"Living Together Alone or Together": Commentary on Tzvetan Todorov's "Living Alone

Together"
Author(s): Stephen A. Mitchell
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 27, No. 1, A Symposium on "Living Alone Together"
(Winter, 1996), pp. 35-41
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057332 .
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 Alone or
"Living Together Together":
Commentary on Tzvetan Todorov's
"Living Alone Together"

Stephen A. Mitchell

Tzvetan Todorov traces the dialectic within Western intellec

tual history between a major current in which humans are
defined essentially as isolates and a minor current which points
to a social dimension in human nature. From Rousseau to Smith to

Hegel, Todorov charts a line of theorizing in which relations with others

are regarded not as an option for living but as constitutive of the human
species. The contrast Todorov is drawing recalls Isaiah Berlin's distinc
tion between the concept of "negative liberty" developed within British
political philosophy (Hobbes and Locke) and "positive liberty" devel
oped within Continental political philosophy (Rousseau and Hegel).
But Todorov is trying to focus our attention beneath political categories
to basic motivational principles: a fundamental need of human beings
for other human beings ("consideration" for Rousseau; "attention" for
Smith; and "recognition" for Hegel). And Todorov ends with a moral
and therapeutic plea: by undervaluing the social dimension of our
we remain with others in for
experience caught self-mutilating struggles
dominance.
This argument is of particular significance vis-?-vis theorizing in
contemporary psychoanalysis. In demonstrating why this is so, I hope to
illustrate the way in which current psychoanalytic thought may add a
novel dimension to the kinds of issues Todorov is struggling with.
The philosophical shift Todorov is depicting and calling for has been
mirrored almost exactly in the history of psychoanalytic ideas. The
classical psychoanalysis of Freud and his contemporaries was based on a
view of the individual as isolate. Freud's basic unit of analysis was what he
termed the "psychic apparatus." He was concerned with the mind of the
individual and the psychodynamic processes operative within. The basic
motivational forces within mind, for Freud, were instinctual drives,

arising within the individual and demanding discharge. Social factors

and other people an important role in Freud's
played psychological
accounts, but as vehicles for the more drives, as either a source
primary
of or a threat to or for In this
gratification punishment gratification.

New Literary History, 1996, 27: 35-41

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 36 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

sense, Freud's approach to the relationship between the individual and

society was distinctly Hobbsean.
The most fundamental feature of the movement from classical to
contemporary, postclassical psychoanalysis has been a shift from what
has been termed a to a framework.1 There is
"one-person" "two-person"
a wide variation in contemporary schools of thought
psychoanalytic (ego
psychology, self psychology, object relations theories, relational psycho
analysis) but, in one fashion or another, they have all transformed the
basic unit of study from the individual driven by instinctual drives to
relational units of self vis-?-vis others. This is also true of contemporary
Freudian revisionists like Hans Loewald (who rewrites Freud as an object
relations theorist) and Jacques Lacan (who embeds the individual in a
transpersonal world of language and symbolic structures).
This shift in the basic psychoanalytic conceptual unit parallels exactly
the contrast Todorov draws between a view of others as secondary and

peripheral to the individual's fundamental concerns and a view of

others as constitutive of the basic human project. In classical Freudian
metapsychology, others are means
toward more primary ends (instinc
tual discharge or defense instinctual discharge).
against In contempo
rary psychoanalytic metapsychology, relations with others are the very
stuff out of which mind develops and sustains itself.
Probably the most important single concept that has made possible
the shift from a classical to a framework in
postclassical contemporary

psychoanalysis is the concept of the internal object. Freud's notions of the

and the were to this In the first
ego-ideal superego precursors concept.
two decades of his clinical work, Freud understood his patients to be
rent conflictual affects and But in the nineteen-teens,
by impulses. early
he began hearing something different in his patient's free-associations.
What he heard were voices other than the voice, residues of
patient's

early childhood relationships: parental prohibitions, affirmations, and

ideals. Wftien Adam Smith speaks of the "spectator that lives within" he is
referring to the same experiences that led Freud to establish the
superego as one of the three basic agencies of mind (along with the id
and the ego).
Freud granted the superego an important yet circumscribed place
within the psyche. It was in the work of Melanie Klein that internal
objects proliferated. From the simple notion of a singular superego,
Klein envisioned all varieties of good and bad objects at different levels
of primitivity and sophistication. But Klein's richly imaginative vision
remained always loosely ensconced in Freud's instinct theory. It was in
the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn2 (a Scot like Adam Smith) that the
establishment of internal objects, paralleling the world of external

