Chapter IV

From Heinz Kohut: The Chicago Institute Lectures
Edited by Marian Tolpin and Paul Tolpin

November 22, 1974

Revised July 1991

[This lecture deals with introspection and empathy as method and process, not as “technique.” Imperfection in the method is inevitable and striving for improvement is the best we can do. Kohut also examines and contrasts drive experiences and self experiences.]

Kohut: Well, let’s get started again. Is there anything left from the last time or the time before? Yes, Dr. L.

Candidate: I’m interested in hearing about the difference between shame and guilt and getting a perspective on that whole area and thinking about the libidinal and the narcissistic aspects of it. I have some questions about masochism, too. I hoped some of these things would be discussed.

Kohut: Yes, good. Does anybody else have any topics for discussion?

Candidate: I was curious about your usage of the term transference. I had the impression that it was pretty much restricted to the analytic situation and that it could not be introduced into any other area. Yet, you seem to use it in a more general sense. You take it out of the psychoanalytic context.

Kohut: All right. Does anybody else have any other suggestions for topics? They needn’t be limited to areas that are my particular field of interest – I am not really that restricted in my interests. True, my writings have been in one particular direction in recent years but not even that is altogether true. So I certainly don’t think that you need to limit yourself.

Candidate: Another area that might be important to talk about is the psychology of the self, some ideas about the nature of the process of internalization.

Kohut: I didn’t quite understand what you said at first before you said the nature of the process of internalization. Were you referring to something specific?

Candidate: Yes, in terms of the earlier topics of the psychology of the self and I was wondering if it would be useful to clarify the concept of the development of the self.

Kohut: Oh, I see. OK. Anything else? We are collecting topics. Is there anything specific that you might think would be useful to hear? Not necessarily right now but for the future?

Candidate: I hope we will eventually get back to where we left off at the end of the first class when you were beginning to talk about the superordinate position of the psychology of the self.

Candidate: I’d like to hear more about how conceptually one can integrate theories of libidinal development and object-related phenomena in the narcissistic disturbances such as you were doing last time with the mechanism of paranoia. I was wondering how your explanation for the phenomena of paranoia might be brought into approximation with Freud’s explanation and how one might be integrated with the other to enlarge our understanding of the progress of the syndrome.

Kohut: You’re giving me quite a job. Well, to answer the various questions on the various topics you suggested could easily fill a year. But it seems to me that some of the questions are quite inter-related at least when seen in broad perspective. Let’s take the last topic first, though I think some of the other questions dealt with related issues. How do the concepts concerning narcissistic disturbances, concerning the disturbances of the self, fit into the framework of libido theory. As soon as one talks about narcissism, the very use of this term leads to libido theory. So long then as we talk about the issues that we raise with regard to narcissistic disturbances with the terms of narcissism, we remain – despite the introduction of certain refinements and of certain variations, perhaps very significant variations – we remain on the whole within the framework of the libido theory. Of course, you are getting into a bit of trouble as soon as you begin to talk about the libido theory. You have to ask yourself first of all how much you really do know about libido. It is not possible to sit through a year or two of psychoanalytic courses without recognizing on what shaky ground we are when we get to the definition of some very basic concepts in psychoanalysis. What is libido? Obviously, there are ways one can be too concrete about it, and there are ways in which one becomes so slippery about it so that very little useful is left. Is it a concept that refers to something that is found biologically, as I think Freud was inclined to postulate? Do we only talk about the libido because some somatic substance, the substrate of libido, has not yet been found or has not yet been chemically isolated but which hopefully will someday be found? And will the psychological approach at that future point be superseded by biochemistry or by some other science that is related to biochemistry? On the other hand there are those who talk about the basic concepts in psychoanalysis in such an abstract way that these concepts are little else but ordering principles, or ways of thinking, ways of dealing with a variety of observed behavior, and then concepts become so slippery that they somehow always seem to elude one’s grasp. I think in the midst of the morass of these problems I have always felt that we must hold on to the observation of our actions, hold on to the description of what we are actually doing. We must fasten our attention on the material as we actually see it, and we must derive not only that part of our theory that is more or less close to the observed data but also that part that is pretty far away from what can be more directly observed and is on an even higher level of abstraction and generalization from the actual data we are dealing with. And as you know, I long ago expressed the conviction that the actual data we are dealing with are psychological data, psychologically perceived data. We are not perceiving biochemical data. Our data cannot be moved to a new level, we must deal with them in the form in which we perceive them, even if our abstractions are ultimately at a great distance from our observations. As you may remember, I felt long ago that the observational method of introspection and empathy which we have at our disposal lies at the very center of depth-psychological theory, that it determines the very nature of psychoanalytic theory. That old paper of mine on introspection and empathy is a widely misunderstood paper, although there is really nothing in it as far as I am able to see that lends itself to misunderstanding. Some readers always seem to believe that, in this paper, I urge analysts to be empathic, or that I recommend them to be introspective. In other words, some people felt that this paper dealt with issues related to technique or that it recommended a certain kind of behavior to the analyst and to the analytic researcher. That is not the case at all. What I meant to say was that in analytic work introspection and empathy are of the essence, that analysis without introspection and empathy is unthinkable. It was not a question of advice about a therapeutic stance. It was not that I said the analyst should be empathic – I said that he is empathic, that this cognitive operation defines analysis. I said that there is no other way of observing analytically except through empathy, that there is no other way of finding out about psychological data except through introspection and empathy.

