Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self and Literature

Author(s): Ernest S. Wolf

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 12, No. 1, Psychology and Literature: Some Contemporary
Directions (Autumn, 1980), pp. 41-60
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468804
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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

psychoanalysis and literature on the occasion of receiving the

Goethe prize, we are again witnessing the impact of new and
powerful psychoanalytic ideas.1 Not only within the field of clinical
and theoretical psychoanalysis proper but also in their reverberations
in the contiguous fields of art, literature, history, sociology, an-
thropology, and religion, the conceptualization of Heinz Kohut's
psychoanalytic psychology of the self has led to a renewed examina-
tion of the contribution of psychoanalysis to its sister sciences in the
study of man.2 While staying strictly within the classic psychoanalytic
method as developed by Freud and, consequently, within the field of
study as delineated by the applicability of the classic psychoanalytic
method, Kohut has achieved a major expansion of the range of the
phenomena that can come under psychoanalytic scrutiny. He has
facilitated the articulation of psychoanalysis with other contemporary
sciences, bridged the gap between depth psychology and the
humanities, and expanded the applicability of psychoanalysis clini-
cally and in nonclinical areas.
The apparent familiarity yet, pari passu, the surprising novelty of
the outstanding features of Kohut's psychology of the self, being both
continuous with classical Freudian psychoanalysis and yet a decided
departure in a new direction, can perhaps be dramatized in analogy to
the sudden reversal of figure and ground that can occur when an
observer intently yet openly looks at certain geometric configurations.
In depth psychology the changed gestalt resulting when figure and
ground are suddenly inverted comes about by a number of shifts in
attention leading to a new synthesis, i.e.: (1) a shift away from giving

Copyright© 1980 by New LiteraryHistory, The University of Virginia

42 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

primary consideration to the data of objectiveobservation toward the

more subjective data of introspection and empathy; (2) a shift away
from giving primary attention to parts, e.g., to instincts and bodily
zones (which may lead to pars pro toto distortion in perception and
interpretation), toward attempting to grasp the totality of a whole
person (which may lead to superficiality and loss of depth if done
without the requisite prolonged empathic immersion); (3) a shift in
the vantage point of the observer, whether analyst or analysand, away
from looking at the mind from outside, i.e., conceptualized as a mental
apparatus, toward a position where the observer is stationing himself,
so to speak, inside the observed psychological phenomena, i.e., he
empathically (by vicarious introspection) experiences and describes
another's self. These three methodological shifts per se are not
necessarily new in psychoanalysis, but have always been part of the
method of clinical psychoanalysis as practiced by gifted and sensitively
attuned analysts. However, in classic psychoanalytic theory, especially
in the more experience-distant aspects of theory which Freud called
metapsychology, the empathic-subjective-inner aspects of human
psychology were largely only implicit and in the background while the
theory focused on the foreground of a so-called mental apparatus
consisting of parts, such as id, ego, and superego, that are moved by
energic forces, such as libidinal and aggressive drives. The resulting
concepts deal primarily with the issues of conflict, i.e., with drives and
the defenses against them and with the interrelations of the three
agencies of the mind, i.e., id versus ego, ego versus superego, and the
various functions of these mental structures. In this framework
psychological development, in the main, becomes a study of drive
development and of ego development concomitant with resolution of
the inevitable intrapsychic conflict and eventuating in a relatively
conflict-free independence from the environment. Furthermore, in
this schema, the central pathogenic and to some extent inevitable
vicissitude of sexual development pivots around the well-known oedi-
pal conflict.
In psychoanalytic self psychology these issues of drive and defense,
so central in Freudian theory, become peripheral. The central con-
cern now becomes the state of the self, which is seen to result from the
interaction of the developing child's psyche with those functions of
the environment that are needed for their life-sustaining and self-
evoking impact. No longer is the newborn viewed primarily as
helplessly in the grip of powerful sexual and aggressive drive compo-
nents upon which society will impress a host of drive-taming and
adaptive constraints to which the youngster may outwardly submit but
against which he carries on a lifelong inner struggle of self-
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 43

