Introduction
I'm going to step out of Psychoanalysis for a while -- at least, the deepest, darkest area of Psychoanalysis -- and focus on the inter-relationship, the pluralistic entanglement, between sensory perception, perceptual interpretation, inferences, language and meaning -- all that can be summarized as 'epistemology' (the study of knowledge), and then value judgments, narcissism, ethics, problems and problem-solving, conflicts and conflict-resolving, value choices, and action.
All of this we will summarize as 'Central Ego Functioning (and Dysfunctioning): Epistemology, Narcissism, Ethics, Value Choices, and Action' which is basically a re-working of my Honors Thesis in Psychology in 1979, 30 years ago.
Back in 1979, the essay was called 'Evaluation and Health'. By the time I finished the essay, I knew that there was a considerable amount of work that I hadn't done yet in the area of 'learning', 'memory' and the effect that these two factors -- and others -- can and do have on the functioning and dysfunctioning of 'The Central Ego'.
Back then, I hadn't even named what I was writing about as 'The Central Ego' yet -- this was a concept that I would start to develop later in the 1980s and 90s after reading numerous Freudian and post-Freudian papers on 'transference', 'narcissism', 'ego-functioning', 'the defense mechanisms', 'Object Relations' and more...
The more I probed into these different areas of Psychoanalytic theorizing, the more I realized that there were 'darker, deeper areas of the psyche that couldn't really be properly described and explained by simply talking about 'The Central Ego'. Rather, there was a need to talk about the subject of 'ego-splitting', 'ego-compartments' or 'ego-departments' and the 'harmonization' or 'disharmonization' of 'The Ego or Self or Psyche-As-A-Whole'.
This is where I got 'stuck in my theorizing' a little later in my self-study project in the 80s and 90s as I was trying to integrate Gestalt Therapy, Adlerian Psychology, and Psychoanalysis all into one.
Yet there was a probem here because Adlerian Psychology was always talking about 'unity in the personality' -- as in 'no conflict in the personality' -- whereas both Gestalt Therapy and Psychoanalysis were always talking about either 'conflict' and/or 'resolving conflict' and in the case of Gestalt Therapy -- 'closing the unfinished gestalt, the unfinished situation'.
How was I to reconcile these differences between Gestalt Therapy and Psychonanalysis on the one hand, and Adlerian Psychology on the other hand?
I finally reconciled this theoretical impasse when I came to the conclusion -- not too long ago -- that all three schools of psychology were partly right: that there is both 'conflict' and 'unity' in the personality at the same time to the extent that it makes senses to talk about either 'unified conflict' and/or 'conflicted unity' in the personality.
In effect, this is no different than saying that The Democrat Party is both unified and divided by conflict, or The Republican Party is both unified and divided by conflict, and similarly up here in Canada where we can also talk about it being the nature of all political parties that they are both united and divided at the same time -- on either the same issues and/or different ones.
A political party -- and perhaps even more so, the government-as-a-whole of a democratic country, as with any social, religious, business, and/or political organization -- is only an outer projection, an outer extension, of the inner workings of the human psyche, dominated at different times by this 'compartment of the personality (or government)' or that 'compartment of the personality (or government', by 'this will to power' or 'that will to power' with other subsidiary 'will to powers' being either included or excluded in the democratic process, either harmonized or alienated, either accepted and respected or suppressed and marginalized.
'Ego-splitting' and 'ego harmonizing' is like playing 'Humpty Dumpty' with the psyche.
Whether you believe that all these different 'ego-compartments' -- whether you want to 'create' 2 of them or 20 of them -- are perhaps 'useful conceptual fictions' for educational and teaching purposes, or whether you believe that they are only 'non-useful fictions' that do more to distort and fabricate reality than 'enlighten us' on it, or whether you believe that these different 'ego-compartments' actually exist in the psyche, our main guiding lights should be a combination of 'functionality' and 'practicality' or 'pragmatics' -- as soon as the model we are using -- whether it is a huge one or a small one -- stops being useful and practical, then we should stop using it.
Again, I see partial 'truths' and 'distortions' in all of these different perspectives -- I believe that 'as if fictional concepts' can sometimes be pragmatically useful, even if they don't empirically (objectively) exist.
I am certainly no 'radical empiricist' like Berkeley or Hume, nor am I a 'materialist reductionist' (or a 'reductionist materialist).
Rather, I follow the thinking of my main mentors in 'rational-empricism': philosophers like Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, most of the Enlightenment Philosophers, Korzybski, Wittgenstein, Hayakawa, Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Erich Fromm, and the like...
If a model doesn't work, you make a better one. If two models or theories oppose each other and they both seem to contain a combination of 'partial truths' and 'partial distortions' -- then you integrate the two theories to make a better dialectically integrative theory. This is essentially what physicists did when they evolved from 'particle theory' to 'wave theory' to 'particle-wave' or what would later be called 'quantum physics'.
I do not support Wittgenstein's idea that the best theory is no theory.