The only thing I will now add to that simple basic point that I made nearly twenty years ago is that I have perhaps become even more consistent about the application of the theoretical consequences of the fact that the basic operation that analysts perform is empathic observation. Since we are dealing with the data of introspection and empathy, since we are dealing with the data we observe with these instruments, or on the basis of this kind of an attitude, I am presenting my data in conformity with the fact that they belong in the context of an introspected or empathically perceived world. When I speak of narcissism, for example, or in the obverse, when I speak of object-instinctual contents of the mind, whether it be object love or object hate, the issue that is involved is not the physical or ideational absence of another person or for other people, in the first instance, or the presence of another person or of other people, in the second. The issue that is involved is whether the other person is experienced as part of or as separate from oneself. In other words the basic issue in my differentiation between narcissism and object love is not the distinction between narcissism and object relations. The issue of relations to objects is a spurious one for the simple reason that the most important narcissistic experiences do concern other people. It is a meaningful question, however, if one asks whether another person is related to because he is a source or supply of self-esteem, because he is that image of greatness into whom one wants to merge, whom one wants to become part of, or, on the other hand, whether one loves (or hates) a separate object. It is true that even in the first instance another person is involved as far as social reality is concerned – still, as far as introspected inner experience is concerned, we are dealing with the self. That is why I introduced the term self-object to make this especially clear. Now, so long as we are using the conceptual framework of narcissism, and applying it to observed phenomena, we are still within the framework of the libido theory. As I said it may be a libido theory that with my point of view has taken on a particular slant. It is a libido theory with on the one hand is firmly based on the data of empirical investigation by the instruments of introspection and empathy, and at the same time it is a theory that has nothing to do with any biochemical equivalent of the concept of libido. In the future it might become possible to establish biochemical equivalents to introspected experiences that are now expressible only in psychological terms (for example, in terms of the libido theory), but at the present time we must acknowledge that what we are observing are certain introspectively and empathically graspable mental contents and that we generalize about some aspect of them by speaking about libido, about aggressions, about drives. We can recognize that there is an urge in us, and that it can be stronger or weaker; we can recognize that this urge takes a certain direction and we can describe its course and we analogize the urge to certain processes in the external world. We speak about energic processes in the external world when there is motion, when there is more or less of a push behind them, when work is to be done, when we see processes unrolling in a certain direction, things on that order. And metaphorically we analogize introspectively grasped contents and, by abstracting further, speak of psychic energy. But we deal with a psychological universe, with an introspectively and empathically grasped universe, and the abstractions are code words for that experienced psychological universe. In other words, I take psychologic life seriously as psychologic life. It is difficult for many people to accept this way of thinking. These difficulties are often buttressed with philosophical arguments but I think they stem specifically from the traditional views held about the mind by the scientists of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, who did not and still cannot believe that a psychological science is possible. Certainly it is difficult for an introspective-empathic science to achieve consensual validation of data. Errors of observation are great; one can easily be misled. All I can say is that these data are all we have and that we must do the best with what we have. We must learn what the safeguards against error in our kind of observation are, but we cannot abandon it because then we abandon everything. As I have tried to define our science, it is an introspective and empathic science of complex psychological states. What we are aiming for as we confront this universe of introspectively and empathically experience is the establishment of some order, the establishment of some systematization. That we are using terms that are taken from the non-introspective physical sciences is to my mind perfectly permissible. This terminological analogy won’t harm us so long as we know what we are doing, what kind of phenomena we are dealing with. As a matter of fact, it hasn’t harmed some of the physical sciences that some of their terms are used in analogy to psychological experiences. The term energy refers after all originally to human work. It is something that people do: ergon means work, in particular the farmer’s work in the field. This derivation has done no harm to the abstract meaning of the term energy in the physical sciences. It is quite appropriate to use terms, borrowed from parallel experiences, because they are evocative – so long as they are appropriately defined within the specific framework in which they are used.