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 "LIVING TOGETHER ALONE OR TOGETHER" 37

objects (others), became formalized as a fundamental motivational basis

for the development of mind.
Todorov speaks of the "human passions which send us toward one
another" (7). It was an appreciation of these passions that led Fairbairn
to the conclusion that relationships with others are not just means to
but are ends in themselves. "Libido is not
gratification object-seeking,
pleasure-seeking," Fairbairn insisted. What human are about,
beings
motivationally speaking, from earliest infancy throughout the life cycle,
is the establishment and maintenance of relationships with others.
The implications of this object relations revolution in psychoanalysis
are still worked out. They lead to a very different vision of the
being
nature of mind and human And one of the central
experience.

implications of this shift from classical instinct theory to an (object)

relational framework is that the very effort to define the individual as an
isolate is fundamentally misguided. We are embedded in relations with
others; our individual consciousness arises in the context of and is
constructed out of the very materials of those relations; we carry past
and present others around with us as internal presences. We do not
choose whether to be social or isolated. Somewhat like hive or herd
animals, although on an enormously greater level of sophistication, our
brains have evolved with wiring that requires language and culture (see
Danniel Dennet's discussion of Dawkins's concept of "m?mes"3) for
completion into distinctively human minds. We make complex choices
(with greater or lesser degrees of conscious deliberation) among the
kinds of (actual or internal) objects we are related to; we cannot choose
whether or not to be The more one absorbs
object-related. deeply
current psychoanalytic concepts their parallels in many areas of
(and
contemporary thought including evolutionary biology), the more the
very notion of the individual as isolate seems to rest on the same kind of
epistemological foundation that supports members of The Flat Earth
Society. The earth seems flat; it is only from a wider perspective that we
can understand the way in which our phenomenology can mislead us.
We seem to be separate individuals; it is only from the kind of and
deeper
more historical that recent (now including
perspective theorizing
Todorov) provides that we can understand the way in which our
phenomenology can blind us to the relational matrix that makes our
individual consciousness possible. Perhaps a brief clinical example will
make this more vivid.

Robert, a seeks treat

forty-year-old corporate lawyer psychoanalytic
ment because
he is tortured by bad dreams in which he is
swamped with
tasks and demands on his time and discovers that he has overlooked or
about some crucial detail, to disastrous
forgotten leading consequences.

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38 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Robert has a simple, unidimensional view of his own mind. His parents
were devoted to their children, making enormous personal sacrifices to
fund their education; they were poor but happy. Robert understands his
as due to the pressures of his job, but he does not
nightmares
understand why he cannot handle those pressures with greater ease.
Within the first several weeks of sessions it becomes clear that the
affect in the dream vis-?-vis work-related to a
pressures corresponds
that he has
more general worry about his wife and children suffered
from for many years. Robert fears that he will become absorbed in some

project
or distraction and will not be available to them when they are
endangered. He has particular
concerns about his son David (he also
has two older daughters). He sees David as caught up in the greedy,
materialism of American culture and worries about
television-inspired
how he will be able to instill in him the self-sacrificing devotion he
learned from his own parents. He then reports his first dream in

analysis:

I am down a stone wall in my backyard; David is with me. I am

climbing lowering
him down to the ground onto his arm. He was about a foot from the
by holding
when I let him go. It should have been safe, but he punched a hole in
ground
the ground and sank into some kind of chamber. He disappeared into the hole.

There was some sort of as if there were a floor five or six feet below the
light,
He bounced and rolled off to the side. I couldn't see him. I started
ground.
for my wife to call the police, an ambulance, I began
screaming something.
I wasn't There were rocks. Then
digging frantically. getting anywhere. sliding
there were rescue workers, lots of people. There was an horrific that
feeling
David was Then I noticed a of wood out of the dirt some
dying. piece poking
distance It was moving. I dug down and uncovered a box like one of my
away.
boxes in which I keep all sorts of I think I might need I
filing things someday.
the box up, and inside was David. He was alive and well.
pulled

Dreams in psychoanalysis are complex phenomena; they can and have

been looked at in many different ways. For our purposes here, Iwant to
note only several features of the interaction between Robert and myself
around this dream. After exploring many of his rich associations to the
dream, I told Robert I the dream might be understood to
thought
that there were in his mind that he was not aware of, in
suggest places
own experience for
which had been placed for safekeeping pieces of his
future reference. I also suggested that his struggles with his son were in
some measure reflective of struggles with a part of himself that had been
long buried.
Robert began the next session by complimenting me on my "creative"
of the dream, by which it soon became clear he meant
understanding
far-fetched. But he then told me another dream in which now his wife

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 "LIVING TOGETHER ALONE OR TOGETHER" 39

