Chapter 7: Contemporary Freudian Revisionists: Kernberg, Schafer, Loewald, and Lacan

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

Today we're jumping into something really fascinating.

The world of psychoanalytic revisionists.

We're basically unpacking a key chapter from Mitchell and Black's Freud and Beyond.

Right, focusing on how thinkers after Freud took his work in new directions.

Exactly.

Our mission today is to get you the core ideas, how they built on Freud, how they challenged him, reshaped things, the essential insights without getting too bogged down.

It's a great topic because Freud himself could be pretty speculative.

He wasn't always purely clinical.

Oh really?

Well, take Totem and Taboo from 1913.

He cooks up this whole anthropological myth about a primal horde killing the father figure to explain the Oedipus complex.

Wow, okay.

So maybe not solid anthropology?

Not really, no.

But it did give this really rich way to think about generational conflict, the new generation grappling with the old.

And that kind of grappling happened within psychoanalysis itself, right?

After Freud died.

Absolutely.

You had this whole spectrum.

Some were like ultra -orthodox, keeping Freud's texts exactly as written.

Preserving them in pristine form, as the book says.

Then others, like maybe Sullivan or Kohut,

they went a different route, replacing core Freudian ideas altogether.

But we're looking at the middle ground today, the Freudian revisionists.

Exactly.

These are the people who wanted to, let's say, keep Freud's concepts but tweak them, sometimes fundamentally.

Like renovating a grand old house instead of tearing it down.

That's a perfect analogy.

Keep the Victorian mansion, but modernize it.

Make it work for today.

We'll look at four key figures.

Otto Kernberg, Roy Schaeffer, Hans Lowald, and Jacques Lacan.

Kind of moving from less radical to more radical revisions.

Sounds great.

We're hoping you get some real aha moments as we explore how these minds reshaped our view of the psyche, keeping it clear and accessible.

Okay, let's kick off with Otto Kernberg.

He's called the systematizer extraordinaire.

Yeah, that fits.

His big move really was bridging different psychoanalytic camps.

And rethinking personality disorders.

Asserting drives aren't just innate, but forged in relationships.

Precisely.

He aimed to integrate Freud's classic instinct theory, you know, sex and aggression, and his structural model, idigo super rito, with object relations theory.

People like Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, their focus was on how our earliest relationships literally shape our inner world.

Okay.

And he also brought in developmental ego psychology.

I think Jacobson, Mahler, focusing on how the self, the ego, emerges and gets stronger over time.

So he's pulling threads from everywhere.

What was his scope?

Pretty vast.

From severe clinical issues all the way to abstract metapsychology, the big picture theory of psychoanalysis.

Always focused on interpretation, understanding meaning.

Like a master architect, as you said, combining different boot prints.

So what were these foundational ideas he was trying to bring together, these contrasting views?

Okay, so you've got Freud's view.

We're born with these bodily drives, sex and aggression, unfolding biologically leading to the Oedipus complex.

The mind's job, channel these drives.

Got it.

Standard Freud.

Then you have Jacobson and Mahler saying, wait,

psychological birth isn't physical birth?

Our sense of self emerges slowly from like a merged state with mom over the first year and a half.

Separation, individuation.

Okay, a gradual emergence.

And then Klein comes in saying, we're born with these really powerful, primitive ways of loving and hating.

And life is a struggle to integrate those intense feelings.

So Kernberg saw these weren't necessarily contradictory, especially for severe problems.

How did he structure them?

You mentioned a hierarchy.

Yeah, he layered them.

To explain development and different levels of psychopathology,

mental illness,

three developmental tiers.

Okay, tier one.

Tier one, psychotic states.

This is about failing that first big task from Jacobson clarifying self from other.

If you can't reliably tell me from not me, you lose the boundary between inner and outer reality.

Leading to things like hallucinations, delusions.

Exactly.

That confusion stems from failing to differentiate self from object images.

Okay, tier two.

Tier two, borderline pathology.

Now these individuals can tell self from other, but they struggle with the second task, inspired by Klein, overcoming splitting.

Splitting, that's keeping things all good or all bad.

Right, it's a defense.

Keeping the good loving images of self and others totally separate from the bad hateful ones.

Borderline personalities find it too threatening to integrate these, to see someone as complex, both good and bad.

They retreat from that whole object experience.