But let’s return to the question of the legitimacy of an introspective-empathic science of complex psychological states. Reality in its essence is unknowable. You have probably heard that from me before and you will probably hear me say it again. We don’t know what reality is. All we know is what our senses tell us. We rely on them. And yet relying on the data of our sensory perceptions, we assume that we are not having illusions, we assume that when other people report to us that they have similar experiences we are dealing with something that is reliable enough so that we can try to bring some order into it, and so we try to do just that, to bring order into the data of our sensory perceptions through our theories and hypotheses about the externally observed world. All I am claiming now is that psychoanalysis at its best does exactly the same thing with all the complexities it observes in the psychological world, in the world of the inner life, in the world of the inner experience of man. We must take the reality of inner experience seriously. While it may be possible to prove and very difficult to be certain that you and I are sharing the same sensation when I say this wall is yellowish-green and you say the wall is yellowish-green, we have still come to rely on the fact that we do. When we observe patients empathically, when we observe ourselves introspectively, when there are similar experiences reported by you and by me, we may admit that there are great sources of error, but with hard work and continuous attempts to guard ourselves against biases we can fight these errors. Oh, obviously, there are very specific difficulties in observing the area of complex mental states that are not encountered by the sciences that deal with the observation of the physical, of the external world. however, we also have one distinct advantage in observing the internal world of others which we do not have when we observe the external world. This advantage is that, in its essence, the observed is similar to the observer. It follows then that consistent introspective scrutiny of one self prepares one for a more consistent and a more reliable perception of the inner life of others with the use of one’s increasingly trained empathic instrument. Yes, our observations are still full of errors, full of the possibility of mistakes – but then ours is still a very young science. Tremendous errors have also been made and will still be made in the physical sciences, but there is nothing else to do but to work, to improve, to correct. There is no perfection. There is only a striving for perfection. There is only a direction in science, never an absolute result.

