One of the few times that I have found in the Psychoanalytic literature where Freud and Adler were actually on the same page together was Nov. 7th, 1906 during a meeting of The Psychoanalytic Society.
Adler had just deliver a presentation to the Society on 'psychic compensation' -- probably one of the most important concepts to come out of Adlerian thinking, next to his concept of 'lifestyle' and his 'interpretation of conscious early memories'.
Here Freudian and Adlerian thinking -- if only for one or two brief moments in history came together in a way that was actually 'integrative'.
DGB Philosophy-Psychology 'fixates' on this moment in Psychoanalytic history because it is one of the starting points and focal points for the beginning of what I will call 'DGB-GAP' Integrative Transference Theory'. I use the name 'GAP' as part of my 'DGB-GAP' name here because it actually represents my first 'theoretical-integrative project' back in the 1980s, after I finished my Honours Thesis in Psychology in 1979 (Evaluation and Health') which I still plan to re-write.
'GAP' when I first used it represented 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic (GAP)' which is where we return to right now from the mid 1980s when I was working in this area.
Nine concepts are critical here -- we will introduce others later -- but right now, two from Psychoanalysis, five from Adlerian Psychology, and two from Gestalt Therapy. They are respectively: Freudian: 1. 'narcissistic injury', 2. 'narcissistic fixation'; Adlerian: 3. 'inferiority feeling', 4. a) 'masculine protest' to b) 'superiority striving', 'compensation', 5. 'lifestyle', and 6. 'conscious early memories'; Gestalt: 7. 'figural gestalt', 8. 'unfinished situation'.
On November 7th, 1906 Adler was just starting to get his theoretical legs under him.
Indeed, this session can actually be marked as the beginning of Adlerian Psychology as it basically started to focus on three or four things: 1. 'inferiority feelings' and 2. 'compensation' 3. 'superiority striving', and 'conscious early recollections'.
Stated another way, Adler was starting to formulate his own alternative theory to Freud's at least partly to mainly abandoned 'traumacy' theory.
And yet things were again starting to change for Freud in a number of different ways. He was both looking 'backwards' in time to his and Breuer's old traumacy theory. And yet he was starting to move away from 'Sexual Fantasy Theory' in a partly different direction to his old Traumacy Theory and his present Sexual Fantasy Theory. (Freud had just published 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' in 1905.)
Freud was moving towards a theory of 'Narcissism', a concept that he didn't use in The Vienna Psychoanalytic Circle til November, 1909 -- three years later than this session here -- and then he would use it again in December 1909 (in an updated preface to 'Three Essays'), and again in 1910 in his essay, 'Leonardo Da Vinci'.
The concept of 'Narcissism' which is attributed partly to Havelock Ellis in 1898 and partly to Paul Nacke in 1899 (which Havelock Ellis, himself, insisted on sharing with Nacke) was not fully introduced by Freud himself to the public until his 1914 paper 'On Narcissism' -- which to me is one of the most important papers in the history of Psychoanalysis. Another critically important Psychoanalytic paper, 'The Dynamics of Transference' was published in 1912.
Thus, two critically important Freudian Psychoanalytic papers were published two years apart from each other -- 'The Dynamics of The Transference' in 1912, and 'On Narcissism' in 1914. And yet here was the 'kicker': for Freud the two concepts were 'mutually exclusive' -- never, according to Freud, would the two concepts meet in clinical practice. For Freud, the more narcissism ('egotism' and 'auto-eroticism') you had/have in a clinical case, the less transference you have -- and visa versa.
For example, the 'schizophrenic person' according to Freud is extremely 'narcissistic' -- meaning 'self-fixated' and 'self-fantasy-fixated'. This eliminates the possibility of the schizophrenic 'falling in love' and exhibiting the characteristics of 'transference love' because again, the schizophrenic is too 'self-fixated' and too 'self-fantasy-fixated'. The schizophrenic is too fixated on 'internal memory-fantasy objects' inside his or her own head to pay enough attention to the therapist's 'external characteristics' -- to consequently, 'fall in love'. Worded otherwise, the schizophrenic person is too 'narcissistic' to exhibit 'transference features' in Psychoanalytic psychotherapy -- thus, Psychoanalysis cannot help schizophrenic clients. So was Freud's thinking in 1914 -- and for the duration of his Psychoanalytic career.
