Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis (excerpt)

Details: Last Updated: Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37; Written by Charles Spezzano

"Excitement, Certainty, Relational Coordination, and Competence": excerpt from a chapter on narcissism in Charles Spezzano's book on affect.

Excitement, Certainty, Relational Coordination, and Competence

The ressentiment experience is always characterized by this
"transparent" presence of the true objective values
behind the illusory
ones-by that obscure awareness that one lives
in a sham world which
one is unable to penetrate.

-Max Scheler (1972)

Excerpt from Pp. 151-169.

In Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis

by Charles Spezzano. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale NJ. 1993

Psychoanalytic theorizing has been fueled by the search for an ultimate duality to which all the dialectics of human psychological life might be reduced. Freud started out with sex and survival and ended up with Eros and Thanatos. Melanie Klein, as Winnicott read her, posited ruthless love and malevolent hatred in a dialectic that might developmentally be synthesized into a capacity for concern and guilt. British object relations theories, following Fairbairn, focused on the tension in each of us between the desire to hold onto the certain security of those self-and-object configurations within which we have survived and the desire to reach for new and risky configurations that might offer greater satisfaction and fulfillment-more options for gratifying work and love-or that might tease and frustrate, if not destroy, us. Self psychology rests on an implied dialectic between urges for self-creation and affiliation. Interpersonal theory, following Sullivan, has drawn our attention to our contending predispositions constantly to re-create relational arrangements that we perceive ourselves as competent to manage, but that offer limited satisfactions; and, on the other hand, to create new and potentially more useful, exciting, and interesting arrangements with others in the management of which we will initially be relatively incompetent and thus insecure. Most recently, Greenberg (1991) has suggested a drive for safety in inevitable conflict with a drive for effectance.

If one asks which dialectic is the foundation, the affective and interpretive bedrock, in a hierarchy of human desires, then one must choose from among these contenders or invent one's own dialectic to which, one might then argue, all the others are ultimately reducible. We do not, however, have to ask that question. It is equally plausible to hold the position that there is no permanent hierarchy of desires (with one dialectic duality underlying all the rest), that there is rather "a jostling democracy of contending predispositions" (Rieff, 1966, p. 55). Each of these predispositions is subjectively experienced as a desire to maximize and elaborate, or to minimize and truncate, a specific affect.

The full array of these affects defines the human agenda. We must survive, so we are equipped with the potential to experience the affective states of safety or anxiety. We must procreate and affiliate, so we have the capacity to feel sexually excited, affectionate, concerned, and guilty. We must act in and on the world, so we have the potential to become interested in and excited about various opportunities for such activity: various aspects of events and actions elicit in us the crucial affect of interest excitement, a feeling that Freud thought was an elaboration of sexual excitement but that, in agreement with Winnicott and Kohut, I find it more useful to consider as a separate affect with a life of its own within each psyche. We must, apparently, also know when it is hopeless to act, and so we are equipped with the capacity to feel depressed, to withdraw our excitement about the world and shut down affectively.

I do not intend the previous paragraph to be a comprehensive list of affects. I offer it to substantiate the point that we do not have to arrange this democracy of affects-viewed as crucial forms of information about the state of the self among its objects, as modes of communication, and as action predispositions-into a hierarchy in which some are reduced to others. Each reflects an inescapable domain of human life, an unavoidable item on the human agenda, with which each of us must contend in one way or another from birth to death.*

*'For an examination from another angle of the basic human relational and affective agenda, see Spezzano (1992).

As we move through the intrapsychic and relational events that make up our lives, these affective priorities are arranged and rearranged into an endless variety of conflictual dualities and multiplicities. Rather than searching for the bottom-line affect or duality of affective desires to which all the others are made subordinate, it is more theoretically useful and more consistent with actual clinical practice to discriminate carefully and expand the range of affective states and the subtle nuances of those states. In fact, the evolution of psychoanalysis has been just that-a continual expansion, rather than reduction, of the list of human affects and their associated desires, with each theory, paradoxically, positing a specific pair of these desires as the overriding key to human motivation.

A NEW CONSTELLATION OF AFFECTIVE STATES

Consistent with this view of how psychoanalysis has been evolving, this chapter explores four related affective states, the importance of which has been implied by many theorists from Winnicott to Greenberg, but whose dialectically related origins and vicissitudes have not been made explicit: the feelings of excitement, certainty, relational coordination, and competence.*

* Greenberg (1991) has come closer than any previous theory builder to illuminating the profound influence of some of these affective potentials in development, pathology, and the clinical process, and later in the chapter I will gratefully draw on (and, I hope, elaborate in a useful way) his work.

