Here is an interesting read that was emailed to me from a reader with a strong Nietschean and Psychoanalytic background.... I don't entirely support the logic of the writer -- Norman Brown, a very provocative Psychoanalytic writer from the 1960s. I find him to be a little too strong in his 'Dionysian extremism'....like Nietzsche after 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT) when Nietzsche basically abandoned Apollo and rode his Dionysian horse for the rest of his writing career...
I will offer some discussion afterwards...
Here is the Norman Brown piece...
Thank you Trevor Pederson for bringing my attention to it -- and the writer.
-- dgb, July 27th, 2010
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Brown, N.O. (1960). Adventures in Ideas: Apollo and Dionysus. Psychoanal. Rev., 47A:3-23.
(1960). Psychoanalytic Review, 47A:3-23
Adventures in Ideas: Apollo and Dionysus
Norman O. Brown
A sound instinct made Freud keep the term “sublimation,” with its age-old religious and poetical connotations. Sublimation is the use made of bodily energy by a soul which sets itself apart from the body; it is a “lifting up of the soul or its Faculties above Matter” (Swift's definition of religious enthusiasm). 1 “Writing poetry,” says Spender, “is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the balance of body and mind.” 2 “Mathematics,” says Bertrand Russell, “rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without any appeal to our weaker nature… The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.” 3 And, like the doctrine of a soul distinct from the body, sublimation, as an attempt to be more than man, aims at immortality. “I shall not altogether die,” says Horace: “my sublimations will exalt me to the stars (sublimi feriam sidera vertice).”
Sublimation thus rests upon mind-body dualism, not as a philosophical doctrine but as a psychic fact implicit in the behavior of sublimators, no matter what their conscious philosophy may be. Hence Plato remains the truest philosopher, since he defined philosophy as sublimation and correctly articulated as its goal the elevation of Spirit
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From Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, by Norman O. Brown. Copyright $$ 1959 by Wesleyan University. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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above Matter. But, as Frazer showed, the doctrine of the external or separable soul is as old as humanity itself. 4
The original sublimator, the historical ancestor of philosopher and prophet and poet, is the primitive shaman, with his techniques for ecstatic departure from the body, soul-levitation, soul-transmigration, and celestial navigation. The history of sublimation has yet to be written, but from Cornford's pioneering work it is evident that Platonism, and hence all Western philosophy, is civilized shamanism —a continuation of the shamanistic quest for a higher mode of being —by new methods adapted to the requirements of urban life. The intermediate links are Pythagoras, with his soul-transmigrations, and Parmenides, the great rationalist whose rationalistic vision was vouchsafed to him by the goddess after a ride through the sky to the Palace of Night. 5The discovery of the shamanistic origins connects the historical investigation of Western philosophy with the psychoanalytical investigation. The shaman is far enough from us so that we can recognize that he is, to put it mildly, a little mad; and, as we have seen, psychoanalysis discerns an intrinsic insanity in sublimation. “Pure intelligence,” says Ferenczi, “is in principle madness.” 6
The aim of psychoanalysis—still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious—is to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation. Hence since sublimation is the essential activity of soul divorced from body, psychoanalysis must return our sublimations to our bodies; and conversely, sublimation cannot be understood unless we understand the nature of the soul—in psychoanalytical terminology, the nature of the ego. Sublimation is the “ego-syntonic” way of disposing of libido. The deflection of libido from its original aim in sublimation is a deflection caused by the influence of the ego; the desexualization is the consequence of passing through the crucible of the ego. Sexual energy is bodily energy, and the desexualized is disembodied energy, or energy made soulful. Technically, therefore, we can ascribe the backwardness of the theory of sublimation to the backwardness of the psychoanalytical theory of the ego; but the backwardness of the psychoanalytical theory of the ego is really due to an existential factor —a hesitation to break with the great Western tradition of sublimation and the soul-body dualism on which it is based.
What orthodox psychoanalysis has in fact done is to re-introduce the soul-body dualism in its own new lingo, by hypostatizing the
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“ego” into a substantial essence which by means of “defense mechanisms” continues to do battle against the “id.” Sublimation is disposed of by listing it as a “successful” defense mechanism. 7 In substantializing the ego, orthodox psychoanalysis follows the authority of Freud, who compared the relation of the ego to the id to that of a rider to his horse 8—a metaphor going back to Plato's Phaedrus and perpetuating the Platonic dualism. But Freud's genius always somewhere transcends itself. The proper starting point is his formula in The Ego and the Id: “The ego is first and foremost a body-ego,” “the mental projection of the surface of the body,” 9 originating in the perceptual system, and, like the perceptual system, having the function of mediating between the body and other bodies in the environment. If we can come to understand how that body-ego becomes a soul distinct from a body, we shall understand sublimation; and, by the same token, we shall understand the conditions under which the soul can recover its natural function and be again a body-ego.
At the beginning of The Ego and the Id Freud says, “The ego has the task of bringing the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle which reigns supreme in the id… The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.” 10 The passage suggests that the force which constitutes the essence of the ego, and which it applies when it influences the id, is simply the reality-principle. In other words, the ego is simply a transparent medium between the id and the environment, and the force which causes repression and sublimation is out there in the environment.
This naïve equation of the ego and the reality-principle (and of repression and external reality) disappears from Freud's later writings, but not from the textbooks of psychoanalysis. Thus Fenichel: “The origin of the ego and the origin of the sense of reality are but two aspects of one developmental step.”11 The truth of the matter, according to Freud's later theory, is that the peculiar structure of the human ego results from its incapacity to accept reality, specifically the supreme reality of death and separation. The real achievement of The Ego and the Id is the pioneering effort to make an instinctual analysis of the ego, to see what the ego does with Eros and Death. And in that analysis the point of departure for the human ego is death not accepted, or separation (from the environment, i.e., the mother)
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not accepted, or, in Freud's preferred terminology, object-loss not accepted.
The ego, to be sure, must always mediate between external reality and the id; but the human ego, not strong enough to accept the reality of death, can perform this mediating function only on condition of developing a certain opacity protecting the organism from reality. The way the human organism protects itself from the reality of living-and-dying is, ironically, by initiating a more active form of dying, and this more active form of dying is negation. The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body. As we saw in a previous chapter, this negative posture blossoms into negation of self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression). But negation, as the dialectical logicians recognize, and as Freud himself came to recognize when he wrote the essay “On Negation,” is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted affirmation of what is officially denied. To quote Freud: 12
Thus the subject-matter of a repressed image or thought can make its way into consciousness on condition that it is denied. Negation is a way of taking account of what is repressed; indeed, it is actually a removal of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed… Negation only assists in undoing one of the consequences of repression—namely the fact that the subject-matter of the image in question is unable to enter consciousness. The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the repression persists.
It is thus a general law of the ego not strong enough to die, and therefore not strong enough to live, that its consciousness of both its own inner world and the external world is sealed with the sign of negation; 13 and through negation life and death are diluted to the point that we can bear them. “The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the repression persists.” This dilution of life is desexualization. In other words, sublimation must be understood in the light of Freud's essay “On Negation.” Sublimations, as desexualizations, are not really deflections (changes of aim) of bodily Eros, but negations. Here again it becomes apparent that psychoanalysis, if it is to break through the barrier of repression, must break through the logic of simple
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negation, which is the logic of repression, and adopt a dialectical logic. The mode in which higher sublimations are connected with the lower regions of the body (as postulated by psychoanalytical theory) is the dialectical affirmation-by-negation. It is by being the negation of excrement that money is excrement; and it is by being the negation of the body (the soul) that the ego remains a body-ego.
The negative orientation of the human ego is inseparable from its involuted narcissism; both are consequences of separation not accepted. The point of departure for the human ego is object-loss: in fact, Freud once defined “the process of repression proper” as consisting in “a detachment of the libido from people—and things— that were previously loved.” 14 But the object-loss is not accepted. To quote from The Ego and the Id again: “When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues a modification in his ego which can only be described as a reinstatement of the object within the ego.” 15 That is to say, the object is not “lost,” but has to be actively negated, and, by the dialectical principle of affirmation-by-negation, the object is still affirmed (the identification). Thus, as a result of object-loss not accepted, the natural self-love of the organism is transformed into the vain project of being both Self and Other, and this project supplies the human ego with its essential energy. When the beloved (parental) object is lost, the love that went out to it is redirected to the self; but since the loss of the beloved object is not accepted, the human ego is able to redirect the human libido to itself only by deluding the libido by representing itself as identical with the lost object. In Freud's words, “When the ego assumes the features of the object, it forces itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and tries to make good the loss of that object by saying, ‘Look, I am so like the object, you can as well love me.’” 16 In technical Freudian terms, an identification replaces object-love, and by means of such identifications object-libido is transformed into narcissistic libido.
According to The Ego and the Id, the reservoir of narcissistic libido thus formed constitutes a store of “desexualized, neutral, dis-placeable energy” at the disposal of the ego, and it is this energy which is redirected outward to reality again in the form of sublimations. 17 Thus desexualization is an intrinsic character not just of sublimations, but of the energy constituting the ego, and this desexualization is the consequence of substituting for bodily erotic union with
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the world the vain, shadowy project of having the world within the self. To quote Freud, “The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a process of desexualization; it is consequently a kind of sublimation.” 18 Thus the soul is the shadowy substitute for a bodily relation to other bodies.
The lost objects reinstated in the human ego are past objects; the narcissistic orientation of the human ego is inseparable from its regressive orientation, and both are produced by the dialectic of negation. The separation in the present is denied by reactivating fantasies of past union, and thus the ego interposes the shadow of the past between itself and the full reality of life and death in the present. What we call “character” is this shell imprisoning the ego in the past: “The character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.” 19 What we call “conscience” perpetuates inside of us our bondage to past objects now part of ourselves: the super-ego “unites in itself the influences of the present and the past. In the emergence of the super-ego we have before us, as it were, an example of the way in which the present is changed into the past.” 20
The regressive orientation keeps not only our moral personality (character, conscience) in bondage to the past, but also our cognitive faculty—in Freudian terminology, the ego's function of testing reality. The human ego, in its cognitive function, is no transparent mirror transmitting the reality-principle to the id; it has a more active, and distorting, role consequent upon its incapacity to bear the reality of life in the present. The starting point for the human form of cognitive activity is loss of a loved reality: “The essential precondition for the institution of the function of testing reality is that objects shall have been lost which have formerly afforded real satisfaction.” 21 But the lost objects are retained and are what the cognitive ego is looking for, so that human consciousness has essentially an anamnestic aim. To quote again the essay “On Negation”: 22
It is now no longer a question of whether something perceived (a thing) shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is present in the ego as an image can also be rediscovered in perception (that is, reality)… Thus the first and immediate aim of the process of testing reality is not to discover an object in real perception corresponding to what is imagined, but to rediscover such an object.
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More generally, as stated in The Interpretation of Dreams: All thinking is nothing but a detour, departing from the memory of a gratification and following byways till it reaches the cathexis (Freud's word) of the identical memory, now reached by the path of motor action. 23 Despite Freud's formula about substituting the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle of the id, the ego does not abolish the pleasure-principle, but derives from it the energy sustaining its exploration of reality. Thus his fundamental theorem about the human libido—every object-finding is in reality a refinding 24—is true of consciousness as well. Hence also human consciousness is inseparable from an active attempt to alter reality, so as to “regain the lost objects.” 25 The reality which the ego thus constructs and perceives is culture; and culture, like sublimation (or neurosis) has the essential quality of being a “substitute-gratification,” a pale imitation of past pleasure substituting for present pleasure, and thus essentially desexualized.
The more specific and concrete mechanism whereby the body-ego becomes a soul is fantasy. Fantasy may be defined as a hallucination which cathects the memory of gratification; 26 it is of the same structure as the dream, and has the same relation to the id and to instinctual reality as the dream. Fantasy and dreaming do not present, much less satisfy, the instinctual demands of the id, which is of the body and seeks bodily erotic union with the world; they are essentially, like neurosis, “substitute gratifications.”
