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Copyright

Michael Briant

Published On

2025-03-04

Page Range

pp. 57–66

Language

  • English

Print Length

10 pages

2. Instincts or Relationship

An Historic Divide

  • Michael Briant (author)
Chapter of: Troubled People, Troubled World: Psychotherapy, Ethics and Society(pp. 57–66)
Spinoza and Freud were both concerned to stress the importance of our understanding ourselves as part of nature, but Freud’s view of that nature, writing after Darwin, differs from Spinoza’s. In his summaries of his thinking in the last two decades of his life he saw human nature, as driven by two very powerful instincts: the life instinct and the death instinct. Freud had introduced the latter almost apologetically, as a reaction to the senseless slaughter of the First World War, but its explanatory power is poor. In the forties and fifties the Scottish analyst W.R.D. Fairbairn argued that instincts in higher mammals are not powerful and that the death instinct is a redundant concept. Our most basic drive, he maintained, is for relationship, or as Bowlby put it slightly later, ‘attachment’. The revised psychoanalytic theory he reconstructed from it was clumsily labelled ‘Object Relations Theory’ by members of the Tavistock clinic who were sympathetic to it.

Fairbairn believed that failures in early relationships lead to ‘splitting’, to the emergence of schizoid states, which are characterised by demonization and dehumanisation as we attempt to deal with the relational failures by projecting parts of ourselves we sense are unacceptable on to other individuals or groups. This is the paranoid-schizoid process, But the rejected parts of ourselves, which might be, for example, our own aggression, or sexual desires which the culture forbids, are hate loaded and sensed as returning that hate in all its force. This, we feel, justifies our persecuting them. The history of Christianity vividly illustrates the splitting process with its images of Christ and Satan, or the Virgin Mary and the Witch: Satan and the Witch are not just passive shadows, but seen as full of malevolent power and intent.

Contributors

Michael Briant

(author)

Michael Briant is a member of the Guild of Psychotherapists and an Associate member of the Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy. After graduating from the University of Cambridge he worked for the British Council, where, amongst other things he was involved in the cultural exchange agreements which, it was hoped, would further understanding between Britain and the former Soviet Union. He left to pursue post-graduate studies at the L.S.E., where, as a pupil of Ernest Gellner, he wrote a doctoral thesis on psychoanalysis. His experience has mostly been in various parts of the education system, for the last 36 years within the University of Cambridge, where he also directed a postgraduate diploma in psychodynamic studies, run jointly by the University Counselling Service and the Department of Continuing Education. Michael has contributed to leading journals in the field of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and is the author of “Psychotherapy, Ethics, and Society: Another Kind of Conversation’ (2018), of which this book is a new, revised and expanded edition.