A useful window through which to explore this constellation of affects is the clinical problem of narcissism, perhaps the quintessential affective resolution of our time. Narcissists are divorced from their excitement, have retreated from the world of choice and chance into an illusion of certainty, substitute the illusion of perfect relational coordination for an awareness of the reality of mutual affective influence, and have constructed a dominant self-representation specifically designed to ward off consciousness of their perceived incompetence at using others to regulate their affective states effectively.

Developmentally, narcissism is a perversion of both forms of excitement, sexual excitement and interest excitement. We imagine that at the start an infant finds various bodily events and actions to be exciting. Then he becomes aware that his excitement and the mother's excitement are not in absolute synchrony. What would happen if they ever were is not known to us. This cannot happen.

If they are close enough, if the mother's ability to match the child's excitement is good enough, then the child will come to like and trust his excitement. He will play with it apart from the mother. He will take his excitement into transitional space, where he will maintain an excitedly playful mood without the mother's participation. Here, in transitional space, he will hold and keep alive his own excitement without referring to any other subjectivity to validate it. He will elaborate his excited feelings into ideas, fantasies, plans, actions, and representations of self and other in various interactions.

It is in this sense that each child has the capacity to be a center of initiative, as Kohut (1984) put it. This way of understanding the notion of "self as center of initiative" helps to demystify it, but not fully I hope, because we never fully understand why certain bodily events or ways of acting in and on the world are more exciting to a particular child than are other events or actions. Each child unfolds or creates a natural hierarchy of excitements that we discover as we watch the child develop.

As she playfully elaborates her excited feelings in transitional space, the child literally creates herself and her version of being in the world. In doing this work the child always feels some tension about having pulled away from others in the world, and so she always, to some extent, has one eye on the parents to see how they are reacting to her excitement. In fact, reading Winnicott, (1936) we get the sense that it is difficult to locate fully the feeling of excitement inside any one person at any moment. Winnicott's center of excitement and initiative seems to be a moveable feast, hovering intersubjectively between parents and child. The child feels a spark of excitement, has the potential to become excited to an extent that would allow full "aliveness" to develop, but uses the excitement of the parents to actualize this potential.

If, by contrast, the child and his mother are too far out of synchrony, then he will begin to pay less attention to his own excitement and become a slave to the mother's. Since excitement draws us toward its object, the child discovers that the excited mother is drawn toward him. He abandons the self-creative agenda suggested by his own excitement and devotes himself to the more immediate affiliative satisfactions that come his way when he can keep his mother excited about him. Out of whatever excites her he weaves his preferred self-representation which becomes an "illusion of perfection" (Mitchell, 1988). The illusion is perfect because it is an amalgam of what has worked perfectly to excite his mother. Behind this illusion, however, always lurks the threat of awareness of both the emptiness created by the absence of the child's own excitement and the memory of feelings of disgust experienced when the mother was pushing her own excited agenda down the infant's bodily or psychic throat.

Cut off from his own excitement, the narcissist literally does not know what to do with himself. He requires the excitement of others not only to confirm his dominant self-representation but also to keep from becoming immobilized. He desires whatever excites others or whatever he believes will excite them. He has no way to decide among options unless another person appears to be significantly more excited about one of them than about the others.

Here is how one analysand experienced this narcissistic dilemma. Whenever he proposed to his wife or child that they do something together, he almost immediately was aware of being uncertain that he really wanted to do what he himself had just suggested. He would wait to see how excited they became about the idea. If they simply indicated a willingness to go along with him, he would become angry and confused. He would criticize them for always wanting to do something other than what he wanted to do. Gradually he came to understand that he was tossing out ideas in the hope of catching some excitement in his wife and child. He did not want mere cooperation, because he was not sure that what he had suggested was actually what he wanted to do. He could imagine doing any number of things. He was waiting to see if the idea he proposed led them to say, "Great idea! We'd love to do that." Then he would feel, not necessarily excited, but pleased with himself for having thought of a great idea. Any excitement would have to come from his wife and child.

The primary affective source of the narcissist's tendency to idealize others is his seeing in them the excitement he can no longer find in himself. Potential guides and mentors are everywhere. Anyone with a clear sense of initiative may be adopted as a source of wisdom, a provider of direction. Or, in what has come to be called an alter ego or twinship relationship, the narcissist may develop the illusion that self and other are joined in identical excitement about some person, place, thing, activity, world view, or set of values. The narcissist, however, is able to be excited only to the extent that he is feeding off the excitement of the other and feeding it back to the other.