Fantasy is essentially regressive; it is not just a memory, but the hallucinatory reanimation of memory, a mode of self-delusion substituting the past for the present—or rather, by negation identifying past and present. In fact, this “hallucinatory cathexis of the memory of a gratification” alone makes possible the primal act of negation, and constitutes the hidden affirmative content behind every formal negation (including repression). It is through fantasy that the ego introjects lost objects and makes identifications. Identifications, as modes of preserving past object-cathexes and thus darkening life in the present with the shadow of the past, are fantasies. Identifications as modes of installing the Other inside the Self are fantasies. Identifications, as masks worn by the ego to substitute itself for reality and endear itself to the id, are fantasies. By the same token, fantasies are those images already present in the ego which the ego in its cognitive function is seeking to rediscover in reality.
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Fantasy, according to The Interpretation of Dreams, is the product of the primary process, the human organism's first solution to the problem of frustration, and the raw material for the secondary process in which the excitation arising from the need-stimulus is led through a detour, ending in voluntary motor action so as to change the real world and produce in it the real perception of the gratifying object. 27 Isaacs, who is one of the heretics in British psychoanalysis, is, despite the opposition of that stalwart defender of orthodoxy, Edward Glover, only carrying forward the thought of the later Freud when she says that “reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting unconscious phantasies.” 28 Fantasy is also the mechanism whereby the ego constructs the pregenital and genital sexual organizations. Again we follow Isaacs, who says that fantasy has the power to alter the body. 29 Perhaps we can say that since life is of the body, fantasy as the negation of life must negate specific bodily organs, so that there can be no fantasy without negation-alteration of the body.
As we saw in a previous chapter, the pregenital and genital organizations are constituted by regressive fantasies of union with the mother, attached to the specific organs where the infantile drama of separation is enacted. For example, the prototype of all “transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido,” and therefore the prototype of all sublimation (and probably the most satisfactory of all sublimations), is infantile thumb-sucking, in which, with the aid of fantasy or dream of union with the mother, the child makes himself into both himself and his mother's breast. Altogether, therefore, the world of fantasy is that opaque shield with which the ego protects himself from reality and through which the ego sees reality; it is by living in a world of fantasy that we lead a desexualized life. In sublimation the erotic component, what is projected is these infantile fantasies, not the reality of the id. Sublimation is the continuation not of infantile sexuality but of infantile dreaming; it comes to the same thing to say that what is sublimated is infantile sexuality not as polymorphously perverse, but as organized by fantasies into the sexual organizations.
“As long as man is suckled at a woman's breast,” says Anatole France, “he will be consecrated in the temple and initiated into some mystery of the divine. He will have his dream.” 30 Culture, therefore, the product of sublimation, is, in Plato's words, the imitation of an
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imitation; in Pindar's words, the shadow of a dream.
Fantasy is the clue to the human neurosis and a crux in psychoanalytical theory. Freud himself was somewhat equivocal on the question whether the ultimate pathogenic material in the human psyche was actual experience or fantasy. As late as 1918 he said that “this is the most ticklish question in the whole domain of psychoanalysis.” 31 But it was a turning point in Freud's early career when he discovered that the buried cause of neurosis was not an actual event (for example, seduction in childhood) but fantasies: 32
One must never allow oneself to be misled into applying to the repressed creations of the mind the standards of reality; this might result in undervaluing the importance of phantasies in symptom-formation on the ground that they are not actualities; or in deriving a neurotic sense of guilt from another source because there is no proof of actual committal of any crime. One is bound to employ the currency that prevails in the country one is exploring; in our case it is the neurotic currency.
The neurotic currency is wishes and thoughts, given reality in magic and in neurosis by the narcissistic principle of the omnipotence of thought. Hence Freud can say, “It is not really a decisive matter whether one has killed one's father or abstained from the deed; one must feel guilty in either case”; and “It is not primarily a matter of whether castration is really performed: what is important is that the boy believes in it.” 33 Hence more generally neurotic symptoms derive not from the facts of infantile sexual life but from the fantastic theories of sexuality developed by children, and expressing the narcissistic wish to be the father of oneself. In fact it is the efflorescence of fantasy in infantile sexuality that necessitates the final catastrophic repression. Infantile sexuality is doomed because “its wishes are incompatible with reality” and it “has no real aim.” 34
Self-styled materialists argue that Freud, in turning from the memory of a real event to fantasy as the cause of neurosis, made a fatal “repudiation of life-experience” and “transition to unabashed idealism.” 35 The “repudiation of life experience” and “unabashed idealism” are not Freud's, but humanity's. The recognition that we are all in practice idealists, alienated from our bodies and pursuing, like infantile sexuality itself, “no real aim,” is the precondition for overcoming, in reality as well as in theory, the mind-body dualism. The real nature of the primal fantasies is revealed by the fact that they cannot be remembered, but only re-enacted. They exist only as
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a neurotic way of acting in the present, and only as long as the ego perpetuates the infantile flight from life-and-death and the infantile fantasy-substitutes for the reality of living-and-dying. Or to put it another way, they do not exist in memory or in the past, but only as hallucinations in the present, which have no meaning except as negations of the present.
In his later writings Freud repeats that “hysterical symptoms spring from phantasies, and not from real events,” 36 but his interpretation of the “phylogenetic factor” or the “archaic heritage”— i.e., the factor not traceable to individual experience—in the etiology of neurosis causes fresh difficulties. He says that “all we can find in the prehistory of neurosis is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.” 37 It is plain from the quotation that the “phylogenetic” element is the same as the element of fantasy; the term “phylogenetic experience” really means that Freud is deriving the element in fantasy not derivable from real events in the history of the individual from real events in the history of the human race. Thus Freud's concept of the “archaic heritage” makes fantasy a real memory once more, only now it is “memory-traces of the experience of former generations.” 38
This line of thought makes the Primal Father and the Primal Crime real historical events—real historical events which constitute the ultimate pathogenic material in the human psyche. But in an earlier chapter we argued that psychoanalysis breaks down if it has to explain neurosis by invoking history instead of explaining history as neurosis, and that the Primal Crime is a myth, a fantasy. It still remains true that each one of us is suffering from the trauma of becoming human, a trauma first enacted in the Ice Age and re-enacted in every individual born in the human family. But the legacy of the trauma is not an objective burden of guilt transmitted by an objective inheritance of acquired characteristics—as Freud actually postulated 39—and imposing repression in the organism from outside and from the past, but a fantasy of guilt perpetually reproduced by the ego so that the organism can repress itself. Freud's myth of the Primal Crime still asserts the reality of the fantasy, and still maintains the repression; but an ego strong enough to live would no longer need to hallucinate its way out of life, would need no fantasies, and would have no guilt.
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Fantasy, as a hallucination of what is not there dialectically negating what is there, confers on reality a hidden level of meaning, and lends a symbolical quality to all experience. The animal symbolicum (Cassirer's definition of man) is animal sublimans, committed to substitute symbolical gratification of instincts for real gratification, the desexualized animal. By the same token the animal symbolicum is the animal which has lost its world and life, and which preserves in its symbol systems a map of the lost reality, guiding the search to recover it. Thus, as Ferenczi said, the tendency to rediscover what is loved in all the things of the hostile outer world is the primitive source of symbolism. And Freud's analysis of words as a halfway house on the road back to things discloses the substitutive and provisional status of the life of symbolic satisfactions. Sublimations satisfy the instincts to the same degree as maps satisfy the desire to travel. 40 The animal symbolicum is man enacting fantasies, man still unable to find a path to real instinctual gratification, and therefore still caught in the dream solution discovered in infancy. Already in the construction of the infantile sexual organizations fantasy confers symbolical meaning on particular parts of the child's own body. In the oral phase the dream of union with the mother is supported by thumb-sucking, and in thumb-sucking the thumb is a symbolic breast. Similarly the anal organization involves the symbolic manipulation of feces. When infantile sexuality comes to its castastrophic end with the castration complex, the child, as Freud says, gives up the body but not the fantasies. 41 Nonbodily cultural objects (sublimations) inherit the fantasies, and thus man in culture, Homo sublimans, is man dreaming while awake (Charles Lamb's definition of the poet). 42 LaBarres' epigram expresses the literal truth: “A dollar is a solemn Sir Roger de Coverley dance, a codified psychosis normal in one subspecies of this animal, an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once.” 43
Sublimation perpetuates the negative, narcissistic, and regressive solution of the infantile ego to the problem of disposing of life and death—in a word, it perpetuates the infantile dream—and yet there is a difference between sublimations and the infantile sexual organizations out of which they arise and which they perpetuate. After the castration complex the ego loses the body but keeps the fantasies. But in losing the body, the ego must in some sense lose the fantasies too (hence Freud speaks of the total abrogation of the Oedipus complex).
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Fantasies, like everything else, exist only in the present, as hallucinations in the present, and must be attached to objects in the present. According to psychoanalytical theory, after their detachment from the body (in Freud's blunt style, after masturbation is given up) they are projected into reality, forming that opaque medium called culture, through which we apprehend and manipulate reality.
How is this projection effected, and what is its significance? The answer is contained in Freud's late studies of denial, specifically fetishism as the result of denial. Starting from the castration complex, Freud shows that the fact of sexual differentiation both is and is not accepted, or rather that the fact of sexual differentiation from the mother is accepted only at the cost of finding in some other external object a symbolic substitute for the penis, “a compromise formed with the aid of displacement, such as we have been familiar with in dreams.” 44 Sublimations are formed out of infantile sexuality by the mechanism of fetishism; sublimations are denials or negations of the fantasies of infantile sexuality, and affirm them in the mode of affirmation by negation. The original fantasies are negations; sublimations are negations of negations. The original activity of the infantile sexual organizations was symbolic; sublimations are symbols of symbols. Thus sublimation is a second and higher level of desexualization; the life in culture is the shadow of a dream.
It is this second level of desexualization or negation that gives us a soul distinct from the body. Freud points out that the simultaneous acceptance and denial in fetishism involves a split in the ego. 45 Of course there is a split inherent in the ego from the start by virtue of its origin in a trauma of separation not accepted and denied by fantasy. As Ferenczi says, “There is neither shock nor fright without some trace of splitting of personality … part of the person regresses into a state of happiness that existed prior to the trauma—a trauma which it endeavours to annul.” 46 But while the infantile bodyego works out compromises between its soul (i.e., fantasies) and its body (the infantile sexual organizations), and, as Freud said, the child remains its own ideal, 47 the adult body-ego, as structured by the castration complex, has to break itself in two because it is called upon to choose between body and soul; it cannot abandon the body, and is not strong enough to give up the soul. By a process of “narcissistic self-splitting” the ego is divorced from the super-ego: the whole stratum of abandoned object-cathexes (identifications) which form
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its own character becomes unconscious; and, in Schilder's terminology, the intellectual ego is split from the body-ego. 48
But the ego cannot get rid of the body: it can only negate it, and by negating it, dialectically affirm it. Hence all symbolism, even in the highest flights of sublimation, remains body symbolism. “The derisive remark was once made against psychoanalysis,” says Ferenczi, “that the unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and a vagina or anus in every concave one. I find that this sentence well characterizes the facts.” 49 Infantile sexuality (in the infantile sexual organizations) negates the world and attempts to make a world out of its own body. Sublimation negates the body of childhood and seeks to construct the lost body of childhood in the external world. Infantile sexuality is an autoplastic compensation for the loss of the Other; sublimation is an alloplastic compensation for the loss of Self.
Hence the hidden aims of sublimation and the cultural process is the progressive discovery of the lost body of childhood. As we saw in the last chapter, the repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into an external perception, by being projected. According to Freud, the mythological conception of the universe, which survives even in the most modern religions, is only psychology projected onto the outer world. 50 Not just mythology but the entirety of culture is projection. In the words of Spender, “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.” 51
The first breakthrough of the insight which flowers into psychoanalysis occurs in German idealism, in Hegel's notion of the world as the creation of spirit and, even, more, in Novalis' notion of the world as the creation of the magic power of fantasy. In fact, there is a certain loss of insight reflected in the tendency of psychoanalysis to isolate the individual from culture. Once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch, or rather, once we recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture, it becomes plain that there is nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze except these projections—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—and thus psychoanalysis fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis. It also follows that consciousness of the repressed unconscious is itself a cultural and historical product, since the repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into an external perception in the form of a cultural projection.
