The Psychoanalysis of Elation

By Bertram D. Lewin

Perfect for any student of the human brain, this historic text looks at the most pleasant human emotion, elation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473386105

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Psychoanalytic

Approach to Elation

PSYCHOANALYSIS now sees the human total personality as made up of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The ego occupies a conspicuous role, for it is the part which is the intermediary between the id, source of instinctual demands, and the external world, which is the source of many and varied stimuli. The superego, of importance in many circumstances, is gradually developed from the original ego under the pressure of upbringing and represents mainly the internalized demands of upbringers. Sensitive to stimuli from the id, the superego, and the external world, the ego, to settle conflicting claims, must often try to eliminate or avoid the demand made by one or the other contending party.

Because of Freud, psychoanalysis appreciates many of the methods which the ego uses in this mediation, particularly what are called the defense mechanisms. These come to light in dreams and neuroses, but most illuminatingly during analytic treatment as resistances, for they then reveal their antecedents and purpose. Even experienced practitioners are surprised by the forms which the resistances may take and by the ego functions which may be called upon to serve the defense. Not only may bodily alterations serve this function, as in conversion hysteria, but also instinct expression, anxiety, or the claims of reality or conscience (superego) may be fought off by organic disease, by traits of character that in themselves are not necessarily uncongenial to the person affected; and even careers and ways of life may be impressed to serve the same ends. Old gratifications may be altered into current defenses. The defenses, as Hartmann (1950)¹ states, may originate in other areas and in some cases primitive fore-stages may even have served different functions before they are secondarily used in what we specifically call defense in analysis. It is accordingly one of the tasks of psychoanalysis to determine, where possible, the psychological matrix of the defenses, their antecedent anlage in early stages of the psyche.

In practice, the more ordinary and obvious task is to bare the conflicts and the anxieties which the defenses may be covering and especially, in the neuroses, to see what instinctual expression they may be opposing. Faced by a great variety and abundance, the analyst has come to be universally suspicious and to believe that any part of the ego, any conscious and visible manifestation, may conceal warded-off instinct or anxiety. He finds himself in the position of the syphilologist Ricord, of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes said, He would have submitted Diana to treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills for the Vestal Virgins. Practically, this means that an analyst is bound to live up to the etymology of his title and analyze, i.e., reduce what he finds to more elemental forms.

This too is his task when he turns to theoretic, scientific problems: to suspect the complexity of the apparently simple and reduce the complex to its constituents. Paradoxically, the search for the elemental has given rise to an ever more complicated practical and scientific superstructure. For our conception of the ego and the defenses becomes more complex and more novel as we come nearer to establishing the primary and elementary, much as in the physical sciences, where the reduction of the old Daltonian atom into simpler elements produced such novel complexities as radioactive iodine and the cyclotron.

The elementary is not so easy to define, and many sterile syntheses and classifications have gone wrong by arbitrarily selecting false elements. Some prejudices about what is elementary have been inherited from our ancestral psychology and psychiatry. From the seventeenth century comes the idea of the elementary nature of the mental faculties, the atomicity (uncuttability) of such mental processes as intelligence, will, emotion, and the rest. Particularly in the field of emotions, we tend to assume that we know elements, mental states which need no further dissection because they are irreducible. Rage, fear, joy, sadness, impress us as self-evident and atomic, for they are the clear points in what T. S. Eliot calls the general mess of imprecision of feeling; and it must be admitted that efforts to set up categories of combined or mixed affective states, such as McDougall’s sentiments, and the superdistinctions of the latter-day phenomenologists, whatever their occasional descriptive value, throw us back into the mess. They lack verisimilitude and are reminiscent of humoral medicine and alchemy.

We carry some of this faculty psychology unwittingly into our psychiatric thinking, as our forefathers did, when they singled out an apparently unitary, conspicuous, psychic fact as the basic element in a psychiatric picture. They thought of a lesion in the affective sphere or the ideational sphere as the prime source of all the other parts of a mental disorder. A certain psychosis was attributed to a primary fixed idea, another was thought to be due to a central feeling of depression, a third was supposed to arise from a focal weakness in the will, and from these, it was held, sprang all that was manifest in the clinical pictures.

Our newer conception of the elemental or primary is not, like the above, that of a chemist or a phrenologist, but resembles more that of an embryologist or geologist. The guiding principle of this type of analysis is known as the genetic principle. It does not seek current primordial molecular entities, but may rest when it establishes a set of early simple states which are anlagen or matrices of later, more developed ones. There is nothing transcendental or remote about this sort of investigation. In the biological field, research on the embryology of the pancreas led directly to the preparation of insulin. A knowledge of the history of the earth tells us where to look for uranium.

A special principle in psychoanalytic method is the effort to analyze manifest forms and formal elements in a mental picture into antecedent contents. The great success of this method is to be seen in the first six chapters of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. In the first chapter, Freud reviews what his predecessors had to say about the dream; they carefully listed such immediately evident formal elements as duration, clearness, completeness, logicality, and other similar formal qualities. Freud undertook to treat all formal elements of the manifest dream picture on an equal footing with content elements. As the proper way to find out what a person in a dream stood for was to ask, What are your associations to this person?, similarly if a dreamer stated that his dream seemed long or real or important, then the appropriate question would be: What do you associate to ‘long’? or to real, and so on. Thus, the sense of reality in a manifest dream picture was found to mean that something in the latent dream content was real. An omission or gap in the manifest dream story meant that there was something missing in the contents that instigated the dream, as in the dream recounted by Freud of a man who had peeped at his female relatives.