This all changed with the work of Heinz Kohut in 1971:
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Narcissistic Transference
Narcissistic transference is a post-Freudian term introduced by Heinz Kohut, in the context of his theory of narcissism, to refer to a group of clinical phenomena observed during analytic treatment.
For Freud himself, transference concerned the transposition of object relationships; transference and narcissism were such contrary ideas for him that the expression narcissistic transference would have been meaningless in his eyes: "Observation shows that sufferers from narcissistic neuroses have no capacity for transference or only insufficient residues of it" (1916-17a [1915-17], p. 447).
One of the first authors to take narcissism into account in the evolution of the treatment was Béla Grunberger, in 1956. Grunberger deemed narcissism one of the motors of the analytic cure, and this even among neurotics. Out of fidelity to Freud's thinking, he nevertheless refrained from using the term "narcissistic transference," and spoke only of a "narcissistic analytic relationship." In this context he described certain ploys on the part of the patient, as for example "using the analyst to create a double [or mirror] image of himself" or projecting his ideal ego onto the analyst, which would later be evoked by Heinz Kohut.
Kohut brought narcissism into relation not with the ego but with a broader and less limited entity, the self. At the same time he introduced the idea of a line of development of narcissism paralleling the development of object-cathexes and interacting with it. Narcissism and object-love were thus no longer in contradiction with each other, but complementary, and it became possible to speak meaningfully of narcissistic transferences.
In The Analysis of the Self (1971), Kohut describes several aspects of such transferences. "Mirror transferences" correspond to a remobilization of the idealized "grandiose self" and imply the following demand with respect to the other person: "I am perfect and need you to confirm it." A mirror transference easily gives rise to a feeling of boredom or impatience in the analyst, whose otherness it does not acknowledge. Such transferences are of three types (pp. 114-16). The most archaic is "merger transference," in which the patient strives for an omnipotent and tyrannical control over the analyst, who is experienced as an extension of the self. In an "alter-ego transference," the other is experienced as very similar to the grandiose self. Lastly, in the case of mirror transference "in the narrower sense," the analyst is experienced as a function serving the patient's needs. If the patient feels recognized, he will experience sensations of well-being associated with the restoration of his narcissism. An "idealizing transference" is defined by Kohut as the mobilization of an idealized and all-powerful parent imago (p. 37), and it is encapsulated in the sentence "You are perfect, but I am part of you"; it is correlated with a struggle against feelings of emptiness and powerlessness. Kohut's notion that certain people are cathected as parts of the self, integrated into the mental functioning of the patient himself, led him to speak of "self-objects" and to describe narcissistic transference as based on an idealized self-object.
Kohut's approach has been criticized on the grounds that it first relegated the instincts and the Oedipus complex to the background and then eliminated them completely.
PAUL DENIS
See also: Bipolar self; Self; Self-object; Self psychology; Sexualization.
Bibliography
Dessuant, Pierre. (1999). Béla Grunberger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1916-17a [1915-17]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15-16.
Grunberger, Béla. (1979 [1971]). Narcissism: Psychoanalytic essays (Joyce S. Diamanti, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press.
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
Oppenheimer, Agnès. (1998). Heinz Kohut. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Further Reading
Cohen, D. W. (2002). Transference and countertransference in analysis of narcissism. Psychoanalytic Review, 89, 631-652.
Schwaber, Evelyn (1977). Understanding unfolding "narcissistic transference." International Review of Psychoanalysis, 4, 493-502.
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Back in the mid 1980s -- without knowing anything about the work of Heinz Kohut at the time -- I was playing around with a mixture of Freudian, Adlerian, and Gestalt ideas. You can probably even add the work of Eric Berne and Transactional Analysis as well as Ronald Fairbairn (through Harry Guntrip's book, 'Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and The Self', 1971,73) and Fairbairn's polar-paradoxical ideas of 'rejecting and exciting object' which I was just starting to learn as I started reading about 'Object Relations' for the first time.
