrapsychic processes concerning the self-its bound-
aries, its cohesion, and its fragmentation-under various conditions
of correctly attuned or of faulty selfobject responsiveness.
Like the classical psychoanalyst, the analytic self psychologist also
observes the same development of sexuality from infancy to adult-
hood in full integration with the state of the self that pertains at the
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 45
II
those impressions, on the other is one of the most attractive subjects of ana-
lytic examination.9
III
IV
insist, a needed psychic reality for adults as well. No matter how much
of the actuality of the real world outside of us-the reality of the
philosopher and of the scientist-we believe and accept and let regu-
late our behavior in that world, there still remains a psychic reality-to
others undoubtedly an illusion-in which we live and which we reject
at the peril of our sanity. Freud thought that the child distinguishes his
world of play and fantasy quite well from reality and that the child
links his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible
things of the world. "The creative writer does the same as the child at
play ... creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously-that
is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion-while separating
it sharply from reality."36But I believe the separation is not quite as
sharp as Freud liked to see it. The "tangible and visible things of the
world" have selfobject functions which make them part of our selfs
and thus restore to us, or sometimes even give us de novo, our whole-
ness. Here, I suggest, we return to the analogy of the reversal of
figure and ground with which I introduced the new outlook of self
psychology. We need to reverse also the Freudian outlook on illusion
and reality by recognizing that, indeed, for the child, reality is what
Freud calls illusion, and that Freudian reality for the child has become
the illusion. As the child becomes an adult he believes more and more,
with Freud, that reality resides outside and that inside are fantasies,
imagination-in short, illusions. He no longer knows and usually does
not remember that in his innermost being, his nuclear self, he still
lives in his inside reality. An adult cannot escape the tension of the
paradoxical relation of illusion and reality, but through the experi-
ence of art he can momentarily resolve it.
Psychoanalysts have always been inspired by great literature in their
quest to discern meanings in the inner life of man. By tracing regres-
sive motivations in the literary content, it has seemed at times that the
psychoanalytic enterprise was essentially reductive in spite of all its
contributions to a fuller understanding of the work of art. Self psy-
chology has added a new element to the psychoanalytic explorations
and, by its emphasis on the wholeness-creating dynamics of the artistic
enterprise, has given new impetus for a newly productive dialogue
between artist and psychoanalyst.
NOTES
2 Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York, 1971), hereafter cited as Analysis;
Kohut, The Restorationof the Self (New York, 1977), hereafter cited in text as RS; and The
Searchfor the Self: SelectedWritings of Heinz Kohut, 1950-1978, ed. and introd. Paul H.
Ornstein, 2 vols. (New York, 1978), hereafter cited in text as SS.
3 Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf, "The Disorders of the Self and their Treatment: An
Outline," InternationalJournal of Psychoanalysis,59 (1978), 413-25.
4 C. Strozier, "Heinz Kohut and the Historical Imagination," The Psycho-historyReview,
7 (1978), 36-39.
5 Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes,
1887-1902, ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, introd. Kris (New
York, 1954), pp. 256-57.
6 K. R. Eissler, "The Relation of Explaining and Understanding in Psychoanalysis,"
The PsychoanalyticStudy of the Child, 23 (1968), 141-77, esp. p. 165.
7 Wolf, "Sigmund Freud: Some Adolescent Transformations of a Future Genius,"
Adolescent Psychiatry, 1 (1971), 51-60; Wolf, "Saxa Loquuntur: Artistic Aspects of
Freud's 'The Aetiology of Hysteria,'" The PsychoanalyticStudy of the Child, 26 (1971),
535-54; rpt. in Freud: The Fusion of Scienceand Humanism,ed. John E. Gedo and George
H. Pollock (New York, 1976), pp. 208-28 (hereafter cited as Fusion); Gedo and Wolf,
"The 'Ich-Letters,'" Fusion, pp. 71-86; Gedo and Wolf, "Freud's Novelas Ejemplares,"
Annual of Psychoanalysis, 1 (1973), 299-317 (also in Fusion, pp. 87-111); Wolf and
S. S. Nebel, "Psychoanalytic Excavations: The Structure of Freud's Cosmography,"
AmericanImago, 35 (1978), 178-202; Wolf and Harry Trosman, "Freud and Popper-
Lynkeus," Journal of the AmericanPsychoanalyticAssociation, 23 (1974), 123-41 (also in
Fusion, pp. 332-53).
8 Strachey, "Appendix: List of Writings by Freud Dealing Mainly or Largely with Art,
Literature or the Theory of Aesthetics," Standard Edition, XXI, 213-14.
9 Freud, "The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest" (1913), StandardEdition,
XIII, 187.
10 Freud, "Preface to Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A
PsychoanalyticInterpretation(London, 1949)," Standard Edition, XXII, 254.
11 Kris, PsychoanalyticExplorationsin Art (New York, 1952); Robert Waelder, Psycho-
analytic Avenues to Art (New York, 1965).
12 Kohut, "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann: A Story about the Disintegration of
Artistic Sublimation," SS, pp. 107-49.
13 Ernest S. Wolf and Ina Wolf, "WePerished,Each Alone. A Psychoanalytic Commen-
tary on Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse,"International Review of Psychoanalysis, 6
(1979), 37-47.
14 Kohut, Analysis, pp. 235-37.
15 Kohut, SS, pp. 793-843 (also in Fusion, pp. 379-425); SS, p. 814.
16 Gedo and Ernest S. Wolf, "Die Ichthyosaurusbriefe," Psyche, 24 (1970), 785-97.
An English version appeared in Fusion, pp. 71-86.
17 Wolf, "Sigmund Freud: Some Adolescent Transformations of a Future Genius";
Gedo and Wolf, "Freud's Novelas Ejemplares."
18 Wolf, "Saxa Loquuntur"; Kohut, SS, pp. 804-23.
19 Ernest S. Wolf, Gedo, and David Terman, "On the Adolescent Process as a
Transformation of the Self,"Journal of Youthand Adolescence, 1 (1972), 257-72.
20 Ernest S. Wolf, "What Method This Madness: An Inquiry Into Hamlet's Antic
Disposition," ComprehensivePsychiatry, 14 (1973), 189-95.
21 Marian Tolpin, "The Daedalus Experience: A Developmental Vicissitude of the
Grandiose Fantasy," Annual of Psychoanalysis,2 (1974), 213-28.
22 Wolf and Trosman, "Freud and Popper-Lynkens."
23 Wolf and Nebel, "Psychoanalytic Excavations."
60 NEW LITERARY HISTORY