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Cultures therefore differ from each other not in the content of the repressed—which consists always in the archetypical fantasies generated by the universal nature of human infancy—but in the various kinds and levels of the return of the repressed in projections made possible by various kinds and levels of environment, technology, etc. Hence those psychoanalytically minded anthropologists who attempt to explain the varieties of culture from the variable actualities of infant-rearing practices are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. The pathogenic material in culture, as in the individual, is not the real experience of childhood, but fantasy. Hence, on the other hand, psychoanalysis, as a new and higher mode of consciousness of the unconscious, was made possible by the industrial revolution and its new revelation, or projection, of human psychology. Psychoanalysis is part of the romantic reaction.
Sublimation is the search for lost life; it presupposes and perpetuates the loss of life and cannot be the mode in which life itself is lived. Sublimation is the mode of an organism which must discover life rather than live, must know rather than be. As a result of its origin in object-loss (first loss of the Other, then loss of Self) human consciousness (the ego) is burdened not only with a repressive function distinguishing men from other animals, but also with a cognitive function distinguishing men from animals. The human consciousness, in addition to the function of exploring the outside world, is burdened with the additional task of discovering the sequestered inner world. The result is an inevitable distortion of both the outer and the inner world. Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies, must distort the external world. In Freud's words, the boy saves his own penis at the cost of giving the lie to reality. 52 Projections bring the inner world to consciousness only under the general sign of negation or alienation; their relation to the inner world must be denied. Sublimation perpetuates the incapacity of the infantile ego to bear the full reality of living and dying, and continues the infantile mechanism (fantasy) for diluting (desexualizing) experience to the point where we can bear it. From the psychology of dreams Freud derived the basic law that the conscious system (the “secondary process”) can cathect an idea only when it is able to inhibit any pain that may arise from that idea.53 Sublimation inhibits pain by keeping experience at a distance and interposing a veil between consciousness and life. We project, says Freud, only those
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things about which we do not know and do not want to know, 54 so that we can know without knowing all. Again quoting Freud: 55
To be thus able not only to recognize, but at the same time to rid himself of, reality is of great value to the individual, and he would wish to be equipped with a similar weapon against the often merciless claims of his instincts. That is why he takes such pains to project, i.e., to transfer outwards, all that becomes troublesome to him from within …
A particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes.
The basic mechanism for producing this desexualization of life, this holding of life at a distance, is, as we have seen, negation; sublimation is life entering consciousness on condition that it is denied. The negative moment in sublimation is plain in the inseparable connection between symbolism (in language, science, religion, and art) and abstraction. Abstraction, as Whitehead has taught us, is a denial of the living organ of experience, the living body as a whole; 56 in Freud's words, “Subordinating sense-perception to an abstract idea was a triumph of spirituality [Geistigkeit] over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.” 57 The dialectic of negation and alienation appears in the history of the sublimating consciousness as a law of ever increasing abstraction. Our deepest knowledge of ourselves is attained only on condition of the higher abstraction. Abstraction, as a mode of keeping life at a distance, is supported by that negation of the “lower” infantile sexual organizations which effects a general “displacement from below upwards” of organ eroticism to the head, especially to the eyes: 58 Os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre jussit. The audiovisual sphere is preferred by sublimation because it preserves distance; the incest taboo in effect says you may enjoy your mother only by looking at her from a distance. 59 Whitehead too has criticized as a form of abstraction the restriction of cognition to “a few definite avenues of communication with the external world … preferably the eyes.” 60 As life restricted to the seen, and by hallucinatory
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projection seen at a distance, and veiled by negation and distorted by symbolism, sublimation perpetuates and elaborates the infantile solution, the dream.
If the mechanism of sublimation is the dream, the instinctual economy which sustains it is a primacy of death over life in the ego. The path which leads from infantile dreaming to sublimation originates in the ego's incapacity to accept the death of separation, and its inauguration of those morbid forms of dying—negation, repression, and narcissistic involution. The end result is to substitute for the reality of living-and-dying the desexualized or deadened life. This conclusion, so shattering to the hope of finding in sublimation a “way out”—and therefore omitted in the encyclopedias of psychoanalytical orthodoxy—is squarely faced and stated by Freud in The Ego and the Id: “By thus obtaining possession of the libido from the objectcathexes, setting itself up as the love-object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual trends.” 61
And since the dialectic of sublimation in civilization is cumulative, cumulatively abstract and cumulatively deadening, Freud's intuition that civilization moves toward the primacy of intellect and the atrophy of sexuality is correct. 62 At the end of the road is pure intelligence, and, in the aphoristic formula of Ferenczi, “Pure intelligence is a product of dying, or at least of becoming mentally insensitive.” 63 But, as Freud also stated in The Ego and the Id, this solution disrupts the harmony between the two instincts, resulting in a “defusion of Eros into aggressiveness”: “After sublimation the erotic component no longer has the power to bind the whole of the destructive elements that were previously combined with it, and these are released in the form of inclinations to aggression and destruction.” 64 Thus the path of cumulative sublimation is also the path of cumulative aggression and guilt, aggression being the revolt of the baffled instincts against the desexualized and inadequate world, and guilt being the revolt against the desexualized and inadequate self.
If there is a “way out” from the dialectic of cumulative repression, guilt, and aggression, it must lie not in sublimation but in an alternative to sublimation. To understand our present predicament we have to go back to its origins, to the beginning of Western civilization and to the Greeks, who taught and still teach how to sublimate,
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and who worshiped the god of sublimation, Apollo. Apollo is the god of form—of plastic form in art, of rational form in thought, of civilized form in life. But the Apollonian form is form as the negation of instinct. “Nothing too much,” says the Delphic wisdom; “Observe the limit, fear authority, bow before the divine.” Hence Apollonian form is form negating matter, immortal form; that is to say, by the irony that overtakes all flight from death, deathly form. Thus Plato, as well as his shamanistic predecessors Abaris and Aristeas, is a son of Apollo. Apollo is masculine; but, as Bachofen saw, his masculinity is the symbolical (or negative) masculinity of spirituality. Hence he is also the god who sustains “displacement from below upward,” who gave man a head sublime and told him to look at the stars. Hence his is the world of sunlight, not as nature symbol but as a sexual symbol of sublimation and of that sunlike eye which perceives but does not taste, which always keeps a distance, like Apollo himself, the Far-Darter. And, as Nietzsche divined, the stuff of which the Apollonian world is made is the dream. Apollo rules over the fair world of appearance as a projection of the inner world of fantasy; and the limit which he must observe, “that delicate boundary which the dream-picture must not overstep,” 65 is the boundary of repression separating the dream from instinctual reality.
But the Greeks, who gave up Apollo, also gave us the alternative, Nietzsche's Dionysus. Dionysus is not dream but drunkenness, not life kept at a distance and seen through a veil but life complete and immediate. Hence, says Nietzsche, “The entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement” 66 (Rilke's “natural speech by means of the body” 67). The Dionysian “is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.” 68 Hence Dionysus does not observe the limit, but overflows; for him the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Nietzsche says that those who suffer from an overfullness of life want a Dionysian art. 69 Hence he does not negate any more. This, says, Nietzsche, is the essence of the Dionysian faith. 70 Instead of negating, he affirms the dialectical unity of the great instinctual opposites: Dionysus reunifies male and female, Self and Other, life and death. 71 Dionysus is the image of the instinctual reality which psychoanalysis will find the other side of the veil. Freud saw that in the id there is no negation, only affirmation and eternity. In an earlier chapter we
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saw that the reality from which the neurotic animal flees in vain is the unity of life and death. In this chapter we have seen the dreams of infantile sexuality and of Apollonian sublimation are not, are negations of, the instinctual reality. The instinctual reality is Dionysian drunkenness; in Freud's words, “We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.” 72
The human ego must face the Dionysian reality, and therefore a great work of self-transformation lies ahead of it. For Nietzsche was right in saying that the Apollonian preserves, the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness. As long as the structure of the ego is Apollonian, Dionysian experience can only be bought at the price of egodissolution. Nor can the issue be resolved by a “synthesis” of the Apollonian and the Dionysian; the problem is the construction of a Dionysian ego. Hence the later Nietzsche preaches Dionysus, and to see in this Dionysus a synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus is to sacrifice insight for peace of mind. Not only does Dionysus without the Dionyian ego threaten us with dissolution of consciousness; he also threatens us with that “genuine witches' brew,” “that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty (Nietzsche again 73), which is the revolt of the Dionysian against the Apollonian, and an ambivalent mixture, but no fusion, between the instinctual opposites.
Since we are dealing with bodily realities, not abstract intellectual principles, it is well to listen to one who knew not only the life of the mind, but also the life of the body and the art of the body as we do not—Isadora Duncan, who tells how she experienced the Dionysian ecstasy as “the defeat of the intelligence,” “the final convulsion and sinking down into nothingness that often leads to the gravest disasters—for the intelligence and the spirit.” 74 But her Dionysian ecstasy is the orgasm—that one moment, she says, worth more and more desirable than all else in the universe. The Dionysian ego would be freed from genital organization and of that necessity of “ridding the organism of sexual cravings and concentrating these in the genital” (Ferenczi 75). While the Apollonian ego is the ego of genital organization, the Dionysian ego would be once more a body-ego and would not have to be dissolved in body-rapture.
The work of constructing a Dionysian ego is immense; but there are signs that it is already under way. If we can discern the Dionysian witches' brew in the upheavals of modern history—in the sexology of
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de Sade and the politics of Hitler—we can also discern in the romantic reaction the entry of Dionysus into consciousness. It was Blake who said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Hegel was able to see the dialectic of reality as “the bacchanalian revel, in which no member is not drunk.”76 And the heirs of the romantics are Nietzsche and Freud. The only alternative to the witches' brew is psychoanalytical consciousness, which is not the Apollonian scholasticism of orthodox psychoanalysis, but consciousness embracing and affirming instinctual reality—Dionysian consciousness.
Notes
1 Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939. I, 174.
2 Cf. B. Ghiselin, ed.: The Creative Process. New York: New American Library, 1955. p. 114.
3 B. Russell: Philosophical Essays. London: Longman's, Green, 1910. p. 73.
4 J. G. Frazer: The Golden Bough, abr. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1947. pp. 667-707.
5 F. M. Cornford: Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. pp. 88-127.
6 S. Ferenczi: Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis. Ed. M. Balint, tr. E. Mosbacher and others. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. p. 246.
7 Cf. O. Fenichel: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945. p. 141.
8 Freud: The Ego and the Id (henceforth EI), tr. J. Riviere. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1927. Freud: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. W. J. Sprott. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1933. p. 102.
9 EI, p. 31 and note.
10 EI, 30.
11 Fenichel: Op. Cit. p. 35.
12 Collected Papers (henceforth CP), V, 182. Cf. CP IV, 119.
13 Cf. Ferenczi: Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic Books, 1952. pp. 367-69.
14 CP III, 458.
15 EI, 36.
16 EI, 37.
17 EI, 61-64. Cf. O. Roheim: The Origin and Function of Culture. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs, 1943.
18 EI, 37-38.
19 EI, 36.
20 An Outline of Psychoanalysis (henceworth An Outline), tr. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1949.
21 CP V, 184.
22 Loc. cit.
23 The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. A. A. Brill. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (henceforth BW). New York: The Modern Library, 1938. p. 35; Cf. Ibid., 533.
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24 Three Contributions to the Study of Sex, tr. A. A. Brill. In BW, 614.
25 CP IV, 14, 136.
26 The Interpretaion of Dreams, in BW, 533.
27 Loc. cit.
28 S. Isaacs: The Nature and Function of Phantasy. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., XXIV (1948), 73-79; E. Glover, Examination of the Klein System of Child Psychology. Psychoanal. St. Child, I (1945), 75-118.
29 Isaacs, Op. cit., p. 90.
30 H. Feldman The Illusions of Work. Psychoanal. Rev., XLIV (1955), pp. 262-70.
31 CP III, 584 n.
32 CP IV, 20. Cf. Totem and Taboo, in BW, 874.
33 Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Hogarth, 1930. p. 121. NIL, 114.
34 CP V, 259; ibid, II, 269; Beyond The Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1950. p. 22.
35 F. Bartlett: The Concept of Repression. Science and Society. 18 (1954), pp. 362-39.
36 NIL, 154.
37 CP III, 577.
38 Moses and Monotheism. New York: Knopf, 159.
39 Cf. CP V, 343-44.
40 Ferenczi: Further Contributions, p. 407. CP IV, 136. Cf. G. B. Wilbur: Freud's Life-Death Instinct Theory. American Imago, II (1941), pp. 144, 211.