Critical to all this theoretical work that I was integrating -- and I do not really have a clue when this integration actually came together (some time between the mid 1980s and early 1990s, I believe) was the concept of 'narcissistic injury' which was basically the Freudian and/or post-Freudian equivalent of Adler's concept of 'inferiority feeling'.
Clinically -- and theoretically speaking -- we can say that out of a 'childhood narcissistic (self-esteem) injury' -- often captured in the 'narcissistic fixation' or 'figural gestalt' of a consciously remembered early childhood memory, often develops a more clinically and experientially prolonged and neurotically relevant sense of 'physical and/or psychological inferiority feeling'.
In my own paraphrase of Adler's words, this more prolonged sense of 'inferiority feeling' happens to all of us in differing degrees of 'lifestyle' 'uniqueness' and 'specificity', 'quality' and 'quantity' relative to our own unique 'genetic characteristics' as well as our own unique 'subjective experiences' and 'learned lessons and personality characteristics' from these unique, subjectively perceived childhood experiences -- all captured in our consciously remembered early memories of these experiences.
Note, that it is at this specific juncture --not to fully develop til years later -- that Freud and Adler theoretically and therapeutically separate and go in opposite directions: 1. Freud and Psychoanalysis continued to remain focused and 'fixated' on their theoretical paradigm of 'unconscious, repressed memories' and 'repressed, sexual fantasies of distorted 'false' memories'; while Adler was entering into an entirely different domain, a different theoretical paradigm -- the domain and paradigm of 'consciously or (subconsciously) remembered early childhood memories'.
For an Adlerian Psychologist -- 'ask and you shall receive' -- you simply ask a client for a 'consciously remembered one-time, specific event in his or her early childhood (usually before the age of 7 or 8 years old) and, as a clinical diagnostician and therapist, you will get what you want: a 'lifestyle' memory that when combined with 3 or 4 other memories of this type and when taken together with information about the client's 'family constellation' will give the therapist the type of diagnostic and therapeutic information that he or she needs to work with you in the same basic way that a Psychoanalytic Therapist would would work with a 'client-therapist transference relationship'.
Which basically begs the question: How much different is what we will call here (with a little 'DGB theoretical embellishment') an 'Adlerian Lifestyle Complex and/or Script' to a 'Freudian or post-Freudian 'Transference Complex or Script'?
The answer from this DGB theoretical perspective right here is -- at least after you 'fill in some theoretical gaps within and between the two respective schools of psychology -- 'not too different'.
One primary difference is that Psychoanalysis believes in the assumption-principle of 'conflict and division in the personality' whereas Adlerian Psychology believes in the assumption-principle of 'unity -- as in no conflict -- in the personality.
A second major difference occurs within Psychoanalysis itself: specifically, Freud never connected his 'Traumacy and/or Seduction Theory' with his 'Transference Theory' -- although he definitely should have. Consequently, because of this failure on Freud's part to make a 'Traumacy-Transference' connection, therefore there was no resulting principle or concept in Psychoanalysis that reflected this concept here: a 'transference memory'. Nor a 'transference complex'. Nor a 'transference script'. Nor a 'transference game'. Nor a 'compensatory-transference-reversal' (similar with Ferenczi's and Anna Freud's concept of 'identification with the aggressor').
These ideas would all demand 'stepping outside of orthodox Psychoanalytic Theory Paradigm and integrating other ideas inherent in other schools of psychology such as by 1. Jung (complex); 2. Adler ('lifestyle memory', 'inferiority feeling', 'compensation', and 'superiority striving'); 3. Fairbairn ('rejecting' and 'exciting' object); 4. Berne ('scripts', 'games', 'payoffs', 'ego-states'...); and 5. Perls ('figural Gestalt', 'unfinished situation', 'symbolically repeating unfinished situations in order to finish them'...).
Two more ideas that I was playing around with in the mid 1980s were: 'topdog transferences' and 'topdog transference ego-states' vs. 'underdog transferences' and 'underdog transference ego-states'.
