Lacan's Imaginary

It almost seems like misunderstanding Lacan is  prerequisite of being a Lacanian.

I'm not a big fan of Lacan. There's very little I've read in his work or, heard from others, that is original. He's either taken over a concept from someone else and renamed it in his jargon or his formulations are so abstract that everything or nothing can fit into them. However, he has kept alive in the hearts of many mediocre people the struggle for knowledge beyond one's capabilities in an age when many psychoanalysts have given up on Freud's grand models.

Lacanians seem to refer to the imaginary as if it is the dimension of ego identity that belongs to different roles or group identities that an individual may have. However, the imaginary exists with animals and, the interactions it represents, even once the word-presentations emerge at the phallic stage, are always better understood as inter-subjective. Lacan writes:

“The relations between beings in the real, including all of you animated beings out there, might be produced in terms of inversely reciprocal relations. This is what psychology, and a whole area of sociology, is trying to do, and may succeed in doing so far as the mere animal kingdom is concerned, for the capture of the imaginary is enough to motivate all sorts of behaviour in the living being. Psychoanalysis reminds us that human psychology belongs to another dimension” (seminar xi, p. 206-7). 

A good clinical reference for this is what Reich and early analysts referred to as an oral block on aggression. It means that the pre-verbal child in its imaginary relations with the parent might experience traumatic fear in its expression of aggression and from then on it will have a hard time experiencing aggression. This produces someone who can't say no to others and who is a push-over. "Lacanians" will want to look for identifications with religious narratives, things the mother said, etc. that are only rationalizations while the true problem is in the imaginary. Ironically, Lacanians are often "ego psychologists" in practice even though Lacan rails against them in his texts constantly. 

The imaginary still exists after word-presentations. In the father complex there is an imaginary relation to "mainstream" or "adult"society in general through the father. The "genital  hysteric" experiences traumatic aggression towards the father that leads to promiscuity in the sexual version, and in the social version she takes out her aggression towards those who represent the "mainstream". A person who identifies with "the rebel" who was his "mother's desire" (phallic-narcissistic) or has some other motivational or drive structure will present much differently than the genital hysteric. However, Lacanians aren't interested in the phenomenological differences between people, they want a universal formula for all individuals or to say everyone is unique.      

Reich's body-psychotherapy should be understood as using the imaginary to access the Real trauma and defensive positions by working with bodily sensations and allowing activated impulses to be discharged. However, often times the armour removed comes back and the energy increase can't be tolerated. This, I believe, comes from the lack of symbolic work to deal with the superego and bad conscience of most neurotics. I think the classical techniques of working with dreams and what Lacan kept alive in the signifying chain is very important for this and hopefully the time will soon arrive when these two sides can finally unite.  

   

the mystics and the mechanists: obsession with narrative or discourse

Last year I pointed to the problem with discourse and narrative theory that placed it in a schema of mysticism and mechanism:

there are properly two main categories based upon the subjective and objective. In the former there are mystics who appeal to a subjective absolute human freedom through reason or through the conscience. In the former case the intentionalists can’t give satisfactory answers on the appearance of reason in a child nor its departure through mental illness or death. In the latter case the spiritualists talk about the eternal moral order in the subjective experience of the conscience. However, they do so as if different religions, moral orders, and revelations didn’t exist from culture to culture. These two are followed by the mechanists who are concerned with causes in relation to humans belonging to a certain genus or culture. With them the physicalists talk about humans as if they were animals and everything was evolutionary and no culture existed. The narrativists talk about culture, its propagation of roles and stereotypes, and the uniqueness of cultural difference as if culture always existed and had no body, or pre-verbal animal, which it was based upon.

I'm taking a class on narrative analysis and thought I'd share a reaction paper on the class readings

I can agree with some of Brunner’s statements: “stories are always told from a particular perspective… unmasking one perspective only reveals another… it is the awareness of alternative perspectives, not from the view from Olympus, that sets us free to create a properly pragmatic view of the Real” (23). However, I don’t know who would claim that he or she perfectly understands human nature and everyone’s motivations all the time.