41 An Outline, 59.
42 Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination. Garden City: Doubleday, 1953. p. 53.
43 W. La Barre: The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
44 An Outline, 74. Cf. CP V, 198-204, 372-75.
45 An Outline, 73-74. CP V, 372-75.
46 Ferenczi: Final Contributions, p. 164.
47 CP IV, 51.
48 Ferenczi: Final Contributions, p. 246; P. Schilder: The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935. p. 136.
49 Ferenczi: Sex in Psychoanalysis, tr. E. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 1952.
50 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In BW, 164.
51 B. Ohiselin, ed.: The Creative Process. p. 119.
52 CP V, 374.
53 The Interpretation of Dreams. In BW, 535.
54 Totem and Taboo. In BW, 856.
55 CP IV, 148; Beyond The Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. tr. A. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1936.
56 A. N. Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan, 1954. p. 289; A. N. Whitehead: Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1927. pp. 64-73.
57 Moses and Monotheism, pp. 178-79.
58 Ferenczi: Sex in Psychoanalysis; p. 275; Ferenczi: Further Contributions, pp. 85, 88-102, 171-72.
59 Cf. G. C. Wilbur: Freud's Life-Death Instinct Theory. American Imago, II (1941), pp. 246-53.
60 A. N. Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas, p. 289.
61 The Ego and the Id, 65. Cf. Wilbur, loc cit., pp. 241-44.
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62 Civilization and Its Discontents, 74-78; CP V, 286. Cf Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture 199-100.
63 Ferenczi: Final Contributions, 246.
64 The Ego and the Id, 80.
65 F. W. Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 1927.
66 F. W. Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 955, 960.
67 J. Hytier: La poétique de Valéry. Paris: Colin, 1953. p. 29.
68 Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 956.
69 W. Kaufmann: Nietzsche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. p. 956.
70 W. Kaufmann: Nietzsche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. 247.
71 Cf. W. F. Otto: Dionysos, Mythos and Kultus. Frankfurt Am Main: Klosterman, 1933. pp. 74, 84-85, 95, 124, 159.
72 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 98.
73 Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 958.
74 Isadora Duncan: My Life. New York: Boni and Liveright. p. 105.
75 Ferenczi: Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality. New York: Psychoanal. Q. 1938. p. 16.
76 W. Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; G. F. W. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie. 2d ed. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931. p. 105.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Brown, N.O. (1960). Adventures in Ideas: Apollo and Dionysus. Psychoanal. Rev., 47A:3-23
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
Fifteen Quick Steps To Understanding The Essence of DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis: Ego-States, Ego-Splits, Characterization, Symptomology and Diagnosis
Just finished...July 25, 2010...
Synopsis
I stated previously, and I will state it again, at bottom level, theoretically, Psychoanalysis is a rather simple art and science. It's a one, two, three step dance -- 1. impulse, 2. defense/restraint/resistance, and 3. compromise-formation.
Very Hegelian.
However, we will expand this 'three step dance' to 'fifteen steps' to accomodate my own unique modfications to Classical Freudian Psychology. Call this 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis' if that works for you. If not, we will go back to an older name I used to use: DGB-GAP (Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalysis) Psychology. Sorry, 'Transactional Analysis' but your name should be represented by a 'letter' too. But you were the last addition and by then, my first name 'GAP' Psychology, and then later, 'DGB-GAP' Psychology -- was set. I would say that what is conceptually represented below is about 60 percent Psychoanalysis, 10 percent Adlerian Psychology, 10 percent Gestalt Therapy, and 10 percent Transactional Analysis. The percentage is debatable but regardless, the integration is unique. You won't find this constellation of ideas in any other school of psychology.
So here is my '15 step DGB-GAP dance':
.............................................................................................................................
1. We have impulses, perceived and/or real needs, desires, drives, and;
2. We have restraints, defenses, compensations against those same impulses, desires, drives...as well as;
3. We have an external world that provides us with a mixture of need satisfactions and need frustrations as well as a combination of perceived and/or real dangers;
4. Of which our 'defensive(reality)-ego' provides us with defenses against these real and/or perceived external dangers as well as the most extreme and/or perceived dangerous of our own internal impulses.
5. Back around 1911 (Freud, Formulations on The Two Principles of Mental Functioning), before Freud came up with his classic distinction in 1923 (Freud, The Ego and The Id) between: 1. 'the ego' (our compromise-formation, conflict-resolution, and problem-solving mind-brain central processor system), 'the id' (our wild, dangerous, and hard to control, unconscious impulse system), and 'the superego' (our ethical-moral-legal-economic restraint system), Freud was working with two prior concepts instead: 1. 'the pleasure ego'; and 2. 'the reality ego'. The 'pleasure-ego' (1911) was the precursor to his later 'id' (1923) with two notable differences: 1. Note that the 'pleasure-ego' reflects what might be called an 'alter-ego' or a 'shadow-ego' or an 'id-ego' that is more archaic and dangerous, directly and extremely connected to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of unpleasure without any 'long term' or 'reality' consequences in mind than the usually much more reasonable, rational, and socially sensitive reality-ego. 2. Note also, that the 'pleasure-ego' can be viewed as an 'ego-state', similar in this one respect to what Freud later called 'the ego ideal' which ended up being the precursor of his 1923 'superego'. In contrast, in 1923, 'the id' would be differentiated from 'the ego' altogether (and no longer viewed as an 'ego-state' at all) which was very different than where his thinking was in 1911. Quite frankly, I prefer the 1911 terminology (even though it had some problems and wasn't complete) because it was in line with the idea -- to be developed later by the Object Relations theorists and the Transactional Analysts -- of 'ego states' and the concept that Freud came back to in the twilight of his career (around 1938, I believe, or a few years previously) of 'ego-splitting'.
6. You see, the concepts of 'ego-states' and 'ego-splitting' are conducive to each other. When the 'ego splits' -- either for 'functional' (evolutionary specialization) purposes and/or because of 'childhood rejections and/or failures' (which have the effect of 'splitting' the personality/ego like Humpty Dumpty after his 'great fall') -- the result is a combination of harmonious and non-harmonious, co-operative and competing, 'ego-states'.
7. The personality/ego invariably splits in at least four different ways: 1. 'horizontally' along the lines of 'nurturing, encouraging, supportive, co-operative' vs. 'criticizing, rejecting, abandoning'; 2. 'vertically' along the lines of 'superiority complex' vs. 'inferiority complex' or 'topdog' vs. 'underdog' or 'superego' vs. 'underego'; as well as 3. 'organizationally' vs. 'disorganizationally' ('order' vs. 'chaos'); and 4. 'impulse' vs. 'restraint' or 'pleasure-ego' vs. 'reality-ego' or 'Dionysian-Narcissistic Ego' vs. 'Apollonian Ego' (which also accounts for the distinction between 'order, righteousness, fairness, justice, and restraint (The Apollonian Righteous-Rejecting-Reality Ego, short form if you want: 'The ARE') vs. 'disorder, deconstruction, rebellion, anarchy, pleasure-seeking (hedonism), no rules, free spirit, freedom, lack of restraint, impulse psychology to the max, self-infatuation, narcissism....(The Dionysian-Narcissistic (Pleasure-Seeking) Ego, possible short forms if you want, 'The DNE' or 'The PSE' or 'The DNPSE').
8. The DNE (Dionysian-Narcissistic Ego) and ARE (Apollonian-Righteous Ego) have their legacy in Freud's distinction between the 'oral personality' and the 'anal personality' as well as further back than this to Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' in 1872, which was the main bridge between Hegelian Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, with generous respect also being paid here to Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation', 1818, which Nietzsche was heavily influenced by when he wrote and then published BT in 1872).
The 'oral' personality can be defined by the polar spectrum of 'giving' (nurturing, encouraging, supporting, pleasing, approval-seeking...) and 'getting' (wanting, needing, demanding, expecting....all hallmarks of the 'narcissistic personality'). Further distinctions can be made between the: a) 'oral-giving personality', b) 'oral-giving' ('oral-narcissistic') personality, c) 'oral-receptive personality' (friendly, open-armed, maternally or paternally receptive, sexually receptive...), d) 'oral-schizoid, resistant, and/or defensive personality'...this category -- or the idea leading up to it -- was introduced by Fritz Perls in Vienna in 1936 when Perls met Freud for the first and only time -- a crushing disappointment for Perls. Perls, at this point, was still a psychoanalyst who had just opened a Psychoanalytic practice in South Africa, had taken a boat from South Africa to Vienna with little money on his person to cover the expense of the trip, but was exciting about the prospect of reading to the Conference, and sharing with Freud, Perls' new and provocatively unorthodox ideas on 'oral resistances' (an idea that he probably developed through his work with Wilhelm Reich on 'body armor protecting a person from emotional release', and which Perls would further develop in his first published 'Gestalt' book called, 'Ego, Hunger, and Aggression', a remarkable book in my opinion as Perls, in conjunction with his eventual wife, Laura Perls, started to conduct his own 'major revision' of Freudian Theory that would eventually turn out to be 'Gestalt Therapy'). Up til this point in Freudian Theory, all talk had been about 'anal resistances', not 'oral resistances'....Whether this is a matter of 'semantics' and 'terminology' on the one hand, or whether there is a significant distinction that needs to be made here is a matter of some debate... I support the latter position, and thus, an 'oral schizoid' person becomes a person who is 'not oral-receptive' but the opposite -- 'unfriendly', 'unreceptive', 'untalkative', with underlying issues of 'anger' and distrust'...to be further distinguished from an 'oral phobic' person who is 'afraid' to talk...or eat, or drink, or socially or sexually engage...all hallmarks of the 'oral personality' -- the bipolarity here being between those who are 'open' and 'receptive' vs. those who are not, and a further bipolarity being between those who are angry vs. those who are scared...
The 'anal' personality has some important differences and the only question of debate might be whether the 'oral-schizoid personality' and 'the anal-schizoid personality are essentially the same thing...In general, the 'anal' personality is generally 'tight-assed', 'righteous', 'rejecting', parsimonious, punctual, cheap, rule-abiding, rule-demanding, organized, more unapproachable, less giving and nurturing....There is a second type of 'anal personality' that is more the opposite of the first...This is the 'anal-explosive' personality who is more of an 'anarchist', angry, rebellious, hates rules and laws, hates authority-figures, and either hides his or her rage beneath the surface of his or her personality and/or is capable of 'blowing up' given sufficient provocation, which may not be much....Other sub-types of 'anal' personalities: the 'anal-schizoid' (angry, distancing) personality, the 'anal-retentive' personality ('cheap'), the 'anal-righteous' personality (rule demanding), the 'anal-rejecting' personality (rejects and shuts out people easily...carrying an 'arrogant, superiority complex'), the 'anal-phobic-obsessive-compulsive' personality (heavy restraints and compensations against germs, dirt, disorder, bad hygiene, uncleanliness...)
9. What Freud called the 'phallic personality', I include here under the 'oral getting (narcissistic) personality' although distinctions can be made between the 'phallic obsessive-compulsive (narcissistic) personality' (likes to brag about his or her masculine or feminine prowess...and 'exploits') vs. the 'phallic schizoid' and/or 'phallic phobic' personality who steers away from sex for either angry, rejecting (schizoid) reasons or for 'phobic' reasons ('performance anxieties', lack of confidence and/or inferiority complex around living up to his or her 'masculine' or 'feminine' ideal or his or her perception of society's masculine or feminine ideal....)