expression-subjectively experienced as inner states and objectively

observed in behavior-that may result in neurotic illness. Rather, now
the neonate is seen as born equipped with sensitive perceptual abilities
and with complex responsive capacities which make the neonate
powerfully evocative in eliciting needed responses from the environ-
ment. From the moment of his birth the infant is in communication
with his surround in an attempt to evoke from the environment the
very responses that will guarantee an adequate supply of the needed
physiological and psychological nourishment. And, as we see it, de-
velopment tends not toward greater independence from the envi-
ronment but toward the facilitation of increasingly smooth recipro-
cally responsive interaction, which in their aggregate effect control
the integration of the individual into an environmental matrix. The
latter offers the physiological and psychological functions needed for
survival, growth, and development. In the realm of psychology this
means the emergence of a self, its strengthening against the vicissi-
tudes of life, and its expansion to fulfillment.
Does then the shift to self psychology, with its accent on the recip-
rocal relations of self and environment, represent a loss of depth, a
loss of the unique contribution that psychoanalysis has brought to the
study of man, and the return of a more superficial social psychology?
Has self psychology abandoned the hard-won insights into the un-
pleasant truths about human nature, especially in its disposition to-
ward ugly and self-destructively untamed aggression and sexuality, in
favor of a more comfortable and compassionate view of man's essen-
tial goodness which is spoiled only by the evils of the world? Is not the
emphasis of self psychology on the psychological need for a respon-
sive other a new resistance against the recognition of the harsh truth
of a universal and timeless but forbidden sexual urge, while at the
same time representing a return of that repressed wish in the dis-
guised form of an apparently scientifically supported social good?
Have we lost our nerve to be scientists and become soft-minded?
To answer these questions I must introduce Kohut's concept of the
"selfobject." Remembering that the observational stance of the self
psychologist is a subjective one, vicarious introspection leads to the
conceptualization of the empirical finding that certain aspects of what
objectively is observed as the environment are often also observed to
be experienced by the self as part of itself. Selfobjects are those as-
pects of the environment that at the same time are part of the self. For
example, a child's ability to function comfortably and age-
appropriately with a subjective sense of well-being and confidence-
in other words, to function as a whole, cohesive self-may, at a par-
ticular time, depend on the presence in the room of its mother. If
44 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

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

time. During the oedipal phase of development, for example, the

healthy youngster's self will joyfully and playfully express his erotic
interests in the parent of the opposite sex pari passu with wishing to
eliminate the parent who is seen as a rival. Such a lusty self-assertion
does not eventuate in neurotic pathology, however, unless the
youngster's self fragments under the impact of excessive inner ten-
sion in consequence of faulty responses from the needed selfobjects.
The untamed drives that are seen by classical psychoanalysis as the
normal givens of sexuality and aggression (and which have to be
restrained by civilizing defenses, at the cost of neurotic illness) turn
out, in the view of self psychology, to be pathological disintegration
products of a weakened self. Neurosis, in this view, is a particular type
of disorder of the self, ensuing from the untoward responses of the
selfobject milieu to the oedipal child's self-expression of its assertive
sensuality. The larger category of disorders of the self encompasses
all those conditions that are characterized by the impairment of the
cohesion, vigor, and harmony of the self. These include the func-
tional psychoses, the borderline states, the narcissistic behavior disor-
ders, and the narcissistic personality disorders.3

II

Psychoanalysis and literature have long found themselves in a

dialogue of mutually enriching yet often quite unsympathetic crit-
icisms since Freud first dared to take his earliest clinical insights into
what Strozier calls the treacherous area of psycholiterature.4 Thus, in
June 1898, upon the urging of his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud read
C. F. Meyer's Die Richterin and rewarded Fliess with a first essay in
applying psychoanalysis to a work of literature.5 Curiously enough, in
this essay, written before The Interpretationof Dreams (1900) and before
the Three Essays on The Theoryof Sexuality (1905), Freud refers to the
neurotic's "so-called family romance (which becomes conscious in
paranoia); on the one hand it serves the need for self-aggrandisement
and on the other as a defense against incest" (my italics). It seems that
Freud at that time recognized, perhaps only fleetingly, the impor-
tance of both the needs of the self and defenses against incestuous
sexuality in the formation of complex psychological structures, such
as fantasies and their concretization in artistic products. To be sure,
Freud's essay on Die Richterin was not published during his lifetime
and would have been destroyed along with all of the correspondence
to Fliess had Freud's explicit directions been obeyed. The Richterin
46 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

essay is thus mainly of historical value, along with numerous other

writings, in testifying to the almost midwifely role played by literature
during the birth of psychoanalysis.
Indeed, K. R. Eissler, a highly respected psychoanalyst and Freud's
biographer, speculates that "Freud may have discovered the oedipus
complex from his study of Shakespeare's tragic hero, as much as from
his observation of clinical cases."6 I would add my own speculation
that Freud found in great literature the needed mirroring and echo-
ing selfobject responses that affirmed his own grandiose self; and he
found in the great writers and their unconquerable literary creativity
the needed idealized selfobjects with whose strength, beauty, and wis-
dom he could merge and which he could reshape into his own values
and ideals.7 Freud loved literature and greatly enriched our under-
standing as well as our appreciation of great works of literary art. He
saw himself as having learned at the feet of the masters. And yet it
seems to me that literature as an enterprise often looks upon
psychoanalysis as some misbegotten and ungrateful child, a runt that
is besmirching and degrading its betters by reducing the products of
their sublime inspirations to nothing but a sum of secretory, excre-
tory, and ejaculatory fantasies. This distorted view of the psycho-
analysis of literature surely does not fit Freud or most psychoanalytic
commentators.
The mutual interest of psychoanalysis and literature in each other
never has waned but is beyond the need of elaborating for the readers
of this journal. Suffice it to say that James Strachey, editor of The
Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Worksof Sigmund Freud,
lists twenty-two separate writings by Freud dealing mainly or largely
with art, literature, or the theory of aesthetics.8 Freud summarized
that