His account lacks both a recognition of ideology and a recognition of psychology. Psychology he writes off as simply: “where patients must be helped to tell the right kinds of stories in order to get well” (11). His view of the self is post-modern in that he doesn’t appeal to human freedom through mystical claims but simply posits that there are “endless forms of narrative through which we construct (and maintain) a self”(14). I don’t see people employing endless forms of narrative about their self and, in general, I’d say that when we use words like confident, shy, vain, self-effacing, ambitious, etc. we are describing different motivations and attitudes of others that are stable.

Where narratives do matter most, in ideology, he is silent. If an individual’s feelings of self-esteem only came from their success in love or work, their fame or good reputation then there would be no ideology. Narratives in which one sees oneself as a man/woman, father/mother, or a religious person, patriot, reformer, defender, etc. and wants to be regarded as such by others is precisely the place in which ideology enters. Between the former ego ideals vs. the latter social ideals a very important dialectic exists that Brunner ignores for aesthetic musings. 

The key paragraph for me is as follows:

Michael Tomasello argues persuasively that what originally differentiated the human species from other primates was our extended capacity to read each other’s intentions and mental states- our capacity for intersubjectivity, or “mind-reading”. It is a pre-condition for our collective life in culture. I doubt such collective life would be possible were it not for our human capacity to organize and communicate experience in narrative form. For it is the conventionalization of narrative that converts individual experience into collective coin which can be circulated, as it were, on a base wider than a merely interpersonal one. Being able to read another’s mind need depend no longer on sharing some narrow ecological or interpersonal niche but, rather, on a common fund of myth, folktale, “common sense”. And given that folk narrative, like narrative generally, like culture itself, is organized around the dialectic of expectation-supporting norms and possibility-evoking transgressions, it is no surprise that story is the coin and currency of culture. 16

So Brunner takes Tomasello’s mind-reading capacity and, tacks onto it, with no argument, that collective life would not be possible without narrative. If he brought up some of the social ideals and group identities I would agree but he only brings up individual narratives. I certainly agree that people self-consciously imitate narratives. Umberto Eco defined semiotics as “a sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie”. Whether it is someone who is trying to look brave when they are scared or fake feeling in a relationship in which they don’t have any, or trying to represent themselves as “dignified and lordly” or as grappling with existential angst, etc. the inauthentic here only derives its referents from the authentic. Fake emotion requires the bodily signs of real emotion so that it can be imitated. Some people fully cry or sob, but some people get ‘choked up’ and we only see the sadness in their eyes and hear it in their voice. There isn’t one way of expressing emotion (except the universality of young children). Similarly, narratives of certain styles of being (dignified and lordly, angsty, etc.) take their model from real individuals and aren’t simply created ex-nihilo. To say that someone is self-consciously imitating or trying to affect this style means that there is a person who expresses these qualities in an authentic way and capable of producing new expressions of the style while the imposter/poseur/actor performs the clichés and the narrative that is known publically.

The next problem is that Brunner says that ‘mind reading’ can somehow be replaced by the narratives in myth, folk-tale, or common sense. Let’s take the example of ‘sour grapes’. To say someone has sour grapes is to say that they diminish the value of an object or skill because he can’t possess it or perform it well. This can be applied to someone who is vain and wants to be seen by others as not lacking. Such a judgment of someone is not provided by being familiar with the ‘cliché’ alone but requires good judgment. Brunner seems to mix up genre conventions in cultural works (stories, fables, etc.) with the common sense judgments of individual psychology. He writes: “Narrative, then, presents an ontological dilemma. Are stories real or imagined?” (23). This is tantamount to saying that we can’t make judgments about whether someone is confident, vain, shy, (etc.). Again, no one is infallible in making such judgments but certainly there are some people who are better at it then normal and show their understanding by predicting the behaviours of others.

