Dependency and Japanese Socialization: Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Investigations in Amae

2. Psychoanalytic Formulations Connected to Dependency

C H A P T E R 2 Psychoanalytic Formulations Connected to Dependency This chapter will examine how the concepts of dependency, interdependency , and attachment are addressed in traditional psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps the most interesting fact is that dependency has not attained the status of a central explanatory concept in metapsychological writings, nor has it become tightly formulated in a direct way that relates to other concepts and explanations. One might ask how such a ubiquitous and significant characteristic of human relatedness became overlooked amid the comprehensive formulations generated by Freud and subsequent psychoanalytic authors. The answer is that dependency (and interdependency)has been diffused and appears as an underlying component in a number of theories addressing psychological development, function, disability , and rehabilitation. As various aspects of psychoanalytic theory are carefully examined, dependency emerges as it were in bas relief: implicitly present but rarely stipulated, and moreover subordinated to other technical, metapsychological explanations. Background Parens and Saul (1971) are responsible for belatedly but comprehensively confronting both the psychic and behavioral manifestations of dependency in psychoanalytic formulations about psychological structure and function. They carefully examined Freud's writings, 38 Psychoanalytic Formulations Connected to Dependency 7 3 9 where the term was explicitly used in a descriptive, qualitative manner—notably in relation to the infant/mother relationship and the manifest helplessness of early human development. They describe dependency as having two separable but interrelated coordinates . The first of these is concerned with dependency on an object ) that is, on a person or persons for the gratifications of needs. This coordinate is defined as "nonautoerotic," and described as urgently focused on eliciting nutrition, tactile contact, comfort, warmth, and security. It putatively is driven by the "ego instincts/' The second coordinate seeks dependency for the more complex satisfaction of what have traditionally been defined as "libidinal needs/7 earliest divided between sensual and affectional, but later acquiring more refined expression as ego-developmental needs "wherein the child turns to the object for training, . . . motor coordination , in communication, general skills and for education"(Parens and Saul 1971, 143). These authors carefully trace the characteristics of psychological dependency from infancy through old age. They illustrate the changing need satisfactions over the life course, examined according to categories of physiological, libidinal, and ego-developmental needs. (Libidinal needs are subdivided into "sensual" and "affectional .") These needs evolve by way of a biologically and socially regulated progression from the obligate dependency of earliest infancy , through an intermediate state of emotional self-reliance, eventually reaching a reciprocal interdependency attained in adult object relationships. Picking up on some of their own earlier work, they describe the psychological dimension of this progression in terms of achieving libidinal "inner sustainment" (Saul 1970; Parens 1970). The satisfaction of these needs, and the processes through which they proceed, are portrayed as unconscious in two ways. First, they are manifestly unconscious in neonates, infants, and young children , who are oblivious of these processes. Second, these needs are unconscious in the sense of constituting a group of structural components that function largely out of awareness regardlessofage. Although Freud did not use "dependency" as a major conceptual or constructional term, there nevertheless are 383 references to the word (ora compounded expression) cited in the Concordance to the Standard Edition (Guttman 1984). In many of these, the word is used to define a functional relativity between two or more people involved in some form of affiliative, interdependent association. 40 / Theoretical and Cultural Background Less frequently, it is used to indicate a dependent relation between a person and either "things" or "ideas." In the German language, the word anlehnung semantically means "leaning on," and is close to the English etymological definition of dependency as "to hang from or lean on." Both definitions portray a connectedness between something inferior (weaker or lower), which either "hangs down from" or "leans up against" something that is superior (i.e., higher or stronger). Freud's use of anlehnung frequently referred to dependent connections between infant and mother, infant and parents, sons and fathers, children with older siblings, and the relationships between patients and their physicians or psychoanalysts. In his initial discussion of dependency, Freud (1914) introduced the term "libidinized object" to describe an internal structure that connected with or "depended" upon an outside , human object.1 Albeit in a discursive rather than tightly formulated sense, Freud also described dependency as existing between individuals in their connections to ideologies, beliefs, gods, or myths...