So too is great destruction...as well as great creativity...born from the Shadows of the Personality...
There is an ongoing dialectic in the Shadows of the mind between great creativity and great destruction, between life and death processes...between healthy and toxic processes...They both play themselves out in our 'childhood to adult transference complexes'...the 'seeds of our remembered childhood traumacies, our remembered childhood narcissistic injuries, coming back, re-cycled, in a newer, fresher, creative and/or destructive format...in our 'counter-phobias'...as we re-create, repeat, and relive all over again -- in symbolic, metaphorical fashion -- these old childhood scenes, trying to turn the 'bad' (our 'inferiority feelings') into the 'good' (our 'mastery compulsion') but often the 'bad just becoming 'bad' all over again...indeed, sometimes even 'worse'...
Messages from our subconscious -- whether in the form of a dream, a fantasy, a nightmare, a creative and/or destructive piece of work -- are message to ourselves, to our Central Ego...They are allusions to immediacy...and allusions to self-awareness and self-contact...
That is not illusions (as in falsehoods) but rather allusions (as in coded and interpretable messages)...
There is an underlying interaction in the Subconscious between past memories and particularly past traumacies, messages from our 'Transference Memory Templates' in the form of anxieties, fears, phobias, paranoias, nightmares, warning signs, messages from our Potential Self in the form 'directional signposts' and 'roadblocks to personal growth', messages in the form of 'mythological symbolism', messages relative to potential destructive elements and forces in the personality...
All of these different 'allusions to immediacy' get mixed together in the Subconscious Personality, in the Shadows of the Personality, in our own personal version of 'Hegel's Hotel'...and through our dreams, our fantasies, our creative expressions -- through each and every way we have of 'projecting' our internal, subconscious world of fears and phobias, counter-phobias, transferences, sexual and/or violent impulses, growthful and/or toxic needs -- all of these elements come driving up from the subconscious, are met with, and integrated with a 'Subconscious Censor' (Freud called this aspect of the sub/unconscious 'the dream censor'), and surface in the conscious personality in the form of 'coded messages' or 'allusions to immediacy' which, to repeat may contain a mixture of both growthful and toxic elements....
Our 'transference complexes and neuroses' usually contain a combination of 'growthful and toxic elements' that need to be guided properly, sometimes with the support and insights of a good psychotherapist...Do we keep going back to the same 'transference merry-go-round', the same 'transference roller coaster', or are there 'new modifications and editions in our transferences'
that are taking us in a 'healthier direction'?
Are we going back to the same 'destructive and/or self-destructive elements'? Or are we progressing and evolving in newer, better, more personally meaningful and growthful directions?
What kind of personal demons and monsters and skeletons and ghosts of yesterday and yesteryear are we still fighting with?
How are our transference complexes/neuroses working their way into our present lives?
What are we still trying to prove?
Who are we still seeking approval and/or love from?
Who are our ongoing 'internal rejectors', our ongoing 'bad internal objects' that we keep 're-projecting back into our present world'?
How much 'distortion' is there in our transference projections as opposed to 'accurate perceptions'?
Accurate perceptions that seemingly come out of nowhere -- we often call these 'intuitions' -- often if not always come from deep in our subconscious, our transference complexes that we are 'perceptually projecting' into our present world...
Perhaps the main reason that I can look back at one of Freud's earliest memories -- probably his earliest -- and interpret it with a 'transference clarity' that thousands of other psychoanalysts have been unable to do -- is because my first 'transference memory' is very similar in structure and process... Also, I have not been taught -- or shall I say 'brainwashed' -- to think within the 'Classic Freudian Box'...
In Freud's first memory, he burst into his parents' bedroom to discover his parents engaged in sexual intercourse -- an activity that the very young Freud (3 or 4 years old) could not comprehend at the time of his shocking discovery...He was greeted (not surprisingly) by his dad yelling at him to get out of the room and close the door....
In Ernest Jones' famous biography of Freud, Jones called the memory 'banal' and basically lacking in significance (presumably because it was a 'conscious early memory' and not a 'repressed early memory') except that perhaps it at least partly explained the beginning of Freud's 'sexual curiosity'....
In contrast -- and based mainly on my 2 years of Adlerian training -- I diagnose this 'conscious early memory' of Freud's as a 'full-blooded transference memory', easily the most important transference memory in Freud's subconscious personality.