Frank’s article is more subtle, but also less coherent. He wants to focus on the effects of stories rather than the underlying psychological/philosophical issues but his entire article is peppered with statements about these issues that often contradict one another.

As far as I can tell Frank’s base view of people is a bourgeois individualist view. He doesn’t think that people are social by nature but claims that “stories act to make life social” (20). He recognizes that stories can ‘mimetically’ reflect life but seems enamored with provocative statements from others about that it might be the other way around. The clear failing of his account is to recognize the already social nature of humans as well as both the natural and structural differences of power between them. For example, he mentions the Ilongot huntsmen who seek out experiences that can be told as stories and arrives at his position “stories often shape, rather than simply reflect, human conduct’ (22). However, he only gives so much value to stories and to the image because of his failure to talk about power differences between individuals. There is no psychological investigation of the Ilongot huntsmen. They are simply all ascribed the desire of seeking out stories as if there were no differences between them. Another similar problem is that it is the story, and art that has power “art’s effects on human minds depend on its power to compel attention” (27). If we take a song for example, many different people could sing it and there could be many different responses of the audience to the various singers. Frank, along with Brunner, completely ignore the dimension of individual differences of power (charisma, ability to inspire fear in others, and generally the ‘individual psychology’ Freud mentioned that separates the group leader from the herd). Frank occasionally brings up ‘letting the story breathe’ and points to the skill of the storyteller but it is clear that the power is in images and the story and humans can find out how to access it or impede it. The reverse of this, can be seen when someone who appreciates the charisma of the artist will say, ‘s/he can read (or sing) the phonebook and I’d be mesmerized’, or the soldier who say ‘I’d follow him to hell if he asked me’.   

So, again, rather than saying all Ilongot huntsmen look for stories, I’d say that individual hunters have motivations (i.e. vanity, looking for approval, etc.) that drive them to look for stories so they can be seen as having spiritual power or impress the elders or feel like it’s expected of them to fit in, etc.. In an identical way, some students at our school will go looking for inductions (feelings projected into them) from their patients but it’s never everyone and there are differences in motivation when it occurs.

Frank mentions the importance of telling children a story in a certain way (27), and the ‘performative’ aspect of the story-teller “anticipating the response of those how receive the story and shaping the story in anticipation of that response’ (40). However, this doesn’t lead him to notice differences of power between individuals (whether structural or characterlogical). Instead, by the end of the chapter he wants to anchor the story and image in “an inner demand or hunger for direct experience… inherently pleasurable acts of the sensory, muscular, and imaginative processes by which the embodiment is consummated” (44). Like Descartes’ pineal gland where the non-material mind is supposed to interact with/control the body, Frank simply points to “processes of embodiment” to explain the power of the story and image.

Although psychoanalysis or Marxism doesn’t have a fully systematized explanation of the inter-subjectivity through which the mind is created and through which different objects and commodities receive their power, presence, or ‘meaningfulness’ for people, I still believe it is much more instructive to try to make sense of the ideas there then to accept mystical and ideological positions just because they are easier to grasp. 

anal horde leader vs. phallic group leader

As Chasseguet-Smirgel and McDougall point out, the Oedipus complex is the internalization of a father imago who represents both sexual difference and the difference between the generations (children and parents).

Full internalization means that the child wants to be a grown-up and that means the individual ego ideal becomes a social ideal of wanting to belong to the groups of adults and wanting to be married like adults. This is the "genital" stage and it is different than the child reaching puberty

Even after the full internalization occurs when the child identifies with its mother or father, the 'father complex' of the genital stage means that the difference between the generations might be problematic. The child, recognizing the difference between the generations should find a love object amongst other children (i.e. siblings or other children). If the parent gives the child the idea that it is preferred to the spouse or treats the child like it is a grown-up and belittles his or her spouse then a problem can occur.