10. 'Anger', 'rage', and 'aggression' can be divided into three types: 1. 'Righteous anger, rage, and/or aggression' connected to disobeying a particular ethical, moral, social, and/or legal rule or set of rules; 2. rebellious anger, rage, and/or aggression connected to being 'overly controlled' and/or exploited and/or suppressed by a particular rule or set of rules and its/their associated authority figure(s); (the perceived 'slavery' syndrome); which borders into 3. narcissistic anger, rage, and/or aggression connected to simply not getting what one wants, and/or with self-preservation, and/or with overcontrolling and/or annihilating some one else's self, or sense of self;
11a. The 'Oedipal Complex' is a valuable Freudian concept as long as it is not abused. Using 'The Oedipal Complex' as a 'cover up' for the possibility/probability of very real child sexual abuse between a daughter and her father in a case where a female client asserts such a childhood memory is obviously a clinically pathological use of The Oedipal Complex unless there is strong empirical and/or circumstantial evidence to the contrary that makes the memory 'highly doubtful' as an 'empirical reality'. But even here, a therapist is treading on very dangerous epistemological and ethical territory -- to the point where he or she may simply have to admit that the 'historical and empirical reality' of the memory is unprovable one way or the other, and/or a matter for the courts to decide...similarily, 're-interpreting' or 're-constructing' a client's memory to the point where it becomes something other than what the client asserted is treading into the territory of 'brainwashing' -- regardless of whether a therapist is an 'Oedipal Theorist and Therapist' or whether a therapist is a 'new brand' of 'Seduction Theorist' and possibly 'projecting' interpreted childhood sexual assaults into memories where the client asserted no such thing.
11b. The best use of 'The Oedipal Complex' by a therapist is simply to ascertain from the client's childhood history and also from the client's more current adult clinical information what makes up the client's 'masculine' and/or 'feminine ideal', what makes up their 'rejecting and/or exciting object-transference figure, and what makes up his or her 'narcissistic fixation' in terms of the character and physical type of 'romantic/sexual object/figure' that 'turns the client on'. Freud's 'maternal love' (i.e. his 'Maternal Oedipal Complex') from his mother was very strong and steady which seems to have been 'carried on' and/or 'transferred' into his relationship with his wife; in contrast, Freud was much more uncertain and conflicted in terms of his 'paternal love' from his father and it was his 'Paternal Oedipal Complex' that triggered most of Freud's deepest transference (core nuclear) conflicts that were then 'carried over' and 'tranferred onto' most of the men that Freud worked with as an adult clinician, therapist, and theorist. A person can have an 'inconsistency' and conflicted bi-polarity between an 'Oedipal Complex' and a 'Counter-Oedipal Complex'; and/or between a 'maternal' and a 'paternal' Oedipal Complex.
12. Conscious early memories are very, very good way of 'diagnosing' a person's character-type, various 'ego-splits' and 'ego-states', 'topdog' and 'underdog' interactions, 'righteous/rejecting and approval-seeking interactions, righteous/rejecting and rebellious interactions, 'nurturing' and 'pampering' interactions, and 'approval-seeking' and 'rebellious' interactions, as well as 'oral' characteristics, 'anal' characteristics, 'narcissistic' characteristic, phobic and counter-phobic behavior patterns, 'repetition compulsion' and 'mastery compulsion', 'overt, dominant' and 'covert, latent' ego-states...and more....Our early recollections are great symbolic metaphors of 'The Story of Our Life' (my paraphrasing of an Adlerian quote already cited in several previous essays...).
13. I prefer using the term 'subconscious' generally speaking rather than 'unconscious' and I shy away for the most part from the concept of 'repression'. 'Ego-splitting', defensive reactions, and various types of 'compensatory behavior' are terms and concepts that all work better for me.
14. Oh, here's one....I have not engaged in a group or individual psychotherapy session in about 15 years now...I think the last time I was in a Gestalt Group Psychotherapy Session or Program was back about 1995...However, I was fairly active in a series of group psychotherapy personal and professional growth programs back between 1979 and 1991. In contrast, I have never experienced a Psychoanalytic session....(too much money for one main reason). This having been said, it is perhaps not surprising that I have a personal preference for 'The Gestalt Hot Seat and Empty Chair Technique' as opposed to 'The Psychoanalytic Couch'. From my perspective, The Hotseat and Empty Chair Technique is more interactive, more existential, more immediate, more conducive to 'jumping between different ego states' and expressing the 'bipolarities of different ego splits and ego-states'...topdog vs. underdog, and everything else that I listed above...more conducive to actual interactions with the therapist and with other group members....Too much 'interpretation' and 'analysis' will basically 'kill any form of psychotherapy'...abstractionism and 'cognitive mind games' are easy 'defense mechanisms' for most people who are used to being in their 'heads', and not in touch with either their feelings and/or their bodies...
Some interpretation and transference analysis, I believe, is important...but even this is more effectively shown to the client through the 'immediacy and the interactiveness of the existential moment'....not through a therapist analyzing a client to existential death....and not by 'hiding behind a couch' and being 'invisible to the client' or 'from saying nothing or sounding profound or making pathological theoretical over-generalizations in books or essays that are going to 'prejudice' a therapist into making theoretical and therapeutic judgments about a client that he or she has not even met yet....
15. As both Freud and Adler have stated in different essays or books (Freud, The Aetiology of Hysteria; Adler, What Life Should Mean To You), Freud relative to 'repressed memories' and Adler relative to 'conscious early memrories', and I will extrapolate on, and modify here: Memories, fantasies, dreams, nightmares, creative work and hobbies (sublimation, choice of friends and lovers (projection and compensation), all support each other and co-operate with each other in the pursuit of the individual person's unique brand and choice of the 'mastery compulsion' as woven around his or her transference complex, his or her core nuclear conflict, much like the planets revolve around the sun, are energized by the sun, often take on too much heat and will self-destruct when they are too close to the sun, but will self-destruct also if they are too far away from the sun's energy...Adler called this our 'lifestyle plan', Freud called this a (transference) 'template' in 'The Dynamics of The Transference, Jung called it a 'Complex', and I am calling it our 'Central (or Core Nuclear) Transference Conflict'....or there may be several such conflicts that are all intertwined....You might have one transference conflict centering around your mom, another one around your dad, another one around a sibling, or a relative, or a childhood friend, or a childhood enemy, or a childhood stranger....or any type of unique subset, all intertwined into one lifelong 'transference psychodrama' propelled by 'the re-creation and mastery compulsion'....and energizing you to either great creative accomplishments and triumphs or great self-destruction....or both....
That is a good enough capsule of my intention for this essay...Six days of work....and finally a day off...
-- dgb, July 23rd, 24th, 25th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
Synopsis
I stated previously, and I will state it again, at bottom level, theoretically, Psychoanalysis is a rather simple art and science. It's a one, two, three step dance -- 1. impulse, 2. defense/restraint/resistance, and 3. compromise-formation.
Very Hegelian.
However, we will expand this 'three step dance' to 'fifteen steps' to accomodate my own unique modfications to Classical Freudian Psychology. Call this 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis' if that works for you. If not, we will go back to an older name I used to use: DGB-GAP (Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalysis) Psychology. Sorry, 'Transactional Analysis' but your name should be represented by a 'letter' too. But you were the last addition and by then, my first name 'GAP' Psychology, and then later, 'DGB-GAP' Psychology -- was set. I would say that what is conceptually represented below is about 60 percent Psychoanalysis, 10 percent Adlerian Psychology, 10 percent Gestalt Therapy, and 10 percent Transactional Analysis. The percentage is debatable but regardless, the integration is unique. You won't find this constellation of ideas in any other school of psychology.
So here is my '15 step DGB-GAP dance':
.............................................................................................................................
1. We have impulses, perceived and/or real needs, desires, drives, and;
2. We have restraints, defenses, compensations against those same impulses, desires, drives...as well as;
3. We have an external world that provides us with a mixture of need satisfactions and need frustrations as well as a combination of perceived and/or real dangers;
4. Of which our 'defensive(reality)-ego' provides us with defenses against these real and/or perceived external dangers as well as the most extreme and/or perceived dangerous of our own internal impulses.
5. Back around 1911 (Freud, Formulations on The Two Principles of Mental Functioning), before Freud came up with his classic distinction in 1923 (Freud, The Ego and The Id) between: 1. 'the ego' (our compromise-formation, conflict-resolution, and problem-solving mind-brain central processor system), 'the id' (our wild, dangerous, and hard to control, unconscious impulse system), and 'the superego' (our ethical-moral-legal-economic restraint system), Freud was working with two prior concepts instead: 1. 'the pleasure ego'; and 2. 'the reality ego'. The 'pleasure-ego' (1911) was the precursor to his later 'id' (1923) with two notable differences: 1. Note that the 'pleasure-ego' reflects what might be called an 'alter-ego' or a 'shadow-ego' or an 'id-ego' that is more archaic and dangerous, directly and extremely connected to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of unpleasure without any 'long term' or 'reality' consequences in mind than the usually much more reasonable, rational, and socially sensitive reality-ego. 2. Note also, that the 'pleasure-ego' can be viewed as an 'ego-state', similar in this one respect to what Freud later called 'the ego ideal' which ended up being the precursor of his 1923 'superego'. In contrast, in 1923, 'the id' would be differentiated from 'the ego' altogether (and no longer viewed as an 'ego-state' at all) which was very different than where his thinking was in 1911. Quite frankly, I prefer the 1911 terminology (even though it had some problems and wasn't complete) because it was in line with the idea -- to be developed later by the Object Relations theorists and the Transactional Analysts -- of 'ego states' and the concept that Freud came back to in the twilight of his career (around 1938, I believe, or a few years previously) of 'ego-splitting'.
6. You see, the concepts of 'ego-states' and 'ego-splitting' are conducive to each other. When the 'ego splits' -- either for 'functional' (evolutionary specialization) purposes and/or because of 'childhood rejections and/or failures' (which have the effect of 'splitting' the personality/ego like Humpty Dumpty after his 'great fall') -- the result is a combination of harmonious and non-harmonious, co-operative and competing, 'ego-states'.
7. The personality/ego invariably splits in at least four different ways: 1. 'horizontally' along the lines of 'nurturing, encouraging, supportive, co-operative' vs. 'criticizing, rejecting, abandoning'; 2. 'vertically' along the lines of 'superiority complex' vs. 'inferiority complex' or 'topdog' vs. 'underdog' or 'superego' vs. 'underego'; as well as 3. 'organizationally' vs. 'disorganizationally' ('order' vs. 'chaos'); and 4. 'impulse' vs. 'restraint' or 'pleasure-ego' vs. 'reality-ego' or 'Dionysian-Narcissistic Ego' vs. 'Apollonian Ego' (which also accounts for the distinction between 'order, righteousness, fairness, justice, and restraint (The Apollonian Righteous-Rejecting-Reality Ego, short form if you want: 'The ARE') vs. 'disorder, deconstruction, rebellion, anarchy, pleasure-seeking (hedonism), no rules, free spirit, freedom, lack of restraint, impulse psychology to the max, self-infatuation, narcissism....(The Dionysian-Narcissistic (Pleasure-Seeking) Ego, possible short forms if you want, 'The DNE' or 'The PSE' or 'The DNPSE').
8. The DNE (Dionysian-Narcissistic Ego) and ARE (Apollonian-Righteous Ego) have their legacy in Freud's distinction between the 'oral personality' and the 'anal personality' as well as further back than this to Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' in 1872, which was the main bridge between Hegelian Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, with generous respect also being paid here to Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation', 1818, which Nietzsche was heavily influenced by when he wrote and then published BT in 1872).
The 'oral' personality can be defined by the polar spectrum of 'giving' (nurturing, encouraging, supporting, pleasing, approval-seeking...) and 'getting' (wanting, needing, demanding, expecting....all hallmarks of the 'narcissistic personality'). Further distinctions can be made between the: a) 'oral-giving personality', b) 'oral-giving' ('oral-narcissistic') personality, c) 'oral-receptive personality' (friendly, open-armed, maternally or paternally receptive, sexually receptive...), d) 'oral-schizoid, resistant, and/or defensive personality'...this category -- or the idea leading up to it -- was introduced by Fritz Perls in Vienna in 1936 when Perls met Freud for the first and only time -- a crushing disappointment for Perls. Perls, at this point, was still a psychoanalyst who had just opened a Psychoanalytic practice in South Africa, had taken a boat from South Africa to Vienna with little money on his person to cover the expense of the trip, but was exciting about the prospect of reading to the Conference, and sharing with Freud, Perls' new and provocatively unorthodox ideas on 'oral resistances' (an idea that he probably developed through his work with Wilhelm Reich on 'body armor protecting a person from emotional release', and which Perls would further develop in his first published 'Gestalt' book called, 'Ego, Hunger, and Aggression', a remarkable book in my opinion as Perls, in conjunction with his eventual wife, Laura Perls, started to conduct his own 'major revision' of Freudian Theory that would eventually turn out to be 'Gestalt Therapy'). Up til this point in Freudian Theory, all talk had been about 'anal resistances', not 'oral resistances'....Whether this is a matter of 'semantics' and 'terminology' on the one hand, or whether there is a significant distinction that needs to be made here is a matter of some debate... I support the latter position, and thus, an 'oral schizoid' person becomes a person who is 'not oral-receptive' but the opposite -- 'unfriendly', 'unreceptive', 'untalkative', with underlying issues of 'anger' and distrust'...to be further distinguished from an 'oral phobic' person who is 'afraid' to talk...or eat, or drink, or socially or sexually engage...all hallmarks of the 'oral personality' -- the bipolarity here being between those who are 'open' and 'receptive' vs. those who are not, and a further bipolarity being between those who are angry vs. those who are scared...