So the world stays black and white, makes sense.

And tier three?

Tier three, neurosis.

This is where Freud's classical model fits best.

These people have achieved self other boundaries, they have overcome splitting, they relate to others as whole objects.

Their issues are more about internal conflicts, impulses versus defenses.

So this really changes the view on drives.

For Kurnberg, they aren't just there from birth, they're forged in these interactions.

Yes, that's a huge shift.

Those vague good and bad feelings from early relationships.

They consolidate over time into libidinal drives, pleasure seeking, and aggressive drives, destructive.

They're still sources of conflict, definitely, but their origin is relational, not just biological.

That completely reframes personality, doesn't it, and love.

How did his idea of character differ from Freud's?

Well Freud and Carl Abraham, they classified personalities based on libidinal fixation, oral, anal, phallic stages, where you might get stuck.

Right, like the anal character being stingy or controlling.

Exactly, very vivid description sometimes.

Wilhelm Reich even talked about an ideal genital character, mature and realistic.

So how did Kurnberg reimagine character?

He shifted the focus.

Instead of instinctual fixation, the core of personality became the developmental level of internal object relations.

How integrated are your inner representations of self and others?

Okay, so how does that explain problems and love differently?

It gives a very different lens.

For someone severely disturbed psychotic range, they can't do stable self other boundaries.

So love is either terrifying merger, losing yourself, or complete isolation.

Like the patient Robert you mentioned.

Yes, Robert.

Arousal felt dangerous, so he'd rush intimacy to possess the woman, then needed to push her away.

Ended up with prostitutes or fantasy for control, seeing women as undifferentiated masses, not people.

A chilling example of that lack of differentiation.

What about the borderline range?

For them, the issue is integrating good and bad.

So desire often gets tangled up with, say, perverse or violent fantasies, kept separate from any tender feelings.

Joyce, for instance, needed fantasies of brutal treatment for orgasm connection fused with punishment.

This unconscious fear aggression would destroy love.

Or Harold, whose relationships were mostly sexless, and when sex happened, it was ritualized, almost antiseptic, to contain his own feared aggression.

And neurotics.

Their conflicts are within relationships with whole people.

Like Gloria, mentioned earlier, it's about impulses versus defenses in the context of seeing others complexly, not a fundamental split in how they perceive self or others.

It's a total reframing.

Kurnberg keeps Freud's structure, but grounds it in object relations.

Sexuality becomes about meaning in relationships, not just the root cause of trouble.

Precisely.

As Kurnberg puts it, it is the world of internalized and external object relations that keep us keep sexuality alive.

It's the relationship context.

And this naturally leads you to ask, well, if drives are built through interaction, what does that mean for human experience overall?

It also led to big debates, like with Kohut.

Kurnberg really emphasized love and hate, primary aggression, while Kohut saw aggression more as a reaction to narcissistic injury.

Okay, so Kurnberg expanded the mansion.

But Roy Schaeffer, our next stop, sounds like he questioned the very language used to describe the building.

That's a good way to put it.

Schaeffer was, well, brilliant.

And his work covered a lot, terminology, philosophy, bringing in narratives and hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, right?

Right, how we make meaning.

So Schaeffer was both explaining Freud and critiquing him quite sharply.

And he tackled this problem of agency.

What's that about for us listening?

Agency is basically being the author of your own actions and experiences, feeling like you're in charge.

Freud showed pretty convincingly that our minds aren't simple.

They're full of conflicts, unconscious stuff.

He used metaphors from physics, psychic apparatus, forces, structures like id, ego, superego.

In that view, our conscious sense of being in control,

kind of an illusion.

The conscious self is more like a puppet pulled by unseen strings.

A puppet, so not really in charge.

Not in those early Freudian models.

And then it got messier with Klein and others, this population explosion, Schaeffer called it, of internal quasi -agents.

Intrajects, internal objects, all acting on the person.

His maternal interject attacked him.

Schaeffer's like, hold on, who is actually doing what to whom here?

He wanted to put the person back in the driver's seat of their own experience, not just being pushed around by internal bits and pieces.

Exactly.

And he argued the language Freud used was part of the problem.

Describing drives building up inside, pressing for discharge.

It sounded very mechanical, very bodily, like urination or something.

Schaeffer felt this language, steeped in unconscious fantasy itself, actually removed the sense of the person, the agent, doing the feeling or acting.