in the exercising of an art [psychoanalysis]sees once again an activity in-

tended to allay ungratified wishes-in the first place in the artist himself and
subsequently in his audience or spectators. The motive forces of artists are the
same conflicts which drive other people into neurosis and have encouraged
society to construct its institutions. Whence it is that the artist derives his
creative capacity is not a question for psychology ... He represents his most
personal wishful fantasies as fulfilled; but they only become a work of art
when they have undergone a transformation which softens what is offensive
in them, conceals their personal origin and, by obeying the laws of beauty,
bribes other people with a bonus of pleasure. Psychoanalysis has no difficulty
in pointing out, alongside the manifest part of artistic enjoyment, another
that is latent though far more potent, derived from the hidden sources of
instinctual liberation. The connection between the impressions of the artist's
childhood and his life history on the one hand and his works, as reactions to
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 47

those impressions, on the other is one of the most attractive subjects of ana-
lytic examination.9

Twenty years later Freud's last comment on literature spelled out

his final outlook most succinctly: "Investigations of this kind are not
intended to explain an author's genius, but they show what motive
forces aroused it and what material was afforded to him by destiny."10
At the time of Freud's statement psychoanalysis had already begun
to move into a new phase of development, which had been heralded
by Freud's important The Ego and The Id (1923) and by Anna Freud's
The Ego and The Mechanismsof Defense (1946). The accent was to shift
from paying almost exclusive attention to instinctual forces toward a
broader appreciation of the variety of ways in which the ego managed
to cope with these forces. In an oversimplified manner, one might say
that a phase of id psychology was followed by a phase of ego psychol-
ogy. Similarly, in the psychoanalytic approach to literature more at-
tention was paid to the ego and its role in the fashioning of works of
art. Ego psychology stressed the problem-solving tasks. The perfec-
tion, elegance, and economy of means received due recognition in the
so-called ego aspects of beauty.11 Essentially, however, ego-
psychological approaches to literature represented a refinement
rather than an advance on Freud's more id-oriented analysis.

III

Kohut's 1966 publication of "Forms and Transformations of Nar-

cissism" may be designated as launching a third phase of
psychoanalysis, namely a self psychology phase (SS, pp. 427-60). To
be sure, the importance of the self had been approached by
Hartmann, Jacobson, Spitz, Winnicott, George Klein, Lichtenstein,
and others. Kohut's conceptualizations, however, brought forth the
first encompassing theory of the self. In the following I shall examine
the impact of the psychology of the self on the psychoanalytic in-
terpretation of literature.
Kohut's first effort in applied psychoanalysis, indeed, his first psy-
choanalytic paper, was his 1948 essay on Mann's Death in Venice, which
was, however, not published until 1957, after Mann's death.12 Though
the writing of this essay preceded Kohut's conceptualization of the
psychology of the self by almost two decades, one can already discern
pointers into the future direction of his theorizing. Kohut, in har-
mony with classical psychoanalytic views, discussed at length Aschen-
bach's neurotic conflicts. But he then consigned them to peripheral
48 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

consideration by stating that "the decisive threat to Aschenbach's de-

fensive system, is, however, caused neither by the traces of envious
hostility against Tadzio nor by the hatred against the father but by the
breakdown of sublimated homosexual tenderness. Aschenbach's last
dream is an expression of the breakdown of sublimation; it describes
the destruction of the whole cultural structure of a lifetime" (SS, p.
125). Implicit are the secondary role of sexuality and aggression, in
life as well as in factors motivating artistic creativity. The central
theme of Kohut's essay, namely that Death in Venice deals with the
disintegration of artistic sublimation (or, to put it into the language of
present-day self psychology, the fragmentation of a creative self) is
elevated, already in 1948, into the subtitle of the essay. The fate of a
disintegrating self, as Kohut would conceptualize it now, becomes
symptomatologically evident in the emergence of sexuality and
aggression as distorted disintegration products. In 1948 he prefigured
this later conceptualization in the comment about "the nearly un-
checked onrush of unsublimated homosexual desire in the aging
[Aschenbach]" (SS, p. 125). Kohut returned to his essay on Death in
Venice in 1976:

While in his childhood [Aschenbach] must still have been in severe

jeopardy-his childhood self had been insufficiently sustained by his envi-
ronment and had been in danger of fragmentation-he had later become
capable of providing himself with the needed experience of psychological
perfection and wholeness-i.e., the experience of basic self-esteem-through
the creation of works of art. Extensions or duplications of the self were now
available which he could invest with narcissistic libido: he could give them
formal perfection. But, as the story begins, this ability is being lost. The artist
is aging, and his power to create replicas of the perfect self is waning. On the
way to total disintegration, however-and here lies the focus of the
novella-we see the revival of the sexualized precursor of the artistic product:
the beautiful boy (though frail and already marked for destruction) who is the
symbolic stand-in for the core of the still unaltered childhood self which
craves love and admiration (SS, pp. 821-22).