THE NARCISSISTIC PERVERSION OF EXCITEMENT

Viewed through the lens of classical drive theory (Freud, 1914b) the sexual excitement of the narcissistic patient has been perverted into total self-excitement, but the perversion goes much further. The narcissist has come to mistrust all forms of excitement emerging in himself. He no longer searches for these affective states. Like Blanche Dubois (in the play A Streetcar Named Desire), who came to rely on the kindness of strangers, the narcissistic patient has come to rely on the excitement of others. Where does the narcissist turn when he turns away from his excitement? He searches for an immutable and omnipotent sense of certainty.

The writings of Erik Erikson and Jay Greenberg flesh out our understanding of this developmental detour. Erikson (1950) described two qualities that play a crucial role in the development of a strong character: initiative and industry. Greenberg (1991) argues that we are driven to search for two affective states, which he labels safety and effectance. Neither author emphasizes feelings of certainty or excitement, but both implicitly rely on those feelings to ground their affect theories. Erikson (1950) suggested that the sense of initiative rests on a kind of energy that permits us "to approach what seems desirable (even if it also seems uncertain and even dangerous) with undiminished and more accurate direction" (p. 255; italics added). Translated from the language of energy into the language of affect, it is precisely the feeling of excitement on which a sense of initiative rests; in turn, industry rests upon initiative. As Erikson put it: "[I]nitiative is a necessary part of every act, and man needs a sense of initiative for whatever he learns and does" (p. 255).

Similarly, in describing the affective state of effectance, Greenberg (1991) plays down the possible role of excitement in its total makeup. He writes that a person experiencing the affective state of effectance is "perhaps excited."3

3 Although disparity might be expected between Greenberg's view and mine because he is writing about drives toward affective states whereas I am trying to get at affective states directly, it still surprised me at first that he included the phrase "perhaps excited" in his description of the affective state of effectance. It now seems to me that this is Greenberg's nod toward the moment of initiative that kicks off the process in which his real interest lies: industry and the unique form of self-esteem it provides. In other words, I think I am putting my emphasis on a part of the process that was not Greenberg's central focus. During this initial stage of the process of acting on the world, excitement is very much the key affect.

Yet it is hard to pull the spice of excitement out of the blend of ingredients with which Greenberg creates effectance-"vitality," "vigorousness," "alive and active," "exuberance," "effective, stimulated"-while still imagining that it has the flavor he obviously wants it to have. In turn, the affects of excitement and effectance are the felt components of Erikson's qualities of initiative and industry. Erikson's (1950) terms refer more to how the developing person observing herself, or someone else observing her, might assess the behavioral manifestations of those qualities. In other words, a child who can with relative spontaneity identify a task as the one that interests her most at the moment and can undertake that task (be it playing, working, or relating) will be perceived as showing initiative. If, in addition, she shows the stick-to-itiveness to complete the task, she will have exhibited industry. Subjectively, however, the child will feel excited about the task and will later feel effective for having seen it through, for having done something worthwhile, for having mastered some previously unmastered segment of the world.

When Greenberg (1991) describes effectance, he focuses on the special brand of self-esteem that comes from a sense of having been productive. In other words, he focuses on Erikson's stage of industry. He writes that we see this affective state of effectance in "the athlete who has just won a race" and we feel it in ourselves "when we have achieved a goal, overcome an obstacle, felt that we have used ourselves well" (p. 130). This is a wonderfully concise definition of industry as Erikson used it. Greenberg, however, goes beyond that definition in the direction of combining the excitement of initiative with the self-esteem of productivity into the affective state of effectance, which captures well the blend of related affects that characterizes the whole process of undertaking a course of action and bringing it to a successful conclusion.

CERTAINTY AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR EXCITEMENT

Initiative launches those activities which have the potential to yield the affective state of effectance that Greenberg describes. The search for the excitement associated with such initiative, therefore, will often run counter to the search for a feeling of safety, just as Greenberg argues that the search for a feeling of effectance often runs counter to the search for safety. This is what Erikson was getting at when he said that our initiative pushes us toward what excites us, what is desirable, even in the face of uncertainty.

The uncertainty about which we are all concerned is ubiquitous and is the source of many of the conflicts and concerns that patients report. We never know with certainty how any decision, choice, or mental or behavioral strategy will leave us feeling. We can never proceed on the basis of future certainty. In the absence that sort of omniscience, the affect of excitement is a critical human guide to what direction we should move in at any given moment.

