Introduction to Honoring Fred Pine

ABSTRACT

The contributions to Honoring Fred Pine represent several generations of Pine’s influence. All highlight developmental processes, which lie at the heart of Pine’s work. Slade integrates Pine’s work with Attachment theory—threat and fear in the first year can become supercharged affective moments, as the child seeks connection to regulate fear. My paper emphasizes the formative role of early supercharged affective moments and their lifelong role in internalization and identification processes. Eagle emphasizes the role of subjectivity, staying as close as possible to experience-near interpretations as central in both his and Pine’s work. Blum emphasizes Pine’s contributions to preoedipal development with his paper on the meaning of Leonardo’s screen memory from earliest life and its relation to the Mona Lisa. Lastly, Akhtar describes the essence of Pine’s work with clarity and charm.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification
• internalization processes
• affective supercharged moments
• subjective experience
• development over time

The papers in this section are united by the writers’ deep feelings of affection for and appreciation of Fred Pine as a person, his impact on their professional and personal lives, and an attempt to articulate Fred’s contributions to the field of psychoanalysis.

Arietta Slade’s work is from the perspective of having experienced Pine as her teacher, supervisor, and mentor, impacting the development of her ideas in lasting ways as she has built an extremely rich academic, research, and clinical career and influenced so many in her expansion of some of Pine’s core ideas, by bringing them into coordination with central concepts from the realm of attachment theory. Especially important to her is Pine’s belief that the capacity to imagine the inner life of patients from a developmental perspective and that the developmental path to their clinical picture is at the heart of psychodynamic treatment, which is only possible when one has a deep familiarity with the phenomena of early childhood and the developmental theories to which they gave rise. Attachment reflects the actual relationship experiences, particularly the regulation of threat across the first year, setting the stage for defenses—ways of seeking care and safety as a young child and managing unbearable threat. The “moment” of threat and fear of abandonment becomes a “supercharged affective moment” (Pine 1981), activating defenses to ensure safety within a particular environment. Attachment means seeking the most basic connection to regulate fear and anxiety. Memories of earliest experiences can be dysregulating. One must speak to early feelings of threat, danger, or fears of loneliness to build a sense of trust. The antidote to isolation is the building of the capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection, an enriching integration of Pine’s ideas and attachment theory.

My own paper highlights Pine’s devotion to the developmental perspective, particularly the idea of how formative certain early “affectively super-charged moments” can be. Following the evolving ways the developmental trajectories of two Mahler babies, sisters, beginning in the first three years and over the course of 60 years, changed over time, highlights the role of internalization processes and identifications, a very important aspect of Pine’s work. The goal was to explore what leads to stable vs unstable elements of psychic structure and change vs rigidity over time. Both girls suffered from the lasting impact of supercharged moments of disrupted, unrepaired merger. This supercharged affective moment, that was so formative, was played out differently with each sister because each identified with a different aspect of mother. The findings emphasize the role of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. Central were the different ways of coping with early aggression, the different experiences of merger, and the evolution of different internal organizations. Pine’s concept of magnification processes—when phase-appropriate behaviors activate mother’s conflicts, which she brings into handling her child, magnifying their conflictual power, the outcome is the child carries conflicts like those of the mother, thereby identifying with her—was an important contributor to the evolving character of these sisters and central to his ideas about the importance of internalization processes and early identifications.