This principle has not been used as much as it perhaps should be in the interpretation of the formal elements of mental states. Yet it underlies in large measure Bleuler’s and Jung’s research on schizophrenia, and other work on the psychoses. Too often it has been overlooked that the basic content that determines a formal quality may be an infantile one.

In the clinical field, as in dream interpretation, psychoanalysis has broken up most of the old-style faculty psychologizing. It has analyzed depression into a form of aggression and shown that doubt and fixed ideas are the respective outcomes of an instinctual conflict. Temporarily we accept the instincts as our atoms or electrons, since they appear to determine the early states that are relevant in our genetic studies. We do so reluctantly, however, hopeful or impatient for their further, possibly organic, reduction.

We psychoanalysts are surely the last to underestimate the cryptic and insidious effect of history. We cannot, therefore, be unduly surprised that history has militated against us, too, in one matter, and that we were slow to view through the glass of analysis one member of the class of affects. I refer to the feeling of elation, variously known as joy, bliss, euphoria, and to the poet Milton, mirth and youthful jollity, In Heav’n yclept Euphrosyne. Can elation too be a defense, or a resistance, or a manifest element that needs reduction? A human enough prejudice opposes this idea. The condition was late in being studied by analysts, yet they are hardly to be blamed for the lag. The cheerful do not as a rule come for treatment, any more than Diana or the Vestal Virgins. There are, to be sure, out-and-out manics, but they must be extremely rare in ordinary analytic practice and certainly not amenable to true analytic study in the hospital wards. Without specifying what proportion of manic patients the figures include, Fenichel’s statistics for ten years of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic show only 14 manic-depressive patients among the total number of 604. Neurotic elation exists, but is rarely discussed in psychoanalytic groups, and the idea is relatively unfamiliar. In analysis, neurotic patients attack their transient depressions with more willingness than they do their upswings of mood, and it has not been usual for analysts to be very attentive to the minor elations that do come along. Elation as such, then, is not in its mild forms apt to bring persons into analysis, or once they are there to provoke much desire for change or therapeutic effort.

Despite this unfavorable situation for study, psychiatric tradition has always prompted an interest in elations. The idea of mania goes back to the Greeks, and the term has been used since for a variety of excitements, delusional states, and other conditions. (See Falk, 1866.) Because of Kraepelin and the emphasis on the central importance of the happy mood, what we are apt to think of now as the typical manic attack was actually described originally by Mendel (1881) as hypomania—an undelusional, overactive, elated state.² Kraepelin relegated the delusional manias that do not get well to the category of dementia praecox and included Mendel’s clear type as one of the forms of the manic-depressive psychoses. To psychiatrists trained to think of circular psychoses and manic-depressive states, a theory of depression without some reference to mania seems incomplete. Hence, even the first analytic studies of depression, those of Abraham and Freud, took cognizance of the need for a theory of elation. But the focus of interest then and subsequently has been depression. Kraepelin’s hyphenation has effectively joined the two ideas. Mendel’s monograph is probably the latest that dealt only with the elations and excited states.

In general the morbid happy states were taken pretty much as parts of a circular picture, or as the outcome of a depressive process. For analysts too, the problem seemed to be solved once the mechanism of the depressions was understood. Elation was considered an almost inevitable appendage of the depressive state, and the very education in Kraepelinian thought, which in the first place had picked up the problem, at the same time tacked it too tightly on to the problem of depression and led to its relative neglect. It was as if we had forgot that all depressions are not accompanied by a mania, and that many elations themselves occur or recur without an attendant depression.

As a result of the theoretical wedding of the two states, though the wish-fulfilling quality of elations was recognized, they were generally treated as the termination of a circular process. It was certainly true that many depressions terminated in a mania, and this demanded an explanation, and the conjoint study of the two states was fruitful in showing what they had in common. But many theoretical discussions focused on this fact to the neglect of all others, so that despite a general acknowledgment that depressions and elations might occur independently and that sequences other than the depression-mania one did exist, most of the intrinsic elements of the elations were slow in being recognized. Fenichel (1945), bringing together what there was in the literature, gave twenty pages to depressions and only five to elations. The study of the two phases together as parts of one disorder or process brought insight into the elations, too, but in the union an important party, elation, was in subjection and was not given the special consideration that it deserved.

With the idea of elation as the termination of a circular process, an uninvited guest crashed the party. For the idea of process, as traditionally used in this connection, is not congenial to the psychoanalytic circle of ideas. For historic reasons, when the word was used with depression or elation, it implied perhaps a disease entity, certainly a course and an outcome, and these conceptions are aliens in the psychoanalytic realm. Whatever our shifting nosological preferences may be, analytic thought has never tolerated the idea of a course or an outcome as something inherent in a syndrome. We do not recognize a process in hysteria or a course in the obsessional neurosis. With all genuine respect for our psychiatric predecessors, we fail to see the pertinence of the course and outcome to a psychoanalytic formulation. So far as our education led to any such tacit assumption, it did so inadvertently.

On the positive side, the conjoint study gave us many valuable insights into elation. The elation is certainly a narcissistic neurosis like the depression. It too has its roots in oral eroticism. Incorporation and identification play a large role in both states, and the status of the manic superego is the counterpart of that found in the depressions. The consequence of the manic-depressive conception will be considered in more detail in later chapters.

However much the idea of a manic-depressive psychosis may have haunted our background, in practice analysts have found truly analytic things to say about the elations. Among other ideas, it was proposed, in the early 1930’s, to consider the elated state as one of defense, and this idea could be pursued naturally and independently. The connection of elations and oral eroticism, too, has suggested intrinsically psychoanalytic leads; for besides the affective disorders there are numerous neurotic situations propitious for the study of orality, with a consequent enrichment of