Someone asked for an "elevator shpiel" about my 1998/2016 volume. I promised a precis but that must be on some other storage device. Here's the preface to the 2016 edition.
Preface to the Reprint Edition: a bit of personal history
I am
quite grateful and, indeed, honored that the Object Relations Institute Press under
the Editorship of Inna Rozentsvit has
undertaken to reprint Oedipal Paradigms
in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (1897-1997). I have decided not to revise the original
text. I have done so not because the original edition was without flaws but
rather because it offers up a perhaps representative glimpse into how one
analyst trained in the techniques and theories of Classical Psychoanalytic Theory
was moved to proffer a revisionist psychoanalytic model during a specific
period, beginning more than 33 years ago and continuing through the original writing
of this volume in 1994. Some background …
I
trained in the 1970’s at an Institute that made no peace with Kohut, the Object
Relationists, the Lacanians, etc. or, for that matter, with the Intersubjectivists
or the early advocates of the Relational Schools that were beginning to surface
with the works of Mitchell, Stolorow, Atwood, Orange and others. My own
training analyst, indeed, fretted quite a bit about how destructive it was for
a Theory of das Unbewusste to think of the Ego Psychologists and Developmentalists as
living within a psychoanalytic framework and sought compromise when he spoke by
referring to treatments guided by such theories as “modified psychoanalytic
treatment.” It might be no surprise, then, that in spite of his recommendation
that I publish these ideas and “take my comeuppance like a man,” I waited many
years after our work was complete and until after his death in 1986 to press my
ideas further than brief presentations. Oedipal
Paradigms appeared in my last year as Director of that Institute.
It
may be said that during and before this period of time in which I trained and
early-practiced, psychoanalysis had –
in most venues – morphed into a Proper Noun, Capital-P Psychoanalysis. It, by
then, referred to one singular practice of
the analysis of unconscious functioning, the one practiced by that
specific contributor or group. In whichever univocal manner it was assembled,
the language of psychoanalysis during those years became thick with the words
and technical expressions of each of its particular incarnations. If it had
been, for instance, the case that after reading a paragraph written by Freud,
one understood both its intent and whether or not one agreed with it, now our
language had become heavy and not infrequently required a specific lexicon of
words for each of these forms that psychoanalytic thinking assumed and in order
to determine whether one was prepared to
sign on to whatever was being articulated.
I
don’t want to be misunderstood. We candidates and our teachers did – in this
era – read beyond the Freudian Canon. Yes. We cut our teeth on all the writings
of Freud, Abraham and early Ferenczi
but we did drink, as well, from the trough of the perfidious revisionists; we
kept it pretty quiet, though. Much like religious cults/sects being
identifiable by their hats and robes, we were identified by our theoretical
beards and cigars. When Psychoanalytic Dis/Malcontents were presented by any of
us, they were described more often for what they weren’t than for what they
might be or might become. A not infrequent argument went something like:
“This is where they disagree with
us and
–
insomuch as they do disagree with us –
they are wrong.”
We
were all – candidates and teachers – expected to toe the line. I was living in quiet Philadelphia where there
were 4-6 Institutes at any given time. The candidates and faculty of the
Medical institutes didn’t speak to each other very much since Pearson and
English had a falling out years before nor was there significant communication between
the physicians and members of the non-Medical Institutes, who didn’t speak to
each other across enemy lines,
either. Accusations of impropriety for not being sufficiently Conservative, on
the one hand, or for being Half-Baked for not recognizing the newest forms of
analytic thinking, on the other, were pretty common. Spurgeon English’s wife,
Ellen, expressed surprise that her husband and Pearson, his once-best-friend
and co-author of multiple texts, couldn’t get along or even speak to each other
peaceably. After all, she opined:
“They were analyzed and
should have known better.”
Perhaps,
indeed, my recognition of these disharmonies was my point of departure … the
beginning of my fall from grace.