In other posts I have shown that as development progresses egoism and altruism become ever more intermingled. At the proto-phallic stage the egoist becomes altruistic towards his image and the altruist loves the object's egoism. At the genital stage the intermingling is complete and the egoist emerges as being able to love his children as part of himself and the society/country he was born in. His love doesn't extend to other members of his society and outsiders may be considered non-persons and thus guilt doesn't follow from mistreating them. The altruist emerges as someone now capable of self-assertion but there is a guilt that is attached to having an unfair advantage and the disadvantaged in society and the non-persons have to be helped. In helping them one can believe in one's own ability to make it.

The problem in the father complex have their social or public expression around the idea of "society" (think of the meaning that most adolescents give to the word). Full internalization of the father means that child doesn't have to become famous or powerful in the minds of others in order to "exist" nor have the protection or desire of such a person. As a son or daughter of a father (procreator), one recognizes the difference between the generations and 'looks up to' the older generation (the parents) and one's existence in 'society' is secured. In the father complex the egoist is acting out his own issues with the internalization of the superego at the level of society. For example, the conservative who is fighting for the recognition of the family and morality (against homosexuality and decay of values) is obviously fighting against his own desire for his father or against the father's irresponsibility in regards to the family and what is moral. For the altruist there is a rebellion against society as there is against the father. The altruist can become a rebel who hasn't fully acquired self-assertion and must fight to reform society ('the father') or spend most of her time fighting for the rights of others ('the mother') who are ignored. The altruist doesn't feel comfortable with her father's (society's) attention (i.e. white guilt).  

At the anal Oedipal stage there is a difference between the generations as well but it's closer to the difference between a human and God than child and adult. There is also sexual difference that isn't distinguished by genitals but by comportment. Stoller and others trace core gender identity to this phase and classical analysts like Reich often mention anal identification with the mother in boys. Following the anal oedipal phase all indications point to full internalization of the father imago being the urethral stage. It seems likely that the same interference with the difference between the generations can happen here and I think that classical psychoanalysis often confused the anal oedipal/urethral and the phallic oedipal/genital when theorizing the social or public behaviour of an individual.

As opposed to the phallic level concern about sexuality and intentions regarding conscience the anal level would be concerned about the body and damage to the body. For example, as opposed to the conservative concerned about perverse sex and decay of values the police officer who is identified with the criminal and his violation of another's body or his property is an example of the urethral conscience being caught in a complex after full internalization. Early analysts like Ferenczi (sphincter morality) had found a sense of morality before the phallic-oedipal guilt conscience but no one in psychoanalysis has seemed to do much with it since then. Again,  at the genital level the guilt conscience is at the level that the mere fantasies of crimes is enough to feel guilt, at the urethral level we can say guilt is experienced after the deed. Freud has attempted to call this conscience after the deed remorse in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Also, Van Ophuijsen has pointed out that the anal sadism held in check by the anal conscience can be overcome by joining with phallic sadism and hate. He clearly separates the anal sadism that wants to hurt a body, to the later sadism connected to the idea of the other experiencing pain:

Experience has taught us that the sadist often continues his violence after death has supervened and rendered the object incapable of sensation, or that he actually chooses for his victim a lifeless person. v. Krafft-Ebing even suggests in one instance that it was just the lifeless condition which constituted the stimulus to sadistic action… My experience of the neuroses supplies me with the following example, —a communication by a patient in a state of vehement anxiety. She said: 'Oh, how I should like to ill-treat someone, to do just whatever I liked to him, but—it would have to be someone who would not feel it, a dead person, I suppose'. She added that then she would regain her peace of mind. A number of such experiences have convinced me that the sexual aim of sadism as manifested in violence is not to inflict suffering on the object, but to perform certain activities (which I will presently discuss in greater detail) in relation to an object which either may be regarded as, or actually is, insensible… it is significant that various authors many years ago drew attention to the simultaneous occurrence of anal and sadistic traits in certain clinical pictures where there was markedly strong narcissistic fixation. It cannot be denied that in those neurotic and psychopathic phantasies which may be termed 'sadistic' the pain inflicted on the objects is of great importance and the perception of it enhances the subject's feeling of pleasure. What I would assert is that this phenomenon does not come under the heading of pure sadism but is a consequence of the fact which has been established by various writers: namely, that the sadistic tendency readily unites with other tendencies. Naturally the tendencies in question are such as manifest themselves in the same or similar ways as sadism. (The above statement is true of masochism also.) First and foremost come hate and revenge, which are certainly compatible with cruelty (The Sexual Aim of Sadism as Manifested in Acts of Violence, p.140-1).

