DGB
You have to understand that even as I criticize Freud and Psychoanalysis -- like many, many before me -- I am still trying to make it better. From my little corner of the universe here in Hegel's Hotel, I am still examining -- probably with the beginning of more thoroughness than ever before -- Freud's every move, his every theoretical move, why he did it, and what the eventual outcome of his moves were relative to the ongoing evolution of Psychoanalysis. Again, many, many others have been here before me, some with far greater expertise than me, on the exact historical details relative to the development and changes in direction of Psychoanalysis.
I come into the picture -- let us say about 120 years after Freud started making his first theoretical, clinical, and psychotherapeutic moves towards the birth of Psychoanalysis.
And I have to go back to that first case of 'Anna O' treated by Joseph Breuer -- like thousands and thousands of academics have been here before me -- and I say, 'Herein lies the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate beauty of the birth of Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic intervention even though it basically involved Breuer simply sitting by in awe and listening while 'Anna O' treated and cured herself of some of her various 'neurotic or hysterical symptoms' -- 'physical conversion symptoms' (see below) -- with 'her talking cure' and what she called 'chimney sweeping'.
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From the internet...wikipedia
Anna O. was the pseudonym of a patient of Josef Breuer, who published her case study in his book Studies on Hysteria, written in collaboration with Sigmund Freud.
Anna O was, in fact, Bertha Pappenheim, an Austrian-Jewish feminist, treated by Breuer for severe cough, paralysis of the extremities on the right side of her body, and disturbances of vision, hearing, and speech, as well as hallucination and loss of consciousness. She was diagnosed with hysteria. Freud implies that her illness was a result of the grief felt over her father's real and physical illness that later led to his death[1].
Her treatment is regarded as marking the beginning of psychoanalysis. Breuer observed that whilst she experienced 'absences' (a change of personality accompanied by confusion), she would mutter words or phrases to herself. In inducing her to a state of hypnosis, Breuer found that these words were "profoundly melancholy phantasies...sometimes characterized by poetic beauty". Free Association came into being after Anna/Bertha decided (with Breuer's input) to end her hypnosis sessions and merely talk to Breuer, saying anything that came into her mind. She called this method of communication "chimney sweeping", and this served as the beginning of free association.
Anna's/Bertha's case also shed light for the first time on the phenomenon called transference, where the patient's feelings toward a significant figure in his/her life are redirected onto the therapist. By transference, Anna imagined to be pregnant with the doctor's baby. She experienced nausea and all the pregnancy symptoms. After this incident, Breuer stopped treating her.
Pappenheim under her real name translated the diary of her ancestor Gluckel of Hameln.
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DGB
Now, I want to back up a few steps further in history.
The case of 'Anna O' may have marked the beginning of psychoanalysis from a 'therapeutic treatment' point of view.
However, from an 'academic-philosophical' point of view, I will say again what I have said before -- and not too many -- if any -- academics before me that I know of have made this claim: In juxtaposing the work of Hegel in 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807) with the work of Schopenhauer in 'The World as Will and Representation', Nietzsche's first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT) marked the true academic-philosophical birth of Psychoanalysis.
In this respect, we might look at the case of 'Anna O' as the first clinical-psycho-therapeutic application of Nietzsche's BT. Let me make my case.
My case is symbolic, metaphorical, metaphysical -- and mythological, a growing tendency in Hegel's Hotel here.
Let us enter a world of 'As If' -- See Hans Vaihinger.
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From the internet...wikipedia
Hans Vaihinger
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Hans Vaihinger Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Hans Vaihinger
Birth September 25, 1852 (Nehren)
Death December 18, 1933 (Halle)
School/tradition Neo-Kantianism
Main interests idealism, positivism
Notable ideas fictionalism, instrumentalism, nominalism
Influenced by[show]
Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer[1], Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced[show]
Alfred Adler
Hans Vaihinger (September 25, 1852 – December 18, 1933) was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of As If), published in 1911, but written more than thirty years earlier.[2]
Vaihinger was born in Nehren, Württemberg, Germany, near Tübingen, and raised in what he himself described as a "very religious milieu". He was educated at Tübingen, Leipzig, and Berlin, became a tutor and later a philosophy professor at Strasbourg before moving to the university at Halle in 1884. From 1892, he was a full professor.
In Philosophie des Als Ob, he argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. In particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protons, electrons, and electromagnetic waves. None of these phenomena have been observed directly, but science pretends that they exist, and uses observations made on these assumptions to create new and better constructs.
This philosophy, though, is wider than just science. One can never be sure that the world will still exist tomorrow, but we usually assume that it does. Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, was profoundly influenced by Vaihinger's theory of fictions, incorporating the idea of psychological fictions into his personality construct of a fictional final goal.
Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (1967) was an early mention of Vaihinger as a useful methodologist of narrativity.
Later, James Hillman developed both Vaihinger and Adler's work with psychological fictions into a core theme of his work Healing Fiction in which he makes one of his more accessible cases for identifying the tendency to literalize, rather than "see through our meanings," (HF 110) with neurosis and madness.
[edit] Works
1876 Hartmann, Dühring und Lange (Hartmann, Dühring and Lange)
1897-1922 Kant-Studien, founder and chief editor
1899 Kant — ein Metaphysiker? (Kant — a Metaphysician?)
1902 Nietzsche Als Philosoph (Nietzsche as Philosopher)
1906 Philosophie in der Staatsprüfung. Winke für Examinatoren und Examinanden. (Philosophy in the Degree. Cues for teachers and students.)
1911 Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of "As If", translated by C. K. Ogden, 1924)
1922 Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), edited by Raymund Schmidt
[edit] References
^ "Schopenhauer's love of truth was a revelation to me." The Philosophy of As–If, p. xxix.
^ Loewenberg, J. Untitled Review. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 9, No. 26. (Dec. 19, 1912), pp. 717-719.
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DGB
So here is the metaphor, here is the mythology. For our purposes here -- which does not sway far from Nietzsche's purposes in BT -- Apollo represents The God of Self-Restraint and Self-Defense. Juxtaposed against Apollo is -- Dionysus, The God of Self-Expression and Self-Impulse. Put into Classic Psychoanalytic terminology, Apollo is The God of The Superego, while Dionysus is The God of The Id.
Let us now make another metaphorical or symbolic leap into the 'World of As If'.
Apollo is The God of The White Blood Cells.
Dionysus is The God of The Red Blood Cells.
Both are crtical to the life process. One defends, restrains, and deconstructs (Apollo and the white blood cells.) The other surges forward and embraces life and all of life's impulses -- birth, creativity, sensuality, sexuality, pleasure, romance, intimacy...(Dionysus and the red blood cells.)
The two -- Apollo and Dionysus -- are forever locked in 'compromise formations' with each other that express themselves in all elements of human behavior, and stand out particularly in 'neurotic symptoms' -- in 'neurotic clinches or impasses between Apollo and Dionysus, between red and white blood cells'.
What is a 'joke'? A joke is an 'allusion to immediacy'. A joke is a compromise-formation between Dionysus and Apollo, between Superego and Id.
In 'either/or' terminology, there are two different types of 'neruoses'.
For our purposes here, we will define a 'neurosis' as a 'homeostatic imbalance' in the mind and/or body such as between Apollo and Dionysus.
In a 'Narcissistic and/or Dionysian Neurosis', Narcissus and/or Dionysus rules, while Apollo succumbs to Dionysus' and/or Narcissus' greater power.
In an 'Anxiety and/or Distancing Neurosis' Apollo rules while Dionysus and/or Narcissus succumb to Apollo's greater power.
A third type of neurosis might be called a 'Neurotic Clinch or Impasse'. Here, Apollo and Dionysus are locked in a fairly evenly matched power battle where neither one is really winning or losing -- but the health of the mind and/or body as a whole is losing. Too much energy is being locked up in the 'neurotic stalemate'. This can be seen in the case of Anna O.
We probably all have 'hysterical conversions' at one time or another. They may not be as pronounced and as dramatic as Anna O's refusing to talk or eat but still different types of 'clinches in the human body' can be viewed as hysterical conversions.
We may have a 'tightness of jaw' where we are holding back anger or grief or saying something, we might have a 'tightness around our eyes' where we are holding back tears, we might be holding back grief around our chest area or in the pit of our stomach, we may be holding back anger or rage in the 'clinch of a migraine headache', we might be holding back sadness in the back of our neck. A partly clenched fist could obviously involve the holding back of anger...
How about the tragedy just recently involving the little girl whose dentist pulled all her baby teeth? She stopped eating -- and died -- her obvious and dramatically tragic protest against the supremely perceived narcissistic traumacy of all her teeth being pulled. What was the dentist thinking? He obviously was not thinking one iota about the little girl's self-image, her self-esteem. I had to almost cry about that one.
Unravel the pain, unravel the anger or rage, uravel the fantasy or impulse -- let Dionysus 'free' within the safe confines of the therapeutic setting -- and you set in motion 'the talking cure', 'chimney sweeping' and the unclinching of the neurotic sypmtom, the hysterical conversion. 'Talk -- and the truth will set you free.'
