Looking
Beyond the Libido for the Lost Ego Instincts

In the preface to Where Do We
Fall When We Fall in Love, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl summarizes her written
production to date by dividing it into three phases, each one lasting roughly a
decade of her life and matching the dominant role of each:  philosopher,
biographer, psychoanalyst.  It is not that as a psychoanalyst she has outgrown
the first two roles, but rather that the motivating questions–retrospectively
seen as focusing on the possibilities of change–endure throughout her career
and its various turns. This current book–a collection of essays–reflects the
ways in which these questions about change play out in Young-Bruehl’s clinical
psychoanalytic work.   Like Young-Bruehl’s prefatory career scansion, the book
is divided into three rather distinct parts, each of which turns around a
coherent and cohesive topic. Although any of the three could be read and
enjoyed independently, each nonetheless plays into the others, repeating,
re-framing and building upon a common set of concerns that could be distilled
into the rather general ideas of relationality and cherishment, or the more
specific idea of a revivification of Freud’s ego instincts.

In Young-Bruehl’s own words, these
essays "celebrate (and theorize about) the Growth Principle."
Young-Bruehl arrived at the concept of the Growth Principle in a collaborative
effort with Faith Bethelard, co-author of the book Cherishment: A Psychology
of the Heart 2000). Young-Bruehl calls this collaboration the "matrix"
from which all of the current essays have grown, and indeed, three out of the
six essays that compose Part I, entitled "Cherishment Psychology,"
are co-authored with Bethelard.  The three essays of Part II, "Sexual and
Gender Identity," work with the same or related concepts in order to
reconsider the long-standing psychoanalytic question of female sexuality, with
particular emphasis on female homosexuality.  Part III, "Character Theory
and Its Applications," employs these concepts to revisit and re-fertilize
ground Young-Bruehl covered previously in her work on characterology (Creative
Characters, 1991; The Anatomy of Prejudices, 1996).

Part I

Young-Bruehl’s opening essay, "Where
Do We Fall When We Fall in Love?", begins with a straight-talking critique
of the discourse on love dominating contemporary public spheres in the U.S.,
namely a sociobiological, neo-Darwinian evolutionism.  According to
Young-Bruehl, this discourse offers a reassuring scientific causality–for
example, that humans are hard-wired to love as we do–while leaving aside the
importance of psychological phenomena.  As she writes, "they obscure what
it is in sexual passion that so often leads not to attachment but to
impossibilities of attachment, whether tragic or comic or tragicomic." To
combat this popular obfuscation of the psychic, Young-Bruehl lays out one of
the ideas Darwin and Freud shared, the notion of instincts.  More specifically,
two instinct systems, one serving reproduction or species preservation (Freud’s
sexual instincts) and the other concerned with self-preservation (Freud’s ego
instincts). 

Here emerges the crux of the
argument that Young-Bruehl will continue to develop throughout this collection,
from various historical, cultural and therapeutic vantage points: the ego
instincts must be recuperated and re-imagined if we are to come to a fuller
understanding and experience of love and attachment.  Put in Young-Bruehl’s
terms, "the fundamental aim of the ego instincts is ‘growing,’ or ‘developing,’
which not only requires relatedness rather than aloneness, but is relatedness."
By positing a Growth Principle that would take its place alongside the Reality
and Pleasure Principles, Young-Bruehl hopes to provide psychoanalysis with a "wider
concept of object relations."

 In almost every essay of this
collection, Young-Bruehl recounts the story of Freud’s shifting views of the
instincts, as well as the development of theories of the instincts in
succeeding generations and schools of psychoanalysis. As she relates it, Freud
initially used the terms "affectionate current" and "sensual
current" to describe the ego instincts and the sexual instincts
respectively. He quickly revised his thinking such that the libido–naming not
just the sexual instincts, but all instinctual functioning–becomes the primary
instinct and the basis for the theoretical model of all instinctual life. Freud’s
next theoretical modification occurs in his post-1920 dual instinct theory with
the life instinct  (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos). Young-Bruehl
maintains that Freud lost sight of the ego-instinctual, affectionate current.
Here she champions the specificity of the ego instincts as well as their
sometimes conflictual, sometimes harmonious relationship to the sexual
instincts throughout an individual’s lifetime. 

As several of the subtitles in Part
I demonstrate–"The Lost Thread of Freudian Theory," "The Hidden
History of the Ego Instincts "–the project of Young-Bruehl (and Bethelard,
when co-authored) is framed as a recuperation of something that was already
there but overlooked or unsatisfactorily developed. The latter essay tracks the
history of the ego instincts and how they were ignored or developed by Freud’s
contemporaries (Adler, Jung, Ferenczi) as well as by those who followed (Balint,
Klein, Winnicott). Another essay focuses on the work of the Budapest School,
particularly that of Ferenczi and Balint.  Young-Bruehl further chooses to
align her view of the ego instincts with the work of the Japanese psychoanalyst
Takeo Doi.  Doi’s work on amae, which Young-Bruehl and Bethelard translate
as "cherishment," informs their earlier collaboration, and amae is
featured here as an issue that is not just theoretical, but cultural; that is,
it becomes a question of our daily lives.