Now, to return to the issue of narcissism within libido theory. As long as we speak of narcissistic phenomena we are using libido theory. We are within libido theory in ways that are perhaps slightly different from the traditional concepts of narcissism but we are still within the conceptual framework of libido theory. And as long as we stay within the conceptual framework of libido theory an important device is available to us – one could call it a crucial conceptual gimmick of psychoanalytic theory – we can use the term, the concept of cathexis. We can explain that something is more or less cathected with a particular form of intensity – with a charge, with a libidinal charge. Now, however, the question that needs to be answered is whether when we speak about the self and its cathexis, we remain entirely within the realm of libido theory. Clearly, yes, up to a point. The concept of a libidinally cathected self may be somewhat of a variation from previous modes of conceptualization but that doesn’t place it outside the usual framework. For example, when we say that introspective-empathic observation does not confirm the fact that there is a simple relationship of an opposite or antagonistic or obverse kind between object libido and narcissistic libido, between object love and narcissistic involvement, between the cathexis of objects and the cathexis of the self, then we are simply emending or correcting something in the previous theory without however abandoning the framework of the previous theory. In the specific example cited we are emending a previous theory by saying that while certain phenomena are not properly so described. The old theory must therefore be applied in a different way; but we are still thinking within the established conceptual framework. When we speak about the formation of the self, for example, on the whole we remain within the framework of classical theory, i.e., we apply the dynamic, genetic, and structural points of view. We say that the self has to be cathected with libido, that a person must be capable as it were of loving himself, that self-confidence is the capacity of cathecting the self and we also say, and this is a critical point, that these psychic acts of cathecting the self are not in contrast to, are not diminished or abolished by a person’s intense love for another person. As a matter of fact, observation will tell us that intense love experiences go hand in hand with enhanced self-esteem – at least they do not necessarily lead to a drop of self-esteem. So, within certain limits the psychology of the self fits quite well within the framework of a slightly altered libido theory. For instance, we can describe the intertwining of object-libidinal and narcissistic forces and we can see their mutual influence. All these things are in their essence compatible. Think for example of such issues as the development of the sexual libido as presented by Freud in the Three Issues on Sexuality, the classic, basic work on libido development. Freud speaks of drives, of their physical sources, of their aims, their objects, their intensity, and their direction; he describes the drives with reference to the leading body zone involved, the erogenic zones, and he indicates his belief that the drives are for the most part determined by innate givens. He considers these to be genetic in the biological sense, that is, that a particular, predictable sequence determines which leading body zone carries the greatest quantity of libido at any given time, and that this sequence unfolds in its predetermined course and follows the biological givens whatever the cultural surroundings are. Oral libido comes first, and anality comes next – these are biological givens. It is not that culture has imposed this sequence on the baby, rather, culture – nursing, first, toilet training next – has followed the lead of an innate, unfolding biological sequence. Now as far as the chronological primacy of the oral zone is concerned, I would think that there would probably be very little argument about that. Whether the same is true for the chronological position of the anal zone, i.e., for the time of toilet training, is more open to question. Freud would probably say that following the given of the oral stage there is the innate given of libidinization of the anal and urethral regions, that the libidinization of the speech apparatus leads to the development of speech, and that then the culture, the educational surroundings, fit themselves into these developmentally predetermined givens, that is into the needs of the child. And on the whole I think these were correct findings, and that they are of great importance. However, these body zones and the activities which are correlated to them concern very elemental psychological experiences. We are dealing with experiences that relate specifically to circumscribed body zones or, in terms of an introspective and empathic psychology we are relating to experiences that have confined their area of focus to these body zones. As long as we restrict our focus to these particular body zones we are dealing with experiences of great simplicity. Still, the explanatory power of these theories were great. Take, for example, the marvelous discovery that certain very complex psychological attitudes of later life can be correlated to these elemental experiences during early psychological maturation. According to Freud (and Abraham) such complex characterological features of adults as penuriousness, orderliness, and generosity relate in some specific way to such simple experiences as those of the early sensations around the anal region and the oral region. These experiences serve to explain these very complex adult attitudes. They explain, for example, those attitudes which we have in mind later in life when we say that so and so is a penurious guy, a stingy guy. Now one question is, is such a theory correct? I would think the answer is yes. There is enormous material available in observation over and over again which makes it possible for us to say that at least in some way it is correct. Another question is, is it satisfactory? To that I would say no. I do not believe that attitudes such as penuriousness or generosity are satisfactorily explained by reference to a holding-back anality or to a fulfilled orality. Why do I say that? Let’s compare a psychology of the self with a psychology of the drives, using the analogy of organic and inorganic chemistry and how they are used to explain biological phenomena. It is not that inorganic chemistry is wrong. And, furthermore, organic chemistry could not have come about without inorganic chemistry having been there first. And further it is also true that there are some highly complex phenomena in the biological sphere which can be explained without the use of organic chemistry; they do not require explanations with the aid of organic chemistry. There are some highly complex organic states, highly complex diseases, such as, for instance, iodine-deficiency hypothyroidism, in which the essential issue is handled by stating that the lack of one single inorganic element is the cause of the disease. Of course, many other important things could be said about it, too, which would include considerations that belong to organic chemistry, but the essential clinical mastery over the condition is achieved by the discovery of the absence of one inorganic element and its restoration to the complex biological condition. But these are the exceptions. On the whole, inorganic chemistry alone would be woefully inadequate to explain most of the organic diseases – even though an understanding of organic chemistry itself requires a firm understanding, and the firm study of inorganic chemistry. Now, I don’t believe that the contrast I have drawn here is a fair rendition of the contrast between drive psychology and self psychology. Drive psychology is considerably more complex than inorganic chemistry. At least drive psychology with the supportive conceptual cast of structural psychology, of the theory of sublimation, of the theory of the defenses, is a theory that is based on the complex concept of a psychic apparatus. It allows formulations of a relatively much greater complexity than the analogy with inorganic chemistry would suggest. Still, the analogy renders correctly the nature of the difference, if not the extent of the difference of a psychology of drives and a psychology of the self.