Sometimes a 'massage psychotherapist' might get faster and more efficiently to an area of the 'body-psyche' -- the neurotic clinch -- where a psychoanlyst might be having much more trouble -- or take much longer -- to get to.
The 'no touching' rule was/is? quite prohibitive in Psychoanalysis but certain Psychoanalysts broke into new therapeutic ground when they broke this Psychoanalytic rule. (Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich...) And a long chain of psychotherapists followed...
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Wilhelm Reich
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Wilhelm Reich
Born March 24, 1897(1897-03-24)
Dobrzanica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died November 3, 1957 (aged 60)
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Residence Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine,
United States
Citizenship Austria, United States
Fields Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis
Alma mater University of Vienna
Known for Freudo-Marxism, body psychotherapy, Orgone
Influences Max Stirner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx
Influenced Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Ronald Laing, Arthur Janov
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[1] He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Marie Louise Berneri Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Colin Wilson, Shulamith Firestone, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.[2] [3]
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having succumbed to mental illness or somehow gone astray. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and other prominent psychoanalysts.[4]
He was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. As a communist of Jewish descent, he was in danger, and he therefore fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's,[5] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims about orgone, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison[6], and on 23 August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA[7][8]. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.[9]
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Sándor Ferenczi
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The native form of this personal name is Ferenczi Sándor. This article uses the Western name order.
Sándor Ferenczi
Born July 7, 1873(1873-07-07)
Miskolc, Hungary
Died April 22, 1933 (aged 59)
Budapest, Hungary
Fields Psychoanalysis
Institutions International Psychoanalytical Association - (president)
Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society - (founder)
Known for "Budapest School of Psychoanalysis"
Influences Sigmund Freud
Influenced Mihály Bálint, Aliz Bálint, Imre Hermann, Sigmund Freud
Sándor Ferenczi (July 7, 1873, Miskolc, Hungary – April 22, 1933, Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Ferenczi’s main ideas
3 Notes
4 Further reading
5 See also
6 External links
[edit] Biography
Born Sándor Fraenkel to Baruch Fraenkel and Rosa Eibenschütz, both Polish Jews, he later magyarized his surname to Ferenczi.
Over the course of his psychiatric work, he came to believe that his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as children were truthful, having verified those accounts through other patients in the same family. This was a major reason for his eventual break with Sigmund Freud.
Prior to this break he was a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis and was notable for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual in psychoanalytic practice. In the early 1920s, criticizing Freud's "classical" method of neutral interpretation, Ferenczi collaborated with Otto Rank to create a "here-and-now" psychotherapy that, through Rank's personal influence, led the American Carl Rogers to conceptualize person-centered therapy (Kramer 1995).
Ferenczi has found some favor in modern times among the followers of Jacques Lacan as well as among relational psychoanalysts in the United States. Relational analysts read Ferenczi as anticipating their own clinical emphasis on mutuality (intimacy), intersubjectivity, and the importance of the analyst's countertransference. Ferenczi's work has strongly influenced theory and praxis within the interpersonal-relational movement in American psychoanalysis, as typified by psychoanalysts at the William Alanson White Institute.
Ferenczi presided over the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1918 to 1919.
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.Ernest Jones, a biographer of Freud, termed Ferenczi as "mentally ill" at the end of his life, famously ignoring Ferenczi's battle with pernicious anemia, which killed him in 1933. Though desperately ill with the then-untreatable disease, Ferenczi managed to deliver his most famous paper, "Confusion of Tongues"[1] to the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden, Germany, on September 4, 1932.[2]
In 2002 Ferenczi's reputation was revived by publication of Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis[3] One of the book's chapters dealt with the tragic nature of the relationship between Freud and Ferenczi.
[edit] Ferenczi’s main ideas
1. Activity in psychoanalytic therapy.
Contrary to Freud’s view of an abstinence therapeutic stance, Ferenczi purposed a more active role for the analyst. For example, instead of the relatively “passive” stance of the listening analyst encouraging the patient to free associate, Ferenczi used to curtail certain responses, verbal and non-verbal alike, on the part of the analysand so as to allow suppressed thoughts and feeling to emerge. Ferenczi (1980) described in a case study how he used a kind of behavioral activation (uncommon in the psychoanalytic therapy at that time) when he asked an opera singer with performance anxiety to “perform” during therapy session and this way to face her fears (Rachman, 2007).