It is sometimes suggested that narcissists try to turn back defensively to omniscience. I believe, instead, that they more often substitute a felt sense of certainty for excitement as a guide to making choices. It is not that they are omniscient, but that there is nothing to know about. There is no need to know because there is one self-evident path to follow that is obviously perfect. As Rothstein (1984) has elegantly and insightfully elucidated this human predicament, we can be thrown into the urgent pursuit of perfection by a variety of painful affects or by affective states perceived as potentially threatening. He writes, "Signal anxieties, and the often associated feelings of rage, disappointment, or sexual excitement, may motivate a subject to pursue one form or another form of narcissistic perfection" (p. 19). These affects, viewed (as we have been viewing them) as predispositions to action, call for us to do something, and further anxiety and confusion may then occur because of the difficult choices with which the affects confront us. In the narcissistic solution, however, there are no choices to be made because one resolution is treated as perfect; thus there is no need to be omniscient in order to choose among them.

If there are no choices to be made, if there is a way to have it all, then the narcissist can rest easy. As soon as compromise, limitation, and choice enter the picture, he becomes confused and immobilized or frantic and impulsive. Having failed to master his own excitement, he cannot use it to prioritize his possibilities for getting what he wants or doing what he wants. If he can be said to desire at all, it must be said that he can desire only what excites others. More to the point, however, the narcissist wants to create the illusion of a world in which there is only one thing that might possibly be desired. In such a world, the person without excitement can move around as effectively as the person with it.

Mitchell (1988) has shed significant light on the psychic versions of perfection and certainty that are open to the person reaching for a narcissistic solution in the face of such a quandary. Three illusions of perfection make this solution possible. The self that will always excite the other, the other whose excitement will guide the self, and the mutually excited self-other relationship all make the representational world a unified and coordinated whole. Hegel (quoted in Kimball, 1992) took great comfort in this sense of having gotten hold of the "whole" story of existence. He said that his faith in a vision of history as the gradual unfolding of reason in the world was not an assumption from which he had launched his philosophical investigations. His faith, his sense of absolute certainty, was actually a conclusion he had reached after coming to know history and the world whole. As Roger Kimball (1992) has observed about this claim, "It is cheering to possess knowledge of `the whole,' of course, but a bit daunting for the rest of us" (p. 13).

In this spirit, Frank Lloyd Wright is rumored not only to have designed a house for his client but also to have designed and positioned everything in it. If he came to visit and something had been moved, he invariably noticed and moved it back. Any change ruined the entire design for him.

Similarly, in Raymond Carver's (1989) short story, "Chef's House," a recovering alcoholic named Wes constructs a narcissistic world out of a house on the California coast in which his friend, Chef, allows him to live for "next to nothing." In this house everything will work out. All past damage will be undone and set right. Wes invites his estranged wife to spend the summer with him, and they effect a reconciliation; but when the house is reclaimed by the owner, Wes is enraged. He immediately begins hatefully to denigrate Chef's daughter, Linda, who is going to move into the house. Despite the fact that Chef has told him that Linda's husband has apparently been lost in a boating accident, that she is alone with a small child, and that he wants to take care of her, Wes begins to scorn her, focusing on her being overweight and saying to his wife, in an attempt at sadistic humor, that he too would choose to go down with his ship rather than be forced to live out his life with "fat Linda and her kid."

Wes becomes confused and unable to imagine a future, much less move toward it. His wife suggests they move to another house, but he knows it will not be the same. She tries to get him to imagine options, but he says that for there to be options for him, he would have to be someone else. For the self that he has constructed, there is either having the house or not having it. In it he has permanent security and self-esteem. Without it, his life, his chance for a new life with his wife, his whole sense of well-being have been ruined beyond repair. He sees himself as having no choices. The house was a one-of-a-kind opportunity. In my view, Wes actually was prevented from making any choices by the perpetual existence of a representation of total wellbeing in his inner world that he alternately projected onto a bottle of alcohol or the house. He kept choosing a representational arrangement that puts him inside something absolutely secure and sustaining. For Wes, it was either the house or the bottle.

This narcissistic sensibility is a universal element in psychic life. We are reluctant to rely on our excitement as a guide to what direction we should move in. We are reluctant to face uncertainty. Things may change for the worse. We fear that they will. A desire for immunity to unwelcome changes in our affective states underlies, I believe, what Greenberg (1991) has described as the universal human "drive" to seek a feeling state of safety. In this feeling state, "There is a sense of continuity that verges on timelessness; neither the wellbeing nor the conditions that produce it will ever change" (p. 130).

