0.4 Neo-freudian perspectives on personality  (Page 25/28)

Despite seemingly significant differences between Freud’s classical theory and the theories of the neo-Freudians we have examined above (as well as others we have not looked at), Kernberg has done an admirable job of bringing the theories into a cohesive framework. This was accomplished by setting up a hierarchical series of developmental levels at which failure to develop normally causes characteristic types of disorders, whereas successful development leads to a healthy individual. In contrast to Freud, Kernberg believes that an infant begins life as an emotional being unable to separate its own reality from others around it. As the child experiences object relations in this first stage of development, those emotions develop into the drives described by Freud: pleasant emotions lead to libidinal drives and unpleasant emotions lead to aggressive drives. During the second stage of development, the child’s continued development in relation to others leads to an understanding that objects can be both negative and positive (the process of splitting described by Klein), and this leads to a reduction in the intensity of love and hate toward those objects. In other words, the child can love flawed individuals, since the child does not need to completely love or completely hate the important objects in their life. In simple terms, according to Kernberg, individuals who fail to accomplish the first stage of development, an understanding that they are separate from others, develop psychotic disorders. Individuals who fail to accomplish the splitting necessary in the second stage of development will develop borderline disorders, characterized by an exaggerated fixation on “bad” self and object representations (Kernberg, 2004). Completing these first two stages does not end the process, however, because the third level is the one described by Freud himself: the developmental stage in which unconscious id (emotional) impulses threaten the individual’s sense of what is good and acceptable behavior. Thus, classic neurotic disorders still potentially face those who have moved beyond the more severe psychological pathologies of psychotic and borderline conditions (Kernberg, 2004; Mitchell&Black, 1995). We will examine Kernberg’s theory in more detail at the end of the chapter, where we will examine his psychoanalytic theory of personality disorders.

In 2004, Kernberg published an excellent book entitled Contemporary Controversies in Psychoanalytic Theory, Techniques, and Their Applications . In this chapter we have seen that many disagreements arose between neo-Freudian theorists, and at first glance their theories seem to disagree more than they agree. Kernberg, however, has this to say:

Psychoanalytic object relations theories constitute so broad a spectrum of approaches that it might be said that psychoanalysis itself, by its very nature, is an object relations theory: all psychoanalytic theorizing deals, after all, with the impact of early object relations on the genesis of unconscious conflict, the development of psychic structure, and the re-actualization or enactments of past pathogenic internalized object relations in transference developments in the current psychoanalytic situation. (pg. 26; Kernberg, 2004)