A 'narcissistic topdog transference complex, script, and game' involves playing out the role of a childhood idealized, idolized 'ego ideal' in what comes across in the manner of an adult 'superiority complex'.
In contrast, a 'narcissistic underdog transference complex, script, and game involves playing out usually a childhood version of oneself -- either an 'approval-seeking', a 'schizoid/distancing', and/or a 'rebellious' 'complex', 'script', 'game' in what can also be viewed as three different but often overlapping versions of an 'inferiority complex' involving either: 1. trying to 'please'; 2. trying to 'distance and avoid'; 3. trying to 'narcissistically and/or righteously 'get one's own way' and/or 'confront and/or overpower'; and 4. trying to 'manipulatively seduce'...
From these evolving integrative ideas, DGB-GAP Psychology gets 'four underdog transference ego-states: 1. The Rebellious (Rejected) Underdog Ego; 2. The Seductive-Manipulative (Narcissistic-Hedonistic) Underdog Ego; 3. The Distancing-Schizoid Underdog Ego; and 4. The Approval-Seeking (Pleasing) Underdog Ego.
These are mirrored by: 5. The Nurturing Topdog Ego; 6. The Seductive-Manipulative Topdog (Narcissistic-Hedonistic) Ego; 7. The Righteous-Rejecting Topdog Ego; and 8. The Distancing-Schizoid Topdog Ego. (I thank Harry Guntrip for the new addition of 'The Distancing-Schizoid Topdog and Underdog Ego' concepts. I forgot about this aspect of his work.)
Nestled in the 'middle and mediating zone' of these 8 topdog and underdog dialectic ego-states, I add 9. 'The Central Mediating, Executive (DGB Post-Hegelian, Rational-Empirical, Humanistic-Existential) Ego'.
And just to make life a little more complicated but interesting in 'The Multi-Dialectic-Wholistic Ego', I add a number of other 'middle-zone' dialectic-democratic ego-states that you can choose to either explore and utilize -- or ignore and not use -- as you see fit.
I like them -- this is like how 'The Senate' should function in Canadian Parliament as an 'overseeing consortium of 'dialectic-democratic specialist agents': 10. The Narcissistic-Altruistic Ego; 11. The Rational-Empirical Ego; 12. The Capitalist-Socialist Ego' 13. The Liberal-Conservative Ego; 14. The Creative-Destructive (Constructive-Deconstructive) Ego; 15. The Security-Excitement Ego; 16. The Enlightenment-Romantic Ego; 17. The Apollonian-Dionysian Ego...
That leaves us with room for three more 'Unconscious-Subconscious-Conscious Compartments of The Personality, of The Wholistic Self:
18. The Symbolic, Dynamic, Creative-Destructive Dream and Transference Fantasy Maker;
19. The Structural Transference Experience-Memory Template;
20. The Genetic, Potential Self.
And that, I believe, might be my final 'model of the personality or self'
I like the magic number '20' -- and I like all the different elements that comprise this model.
And it all starts/started with the concept of 'narcissism' and 'narcissistic injury'.
The DGB Post-Freudian, post-Kohutian Concept and Theory of 'narcissism' and 'narcissistic transference theory' holds a huge theoretical and clinical advantage over all other Freudian concepts and theories in that it is 'all encompassing' in a way that all of Freud's other theories were not:
1. Freudian Repression Theory was too reductionistic;
2. Freudian Traumacy Theory was too reductionistic;
3. Freudian Seduction Theory was too reductionistic;
4. Freudian Childhood Sexuality was too reductionistic;
5. Freudian Oedipal Theory was too reductionistic;
6. Freudian Transference Theory was too reductionistic;
7. Freudian Dream Interpretation Theory was too reductionistic;
8. Freudian Death Instinct Theory was too reductionistic (if not flat out wrong);
9. Freudian Ego, Id, and Superego Theory was too reductionistic;
That leaves two Freudian theories left (I probably missed a couple) that had 'all encompassing' value. These were, and still are:
10. Freud's Theory of Narcissism which had the distinct advantage over any of his previous or all but one of his later theories to be 'all encompassing'.