Similarly, Fairbairn, Sullivan, Winnicott, and Kohut have all illuminated our understanding of the universal concern with a felt sense of certainty-each in his own language. Fairbairn's (1944) internal objects are attempts to avoid the dangerous unpredictability of real people. Sullivan's (1953) self-system seeks to lock in place an interpersonal modus operandi that reduces all future interactions to a few well-practiced scripts. Winnicott's (1988) magical introjects (not part of instinctual experience, he argued) provide the illusion of both affective immunity and control, but at the cost of psychic growth "in the true sense of the word" (p. 77). Kohut's (1984) grandiose self, idealized other, and alter ego freeze the subject into an immutable picture of "cohesion, vitality, strength, and harmony" (p. 197), but still leave the warded-off depressed version of the self attempting to "maintain itself through joyless pleasure seeking" (p. 209), that is, through an agenda not derived at all from one's own excitement.

The psychic enemy of a felt sense of certainty is choice. Even to acknowledge the existence of choices in any situation is an assault on the narcissistic sensibility, with its unquenchable desire to define and embrace a single version of the perfect life. Choosing and deciding are topics that often occupy a peripheral role in the psychoanalytic literature because they seem to belong to the realm of external reality, where the analyst has no business treading. Yet, as Rangell (1986) has argued, key functions of the ego are to take the initiative and formulate choices and make decisions on the basis of the ego's assessment of the competing agendas suggested by the id, the superego, and the external world. Another way to put this is that all structural conflicts involve a dialectic between certainty and possibility in the form of change from old psychic arrangements to new ones. In the process, old versions of self and other must be left behind and new ones embraced. "Moreover, the resolution of a conflict is a question of choice which on the one hand signals gain but on the other invariably spells a relinquishing [and] the situation of choice and relinquishing is very difficult in itself, as it clashes with the basic narcissistic desire for perfection and omnipotence" (Kulka, 1988, p. 525).

The clash between certainty and choice is a central narcissistic conflict. Certainty is the ultimate comfort and security whereas choice is inevitably risky. The narcissistically constructed object is fantasized as being able to accommodate completely the fluctuating regressive and progressive affective states of the patient. It is the repository of the patient's hope for continuous well-being. It also eliminates the need to recognize choice. Choice inherently implies options, each of which is limited in its ability to satisfy the patient's affective hopes. If one option provided total satisfaction with no cost in affective disappointment, distress, or pain, then there would be reason to select otherwise. When the patient has not been able to realize this option, his sense is that either he has failed or settled, but he has not chosen and will not experience himself as having done so. If he has failed, he will experience shame and self-hatred. If he has been forced by something perceived to be outside himself to settle for less than the perfect option, he will hate the antagonistic external force.

The psychic stalemate captured so well by Carver (1989) is that the more narcissistically imbued the self- or object representation, the more it will interfere with interaction between the intrapsychic and the environmental realms by limiting the patient's ability to become excited about anything in the world. Some patients who enter analyses with the feeling that there is something they want to do but cannot seem to act on have already made the one choice that eliminates the necessity of all other choices and decisions, the choice to relate exclusively to the internalized narcissistic object or to relate to all objects through the narcissistically determined version of the self.4

(4) I am grateful to Steve Garger for suggesting the idea (quite some time ago and in another context) of the single choice that eliminates the need for any future choices.

They are immobilized not because there are choices "in the world," but because they have already chosen not to act at all in a world that offers choices that never measure up to the internal narcissistic arrangement's promise of certain excitement, security, and self-esteem.

It is not simply, for example, that both lovers or both jobs are desirable in mutually excluding ways, but that neither is as desirable as the narcissistic arrangement. To try to analyze the failure to choose in such love and work situations in terms of the competing desirabilities of each option or in terms of the reluctance to choose, and then grieve the loss of what was desired in the relinquished option, often results in an endless impasse of inactivity-with the patient agreeing that that is exactly why she cannot choose, but continuing to feel unable to choose anyway.

By contrast, the technical strategy of specifically interpreting the power of the excitedly and blissfully imagined unavailable option (the narcissistic object with its guarantee that, once obtained, the final corner will have been turned and life will be wonderful forever) to overshadow all existing options more often leads to a specific change in self-understanding. The perceived conflict shifts from "there are two equally desirable and equally flawed options between which there is no logical way to choose" to "I am choosing to gamble that someday the world will reveal or yield up to me the person, place, job, or thing that will be beyond choice because in its presence I will feel certainty, not doubt, about my emotional future."

The patient now perceives herself as already doing something, as already choosing to relate to the certain internal object and to sacrifice experimenting with uncertain external options. The gnawing sense that something is wrong is now understood, not as the existential anxiety of choosing, but as the awareness that the internal object, like the hallucinated breast, can serve one's needs onlyso far. There are constant affective reminders that remaining uncommitted to any actual person or vocation, including this analyst and this analysis, is a strategy that inevitably produces a periodic and painful sense that something important is missing from one's psychic life.

