Herbert Alexander Rosenfeld (2 July 1910 – 29 November 1986) was a German-British psychoanalyst. Rosenfeld made seminal contributions to Kleinian thinking on psychotic and other very ill patients; while his emphasis on the role of the analyst in contributing to potential impasses in the analytic encounter has had a wide impact on analysts both in Britain and internationally. Among his most significant contributions were his groundbreaking exploration of

projective identification Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Projective identification may be used as a type of defense, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a ...

; the development of the concept of "confusion"; and the foundation of a theory of destructive narcissism, since taken up and developed by André Green and

Otto Kernberg Otto Friedmann Kernberg (born 10 September 1928) is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. I ...

Life

Rosenfeld was born in Nuremberg in 1910, received his medical diploma from Munich in 1934, and emigrated to Britain one year later due to the Nuremberg laws prohibiting him from working with non-Aryan patients. He retook his medical in degree, and went on to undergo a teaching analysis with

Melanie Klein Melanie Klein (née Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested t ...

. He eventually became an analyst in 1945 himself and continued to work within the Kleinian movement. He died in London on November 29, 1986.

Work

On "confusion"

Rosenfeld saw confusion as a half-way house between splitting and reintegration, either as a progressive step towards the latter, or as a regression from it. In its negative aspect, according to Hanna Segal, "a most powerful element in confusion is envy...Narcissistic organisation protects us from that confusion".

Destructive narcissism

Rosenfeld played a leading part in the work of Kleinians on the destructive aspects of

narcissism Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive interest in one's physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with one's own needs, often at the expense of others. Narcissism exists on a co ...

. For Rosenfeld, "destructive narcissism...is directed against the libidinal ties or bonds of the self to the object". The concept of what Rosenfeld termed "narcissistic omnipotent object relations" - a state of mind dominated by an internal object merging ego and ego ideal in a form of mad omnipotence - was later to feed into Kernberg's notion of the pathologically

grandiose In the field of psychology, the term grandiosity refers to an unrealistic sense of superiority, characterized by a sustained view of one's self as better than others, which is expressed by disdainfully criticising them (contempt), overinflating ...

self

Analytical impasse

Rosenfeld's final work, ''Impasse and Interpretation'' (1987), focused on the possibility of the overcoming of critical moments of impasse with difficult patients. Rosenfeld was increasingly convinced that such potentially destructive impasses were predicated on the existence of blind spots in the analyst, thus pointing the way for the later developments of

intersubjective psychoanalysis The term " intersubjectivity" was introduced to psychoanalysis by George Atwood and Robert Stolorow (1984), who consider it a "meta-theory" of psychoanalysis. Intersubjective psychoanalysis suggests that all interactions must be considered contex ...

. While for some analysts, the

negative therapeutic reaction The negative therapeutic reaction in psychoanalysis is the paradoxical phenomenon whereby a plausible interpretation produces, rather than improvement, a worsening of the analysand's condition. Freud's formulations Freud first named the negative th ...

is an insurmountable block, Rosenfeld attempts to show that these "dead ends" are moments that can and should be overcome. Using the concept of

envy Envy is an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another's quality, skill, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it. Aristotle defined envy as pain at the sight of another's good fortune, stirred b ...

to shed light on analytic impasse, Rosenfeld maintained that while patients may in some ways prefer to resist change rather than allow the analyst to help them,Robert Withers, ''Controversies in Analytical Psychology'' (2003) p. 241 if handled innovatively, such stalemates may allow patients to bring back to life for their analyst the impasses they subjectively lived at key moments in their development.

Bibliography

* ''Über die sogenannten "gehäuften Absencen" im Kindesalter''. Medical dissertation, Munich 1938. Triltsch, Würzburg 1935. *''Psychotic States: A Psychoanalytic Approach'' (1965) *''Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-therapeutic Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline, and Neurotic Patients'' (1987) *''Herbert Rosenfeld at Work: The Italian Seminars'' (2001)

References

External links

Koehler, 'Philosophical perspectives: Rosenfeld'
;In French

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20100528153903/http://www.megapsy.com/autres_bibli/biblio146.htm Des transferts narcissiques
L'idéalisation narcissique

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rosenfeld, Herbert British psychoanalysts British psychiatrists Narcissism writers 1910 births 1986 deaths Analysands of Melanie Klein 20th-century British medical doctors Physicians from Nuremberg German emigrants to the United Kingdom