Every time as an adult, when Freud walked into his 'Classic Psychoanalytic Room' and saw a woman (or man) lying there on the 'couch', Freud was subconsiously reliving the psycho-dynamics of his earliest transference memory. Freud could say all he wanted to that the reason he brought 'the classic couch' into his therapeutic room is because 'he didn't want to be looking at his clients' eyes' and/or he wanted his clients to engage in undistracted free associations without them being led astray by their counter-reactions to the therapist's reactions to what the client was saying and thinking...In other words, he seemingly wanted his clients' projections and transferences to be basically 'unspoiled' by client-therapist facial and bodily reactions...This may all true but it doesn't take us deep enough into Freud's own transference makeup...
We all have a 'projective re-creation compulsion' and Freud was no different. People who land in, and stay in, certain jobs and careers for a long time generally have a 'transference reason' for doing so...And thus, it was with Freud....Freud had basically 'projectively re-created' his earliest transference memory in his adult life in the makeup and setup of The Classic Psychoanalytic Room -- complete with a 'couch' subbing in for the 'bed' in his earliest transference memory/traumacy...and 'one of his two projected parents' lying symbolically and metaphorically on the couch/bed of The Psychoanalytic Room...
If Freud was having trouble 'looking into his clients' eyes'...it was probably because he was 'projectively transferring' his father's critical/rejecting eyes and voice into the eyes of his clients...Freud's father, in his first and primary transference memory, played the part of his 'internal bad or rejecting object' which would then be projectively transferred into the Psychoanalytic Room onto the person (especially if the client was male) lying on the couch...
This has been said before -- and I don't mean this judgmentally of Freud because we all have these same types of cognitive transference processes working inside of us -- but it needs to be repeated: Freud was basically a 'closet voyeur'...that made up 'the inner libidinous essence' of his outer 'scientific and clinical curiosity'....And in this regard, Freud didn't want his voyeurism, his 'projective re-creation compulsion', his 'repetition compulsion', and his 'mastery compulsion' to be interrupted by anyone's negative judgments...In effect, vicariously, he was 'projectively telling his dad to 'shut the *** up because, come Hell or high water, he was going to find out every possibility of what was going on in his parents' bedroom when he was so rudely ejected from their room by his dad at such a young, naive, and ignorant age, incapable of understanding the full essence and nature of such mind-boggling, hidden, human narcissistic activities'...
Freud would spend his whole life seeking -- rather 'obsessing' -- over such a complete (sexual and defensive) understanding...
In the 'repetition compulsion' component of the re-enactment of Freud's earliest transference memory, Freud was vicariously and symbolically rejected by a current-day edition of his 'rejecting internal object', i.e., his dad ejecting the young Freud from the parental bedroom...This would apply at least partly to Breuer, Fliess, Jung, Adler...i.e., whoever was 'subconsciously construed by the adult Freud as 'ejecting him from their respective individual presence'...Freud -- based on his father being his lifelong 'internal rejecting object' within his personality, was both very sensitive to 'masculine (projected paternal) criticism' and conversely was also very quick to externalize and play out this 'superior, holier than thou, rejecting object' against other men who he criticized like his father criticized him...
Freud's most 'libidinous' masculine transference projections were most apparently Fliess and Jung...In these two 'projected masculine transference figures', Freud would seem to have seen important elements of his 'father's judgmental character'...which he then played out his 'primary transference complex/neurosis' in his respective relationship with each of them...until respectively, both transference relationships blew up on strong negative (mutual) judgments...
In the 'mastery compulsion' component of the re-enactment of Freud's earliest transference memory, Freud would play the part of 'the rejector' as opposed to the 'rejected'....a 'transference reversal' from the role of 'rejected underdog or underego' to the role of 'rejecting topdog or Superego'...i.e, this can be interpretively construed as 'compensatory transference identification with his internal rejecting father'....
How many men as an adult did Freud symbolically and/or literally 'eject from his room'....(Ferenczi and Anna Freud labelled this 'serial' transference phenomenon as 'identification with the aggressor'...or by extension...'identification with the victimizer, abandoner, rejector, assaulter, betrayer....') There were a lot of 'serial masculine rejections' in Freud's adult life...too many for me to completely here and/or to try to figure out exactly 'who rejected who' because in a lot of cases it was 'mutual'....
