To my mind, says Heinz Franz Cote, to my mind, this viewpoint is a theory built into a non-scientific value judgment that has nothing to do with developmental psychology.
So he fiercely criticizes Freud.
Cote’s contention is nothing less than revolutionary. He says that narcissism, subject love, and object love coexist and interact throughout life, they never stop.
True, they were different guises with age, with maturation, but they always cohabitate. A subject love never goes away. Narcissism never goes away. It continues to interact with object love.
And when we have a pathology like schizoid core and so on, narcissism would redirect this love, this libidinal energy, inwards towards the self and withdraw from object relations.
In a way, this sits well with my model, when narcissism actually is a desperate attempt to maintain object relations in the face of the inexorable pull of the schizoid core.
Schizoid core wants the narcissist to vanish, to disconnect from people, to become 100% self-sufficient, unabomber, lone wolf. And the narcissist is fighting this and the only tool, the only instrument and weapon he has is his narcissism. That’s the only defense he has. His narcissism is actually an attempt to counter and neutralize his schizoid core.
Cote writes, it is not that the self experiences are given up and replaced by a more mature or developmentally more advanced experience of objects.
And so this dichotomy inevitably leads to a dichotomy of disorders.
Cote agreed with Freud that neurosis are conglomerates of defense mechanisms, formations, symptoms, and unconscious conflicts. Cote even did not object to identifying unresolved erdipal conflicts, ungratified unconscious wishes, and their objects.
It’s the root of neurosis.
He said, okay, Freud, let me give you the pound of flesh. You want neurosis to be based on conflict, mainly sexual conflict. No problem.
But Cote identified a whole new class of disorders, the self disorders.
Einstein said that these are the result of the perturbed development of narcissism. It was not a cosmetic or a superficial distinction.
Self disorders are the outcomes of childhood traumas, very much different to Freud’s erdipal castration and other conflicts and fears. These are the traumas of the child either not being seen, in other words, not being affirmed by object, especially the primary objects, the parents, or they are the results of being regarded merely as an object for gratification or abuse. It was Cote who introduced the concept of being seen. I have a lecture that I gave in London, and I made it available courtesy Richard Grannon. I made it available here on my channel. And it’s about being seen, the need to be seen.
And it comes from Cote.
And Cote said, if you’re not seen by your parents, if they don’t affirm you, if they don’t hold you and love you and embrace you and so on, if they don’t provide actually the pushback and the feedback, because your parents are the only reality you can grow and evolve, especially your ego, only by interacting with reality. And reality is mediated via objects, in other words, via people, like your parents.
Later the circle grows and there are peers and teachers and lovers, but at the beginning it’s only the parents.
So if the parents give the wrong feedback, or if they regard the child as an object of gratification, or if they abuse the child, in other words, if they are bad parents, dead mothers, it’s destructive, it creates self disorders.
So Cote said neurosis is one class of disorders, but we have an entirely different class of disorders. And that’s the self disorders, which today we call personality disorders.
He’s the father of personality disorders in many ways.
And so these kind of children who are not seen, who are objectified, parentified, whose boundaries are bridged in a variety of ways, these children grow up.
And even these children become adults or ancient, and they’re not sure that they exist. They have a lack of sense of self-continuity. They have a lack of core. They have what we call, today we call it identity disturbance. They’re not sure that they exist, and they’re not sure that they are worth anything, even worth existing. They have a labile sense of self-worth, fluctuating, bipolar, self-esteem, and their emotions are dysregulated.
Now, the dysregulation can come to the surface and overwhelm them, that’s borderline, or the dysregulation can remain repressed, remain repressed, and create anger and depression, so schizoid, or it can remain repressed. And this pent-up energy becomes aggressive. That’s the narcissist and the psychopath, but it’s there.
These children suffer from depressions, as neurotics do, but the source of these depressions is existential, a knowing sensation of emptiness, the empty core.
It’s not a guilty conscience, the guilty conscience of the neurotic, it’s the empty conscience, or the empty, the emptiness of the borderline and the narcissist.
And Kohut wrote, such depressions are interrupted by rages, because things are not going their way, because responses are not forthcoming in the way they expected and needed. Some of them may even search for conflict to relieve the pain and intense suffering of the poorly established self.
The pain of the discontinuous, fragmenting, under-cath who wants to go its own way.
These are individuals whose disorders can be understood and treated only by taking into consideration the formative experiences in childhood of the total body-mind self and its self-object environment.
For instance, the experiences of joy, of the total self-feeling confirmed, which leads to pride, which leads to self-esteem, zest, initiative, or the experiences of shame, loss of vitality, deadness and depression of the self who does not have the feeling of being included, welcomed and enjoyed.