(who has an interest in psychoanalysis and had encouraged him to enter

treatment) disappeared into an elaborate system of underground pipes.
In his associations to this image, he recalled that the house in which his
a septic system underneath
family had lived had the backyard. The tank
in this system would need to be drained periodically by a visiting truck,
at considerable To save for the education of the
expense. money
children, his father undertook the massive project of digging trenches
for lateral pipes to the tank which would increase the available drainage
underground. The children would be enlisted in these massive digging
projects. Robert remembered his mother's concern for his safety, since
the trenches were at times deeper than he was tall. There was one
memory in which he struck at some rocks with his shovel, and water
from an underground spring began to fill the trench. But he was pulled
to safety before the trench filled with water.
The themes and memories associated with these dreams provided
material for many sessions to come. My aim in presenting them here is
to suggest the way in which the simplicity of Robert's self-experience, as
it is exposed to the psychoanalytic process, is revealed to rest on illusory
between and self and other, external and
separations past present,
internal. Robert experiences himself as a psychological isolate: his past is
tidily resolved; he is separate from both his father and his son; his
problems with his external realities are uninfluenced by internal dynam
ics. But the dreams and subsequent analytic inquiry suggest something
quite different.
Through the lens of contemporary (relational) psychoanalytic theory,
Robert's conscious, isolated sense of himself is embedded within a

complex network of relationships within his own mind of which he is

unaware. His father, whom he remembers was
largely only lovingly,
internalized by him in a complex fashion. There is a part of him, a
greedy, aggressive part of him, that had been buried in his father's world
of devotion and hard work. The sector of his experience that was buried
and remains dissociated seems to to and resonate with his
correspond
son and his typical childish egotism and Robert becomes
greediness.
involved in desperate efforts to control his son, partly because the son
stands also for the version of himself that he has long since entombed
and which he deeply fears. Yet, his dreams of something important that
has been forgotten suggest that he is struggling with a sense that he has
tragically mutilated his own inner resources and potentials. Psychoanaly
sis seems to offer entry into a complex, labyrinthine world in which he
might very well get lost, as he did in some sense in the world of his
father. (The anal metaphor of the septic system suggests fecal passage
ways, fantasy of paternal bowels in which he was hiding/trapped.) There
is the strong suggestion that, as is always the case, his with
relationship

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40 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

his father will reemerge in the same basic forms, in the transferential
relationship with the analyst. My analytic concepts and vision will
become an of his father's septic vision. Robert's
analogue struggle with
his father and his trenches will be fought in the analytic trenches with
me.

These thoughts in relation to the dream are meant to be

merely
and Dream are co
speculations anticipatory musings. meanings slowly
created in the analytic process over time. My intent is to demonstrate the
way in which contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing regards (psychic)
living together not as an option but as constitutive of human mind and
the way in which the analytic process makes it possible for the analysand
to regard (internal and external) relationships with others as a rich
reservoir of resources.

Todorov's critique of the dominance theme in the Hegel-Koj?ve myth

of origin seems very compatible with a contemporary psychoanalytic
as well. As he suggests, the Hegelian
sensibility struggle for recognition
through dominance diverts attention from what can only be a develop
mentally earlier pursuit of recognition through loving and playful
interaction between mother and infant.4 In psychoanalytic terms, it
be as constituting a "manic defense" against underlying
might regarded
anxieties connected with dependence.
Freud regarded the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious as a
narcissistic blow. Copernicus had disabused us of the illusion
profound
that we are the center of the universe; Darwin dispelled our claim to
been specially created; and Freud demonstrated that we are not
having
even in control of our own minds. From my perspective, I think Freud
was to the of the unconscious as a diminu
wrong regard appreciation
tion; rather, it is an Freud looked out on the world from a
expansion.

perspective pervaded by the manic, nineteenth-century rush of excite

ment over humankind's increasing technological triumphs and what
Freud envisioned as our of nature." In that
"progressive conquest
context, the discovery of the limits of our conscious knowledge of and
control over ourselves seemed like a narcissistic blow indeed.
In our current historical context, in which the goal of conquering
nature seems an of fatal hubris, we are reassured to find
expression ways
in which we can remain a constructive of an
part ecological system.
Freud's of the unconscious and, more the
discovery recently, psychoana
of internal relational networks make available to us an
lytic discovery
enormous reservoir of resources. What is lost in the claim to a
hegemonic,
isolated consciousness is a illusion. Todorov's recent
only dangerous
work seems designed to help us appreciate where our true interests lie.

New York City

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"LIVING TOGETHER ALONE OR TOGETHER" 41

NOTES

1 J. Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge,

Mass., 1983); Mitchell
Stephen and M. Black, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern
Psychoanalytic Thought (New York, 1995).
2 W. R. D. Fairbairn, An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality (New York, 1952).
3 Danniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York, 1995).
4 Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York, 1985).

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