For this reason: Narcissism encompasses the three ideas of: 1. 'neuroticism'; 2. 'eroticism'; and 3. egotism' (self-esteem).
Perhaps Alfred Adler's most important legacy to the study and practice of clinical psychology is that he opened up the door to the 'study of self-esteem'.
The main essence of Adler's Theory -- couch partly in DGB Post-Freudian, Post-Adlerian Terminology -- runs something like this:
1. A 'childhood narcissistic (self-esteem) injury becomes 'fixated' on in the form of a 'conscious early memory' that reflects the subjective perception of the event. The narcissistic injury becomes 'crystallized' in the personality in the form of a more generalized 'self-esteem problem' or what Adler called an 'inferiority feeling' that 'propels an upward motivating, compensatory force' aimed at attempting to 'solve or resolve' the generalized inferiority feeling or 'transferred narcissistic injury'. The self-esteem injury -- and the memory of the event that crystallized it -- become the focus -- the fixation -- of 'obsessive-compulsive attention'. This 'fixated, obsessive-compulsive attention' is firstly organized in 'The Transference Template', and often integrated with elements of 'The Potential, Genetic Self' which may include 'Archetypal, Mythological Figures' that come from deep in our distant, ancient, genetic, Darwinian-Evolutionary past...
Our 'Dynamic, Creative Transference, Dream, and Fantasy (TDF) Maker grabs a hold of all of the material coming from deeper in our unconscious -- from our Transference Experience, Memory, and Fantasy Template; and from our Genetic, Potential Self -- and is integrated together in the form of: 1. a 'transference projection'; 2. a 'creative and/or destructive piece of fantasy-impulse, work, art, and/or 'Essence-Wall behavior'; 3. a 'creatively reconstructed symbolic Transference-Scene' that combines childhood and adult elements to it. Generally, there is a mixture of 'neuroticism, eroticism, and egotism' which together -- or separately -- we can call combined and/or separated elements of -- narcissism: 'transference memory', 'narcissistic injury', 'narcissistic fantasy-impulse', and 'mastery compulsion'.
I have a feeling this little essay here may become my signature psychological work -- my most complete and concise rendition of transference in relation to personality theory (splitting of the ego into ego-states that behave like 'lobbyists' walking down government halls, conflict and dissociation in the ego, divisions into 'dominant ego states' vs. 'marginalized, suppressed ego-states'...)
Some -- many -- may accuse me of creating a model that is too big and cumbersome -- it looks like an 'embellished' Transactional Analysis model with elements of Jungian psychology, Freudian Psychology, Object Relations, Adlerian Psychology, and Gestalt Therapy thrown into it. Critics may say that it fails the 'Okham's Razor' test -- it fails the 'simplicity' test. Having 20 different 'Ego or Sub-Ego States or 'Unconscious Self-Compartments' as opposed to Freud's three (Ego, Superego, and Id) or Gestalt Therapy's two (Topdog vs. Underdog) or Adlerian's Psycholgy's one ('lifestyle') is obviously going to raise some eyebrows and/or generate some quick 'rejection judgments'.
My counterargument is that all 20 'Self-Compartments' are relevant and significant to human behavior whether we want to label them the way I have chosen to or not. The model can easily be broken down into smaller, more workable, 'dialectic pieces' in a therapeutic setting. A 'Multi-Dialectic Model' can be broken down to simply a 'Dialectic Model' that focuses on two different ego-states wrestling with each other and each seeking dominance. And if I am 'over-objectifying' the self here, we can easily change our language from 'objectified language' to more 'subjectified, humanistic-existential language.
There is practically a lifetime -- 37 years (1972-2009) -- of research, analysis, integration, and theoretical reconstructionism that is locked up into this little paper here. The key to it is in the successful application of it.