Let us go back again to a more specific theme: anality, or, even more specifically, anality as it refers and relates to the kind of thing we used to talk about as the anal character. It is clearly not satisfactory to think about the genetic determinants of this complex characterological state of adult life exclusively in terms of the stimulation of anal mucosa. Anal erotic excitement is an element, but only a single element in the total experience. The important issue is something very, very different. In what we have come to speak of as anality, the child’s experiences are not simply experiences of bodily anal stimulation. The heightened anal experiences of early childhood are not primary drive-determined givens but rather regressive states after much more complex experiences have broken down. Normal development, in other words, cannot properly be described in terms of drive development but it must always be described in terms of much larger, broader constellations in which the drive elements play a particular role. But a simple, drive experience alone, especially when it is related to isolated body zones, is already a disintegration product of more complex experiences of early childhood. Let’s go back to the experiences of the anal phase. I do not believe that they begin with hyper-stimulation of the anal mucosa. I think they begin with, are inter-meshed with a complex interplay between mother and child around the area of defecation, and that everything depends on how the interplay between mother and child around this particular functional experience succeeds or fails. When the mother responds to the child’s fecal gifts or to the child’s putting things in the right spot, or to the child’s increasing ability to control his sphincter, she doesn’t respond to the anal mucosa or to the sphincter, she doesn’t even respond to the feces, she responds to Charlie, to Lisa, to Tom, to Sue, including his or her nice gift, and including his or her developing capacities. In other words the experience that he or she gets out of all this is the experience of being an anal self or, let me say rather, of being a self within the area of anal experiences. Charlie feels: I am great, I can put those things there. Sure those are marvelous feces and they are being produced back there somewhere – but the real issue is the gleam in the mother’s eye about his performance or her dissatisfaction with his performance, and innumerable variations of such experiences. If, however, we have a mother whose personality is disturbed, who is indeed incapable of relating empathically to this particular maturational state, so that rather than my: my Charlie is now doing this when formerly he was doing that, and I knew he could do it, I knew it was going to come, and this is my kid, and I called him by name, and I really am proud of him. That is something quite different. If she cannot do that, but if she responds only to disintegration products, to fragmentary aspects of the total Charlie, if she responds with intense interest only to the anus or to the feces, then she will encourage something – a fixation, as we call it in terms of libido theory – not because this particular issue is so satisfying at this particular moment but because the joy of the selfness of this particular developmental time is not encouraged and is not supplied to him by the mother. It doesn’t even have to be that the mother is very interested in the feces, or very interested in the anal region, that may or may not be the case. She may just simply not be capable of responding to the total child, to the totality of his anal behavior which at the time happens to be his leading, his most meaningful, performance. Later on it will be something else, it will be his successful pitching in the baseball game, and when he comes home, if this particular anally fixated Charlie, or Sue, or Tom is not responded to, then he will become depressed. His self will become decathected, the particular cohesion of the self which is concentrated around this particular performance will fragment into parts again and in this fragmentation, in this particular, partial collapse of his self, he turns away from the joys of a full self experience to an intensified but constricted libidinal pleasure of a particular erotogenic zone.