So how does analysis help reclaim that agency, according to Schaeffer?

Well, patients often come in believing their problems, I'm damaged, the world is hostile,

are just objective facts about reality.

Through analysis, they start to see, wait a minute, I've constructed these facts.

Maybe I get some hidden satisfaction or feel safer believing them, even though I hate them unconsciously.

They realize they are the agent, the designer, builder, interpreter of their world.

And if they build it, maybe they can build it differently.

And that insight led him to the idea of narrative, our lives as stories.

Yes.

He initially tried an action language, but found it awkward.

By the 80s, he landed on narrative as a more powerful idea.

He proposed that our minds are generated by and organized through narratives,

psychoanalytical concepts, they become interpretive storylines.

And the person,

the narrator of stories.

Let's make that concrete.

Ronald's dream about the blob.

How does Schaeffer read that?

Okay, so Ronald dreams about this blob moving, devouring things, becoming giant versions of them, then collapsing back into a blob.

It even starts becoming his analyst's chair before he wakes up.

A really unsettling image.

Ronald himself linked it to his depression, meaninglessness.

Right.

Now a traditional view might say the blob is his anal sadism, or his true self, or damaged ego structures.

But Schaeffer says, hang on, all those interpretations miss the dreamer's activity.

The dream is a creation.

Ronald constructed this narrative for certain reasons.

So the blob isn't just in him.

It's how he chooses to represent something about himself,

unconsciously maybe.

Exactly.

Maybe Ronald used anal imagery to depict how he destroys meaning, or maybe it helped maintain a connection to his sick mother.

Or maybe it was a way to symbolically defeat his father.

For Schaeffer, an interpretation isn't valuable because it's objectively true about what the blob is.

Its value lies in opening up new ways for Ronald to experience himself, to claim his role as the creator of that dream, the narrator of that blob story.

That's a fascinating shift.

It really puts the power back with the individual, which leads to the question for you listening.

If we see our experiences as narratives we construct, how does that empower us to perhaps rewrite them?

Okay, from Schaeffer's focus on narrative and agency, we move to Hans Lowald.

He sounds like someone trying to reconnect things, find unity, described as powerfully unique and visionary, studied with Heidegger.

Yes, Lowald is all about connection and reconciliation, bridging divides that others emphasize.

You see it clearly in how he thought about language.

Language again?

Okay, that example of the child saying, Numa Numa Numa Numa Juus for Juus, how is that a key bridge for Lowald?

It's a great example of what he saw as moving between two worlds.

The child starts in an idiosyncratic world, pre -verbal, personal, full of what he called autistic reveries, that's the Numa Numa stage, rich, sensory, personal meaning.

Right.

Then they move toward the social world of shared abstract meanings,

Juus.

Other theorists, like Sullivan or Stern, saw a big gap here.

Sullivan thought language rescued us from isolation,

Stern thought it cost us sensory richness to gain clarity.

But Lowald didn't see a gap.

No, not really a gap, more like a continuous development with potential for integration or rupture.

For Lowald, that early primary process language isn't just translated into later secondary process language, it's a form of sensory experience itself.

The baby is bathed in sound rhythm, it's part of a whole experience.

So the goal is to keep those connected, the sensory richness and the abstract meaning.

Absolutely.

Mental health, for Lowald, involves a perpetual reconciliation and interpenetration of these.

Pathology happens when there's a rupture, when the sensual gets cut off from the abstract, fantasy from reality,

that playful Numa Numa Juus should ideally still echo, still lend its sensory pleasure, even when the child learns the clear concept, more Juus.

He also rethought Freud's starting point for development, moved away from just inborn drives.

Radically, yes.

Freud assumed a baby plus drives meets external reality.

Lowald said no, the starting point is an original unitary whole, baby and caregivers together, no separation initially between self the other, ego reality, instinct object, everything emerges from interaction.

Wow, that interactional basis changes everything.

How did that make him reread Freud?

Profoundly.

He argued Freud actually had two ideas about drives, an early one about drives just seeking discharge, tied to 19th century science, and a later one, with arrows, about drives seeking connection, trying to restore that lost original unity.

Lowald championed this later, connection seeking view.

Drives are relational.

And that connects to how he reinterpreted Freud's analogy about archaeology.