That’s again a Heinz Kohut in the preface to the Chicago Institute Lectures 1972-1976 edited by Paul and Marion Torpy.
One note before we continue.
Constructs. I keep saying constructs, structures, and I see some of you, you know, kind of baffled, as usual, and I have received a few questions.
What the heck is constructs? Constructs or structures are permanent psychological patterns, but this is not to say that they do not change. They are capable of slow change.
Kohut and his self-psychology disciples believe that the only viable constructs are comprised of self-object experiences and that these structures are lifelong ones.
Which leads me to Melanie Klein.
Melanie Klein believed more in archaic drives, splitting defenses, and archaic internal objects and part objects.
Winnicott, Balingt, other British object relations school adherents, other ego-psychologies. All these people thought that only infantile drive wishes and hallucinated oneness with archaic objects qualify as structures.
So there’s even a debate.
What is a structure? What is a construct? Or even if you go deeper, what constitutes an internal object and what is a part object?
And even within the object relations school, there are the Kleinians, which include Kernberg and others, and there the Fairbairn-Winnicott-Guntrip school, which wholeheartedly disagreed with Melanie Klein on numerous issues.
When is a mother good enough, mother?
According to Winnicott, when she gradually and increasingly frustrates her child, you heard me well, frustrates her child, these cumulative denials of the child’s wishes, these negations of his delusional and fantastic magical thinking, they are crucial to the child’s emerging perception of an external world and an unimpaired reality testing.
The good mother encourages the child’s separation from her and the child’s individuation via the formation of inviolable and respected personal boundaries. She does not sacrifice her autonomy and identity. She does not fuse with the child, merge with the child, does not treat the child as her extension, let alone as her parent.
The good mother acknowledges her own moments of exasperation and depression. She does neither idealize nor devalue herself or the child. She harbors realistic expectations of the budding relationship and reacts proportionately. She has no mood swings. She is not lebau. She is stable, firm, but not harsh, just and predictable, but never dull. She encourages her offspring’s curiosity, even as she indulges her own.
This is Winnicott, Donald Winnicott, who was a pediatrician, by the way.
Now we move on to Karen Horney.
I have heard professors of psychology, no less, pronouncing her name as Karen Horney. That must have been a projection of some sort, and I don’t want to go into any sordid details, but her name is Karen Horney. It’s a German pronunciation.
Horney is one of the precursors of the Object Relations School of Psychodynamics.
She observed that one’s personality was shaped mostly by one’s environment, society, or culture.
So she is among the first relationists or relational psychologists.
She moved away from the atom of individual, non-dividable. She moved away from the separateness of the individual, the atomization of the individual, and she regarded the individual as a node in a network, embedded.
She believed that once relationships and interactions with others in one’s childhood, determine both the shape and the functioning of one’s personality.
Horney expanded the psychoanalytic preparatory. She added needs to drives, where Freud believed in the exclusivity of the sex drive, sexmania. He believed that the sex drive is the only agent of transformation, and much, much later he added other drives.
Horney believed that people, children, needed to feel secure, to be loved, protected, emotionally nourished, and so on.
So she is the mother of everything we are teaching today.
When today we say, well, a good mother should love her child, should be a safe base, make the child feel secure, that’s Horney.
She believed that the satisfaction of these needs, to be loved, to feel safe, etc., the frustration of these needs, satisfaction or frustration in early childhood, are as important and determinant as any drive.
Society came in, she said, through the parental door.
Today we say that parents are agents of socialization. Biology converged with social injunctions to yield human values such as the nurturance of children.
Horney’s great contribution was the concept of anxiety. Yes, believe it or not. Anxiety. You would trust a German to come up with this idea.
Freudian anxiety is a rather primitive mechanism, a reaction to imaginary threats arising from early childhood sexual conflicts.
Horney argued convincingly that anxiety is a primary reaction to the child’s dependence on adults for its survival. If you were dependent on anyone for your survival, wouldn’t you be anxious?
asked Horney.
And right she was. Horney or not? She was right about this one.
When you’re dependent, you’re anxious. Dependency, codependency, dependent personality disorder could be easily conceived or reconceived together with borderline personality disorder as anxiety reactions.
Anxiety is a very common after effect, after shock of trauma.
So if we reconceive a personality disorder as post-traumatic conditions, anxiety fits in perfectly.
Children, she said, are uncertain all the time, insecure all the time. They are uncertain of receiving love, protection, nourishment, nurturance, a roof, food, anything, water, something. Children totally depend. Like, it really sucks to be a child. I’m so glad I mentioned.
