Introduction to
 Recovery of the Lost Good Object
 Eric Brenman

 by
 Gigliola Fornari Spoto
 

Introduction

I vividly remember first meeting Eric Brenman, about thirty years ago, when, as a young Intern in Psychiatry, (and as a future candidate of the British Society ), I was asked to be the translator for the seminars which he and Irma were running at the Milan Institute. This was my first contact with ‘real life’ clinical Kleinian analysis. My analytical knowledge, up to then, was somewhat limited, coloured by a touch of idealization and largely theoretical.
What struck me, at the time, was Eric Brenman’s passion for the clinical work, his humanity, his clinical acumen, his capacity to ‘take the patient in’, to move fluently from the experiential to the theoretical, and to transform the scattered elements of a patient’s history and background, as they emerged in the transference, into a complex , intriguing narrative about human conflicts, desires, loving and hateful feelings, in a rounded, never reductionist way, where internal and external reality, past and present, became interwoven and mutually resonant with meaning . You felt the analyst and the patient were two real human beings struggling together, sharing a journey which was never easy but always compelling.

I remember him to be also rather partial to good Italian food and wine, which I took to be part of his natural ability to recognize ‘good objects’ and tune in with them. My resolve to come to England to train as an analyst was very much strengthened by this good experience and I am grateful to Eric for it.
I felt very pleased and honoured to be asked to be the English editor of his book, a task which I think of , at a personal level, as a ‘recovery’ of a past good ‘psychoanalytical object’ and of my Italian roots.

This book is adapted from the one originally published in 2002 in Italy, edited by the Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi Cesare Musatti, edited by Roberto Basile, Paola Capozzi, Franco De Masi, Patrizia Gammaro Moroni, Dino Lanzara, and Federico Rocca. It was meant as a tribute to Eric Brenman as a remarkable clinician and psychoanalytical thinker, who fostered and nurtured their psychoanalytical development.

Several analysts from the Milan Institute had been attending clinical supervision seminars, run by Eric Brenman throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when Italian psychoanalysis, always receptive to psychoanalytical ideas from other countries, was consolidating a stronger and more distinctive sense of identity. The Milanese analysts found Eric’s supervisions inspiring and illuminating and wanted to be able to keep and share their valuable experience by giving it a written form.
The moving and grateful tribute that Franco de Masi pays to Eric, here placed as an introduction to the clinical seminars, shows how central Brenman’s seminars were in the development of many Milanese colleagues.

The Italian edition of the book contained all of Eric Brenman’s published papers, and five clinical seminars . Eric has added an unpublished paper to the English version, ‘The Recovery of the Good Object : the Conflict with the Superego’, which gives this book its title and gathers together some of his most significant theoretical views. Some of the papers have been previously published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and will be familiar to the English reader. Collected together, the papers give a much more organic sense of the development of Eric Brenman’s clinical and theoretical thinking, of the various themes which he has addressed in his long psychoanalytical career, allowing for a better understanding of his distinctive voice amongst post-Kleinian analysts .


For the English edition we have retained three of the Clinical Seminars in their entireties as they are very relevant to contemporary psychoanalytical debate - the trans-generational transmission of trauma, the analysis of borderline pathology, and the psychoanalytical approach to severely deprived patients.

Although the Clinical Seminars, as one would expect, are discursive in style, and do not claim to have the conceptual rigour of a paper, they convey very effectively Eric’s qualities as a supervisor , and show supervision as a process, ‘work in progress’, where ideas take shape in a creative exchange and where conceptualisation is always firmly rooted in clinical practice. Those who know Eric as a teacher, will be able to recognize his clinical astuteness as well as his maieutic , facilitating, non- prescriptive style of supervision, which in this case also had to take into account a different psychoanalytical culture. The seminars also show his balanced approach to the clinical material, and the absence of reassuring, all-knowing certainties, something which also permeates his clinical work. When he helps the analyst to formulate his interventions, Eric is always mindful of the patient’s struggle to cope with the vicissitudes of life, (in the light of the emotional equipment he possesses) but also of the powerful, distorting and destructive forces which interfere with this struggle. The task of the analyst is to widen the patient’s horizons, restricted by forces which attack truth and human understanding and which aim to perpetuate a narrow mental picture in both members of the analytical couple, and to provide a suitable space for a different kind of development.

I decided not to edit the seminars too much and I am aware that some repetition is unavoidable . Giving the full transcript however, I thought, is useful for thinking about the process of supervision itself, which is a topic of great interest to many of us today.

