John,
You remarked that "getting fed" was the motive underlying drives in orthodox psychoanalytic theory. However, the essential task for the child is the Oedipal Complex, which is psychosocial. Further, in "3 Essays..." didn't Freud speak of the drive for curiosity and knowledge in children. ...On another topic, stage theories must have had their day. With the vituperativeness in our current society, why is Erikson's work not more criticized--with his boys building towers and girls building enclosed spaces experiments. --Damon
(response by Dr. Auerbach)
In my previous post, I quoted—and re-quote here—Freud’s famous statement from the Three Essays: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Alternatively, we keep repeating childhood relationships in adulthood, so it is a blessing to have had responsive parents who facilitated secure attachments and a curse to have had poorly responsive parents who repeated their childhoods and created insecure attachments. One way of understanding one the central problems in Freud is that there is the clinical Freud, who usually but not always (see his views on women) makes a great deal of sense, and the theoretical or metapsychological Freud, who usually has things all wrong. That is an oversimplification of course, but Freud the clinician understood that connections to other were central to human life. The concept of transference depends crucially on the idea that the finding of an object is a refinding of it. Freud even says in “On Narcissism” that love is an illness but that we must love in order not to fall ill. For those who think that Freud is an irrelevance—that “it just doesn’t matter—good luck finding an insight like that, or for that matter like “the finding of an object is a refinding of it,” in any modern therapy manual. But Freud the theorist built a brilliant model based on the idea that the mind is an energy transformation system that attempts to bring the level of energy system to zero or as close as possible to zero while still remaining alive. Just remember that it was based on the best science available at the time, but also remember that, if you start with a false premise, you can prove anything to be true. Freud the theorist also tried to shoehorn all of human behavior into two drives—sex and self-preservation in the early model, sex and aggression in the later one—even though Freud the clinician and the keen observer of human behavior knew full well that children (and adults as well, I here) have a drive called curiosity. It is also a reasonable argument that, as regards his own psychodynamics, Freud was himself very uncomfortable with relatedness and much more comfortable with individuation that his theoretical choices are almost always in favor of the latter than the former. We have enough biographical information to be confident in this inference.
As for Erikson, he has been subjected, and appropriately so, to rigorous feminist critique because of how much of his theory is about individuation, rather than relatedness. One major sociological reason for the rise of relational thinking in psychoanalysis—let’s forget about the empirical literature on attachment for now—has been the shift within psychology, psychoanalysis included, from majority male to majority female. In general, because there are many exceptions (think of Fairbairn, Winnicott, Balint, and Bowlby), for men, life is about individuation; for women, life is about relationship. Hence, also Carol Giligan’s critique of her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg. One major exception among female psychoanalytic theorists, however, as regards a relational emphasis would be Margaret Mahler, whose theory is almost entirely about the separation-individuation process. It would not be too far wrong to say that she wanted to play with the boys instead of with the girls.
As for stage models, I have to agree with you that they have problems and greatly oversimplify the complexity of development, but development is so complex that most of us have difficulty understanding it without a reliance on stage models. My mentor, Sidney Blatt, was so heavily influenced by both Freud and Piaget, that he could not do without them, but they inevitably simplify a much more complex reality. Sid did come up with an interesting relational revision of Erikson, however. Erikson’s stages are as follows: trust vs mistrust (relationship), autonomy vs shame and doubt (individuation), initiative vs guilt (individuation), industry vs inferiority (individuation), identity vs role diffusion (individuation), intimacy vs isolation (relationship), generativity vs stagnation (individuation), and integrity vs despair (individuation). You can easily see the model’s self-definitional weighting. Sid proposed another stage, mutuality vs competition or cooperation vs alienation, a relational stage, to go between initiative vs guilt and industry vs inferiority. In terms of the original Freudian model, this would have been a late Oedipal stage to go between the early Oedipal stage and the latency stage. Regardless, its inclusion would make Erikson’s model much better balanced between relatedness and individuation since the alternation of stages would now be relational (trust), self-definitional (autonomy), self-definitional (initiative), relational (mutuality or cooperation), self-definitional (industry), self-definitional (identity), relational (intimacy), self-definitional (generativity), self-definitional (integrity), with a repeating rhythm of one relational stage followed by two self-definitional stages.