Part II

Part II opens with a metahistorical
account of "women and psychoanalysis."   Young-Bruehl argues that the
metapsychological fixation on sexual difference as based on stable dyads has
limited our ability to fully explore sexuality.  Noting that we are in a time
where the pluralization of psychoanalytic concepts is well under way (for
example, one speaks of identifications, of processes of object choices rather
than constant, fixed ones), Young-Bruehl advocates for a similar flexibility in
the metapsychology. This is evident in her quite perspicacious assessment of
the counter-arguments feminists have used against Freud’s supposedly sexist
emphasis on sexual difference.  Comparing Freud’s and his critics’ positions on
sexuality to reversal and disavowal, Young-Bruehl looks for an exit from what
she sees as the impasse of "one-cause thinking in combination with sex
stereotyping."  Instead of the re-vamped but still limited question "[h]ow
are men and women different (or the same)?" that Young-Bruehl considers as
too often dominating the psychological domain, she ends her essay with the
following question: "In what ways (plural is crucial) do woman and men of
all sorts–all developmental courses, all characters, all pathologies–grow
from the original (and historically influenced) condition of dependency, and
what roles do sexual differences (also historically influenced and interpreted)
play in those ways of development and become influenced, in turn, by those ways
of development?". 

The next two essays of this section
continue to raise questions about the nature of human sexualities.  In the
first essay the focus is "bisexuality" in the history of
psychoanalysis, as well as in sexology (Krafft-Ebing, Ulrichs, Kinsey).
Young-Bruehl shows that Freudian theory allows a positing of three bisexuality
domains–sex, gender, kind of object choice–and subsequently contends that the
last of the three has been ignored or misrecognized.  Moreover, she believes
the emphasis should be on the object as much as on the choice, that is, on the
object’s own inner life and type of object choice.  Taking up the complex
multiplicities of structuration again, particularly in considering sociocultural
factors, Young-Bruehl argues for a more variegated view of the bisexualities. 

The final essay of Part II explores
the psychoanalytic history of "the female homosexual" and explains
how recent work has loosened the rigidity of this stereotyped sexual position.
Young-Bruehl contends that if Freud had not let go of his earliest idea of ego
instincts, the possibility of a multi-line developmental schema might have
opened a more promising future for female sexuality and less of an inclination
to view homosexuality as narcissistically pathological.  Offering her own
clinical work with lesbian patients as examples, Young-Bruehl articulates a
striking view of the need to look at identifications based not only on sexual
and mental characteristics, but also on affectional ones. 

Part III

Part Three’s emphasis on characterology
does not leave behind the question of homosexuality, but instead opens it to
the larger dynamics of culture in the essay "Homophobias: A Diagnostic and
Political Manual."  Along with an essay on the "Characters of
Violence," this work looks at character types as determining factors in
types of prejudices. Although Young-Bruehl  has written extensively on
character, this section is far from a re-hashing of old work, as she
convincingly argues that too much current research and public discourse on
violence, particularly on violent adolescents, looks for a "one-cause"
answer. This short essay contemplates the sociological and scientific
discussions about violence and delineates a characterological way of viewing
different types of violence that includes clinical vignettes.

The last essay of Part III, "Psychoanalysis
and Characterology," turns character theory upon itself, exploring the
competing histories of characterology–namely those springing from the Freudian
and Jungian traditions, including John Bowlby’s attachment theory–to show that
there is more complementarity than competitiveness to be found.  Summarily
tracing characterology from classic Greece to Myers-Briggs, Young-Bruehl
delineates three main types–dyadic, triadic/triangular, and fourfold (the one
that she seems to advocate as a more balanced version).  Young-Bruehl takes a
step beyond simple categorization and into what she terms a reflexive turn,
however, when she contends that thinkers of a certain character type produce characterologies
of the same type: that is, hysterics who see the world in terms of conflict
produce dyadic characterologies.  This reflexivity–turning psychoanalytic
technique back onto its own theoretical production–brings with it a new kind
of flexibility that banks on the ability of individuals and theories to
grow into less rigid characters.

The final essay of the book, "Amae
in Ancient Greece," coauthored with Joseph Russo, feels like an addition
to the work as a whole rather than an extension of Part III.  In fact, this
essay functions as a final tug on the needle that would sew the sections on female
sexuality and characterology back to the opening work on cherishment and
recovering the ego instincts.  Perhaps fittingly, then, this essay attempts to
recover even older territory, that of a linguistic and cultural network in the
Western tradition that could compare with the rich Japanese "amae"
network of cherishing and nurturing.  This philological foray lays the
groundwork for scholars of various fields to rediscover the "cherishment
culture" Young-Bruehl and Bethelard find so vital to re-thinking love in
psychoanalysis and in contemporary Western cultures. 

Overall, Young-Bruehl centers this
collection on the promise she believes the ego instincts hold for investigating
the multiplicities of sexual and cultural development.  Although I read it as
an invitation to the psychoanalytic community to join in this endeavor, those
who are unfamiliar with the historical debates and nuances of psychoanalytic
theory will find much of interest here, and profit from Young-Bruehl’s clarity
and suggestive interpretations. In fact, Young-Bruehl’s concerns here lie not
only with the temperature of the water in the psychoanalytic pool, so to speak,
but with the cultural climate in general.  Because of this attentiveness to the
public sphere, one could read the opening, titular essay as a response to the
works of reigning sociobiological neo-Darwinians.  It is unfortunate that the
discussion of romantic love through the lens of a cross-disciplinary debate
becomes a bit lost in the subsequent essays of the collection, and I would like
to read a book-length work on this topic. In the end, though, this collection
does re-interpret the origins and outcomes of "falling"; of falling
in love, yes, but more importantly for Young-Bruehl, of falling (back) into a
stance where dependence and relationality are culturally valued.

 

© 2004 Angela Hunter

 

Angela Hunter, Program in
Comparative Literature and Psychoanalytic Studies Program, Emory University

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Sexuality