After all, how could it be that well-analyzed folk couldn’t get along. If we
who had our finger on the pulse of humanity’s love-life and aggressions (see,
the Epilogue) couldn’t live in harmony with each other, something had to be
missing in our Theories, Techniques or Training Structures.
So,
that’s where I was. Howard Covitz, freshly minted from the couch of Harold Feldman
who received his wisdom on Paul Harbour’s divan, who was analyzed by Hans Sachs
who studied with Dr. Freud, der Grosse
Hexenmeister fum Wien … I,
Howard, was living in a bubble. I knew preciously little of the goings-on
crosstown at the competing Institutes or in New York or Chicago, never mind in
the training centers of Europe … and Heaven forefend should I dare to glean
from the Adlerians, Jungians, Stekelians or that Szondi crew. Making it all the more messy, perhaps: my
brother, Joel, was a Jungian from the Zurich Group and one of my sisters,
Judith Maidenbaum, trained with both the Jungians and the Spotnitzians
I
had first taken it upon myself in 1982 to consider whether Freud’s central
paradigm for the development of a socialized ethic in the child might not have
a soft object relational underbelly; I, perhaps naively, sought Common Ground …
a singular tune that might be accepted by all the Pied Pipers leading us to
drink from this river or that. I fascinated about the existence of such an
underlying unconscious dynamic that precipitated from a more general than a
purely sexually-symbolic Oedipal. I did remember how strenuously Freud had
asked Jung (1912) to support a sexual theory and aetiology of the neuroses as
an absolute bulwark against the forces that sought to undermine the exciting
new thinking that Freud and his students had produced in the not quite 20 years
since the two papers on the “Psychoneuroses of Defense” were published and
established a nascent psychoanalytic form.
I was moved to consider the possibility
of an Oedipal sine sexualis … and
this did not arise out of thin air.
Three
years prior to a first paper (“Joseph and his Narcissistic Dreams”) that
attempted to outline such a dynamic, I had been listening to Hans Loewald
present his now-classic reconceptualization of the child’s relationship to his
or her parents during the oedipal phase. Loewald was among the exceptions, as
he spoke his mind without fuss, fanfare or dramatic exits. He was offering
explication and, as far as I can discern, did not see himself as smashing idols or even breaking with the
past. While Loewald shall be discussed, at length, in Chapter 2 of Oedipal Paradigms, I briefly mention his thoughts about the little
Boy and his Mother, those ideas that originally moved me to reconsider my own
training roots.
Loewald
reasoned that it was the consubstantiality
of the earlier Mother of Symbiosis with a Mother of Desire that added
complexity and conflict to the youngster’s world. I was struck by this subtle
difference in emphasis between Loewald’s formulation and the Classical one that
I and so many of us studied earlier, in which the child’s conflict was
conceptualized as centered on sexual desire coming in conflict with an incest
taboo and parental deterrents in the form of either implicit or explicit castration
threats. It was not, I found myself thinking, that Loewald had negated the
existence of a taboo against incest but rather that he pointed at an object
relational conflict that the growing child faced: How can one Mother turn into
another? Or … How can it be that the Sacred Mother who cared for the infant/toddler
during Symbiosis now morphed into a far more complicated Lover-Mother? … And,
simultaneously, how could the Beneficently Protective Father change into a
Competitive Other?
As
Loewald continued speaking one Winter day near Philadelphia, I stopped listening
discretely and entered a quiet reverie. I found myself thinking of Joseph’s
dreams. These dreams were quite familiar
to me from my still earlier days in Jewish seminaries and are, for that matter,
still familiar to me, today. Young Joseph reported two dreams to his brothers
(Gen. 37); I was to repeat them to my confreres
in the Psychoanalytic community:
We were gathering sheaves in the
middle of the field
and your sheaves stood up and
bowed to mine.
The Sun and the Moon and the
Eleven Stars
were bowing down to me.
