"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold
two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain
the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to
see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make
them otherwise."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
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[Larval Subjects March 12, 2007
Scattered Thoughts on Dialectical Reason
Posted by larvalsubjects
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, “the most enduring result of Hegelian logic is that the individual is not flatly for himself. In himself, he is his otherness and linked with others” (161).
For me, Hegel’s Science of Logic has always been the great white whale, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake of philosophy. What interests me in Hegel is not what he has to say about Spirit or reconciliation or the formation of a total system where nothing escapes– as absolute knowledge is sometimes thought to be...
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Warning: Object(s)ions in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear
Posted by larvalsubjects under Blogging, Boring Stuff About MeOne of the central theses of psychoanalysis is that the manner in which we interpret others says more about the structure of our own desire than the desire of the other person we’re interpreting. I am not sure one even has to be an advocate of psychoanalytic theory to endorse this thesis. Given that we don’t have access to the minds of other people our attributions of motives to others must proceed by analogy to ourselves, such that we attribute motives to others based on what motivates us.
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dgb's article....
The mind and personality -- just like the body -- is full of compensatory measures and homeostatic (dialectically balancing) functions.
That is how the principle of homeostasis (see Cannon, The Wisdom of The Body) works -- through continually engaging in compensatory measures in the mind-brain-personality-body aimed at searching for the always 'short and fleeting center-point of Mind-Brain-Personality-Body (MBPB) homeostatic (dialectic-democratic) balance'. The minute we get there -- Friedlander and then Perls called this place in our mind the 'point of creative indifference' -- and I will also refer to it as the point of 'Homeostatic-Dialectic-Democratic Utopia' -- until something either external or internal to us changes things to upset this most delicate, fragile, and fleeting, transitory balance. To use a partly Reichian analogy, it is like the second or two after orgasm before we start to withdraw from contact. But what we are talking about here is not only related to sexual homeostasis.
We are also talking about: intellectual homeostasis, mental homeostasis, personality homeostasis, psychological homeostasis, emotional homeostasis, physical homeostasis, biochemical homeostasis, economic homeostasis, social homeostasis, political homeostasis, philosophical homeostasis, creative-artistic homeostasis, spiritual-(religious) homeostasis, and more...
Blood pressure can't be either too high or too low...
Blood sugar levels can't be either too high or too low...
Both bodily and psychopathology can be defined as gravitating too far towards the bi-polar extremes of human (dys)functional behavior...
In essence then, every aspect and every type of psychopathology can be equated in some way or another to the idea of 'bi-polar extremism'.
Thus, every form of medical condition and every form of psychopathology -- neurosis and/or psychosis -- can be viewed as some form of 'bi-polar disorder'.
'Manic-Depression' -- the 'old' name for 'bi-polar disorder' -- is just one example of how the body can compensate radically and dramatically from one 'existential extreme' to the 'opposite existential extreme' in an effort to compensate for the preceding (and opposing) state of psychological extremism.
Depression, in my research and experience, usually reflects some combination of a 'hanging on bite', a 'bad (punitive, discouraging) internalized object (person), and/or a 'lost internalized object (person) -- a parent, a sibling, a lover, a friend...
For example, depression can involve some aspect of the 'self-torture game' where our Righteous- Critical (Rejecting, Abandoning...)Topdog/Superego runs roughshod over the rest of our personality to the point where both our Approval-Seeking and Rebellious Underdog/Underego basically 'give up' and collapse in discouragement and futility relative to the onslaught of our Anal-Sadistic-Torturing Righteous Topdog/Superego.
Or depression can involve 'hanging on' to a 'lost love object' that we just won't let go....a parent, a child, a sibling, an ex-lover, an ex-friend...Depression here to can involve an element of both anger/rage and grief -- grief at 'losing the loved object'; and/or anger/rage at the person who left you...But both strong feelings of grief and anger are denied and buried -- and we are left with a more 'abstractified, vague and seemingly objectless and directionless depression'.
If you are 'depressed', then maybe you need to sob or rage at something and/or someone who is the source of the depth and intensity of your feeling beneath your 'watered-down or sugar-coated depression'. Depression can hang around for long periods of time with seemingly no way out of it...
Engaging in more 'full-blooded contact' with a friend, a lover, a therapist (a safe person) in order to 'dig beneath your depression to the source of the stronger but denied underlying feelings whatever they may be -- grief, guilt, anger, resentment, rage, hatred...-- may be the necessary 'therapeutic work' needed under the depression. And the more threatening and scary the work may seem to be, probably the greater the need for a good, safe psychotherapist.
To the extent that depression can be equated with a 'listlessness of feeling' -- living the life of an emotionally 'dead person' -- the Mind-Brain-Personality-Body (MBPB) is also prone to take strong compensatory measures to alleviated these feelings -- or their lack thereof. Eating, drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling...can all by 'compensatory symptoms' of an underlying depression -- and under that a 'bad or lost internalized love object'. The symptom of feeling a 'void' in our heart and/or in the 'pit of our stomach' is often symptomatic of an ongoing depression...The 'compensatory measure' -- often of an extreme and neurotic and/or psychotic, self-destructive type -- is often aimed at trying 'to get rid of this sense of a void within us'...
The behavior of 'self-punishment' is often linked with underlying 'guilt'. The self-punishment can be viewed as a compensatory measure taken to alleviate or get rid of the guilt. We feel guilt and opt for self-punishment in order to 'close' the guilt. But the guilt could be of a 'circular, serial type' caused by an internalied Bad Object (or torturing Topdog/Superego) -- the legacy of one of our parents growing up perhaps and/or some other childhood 'role model'. Thus, in this case, the circle never stops. Topdog Blame. Underdog Guilt. Compensatory Conflict Resolution: Self-punishment.