The fact that I have worked this long and this hard on the evolution of the model is a statement and a reflection in itself of a 'narcissistic transference obsessive-compulsion-complex' of the first order! There is definitely an interconnection between 'transference-lifestyle complexes' on the one hand and 'any type of work-sublimation-obsesive-compulsion that may structurally fit into -- or interconnect with -- this transference-lifestyle complex...
Are you listening Dr. Brian Bird? (I can't find any recent biographical material on you but I think you are still alive, I hope you are still alive. You are one of my 'transference gurus'.)
Are you listening Dr. Jeffrey Masson? (I know you are alive -- you have an active website...)
We all have something to prove at some stage or another in our lives. If people didn't have some element of 'perceived marginalization and/or rejection kicking around in our heads, disturbing our peace and equillibrium, half the the things that have been accomplished in this world would never have been accomplished. The 'neurotic drive' -- for better and/or for worse -- is one of the most powerful drives in the human psyche...
'Personal narcissism' that can be broken down into numerous areas of 'sub-areas' of human motivation: 'Survival, safety, and security'...'contact excitement'....'money', 'greed, 'moral/ethical righteousness', 'romanticism', 'eroticism'...'reason and logic', 'healthy and/or neurotic egotism'...all of these motivational factors can play a crucial role in the foundational base of man's individual and collective motivation...
Fully recognizing the central part played by 'neurotic egotism' was Alfred Adler's greatest contribution to the study of the psychology of man.
Where did the boundary between Freud's healthy and neurotic egotism lie?
Where did the boundary between Masson's healthy and neurotic egotism lie?
Where did the boundary between Janet Malcolm' healthy and neurotic egotism lie?
Where does the boundary between my 'healthy' and 'neurotic' egotism lie?
At what point does a writer risk stepping over a line of 'professional conduct relative to good writing work' by perhaps sharing too much of his or her own personal 'Essence' and not maintaining enough 'Personal-Private Wall'...
Alternatvively, at what point does a writer risk reaching over -- and judging -- too deeply into another person's/writer's Personal-Private Wall, and in so doing, again, compromise his or her own professional writing work.
To be sure, I have a mitful of 'neurotic and/or transference sensitivities' but behind anyone's neurotic-transference senstivities can be a message that is still existentially real -- and important...
Such as perhaps...
1. You don't have to be a 'Dr.' to write a good psychology paper; nor do you have to live and die inside an 'Psychoanalytic Institute' to know something significant about the 'ins' an 'outs' of Psychoanalysis -- indeed, as Dr. Masson has boldly asserted (or so Janet Malcolm claims), what really might be best for Psychoanalysis is to open up some doors and windows at Anna Freud's house (metaphorically and/or literally) -- and, indeed, in every Psychoanalytic Institute and 'Secret Society' everywhere in the world -- , and 'get some fresh air' into all these buildings, 'breathe some new life in them', yes, even let some women into these buildings, let them behave as women -- and not teach them to masquerade around as 'stuffy, anal-retentive, Oedipal Complex fixated, old men'.
And yes, if I had my way or say in this massive 'Secret Society', Dr. Masson, if you wanted, I would let you back into The Psychoanalytic Institute -- and you could even be the reigning Psychoanalytic 'Intellectual Gigolo' -- metaphporically speaking of course. There are probably millions of men who would wear this mantle -- this title and label -- with egotistic pride. I can't believe you wasted 10 years of your life in a court of life trying to argue that this label 'defamed you'. I shake my head on that one. Try accepting and being accountable -- for better and/or for worse, for right and/or for wrong -- for the line that really destroyed your Psychoanalytic career -- 'Freud lost moral courage'. Personally, I do not believe that Freud turned Psychoanalysis upside down and inside out to protect his own medical career and a certain percentage of possible medical-father child abusers. There are much easier ways in which he could have accomplished this same goal -- such as simply sticking more abstractly to his previous 'traumacy theory'.
Lifestyle-Transference-Sensitivity #2:
Dr. Masson, you are not the only good mind -- and/or 'untainted' mind -- in the history of Psychoanalysis. Generally speaking, there is 'pathology at the extremities of life' -- there is just as much danger in utilizing 'The Seduction Theory out of control' as there is in utilizing 'The Oedipal Theory out of Control'.