Ornstein adds that one "might see Aschenbach's desperate and

uncontrollable longing for Tadzio as an attempt to ward off the ulti-
mate disintegration of his artistic self with the archaic, crudely
sexualized relationship. Tadzio is the archaic selfobject in relation to
whom Aschenbach is to regain the beauty, perfection, and creativity
of his own youth" (SS, p. 11).
Kohut had returned to his interest in Thomas Mann in 1957-
before even his own essay on Death in Venicehad been published-when
he discussed Hirschbach's The Arrow and the Lyre (SS, p. 256). In this
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 49

discussion Kohut is impressed by the precarious psychological ad-

justment, narcissistic regression, and hypochondriacal preoccupation
of many of Mann's heroes, especially those created during the early
part of Mann's creative life. Kohut speculates that Mann may have
faced serious emotional problems and that the "schematic shadowi-
ness" of some of the characters he created-characters who are
threatened by disintegration-might have a relation to Mann's inner
conflicts that could not be completely bound in artistic creativity. Ex-
pressing the same idea in terms of contemporary self psychology, I
might conceptualize the "schematic shadowiness" as a reflection of the
subjective experience of Mann's vulnerable self in its attempt to
maintain a hold on some sort of structure by recourse to identifying
with the security of conventionality. And, indeed, it was only the later
and psychologically more cohesive, i.e., less vulnerable Mann who had
freed himself sufficiently of the mores of the solid German Burger to
create such characters as Joseph and Felix Krull, characters which
Kohut sees in narcissistic balance. Kohut's reinterpretation of Death in
Venice may, therefore, be designated as paradigmatic for the applica-
tion of self psychologically-informed psychoanalysis to the study of
literature. Far from being primarily products of conflict and
psychopathology, the created work of art may become an aspect of the
creator's self; it may express the deepest longings and aspirations of
the self; it may communicate the insights achieved and it may depict
the various states of the self.
Kohut's interest in Mann has continued, and I am tempted to
suggest, in analogy to Eissler's speculation about Freud's inspirations
by literature, that Kohut's concepts similarly might have been inspired
as much by his literary heroes as by his clinical experience. Thus, in
the Hirschbach discussion, Kohut still talks about Mann's inner con-
flicts, but the whole tenor of the discussion emphasizes narcissistic
preoccupations, i.e., preoccupations with self, of both author and the
characters he creates (SS, p. 256).
The shift in Kohut's stance is taken a step further in a 1960 panel
discussion "Childhood Experience and Creative Imagination." The
inadequacy of a conflict psychology to explain creativity is stated ex-
plicitly for the first time: "Creative personalities share with the rest of
humanity all varieties of conflicts and psychopathology, and I do not
believe that either psychopathology or conflict can alone account for
productivity" (SS, pp. 271-74). Rather, "in order to safeguard his
psychoeconomic balance (in today's terms: the structure and balance
of his self), the creative personality is compelled to employ creative
activity to a greater extent than the person who is more successful in
absorbing immediate impressions and their inner elaborations
50 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

through reliable neutralizing and buffering structures." Here Kohut

implies that the greater sensitivity and vulnerability of the artist de-
mand artistic creativity as a self-protective act.
One other paper deserves mention here, though it was written be-
fore Kohut began to publish his ideas on self psychology. In "Beyond
the Bounds of the Basic Rule," the fundamental issues regarding the
application of psychoanalysis to literature are discussed (SS, pp.
275-303). He sharply criticizes the amateurishness and reductionism
of some psychoanalytic critics. He outlines three potential shortcom-
ings of applied psychoanalytic work: "Those relating to the qualifica-
tions of the worker, those emanating from the subject matter and
from the methods of investigations that are employed, and those per-
taining to the validity of the goals that applied analysis attempts to
achieve." Concerning the first, Kohut recommends that, ideally, the
worker in applied analysis should be proficient in two fields, i.e.,
psychoanalysis and the particular branch of the humanities in which
the research is done. The second problem relates to the method of
investigation employed and arises from the circumstance that applied
analysis must proceed without free association, the central instrument
for the investigation of the unconscious, and without the free inter-
play of interpretation, resistance, and transference supported by
therapeutic incentive. Finally, Kohut wonders about the aim of
applied psychoanalysis. "Do we contribute anything of importance to
the understanding of great men and of their creations when we apply
our psychoanalytic clinical insights to this nonclinical subject matter?"
(SS, pp. 279-81). In elaborating on these important problems Kohut
is not yet ready to give unequivocal answers but points to the progress
in psychoanalytic investigation accruing from ego psychology and
from the study of autonomous ego functions. The limitations of
applied psychoanalysis are thus faced, albeit with an optimistic hint
that advances will be made. Indeed, the developments in self psychol-
ogy that were to come have taken us a big step further, though meth-
odological problems remain.
The psychology of the self emerged first in Kohut's published
writings with his 1966 article "Forms and Transformations of Narcis-
sism" (SS, pp. 427-60). It is interesting to note that beginning with
this essay, Kohut, like Freud before him, frequently used literary
references to illustrate the new concepts derived from insights gained
in his clinical practice. Thus, for example, Kohut quotes from Trol-
lope's Barchester Towers to borrow the imagery that will allow the
reader to participate affectively in the mother-baby dialogue, and
thus the reader learns about the new conceptualizations by ex-
periencing them.
However, it would be a serious error to conclude that the use of
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 51