From the standpoint of a psychoanalysis viewed as essentially a theory of affects, a patient's narcissistic reliance on a single, perfectly responsive object representation for his salvation reflects an extreme lack of tolerance for awareness of the possibility of interactions or events that might adversely influence his emotional status quo. A frustration of his excitement or a failed opportunity to feed his self-esteem destroys his illusion of the certain reliability of the narcissistic object. Not only did the event or interaction feel bad, but to accept that such a thing could happen is to abandon all hope for the felt sense of certainty that is the most secure form of well-being.

This perspective helps to illuminate the way in which a heightened narcissistic sensibility largely precludes excitement about the analyst and the analyst's analyzing function while limiting the patient's interest in and excitement about the analyst to perceived opportunities to actualize in the relationship feelings of magic hopefulness. Magical self- and object representations provide the illusion of both affective immunity and control, but at the cost of those engagements with the world that are the stuff out of which psychic growth occurs.

THE ILLUSION OF PERFECT RELATIONAL COORDINATION

The third characteristic of the narcissistic solution is the tendency to substitute the illusion of perfect relational coordination for an awareness of the reality of mutual influence. The patient who cannot decide, who is stuck, who does not know what she wants, can only imagine the way out to be through the analyst, who not only does know what the patient wants, but who also embodies her lost desire and feels her lost excitement. To realize this reassuring fantasy there must be no sense of dyscoordination of goals or feelings in the relationship.

It is at this juncture that Winnicott's work intersects that of Jacques Lacan. In Lacan's (1977) portrait of the genesis of psychopathology we have all aggressively subjugated our own egos to the desires of infantile attachment figures. The Lacanian ego is, to that extent, a conceptual equivalent of the Winnicottian (1960) and the Kohutian (1977) nuclear self. Both are, in the language of object relations theory, versions of the self that hold the promise of a world in which the uncertainties of mutual affective influence need not be taken into account because an arrangement has been achieved with the other in which there is perfect coordination of affect. We forge our egos not only out of the desires of the other or out of the coherent mirror image of the self (which is more solid and certain than the chaotic experience of our actual affective states), but out of an illusory hope for a relational arrangement in which affective conflict between self and object is transcended.

In motivational terms, our narcissism pushes for the elimination of the awareness of conflict between self-creation and affiliation. The patient's narcissistic sensibility does not necessarily lead him to seek either to control or to be controlled by the analyst. It is more essentially narcissistic that he wants to transcend the concerns, anxieties, hates, and shames associated with mutual influence, relational power, and the vicissitudes of control. He wants a dance in which no one leads and no one follows because the two partners are inherently coordinated. As one patient put it after stumbling across an opportunity to do a type of creative work he had been fantasizing about for some time, "I like it best when something I want just falls from the sky." The world senses what he needs and drops it into his lap. He and the world are coordinated. What feels good to him feels good to the rest of the world. The world wants him to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because his doing it makes the world excited too. The world wants him to have what he wants to have when he wants to have it because his having it satisfies the world as well.

Although Lacan's theory of ego and other sometimes resembles the self psychologies of Winnicott and Kohut, it is in the differences that Lacan becomes most interesting to a theory of affects. Not only does his work make an important contribution to a psychoanalytic theory of affects, but affect theory helps to make his work more understandable and less mystical. Consider first Lacan's often too poetic theory of desire. Here's how Guy Thompson (1985), in an unusually lucid introduction to Lacan's work, captures it: "In its fully articulated (sublimated) form, desire is the desire to be recognized by another subject of desire who desires the same thing" (p. 58). This is Lacan's recognition of the longing for perfect affective relational coordination, and Thompson carries the notion into a discussion of the therapeutic relationship which, he argues, "should be structured in such a way that it promotes the inevitable discovery that this state of unification is a fiction" (p.85). The patient ought to wonder what the analyst wants. The patient wants his affective life recognized and wants to believe that it either matches the analyst's affective life or fits it like a glove, but what does the analyst want? The patient wants to be healed, but what does the analyst stand to gain by terminating a case?5

5 Malcolm Slavin and Dan Kreigman (1992) have raised similar questions, and have developed a similar perspective on analysis as a process of negotiation between two people whose interests cannot completely overlap, by applying the principles of contemporary Darwinian evolutionary biology to

clinical theory.

"Until the patient is capable of asking such questions," Thompson argues, "he will stay trapped in the immediacy of his self-serving narcissistic haze" (p.85). In a narcissistic haze, the interests, affects, and agendas of the patient and analyst overlap completely, not partially as they do when viewed from outside the haze.

