The Feeling Intellect: An Essay on the Independent Tradition in British and American Psychoanalysis

229 Pages·2022·2.751 MB·English

by  Steven Groarke

The Feeling Intellect
In The Feeling Intellect, Steven Groarke explores the overlap between
psychoanalysis and philosophy in order to provide the first critical
evaluation of the Independent tradition in British and American
psychoanalysis.
The book focuses on the formation of Independent object-relations
theory as an original mid- to late-twentieth-century development in post-
Freudian psychoanalysis, focusing on contributions by Fairbairn,
Winnicott, Loewald, and others to add to our understanding of what the
author terms the dependence relationship: the earliest relationship between
mother and infant. The theory of acts and relations provides the basic
framework for more detailed discussions of the psychoanalysis of time,
including, Loewald’s idea of the inner future and the role of re-descriptive
memory as a type of reclamation.
This book is aimed at a readership intent on exploring the philosophical
aspects of contemporary psychoanalysis in more detail. It will be of great
value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students studying
psychology.
Steven Groarke is professor emeritus at Roehampton University, a member
of the British Psychoanalytic Society, author of Managed Lives:
Psychoanalysis, Inner Security and the Social Order (Routledge, 2014), and a
practicing adult psychoanalyst.
‘This erudite and lucid study of “object relations” is an interesting
perspective on the convergences and divergences of the British
Independent tradition and the contributions of American relational
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis needs its theoreticians – for it to grow
and develop – and readers have much to gain from diving into this text
from a leading theoretician in the British Psychoanalytical Society’.
Christopher Bollas, psychoanalyst and writer
‘With so much literature competing for the analyst’s attention, my hope
is that enough readers will register the importance of this remarkable
book. With an unostentatious mastery, it offers a boldly ambitious and
rigorous reconceptualization of the fundamentals of metapsychology
from an Independent psychoanalytic perspective. Its contribution to
such basic concepts as the drive, the object, time and memory is wholly
original and brilliantly stimulating. This is a book to be read and
debated for decades to come’.
Josh Cohen, Psychoanalyst and Fellow of British Psychoanalytical
Society and Professor of Literary Theory, Goldsmiths
University of London
The Feeling Intellect
An Essay on the Independent Tradition
in British and American Psychoanalysis
Steven Groarke
Cover image: Luke Groarke aged 2 years
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Steven Groarke
The right of Steven Groarke to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Groarke, Steven, author.
Title: The feeling intellect : an essay on the independent tradition in
British and American psychoanalysis / Steven Groarke.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In The Feeling Intellect,
Steven Groarke explores the overlap between psychoanalysis and
philosophy in order to provide the first critical evaluation of the
Independent tradition in British and American psychoanalysis”-- Provided
by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021055671 | ISBN 9781138241091 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138241237 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315280899 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis–Great Britain. | Psychoanalysis–United
States. | Social sciences--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BF173 .G7196 2022 | DDC 150.19/5--dc23/eng/
20220203
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055671
ISBN: 978-1-138-24109-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-24123-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-28089-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315280899
Typeset in Times New Roman
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
in memoriam
Mary Groarke 2 May 1935 to 16 May 1935
for my bereaved grandparents
and those among their generation in want of consolation
for the mercy of their hands in the diaspora of migrant labour

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Acts and relations 11
2 Dependence 51
3 Prospective identification 106
4 Memory and reclamation 149
Bibliography 193
Index 209
And he whose soul has risen
Up to the height of feeling intellect
Shall want no humbler tenderness, his heart
Be tender as a nursing mother’s heart.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, Book XIII, ll. 204–7
Acknowledgements
Parts of this book, in earlier versions, have been previously published and
are used here with permission: ‘Reflections on the psychoanalysis of hope’,
Steven Groarke, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 23 (4): 365–383, 2018,
Springer Nature; ‘Freud and the remembered past’, Steven Groarke,
American Imago, 77 (2): 277–308, 2020, John Hopkins University Press;
‘The sense of the past: theoretical and clinical aspects of deferred action’,
Steven Groarke, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 102 (6): 1097–1115,
2021, copyright © Institute of Psychoanalysis reprinted by permission of
Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of Institute of Psychoanalysis.