Wittgenstein and Freud

Object relations theorists use the concept of internal objects to provide insights into human action, but what exactly are these internal objects? Where are they located and how are they able to play such a role in our lives? In his 1983 paper The Concept of Internal Object Relations, U.S. psychoanalyst, Thomas Ogden, sketches the development of the concept and offers an account of internal objects that he sees as an improvement on that of Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Bion. The most striking aspect of his discussion, however, is the illustration it offers of how psychoanalysis is grounded in a confused philosophical picture of the mind that obscures the insights Ogden and his predecessors have to offer. Ogden battles his way through to a better position than those he discusses, but if he had jettisoned his dubious philosophical inheritance, he could have achieved his goal more quickly and much more easily.

Ogden notes that Freud did not talk about internal objects or object relations as such. He focused on mental processes within the individual. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he talks of unconscious memory traces and implies that they have the power to perpetuate feelings in forgotten early experience, to attract attention to themselves (in dreams and symptoms) and to press for open expression. Later, in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), he suggests that the ego can split due to identification with an object. He builds on this in The Ego and the Id (1923), where identification does not just split the ego, but leads to the creation of a new internal agency, the superego. These aspects of Freud’s writings point in the direction of object relations, and Ogden explains how subsequent thinkers built on them. 

Even at this stage, however, the problems Ogden later grapples with are visible. The ego and the superego are treated as structures or agencies, but, as well as suggesting rather different things, both of these ideas are obscure. Traditionally, philosophers have thought about our inner life consisting of as a succession of different types of mental representation. The concept of a mental representation is vaguely plausible in relation to perceptions and memories, but it is no use in capturing the varied capacities of our minds. This creates significant problems for Freud and for his successors, who want to revise the traditional philosophical approach, but accept its elements as their starting point. The challenge is to get beyond the stream of mental representations. How are these representations supposed to form a structure? And how are these somehow-coalesced representations supposed to exercise agency ? Freud never addresses these issues. Maybe, in line with his early Project for a Scientific Psychology, he assumed they could be addressed on the physiological level, which he saw as the ultimate driver of mental processes. In other words, the grouped mental representations that constitute the ego (on the psychological level) have agency insofar as they are correlated with neurones which impact other neurones (with different psychological correlates) on the physiological level.

But Ogden is not interested in avoiding problems by pushing them onto some to-be-explored-in-the-distant-future physiological level. He wants a psychological solution and one in which object relations play a large part. He sees Melanie Klein as providing a step forward, since she puts unconscious internal object relationships at the heart of her account. But he claims that she is unclear on their status. Are they fantasies (unconscious mental representations) or relationships between active agencies capable of feeling, thinking and perceiving? The latter option conjures up images of “demons” operating within the mind, which is why (according to Ogden) defenders of Klein tended to emphasize that internal objects were fantasies. But, in that case, how do these thoughts exercise agency (try to do things etc)?

Ogden sees Fairbairn as an improvement on both Freud and Klein. Freud conceived of the id as energy without structure and the ego as structure without energy, but Fairbairn argued that any element involved in conflicts within the psyche had to be a dynamic structure i.e something with both structure and energy. Like Klein, he claimed interaction with objects led to splitting in the ego, but he recognised each of these ego-sub-organisations as a dynamic structure. But he is still not fully clear on internal objects. According to Ogden, he sees them as stable sets of ideas or mental representations, but says that they are not mere objects, which suggests that he recognises them as dynamic structures separate from the ego. However, Fairburn hesitates to embrace this conclusion.

Ogden sees Winnicott and Bion as providing the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. According to Ogden, Winnicott takes forward the idea of multiple interacting self-organizations by differentiating between the True Self and the False Self. It is not clear (to me), however, that Winnicott fits that well into Ogden’s argument. It seems to me that Winnicott’s two selves do not in fact constitute conflicting agencies. It is not that the individual’s False Self wants X and their True Self wants Y. Rather their True Self wants Y, but, due to failures in the individual’s development, the individual does not live out their true wants but act as if they want X. The individual fails to live authentically, but, in contrast with Klein and Fairbairn, there is no hand-to-hand combat between different parts of the self. 