The 'anal' personality has some important differences and the only question of debate might be whether the 'oral-schizoid personality' and 'the anal-schizoid personality are essentially the same thing...In general, the 'anal' personality is generally 'tight-assed', 'righteous', 'rejecting', parsimonious, punctual, cheap, rule-abiding, rule-demanding, organized, more unapproachable, less giving and nurturing....There is a second type of 'anal personality' that is more the opposite of the first...This is the 'anal-explosive' personality who is more of an 'anarchist', angry, rebellious, hates rules and laws, hates authority-figures, and either hides his or her rage beneath the surface of his or her personality and/or is capable of 'blowing up' given sufficient provocation, which may not be much....Other sub-types of 'anal' personalities: the 'anal-schizoid' (angry, distancing) personality, the 'anal-retentive' personality ('cheap'), the 'anal-righteous' personality (rule demanding), the 'anal-rejecting' personality (rejects and shuts out people easily...carrying an 'arrogant, superiority complex'), the 'anal-phobic-obsessive-compulsive' personality (heavy restraints and compensations against germs, dirt, disorder, bad hygiene, uncleanliness...)
9. What Freud called the 'phallic personality', I include here under the 'oral getting (narcissistic) personality' although distinctions can be made between the 'phallic obsessive-compulsive (narcissistic) personality' (likes to brag about his or her masculine or feminine prowess...and 'exploits') vs. the 'phallic schizoid' and/or 'phallic phobic' personality who steers away from sex for either angry, rejecting (schizoid) reasons or for 'phobic' reasons ('performance anxieties', lack of confidence and/or inferiority complex around living up to his or her 'masculine' or 'feminine' ideal or his or her perception of society's masculine or feminine ideal....)
10. 'Anger', 'rage', and 'aggression' can be divided into three types: 1. 'Righteous anger, rage, and/or aggression' connected to disobeying a particular ethical, moral, social, and/or legal rule or set of rules; 2. rebellious anger, rage, and/or aggression connected to being 'overly controlled' and/or exploited and/or suppressed by a particular rule or set of rules and its/their associated authority figure(s); (the perceived 'slavery' syndrome); which borders into 3. narcissistic anger, rage, and/or aggression connected to simply not getting what one wants, and/or with self-preservation, and/or with overcontrolling and/or annihilating some one else's self, or sense of self;
11a. The 'Oedipal Complex' is a valuable Freudian concept as long as it is not abused. Using 'The Oedipal Complex' as a 'cover up' for the possibility/probability of very real child sexual abuse between a daughter and her father in a case where a female client asserts such a childhood memory is obviously a clinically pathological use of The Oedipal Complex unless there is strong empirical and/or circumstantial evidence to the contrary that makes the memory 'highly doubtful' as an 'empirical reality'. But even here, a therapist is treading on very dangerous epistemological and ethical territory -- to the point where he or she may simply have to admit that the 'historical and empirical reality' of the memory is unprovable one way or the other, and/or a matter for the courts to decide...similarily, 're-interpreting' or 're-constructing' a client's memory to the point where it becomes something other than what the client asserted is treading into the territory of 'brainwashing' -- regardless of whether a therapist is an 'Oedipal Theorist and Therapist' or whether a therapist is a 'new brand' of 'Seduction Theorist' and possibly 'projecting' interpreted childhood sexual assaults into memories where the client asserted no such thing.
11b. The best use of 'The Oedipal Complex' by a therapist is simply to ascertain from the client's childhood history and also from the client's more current adult clinical information what makes up the client's 'masculine' and/or 'feminine ideal', what makes up their 'rejecting and/or exciting object-transference figure, and what makes up his or her 'narcissistic fixation' in terms of the character and physical type of 'romantic/sexual object/figure' that 'turns the client on'. Freud's 'maternal love' (i.e. his 'Maternal Oedipal Complex') from his mother was very strong and steady which seems to have been 'carried on' and/or 'transferred' into his relationship with his wife; in contrast, Freud was much more uncertain and conflicted in terms of his 'paternal love' from his father and it was his 'Paternal Oedipal Complex' that triggered most of Freud's deepest transference (core nuclear) conflicts that were then 'carried over' and 'tranferred onto' most of the men that Freud worked with as an adult clinician, therapist, and theorist. A person can have an 'inconsistency' and conflicted bi-polarity between an 'Oedipal Complex' and a 'Counter-Oedipal Complex'; and/or between a 'maternal' and a 'paternal' Oedipal Complex.
12. Conscious early memories are very, very good way of 'diagnosing' a person's character-type, various 'ego-splits' and 'ego-states', 'topdog' and 'underdog' interactions, 'righteous/rejecting and approval-seeking interactions, righteous/rejecting and rebellious interactions, 'nurturing' and 'pampering' interactions, and 'approval-seeking' and 'rebellious' interactions, as well as 'oral' characteristics, 'anal' characteristics, 'narcissistic' characteristic, phobic and counter-phobic behavior patterns, 'repetition compulsion' and 'mastery compulsion', 'overt, dominant' and 'covert, latent' ego-states...and more....Our early recollections are great symbolic metaphors of 'The Story of Our Life' (my paraphrasing of an Adlerian quote already cited in several previous essays...).
13. I prefer using the term 'subconscious' generally speaking rather than 'unconscious' and I shy away for the most part from the concept of 'repression'. 'Ego-splitting', defensive reactions, and various types of 'compensatory behavior' are terms and concepts that all work better for me.
14. Oh, here's one....I have not engaged in a group or individual psychotherapy session in about 15 years now...I think the last time I was in a Gestalt Group Psychotherapy Session or Program was back about 1995...However, I was fairly active in a series of group psychotherapy personal and professional growth programs back between 1979 and 1991. In contrast, I have never experienced a Psychoanalytic session....(too much money for one main reason). This having been said, it is perhaps not surprising that I have a personal preference for 'The Gestalt Hot Seat and Empty Chair Technique' as opposed to 'The Psychoanalytic Couch'. From my perspective, The Hotseat and Empty Chair Technique is more interactive, more existential, more immediate, more conducive to 'jumping between different ego states' and expressing the 'bipolarities of different ego splits and ego-states'...topdog vs. underdog, and everything else that I listed above...more conducive to actual interactions with the therapist and with other group members....Too much 'interpretation' and 'analysis' will basically 'kill any form of psychotherapy'...abstractionism and 'cognitive mind games' are easy 'defense mechanisms' for most people who are used to being in their 'heads', and not in touch with either their feelings and/or their bodies...
Some interpretation and transference analysis, I believe, is important...but even this is more effectively shown to the client through the 'immediacy and the interactiveness of the existential moment'....not through a therapist analyzing a client to existential death....and not by 'hiding behind a couch' and being 'invisible to the client' or 'from saying nothing or sounding profound or making pathological theoretical over-generalizations in books or essays that are going to 'prejudice' a therapist into making theoretical and therapeutic judgments about a client that he or she has not even met yet....
15. As both Freud and Adler have stated in different essays or books (Freud, The Aetiology of Hysteria; Adler, What Life Should Mean To You), Freud relative to 'repressed memories' and Adler relative to 'conscious early memrories', and I will extrapolate on, and modify here: Memories, fantasies, dreams, nightmares, creative work and hobbies (sublimation, choice of friends and lovers (projection and compensation), all support each other and co-operate with each other in the pursuit of the individual person's unique brand and choice of the 'mastery compulsion' as woven around his or her transference complex, his or her core nuclear conflict, much like the planets revolve around the sun, are energized by the sun, often take on too much heat and will self-destruct when they are too close to the sun, but will self-destruct also if they are too far away from the sun's energy...Adler called this our 'lifestyle plan', Freud called this a (transference) 'template' in 'The Dynamics of The Transference, Jung called it a 'Complex', and I am calling it our 'Central (or Core Nuclear) Transference Conflict'....or there may be several such conflicts that are all intertwined....You might have one transference conflict centering around your mom, another one around your dad, another one around a sibling, or a relative, or a childhood friend, or a childhood enemy, or a childhood stranger....or any type of unique subset, all intertwined into one lifelong 'transference psychodrama' propelled by 'the re-creation and mastery compulsion'....and energizing you to either great creative accomplishments and triumphs or great self-destruction....or both....
That is a good enough capsule of my intention for this essay...Six days of work....and finally a day off...
-- dgb, July 23rd, 24th, 25th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
Monday, July 19, 2010
You Get What You Expect....
You get what you expect...If you are expecting nothing -- and/or expecting a negative experience -- then that is what you are likely to get...If you show lack of excitement -- a coldness and/or lack of interest -- the potential excitement of the moment and immediate situation is likely to quickly disappear from your partner as well...You can open up to the potential newness of every new experience...or you can stereotype your judgment on the basis of past bad experiences...and get what you expect -- a new bad experience to match the old...
-- dgb, July 19th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- dgb, July 19th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
Sunday, July 18, 2010
The Essence of DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis -- And Its Connection To 'Domestic Violence'
At bottom level, the study of Psychoanalysis -- and human behavior in general, both healthy and neurotic (psychotic/pathological) -- is a simply art and science.
I say Psychoanalysis even though Psychoanalysis -- particularly Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis -- is regarded by many, laypersons, academics, and professional psychotherapists alike, as being outdated, passe, anachronistic, Victorian, and not in synch with 21st century psychiatry, behaviorism, cognitive-behavior therapy, short term counseling, and even depth psychotherapy.
Psychiatry has gone the easy route (for the therapist) -- for the most part, you might as well call most psychiatrists 'medical control therapists'. I am sorry if that is an overgeneralization -- I try to teach people not to label and stereotype -- but sometimes even stereotypes have some basis of truth in them. For a schizophrenic, medical -- meaning drug -- therapy may be the only way of subduing his or her hallucinations. With the hallucinations, a schizophenic may not (likely will not) be able to live a basically normal life. With the anti-psychotic drugs, and no hallucinations, a schizophrenic may be able to live a decently normal life. So the anti-psychotic drugs are most definitely a huge improvement over anything a therapist could or couldn't do regarding such a client's hallucinations...
Hallucinations -- unless they are drug or stress induced -- are not likely to go away without anti-psychotic medicine. There is an underlying biochemical problem here. Whether that biochemical problem was triggered by genetics, drugs, and/or underlying cognitive-emotional (transference) factors is another question. But the anti-psychotic drugs usually work quickly at 're-grounding' a person who is lost in his or her hallucinations so, under such circumstances, especially if it turns out to be a prolonged acute and/or chronic problem - and with no life-threatening side effects that I am aware of, why would you not use them? I have lived with a schizophrenic person for a number of years, and I am not at all sure that his problem wasn't (recreational) drug and/or stress induced as opposed to genetics, but this having been said, once the problem was full-blown, and not going away, the anti-psychotic drugs (as long as he was taking the pills or later getting the injections), brought his life back to reasonable normalcy. Like everyone else I have met, he still had a full plate of life-altering 'transference neuroses', but at least he wasn't taking 'bizarre trips into the world of the insane'...To all extents and purposes, he was 'normal' again -- and has been ever since.
'Behaviorism' -- I have never liked because it basically pretends that a person's 'mind' is not there -- they call it a 'black box' -- like the mind of a rat in a maze. (Even rats have minds that are more than a 'black box'.) However, if both client and therapist can agree on the intended goal of therapy -- say, for the client to quit smoking (or swearing, or snoring, or drinking, or thinking 'perverse thoughts' -- then sometimes behaviorism can be effective, indeed, even more effective than other different types of 'talking' therapy. Just 'shock' the person -- like the rat in the maze every time he makes a 'wrong turn' -- every time he or she swears, snores, drinks, or thinks 'perverse thoughts'....