literary vignettes as illustrations to explain the new formulations had

no further importance. In fact, the illustrations and the new theory
mutually enrich each other: not only do we grasp the ideas clearly
with the aid of the vivid images evoked by the literary reference, but
we also find our understanding of the artist and his artistic product
greatly enhanced as we discern new meanings.13 In a similar fashion,
Kohut refers to Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and to Melville's Moby-Dick,
when discussing endless hate and lust for revenge, as "two literary
masterpieces that deal with this theme-not as rigorous, scientific
explorations, of course, but with the freedom an artistic medium
provides" (SS, pp. 531, 616-17). Kohut has always been fascinated by
Kleist, and the problem of On the Puppet Theater became for him a
stimulus to investigate the vicissitudes of body narcissism, particularly
the vulnerability of normal self-expressive exhibitionism (SS, pp.
615-16).
A major contribution to the psychoanalysis of literature are Kohut's
brief but penetrating comments on Hamlet. Without denying the de-
mand on the ego from Hamlet's oedipal tensions, which had been the
central pivot for Freud's and Jones's interpretations, Kohut adds that
"the oedipal conflicts by themselves, however, cannot explain the ex-
tent and the nature of the traumatic state from which Hamlet suf-
fers."14He then delineates the origin and fate of that traumatic state
as, in essence, a temporary overburdenedness and fragmentation of a
self injured in its "central values" or, to put it into more contemporary
terminology, a bipolar self with a shattered pole of ideals.
Even as early as 1964 Kohut's interest in the tumultuous and dra-
matic turmoil of youth also had led him to comment on Romeo and
Juliet (SS, pp. 859-60). Even then Kohut "had a hunch" that the two
young lovers were motivated primarily by an imperious need for love
and affection which was the result of gross parental failure. For as the
play makes clear, the parents were so totally absorbed in their feuding
with each other that they had no concern left to spare for their chil-
dren. The children, in their state of deprivation, turned to each other
for the needed selfobject responses whose caring would sustain them.
In their fragmented state these needs become sexualized and are
enacted as brother and sister incest. For it is Kohut's suggestion that
the play really portrays the events in a family where parental overin-
volvement with each other, for whatever reason, leaves the children
without adequate selfobject responses (personal communication).
There is a warning here for contemporary families which breed in
our over-medicated culture, perhaps not so much brother-sister incest
but a turning to drugs, with the danger of addiction, in the quest for
selfobject responsiveness.
The focus on the self has also yielded insights into recent and con-
52 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

temporary art. The Romeo and Juliet theme of children turning to

forbidden satisfaction when parents, i.e., the sustaining selfobjects,
are removed also informs Cocteau's Enfants Terribles(SS, p. 860). In-
deed, Kohut comes close to defining the art which deals with the
problems of the crumbling or deeply injured self as "modern" art (RS,
p. 290). He proposes the hypothesis of artistic anticipation, i.e., the
great artist "is ahead of his time in focusing on the nuclear
psychological problem of his era" (SS, pp. 680-81; RS, pp. 285-86).
The artist stands in proxy for his generation. For the artist not only
brings to his creative work his individual motivation, but also expresses
the leading psychological problems of his day (RS, p. 288). Among
the many artists, not only literary but also painters, sculptors, and
musicians, Kohut repeatedly comes back to Franz Kafka, Marcel
Proust, and Eugene O'Neill. Kafka's Mr. K is everyman exposed to un-
empathic indifference by family and, therefore, grotesquely grandi-
ose and estranged from the world (SS, pp. 680, 780). The cold voices,
the lack of responsive mirroring, leaving nobody around to whom one
can turn, result in the loss of cohesion that transforms Samsa into the
paralyzed, almost inanimate insect of the Metamorphosis(SS, pp. 743
n., 872). Proust enables Kohut to illustrate a shift in the use of mem-
ory. In contrast to the Freudian use of the recovered recollections as a
means to resolve remaining neurotic conflicts, Kohut points out that
the Proustian recovery of the past is in the service of healing the
discontinuity of the self by bringing past, present, and future into
meaningful relation (RS, pp. 181, 288 n.). O'Neill appears to be the
representative par excellence among modern writers, for Kohut re-
fers to him on several occasions as giving the clearest expression of
modern man's problems (in The Great God Brown): "Man is born bro-
ken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue" (SS, pp. 780-81).
Indeed, the infant is born as a collection of uncoordinated pieces of
biological urges, appetites, and reflexes which are designed to be
glued together into a self, a human way of living, by the unearned
grace of being appropriately responded to by the parental selfobjects.
In a survey like this I can only touch upon the highlights in the
exposition of Kohut's encounter with literature. In a correspondence
with a well-known Germanist, Erich Heller, the issues of the role of
psychoanalysis, especially a psychoanalysis informed by the insights of
a psychology of the self, are brought into the foreground of a discus-
sion which had been precipitated by a scolding challenge to
psychoanalysis (SS, pp. 908-27). Kohut here grapples with a critic
whose deep distrust of science, particularly in its valueless and
nonhuman mechanistic forms, prejudicially distorts his approach to
psychoanalysis. Kohut's plea for an open-minded examination of
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 53