These pathological disintegration products, however, must not be confused with the joyful experiences of a leading biological spurt. The experiences surrounding a developmental step forward are an integral part of the “organic chemistry” of the experience of self-cohesion. And the specific self-experience which belongs to each particular developmental stage is not an isolated physical sensation but forms a large experiential unit with the resonating response and with the joyful cooperation of the self-object. What are we dealing with then when we encounter, let us say, an anal fixation later in life, for example in the form of a symbolically enacted holding back of feces or in the form of a symbolically enacted fecal masturbation – with the stool kept inside the rectum and at the anal region rather than letting go of it? What are we dealing with when we encounter the prolonged anal masturbation of a child? These are psychological disintegration products, the manifestations of the fragments of a non-responded-to depressed self that attempts to squeeze some kind of pleasure out of what is available to it, that tries to confirm its own existence in this particular way because it has not experienced the joy of being accepted as a total self. In other words, I see this sector of psychological development not as a primary anal drive which gradually becomes sublimated into something more complex and more mature. I think it is the other way around. I see the primary experience as the complex non-sexual one of a total self that offers itself to the self-object, and when or if that fails we see the narrower intense investment of the disintegration products of the proud healthy (anal) self. Now you can recognize that even though all this is a bit different from the classical presentation, and even though it has a slightly different slant, is more a kind of organic rather than inorganic psychological chemistry, if you again allow me this analogy. It is still not very far from the outlook provided by classical libido theory because we are still talking about the relationship of the self to the self-objects in psychodynamic, psychoeconomic, and structural terms. True enough, the anal experience and the correlated anal libido are no longer considered to be the primary psychological configurations – but we are still speaking of the self as a structure, a structure that is cathected with libidinal energy, and we say that its cathexis has specifically crystallized around this specific maturational spurt – the “anal phase” – through the confirmation by the mother’s libidinal response. The self-object’s approval and interest, its response, leads to a heightened narcissistic state, to the firming of an anal self. All these formulations can be considered as lying within the framework of libido-theory albeit within a specifically emphasized branch of libido-theory that deals with the development of narcissism, that deals with the development of the self. Up to here, different as the new formulations may seem to you, and important as I really believe the changes are which have been brought about by the new emphasis on the self that I outlined in the foregoing, the basic framework of classical theory is retained.

I will not deny, however, that the shifts in emphasis concerning the primacy of the self are of enormous importance clinically because using that theoretical position you are led to a totally different feeling, attitude, about what you observe in your patients. And, secondarily, it will subtly but pervasively change the analyst’s responses to the analysand. It will color the tone of his voice, it will color his total outlook. he will not treat the masturbating child as an evil child who indulges himself in forbidden pleasures but he will think about the child in a different way: why did the child become so depressed that he is masturbating?, will be the question. A very different outlook. That doesn’t mean that there are not times when over-assertiveness and over-demandingness have to be countered by limit-setting. Such curbs must take into account the maturational capacities of the child. If limits are imposed, if regressive drive-indulgence is curbed, then the child’s self will be strengthened. It is the neglected child that is left with his thumb in his mouth and his finger in his anus or whatever he might be doing; it is the empty, detached parent who ignores the child’s depression and his turning to zonal gratification; the responsive parent will react to the child’s preoccupation with his erotogenic zones as a signal and will offer him experiences of greater complexity, experiences that activate the child’s total self.