The Seminars also highlight many issues which are relevant to the present debate about psychoanalytical technique: the interplay between the here and now of the transference and the history; the nature of the patient’s internal and external objects and their capacity to equip the patient to face psychic pain and the reality of life; the patient’s ability to receive interpretations about destructiveness when there isn’t a sufficiently solid internalized connection with a good object; the analyst as an object who can truly bear with the patient what is felt to be unbearable and who is constantly monitoring how the patient assesses his capacity to do so, to name but a few.

Readers familiar with other Kleinian writers, will be able to compare Brenman’s technique, as it emerges from the supervisions, to that of other Kleinian analysts and to see the differences.
The publication, perhaps overdue, of this book, allows us to hear this distinctive voice in the present psychoanalytical discourse. In his paper on ‘Reconstructions in Analysis’, Brenman talks about what shapes our identity as analysts. He writes that we all have to work through oedipal and pre-oedipal anxieties related to our analytical parents (Freud and our teachers), so that our past objects are not murdered, but also so that we are not limited by defensive restrictions, which could be seen as the killing of new analytical knowledge. It seems to me that Eric does just this: he is sufficiently connected with his good original analytical objects to venture into new and different psychoanalytical explorations .
I will try to describe what seem to me seem the most significant of these new explorations.

The first, I think, is Brenman’s development of the notion of analytical containment. His frame of reference includes Freud, Klein and Bion, and Rosenfeld’s description of containment as an active process. He fully embraces what he describes as Bion’s shift to the human relationship . The centrality of the ‘human relationship’ in the analytical relationship, is an ever present concern, and , it seems to me, essential in shaping Eric’s theoretical thinking and technique . Analytic technique is seen as something which does not transcend the reality of human relationships but is an instrument to heighten awareness. It is the emphasis on the human relationship between the analyst and the patient which is a sine qua non, if the analyst wants to help the patient in the move from the omnipotence of the schizo-paranoid position to the human reality of the depressive position. There is an interrelatedness and an acknowledgement of reciprocity between analyst and patient, and both analyst and patient need the recognise the value, and the meaning that they have for one another. If the analyst has to help his patient in facing what is unbearable, the patient needs to have an experience of an analytical object truly capable of facing what is unbearable. The analyst has to go through his depressive position, at a personal level and especially when he has to deal with his feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness in the analysis, and when the patient questions him as a truly ‘good object’. The patient observes the analyst in his entirety and great attention has to be paid to how the analyst is introjected in the patient’s inner world, distinguishing what is projection from what is correct perception. He warns us against the risks of presenting ourselves, in a narcissistic way, as perfect containers, setting in motion (as he describes in his paper ‘The Narcissism of the Analyst’) ‘…a superhuman immaculate model, which promotes a further narcissistic identification by the patient’, confirming his hopelessness about achieving true and limited human understanding.
In his paper, ‘Matters of Life and Death-Real and Assumed’, Eric Brenman looks at how containment develops within the conflict between life and death instincts, between love and destructiveness . He also reconnects us to the very significant role (sometimes perhaps not sufficiently borne in mind) given by Melanie Klein, in most of her writings, to the survival of the good object and its importance in mitigating hate and destructiveness and to the process of reparation.
He attributes a central role to the mother’s capacity to help the infant to give up the primitive defences of the schizo-paranoid position and to negotiate the reality of the depressive position. Freud’s theory about life and death instincts is articulated by Brenman into a human dimension, in the unfolding of the early relationship between the mother and her baby. He thinks that the mother acts as a protective shield (as described by Freud in Instincts and their Vicissitudes) against excessive stimuli and, because of this, she contributes, to some degree, to the construction of the ideal breast, (to which the baby turns in order to avoid persecution), and shares in the omnipotent delusion of the schizo-paranoid position, which insulates the infant from the truth of dependency and the threat of catastrophe. This process, to begin with, is necessary for survival and it deflects the death instinct. Gradually the mother helps the infant to give up the primitive system of defences within the development of a loving human relationship, and what was once believed to be life-saving (omnipotence, projection of the death instinct, insulation and delusion) becomes ‘…falsehood as the human truth borne out of depressive position love becomes more realized.’

A good object is ultimately the result of what happens between the mother and the baby in the working through of the depressive position, and it is the recovery of this good object relationship which is the central task of every analysis. The analyst, like a good enough mother, should then be mindful both of the hold of primitive defences, and of the value of human understanding, enabling the patient to cope with the vicissitudes of life. Brenman widens the concept of containment, articulating it both in an instinct and object relational perspective. In this framework, great developmental importance is given to the absence of an object which provides this kind of containment and leaves the person to go back, fighting for his life, as it were, to the schizo-paranoid position.

