Self and Motivational Systems: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Technique

Abstract

JOSEPH D. LICHTENBERG, FRANK M. LACHMANN, AND JAMES L. FOSSHAGE: Self and Motivational Systems: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Technique. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, 1992, 272 pages, $39.95.Built around articles already published elsewhere, Chapters 2 on model scenes, 7 on the interpretive sequence, and 8 on selfobject experience, this volume has additional chapters on: motivational systems; clinical truth; human development; unconscious mentation; the path of awareness; defense conflict; values and morality; and theory of technique. Essentially neo-Freudian in perspective, it is steeped in motivational concerns (five instead of merely two), infant and early childhood development (pre-oedipal instead of merely oedipal), the central therapeutic role of interpretable historical scenes (here and now instead of merely there and then), and of the analyst who selects them. In spite of such differences, it is rooted in the Freudian tradition by virtue of putting the analyst's interpretive metapsychology of motives in the conceptual and therapeutic foreground.These three like-minded collaborators gain strength from supplementing and supporting one another. Wanting from their finished product, however, is the sense of purpose and momentum created in the mind and spirit of a single writer. This is not a book that poses searching questions still unanswered; nor does it critically examine basic postulates still unclarified; it gives a secure presentation of an arrived-at point of view.To explore its central themes would require far more than a brief review. Instead, I limit my comments to three salient issues that, in my view, require further attention. First is the pervasive and ineradicable presence of suggestion in all coparticipant psychoanalytic therapy, especially the irrational suggestibility of patients and, though frequently overlooked, of their analysts as well. Patients who accept anyone's motivational system that is discordant with the evidence of their own actual experience are deeply dependent, and irrationally so. As one interpreted patient put it, 'Oh why should I believe any of this?!!' (p. 27). And rather than asking her what she believes--or if they asked, not reporting it--they proceed to reiterate their own believed historical, model-scene interpretations. For them, no serious doubt; for their patient, irrepressible doubt. Who's trying to suggest what to whom, here?Second is whether the dynamic unconscious, unlike the motivational-systematic unconscious, can be directly interpreted by model scenes of past events, or whether, instead, such intellectualized schemes lead to pale reflections of the dynamic unconscious as it actually lives, actively and passively. The curious thing about the so-called lived past in psychoanalytic therapy is that it is not at all past; it lives on in the dynamic unconscious present. …