Can We Dispense with Defense?

Abstract

Can We Dispense with Defense? The Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense Revisited. ]. Sandier with A. Freud. New York: International Universities Press, 1986. (556 pp.) Toward the end of her life, Anna Freud participated in a series of discussions with Joseph Sandier, at which her most influential work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (published 40 years previously) was reconsidered. These meetings were attended at different times by a number of other psychoanalysts, mostly from the Hampstead Clinic, who also made occasional contributions to the discussions. The content of these meetings was recorded verbatim, and this book consists of edited transcriptions, each chapter of the original work being discussed in turn, with an introduction by Joseph Sandier. At first sight this format seems promising. It is rare to have access to someone's reflections on their early mature work, and Anna Freud emerges as modest, witty, and, despite Sandler's frequent urgings, reluctant to be forced into doctrinal nitpicking. She even enlivens the proceedings with an occasional genteel sideswipe at Klein. But before one has read many pages, the cosiness and smugness of the discussion become suffocating and it becomes clear that one is eavesdropping on a meeting of disciples rather than attending a scientific debate. Apart from some anecdotal references to individual cases, the discussion is largely concerned with the need to tidy up some of the many contradictions or unclarities of the original text. This task makes relatively little headway, however, in the face of the almost flippant psychoanalytic pragmatism with which Anna Freud defends any concept that is capable of application somewhere. Thus the reconsideration leaves the topographic and structural models coexisting, while the unconscious as a system and the unconscious mental processes remain blurred. The Ego and not the person is the chief actor on the stage. Unrepentent reification rules. The discussion as to whether the Id feels comfortable when invading Ego territory, or whether the Ego has any innate friendliness towards the Id, to balance this hostility (p. 284), betrays only the mildest awareness of the limited value of counting angels on pinheads. The hermetic feel of the discussion is further heightened by the absence of any serious consideration of other views, even from within psychoanalysis, so that, for example, object relations theory and the phenomenon of projective identification are scarcely alluded to, and the recent development in, or debate about, the self, in the psychoanalytic theory of personality, is mentioned only in passing. We are left, then, with the original text, with the familiar list of defenses described in quasi-military metaphors, although with an added emphasis from Anna Freud to the effect that, of course, they always occur in combination, and with much evidence from the discussion of the slipperiness of these concepts, even when employed by like-minded discussants. For example, I myself have always had some difficulty with the concept of sublimation, although I recognize that a drive theory requires an explanation of some sort for constructive and altruistic behavior. The example given did not help me, however. It is an account of a strip cartoon (p. 69), evidently a favorite of Freud pere, which describes the following scene: A girl on a village green is leading a flock of geese. A traveler stops and talks to the goose girl, recognizes her intelligence, and arranges for her to attend higher education. In the final picture we see the girl again on the village green, now leading a file of school children. But if this is sublimation, what was the girl's original libidinal interest in geese? Nonetheless, ambiguous and nonexclusive though they are, the "mechanisms" have served generations of therapists as a descriptive framework with which to make sense of clinical phenomena, which would suggest that, in the consulting room, they offer some accessible maps at an appropriate level of abstraction. …