Cognitve behavior therapy integrates cognitive therapy with behaviorism. I was studying cognitive therapy when I was at the University of Waterloo between 1974 and 1979, and the professor who marked my Honours Thesis was a leader in the area of 'Cognitive-Behavior Therapy' -- Dr. Donald Meichenbaum -- and even after leaving the University of Waterloo as a professor, Dr. Meichenbaum, from what I have read, went on to do a great number of very innovative and important things in the area of Cognitve-Behavior Therapy, of which I have the strongest of respect for him doing.
I experienced first hand, Adlerian psychology and Adlerian Psychotherapy (the main foundation and precursor of Cognitive Therapy) in Toronto at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) around 1980,81 and learned some very valuable ideas and therapeutic techniques there.
And likewise, at The Gestalt Institute of Toronto, I experienced the 'hot seat' first hand in numerous different group therapy sessions, off and on, between 1979 and 1991, while reading much of Fritz Perls' work at the same time.
I have read some pieces of Jungian Psychology and would like to one day read more...
But here I am in 2010,
And I am still both captivated -- and partly mesmerized -- by the grand daddy of them all: Sigmund Freud.
If you haven't figured it out already, Psychoanalysis is basically the centerpiece of Hegel's Hotel.
The biggest influence on my work -- other than arguably Hegel himself -- is, more and more, Sigmund Freud.
Much of Hegel's influence has been indirect.
I studied Gestalt Therapy. What is the backbone of Gestalt Therapy? Hegelian Philosophy.
I studied Jungian Psychology. What is the backbone of Jungian Psychology? Hegelian Philosophy.
I studied Psychoanalysis. What is the backbone of Psychoanalysis? Hegelian Philosophy.
I study Democracy. What is the backbone of Democracy? Hegelian Philosophy.
I study Evolution. What is the backbone of Evolution? Hegelian Philosophy.
I study a little bit about biology, biochemisty, quantum physics, medicine. What is the backbone of all four of these? Hegelian philosophy.
You wonder why this philosophical and psychological and political and economic treatise (if I ever get back to politics and economics) is called 'Hegel's Hotel'?
It is because Hegelian Philosophy provides much of the backbone of Western -- and Eastern -- culture and philosophy.
Hegel's Dialectic Philosophy in a nutshell: 1. Thesis, 2. Counter or Anti-Thesis, 3. Synthesis...and start the process all over again at another level of either 'evolution' and/or 'de-evolution'.
Freud's Final Model of The Personality: 1. Thesis: 'The Id' (the psycho-biological driving impulses of the organism thrusting upwards for 'release'; 2. Counter-Thesis: 'The Superego' (the parental, cultural, legal, and ethical-moral division of the personality whose function is to 'restrain' or 'hold back' any and all dangerous, illegal, unethical-immoral inner impulses that are pushing upwards for 'release'); 3. Synthesis: 'The (Central, Mediating, Conflict-Resolving, Compromise-Forming) Ego' (whose function is basically to solve problems, resolve conflicts within the personality and outside the personality, and to creatively engineer and administer 'compromise formations' that are designed to basically 'appease' both inner factions in the personality (i.e., the id vs. the superego) and outer factions in the social and/or environmental world while at the same time, as best as possible, satisfying as many perceived needs both within the personality and within the organism-as-a-whole as can possibly be satisfied...
That is basically Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis in a nutshell -- very Hegelian in its philosophical and psychological structure: 1. thesis; 2. counter or anti-thesis; and 3. synthesis.
The 'thesis' is the orginal 'driving impulse from inside the organism'....
The 'counter-thesis' is the superego's and/or ego's defense, restraint, and/or resistance against the perceived 'anxiety-provoking (dangerous) nature of the 'inner driving impulse' (usually sexual, aggressive, and/or narcissistic in some way...but very strong emotions of -- grief, rage, anxiety, love...-- can also be perceived as 'externally dangerous' if fully expressed...
The 'synthesis' is the 'conflict resolution', the 'problem-solution', the 'compromise-formation' and/ or the 'allusion to (transference) immediacy' which both hides and alludes to the 'underlying organismic impulse'...
On this essence of Freudian Classical Psychoanalysis, Freud and I are in full agreement with each other.
I met a woman a month or two ago.
I think that she was just coming back from a pet store with food for some of her 'pets'.
I asked what kind of pets she had...
She said rather nonchalantly: 'Scorpions, and snakes, and a dragon (lizard)...',
She said that she had to get rid of one of her snakes because 'it was just too aggressive'...it frightened her poor mom half to death...
I asked her what kind of snake it was, and she said (as best I can remember) that it was some sort of 'Burmese boa constrictor' with teeth or fangs and a lightning fast strike...She kept having to 'unlock her hand from its teeth'...
Our conversation never got any further than this so allow me to wildly (or not so wildly) speculate on this matter from a DGB Quantum Psychoanalytic perspective that revolves around but extends beyond Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis:
Let's call this woman's 'exotic (dangerous)' pets her 'narcissistic fixation' and, at the same time, an 'allusion to her transference immediacy' or to some sort of 'transference complex and childhood transference nuclear conflict'...
How are we to understand this?
Let's imagine that the woman was bitten by a snake (or stung by a scorpion) as a child...
The 'snake' (or the scorpion) becomes (in Ronald Fairbairn's Object Relations terminology) both her 'rejecting object' and her 'exciting object' (thus, the beginning of both the 'phobia' and the 'counter-phobia' or 'obsessive-compulsion' regarding 'snakes'....which then leads to her 'mastery compulsion' regarding 'biting snakes'...
So she starts 'raising dangerous, biting snakes' (and/or scorpions and/or lizards/dragons...), raising them in a more 'controlled environment' where she 'feeds' them and seeks to 'master' them while at the same time 'respecting their potential power over her'...if she isn't careful and/or fast enough to avoid 'the biting teeth' or 'lashing tail'...
She buys one snake which is 'just a little too aggressive and fast for her'...'sinking its teeth into her before she fed it, while she fed it, and/or after she fed it...' Her mother objects to the presence of this snake and puts added pressure on her to get rid of it...which she finally does...but her 'counter-phobia' and her 'obsessive-compulsion', and her 'mastery compulsion' live on regarding her wish to be in the proximity of 'dangerous, biting snakes and/or other animals...'
Who knows? There could even be some 'human symbolism' here in all of this 'transference play' that I am not aware of...I never got to ask her about her relationship with her father and/or mother...so that we will have to leave out of this 'transference equation'....
If I was a Gestalt therapist working with this woman, I might even ask her to 'Be the snake: Who would you like to bite?' Or to 'Be the scorpion: Who would you like to sting?'
Our 'projections' both hide and allude to our innermost feelings and impulses (again, they are 'allusions to immediacy', often 'allusions to transference immediacy')...
We 'project' onto others (people, pets, things, books, titles, essays...) our own 'narcissistic fixations', which are more often than not our 'transference narcissistic fixations'...
I know another woman, a friend of mine, who says that she is 'being beaten' by her current, live-in boyfriend. I asked her the obvious question: Why don't you leave him? Or kick him out of your townhouse? Or call 911 when this is happening? (They have already been through this legal process once already and have done the so-called 'marriage counselling' before getting back together -- and nothing changing, especially when he and/or both of them are intoxicated.)
She told me that she had 'no place to go', and that 'his name was on the lease too' ...and on and on...
Furthermore, she told me that she had gone through 4 years of this type of 'violent behavior' with her previous husband....had been assaulted numerous times by other men, including at least one, if not more, violent rapes...her history with men was not far from pretty...indeed, if anything, pretty horrific....
And this is not a naive and/or a stupid woman that I am describing here...and yet it almost seems like she has 'victim' or 'martyr' plastered all over her forehead...I hate to say this but it almost seems like she has 'radar' attached to her forehead...that leads her right into the psychology and the activity of violent men doing violent things to women...(In Adlerian Psychology, there are two similar but different 'lifestyle patterns/plans/goals/complexes)' called respectively: 1. 'the victim'; and 2. 'the martyr'. The 'serial victim' always manages to get him or herself into situations where he/she is victimized; whereas the 'serial martyr' is victimized -- or even dies -- for a perceived 'noble cause'.)
Like the 'snake' and the 'scorpion' in the preceding example, the best way I can explain this type of behavior is to assume that her dad was both her 'rejecting, violent childhood object' -- and at the same time her adult, 'exciting object' -- the object of her 'counter-phobia' and her intended 'mastery compulsion' -- which generally only leads her back into the arms of misery, pain, violence, and ptential self-destruction -- what Freud would call the 'death instinct' but I call the 'dark side' of our 'obsessive-compulsive, rejecting-exciting transference object and intended psychotherapeutic mastery compulsion'....'This time I will get my 'substitute transference daddy' to love me even if I have to experience more pain and violence to get it...(or maybe the 'potential for violence' even at some subliminal, or not so subliminal, level excites me...)
If you see yourself in this type of 'transference roller coaster or merry-go-round', then quite simply,
Get off the ride or quit claiming to be an innocent, helpless victim...
-- dgb, July 18th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
I say Psychoanalysis even though Psychoanalysis -- particularly Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis -- is regarded by many, laypersons, academics, and professional psychotherapists alike, as being outdated, passe, anachronistic, Victorian, and not in synch with 21st century psychiatry, behaviorism, cognitive-behavior therapy, short term counseling, and even depth psychotherapy.
Psychiatry has gone the easy route (for the therapist) -- for the most part, you might as well call most psychiatrists 'medical control therapists'. I am sorry if that is an overgeneralization -- I try to teach people not to label and stereotype -- but sometimes even stereotypes have some basis of truth in them. For a schizophrenic, medical -- meaning drug -- therapy may be the only way of subduing his or her hallucinations. With the hallucinations, a schizophenic may not (likely will not) be able to live a basically normal life. With the anti-psychotic drugs, and no hallucinations, a schizophrenic may be able to live a decently normal life. So the anti-psychotic drugs are most definitely a huge improvement over anything a therapist could or couldn't do regarding such a client's hallucinations...
Hallucinations -- unless they are drug or stress induced -- are not likely to go away without anti-psychotic medicine. There is an underlying biochemical problem here. Whether that biochemical problem was triggered by genetics, drugs, and/or underlying cognitive-emotional (transference) factors is another question. But the anti-psychotic drugs usually work quickly at 're-grounding' a person who is lost in his or her hallucinations so, under such circumstances, especially if it turns out to be a prolonged acute and/or chronic problem - and with no life-threatening side effects that I am aware of, why would you not use them? I have lived with a schizophrenic person for a number of years, and I am not at all sure that his problem wasn't (recreational) drug and/or stress induced as opposed to genetics, but this having been said, once the problem was full-blown, and not going away, the anti-psychotic drugs (as long as he was taking the pills or later getting the injections), brought his life back to reasonable normalcy. Like everyone else I have met, he still had a full plate of life-altering 'transference neuroses', but at least he wasn't taking 'bizarre trips into the world of the insane'...To all extents and purposes, he was 'normal' again -- and has been ever since.
'Behaviorism' -- I have never liked because it basically pretends that a person's 'mind' is not there -- they call it a 'black box' -- like the mind of a rat in a maze. (Even rats have minds that are more than a 'black box'.) However, if both client and therapist can agree on the intended goal of therapy -- say, for the client to quit smoking (or swearing, or snoring, or drinking, or thinking 'perverse thoughts' -- then sometimes behaviorism can be effective, indeed, even more effective than other different types of 'talking' therapy. Just 'shock' the person -- like the rat in the maze every time he makes a 'wrong turn' -- every time he or she swears, snores, drinks, or thinks 'perverse thoughts'....
Cognitve behavior therapy integrates cognitive therapy with behaviorism. I was studying cognitive therapy when I was at the University of Waterloo between 1974 and 1979, and the professor who marked my Honours Thesis was a leader in the area of 'Cognitive-Behavior Therapy' -- Dr. Donald Meichenbaum -- and even after leaving the University of Waterloo as a professor, Dr. Meichenbaum, from what I have read, went on to do a great number of very innovative and important things in the area of Cognitve-Behavior Therapy, of which I have the strongest of respect for him doing.
I experienced first hand, Adlerian psychology and Adlerian Psychotherapy (the main foundation and precursor of Cognitive Therapy) in Toronto at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) around 1980,81 and learned some very valuable ideas and therapeutic techniques there.