The
story is well known … even popularized by Thomas Mann and discussed by the
likes of Dorothy Zeligs. His brothers were understandably upset by the upstart
and Joseph was repaid with little else than a one-way ticket to indentured servitude
in Egypt following this adolescent
reportage. Oh! And I didn’t fare too much better when relating to my colleagues
a suggested developmental hierarchy that would be further particularized in Oedipal Paradigms. Still, I thought:
“well! maybe, they are connected.”
This
was, in part, my thinking that day about how three apparent facts of the dreams
in the Scriptual text interwove with each other:
First of all, I couldn’t help but recognize the
objectification of each of Joseph’s family members. Brothers were symbolized as
Sheaves or Stars. Father and Mother were missing in the first dream and represented
as Celestial Objects in the second. Sister Dinah was absent from both. Didn’t
she count? Was it loving to think of
Mom and Dad as the Moon and the Sun? Maybe, but objectifying, nonetheless.
Secondly and related to this objectification, I noted that
there was a lack of Object-Object Differentiation in the dreams. Brothers were
indistinguishable Sheaves or unremarkably distinct Stars. Margaret Mahler (1976) had – as had others – emphasized
Subject-Object Differentiation beginning in the early subphases of the
Separation-Individuation process. Later on, in the child’s development, if,
indeed, Endopsychic Objects were to become Endopsychic Subjects in Their Own Right (a
term I would begin using in 1981), there would need to be Object-Object Differentiation, as well. The matrix for early dyadic
relationships didn’t require that the Other had functions other than those that
brought satisfaction or frustration to the child. In various languages, such
Others would be called Part Objects, Need-Satisfying Objects or – for those in Kohuts – Self Objects.
Thirdly and following (I thought) canonically on the first two
observations, I concluded that the Brothers’ rage at the young
tattle-tale-telling Joseph (see, Gen. 37) might well, also, be connected to the
very geometry of the two homologous dreams. In both of his dreams, all action
was towards Joseph; no inter-action
between the dreams’ faceless dancers was permitted. Subjects, I told myself,
had relationships with each Other that included recognition in the Other of an
internal world. Objects were things that
were placed somewhere or other – perhaps in contiguity to other Objects, but
not interacting with them. Subjects were a different beast, entirely.
I
thought to myself quietly, then, and, later (in the years that followed) out
loud:
Maybe, the Oedipal is the ultimate Psychic Organizer (Spitz)
in which Objects become Subjects … by which Others are permitted by the child
to entertain relationships that are independent of him or her; and
Maybe, the Child who is shocked and offended by the parents’
love-making is not pulling back from the aggressive spectacle of the two-headed beast but recoiling, in the
end, from the narcissistically painful recognition that Behind the Green Bedroom Door, Mom and Dad are not discussing how best to raise their child, their young lothario
and Oedipus … but have, indeed, a relationship separate from the one that binds
them to their child.
What
to say? This simple fantasy changed the way I could, thereafter, think about my
own relationships with my wife, my kids, and my grandkids (who later arrived
with the appearance of the volume) and, certainly, altered my sense of those
folk who visited my office. I came to believe that psychic health was in no
small part contingent on the ability to relate intersubjectively … dependent, that is, on the graduated capacity to
see the Other not only qua Object but
as a Subject is His or Her Own Right,
with an internal Object World of Relationships, all their own.
In
the intervening years that passed between learning from Loewald’s writing about
the need for a special kind of intersubjectivity
in resolving the conflicts of the oedipal years and trying to define
way-stations on the road from a paranoid-like disavowal of any given single
Other’s internal world to a capacity to accept and even cherish Others’
relationships that in many ways excluded the child, I was either Faculty or Director of an Ego
Psychological training institute. Having
watched Kohut being disfellowshipped
in the 1970’s, I was loathe to risk excommunication, myself. I thought,
perhaps, that the Object Relations world would be more inviting but was to find
that departures from the Kleinian, Neo-Kleinian or Middle School systems could
be equally treacherous.