psychoanalytic self psychology by all humanists reverberates with his

call to his psychoanalytic colleagues for a new dedication to the values
of an empathic science (SS, pp. 663-84, 685-724).
Ornstein has already pointed out that Kohut's work on narcissism
provided a new theoretical framework for decisive advances in our
understanding of creativeness and the creative process (SS, p. 85). In
clinical psychoanalysis the working through of the selfobject trans-
ference often permits the emergence of a revived or of a newly dis-
covered creativity. Kohut had stated in 1966 that the creative activity
itself deserves to be considered among the transformations of narcis-
sism (SS, p. 446). His 1976 article "Creativeness, Charisma, Group
Psychology" presented a systematic conceptualization of the creative
process, and he proposed the thesis "that during periods of intense
creativity (especially during its early stages) certain creative persons
require a specific relationship with another person-a transference of
creativity-which is similar to what establishes itself during the psy-
choanalytic treatment" of certain self disorders.15 The implication
here, however, is not that creative people are sick, but rather, as
Kohut states explicitly, "the psychic organization of some creative
people is characterized by a fluidity of the basic narcissistic configura-
tions" (SS, p. 815). By his strong emphasis on the process of creativity,
Kohut had begun to free the psychoanalytic consideration of cre-
ativeness from the limitations of considering only the motivating
forces emanating from instinctual sources that found their repre-
sentation in the content of the creative work. A more encompassing
view of man as creator emerged and was stated in 1977: "Indeed, I
believe that we can even be grateful for the fact that the disturbed
wholeness of our self will never be fully and permanently restored-
neither by religion and philosophy nor by science and art-because it
is the very incompleteness of man's self, O'Neill's 'Man is born bro-
ken,' that spurs him to his greatest achievements, that keeps alive in
him, to the end of time, the attempt to recapture the lost wholeness of
his self" (SS, p. 926).

IV

I believe it is no exaggeration to state that the publication of Kohut's

early papers on narcissism and especially of his book The Analysisof the
Self had a fertilizing and liberating impact on many of his colleagues.
In this section I shall survey briefly some of the many publications
that began to pour forth, revealing the almost immediate application
of Kohut's concepts to history and literature.
54 NEW LITERARY HIS TORY

A discussion of a recently discovered correspondence of the ado-

lescent Freud by Gedo and Wolf presented a new view of Freud's
infatuation with Gisela Fluss as an aspect of an adolescent self's need
for idealizable objects.16 But more than a personal history seen
through the eyes of self psychology, Gedo and Wolf emphasized
Freud's youthful literary efforts here as an expression of talents
nourished by admiration for great writers of the past and as per-
forming a vital function in stabilizing Freud through the turmoil of
adolescence. This same theme was further elaborated by an investiga-
tion of the role of Freud's immersion into Cervantes's writings as an
idealized selfobject for Freud's developing values.17 The dependence
of the mature Freud's scientific creativity on a "transference of
creativity" was reflected by Wolf, who demonstrated a parallel artistic,
literary creativity.18 The study of Freud's adolescence as revealed in
youthful epistolary writings, combined with clinical experience and
now illuminated by the psychology of the self, produced a new ap-
preciation of adolescent transformations of the self.19The insights thus
gained brought in their wake a renewed inquiry into Hamlet's mad-
ness.20 The work of Gedo and Wolf demonstrates the fruitful interac-
tion among literary-historical studies, clinical explorations, and psy-
choanalytic theory: there results an expansion along all the con-
tributing parameters. Freud's adolescent writings seen through a
perspective that was widened by new theoretical concepts of an
emerging self psychology allowed a deeper and therefore more in-
sightful immersion into the literary-historical data. The empathic, i.e.,
vicariously introspective, data available to the investigators, which
gave them some access into the inner life of Freud, could now be
explained more meaningfully in context with other historical studies
of Freud and of the origins of psychoanalysis. Contemporary clinical
experience as well as the investigators' analysis of their own
psychological histories then can come together with the empathic data
in forming new interpretations, new theoretical excursions, and can
lead to confirmation or rejection of given theories.
Marian Tolpin began a self psychological reconsideration of some
classical myths by elaborating the transformations of Daedalus's ar-
chaic grandiosity, with some interesting associations to Tolstoy and
Churchill.21 Continuing their Freud studies, creativity and the phe-
nomenon of the doppelgdnger,as experienced by Freud, were also seen
as vicissitudes of transformations of the self by Wolf and Trosman.22
Freud's scientific theories, his world view, and his early struggle to
emerge as a self were brought into relation by Wolf and Nebel.23
Jerome Kavka and Bernard Green brought the self psychological ap-
proach to Oscar Wilde and to a study of the American poet Edwin
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 55