It really does.

Freud saw the primitive stuff, like ancient ruins buried deep, representing an unchanging, inherited past you dig down to.

Lowald said, well wait,

ancient ruins weren't built in a vacuum, they were part of their contemporary world, interacting with politics, economics.

Likewise, the ancient remains of our psyche, the id, aren't just fixed biology, they're also products of interaction and adaptation.

The mind is interactive through and through.

So our earliest experiences, our id, aren't just buried history to overcome, but something that continues to shape and potentially enrich us.

That's the core idea, repressed infantile love detracts.

But if it's released from repression, understood, integrated, it enriches adult love.

New love is both new and old, carrying resonances.

Old love objects, if properly buried and revered, become guides, not ghosts haunting us.

How does this play out with symbolism?

Freud saw symbols like snakes as disguises for, say, a penis, right, sublimation.

Right.

Freud's view was often sublimation redirecting impulses and reductive interpretation.

The snake is nothing but the penis.

Culture gets built on these disguised releases.

Lowald totally rejected that reduction.

So for Lowald, the snake might relate to the penis, but it's not just the penis.

Exactly.

That's the key difference.

Symbolism isn't camouflage, it's mutual transformation.

The symbol creates something new, it enriches what's being symbolized.

Culture isn't just disguised drives, it's a representation and reconciliation of childhood experience on a higher, more complex level.

So Freud's famous line, where it was, their ego shall be, which sounds like conquering the instincts.

Lowald saw that as potentially disastrous, like draining the sea of instinct.

For him, that reclaimed infantile sea enriches the land of the ego.

The sea is always there, powering, enhancing adult life.

Which leaves us with a question for you.

If our past is always with us, shaping us, how do we integrate it, draw strength from it without being trapped or haunted?

Okay, if Lowald was about reconnecting and integrating, Jacques Lacan, our final figure, sounds like he took things apart in a different way.

More challenging, enigmatic, big in France, influenced academia here.

Definitely enigmatic.

Lacan was samously and deliberately obscure.

Poetic style, presentations like word games, tons of allusions.

He didn't want easy understanding.

He called it Socratic sabotage.

Like a zen koan, meant to disrupt your usual thinking, push you into a new, maybe uncomfortable, way of experiencing things.

And he felt Freud's core ideas got lost in biology.

What was the essential Freud for Lacan?

For Lacan, it was the early Freud dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms.

He argued Freud's revolutionary insight was really about language.

That's where Lacan grounds everything, drawing on limboists like Saussure and anthropologists like Levi -Strauss.

He heavily critiqued ego psychology and object relations for missing the boat, for focusing on ego or relationships instead of the fundamental role of language.

Which leads to his famous, tricky phrase, the unconscious is structured like a language.

How does that connect with his idea of the imaginary?

Okay, the imaginary is key for Lacan, especially in critiquing others.

Two main aspects.

First, the mirror stage.

Right, the baby seeing itself in the mirror.

Between 6 and 18 months, yeah.

Before that, the baby's experience is fragmented, chaotic.

The mirror shows a whole unified image, an idealized image.

This becomes the core, the ur -build or primal template of the ego.

So the ego starts with an illusion, an ideal reflection.

Essentially, yes.

It's not just a literal moment, but it shows how the ego is built on these mirages.

The second aspect is human desire.

How is desire different for Lacan?

It's not just about needs like food or warmth.

Desire is deeper, ultimately unfulfillable.

It stems from trying to bridge a fundamental gap, a primordial discord between us and the world from birth.

The baby wants to be everything for the mother, the object that completes her desire.

Like Michael, the patient addicted to dancing.

Perfect illustration.

Michael wasn't seeking intimacy, really.

He wanted to be wholly captivating, the total object of their desire.

He lived in the imaginary, a world of images.

The image he projected, and the women reduced to images of pure desire for his image.

So for Lacan, a lot of ordinary life is lived in this hall of mirrors, based on illusions.

That's his point.

Our everyday ego is a social creation, pasted together, trying to be characters we aren't.

And Lacan thought other psychoanalytic schools made a very big mistake, taking this imaginary ego as the real deal.

Ego psychology studies a mirage.

Object relations studies interpersonal fictions.

Both Burry Freud's real discovery, the linguistic unconscious.