Breuer, Fliess, Adler, Stekel, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, Perls...
Freud was a 'serial transference rejector of men'....
One day I will maybe share my own first transference memory. Perhaps I have already exposed it in a past essay. But for the time being, I don't really want a hundred or a thousand professional or amateur 'psychoanalysts' coming back at me with their own 'transference interpretations of my first memory'...
Our transference revelations can reflect some of our most intimate self-exposures...
This can be both a good and/or a bad thing depending on whether they are used for or against you...
At the deepest level, our transference complexes, neuroses, and obsessive-compulsions display a humanistic-existential but almost 'incessantly unsatisfiable' wish for self and social acceptance and love...
But mixed in with this obsessive-compulsive wish for 'self-social healing' is a 'toxic overload' of the same 'transferred' event and attitude that contributed to the original problem and 'self-esteem void in the personality' in the first place...Thus, transferences can display themselves like 'infected sores' with poisonous pus spilling over the top of the open and infected self-esteem wound...
A 'victimized child becomes a victimizing adult'....
This is the mark of the 'overspilling toxic poison' of 'transference gone bad' (negative transference, transference rage, narcissistic rage...internalized and/or externalized transference rage...)
Underneath all this toxic transference poison is a 'self-rejecting child' who paradoxically wants you to actually play out the role of his or her rejecting/exciting transference figure...
Reject me, then love me, reject me, then love me...in the sphere of the transference, this is how we more often than not want our transference -- our re-creation, repetition, and mastery compulsion -- played out...
This is the 'transference essence' of the time tried love game of 'playing hard to get'...
We want ego resistance before we get ego satisfaction...
Resistance increases tension, increases potential energy, like the 'tautness of a retracted bow and arrow'...like a roller coaster slowly going uphill....increasing both human fear and excitement...
And then the 'release of the bow'...the 'rush of the roller coaster downhill'...
And then the rush of a 'narcissistic-egotistic transference climax and release' which is all too similar to, and basically, the psychological equivalent of a 'bodily orgasmic release'...It is not surprising for humans to ideally seek both simultaneously...in that 'symbiotic union' not only between ourselves and our partner, but also ideally, both psychologically and physically at the same time between the acceptance by, and/or construed mastery over an 'external, fantasized transference rejecting/exciting object' as well as mastery over our own 'self-construed, weak, rejected internal object (or ego-state or underego)'...all of this coming together psychologically and sexually in The Perfect Storm...in conjunction with our 'Mastery of The Perfect Storm' and ideally our Mastery of this Perfect Storm culminating in our own tightly construed idea of the 'Perfect Transference Orgasm'...(I'm starting to write like Wilhelm Reich here...)
Now, not all transferences are erotic, and not all erotic transferences are as tightly wound as I am suggesting above...but still...where transference, love, lust, rejection, anger, resentment, hate, anxiety, grief, guilt...are all intertwined together, or even some smaller subset of these paradoxical emotions...is it any wonder why love becomes so complicated and why all rationality and common sense seemingly flies out the window?
Whether this 'Perfect Transference Storm' is legally and/or politically and/or morally and/or socially tolerated or not depends on whether or not any 'legal boundaries' are being crossed...It also depends on how much 'transference toxicity' is being projected and/or acted out in the transference re-creation...
Some erotic transferences require the help of a therapist -- that is for sure, if not more than a therapist -- depending on the actual nature of the content of the transference fantasy...dominance, submission, bondage, sadism, masochism, seduction, exhibitionism, voyeurism, assault, rape, fetishes, incest, violence, abandonment...some of these are clearly transference obsessions that cross well past the line of legal acceptability...At the extreme polarity, we moves into the territory of 'serial victimizers (rapists,killers)'...and conversely the 'serial victims'....Indeed, there is always an element of both victimizer and victim in the same person...and that applies to all of us...We are all 'serial rejectors' in some fashion or another...specifically, in the fashion of our original childhood transference rejector...
Transference is generally a 'Pandora's Box'...We open the box looking for gold and treasure...and indeed, we might get some of that...but we are likely to find plenty of 'snakes' surrounding the treasure as well...Open with caution...and be aware of the paradox of love, lust (positive romantic and erotic transference) followed by anger, and resentment (negative transference) a little further down the line...
One way or the other, whoever named 'The Seduction Theory' the Seduction Theory (it wasn't Freud) used this label for the wrong psycho-dynamic phenomenon...