Wherever there is a hardline rebel, you can usually find a hardline control freak -- in the same person. (Hardline Righteous Topdog vs. Hardline Rebellious Underdog).
Dr. Masson, you were like an anarchist -- or better still, The Anti-Christ (Freud being the symbolic Christ here) -- you were like Nietzsche on the warpath taking his/your 'hammer philosophy' to everything inside The Psychoanalytic Institute. Isn't that a part of your 'transference pattern' -- first idolizing someone or something, and then taking a 'rhetorical hammer' to your 'Idol' when you one find out that your so-called Idol is not a 'real one' but a 'false one'.
Or am I reading too much into your character just like you might have been when you said/say that 'Freud lost moral courage' as if God gave you the sole right to know what was going on inside Freud's mind back in 1896...Instead, in 1992, in the preface of 'Assault', you wrote that you don't profess to know why Freud 'lost moral courage' (you just know that he did...psychic telepathy again...a direct line into Freud's 1896 brain...)
For you, the 1980s were like -- 'it's my way or the highway', the rebellious-anarchist meets the 'righteous control freak' -- inside your own head, and then projected out into the world. The Psychoanalytic World.
It was like -- 'Okay, you guys, you don't want to play my way, you don't want to believe me, you don't want to play my game, that is fine with me, I will just 'take my net and go home'. (You lived in Toronto -- walked down the same halls as Ernest Jones -- and close to Maple Leaf Gardens -- I think you can appreciate that metaphor.) At the same time, I guess The Psychoanalytic Institute partly threw your net back at you -- and said, 'Go home!'
California wasn't far enough away from The Psychoanalytic Institute -- not far enough away from the 'madding crowd'...You can't get much further away than New Zealand...
And as far as your turn to the study and teaching of 'animal psychology' -- we all have different passions in life, some better actualized than others, depending on which path we choose to turn down in life -- but perhaps you said it best yourself as you turned away from Psychoanalyis and into the study of animal psychology: 'Dogs Never Lie About Love'...
Perhaps a little more transference-projection here?
Dr. Masson, I respect the courage it took for you to confront Psychoanalysis the way you did but as I believe I have said once before, I am here to give your work a fair shake in its own right -- that is your re-trumpeting of Freud's abandoned Seduction Theory -- but at the same time, I am not here to give you a free ride.
As writers -- you, Janet Malcolm, myself included -- we all have choices to make as 'to how far we can and will 'push the humanistic-existential drama' in our writing without compromising the 'factual, historical, and/or character reality' of who and/or what we are writing about.
You took liberties with what you said about Freud's character -- his 'alleged loss of moral courage and integrity' -- and you got a lot of public backlash and heat for what you wrote.
Janet Malcolm took certain liberties with 'alleged quotes about your character' that, if they involved 'fabricated quotes', 'conflated or amalgamated partial quotes from different contexts, times, and settings -- and all thrust together in one context, one time, one place, and/or coming from people who they didn't come from (Anna Freud, Kurt Eisler) -- if this all happened like it seems from what I have read from your court transcripts, it did happen -- then Janet Malcolm, her fact checker, and/or her editor/husband should all be held accountable for that -- in the end, Janet Malcolm's work, at least from this corner, takes at least a partial hit in terms of the 'fact credibility and integrity of her work'.
This having been said, it is also is not too hard to see certain similarities between what you did to Freud's character and what Janet Malcolm did to yours. Malcolm played around with 'quotes' and 'facts'; you played around with your own personal interpretations of quotes and alleged historical facts -- and in the end -- treated Freud's 'loss of moral courage and integrity' as if it was/is a given fact.
It isn't.
Thus, perhaps you got a piece of your own medicine: What goes around comes around.
Back to your re-trumpeting of Freud's Seduction Theory.
Dr. Masson -- your 'clone repetition' of Freud's Seduction Theory is too reductionistic -- let me repeat -- too reductionistic! It sinks when you try to make it sound as 'all encompassing' as you do.
Dr. Masson, you are just as guilty of over-generalizing as Freud was back in 1896.