Arlington Robinson.24 An essay on Sylvia Plath by Sanford Weisblatt

delineated the narcissistic elements in certain of her poems.25
Wolf used the main character in Bll's novel The Clown as a case
history illustrating some of the dynamics of a narcissistic personality
disorder.26 In the "Disconnected Self" he turned his attention to
Kafka, Sartre, and Virginia Woolf. "Samsa, Roquentin and Clarissa
illustrate Kohut's concepts of self, of selfobject, of cohesion, and of
fragmentation much asJensen's Gradiva illustrated Freud's theories."27
Virginia Woolf, in her sensitivity to self-disorder, especially of her
own self, and in her genius for subtle expression of self-experience,
has expanded and enriched the world in which all of us live. More
even than Proust or Joyce, she wrote the modern novel of self-
experience par excellence forty years before psychoanalysts began to
study this experience systematically.28
All of the authors of applied self psychological writings discussed
above were psychoanalysts whose literary expertise is limited. How-
ever, a similar interest in Kohut's concepts has been emerging among
critical scholars in the field of literature. For example, Yeats:The Poet-
ics of the Self by David Lynch is a full-length investigation dealing with
the questions raised by the application of clinical theory to art.29
Daniel Dervin has summarized some of the current trends.30 Norman
Holland, a well-known scholar informed by psychoanalysis in his crit-
ical studies, appears to be reaching similar conclusions about a needed
self psychological approach to literature, though he represents a dif-
ferent psychoanalytic revisionary theory than Kohut.31

What does all this activity of interpreting and reinterpreting from

the point of view of self psychology mean? Is anything gained, really,
by cranking the data of psychoanalytically informed observation of
literary texts and backgrounds through one set of psychoanalytic
theories rather than through another one? To be sure, in the pre-
ceding parts of this essay I have indicated some partial answers to
these questions. But something much more important is at stake here
than a competition between alternative interpretations. Which theory
represents more faithfully and more comprehensively the
psychodynamic processes that find expression in works of art is an
important question but finally an empirical one. More significantly,
the issue here, it seems to me, is alternative views of man: is man in
society the crippled victim of the socializing process, who produces
civilization-including art, literature, and religion-as symptomatic of
56 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the injury to his naturally savage state, or is man, born incomplete,

forever striving in interaction with his fellow man to complete and
express himself through the creation of an ever-expanding culture?
No clear-cut answer can be given. Freud seems to lean more in the
direction of culture as a symptom, Kohut more in the direction of
culture as man's expressed wholeness. According to Freud, man is
born relatively helpless, with dangerous instincts, especially his sexual
and aggressive propensities, which society must tame or perish;
civilization is bought at the price of neurosis. Kohut, in contrast, sees
man born ready to confront his surround in an active dialogue
through which man creates his self as part of the world and creates
the world as part of his self. The neonate together with his parental
selfobjects forms a functional unit out of which emerges the child's
sense of himself and of his world. Soon, very soon, he begins to insert,
playfully, artifacts into this self-selfobject constellation: the sight of a
sparkling toy, the sound of a rattle, the feel of a security blanket
become a part of the self, as do the smile on a mother's face or the
gleam in a father's eye. The child creates a more perfect self-selfobject
relationship, i.e., a more complete self, out of the media over which he
exercises increasing control. Can we distinguish the future artist? I
think not, and certainly not yet. What causes the lifelong unyielding
commitment to a particular medium that makes a painter, or a musi-
cian, or a writer? Is it inborn talent, or some special sensitivity, or
some subtle encouragement by the surround, or some need to com-
pensate for lack of control and loss and pain, or a combination of
these? Perhaps some future empirical studies will answer these ques-
tions. In the meantime we, the artist's audience, can resonate in our
own never-ending quest to create and complete our selfs with the
artist's similar quest as it is enacted by him with his work of art.
The artistic experience of the producers as well as the consumers of
art usually contains an element of imagination. While the work of art
is real, it also commonly evokes what can only be called an illusion:
"Yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagi-
nation that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which
constitutes poetic faith."32A psychoanalytic psychology of the self can
illuminate, somewhat, the origin and the function of the willing sus-
pension of disbelief which allows a poetic faith. For, it seems to me, it
originates in the illusion, entered into willingly by both parent and
child-i.e., by the self-selfobject unit, even if only for a moment-
that "here we are, together, the most beautiful child and the most per-
fect parent." Similar emotional constellations form the core of certain
artistic experiences. Freud had noted in works of art allusions to being
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 57