With the altruist it seems that rebelliousness against society would show up in a more primitive way in the 'masochistic' tendency to complain to and provoke an authority.

Reich clearly roots these things in the anal stage and always mentions the involvement of the urethral:

"the masochist has an anal and urethral inhibition and anxiety stemming from the earlier childhood... his oedipal complex became predominately anchored in the anal zone... the child looked upon his bowel movements as punishable, and so he began to beat himself out of fear of being punished by the father. It is evident that this simple process was of far greater importance for the pathology of the case than the identifications with the punishing father and the masochistic attitudes towards toward the nascent anal superego.  (character analysis, p. 259)

Reich also relates the anal oedipus complex in the social ontology of the horde: 

Masochistic characters cannot endure praise and tend toward self-depreciation and self-abasement. In spite of his great ambition, our patient could not endure it when he was considered a good student in school. "If I had continued to be a good student, I would have fancied myself as standing naked in front of a large crowd with an excited penis" (ibid. 253)

 Reich wants to make the masochistic complaining into an indirect desire for love:

"you see how miserable I am-- love me!" "You don't love me enough-- you are mean to me!" "You have to love me; I will force you to love me! If you don't love me, I'll make you angry!" (ibid. 245).

I have little clinical experience with the masochistic character but keeping with the structural approach I wonder if the problem with the masochist isn't not getting enough love and demanding it or if it was really (like at the genital stage) getting the love of the father that was the problem...

The most important thing about the altruistic pole of the personality is that vicarious pleasure from the other is selected over one's own pleasure. Freud's idea of the phallic stage arose from  the large amount of sexual disinterest in women that shows that their regression from the phallic oedipal to the phallic brings them to a vagina that is banned from pleasure. We also know that some people exist in a state of anhedonia that seems to relate to a general ban of pleasure in the body. 

So, is the masochist's bad conscience towards the urethral mother or, after some activity becomes possible after full-internalization, is the masochist angry that the father doesn't love him or her?

I keep thinking about the exemplary masochistic scenario of being whipped by a woman. Is this not the mother's revenge for enjoying her pleasure?  

absolute perfection ego ideal (anal phallus)

This summer I realized that I've never been able to write a 'real' essay. One friend explained it to me sometime ago as: you take two scholars who argue about a primary text and explicate their arguments and then say which one is more right or point to an important factor that makes both of their positions inadequate.

I've always written papers as if I was a peer of those writing the primary texts (i.e. Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, etc.). I've barely looked at secondary sources until this last year.

I understand this as me triangulating at the anal Oedipal complex.

One quick aside: I hope at some point I can name every complex so that the Oedipus complex will truly just be one form of triangulation among many based upon mental bisexuality.

Rather than the absolute ego ideal that is known as the epistemophillic drive or part of the 'true self' in the writings of others, the anal oedipal draws its power from envy. I try to position myself in relation to the primary text authors as if I were a peer and in conversations with others I have performed verbal acrobatics in order to conceal lack of knowledge or error. I also think that my intense anxiety in reading conference papers is the anal Oedipal signal anxiety before the horde.