Take, for example, the matter of paying for missed sessions as it was illuminated in a courageously revealing report of a particularly sensitive piece of analytic work by Greenberg (1991). There is no single perfect way to respond when patients ask for the rationale for a fee policy. Greenberg reports that a particular patient was not satisfied with his brief references to his need for financial stability. Later he added that he also did it because he did not want to be in the position of judge and jury every time the patient missed an hour. Not only would he feel uncomfortable in that position, but he also believed that his assuming that position would be inherently disrespectful toward the patient. At first, the patient was surprised and pleased. Greenberg does not comment on this initial reaction but rather on the rage that followed.

While writing this chapter, I found myself thinking of that momentary affective state of pleasant surprise. The patient liked Greenberg's explanation. Why? The patient might have been pleased because Greenberg restored the narcissistic haze for a moment by explaining that his charging the patient for all missed sessions was actually good for both of them. When the only reason was that the analyst would feel better if he could predict his weekly income, the lack of affective coordination was obvious to the patient. Even when Greenberg suggested that he felt uncomfortable being a judge, he was still not satisfying the patient's narcissistic sensibility. When, however, Greenberg added that his way of running his practice was respectful to the patient, he and the patient are affectively coordinated again. What is financially good and emotionally comfortable for the analyst is also good for the patient. Then, however, the patient asked why Greenberg had never told him that before, why he had told him only about the financial-security rationale for his missed session policy. Greenberg replied that it was because he had not thought it would be helpful, but maybe he had been wrong. "This," Greenberg reports, "opened up a period of sustained anger."

Although the anger of narcissistically wounded or otherwise hurt and disappointed patients is more commonly the focus of contemporary clinical theorizing (and is where Greenberg directs his attention in his case report), viewing narcissism from the perspective of the affects involved raises the possibility that we should be equally, if not more, curious about the moment when the patient felt pleased. The narcissistic rearrangement of the patient's representational world (when he felt that he and Greenberg were joined by the fee arrangement in mutual respect and goodwill) was, ironically, shattered when Greenberg did not have an explanation for not having made such a rearrangement possible sooner, other than that he had perhaps made a mistake.

In Greenberg's scenario, the patient starts out annoyed at having to pay for certain missed sessions. In part his annoyance stems from the fact that the analyst's policy constantly reminds him of something about which he prefers to remain unaware: that his interests and the analyst's interests do not totally coincide. The analyst wants to rent out his hours and be paid for them whether or not the tenant/ analysand uses all of them. The analysand wants to keep as much of his money as he can and wants to avoid paying rent on the couch when he cannot use it. He keeps asking for another reason why the analyst has such a policy. He keeps asking because he wants to find another reason, one that does not emphasize the self-other dyscoordination of interest and the associated dyscoordination of affect. He cannot find a way that both he and the analyst can feel equally and unconflictedly good about payment for missed sessions.

Then an affective shift occurs when Greenberg suggests that there is a rationale for the policy of payment for missed sessions that could allow the patient to generate the desired narcissistic illusion of unity of interest and affect between himself and the analyst. This rationale is that if the analyst and the patient set up the analyst as judge and jury of the quality and and legitimacy of the patient's reasons or excuses for missing sessions, it would be disrespectful to the patient. Perhaps, I am suggesting, the patient is pleased precisely because, for a moment, looking at things this way lets him rearrange his representational world in such a way that he and his analyst are an affective team dancing with perfect coordination to the tune of mutual respect.

Then, however, the third affective moment emerges. The patient is angry that Greenberg did not provide this narcissistically satisfying solution sooner, that Greenberg let him feel lousy for so long rather than reveal his thinking. I see this anger as further confirmation that the patient had constructed a narcissistic solution to his analytic dilemma out of Greenberg's explanation. He had, for a moment, found relief in the illusion that he and the analyst were dancing with absolute affective coordination, and this pleased him momentarily; but he quickly was angered that the analyst had been stepping on his toes for so long and the pain had been, from that perspective, unnecessary.

The question that this clinical vignette leaves most of us with, I imagine, is when might we offer similar or different explanations about fees or other matters to patients who are asking for or demanding them? As the American Lacanian scholar John Muller (1989) has suggested, it is in the act of responding to the needs, demands, and desires of patients that we and they discover together how we have recognized them through our unconscious processing: "as entitled, as appropriate, as delightful, as obnoxious" (p. 377). Need, want, desire, obnoxiously demanding entitlement, and healthy assertiveness are properties of the unconscious connection between analyst and analysand, not properties of the psyche of the patient.