The role of Bion in Ogden’s argument is clearer. He notes that Bion sees schizophrenics as projecting their perceptual functions into parts of the self, which are then projected into (physical) objects. These objects then take on a life of their own, reflecting the fact that they have had a part of the self (with agency) projected into them. This finally seems to provide a justification for seeing psychic life as interaction between parts of the self and internal objects, all of which have agency. Bion does not quite go this far, sticking with a Kleinian stress on fantasy and treating internal objects as mental representations. But, for Ogden, a schizophrenic who fantasies that a gramophone is capable of perception is best understood as treating the image or mental representation of the gramophone as a self-representation of the perceiving part of their personality.

Ogden’s conclusion is that “an internal object relationship necessarily involves an interaction between two subdivisions of the personality each capable of serving as an active psychological agency”. Other options lead nowhere. Either you end up positing a direct relationship between entities at non-equivalent levels of abstraction (e.g. the ego (a structure) and a thought) or you end up with a relationship between thoughts, which would (absurdly) empower thoughts with the capacity to think.

In his view, the right approach is to recognise that object relations arises when the ego splits into two sub-organisations, one identified with the self in the external object relationship and one identified with the object (i.e. projected in the mental representation or thought of the object). Ogden thinks that this approach is essential for object relations theories because it is the only approach that allows both parts of an object relationship (the subject and the object) to play a dynamic role, i.e. be capable of thinking, feeling, perceiving and responding or, as it puts it more succinctly, be “capable of generating meanings”.

Ogden’s argument is haunted by the spectre of demonology, the fear that his theory will be criticised for positing entities in the mind that are not human but that have agency. The only defence he offers against this challenge is to argue that he is going no further than Freud did in his account of the formation of the superego. But this is simply an appeal to authority. He does not explain why Freud’s account of the superego avoids the challenge of demonology. The underlying problem is getting beyond the world of mental representations. The idea of the ego, which is allowed to play a dynamic or active role, provides Ogden with an escape route, but he does not explore why (or how) the ego is something more than a mental representation (or a group of mental representations). 

Ogden betrays his unease about this issue in a footnote where he suggests that “the I” would be a better translation of the German phrase “das Ich” than the ego. He adds that “the phrase”splitting of the I” better captures the notion of the sub-division of the person’s capacity to think, perceive and create experiences than does the more impersonal term “splitting of the ego”. The difference between the words “ego” and “I” does not really matter, but what does is the shift from mental representations to human capacities. In place of the misplaced idea that what makes us human is the possession of consciousness (a stream of mental representations), there is a recognition that what makes us human is the possession of a distinctive set of capabilities. Understanding people as people involves recognising them as agents, who think, feel, have experiences etc. The entities that are (in Ogden’s strange phrase) “capable of generating meanings” are people.

So, how can we get from people to split personalities without any demonology? Well, very easily. The foundational insight of psychoanalysis is that we are complex beings. We do not have consistent sets of intentions, feelings, thoughts and beliefs. We sort of intend to do things, while not really intending to do them. We feel positively about someone, but we also have hidden (or not so hidden) negative feelings about them. We think that compromise is important in relationships, but in practice want everything on our own terms. We believe our loved ones are the most important people in our lives and then somehow we end up prioritising all sorts of things over them. Reflecting these complexities, we often talk about people in everyday life in non-unitary ways. For example, we say that Bill is a different person outside work and at work, or that under stress our kind friend, Bob, gets transformed into a highly aggressive individual. Or, we say that John seems a different person when he interacts with Anne than when he interacts with Joan.

So, if our everyday accounts of people can recognise our complexities, why shouldn’t these be explored more systematically using models that treat people as if they were composed of multiple people (or selves) or even as pairs of people (or selves) with different aspects of their actions, thoughts and feelings being explicable by reference to one or other aspect of the pair? This is Ogden’s goal, but his journey is hampered by a fear of demonology and his difficulty in breaking free from a view of the mind as consisting of a succession of representations. The real justification for models of the mind that involve multiple elements dynamically interacting with each other is human complexity. Since we see people as complex subjects/agents, it is not surprising that we need complex models to understand them.

Endnote:

Freud and his successors treat the (confused) philosophical account of the mind as a form of primitive science. They take over its basic concepts (e.g. mental representations) with the intention of developing the account scientifically as an investigation of the causal processes that take place within people’s minds/heads. This leads to a fear of demonology (the fear that theory will generate entities that are not people, but seem to have the powers of people) and distracts from the real issue of developing models that can cast light on puzzling aspects of our behaviour. The mistake is to see psychoanalysis as an investigation of causal processes, when, in fact, it is an attempt to find better ways of understanding people as people.