I
became increasingly convinced – even if skeptically so – that a successful
transition into social-triadic functioning would require far more than the
descriptions laid out by Freud in his “Dissolution of the Oedipal” or “the Ego”
papers. I had, in fact, little doubt that my colleagues might well celebrate a
healthy sexual life with my wife; my relationships to my own theories and ideas
was a different matter, entirely. The difficulties I experienced are documented
in the unrevised Oedipal Paradigms in
Collision, as are predictions (in Chapters 9 and 10) that I would be
accused of perfidy against Freud, idolatry in worshipping him and blasphemy in
my use of Biblical themes for such profane matters. Alas!
So,
here I am twenty+ years older than the author of this lengthy work written in
1994. I do remember that author with
great fondness. Indeed, I like his younger form, too, the one who penned his response
to Loewald’s Classical piece on the “Waning of the Oedipus Complex” and who
first began thinking of the possibility of a soft object relational underbelly
to Freud’s Oedipus complex.
For
much of the fifteen years that followed the publication of the first printing
of this volume, I became the peripatetic lecturer … going from meeting to
meeting – sometimes, alone and at other times, with a panel – asking each audience why they imagined that
analysts got along as poorly as they did.
Particularly, I was confronting these audiences with my nagging questions:
If we were so well analyzed, why did we seem so much like actors reading for a
new production: Analysts Acting Badly
(Covitz, 2007, American Journal of Psychoanalysis)? Why couldn’t we cherish
others’ relationships to their own Theories and Gods? And “Warum
Krieg?” Why, indeed, all these psychoanalytic civil wars!
It
was, for instance, quite a surprise to discover that, as I was having these
thoughts about the oedipal, a Relational School was being born with works by
Benjamin, Mitchell, McWilliams, and many others that would touch upon the same
questions. It was surprising in the sense that having attended different
psychoanalytic churches I had no knowledge of this World. This is the price,
apparently, that we pay for internecine conflicts and war!
************
Back
to the volume, itself. It was tempting when ORI Publishers and its Editor, Dr.
Inna Rozentsvit, expressed their willingness to reissue Oedipal Paradigms in Collision, to redact this long work to a shorter
form. The book is undeniably long and its arguments along a winding road
through the Century-long History of Psychoanalysis. Particularly, it was
tempting to cleanse the work of its detours into Personal Reflection, Elementary
Number Crunching and into Scriptural texts. Before closing, I will briefly comment on the
choice not to do so. The writers of the Talmud would not infrequently argue
against the inclusion of certain liturgical pieces not because of their inappropriateness
but due to the unnecessary pain they might cause the praying community … due to
Tircha d’tzibura (דציבורא טירחא). Shouldn’t I be equally as concerned by the
lengthy wordiness of my writing?
In
any case, I might have shortened the work by removing the personal and first person
narratives that some Readers may feel intrude on theoretical clarity and even
introduce a vulgar tone to the volume.
We are, after all, taught in our youth how to write expositively. Hadn’t
Freud, himself, explained the difference between the Male and Female uber-Ich/Superego based on the ability
of the male to keep the boundary between feelings
and shoulds separate? And hadn’t he
seemed to preference the Male version? I have come to think, otherwise, and
have left these personal notes both in the body of the text and the many, many
footnotes that Marilyn Charles praised, in one review, as an ongoing and
welcome dialogue between the Author, Himself and his Readers. Psychoanalysis
runs long and deep … but always personal.
On the
other extreme, I might have removed Chapters 7 and 8. Together, they represent
an informal meta-analysis that some Readers may find cumbersome and overly
intellectualized. Numbers can, indeed, seem dry. Perhaps, it is due to my
earlier doctoral training in Mathematics that I decided against that redaction.