But as I said, as important as I do believe these changes of outlook are, I think they are completely in line with the spirit of the psychoanalytic tradition. The shift I am advocating does not throw away anything, rather it adds something. It does not do away with the important, and still valuable explanatory conceptualizations of the original, relatively simple theory, the classical libido theory. Those formulations were the first great steps in a new science; and even though we may recognize now that they cannot do justice to all the phenomena we observe, they must be acknowledged as the indispensable foundation of our continuously developing science, the stepping stones that lead to the modern conceptualizations. But at what point are we leaving the older theories behind? Or, more specifically, are we still within the old framework of the libido when we speak about a stage in psychological development in which a self is in formation, in which a self exists? My reply is: No, I don’t think we are. The issue we are dealing with here is much more complex than anything I have tried to deal with up to this time – although in some ways it is also very simple. What I am claiming on the basis of empirical observation – and I am stressing that because we are in danger of getting into bad company here, and I want to stress that this is not just an idealistic concept but that it is something one can observe and that can be usefully applied in the clinical situation – what I am claiming is that once a basic self has been established early in life, once basic ambitions have been laid down, once basic idealized goals have crystallized, and once the child has realized that there are certain talents and skills which are characteristic of him, which lead from his ambitions to his goals, then something new has been introduced into depth psychology. The task of psychoanalysis is no longer only the repair of a psychic apparatus that is out of kilter and needs re-programming and re-directing. The long process of psychotherapeutic psychoanalysis is no longer undertaken only for the single simple purpose of rendering the patient’s psychic apparatus able to run smoothly and efficiently, the way a normal psychic apparatus is supposed to run, i.e., specifically to render it capable of using the fuel of libidinal and of destructive instinctual energy for socially acceptable, adaptive purposes with the aid of well-functioning mechanisms that curb, deflect, neutralize, and sublimate the libido. No, once we are dealing with an established self we have moved to an area that is beyond the explanatory power of the libido theory. As soon as we have a self that has been established, we no longer are a psychic apparatus, a machine, but a unit that wished to go its own way, that wishes to express itself, that wishes to reach very specific individually determined goals.

It is my impression – and I have tried to formulate this impression in a specific way – that once the self is formed we should look at it from two different points of view. On the one hand we should see the self as a simple structure – as a content of the mind that is introspectively observable in ourselves and empathically graspable in other people. Even though we consider the self simply as a content of the mental apparatus when we look upon it in this way, we will also recognize that it serves as an organizing factor of some kind. Let us assume that a person is exposed to a particular internal or external stimulus, let us say for instance to a sexual desire. Even if we restrict our conceptualization of the self to considering it simply as one of the contents of a mental apparatus, we will not look at the sexual desire simply in terms of a drive that needs to find an outlet or that needs to be sublimated. As I tried to show you earlier with regard to the anal drive, we will conceive of it as integrated with the totality of the self. The sexual drive becomes, even in this limited conceptualization, related to what a person thinks of himself – the drive concept is broadened to the concept of that person’s experiencing himself as a sexual being with a sexual desire. And insofar as this is the case, the self, even as a content of a mental apparatus, is an important organizing center – it fits into a psychological world that is on the whole controlled by the laws of the pleasure-and-reality principle which are one and the same. (That’s clear to you, isn’t it? I don’t have to expand on this do I? The reality principle and the pleasure principle are a continuum. They are, in essence, one and the same.) We experience and we react under the organizing influence of the self in an organized and not in a chaotic way. The concept of a self is an important conceptual aid in our assessment of man who strives for pleasure, who adapts to a world in which one strives for pleasure and avoids pain.

