> So far as Klein and the Kleinian schools are concerned, I believe they are essentially of the opinion that aggression is primary - a drive in the psychological sense. Their opinion is that the baby is born with a primary wish to destroy. But even at the very beginning of life, they think, there are psychological complexities that cannot be accounted for simply in terms of the urges of a particular basic drive. The Kleinian school asserts, therefore, that from the very beginning there are conflicts - in particular that the baby experiences primitive guilt, and primitive despair about the wish to destroy the source of pleasure. It is the concept of a kind of original sin in the baby, and some archaic trend to expiate for it...
> If aggression is seen as a primary drive then there are certain logical consequences with regard to its developmental fate and to the way it is confronted in therapy. You can build up structures to contain it, you can build up structures to sublimate it, you can build up structures to inhibit it. In therapy we "say" to the analysand that your drive is there somewhere, and now you have to learn to expose it, and when it is exposed you must build up ego structures to master it. If one accepts this kind of concept of aggression, in other words, one is also led to conclude that a push towards ego development will be the appropriate analytic direction vis-a-vis that set of phenomena that we conceive of as a manifestation of an aggressive drive. As I said, in the Kleinian school and in some of its off-shoots, this is indeed what happens...
> Now if one does not hold this opinion about the existence of a primary aggressive need, that does not mean that one does not allow aggressions to come to the fore in the psychoanalytic situation. The mode, however, in which one sees it when it comes to the fore, and the attitude one has towards its emergence, will of necessity be very different from the way in which these phenomena are seen and from the way in which they are handled by those who feel that the emergence of the aggression itself is the ultimate step. Obviously - regardless of whether one believes that there is a primal need to be aggressive and a deep drive to be destructive, or whether one doesn't hold this view - one will recognize not only that there are aggressive impulses, aggressive attitudes, and aggressive fantasies, but also that some of them are hidden away and need to be brought to light - that they must be brought into consciousness so that they can be dealt with. Yet the way in which the analyst will look on the aggressions when they do emerge - how they will be basically understood, the way the analyst will urge the patient to display them, to be open about them, all of these essential attitudes which are part of the analyst's total response and part of the feeling tone in which the revealed aggression will be discussed and investigated by him - all this will be very different when he, as in the case with me, has the conviction that aggression is not the expression of a primary need to destroy but a specific reactive response to specific experiences. In other words if left alone I do not believe that people would develop great urges to destroy, even though they have the capacity to respond aggressively. I think that the aggressive urge, with its quality of drivenness, that this drive toward destructiveness, that these aggressive fantasies are always mobilized for specific reasons. The aggressive urge always arises under very specific psychological circumstances.
> In general, I believe, that psychologically speaking, drives do not originally occur in pure culture - this is an important point to keep in mind - and this holds true especially with regard to the aggressive drive. I think that the experiences of the baby are compounds right from the beginning - albeit relatively simple ones; they are not isolated drives. I think that to believe that the drive is the primary psychologic constellation is a conceptual error...
> The phenomena that we have tended to identify as drives in adults are generally disintegration products. And even the "drives" we see in children and infants are disintegration products; they appear as the result of the breakup of more or less complex psychological constellations. To return now to our starting point: aggression, in particular, is from the beginning but one factor in an already complex psychological structure in which it is imbedded.
> From the very beginning aggression serves an important function in the delimitation of the self [see, for example, Spitz, 195 on psychic organizers, particularly being able to say "no"]. But that is not its only function. It also functions from the beginning as a tool which helps the infant get responses from the self-object. As I see it, the early psychological attitudes of a baby are misunderstood when seen within a theoretical framework which suggests that one separate, individual unit is interacting with another separate, individual unit. [Kohut's statement here can only be understood in connection with parental selfobject functions, otherwise he appears to be talking about the self and object merger into a state of oneness that is part of object relations theory]
> At the beginning of psychological life we are dealing with a world in which a "you" and an "I" are not differentiated. It is a world in which an empathic environment fits into the child's needs and supplies what the child needs: nourishment, warmth, dryness, rhythmical stimulation - whatever happens to be required by the child. No doubt that the functions of an inherent biological apparatus enter into these early, simple, primitive constellations and help to maintain the empathic fit with the self-object who, in turn, must maintain the child's psychologic equilibrium. The baby cries - and then the baby cries angrily when whatever needs to be done is not done immediately. But there is no original need to destroy; the original need is to establish an equilibrium.
> Now under normal circumstances the environment responds empathically to the child, and a satisfactory equilibrium is established, the tensions subside. With each delay of gratification there is an intensification in the child's needs and an increase in the assertiveness of his demands as the urge to re-establish the previous equilibrium mounts. At the same time each delay promotes the differentiation between self and other. If there is no delay, if the self-object is 100% empathic as it were, there is no reason to differentiate it from the self [it is imposible to have a real-life situation without delay, unless the infant is held constantly, never allowed to cry, etc.
> This pathological situation was described by Greenson, R., 19 in connection with his treatment of a boy with a serious gender disturbance]. Only when there is delay does the baby begin to ask questions - if you forgive me this "adultomorphic" expression [developmental psychologists, including analysts like Daniel Stern made tremendous advances in understanding the infant's "independent self" by designing experiments that put the "right questions" to babies.[see Stern, 19 THE FIRST RELATIONSHIP] I got what I needed yesterday, but I don't today. So it cannot be all me, so I am not both the giver and the receiver. The baby begins to perceive that there is a part of the self that makes demands and there is another part of the self that doesn't necessarily respond to the demands.
> Some differentiating border is gradually set up between these two parts of the self: the ultimately established self and the recalcitrant self that becomes not-self, that becomes "you". Aggression, I would think, plays an important role in this differentiating process, in establishing the periphery, the borders, of the self. The self becomes established as a center of aggressively assertive demands. Aggressive assertiveness then contributes to the delimitation of the self. But as I said, under normal circumstances, given a reasonably responsive and empathic environment, these processes do not involve the fragmentation of the complex psychological constellation to a serious degree - there is no chronic dedifferentiation of an aggressive drive in the psychological sense.
> From what I can extrapolate on the basis of the reactivation of early self-self-object states in the analytic transference, no pure destructive urge arises so long as the environment is reasonably empathic and responsive. The pure culture of a destructive urge arises as a disintegration product when the environment is traumatically non-responsive, i.e., when the non-responsiveness transcends the limits one should expect for a parent vis-a-vis his or her child. When the environment becomes traumatically non-responsive, then the original, broader psychological configurations disintegrate and then you may indeed see isolated rage, the isolated indiscriminate wish to destroy and to kill and to tear apart because no empathic response is forthcoming. In other words, the way I see the issue is this: if empathy failures of the self-object environment are with non-traumatizing limits - optimal frustration of the child's need for empathic responses - then there are minor swings in the psychic equilibrium of the child, manifested by an increase of the child's aggressive assertiveness and healthy demandingness.
> If the empathy failures are of traumatic degree, then the complex psychological constellation breakup, fragment, and behavioral manifestations appear that can be referred to as motivated by an aggressive drive. The drive, in other words, is not a primary psychological given [hunger, for example, is a primary biological given; the ideation, emotion, content associated with it is part of psychology].
http://www.psychologyoftheself.com/kohut/tolpin5.htm