He also adds his voice to the discussion about the clinical usefulness of the death instinct. I think his emphasis on the crucial role of mother/infant relationship and the mother’s capacity to negotiate primitive anxieties, is somewhat different from the best known Kleinian papers on the subject, like those of Hanna Segal and Michael Feldman, and, because of this, it enriches this debate.

Another significant theoretical contribution, (with interesting implications for technique), is the importance of the role of the superego, namely the primitive ruthless superego, in shaping the conflict between love and destructiveness and in determining its outcome. His ideas on the superego are presented in organic form in his paper, ‘The Recovery of the Good Object: the Conflict with the Superego’, published here for the first time, but are referred to in many of his other papers. He sees , like Freud and Abraham, the melancholic superego as the prototype of this kind of superego, but he sees it in operation in many other pathological states, and, in fact, as an important part, although not necessarily always visible, of the normal landscape of internal objects . It is one of the earliest organisations in the psyche, and can be moderated by loving human understanding. The superego he describes is related to Melanie Klein’s primitive superego, to Strachey’s views on the superego in his paper on the mutative interpretation, to Bion’s ‘ego destructive superego’ and to
O’ Shaughnessy’s ‘abnormal form of superego’, and to Rosenfeld’s ideas about destructive narcissism .
With a deceptively simple, but compelling conceptualisation, Brenman thinks that this kind of superego takes over when the process of internalising a good object has failed . The ever present conflict between ordinary human object relationships and this god-like superego plays an integral part in the move between schizo paranoid and depressive position. The superego which attacks the very value of human understanding is like a fundamentalist God which demands total devotion .
The story of Oedipus and his internal and external objects is revisited in a very original ‘reconstructive’ manner, as a narrative dominated by the allegiance to this God -like superego and the lack of human understanding.

One of the tasks of analysis of a patient who does not have a good internalised object and whose internal world is dominated by this form of superego, is to offer the patient an experience of a new understanding object, which moderates the power of the superego.
How far the good object can modify the destructiveness of the superego, and how effective is the superego in overruling the good object is the crucial struggle in analysis.
Brenman maintains that only a patient with some access to a good object relationship can make use of an interpretation about his destructiveness in a way that can truly help the patient in his struggle with love and hate. He thinks that without a sufficient attachment to a good object, an interpretation about the patient’s destructiveness, in severely depressed and/or narcissistic patients, or patients stuck in a sadomasochistic impasse, is experienced as a reproach from another inflexible superego which demands that the patient should be ideal and free of hatred.

A further contribution which Brenman makes to the current psychoanalytical debate is in the area of history and reconstruction.
From his papers and from the supervisions, one gets the sense that history and reconstructions play a bigger part than in the writings of other Kleinian analysts.
In his paper, ‘On the value of reconstruction’, he states that ‘ …it is not enough in clinical practice, as opposed to theory, to analyze truth and resistance, if the patient does not have an object who can bear with him what is felt to be unbearable, not only in the present, but also in the past, an object that will go with the patient in an exploration’.
Analysis does not answer the questions about history, but provides the security to explore them. The relationship with the analyst is a new relationship which allows an exploration of a different kind of the patient’s history . The analyst is not a historian but behaves like Virgil accompanying the patient in his journey, ‘going with’ the patient in his exploration.
He also believes that reconstruction has a fundamental role in allowing a full process of mourning and reparation.

Finally just a few brief words about his Eric’s writing style : his clinical descriptions are vivid, compassionate, rich in emotions: patients come alive as whole human beings . When he thinks theoretically he tries to capture and describe complexity rather than aiming at simplified, tidy certitudes. You get a liberating sense of looking at ample emotional and intellectual landscapes, which can accommodate many ideas, rather than at a narrowly focused picture. Sometimes, because of this, there is a certain laborious, wandering, ‘philosophical’ quality about his writing style. But then analysis is a laborious process, where trying to make sense is always mixed with uncertainty and not knowing. Not infrequently, he ventures out of the consulting room to make connections with the wider world of human endeavours, like literature, art, philosophy and this gives his writing invaluable breath and depth and restores psychoanalysis as a humanistic science, where cross fertilization with other disciplines is encouraged and valued .

Eric Brenman, so aware of the disasters that emotional fundamentalism creates in our patients, warns us against the dangers of fundamentalism, in all his its aspects, in our profession, against the risks of elevating psychoanalytical ‘truths’ to the level of ideological masters which narrow our field of vision. He promotes a humanistic, ‘depressive position’ kind of analysis , where the recovery of good object relationships becomes an analytical aim: we are asked to think of analysis a strenuous, uneven effort towards a truly reparative process, a journey where hope and limitations, success and failure, understanding and non understanding are constant companions.

Gigliola Fornari Spoto



Copyright © 2006  Gigliola Fornari Spoto

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