We have reached a crucial point here, namely the point where the concept of man as a psychic apparatus, even the concept of man as a psychic apparatus that contains a self, becomes unsatisfactory. It explains man searching for more or less sublimated pleasures of various bodily zones – man running after sex or enjoying the sublimated pleasures of anality by painting, or whatever. Man concerned in this particular way is, in principle at least, quite predictable, at least in a long-range way, within the framework of the libido theory and the pleasurable-reality principle. Man will strive for what is realistic and pleasurable. He will predictably avoid something that is realistically painful. His actions will be determined by the pleasure and reality principle, the upshot will be that he wants to come out positively in this pleasure-pain balance. And traditional psychoanalysis aims at assisting man in reaching this goal. But, and this is the crucial point that I mentioned before, all this holds only so long as the self is conceived as a structure within the psychic apparatus, so long as its is conceived as a subordinate structure. But this conceptualization runs counter to an empirical observation that I take seriously: we can, via introspection and empathy, establish the fact that a self exists, that a self comes to exist at a certain point in time, and that it has a specific pattern, a specific program. Let me explain further. Some years ago, in a not yet published unfinished work, I compared the basically programmed self, the aspirations of the nuclear self, with a coiled spring that needs to unwind, with a wound up clock that has to run out. In other words, once the organized self has formed, something in an individual is settled that characterizes him deep down more firmly and more determinedly than all the variants of his character which are explained by the various sublimations and defenses concerning specific drives that have this or that preponderance in an individual. And now the second point of view that I promised you earlier. This is not philosophy; this is not abstract, armchair thinking, this comes from observing people and thinking long and hard about what’s with them. So, the second point of view is that once this basic programming has taken place in an individual – he may not, and he often cannot verbalize what it is, though sometimes he may learn to verbalize it more or less in an analysis -, he is guided by something that he senses as being truly himself. This “me”, this “truly me” that wants to express itself has no choice about its basic patterns and goals. And this basic striving, this specific, individual striving is, I believe, beyond the pleasure principle. What the individual strives for in expressing the pattern of his self is not pleasure. He may manage to attach some kind of libidinal pleasure gain along the way but that is adventitious. The living out of the pattern of the self provides an experience that is different from pleasure, even from the most sublimated forms of pleasure. I’ll use a word for it, even though I know it s a word that will arouse the suspicions of the scientist: the word is “joy”. I am using it to set up a contrast with, to differentiate the experience from pleasure – the joy of self-fulfillment versus the pleasure of even the most sublimated basic sensual desire. Once the self has crystallized, it is not any longer motivational contact with any of the erotogenic zones that may have played a role in determining the form of one or the other of its constituents. It is not related to stimulatable nerve endings. But even the most complex pleasurable experiences can – and to have established this fact is the tremendous success of Freud’s genius and of the work of the other contributors to drive psychology – even the most complex pleasures of our lives can in the last analysis be related back, with all due caution, to elemental experiences such as anal, oral or phallic sexuality. No doubt many of the narcissistic strivings of people rooted in early zonal pleasures. But there is a central sector in the human personality – the specific tension gradient between certain basic ambitions, certain talents and skills, and certain idealized goals – which we experience as one’s self, a central sector of the personality which, once it has been programmed cannot be re-programmed by anyone. You can say that there is a deterministic background concerning the formation of the self. You can describe how it formed, you can say that there are certain endowments that a person is born with – including perhaps zonal dominance. You can say that there is interaction among inherent endowments, between mother and father and brothers and sisters and their specific encouragements and discouragements vis-a-vis the inborn equipment that the child presents to the world, and so forth and so on. And all that is true. Yet once all these interactions have gone on for a certain time something else happens. I’ll use a mechanistic analogy. Something locks into place. From then on the individual has a center, a nucleus – what I have referred to as his nuclear self. From that time on that nuclear self may have difficulty expressing itself and may be only incompletely established, although it is clear how it should be completely established, but mainly it has not yet reached expressible ascendancy over the goals and behavior of the person. And to my mind it is this, it is these virtual goals that once established are beyond the pleasure principle. It is a need to live out a particular curve and to come to a particular end, to reach such an end not masochistically because the self wants to die, and not because the goal is dedifferentiation. The goal is to live out what is most centrally recognized as one’s specific ambitions, one’s specific ideals and one’s specific ways and means of expressing them. I have no doubt that at this particular moment I can say only very crudely definable things about this nuclear self and the curve of its unrolling. I am convinced, however, that side by side with the investigating man as a pleasure-seeking animal, I call him Guilty Man, I think there is another aspect of man that is not pleasure seeking but self-expression seeking man, and I call this aspect of man Tragic Man. I name both in a negative way, taking into account the undeniable fact that man’s failures overshadow his successes. We are generally not able to pursue the pleasures of our senses without disturbing conflicts – Guilty Man; and we are generally not able to live out the central program in ourselves without failing or going to pieces in the process – Tragic Man. I will not defend myself if you ridicule these terms as being just high-flown verbiage. The real issue is not names – they always have great shortcomings. True, the advantage in naming things is that the name fixes an ideal comparatively easily in the mind. But the disadvantage is the oversimplification that a name immediately encourages and that can indeed lead to the destruction of the original idea.

Well we’ve gone a long way today from where we began about concepts of narcissistic disturbances of the self and how they fit into the framework of the libido theory. Our time is up, but we’ll have plenty to talk about next time.