The phallic oedipal subject supposed to lead upon full internalization becomes one's procreator or someone taken to be formative to who one is. Under him one belongs to a group mediated through the signifier (family, religious group, etc.). With the anal oedipal subject supposed to know it is a pre-signifier horde that is ruled by an omnipotent (body-neurotic) or omniscient (mind-schizoid) father imago.

I envy the omniscient subject supposed to know and assume the place of a peer to him while at the same time fearing that I'll be 'castrated'-- be shown to have made a simple or error (an amateur). It's as if the anal father will appear among the horde at a conference or public gathering and humiliate me.

Bisexual conflict (active ego vs. passive ego drive conflict) (SE vs. OA)

I found a nice case study that illustrates a number of concepts I've been working on.

Identification and Individuation- David E. Schecter (1968) J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.

A clinical example of decision conflict was seen in a lawyer who was in the throes of determining his career when he embarked on psychoanalytic treatment. The choice of a law practice in a small community was for him associated with active, intrusive, masculine fantasies, "getting into the community," "influencing and moving people," "plunging through the scrimmage line." These fantasies turned out to be connected with idealizations of his father as a traveling salesman fearlessly making his way into unfamiliar territory. The alternative of an academic career was associated with passive dependent and incorporative fantasies. The fame of the scholar would make him the favored and chosen son who would be rewarded with oral and masturbatory "goodies" by big-breasted women. Academic work became suffused with feelings of shame related to the patient's passive yearnings, with feelings of inferiority and failure regarding his masculine assertive strivings, and with the guilt of surpassing his father as an intellectual. On the other hand, the desire to practice law and politics, insofar as it was bound to an identification with an idealization of father's work life, became undermined by the patient's increasingly realistic appraisal of his father as well as by his mother's basic disrespect and derogation of her husband as a "crude businessman." The patient also experienced his father as being constantly pitted against a maternal uncle who was idealized by his mother and held up as the model for the patient's own development.9

—————————————

9 I have been impressed by the frequency and importance of the particular constellation in which mothers take idealized images of brothers, fathers or grandfathers as models for their sons. These idealizations can often be understood as derivatives from the mother's early life when she could be so impressed with and perhaps envious of these male relatives—in contrast to her more realistic, or more distortedly critical evaluations of her husband. Moreover, by having her son live up to her idealized masculine image, the mother can finally triumph over past humiliations and feelings of defeat and inferiority. I recently witnessed an illustration of early occupational bitterness in a nine-year-old girl who felt slighted by her family's differential attitude toward her ambitions as against those of her older brother: "They call him Doctor Ronnie, but do they call me Actress Harriet?" No doubt other constellations can be studied in similar fashion, e.g., fathers' expectations of daughters, husbands' of their wives, etc.

- 56 -

Here we see both an active-masculine and passive-feminine ideals related to the patient's work life. Along the egoistic line the analyst calls attention to what I've pointed to as the phallic deutero stage in which the mother denigrates the father's imago and creates her own phallic image for the child based upon her father, brother, or past lover. The two images seem best understood in psychopathy. The subject supposed to lead transference cements one into a group of peers with 'social feeling' that is the pre-guilt conscience of the egoist (usually associated with remorse). The mother's phallic image allows the pursuit of an ideal not attached to social feeling and therefore one in which harming or taking advantage of others is acceptable in pursuit of the ideal. Again, it's not a natural stage. The altruistic line is clearly about being loved. It sounds like there is a Bellerphon complex (object altruist). 

My patient thus became conflicted by (i) an identification with mother's ideal, and (ii) an identification with an image of father as failing to fulfill this ideal. The latter identification may be elaborated into the theme of father-victim, exploited and humiliated by an essentially dominating woman. To put it somewhat metaphorically, as the patient moves toward fulfilling his mother-inspired ego ideal he suffers pangs of guilt in relation to his father-derived ego identification. And so he becomes paralyzed into inaction because of the potentially dangerous and conflict-ridden meaning of ambitious and assertive activity.