And start the whole process over again...This is what can be called a 'Transference Neurosis' and/or a 'Repetition Compulsion'. The Self-Torture Game never stops...We just keep playing it....over...and over...and over again....
'Counter-phobia' and 'The Mastery Compulsion (Superiority-Striving)' can and often do enter the picture in our particular brand of 'Transference Neurosis/Script/Game' as well.
This is also where Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his later Fantasy-Oedipal Theory merge together into what I am calling 'Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
Traumcy paradoxically in many, many transference neuroses/scripts/games can stimulate (love/hate/erotic-destructive) fantasies out of our original childhood traumacy (memory/encounter/relationship/event).
Our original 'bad childhood transference object' may no longer be in the picture. But that does not stop us. Because internally, our 'bad, childhood transference love/hate object' is still very much alive -- enough to stimulate the strongest of our erotic and/or destructive/vengeful fantasies.
Just like in the statement of a 'murderer always returning to the scene of his or her crime', in transference, this the rule, not the exception. Indeed, either or both the original 'victimizer and/or victim are 'bound by the psychic laws of transference and the repetition and mastery compulsion to return to the scene of the original transference transgression/oppression/rejection/abandonment/betrayal/crime.. (either in reality and/or metaphorically and symbolically) over and over and over again for the rest of their lives unless they undergo and work through some form of profound psychotherapy...And even here the prospects are bleak....
Most, if not all, people are bound to their unique and personal transference complexes/neuroses for their entire lives...Modifications and compensations...and mutations, and and 'bi-polar oscillations' and/or 'switcheroos'....and all sorts of different wild and extreme or watered-down, sugar-coated renditions of our transference complexes are likely to occur throughout the evolution and various regressions in our lives...
But in the end, we can't usually get rid of our transference-complexes...We can only try to use them more functionally, more creatively as opposed to destructively, and stay away from the worst potential extensions of our transference given a level of sufficient self-awareness and self-contact.
The fact that we are bound to our 'own internal Mr or Ms Hyde' (a part of our Shadow) -- the 'bad, rejecting object' in all of our personalities (because each and everyone of us has to at some point in our childhood run into a 'bad, rejecting person', or our perception of such -- by our own obsessive-compulsive transference complexes, and the fact that furthermore, our deepest, and/or darkest erotic fantasies are also intertwined into this picture -- is it any wonder why our love lives get so entwined with erotic desire combined with vengeful fantasy -- indeed the 'exciting, romantic-sexual transference object/person in our adult lives' is also likely to at the same time exemplify the characteristics of our 'bad, rejecting internal childhood object/person' as well....
Thus, the paradoxical and intertwined nature of love and hate, desire and rejection, traumacy and fantasy....
Sigmund Freud, 'You had it right -- both before and after your abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theory -- but only partly right in both cases.'
Your problem was not -- primarily in my interpretation -- a case of 'failure of moral courage' (Masson's accusation).
Rather, your problem was a problem shared by millions and millions of people in the world today.
Specifically, Dr. Freud, you problem was one of 'getting stuck inside the box -- the clothes dryer -- of Aristotelean either/or logic'.
Once you, my dear reader, and Freud, and Masson, and myself move out of the restricting confines of Aristotelean Logic and into the 'larger I and Thou, Here and Now Room of Dialectic-Interconnected and Integrative Logic' -- then the old 'Seduction Theory Paradox and Controversy' folds like a house of cards.
Traumacy exists. Childhood traumacy exists. Sexual assault exists. Childhood sexual assault exists. Incest exists. Childhood sexual abuse exists.
For The International Psychoanalytic Institution and Establishment -- to continue to either deny and/or avoid or disavow or suppress or repress the existence of some cases of 'father-daughter incest' and other forms of childhood sexual abuse, even after we have separated ourselves some 114 years from Victorian Society and Freud's initial Abandonment of The Seduction Theory with a supposedly strong-working egalitarian feminist network at work in North America and most parts of Europe today -- even with all of this -- The Psychoanalytic Society, and Particularly Classical Psychoanalytic Theory, holds onto the most restrictive, and anal-retentive interpretation of The Oedipal Complex like a toddler holds onto a dirty shirt.
Or worse -- like a Neo-Nazi holds onto the belief that The Holocaust 'never happened'.
This is probably the worst example of a supposedly credible School and Institution of Contemporary Psychology continuing to endure the social, philosophical, psychological, and academic ridicule of a 'hanging on bite' in the form of an outdated, anachronistic 'pathological assumption/belief' that I can possibly think of -- other than perhaps those who take the polar opposite assumptive position (that practically every woman who walks into a therapeutic situation has been sexually assaulted as a child). Both polar extremists are equally guilty of practicing 'Aristotelean, either/or, head in a clothes dryer logic'.
The movement needs to be towards a more 'mutually inclusive, traumacy-fantasy, Dialectically Integrative-Bi-Polar Homeostatic Psychotherapy'.
Here I am calling this 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
Where traumacy and fantasy theorists and therapists start to move from their positions of bi-polar philosophical extremism and meet towards the middle with each respectfully acknowledging the presence of the other's legitimate existence.
This is probably my most definitive essay on my particular conflict resolution to the highly emotionally volatile and infamous Seduction Theory Controversy.
Think dialectically and democratically; not unilaterally with your head in a clothes dryer with the door closed.
-- dgb, Feb. 15th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