Indeed, man's most significant evolutionary advantage over the rest of the animal kingdom is his ability to 'reason' and to 'make theories' and to 'test these theories' and to the extent that they do not work, to sit down, think things through, test different things, and ultimately to make 'better theories' -- and then pass them down using 'language' and 'symbols' to other men and women who follow in later generaations. Korzybski called this latter decided advantage that man has over the rest of the animal kingdom as 'time-binding' or perhaps alternative stated as 'culture'. Man -- through the use of language and symbols -- has the ability to pass down through the generations much more 'different learnings' than the rest of the animal kingdom is able to do. Another way of saying this is that besides the ability to 'reason', man's other greatest evolutionary advantage over the animal kingdom is 'language'.
This being said -- these two qualities and capabilities: man's ability to reason and his ability to utilize language -- are also potentially man's two most deadly nightmares because man can use both 'reason' and 'language' to distort reality, falsify it, mystify it, fabricate it, contort it, and in the process either lead his fellow man down the 'garden path to a pathological, toxic, never-never land' and/or himself/herself as well.
Summarized, man's two greatest evolutiony strengths -- his ability to think/reason, and his ability to utilize language for the purpose of enhancing both his thinking process and his communication process with other men and women -- are also his two greatest evolutionary weaknesses, the type of weaknesses that can lead us to war, genocide, suicide, mental institutions, neurosis, bi-polar disorders, religious extremism, political extremism, sadism, masochism, cruelty, greed, unbridled narcissism, power, revenge, righteous extremism, extremist cults, nuclear bombs, blowing each other up, abusing our children and spouses...and all of the other 'nasty human surprises' that life -- and death -- can bring us...
So if we are playing 'Humpty Dumpty' with the human psyche, then we have to remember that when we are through conceptually dividing Humpty Dumpty into as many different 'reductonist pieces' as we want to, or feel that we need to, then we have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again so that we can now understand Humpty Dumpty both 'reductionistically' (in all his different 'part-functions') and 'wholistically' (the way that Humpty Dumpty when put back together again functions as a partly conflicted, partly divided, but still -- 'united whole'.
Dialectically speaking, this is what I call 'reductionistic-wholism'. It is what biologists and biochemists and anatomists, and physicists and other scientists of the human body do each and every day when they study the human body and dialectically move back and forth between the study of 'reductionistic part-functions' of the body and the study of 'the united, integrated wholism of the way all these different part-functions come together to engineer the overall performance and functioning of the 'body-as-an-organism'.
This is the same way that I deal with the 'essence' vs. 'existence' paradoxical quandry.
I do not believe in the idea of 'essentialism' by itself or the idea of 'existentialism' by itself but rather in the 'dialectical interplay' between 'essentialism and existentialism' which makes me a dialectically integrative 'essential existentialist' and/or 'existential essentialist'.
In this regard, I do not support Sartre's famous existential formula of 'Existence precedes essence.'
Rather, I view the 'existence vs. essence' paradox as being like 'the chicken and egg' argument -- neither preceding the other but both dialectically engaged with each other -- or not -- such that we can say either that: 1. I have an 'internal Self Essence' which I need to play out in my existence'; or alternatively, 'Through the process of my existence, I can either choose ot make contact with my Self-Essence and/or I can choose to become alienated and dissociated from my Self-Essence'.
Indeed, the preceding statement might be viewed as the 'essence' of Shakespeare' (Hamlet's) most famous statement: 'To be or not to be, that is the question.'
For me, 'Hegel's Hotel' is an external projection of my own internal dialectic interaction and engagement between my Self-Essence and my Self-Wall, or stated differently, between my different 'ego-states' and my willingness vs. reluctance to fully investigate them and either expose them, allude to them, and/or flat out hide them.
As I have written in another paper, no one can deliver their 'pure essence' -- not even Freud or Jung. Rather, we all deliver a combination of 'Essence' and 'Wall'. 'The Wall' is Freud's 'Psychology of Defense'. 'The Essence' is Jung's concept of 'Self'.
But this habit of 'dialectial thinking' and the idea of 'dialectical engagement' is an idea that I only feel fully comfortable with now after 30 years of 'post-undergraduate self-studies in dialectical psychology and philosophy.
It certainly was not where I was in my head 30 years ago when I first wrote 'Evaluation and Health'.
So to make a long story short, let us call this much newer rendition of 'Evaluation and Health' -- 'Dialectic Thinking' Meets 'Evaluation and Health'. Or alternatively, the title that I used to label this essay at the top of the essay:
Central Ego Functioning (and Dysfunctioning): Epistemology, Narcissism, Ethics, Problem-Solving, and Action (or Inaction)
Let us see if we can follow this project all the way through to the end this time as I have started it a number of times in the past -- and got stuck -- leaving this essay to tackle other theoretical problems, ethical problems, and essays.
Hopefully, this time will be different.
-- dgb, Sept. 12th, 2009. modified and updated Feb. 4th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