So Lacanian analysis aims to disrupt that, to subvert and disperse the illusory ego, break the mirrors.

You got it.

Move from that psychic reality to a true reality,

where unconscious meaning, the linguistic meanings that existed before us, can actually be heard.

That's where free association is crucial for Lacan.

It lets the analyst hear past the empty speech of everyday chat to the full speech of the unconscious, the underlying symbolic structures.

It sort of unhooks you from the ego's usual concerns.

How does the Oedipus complex fit into this linguistic framework?

Lacan re -reads it completely.

Baby starts in blissful unity with mom, separation happens, creates that gap, that primordial discord fueling desire.

The child wants to be the phallus for the mother.

Not the literal penis, though.

No, critically not.

The phallus here is symbolic.

It represents the object that would satisfy the mother's desire, make her complete.

Okay, and the father's role?

The father figure intervenes.

He represents the claim to the mother, he has the symbolic phallus, and he introduces the law.

This forces castration, again, symbolic, for both sexes, meaning giving up that fantasy of total union with the mother, accepting limits, lack.

And the father isn't just dad.

No, it's the name of the father that matters most.

It represents the whole system of language, rules, culture, the symbolic order.

Entering this order means being inserted into social reality, regulated by language and law.

So what's the outcome of a Lacanian analysis, not symptom cure in the usual way?

Not primarily.

It's about a different way of being, living more in existence, less trapped in ego consciousness.

The ego becomes less solid, more transparent.

You experience yourself more as a channel for the unconscious.

Your words part of a larger text, the discourse of the other, the pre -existing structures of language and society.

So you don't eliminate desire.

No, you name it, you own it more fully.

Maybe embrace your destiny within that symbolic order.

For Michael, it might mean recognizing that deep longing to be the object of the other's and maybe finding a different path, perhaps through accepting the limits of the imaginary.

It's complex.

And you mentioned feminism.

How does that connect, given the focus on the phallus?

It's ironic, really.

On one side, Lacan looks very phallocentric.

The phallus is the master signifier, the key symbol, representing what men supposedly have and women lack.

But on the other side, feminists like Juliet Mitchell argued, Lacan actually detaches these ideas from biology.

Gender becomes understood in purely cultural, linguistic terms.

His analysis of how language itself is soaked in patriarchal assumptions becomes a tool for a radical critique of that culture,

which poses a final question for you.

If language shapes us so deeply, how much of our self is truly original and how much is an echo of that larger discourse of the other?

Wow.

What an incredible tour through these different renovations of Freud's mansion.

It really shows there's no single fixed Freudian truth.

If we use that mansion metaphor one last time, Kurnberg, you could say, added new wings for things like borderline states, dug a deeper foundation in object relations,

expanded the building, Schaeffer sort of divided it, kept the old theoretical blueprints in a museum wing, but modernized the clinical living space with agency and narrative,

separated the dated from the vital.

And Lowald and Lacan, each in their own way, went rummaging through the existing structure and said, aha, we found Freud's secret hobby, the real purpose.

For Lowald, it was this deep theory of connection.

For Lacan, the linguistic unconscious, they realigned everything to highlight what they saw as Freud's hidden gem.

And a big theme, especially for Schaeffer, Lowald, Lacan was moving away from biology, right?

Debiologizing Freud.

Translating his ideas about drives, which often sounded biological, into different terms.

Like narrative for Schaeffer.

The interplay of past and present relationships for Lowald.

And language and social structures for Lacan.

Right.

And that shift, it takes psychoanalysis away from making grand claims about some biological bedrock towards something maybe more modest, but still profound.

Offering one powerful way to tell the story of being human.

To trace how we make meaning within our relationships, our culture, our language.

That's a really useful way to think about it, psychoanalysis as a unique lens, one among others, for understanding ourselves.

Which leaves us with one final thought for you to consider.

Seeing how these brilliant thinkers re -examine and re -build upon Freud,

what foundational ideas in your own areas of interest, or even in how you think about yourself, might benefit from that same kind of deep revisionist look?

What assumptions could be questioned?

What old structures renovated?

That's a fantastic question to leave us with.

Thank you so much for guiding us through this deep dive into the contemporary Freudian revisionist.

We really hope you listening have gained some valuable new perspectives.

Keep exploring, keep questioning, it's been a pleasure.

And thanks everyone for tuning in.