The theme of father-as-victim is not only a source for ego identification; it may also inspire a perverted "masochistic ideal" whose virtue, nobility, and even "decency" lie in the capacity to suffer as passive victim in contrast to the hated exploiting aggressor. By the conversion of the active into the passive, the ideal of suffering victim also helps to conceal forbidden aggressive strivings, to relieve the guilt of surpassing the rival parent, and to earn the bitter social compensation of being "the nice guy."

As one often sees in such identification conflicts, my patient attempted to move toward a harmonious combination and compromise of the two major career trends. Further analytic work revealed that his decision making could become more autonomous to the extent that he was able to work through the underlying affects of shame and guilt and the primitive object ties associated with the conflicting identifications.

My claim is that the author's use of identification masks the altruist's complexes and deutero stages. They are observed by analysts in rescue fantasies, scapegoating oneself, wanting a mentor, fear of success, etc. but are always touted as reaction formations to the masculine or generically called identifications.

In the decision-making process only certain aspects of the conflicting forces come into consciousness, at which point we become aware of wrestling with the alternatives. There is a silent preconscious activity going on "below" our conscious thrashings about, consisting of a complex process of decision integration, using the mechanisms of fantasy, compromise, condensation, displacement, rationalization, and experimentation in action; no doubt other mechanisms, including as yet unknown ones, are also involved. This process of integration has also been referred to as part of the synthetic function of the ego, a highest level function

- 57 -

from the point of view of differentiation and hierarchy of structures; hence it is prone to break down under stress. When it works at its best, it presumably accounts for that rare but blissful sense of "things falling into place."

After a certain point of conscious deliberation we know that we must put a decision aside and "sleep on it." Further conscious effort and rational deliberation may at times actually impede the work of integration, which needs free play in scanning the alternatives and trying them out in fantasy (conscious and unconscious) and experiment to experience how they fit underlying identifications and the overall sense of identity. Psychoanalytic treatment aims to free the underlying identifications from a certain primitive rigidity of structure, from their irrational hold on the whole personality, and to clear the way for reorganization of the component identifications and other structures into a more coherent self identity. One of the indispensable means of achieving these goals involves the analysis of associated crippling affects which confer upon certain identifications overriding power in the economy of the whole personality and, at the same time, help maintain potentially creative areas of the self in dissociation. Treatment with psychoanalytic goals rarely seems to require the analyst's verbal formulation of the integration process. This integration apparently occurs spontaneously if the ego is not too damaged or underdeveloped, when the primitive origins and fixation points of various relevant identifications and object attachments have been brought into awareness and worked through.

The author also uses 'economy of the whole personality' and seems to use 'component identifications' as the parallel to the sexual 'economy of the libido' and component or partial drives. His observation that integration occurs spontaneously also suggests that 'subject supposed to' transferences that are part of the very nature of our psychic structure and thus shouldn't be treated as idiosyncratic identifications. As Murray pointed out with his passive pilot, it's not that an identification is de-identified with but rather that the ego ideal is freed up to find a new object or one is capable of making a transference that was previously obstructed by the exchange of self and object images in melancholia:

. At this point I wish to emphasize the significance of the loss of an object which was a symbol of all the patient hoped to be; the pilot embodied and gave a sense of imminence to the patient's hopes and dreams; when this symbol was lost any hope of fulfillment of these longings and expectations was completely shattered. The validity of his ideal self-image died with the pilot: alone he was too weak and helpless.

In the course of treatment of these depressive reactions one had first to help the patient accept and overcome the pain of, and often guilt associated with, the libidinal loss, but before the ego was strong enough to accept the future it was necessary in some measure to restore the hope for an ideal, gone when the external symbol of this was killed. Therapy was not truly complete until a new orientation occurred, one which restored the healthy narcissistic conception of self, embraced the feeling that the future held hope, and included a replacement for the pilot as a symbol of these essential self-image feelings.