IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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with development . This coincides with the Sandlers’ (1984, 1987, 1994) and with Rosenblatt’s (1962) work on past and present unconscious and on unconscious representations. It also presages later formulations (Bachant and Adler, 1997) of transference in relation to adaptive and archaic unconscious functioning. Arlow and Brenner’s (1964) “Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory” revealed a radical reconstruction of the concept of the unconscious. At the core of this reorganization is the relationship between anxiety and conflict. Anxiety for Arlow and Brenner became the crucial factor in the development of conflict between ego and id, and in the ability of the ego to oppose the instinctual drives. Too much unpleasure leads to anxieties connected with the dangers of childhood. These anxieties act as a crucible of fears that organize the unconscious and continue to affect the person (Richards and Lynch, 2010). Loewald was another theorist who contributed significantly to the further developments of the concept. He has been compared to Sullivan, Klein, Rado, Kohut (Cooper, 1988) and Winnicott (Chodorow, 2009), Fairbairn and Guntrip. Loewald, however, considered himself an ego-psychologist. In his work, Loewald stressed the essential role of object relations in both psychic formation as well as the change brought about through analysis. His emphasis on the interaction in object relations breathed life into the ideas of drive fusion and neutralization, analytic neutrality and therapeutic action. For example, he regarded the psychic structure of the instincts and the id as originating in the interaction of the infant with its human environment (mother) ( Loewald, 1978). This is very close to preceeding Jacobson’s (1964) formulations. Instincts were viewed by these theorists as the product of interaction . Up to this point, Loewald was in synchrony more with analysts like Fenichel, Jacobson (1964), Mahler, Stone (1951); and at odds with analysts like Hartmann (1939), Loewenstein (1953) and Kris (1956 a, b, c). Loewald, however, took his thinking a little further by identifying interaction as the critical aspect in the internalization of the subjective representation of the self and other. He went further by veering away from the reified sense of psychic agency, defense and inter/intra- systemic conflicts. Instead, he focused on the nature of interaction with the (human) environment noting the role it “plays in the formation, development and continued integrity of the psychic apparatus” (1960, p. 16). Interaction becomes for Loewald not only the source of the drives (1960, 1971, 1978), but a central aspect of unconscious processes . This stress on interaction as a basic building block of the mind guided Loewald’s theory of the unconscious, drawing upon and heavily modifying the adaptive and genetic aspects of Freud’s metapsychology while leaving the structural/topographical models adrift. He believed that “…in an analysis, …, we have opportunities to observe and investigate primitive as well as more advanced interaction processes, that is, interactions between patient and analyst which lead to or from steps in ego integrations and disintegration” (1960, p.17). Just as was the case for Winnicott in the UK, Loewald and Jacobson in the US can be seen as the forerunners of the intersubjective movement . By the early seventies, experiences with people in the child’s world had become indispensable in conceptualizing the development of the mind (Arlow and Brenner, 1964;

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