Freud was very often in his career guilty of over-generalizing -- it was arguably his worst 'serial offence' as a theorist. That is why Breuer left him (Freud's pansexualism), that is why Jung left him (Freud's pansexualism again)...that is why many of his best therapists and theorists left him in one way or another: because Freud was just too 'anal-retentive' in treating 'his latest, greatest theory like a God-given fact' (even though he notoriously changed them himself faster than people could understand the implications and the applications -- of the theory he was leaving behind)!
Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' was too reductionistic -- in fact, it was probably even more reductionistic and extreme than his aforementioned Seduction Theory.
In fact, The Oedipal Theory -- and I am in full agreement with you, Dr. Masson here -- was easily capable of being 'pathologically wrong'. Freud's Oedipal Theory in its most extreme form created a 'Pathology of Normalcy' in Psychoanalysis -- that could be applied pathologically in thousands of different, individual clinical settings.
But so too can or could the 'unbridled Seduction Theory out of control'...
A therapist's office is not a court of law. It is not a therapist's job to be a 'prosecutor' or a 'council for the defence' or a 'judge or jury'....
'Subjective truths' in therapy -- and 'alleged objective truths' -- should not be confused with 'objective epistemological reality' and 'swallowed whole -- hook, line, and sinker' -- on the basis of a client's subjective testimony that can often be 'manipulatively seductive' -- and turn out to be flat out 'epistemologically wrong' -- or worse, 'a blatant manipulative fantasy and/or lie'.
Funny things can happen in a therapist's office -- just as they can happen in a court of law. No one is immune to the influence and 'distorting reality' of 'narcissistic bias'. Is a client in therapy because he or she was 'traumatized by a brutual reality'? And/or is he or she in therapy because he or she has a serial behavior pattern of 'distorting epistemological and/or ethical reality'?
Both possibilities -- separately or mixed -- can greatly 'muddle the picture of theoretical and/or therapeutic clarity'. Oftentimes, a theorist/therapist is best to remain 'epistemologically agnostic' -- to oneself, as convincing as this story may sound, I just do not know. Empirical and/or circumstantial validation, confirmation, support is needed from outside of the client's often very convincing 'words'.
'Words that are not structurally connected to reality' - that is oftentimes why a client is in therapy in the first place. People can be wrong. And oftentimes, people -- for whatever lighter or darker motivation -- can blatantly lie.
No iron clad theory -- Traumacy, Seduction, or Oedipal Theory -- can be expected to fit every clinical case, every clinical fact. That is why a broader, more open-minded perspective is often to be preferred.
Anyway, here is my 'DGB Integrative Narcissistic-Fixation/Traumacy-Transference Theory'.
No extreme Seduction Theory.
No extreme Oedipal Theory.
Both are too reductionistic in themselves.
But rather, at least a partly Hegelian dialectic-democratic collision and integration of both -- mediated by such concepts of 'narcissism', 'narcissistic injury', 'narcissistic transference neurosis', 'inferiority feeling', 'compensation', 'superiority striving', 'rejecting' and 'exciting' object, 'transference projection', 're-creation compulsion', 'introjection', 'identification', 'identification with the aggressor' (rejector, abandoner, betrayer...), 'mastery compulsion', 'compensatory transference reversal', 'complexes', 'scripts', 'games', 'payoffs', 'conscious early memories', 'neuroticism', 'transference eroticism', 'transference egotism'...
I've exhausted all my narcissistic egotism at this sitting. Tomorrow I may retract it all. If you had it all over again, Dr. Masson, would you have retracted your assertion of Freud 'having lost moral courage'?
Tomorrow or the next day, I will add a case example involving a 'transference-lifestyle memory' involving Freud himself, which I have already analyzed elsewhere (in one of my Wittgenstein essays) but will examine again.
We will look at this hugely important 'transference memory' stemming from Freud's early childhood in the context of Freud's later creation of Psychoanalysis.
For what it is worth, Dr. Masson...
With or without you...
-- dgb, June 24th-27th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic-Democratic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
Are still in process....
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