None of us can regulate our emotional states in total isolation. Despite the constant promoting of individuality and autonomy, we all use others, and allow ourselves to be used by others, every day, in order to survive emotionally. Sullivan (1940) was the first psychoanalyst to grasp the importance of this psychological reality, and his original insight is now mirrored in various terms that have recently appeared in books and articles on psychoanalysis, terms like intersubjectivity and social constructivism. These terms, along with the one I am using, mutual affective influence, all refer to something the narcissist does not want to know: from minute to minute, each of us is an open affective system highly accessible and vulnerable to impact from the words, gestures, actions, and affective states of others.

Normally, the early history of each of us as agent and as container of affects should lead to representations of self and other that reflect the reality of mutual influence in the generating of affective states. In other words, we would, in the best of all possible childhoods, develop an accurate awareness of how we and others in interaction account for each other's affective states, and we would also develop a stable sense that our affects are never under our absolute control nor under the absolute control of another. There are many possible distorted accounts of mutual influence, but, by contrast, the narcissistic account of life is not one of mutual influence at all. The more the patient's representations of self and other deny the reality of mutual influence on the vicissitudes of affective states, the closer the patient lives to the center of the narcissistic world.

RELATIONAL INCOMPETENCE AND THE DENIAL OF MUTUAL INFLUENCE

Why does the narcissist so desperately try to deny mutual influence? The narcissist cannot stand to recognize this aspect of the interpersonal game because he perceives himself to be incompetent at it. As Kohut (1977) and Winnicott (1960) clearly argued, we never outgrow our need for others who allow us to use them to help us soothe ourselves, maintain our security, and manage our self-esteem. To survive emotionally in this open system requires competence at getting others to allow us to use them as well as competence in managing interactions so that we are not emotionally invaded and occupied by the other. The narcissist, however, carries a memory of himself as having been incompetent at doing precisely this. The incompetence that he perceives in himself and represents in a warded-off representation of himself portrays him as unable to get his objects to recognize, share in, and help organize his excitement and as unable to keep others from using him emotionally (except by abandoning all involvements with others and enduring unbearable loneliness).

Consider again the businessman whose anxiety-laden encounter with a venture capitalist was described in the previous chapter. At one stage in his quest for funding for a project that he viewed as a turning point in his career he had on the table only two offers, neither of which came close to realizing the level of financing for or control of the business that he had imagined. He was aware of actions he might take in response to this situation but found himself so lethargic and confused that he could not move forward at all.

As we analyzed his immobility, he became aware of those feelings of lethargy and confusion and then recalled feeling the same way when his mother died. His representation of her took the form of a weak object unable to do for him what an intact mother (equals an enthusiastic and "fair" venture capitalist) would do for him. His accompanying self-representation was of a powerless and confused boy (equals his chronically underfunded entrepreneurial self) who could do nothing to transform her into the healthy woman he could imagine but could never have.

So what did this man do, convinced as he was that he was stuck with an object so weak and so preoccupied with its own problems that it would be all but impossible to get the object to recognize and share his excitement? First, he fantasized that he would be irresistible to even the most hard-to-reach object. His genius would make him indispensable to people with money or would guarantee his success by awing potential backers or buyers of his plans.

Second, he fantasized that he would be totally self-sufficient. He would even write the legal documents his business requires. No attorney could understand his agenda well enough anyway to write exactly what he needed. There was enough truth to his assertion to allow him to do some portion of the task, but never to complete the whole letter or contract satisfactorily. In the process, he would suffer through long, unpleasant weekends at home trying to finish this "homework assignment," which he could easily have avoided by at least consulting an attorney but with which he now felt hopelessly stuck.

Third, he fantasized that he would fix the broken object. When, for example, he sought to defend himself against the representation of the unexcitable object, he would create in fantasy the perfectly excited object. He then excitedly and anxiously imagined project backers who would provide all the money for future needs, replenish his bank account for money already spent on research and development, and still give him the lion's share of control over the business. The problem, as we understood it, was not that no such deal had ever been struck, but that the imagined backers were sought as substitutes for the impotent maternal object and were, therefore, supposed to have the patient's best interests as much in mind as their own, just as he wanted them to imagine that he was doing what he was doing as much for them as for himself. When this mother-son tenderness failed to materialize, he became disappointed, felt others were greedy and unfair, and lamented his own failure to accumulate enough money to finance his own projects. Like the first two strategies, this one replaced the competence he was convinced he did not have, the competence to influence the object and to manage the influence the object might have on him. His strategy was to cure his sense of incompetence with the illusion of self-created rather than selfdiscovered objects.

Excerpt from Pp. 151-169. Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis

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