just finished...Aug. 20th, 2009.
The way to evolve from 'Deterministic, Classical, Orthodox, Psychoanalysis' to 'Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis' is to be wary of, skeptical of, even pessimistic of, all pre-ordained, pre-canned generic theories.
Each and everyone of us comes 'custom-made' and we don't live 'generic, pre-ordained lives' -- we live customized, 'rigid anal-retentive routine' and/or 'recklessly impulsive' (or somewhere in between) lives.
We live some combination of 'Our Essence and Our Wall'.
Sometimes too rigid, sometimes to impulsive...
A life riddled with 'separations'...and 're-births'...
'Traumacies' and/or 'narcissistic fixations'...
'Anal restraints' and/or 'oral obsessive-compulsions' and 'addictions'...
Or somewhere in between...
Freud was always getting it right....
And then making dumb mistakes, ethical, theoretical, therapeutic, and/or personal mistakes...
Freud was brilliant...but far from perfect...
Sometimes rigidly anal-retentive, at other times impulsively reckless...
Masson too was brilliant...is brilliant...he is still alive...and doing other things...
Masson is righteously anal-retentive and sometimes recklessly impulsive...present or past tense...I don't pretend to know his present life...
For a man who became so intimately close to Freud's work,
Masson perhaps turned out to be Freud's worst critic...
Not only challenging his work and his theoretical conclusions...
But also challenging Freud's ethical-moral character...
According to Masson, 'Freud lost moral courage'...
In effect, Freud wimped out...he back away from a 'politically incorrect theory' that brought him 'professional heat and disdain'...and threatened to ruin his credibility, future, and economic viability as a doctor...
So said/says Masson...(The Assault on Truth, 1992)
But both Freud and Masson were 'stuck inside an Aristolean either/or paradigm'...
Masson knows very well that 'The Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory alone cannot carry Psychonalysis on its entire shoulder...The Traumacy Theory fared better in this regard (and could easily include the Seduction Theory as a 'subset' of The Traumacy Theory).
But not even this is enough. Life is not only about traumacy but rather, what you make of traumacy -- both good and bad, creative, compensatory -- and this is the thing that Freud could not get his head around because he thought it violated the 'pleasure principle' -- and that is 'eroticized traumacy compensation'...
To understand this, you need to understand 'the mastery compulsion', the 'unfinished situation', and 'the wish to undo and/or reverse or compensate for childhood rejections'... You need to also understand Fairbairn's 'rejecting' and 'exciting' object -- which paradoxically and almost unbelievably -- turn out to be essentially the same thing...
More than anything, to get from a 'Deterministic, Pre-Ordained, Pre-Canned, Generic, Sterile, Classical-Orthodox' form of Psychoanalysis, and move to a more 'Humanistic-Existential, Here-and-Now, I and Thou' form of Psychoanalysis...you have to 'loosen yourself from the shackles of any and all pre-ordained concepts and theories, all forms of either/or thinking', and start to think 'dialectically in terms of engaging and negotiating opposite polar concepts and theories towards some form of better and more flexible bi-polar theory in the middle -- that can allow you, the theorist, and/or the therapist, to think in terms of each and every 'custom-made and custom-living client' who walks through the room and who could -- or might not -- support and/or refute either polar theory that you have available to you at your workside -- or again, possibly, something completely different.
Ours is not to question why, ours is just to follow the client wherever he or she may take us, for better or for worse, at least until we have some form of reasonable and sustained, consistent proof or some semblance of it, that the client is taking us down a path of blind alleys, throwing 'smoke and mirrors' at us, narcissistic manipulations, distorted half truths -- or less, a 'house of cards', his or her 'protective shield or persona', his or her 'Wall' to hide his or her 'Essence' that could be extremely 'bad' and/or extremely 'vulnerable', 'shaky', and hiding an underlying 'schizoid existential anxiety' -- 'The Abyss between The Wall and The Essence'..
Life is not all about truth and lies, about traumatic memories and narcissistic fantasies and fixations, about Dionysian and Apollonian biases and polar existences...
But rather, life is also about the bridges that join them...and mend the distortions and different brands of righteous and/or narcissistic extremism of one-side polar theories and lives that are dissociated from their other polar half...
This is the domain of Hegel's Hotel...
Think 'dialectic-democratic, humanistic-existential engagement'; as opposed to 'mutually exclusive dialectic dissociation, on-sided dominance and the other side marginalization'.
At least in this context.
As I learned in Gestalt Therapy,
Everything is subject to change.
There are no ironclad formulas in life -- other than in mathematics.
Psychology is not mathematics.
Far from it.
-- dgb, Aug. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
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