The Clinical Significance of Hartmann’s Concept of Adaptation

ABSTRACT

The author views every symptom, conflict, defense, or unconscious fantasy as a result, in part, of an adaptation. For example, cumulative traumas from childhood aren’t just traumatic, but become part of an individual unconscious fantasy while potentially contributing to a way of living that can lead to certain satisfactions along with crippling inhibitions. Analyzing adaptations, along with the other components that bring patients to our offices, is necessary because of a paradigm change in the goals of psychoanalysis from reconstruction to building more complex representations from simple representations. Further, the analyst’s appreciation for forces that lead to adaptations helps reduce intense super-ego pressures. Clinical examples are presented to demonstrate the author’s perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• ego
• representation
• counter-transference
• complexity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ While I am stating 1950 as the date of publication, the reader should keep in mind that the original publication date of The Ego and the Problem of Adaptation was 1939, and it was 1950 when David Rapaport translated it into English.

² In this way fulfilling Ana Freud’s prophecy just mentioned above.

³ It was easier for Dr. A to imagine her dirtiness as smelling badly rather than a result of her unconscious sexual fantasies.

⁴ Our understanding is the result of an evolution from Freud’s (1915) belief that what was curative involved linking thing presentations with word presentations.

⁵ For a more complete description see Busch (2013a, pp. 34–56).

⁶ A good example of this position is Arlow’s (1995) paper on what he calls “stilted listening”.

⁷ I don’t mean to suggest that the brother’s initiation of these sexual encounters led only to pleasure. They were also confusing, frightening, and enraging.

⁸ See my discussion (Busch, 2015) of Steiner’s (1994) “analyst-centered” interpretations as an example.

⁹ For some analytic groups the fear of the internal world has been displaced by unformulated thought.

¹⁰ This is a relative term, in that we all have moments when are ego functions are challenged with certain patients, or due to external circumstances (e.g., illness). One hopes that we are ‘”intact-enough” to catch these moments and try to understand them. They can be valuable in terms of what’s occurring in the analysis, but not always. I believe it takes considerable self-analytic work to determine the meaning of our associations and reveries (Busch, 2013b).

¹¹ Think Oedipus and the riddles of the Sphynks.

¹² Previously reported in Busch (2013b).

¹³ I should have realized that bringing in the transference in this way, a method I have criticized as searching for the transference rather than allowing it into the room (Busch, 2013a), was an indication I wasn’t functioning in my usual manner.

¹⁴ The term used by Da Rochas Barros (2000) that I believe best describes a reverie.

¹⁵ From this perspective, the middle-age man in the commercial was a wish and denial of my actual age.

¹⁶ I can assure the reader not every analysis of reverie is as successful as this was, but the process for understanding it as a successful adaptation is, I believe, on solid ground.

¹⁷ I don’t mean to suggest there was no relationship between my patient’s reaction and my countertransference, it just wasn’t something that was anywhere her experience at this time.

¹⁸ Kris (2000) thought Hartmann was more a modifier of Freud rather than simply extending his views.

¹⁹ See especially Kernberg’s (2000) critique of Hartmann’s views, along with an appreciation.

²⁰ Critiques of Hartmann are generally accompanied by praise for what he accomplished and for what he tried to accomplish.

²¹ Eissler’s (1953) paper of the role of the ego in treatment and the warning against parameters may have olayed a large role in the sterility of treatment. He believed it “mandatory, however, that a warning be raised against the quick introduction of parameters under the justfication that interpretations have been of no avail. There is a great temptation to cover up, by the introduction of parameters, one’s inability to use properly the interpretative technique” (p. 127).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fred Busch

Fred Busch, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He has published over 70 articles in the psychoanalytic literature, and six books. His last four books are: Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2014); The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (2019); Dear Candidate: Analyst from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession (2020); and A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique (2021).