"under the protection of a special Providence" and quoted the Viennese

dramatist Anzengruber's favorite line, "Nothing can happen to me!"
Freud goes on: "It seems to me, however, that through this revealing
characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His
Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and every story."33
Freud also talked about "His Majesty the Baby" and the "compulsion
[of affectionate parents] to ascribe every perfection to the child-
which sober observation would find no occasion to do-and to conceal
and forget all his shortcomings."34 Freud's "Seine Majestat das Ich"
would be translated more correctly as "His Majesty the Self," and I
would suggest that Freud's "hero alike of every day-dream and every
story" refers to "a strong experience in the present [which] awakens in
the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually be-
longing to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish
which finds its fulfillment in the creative work. The work itself exhib-
its elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old
memory."35To which I would add that "the old memory" refers to His
Majesty the Baby-not to the vicissitudes of childhood instinctual life,
as Freud most likely would have meant by "wish," but to a wish, even
an imperious urge, to create and fulfill his emerging self.
Such illusions of unique and blissfully superlative excellence are
not only a common but a necessary experience in the developmental
history of firm and cohesive selfs. Like all selfobject needs, this one
also does not disappear altogether but finds adult form in continued
participation in the illusory aspects of artistic experiences. Artist and
audience willingly join in illusions which create moments of sustaining
selfobject ambience. The mother who refuses to enter into this con-
spiracy of illusion with her child and who instead confronts it with the
debunking reality of the child's smallness, weakness, or its other in-
numerable shortcomings will crush the developing self and surely
plant the seeds for future self-disorder. The values of the scientific
laboratory-the cold, hard facts-are superbly productive of scientific
truths but totally unsuited for the creation of the human qualities of
life. In this latter endeavor art and illusion have always played an
ameliorative and sometimes even a healing role in ministering to
painfully incomplete or injured selfs by providing a sustaining self-
object ambience in which the incomplete self-and all selfs are more
or less deficient--can find moments of wholeness. Freud's total com-
mitment to the truth as the uppermost of all values prevented him
from fully harvesting his rich insights into the creative process. For he
failed to appreciate clearly that the infantile illusion was, indeed, real-
ity, i.e., the infant's psychic reality, a reality that is absolutely necessary
for the establishment of the child's firmly cohesive self and, I would
58 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

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.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL

NOTES

1 Sigmund Freud, "Address Delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfurt" (1930),

StandardEdition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey
(London, 1953-74), XXI, 208-12. Hereafter cited as StandardEdition.
PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY 59

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

24 Jerome Kavka, "Oscar Wilde's Narcissism," Annual of Psychoanalysis, 3 (1975),

397-408, and "The Suicide of Richard Cory: An Explication of the Poem by Edwin
Arlington Robinson," Annual of Psychoanalysis,4 (1976), 497-500; Bernard Green, "The
Effects of Distortions of the Self: A Study of The Picture of Dorian Gray," Annual of
Psychoanalysis,7 (1979), 391-410.
25 Sanford Weisblatt, "The Creativity of Sylvia Plath's Ariel Period: Toward Origins
and Meanings," Annual of Psychoanalysis,5 (1977), 379-404.
26 Ernest S. Wolf, "Narzissmus," in Psychologiefiir Nicht-Psychologen,ed. Hans Jiirgen
Schultz (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1974), pp. 256-65.
27 Ernest S. Wolf, "The Disconnected Self," in Psychoanalysis,Creativity,and Literature,
ed. Alan Roland (New York, 1978), pp. 103-14.
28 Ernest S. Wolf and Ina Wolf, "We Perished,Each Alone. ..."
29 David Lynch, Yeats: The Poetics of the Self (Chicago, 1979).
30 Daniel Dervin, "Introduction: The State of the Question," PsychoculturalReview, 3
(1979), 227-30; "Myself Must I Remake: Psychoanalysis of the Self in Literature,"
PsychoculturalReview, 3 (1979), 267-88.
31 Norman Holland, "Hermia's Dream," Annual of Psychoanalysis,7 (1979), 369-89.
32 Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in SelectedPoetry and Prose, ed. and introd.
Donald A. Stauffer (New York, 1951), p. 264.
33 Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (1908), Standard Edition, IX,
141-54, esp. pp. 149-50.
34 Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914), StandardEdition, XIV, 63- 102,
esp. p. 91.
35 Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," IX, 151.
36 Ibid., p. 144.