What it should have been used for is the idea, the theory, and the phenomenon of an adult in the midst of a 'transference obsession' aiming to seduce a modern day version of his or her original childhood transference rejecting/exciting object...
That is what should have been -- and still should be -- labelled as 'The Transference Seduction Theory'; not Freud's 1896 theory of Childhood Sexual Assault leading to Hysteria...
Freud's Traumacy Theory was partly right in 1895 (with Breuer); Freud's 1896 Seduction Theory was also partly right as a potential and actual subset of his earlier 1895 Traumacy Theory; and so too was Freud's post 1896 evolving Fantasy, Childhood and Adult Sexuality, Dream, Oedipal, Transference, Narcissistic, Object Relations, Life and Death Instinct, and Splitting of The Ego...
The only thing that Freud couldn't do because he was more of an 'Aristotelean either/or theorist' and also partly a 'post-Hegelian dialectically opposing theorist' ...but not a good enough 'dialectically integrative theorist' (other than his work on 'compromise formations in the ego')....to repeat, the only thing that Freud couldn't do was he couldn't bring all of his many different theories, all of the many different pieces of his work -- many of them self-rejected -- he couldn't bring all of these valuable pieces into the same room together...he couldn't blend them all together into one Grand Narrative...into one Grand Symphony or Painting...this is what he couldn't do before he died...Freud couldn't think outside his own tightly construed 'Freudian Box'...
So I will do it for him...
Because I can think inside and outside of all Freudian, post-Freudian, and anti-Freudian Boxes...
That is my Grand Narrative, my Grand Symphony, my Grand Painting...
That is Hegel's Hotel....
Excuse my narcissism....
Enough...
-- dgb, March 6th, 2010
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
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In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings.
-- Wilhelm Stekel
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Wilhelm Stekel
Of Polish origin, Wilhelm Stekel initially contacted Freud in 1902 for a short analysis. He then joined the group of Wednesday eveningswhen he met Alfred Adler. It is together with Adler that, following the Weimar congress, he founded, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, whose direction they assumed.Freud's correspondence needs to be read to note the extent of his poor regard for the two above, which caused him many torments. Whereas Adler had broken in a definitive way, Stekel remained much more ambivalent. Taking as a pretext the difference in opinion regarding the publication of a text by Tausk, Stekel resigned from the Vienna Association of Psychoanalysis, but refused to give up his position with Zentralblatt before the First World War ended its publication.Stekel thereafter tried to join Freud again but the latter did not want to resume the old differences.Stekel practiced a method of short analysis implying a more active participation on the part of the therapist. He is not really known to have had any disciples.
Copyright René DesGroseillers
http://www.microtec.net/desgros/index.html .....................................................................................
From Wikipedia...
Wilhelm Stekel (March 18, 1868 – June 25, 1940) was an Austrian physician and psychologist, who became one of Sigmund Freud's earliest followers, a self-described apostle.[1] He later had a falling-out with Freud.[2] His works were translated in many languages.
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[edit]Career
Born in Boiany, Bukowina, he wrote a book called Auto-erotism: A Psychiatric Study of Onanism and Neurosis, first published in English in 1950. He is also credited with coining the term paraphilia, to replace "perversion."[3] Stekel contrasted what he called "normal fetishes" from extreme interests, "They become pathological only when they have pushed the whole love object into the background and themselves appropriate the function of a love object, e.g., when a lover satisfies himself with the possession of a woman's shoe and considers the woman herself as secondary or even disturbing and superfluous (p. 3).[3]
His autobiography was also published in 1950. Stekel died in London, by his own hand. He was married twice and left two children.[4] His wife Hilda Binder Stekel died in 1969.[5]
He analysed, among others, the psychoanalysts Otto Gross and A. S. Neill.
A biographical account appeared in The Self-Marginalization of Wilhem Stekel (2007) by Jaap Bos and Leendert Groenendijk, which also includes his correspondence with Sigmund Freud.
[edit]In popular culture
Stekel is quoted in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as saying, "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one" (p.?).
It has also been speculated that Stekel was the analyst after which Italo Svevo modeled the narrator in his famous Confessions of Zeno.
It has also been speculated that Stekel was the analyst after which Italo Svevo modeled the narrator in his famous Confessions of Zeno.
Think inside and outside the box....dgb