Morris Eagle’s contribution is that of a colleague and good friend, who shared many professional experiences with Fred, especially being part of the Research Center at NYU, run by Robert Holt and George Klein during the early 1960s. Eagle conveys how Pine’s work fits on the psychoanalytic stage, including his own and Pine’s similarities and differences. At the heart of the difference lie their differing views on how much theoretical integration, as opposed to addition, is necessary for a modernized psychoanalysis. Both agree however that subjectivity, the world of inner experience, should be at the center of concepts about normal and pathological development. For Eagle, it is the consistent subjective experiences that provide the texture and richness of one’s life and are what makes life worth living. He doesn’t believe that the fundamental assumptions of classical theory, the trunk of the tree, are solidly established, and questions whether things can be assimilated into it. Pine thinks the perspectives of the different psychoanalytic schools can be clinically useful and embrace complexity without an overarching theory. Eagle’s focus on the importance of subjective experience fits well with Pine’s central focus on staying as close as possible to the patient’s inner experience. Pine’s depth of developmental knowledge and ability to use words so well in experience-near ways, as Proust did with the evocative madeleine memory, can free up hidden memories of his patients. Eagle argues against the idea that the conscious mind should be treated as epiphenomenon, and that the latent mind, the unconscious, is the ultimate truth, as Freud believed. The preconscious mind is where ideas and wishes are inhibited or held back from developing. Akin to this, a main point of Pine’s to not make deeper interpretations (as Bion 1954; Klein 1930 do), but to make interpretations usable with experience-near material. Eagle ends his paper with, “Once again, despite different starting points, Fred and I end up in pretty much the same place. Thus, in writing this paper, I have re-discovered Fred.”

Harold Blum links his paper on Leonardo Da Vinci to Pine being at the forefront of research and contributions to preoedipal development, preoedipal experience, and the formative, consequent impact on object relations. Blum emphasizes that for Freud, Leonardo was a heroic ego ideal with whom he identified. Blum elaborates on the evidence given by Freud for the idea that the ambivalent enigmatic stare of Mona Lisa expressed and sublimated Leonardo’s early traumatic maternal relationship, both its seductive and sinister side. The screen memory of Leonardo that intrigued Freud, “In my cradle a vulture came down to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me many times with the tail against my lips,” (Freud, 1910, 86–89), suggested that his repressed reaction to his mother’s death was sublimated in his art. Blum’s depth of understanding of development allowed him to appreciate Pine’s uniquely complex and broad contribution to our field.

Salmon Akhtar provides an incredibly incisive guide and orientation to the depth and breadth of Fred Pine’s contributions. Though a short paper, Akhtar’s deep knowledge and appreciation of the field of psychoanalysis allows him to articulate much of the essence of Pine’s work with clarity, humor, and charm. The paper highlights four central contributions of Pine’s work to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis – distinguishing “separateness anxiety” from “separation anxiety;” the concept of the “four psychologies of psychoanalysis;” the clinical necessity of “disciplined flexibility of technique;” and the importance of “developmental work.” Each of these adds to and updates core psychoanalytic concepts and has crucial implications for clinical work.

Taken together these five papers honor Fred Pine’s clinical insight, his contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice, and his impact on the integration of crucial developmental knowledge and conceptualization into contemporary psychoanalysis. Representing several generations of Fred’s influence, they do him proud.

Fred’s whole life embodied the concept of generativity – helping the individuals he treated, taught, supervised, and cared about to achieve their own goals. He was truly available, “uncommonly so.” There was something about his intensity combined with softness that marks the quality of his interest, which felt so unselfish, steadfast, deep, and genuine. In both research and clinical work, he strove to develop a vocabulary that could capture the individuality of each person, to expand psychoanalytic formulations that were experience near. The focus on the valuable good moment, drawing on positive memories, permitted Fred a positive outlook, finding what was of value in multiple theories, in multiple ways of thinking about development, technique, and the way the mind worked, but with perspicacity, clarity, and critical assessment, adding depth and breadth to psychoanalytic understanding. Central was integrating multiple views, making meaning out of complexity, not choosing one right way. His final contribution, published just before he died (2021), describes how openly, courageously, and generously he approached old age, illness, and dying with his patients, family, and friends. We can all be grateful for Fred’s incredible dedication to our field and his indelible contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy Olesker

Wendy Olesker, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and on the Faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is Senior Editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. She is Director of the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. For the past ten years, she has been Director of the Follow-up Study of the Margaret Mahler Foundation.