Donald Nathanson, The Silvan S. Tomkins Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Posted 1998-03-15
edited by Jerome A. Winer for the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.
©1997 by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.)
In an issue of this annual devoted to the memory of Michael Franz Basch, it seems only reasonable to show how one of his contributions has helped expand the power and depth of interpretation while providing new therapeutic force for our field. Although trained as a classical psychoanalyst and brought up within the ethos of drive theory, Basch recognized immediately the validity of Kohut’s (1971) observation that through some form of empathic attunement the mothering caregiver becomes aware of the infant’s inner experience and uses this awareness to guide all attempts toward soothing the infant’s roiling affects. The very existence of empathy strains drive theory to its core, and Basch took the phenomenology, mechanics, intrapsychic ramifications, and interpersonal aspects of empathy as his special pursuit.
InGroup Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921) acknowledged the common observation that wordless fear could mutualize throughout a herd or community of animals with great simplicity. Sullivan (1954) followed the lead of Scheler (1912) in calling this "contagion of emotion," but, like Freud, offered no explanation for the casual case with which emotion seemed to ignore the dielectric that insulates nearly everybody from thethoughtsof others. Sullivan’s interpersonal psychology depended on such transfer of emotion-related information, whereas Freud’s concentration on the intrapsychic world allowed little attention to what might be going on in the "mind" of another. With his observation that self-object function included rapt attention to the inner world of the infant, the ability to mirror and thus experience the affective portion of that infantile experience, and the skill to modulate this raw outpouring of affect, Kohut unwittingly forced the development of bridges between those who see the individual as solitary within a crowd and those who see individual identity as the result of differentiation within a group matrix. With the wry humor that characterized so much of his work, Basch took the position that the interpersonal transmission of emotion required sensible and specific attention simply because it existed.
Contrast the two most extreme forms of emotion transmission—the subtle inferences drawn by the skilled psychoanalyst or novelist about the inner world of a partner in conversation as opposed to the wave of bawling that travels through a newborn nursery when any one of its denizens begins to wail. Primitive empathy, said Basch (1976), involves the transmission of the raw data of emotion as seen in the herd of newborns, whereas mature empathy requires that sophisticated adults experience such transmission and use their personal memory bank of emotional experience to figure out what might have produced that particular outpouring of emotion. Mature empathy is an outgrowth of the primitive transmission of emotion between individuals, even though this dichotomization provides no clue about the way such transmission occurs. Selfobject function may then be viewed as a subset of mature empathy, one that can be graded in its effectiveness on the basis of the levels of skill used to modulate the emotions of the sending organism.
Affect Theory
Finding nothing within psychoanalytic experience or theory to explain this realm of data, Basch now began to evaluate theories of emotion that derived from other sources. The only system of thought that provided answers for all his questions was the extraordinarily challenging and intellectually demanding affect theory of Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963), which had been published and ignored a decade earlier. In brief, Tomkins stated that humans are wired or organized with three primary systems for the management of nonverbal information: the pain system, the drive system, and the affect system.