This paper is addressed to patients' need for help with punitive self-critical attitudes. Such help has not always been sufficiently provided by psychoanalysts, owing to an unrecognized failure of neutrality. Historically, a gradual overemphasis on the concept of an unconscious sense of guilt has acted as a barrier to the appreciation of shame. An alternative concept, punitive unconscious self-criticism, which stands in contrast to constructive self-criticism and is common to the painful affects of guilt, shame, humiliation, and depression, can facilitate helpful analytic treatment. Heinz Kohut's contributions are examined. His analytic stance is differentiated from his theories of development. In the former, characterized by an affirmative attitude, he takes a position of functional neutrality toward shame and pays consistent though unstated attention to the effects of punitive unconscious self-criticism. The affirmative attitude can be employed without adoption of Kohut's self psychology, i.e., without abandoning the basic psychoanalytic approach to mental conflict and development. The concept of punitive unconscious self-criticism and the concept of divergent conflict, provide sufficient explanatory power. Clinical examples are used to illustrate these ideas.
The concept of the analyst's stance is employed to organize a number of ideas about psychoanalytic work, past and present, especially from the viewpoint of the method of free association. Beginning with an emphasis on the intrinsic uncertainties and paradoxes of the analytic process, the author reviews the importance of words, the aim of mastering resistances (i.e., promoting freedom of association), and functional neutrality on the analyst's part. The problem of anonymity is considered from a number of angles. Two traditions of transference are described, deriving from Freud's overlapping early formulations. The distinction between old and new determinants in the two kinds of transference is useful and important in the analyst's stance. Attitudes toward insight, resistance, and conflict resolution are considered from the perspective of the distinction between divergent and convergent conflicts, with special emphasis on the role of punitive, unconscious self-criticism.
Psychoanalytic theory has limited the term conflict to refer only to convergent conflict, whose elements tend to move toward each other, as in repression. Formulations made from the viewpoint of the method of free association have led the author to favor an expansion in the concept of conflict to include also divergent conflict, whose elements tend to move apart, as in regression-progression and in mourning. A broad range of clinical and theoretical phenomena of psychoanalysis can be accounted for by such a revision in the concept of conflict. Focusing on resistance, this paper provides a historical review and discusses the application of an expanded concept of conflict in the field of psychoanalytic technique.
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