Part 1: Preface
This very long essay here that I will break up into numerous parts -- written originally 31 years ago under the name 'Evaluation and Health' -- is, or was, rather dryly written at the time, but with a significant underlying idealistic passion for both the 'cognitive-rational-objective' and the 'humanistic' perspective that I was focusing on, and integrating, at the time...The essay remains a foundation to what is now Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy-Psychology...
I have carried this underlying idealistic rational-romantic-humanistic-existential passion over the past 30 years even as my living, loving, and working experiences have left me -- probably like most of us -- partly scarred along the way...
Beneath the idealistic Capitalism of an Adam Smith, an Ayn Rand, and/or a Nathaniel Branden, is a much colder, more narcissistic, and cut-throat Capitalism that is much harder to link to any sense of ethics, integrity, compassion, fairness, and humanism that the aforementioned three ever wrote about...Adam Smith saw the underlying danger of 'bankers and businessmen gone wild' which became a significant part of the focal point of Marx's and Fromm's later criticisms of Capitalism...as well as their elaborating on the Hegelian concept of 'the master-slave relationship', alienation, work alienation, self-alienation, and social alienation...
Were Hegel, Marx, and Fromm wrong in their respective criticisms of 'Narcissistic Capitalism'?
Personally, I don't think so.
There are some businessmen and women out there who try to maintain a sense of 'ethics', 'integrity', 'compassion', and 'humanism' in a largely narcissistic, cut-throat Capitalist world (which is not to say that many versions of 'socialism' and 'communism' have not been even more barbaric; I certainly don't think Marx would have -- and I know Fromm didn't -- support the political and economic 'leadership' of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung...There was not much, if any, humanism in what these men did...millions and millions of people died under their watch)...
Indeed, for the most part, except in isolated cultures and moments of history, it would seem to be a fair comment to say that man has never in his entire historical existence -- as a species -- been able to subordinate his driving desires for money, power, greed, sex, and revenge to the more humanistic desires of what most religions and the 'The Enlightenment' have preached in their respective religious and secular, non-religious ways: specifically, ethics, integrity, caring, loving, helping others (altruism as opposed to narcissism), generosity, kindness, compassion, empathy, fairness and the conflict and/or market idea of a 'win-win conflict resolution whether in marriage, between parents and kids, and/or between employers and employees, politicians and civilians...
To summarize, it might be easily stated that the 'ultimate dialectic paradox and split in man's personality and character -- both individually and collectively -- is the split between narcissism and altruism...'
Politically, economically, and socially this 'ultimate split in man's personality' is played out externally in the endless impasses and seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of Capitalism vs. Socialism, Liberals and Conservatives, right wing and left wing factions, Republicans and Democrats...
In America, Obama and Democrat politicians keep preaching that they want to see 'bilateral participation, engagement, negotiation, and integration' coming from the Senate but always 'the concrete working out of what is actually meant by this process, and what the end product of all this real or supposed bilateral negotiation is' -- that very much becomes colored by the ideology and the goals of the respective party's who went into the negotiation arena in the first place...and are either 'satisfied' or 'dis-satisfied' by the eventual outcome or not...and that is assuming that final agreements ever get out of the negotiating Senate in the first place...i.e., the 'Democrat health care issue' that has been a part of their driving ideology for decades...but not the Republicans...
Is any marriage conflict usually any different?
Or parent/child conflict?
Or employer/employee or employer/union conflict?
Unilateral, narcissistic, special interest forces always seek to undermine 'bi-lateral compromises'...and in the end, egalitarianism, fairness, integrity, and democracy...
We see (or don't see) this in government halls and lobbies (I read not too long ago on the internet that that is where the term 'lobbyist' came from -- i.e., from the 'special interest people who waited, in English government lobbies to basically 'hit upon' the politicians before and after parliamentary sessions...trying to get into the politicians' ear...if not pocketbook...
In the same sense, we all have 'internal special interest lobbyists' inside our individual personalities...one might say metaphorically 'walking around the halls of our personality trying to get into our 'Central Ego's ear'....and to control and dictate the outcome of final behavioral decisions...
I call these 'internal lobbyists in the personality'...'ego-compartments' or 'ego states' or 'ego splits'....splits based on divided self and/or social interest... such as 'The Nurturing Superego', 'The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Superego', 'The Righteous-Critical (Rejecting, Abandoning, Victimizing...) Superego', 'The Approval-Seeking Under-ego', 'The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Under-ego', and 'The Rebellious-Righteous (Defiant, Critical, Rejecting, Abandoning, Victimizing...) Under-ego.
Six of them, all told, at least in DGB Personality Theory -- surrounding and striving to influence, manipulate, coerce, exploit, control and dominate the decisions of our 'harassed' Central Mediating Ego...
This is the political, economic, social, philosophical, and psychological context that I can provide you with today on March 2nd, 2010, 1 day until my birthday -- which also celebrates the anniversary of the initial meeting between Freud and Jung in 1907, on a Sunday morning, in which they talked for 14 straight hours!! -- that I didn't have when I originally wrote this essay in 1978-79.
By the time I finished the essay below -- or at least the original 1979 version of the essay below -- I knew where I had to get to, or at least I had a 'rough map' of where I knew I needed to get to, which I can say in a pretty satisfied manner here and now, is pretty close to where I am today.
Even as Hegel's Hotel keeps evolving....as I keep writing....
Anyway, I'm going to try to try to write this essay again for about the 20th time, hopefully spicing it up with the addition of my post-university 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, 'multi-dialectic (Hegelian-Freudian-Gestalt-Jungian) influence' that you can see in most of the essays I have written in Hegel's Hotel, including now, this one.
Regarding my main influences back in 1979, that led to where I am writing now...
S.I.Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 1939, 1940, 1941,1949,1963, 1964,1972 (I first read this book when I was in high school in 1972...this and Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (1960), which I read about the same time, led me to the study of psychology at The University of Waterloo (1974-1979), The Adlerian Institute of Ontario (1981,81), The Gestalt Institute of Toronto (1979-1991), and also into the self-study of Psychoanalysis (the mid 1980s), then Jung briefly (mid 80s), then Hegel (mid 80s), Masson (early 90s), then philosophy in general (the 90s and 2000s)...and the project of putting together everything I had learned, first in 'Gap Psychology' (1990s and early 2000s), then in 'Gap Philosophy' (early 2000s), then finally, once 'blogging' hit the internet in the early 2000s, I started the beginning of Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy-Psychology...in I believe July, 2006...which is putting us now into the end of our third year of development...
In addition to Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, here are some of the other books that influenced me during my university years...
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933
Erich Fromm, Man For Himself (1947); The Sane Society (1955); Escape From Freedom (1941); The Art of Loving (1956)...
Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, 1969
Jerome Frank, Persuasion and Healing, 1961, 1963, 1973, 1974
George Kelly, A Theory of Personality, 1955, 1963
Harry Browne, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, 1973
Miller, Nunnally, and Wackman, Alive and Aware: How To Improve Your Relationships Through Better Communication, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978
Severin, Discovering Man in Psychology: A Humanistic Approach, 1965, 1973
Fensterheim and Jean Baer, Stop Running Scared! Fear Control Training: The New Way to Conquer Fears, Phobias, and Anxieties, 1977, 1978
John Powell, the secret of staying in love, 1974
Donald Meichenbaum, Cognitive-Behavior Modification: An Integrative Approach, 1977
I was writing this essay for the last author -- Donald Meichenbaum -- who was my sponsoring professor at The University of Waterloo in 1978,79.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present to you, an updated 2010 version of my 1979 essay, 'Evaluation and Health'...
-- dgb, March 2nd, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
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