Or, perhaps, it relates to my conviction that Qualitative and Quantitative
Analyses are best when intercalated. Every Quantitative Statistical Analysis flows from Qualitative and Anecdotal
observations which, in turn, arise from Quantitative anomalies? The separation
of the Qualitative from the Quantitative into two opposing camps – to my way of
thinking – is akin to the schismatization that I have described in the
Psychoanalytic World.
As
I’ve argued (above), Psychoanalytic Theory had in the second half of its first
century become – as, possibly, many of us do in middle age – weighted down by
its own girth … by its technical nomenclature and over-specified theories. What
had begun in Freud’s early Metapsychologies as an agile and lithe performer had
become more like an Old Rock Star … requiring suspenders to keep up his pants, back-up
singers to support a fading voice and on-stage fireworks to keep listeners
awake. I was looking for simpler models and a simpler language. As others have,
I found one that worked for my own clinical work. I called it the Elemental Oedipal and it combined the
Personal, the Qualitative and the Quantitative.
Finally,
I might have removed Chapter 5 on The
Ethos of Genesis. Why not be
satisfied with staying within Freud’s Sophoclean texts? Perhaps, I might have
looked at the broader questions raised by The
Antigone or even by the Oedipal Trilogy, as a whole. The opening section of
Chapter 5, I named: On the Reader’s Right
to Know. I had come to believe that the Reader has a Right to Know from
where and how the author arose. In the end, all remains consistent with my
senses that the personal and the theoretical cannot be neatly separated and
that oedipal conflicts do, indeed, need to be resolved on more than a
sexual-symbolic level … my contention that they need to be replaced with the
intersubjective ability to cherish each other’s often radically different Weltenschauungen and our Others’ views
of the complexities of life and its quotidian psychopathologies.
***************
It
is indeed so that in the years since the appearance of Oedipal Paradigms in Collision: I have lost some friends who
believed that I had, in writing this, left
the fold (not psychoanalytically religious enough); I lost others who
thought me slavishly connected to Freud (too religious); and have been accused
by still others of perfidy for the besmirching of Old Testament Patriarchs (not
religious, at all).
At
the same time, I received support from colleagues and from students and
supervisees who became my colleagues. There are many and I list a few. My
thanks go out to these folk and others who encouraged, supported and/or
influenced my thinking on these matters by talking with me, indeed, as a Subject in my Own Right: Thanks to Tamar
Barnea, Marilyn Charles, Cass Dalglish,
Hossein Etezady, Elio Frattarolli, Milt Parnes, James Pearson, Dick Peters,
Bert Seitler, and Stan Zuckerman and the Family that I and my wife, Marsha,
have constructed – able interlocutors, one and all. Thank you.
***************
Howard Covitz
December 2015
Elkins Park, PA
Howard
Covitz is a late-middle-aged psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who works inside
an idiosyncratic relational model that he's laid out in this book and later
pieces. He rereads his writings from time to time and still finds his younger
form a charming and engaging author who is as skeptical of his own theories as
he is of others’. He practices in Elkins Park, PA, just a stone's throw North
of Philadelphia, where he lives with his Marsha, a retired university
administrator, and from whence they
travel to visit children, grandchildren, and sundry parts of the World.
Intermingled with running a school for disturbed inner city adolescents, he
taught university Mathematics, Statistics and Psychology for some 40+ years. He
was: Faculty, Training Analyst and Director for many years at the
Psychoanalytic Studies Institute/Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies
in Metro Philadelphia; a long-time member of the Board of Directors of the
National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis; (NAAP), and taught
Biblical Characterology at Gratz College. Oedipal
Paradigms in Collision (1998) and his paper on internecine conflict in the
analytic community (“On the Possibility of Multiple Models in Psychoanalysis,”
AJPA-2007) were nominated, respectively, for the Gradiva Psychoanalytic Book of
the Year Award and Gradiva Psychoanalytic Paper Award. He’s
now working on a volume … In Defense of
Sadness.