So children become anxious. They develop psychological defenses to compensate for the intolerable and gradual realization that adults are merely human and are at times cruel, capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable, unreliable.
Wow. Imagine when the child discovers that these godlike giants are actually as childish as his and that his life depends on them. It’s really, really a worrying discovery.
It’s a reason for concern, you know?
And so he creates psychological defense mechanisms to compensate for this harrowing, traumatic realization.
These defenses provide both gratification and a sense of security. It’s fake security, but so what? It’s still security and better than nothing. It doesn’t solve the problem of dangerous dependence. It still exists, but it is kind of one stage removed, firewall.
Defenses are firewall against insecurity. When the defenses are attacked or perceived to be attacked, for example in therapy, anxiety is reawakened. Karen Walland, W-A-L-L-A-N-T, wrote in the book Creating Capacity for Attachment, Treating Addictions, and the Alienated Self, Jason Aronson, 1999, she wrote, the capacity to be alone develops out of the baby’s ability to hold onto the internalization of his mother, even during her absences.
It is not just an image of mother that the child retains, but also her loving devotion to him.
And so when he is alone, the child can feel confident and secure.
As he continues to infuse himself with her love, we call it object permanence or object constancy.
Pierre-Jean Pierre-Jean was the first to observe it. I’m continuing with Walland. The addict has had so few loving attachments in his life that when he is alone, he is returned to his detached, alienated self.
This feeling state can be compared to a young child’s fear of monsters without a powerful other to help him.
The monsters continue to leave somewhere within the child or in his environment.
It is not uncommon for patients to be found on either side of an attachment pendulum. It is invariably easier to handle patients for whom the transference erupts in the idealizing attachment phase.
It’s much more difficult to treat patients who view the therapist as a powerful and distrusted intruder.
And so the child learns to compromise. He learns to sacrifice a part of his autonomy, a part of his identity, just in order to feel secure.
Horne identified three neurotic strategies, submission, aggression, detachment. The choice of strategy determines the type of neurotic personality.
The submissive or compliant type is fake. He hides his aggression beneath a facade of friendliness.
Today we would call it covert narcissist. The aggressive type is also fake. At heart is actually submissive. The aggression is compensatory. The detached neurotic outlook withdraws from people. It’s what we call today’s coldness.
This cannot be considered an adaptive strategy, mind you.
But having said all this, of all the psychologists I mentioned, Horne, Karen Horne, maybe because she’s horny in the United States, Karen Horne has an optimistic outlook.
Because biology is only one of the forces shaping adulthood. Culture and society predominate this shaping. We become adults mainly by being influenced and interacting with culture and society. Biology plays a minor part.
She believes in reversibility and in the power of insight to heal. This culture and society can be engineered, can be modified, can endure change.
And so there’s hope, plasticity, cultural and societal plasticity, which are reflected, now we know, in brain plasticity.
She was a great believer in the possibility of healing and therapy. She’s among the few who also wrote books about healing, narcissists, and even self-analysis for narcissists.
Horne believes that when an adult understands his problem, his anxiety, he also acquires the ability to eliminate it altogether, insight.
But put Horne’s optimism aside for a minute. Clinical experience shows that childhood trauma and abuse are difficult to completely erase.
Modern brain research tends to support this said view, neuroplasticity notwithstanding. It does offer hope.
The brain seems to be more plastic than previously imagined, but no one knows when this window of plasticity shuts down.
What has been established is that the brain is physically impressed with abuse and trauma, rewires itself, creates new pathways.
It is conceivable that the brain’s plasticity continues well into adulthood and that later reprogramming or deprogramming by someone who is loving, caring, compassionate, and empathic, or by such experiences, maybe this reprogramming can remold the brain permanently in adulthood.
Clearly, adult patients have to accept their disorders as a given, and they have to work around these disorders rather than confront them directly.
After all, our disorders are adaptive. They helped us to survive until now. They helped us to function.
The removal of disorders, including personality disorders, may not always be wise, may not always be necessary in order to attain full and satisfactory life.
We should not all conform to the same mold. We should not all experience life the same.
Idiases, are a good thing, both on the individual level and on the level of the species.
If you don’t harm anyone, if you function in a variety of settings, and if you’re happy, there’s no need to treat you for anything. There’s no yardstick of what is normal. It’s arbitrary. It’s culture-bound, culture-dependent. It depends on society, on a specific period in history, on fashion, on recent discoveries.
So it’s nonsense to apply a rigid benchmark or yardstick.
These are the three critical questions.
Are you happy? Are you functional? Do you harm other people?
If the answer is yes to any of these three, let alone a combination, you should seek treatment and help.