2. Clinical empathy in psychoanalysis.
Ferenczi viewed the empathic response during therapy as the core of clinical interaction. He based his intervention on responding to the subjective experience of the analysand; if more traditional views saw the analyst in the role of the physician, administering a treatment to the patient based upon diagnostic judgment of psychopathology, Ferenczi wanted the analysand to become a co-participant in an encounter created by the therapeutic dyad. This shift to empathic reciprocity during the therapeutic encounter was an important contribution to the evolution of psychoanalysis. Ferenczi also believed that self-disclosure of the analyst is an important therapeutic reparative force. The practice of bringing the therapist’s personality into therapy led to the development of the idea of the mutual encounter: the therapist is allowed to bring to the therapy some content from his own life and from his inner world, as long as it is relevant to the therapy. This is in contrast to the Freudian abstinence therapeutic stance according to which the therapist should not bring to therapy content which relates to his personal life, and should remain neutral (ibid). The mutual encounter is a forerunner of the psychoanalytic theory of two person psychology.
3. The “confusion of tongues” theory of trauma.
Ferenczi believed that the persistent traumatic effect of chronic overstimulation, deprivation, or empathic failure (a term further elaborated by Heinz Kohut) in childhood is what causes neurotic, character, borderline and psychotic disorders (ibid). According to this concept trauma develops as a result of sexual seduction of the child by a parent or authority figure. The confusion of tongues takes place when the child plays, in an infantile way, to be the spouse of the parent. The pathological adult interprets this infantile and innocent game according to his adult “passion tongue” and then forces the child to conform to his “passion tongue”. The adult uses a tongue the child does not know, and interprets the child’s innocent game (his infantile tongue) according to his disturbed perspective. For example, a father is playing with his little girl. During their common game, she offers him the role of her husband and wants him to sleep with her like he sleeps with her mother. The pathological father misinterprets this childish offer, and touches his daughter in an inappropriate way while they are in bed together. Here, the child spoke her innocent childish tongue, and the father interpreted her offer with his passionate adult sexual tongue. The adult abuser also attempts to convince the child that the lust on his part is really the love for which the child yearns. Ferenczi broadened the idea of trauma to emotional neglect, physical maltreatment, and empathic failure. The prominent manifestation of these disturbances would be the sexual abuse.
[edit] Notes
^ Ferenczi, S. (1933). The Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and Children: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion. Sándor Ferenczi Number. M. Balint (Ed.) International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30: Whole No.4, 1949 [The First English Translation of the paper.]
^ Section V - Continuing Education - Ferenczi
^ Andre E. Haynal (ed.),Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books
[edit] Further reading
Ferenczi's Turn in Psychoanalysis, Peter L. Rudnytsky, New York University Press, 2000, Paperback, 450 pages, ISBN 0814775454
Final Contributions to the Problems & Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Sandor Ferenczi, H. Karnac Books, Limited, Hardback, 1994, ISBN 1855750872.
Development of Psychoanalysis (Classics in Psychoanalysis, Monograph 4), Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi, International Universities Press, Inc, 1986, Hardback, ISBN 0823611973.
First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, Sandor Ferenczi, translated by Ernest Jones, H. Karnac Books, Limited, 1994, Hardback, ISBN 1855750856.
Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention, Martin Stanton, Jason Aronson Publishers, 1991, Hardcover, 1991, ISBN 0876685696.
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, Sandor Ferenczi, H. Karnac Books, Limited, 1989, Paperback, ISBN 0946439613.
Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi, Edited by Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron, Analytic Press, 1996, Hardback, ISBN 0881631493.
Antonelli, Giorgio, Il Mare di Ferenczi, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 1996 ISBN 8886044445
Triad: the physicists, the analysts, the kabbalists, Tom Keve, Rosenberger & Krausz, London, 2000, ISBN 0953621901. (http://www.rosenbergerandkrausz.com/)
Paul Roazen: Elma Laurvik, Ferenczi's Step-Daughter from the pages of PSYCHOMEDIA
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914, Harvard University Press
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, Harvard University Press
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920-1933, Harvard University Press
The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, by Sándor Ferenczi. Edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Harvard University Press. ISBN 067413527X
Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, Number 4, pp. 54-110.
Ferenczi, S. (1980). Technical difficulties in the analysis of a case of hysteria: Including observations of larval forms of onanism and onanistic equivalents (J. I. Suttie, Trans.) In J. Rickman (Ed.), further contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis (pp. 291-294). New York: Bruner/Mazal. (Original work published 1919).
Rachman, A. W. (2007). “Sandor Ferenczi’s contributions to the evolution of psychoanalysis”, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 74-96.
Wolman, B. B. (1977). International encyclopedia of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, & neurology, (vol. 5). Aesculapius Publishers, New York.
[edit] See also
Psychoanalysis
Otto Rank
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It is my DGB perspective that much of Psychoanalysis is simply different extensions and applications of the basic formula outlined above.
-- dgb, Feb. 19th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
