در بررسی روانشناسی خویش On Working Through in Self Psychology

Among Freud’s earliest technical guidelines to analysts was the admonition that merely calling attention to resistance on a single occasion would not promote therapeutic change. He observed, One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to “work through,” to overcome it by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with the patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses. (1914, p. 155) Freud’s emphasis on the need to overcome resistance to repressed instinctual derivatives was, of course, integral to his theory of analytic cure. He propounded this perspective on resistance to great effect in the case histories of Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man, and, in theoretical papers of this same era, continued to stress the importance of overcoming resistances to instinctual derivatives and “awakening” memories (1914, p. 154) as central to the treatment of neurosis (Muslin andGill, 1978). In a variety of works, Freud stressed that only repeated interpretations could eventually diminish the analysand’s resistiveness, and that the analytic cure that resulted fromsuch repeated interpretations (working through) was embodied in the ego’s access to repressed contents, whether in the guise of instinctual derivatives, pathogenic memories, or oedipal fantasies. It was in this context that Freud initially approached the interpretation of transference—resistance. In the case of the Rat Man, for example, Freud (1909) broached transference interpretation as a strategy for gaining access to repressed memories (see Muslin, 1979). Transference interpretations focusing on the analyst in the here and now were irrelevant to the analytic enterprise, since the transference was merely one vehicle for uncovering repressed memories. In his monograph of 1926, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud broadened his earlier perspective somewhat by conceding “that the analyst has to combat no less than five kinds of resistance emanating fromthree directions—the ego, the id, and the superego” (۱۹۲۶, p. 160). Even here, however, Freud emphasized that it is with respect to the id resistances that the term“working through” had special relevance: For we find that even after the ego has decided to relinquish its resistances it still has difficulty in undoing the repression; and we have called the period of strenuous effort which follows after its praiseworthy decision, the phase of “working through.” … It must be that after the ego-resistance has been removed the power of the compulsion to repeat—the attraction exerted by the unconscious prototypes upon the repressed instinctual process—has still to be overcome. (1926, p. 159) Succeeding generations of analysts have elaborated, refined, and, in certain instances, altered Freud’s basic notion of working through. Among the elaborators, I would single out Fenichel (1939), who broadened Freud’s notion so as to provide for “the inclusion of the warded off components in the total personality” (p. 304). For Fenichel, whose concerns were primarily clinical, working through simply designated resistance analysis, independent of the nature of the resistance or the nature of the warded-off content. Both Alexander (1925) and Lewin (1950) compared working through to mourning, stressing that working through aims at, and eventually culminates in, the renunciation of complexes of early memories and wishes. Greenacre (1956), for her part, observed that, among the repressed memories eventually overcome via working through, those of actual traumata occupy a place of importance. Stewart (1963), summarizing Freud’s viewpoint, observed that working through should be conceived as the time required of the patient “to change his habitual patterns of discharge” (p. 496). Adhering to Freud’s belief that such change involved the overcoming of id resistance. Stewart pointed out that the resistance in question could be equated with libidinal fixation, libidinal “adhesiveness,” and/or psychic inertia. Among contributors who have proffered definitions of working through that dispense with Freud’s continuing emphasis on id resistance, I would single out Greenson (1965), Kris (1956), and Loewald (1960). Greenson, who introduced the notion of the therapeutic alliance into the theoretical consideration of working through, redefined the latter as “the analysis of those resistances and other factors which prevent insight fromleading to significant and lasting changes in the patient (1965, p. 282). Predictably, he held that only patients able to maintain a therapeutic alliance throughout the analysis of the transference neurosis were able to complete the “work” of working through and successfully terminate. In place of Freud’s emphasis on the analysis of id resistances followed by release of pathogenic material in the unconscious, Greenson’s definition of working through focuses on the reliving of early wishes and fears in the transference and—when the therapeutic alliance is intact—the curative insight that follows this reliving. Kris (1956) explored working through fromthe standpoint of the integrative functions of the ego, claiming that the working-through phase of analysis released countercathectic energies that energized the integrative functions of the ego, as confirmed by the emergence of insight. Finally, Loewald (1960), in another contemporary reformulation of working through, looked at this process froma view of the therapeutic action of analysis that focused not on the overcoming of id resistances and the entering of the repressed into consciousness, but on the resumption of ego development. The latter, for Loewald, derived fromthe analysand’s relationship with a new object, the analyst, as mediated by and through the transference.