And likewise, at The Gestalt Institute of Toronto, I experienced the 'hot seat' first hand in numerous different group therapy sessions, off and on, between 1979 and 1991, while reading much of Fritz Perls' work at the same time.
I have read some pieces of Jungian Psychology and would like to one day read more...
But here I am in 2010,
And I am still both captivated -- and partly mesmerized -- by the grand daddy of them all: Sigmund Freud.
If you haven't figured it out already, Psychoanalysis is basically the centerpiece of Hegel's Hotel.
The biggest influence on my work -- other than arguably Hegel himself -- is, more and more, Sigmund Freud.
Much of Hegel's influence has been indirect.
I studied Gestalt Therapy. What is the backbone of Gestalt Therapy? Hegelian Philosophy.
I studied Jungian Psychology. What is the backbone of Jungian Psychology? Hegelian Philosophy.
I studied Psychoanalysis. What is the backbone of Psychoanalysis? Hegelian Philosophy.
I study Democracy. What is the backbone of Democracy? Hegelian Philosophy.
I study Evolution. What is the backbone of Evolution? Hegelian Philosophy.
I study a little bit about biology, biochemisty, quantum physics, medicine. What is the backbone of all four of these? Hegelian philosophy.
You wonder why this philosophical and psychological and political and economic treatise (if I ever get back to politics and economics) is called 'Hegel's Hotel'?
It is because Hegelian Philosophy provides much of the backbone of Western -- and Eastern -- culture and philosophy.
Hegel's Dialectic Philosophy in a nutshell: 1. Thesis, 2. Counter or Anti-Thesis, 3. Synthesis...and start the process all over again at another level of either 'evolution' and/or 'de-evolution'.
Freud's Final Model of The Personality: 1. Thesis: 'The Id' (the psycho-biological driving impulses of the organism thrusting upwards for 'release'; 2. Counter-Thesis: 'The Superego' (the parental, cultural, legal, and ethical-moral division of the personality whose function is to 'restrain' or 'hold back' any and all dangerous, illegal, unethical-immoral inner impulses that are pushing upwards for 'release'); 3. Synthesis: 'The (Central, Mediating, Conflict-Resolving, Compromise-Forming) Ego' (whose function is basically to solve problems, resolve conflicts within the personality and outside the personality, and to creatively engineer and administer 'compromise formations' that are designed to basically 'appease' both inner factions in the personality (i.e., the id vs. the superego) and outer factions in the social and/or environmental world while at the same time, as best as possible, satisfying as many perceived needs both within the personality and within the organism-as-a-whole as can possibly be satisfied...
That is basically Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis in a nutshell -- very Hegelian in its philosophical and psychological structure: 1. thesis; 2. counter or anti-thesis; and 3. synthesis.
The 'thesis' is the orginal 'driving impulse from inside the organism'....
The 'counter-thesis' is the superego's and/or ego's defense, restraint, and/or resistance against the perceived 'anxiety-provoking (dangerous) nature of the 'inner driving impulse' (usually sexual, aggressive, and/or narcissistic in some way...but very strong emotions of -- grief, rage, anxiety, love...-- can also be perceived as 'externally dangerous' if fully expressed...
The 'synthesis' is the 'conflict resolution', the 'problem-solution', the 'compromise-formation' and/ or the 'allusion to (transference) immediacy' which both hides and alludes to the 'underlying organismic impulse'...
On this essence of Freudian Classical Psychoanalysis, Freud and I are in full agreement with each other.
I met a woman a month or two ago.
I think that she was just coming back from a pet store with food for some of her 'pets'.
I asked what kind of pets she had...
She said rather nonchalantly: 'Scorpions, and snakes, and a dragon (lizard)...',
She said that she had to get rid of one of her snakes because 'it was just too aggressive'...it frightened her poor mom half to death...
I asked her what kind of snake it was, and she said (as best I can remember) that it was some sort of 'Burmese boa constrictor' with teeth or fangs and a lightning fast strike...She kept having to 'unlock her hand from its teeth'...
Our conversation never got any further than this so allow me to wildly (or not so wildly) speculate on this matter from a DGB Quantum Psychoanalytic perspective that revolves around but extends beyond Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis:
Let's call this woman's 'exotic (dangerous)' pets her 'narcissistic fixation' and, at the same time, an 'allusion to her transference immediacy' or to some sort of 'transference complex and childhood transference nuclear conflict'...
How are we to understand this?
Let's imagine that the woman was bitten by a snake (or stung by a scorpion) as a child...
The 'snake' (or the scorpion) becomes (in Ronald Fairbairn's Object Relations terminology) both her 'rejecting object' and her 'exciting object' (thus, the beginning of both the 'phobia' and the 'counter-phobia' or 'obsessive-compulsion' regarding 'snakes'....which then leads to her 'mastery compulsion' regarding 'biting snakes'...
So she starts 'raising dangerous, biting snakes' (and/or scorpions and/or lizards/dragons...), raising them in a more 'controlled environment' where she 'feeds' them and seeks to 'master' them while at the same time 'respecting their potential power over her'...if she isn't careful and/or fast enough to avoid 'the biting teeth' or 'lashing tail'...
She buys one snake which is 'just a little too aggressive and fast for her'...'sinking its teeth into her before she fed it, while she fed it, and/or after she fed it...' Her mother objects to the presence of this snake and puts added pressure on her to get rid of it...which she finally does...but her 'counter-phobia' and her 'obsessive-compulsion', and her 'mastery compulsion' live on regarding her wish to be in the proximity of 'dangerous, biting snakes and/or other animals...'
Who knows? There could even be some 'human symbolism' here in all of this 'transference play' that I am not aware of...I never got to ask her about her relationship with her father and/or mother...so that we will have to leave out of this 'transference equation'....
If I was a Gestalt therapist working with this woman, I might even ask her to 'Be the snake: Who would you like to bite?' Or to 'Be the scorpion: Who would you like to sting?'
Our 'projections' both hide and allude to our innermost feelings and impulses (again, they are 'allusions to immediacy', often 'allusions to transference immediacy')...
We 'project' onto others (people, pets, things, books, titles, essays...) our own 'narcissistic fixations', which are more often than not our 'transference narcissistic fixations'...
I know another woman, a friend of mine, who says that she is 'being beaten' by her current, live-in boyfriend. I asked her the obvious question: Why don't you leave him? Or kick him out of your townhouse? Or call 911 when this is happening? (They have already been through this legal process once already and have done the so-called 'marriage counselling' before getting back together -- and nothing changing, especially when he and/or both of them are intoxicated.)
She told me that she had 'no place to go', and that 'his name was on the lease too' ...and on and on...
Furthermore, she told me that she had gone through 4 years of this type of 'violent behavior' with her previous husband....had been assaulted numerous times by other men, including at least one, if not more, violent rapes...her history with men was not far from pretty...indeed, if anything, pretty horrific....
And this is not a naive and/or a stupid woman that I am describing here...and yet it almost seems like she has 'victim' or 'martyr' plastered all over her forehead...I hate to say this but it almost seems like she has 'radar' attached to her forehead...that leads her right into the psychology and the activity of violent men doing violent things to women...(In Adlerian Psychology, there are two similar but different 'lifestyle patterns/plans/goals/complexes)' called respectively: 1. 'the victim'; and 2. 'the martyr'. The 'serial victim' always manages to get him or herself into situations where he/she is victimized; whereas the 'serial martyr' is victimized -- or even dies -- for a perceived 'noble cause'.)
Like the 'snake' and the 'scorpion' in the preceding example, the best way I can explain this type of behavior is to assume that her dad was both her 'rejecting, violent childhood object' -- and at the same time her adult, 'exciting object' -- the object of her 'counter-phobia' and her intended 'mastery compulsion' -- which generally only leads her back into the arms of misery, pain, violence, and ptential self-destruction -- what Freud would call the 'death instinct' but I call the 'dark side' of our 'obsessive-compulsive, rejecting-exciting transference object and intended psychotherapeutic mastery compulsion'....'This time I will get my 'substitute transference daddy' to love me even if I have to experience more pain and violence to get it...(or maybe the 'potential for violence' even at some subliminal, or not so subliminal, level excites me...)
If you see yourself in this type of 'transference roller coaster or merry-go-round', then quite simply,
Get off the ride or quit claiming to be an innocent, helpless victim...
-- dgb, July 18th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
On The DGB Integration of The Concepts of Narcissism, Transference, and The 'Splitting of The Ego'
Synopsis
In this essay, I want to pull together three central concepts in DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis: 1. Narcissism; 2. Transference; and 3. The Splitting of The Ego.
.....................................................................................................................................
1. Narcissism:
The concept of 'narcissism' holds several advantages over its 'competing' concepts (such as: hedonism/pleasure, sexuality, libido, self-interest, selfishness, egotism, arrogance, power, revenge, superiority striving...) in that it incorporates all of these different concepts into one concept -- narcissism -- and in this fashion allows us to integrate Freudian and Adlerian concepts much easier in a way that potentially makes both schools of psychology stronger as they 'compromise' on their conceptual differences. In human behavior, we usually find a mixture of pleasure-seeking, sexuality, and egotism (self-esteem issues). Freud covered the first of these areas very well (pleasure-seeking and sexuality -- as well as the 'restaint', the 'resistance', and/or the 'defense' against them); while Adler was the first to put his finger on the critical factor of self-esteem (the triadic relationship between 'inferiority feelings', 'compensation', and 'superiority striving').
The concept of narcissism 'kills both birds -- both aspects of human behavior -- with one conceptual stone, and that stone is 'narcissism'. The opposite of narcissism is 'altruism' -- the generous giving to, and caring about others... Altruism is not generally tied up to human psychopathology. Narcissism is. Thus, any discussion of human psychopathology has to centre around the concept of narcissism. Altruism, for the most part, will be discussed at a later time.
2. Transference:
The Freudian concept of 'transference' is very similar to the Adlerian concept of 'lifestyle' with a couple of significant differences in over-riding or under-riding assumptions that keep these two concepts separated from each other, such as: a) the Freudian assumption of conflict in the personality vs. the Adlerian assumption of 'unity in the personality. I opt for the assumption of 'conflicted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality. How's that for a 'working compromise' between the two schools of psychology which definitely works for me?; and b) the Freudian assumption of 'repressed memories', 'distorted memories', and 'screen memories' vs. the Adlerian assumption of 'conscious early memories reflecting a person's lifestyle' (complex -- my addition). Sometimes I will use the integrative concept of 'Transference-Lifestyle Complexes' which leads to the following DGB formula: In general, if we had more 'TLC' in the world (as in 'Tender, Loving, Care'), then we would have less pathological 'TLC's' (as in 'Transference-Lifestyle Complexes). Why? Because most TLC's are built as 'compensatory defenses' against childhood rejections (self-esteem injuries, narcissistic injuries, traumatic, ego-deflating childhood memories of painful encounters...Not all TLC's are built from childhood rejections but most of the most pathological ones are.
3. The Splitting of The Ego
For our purposes here, the ego 'splits' -- either figuratively or literally, take your choice -- in childhood for one or more of three different reasons: a) functional expedience, division of labor, specialization of sub-cognitive-emotional-behavioral functions; b) painful childhood rejections; and/or c) 'narcissistic fixation'. Items b) and c) usually occur together as it is almost a 'psychological given' that a 'perceived painful childhood rejection' (narcissistic injury, self-esteem injury, ego-traumacy...) will become a lifelong 'narcissistic fixation'.
Think of a 'physical injury'. We cut our finger. Our mind-brain-body swings into 'overdrive'. This what Adler, in 1906, called 'supervalent cerebral activity'. The mind-brain-body rushes 'clotting factors' down to the site of the injury to 'clot' the wound before we bleed to death and/or 'opportunistic outside invaders (germs, microbes, bacteria, viruses..) can take advantage of the situation to find easy access into our bloodstream. Which is why our 'immune system' is also given instructions to 'rush down to the site of the injury' to 'protect this new point of bodily weakness and vulnerablity'.
Well, the 'psyche' (or 'mind-brain-body') does the same thing in the event of a 'psychological' or 'narcissistic' (self-esteem) injury -- a psychological traumacy. The most critical narcissistic injuries tend to take place in early childhood up to about 6 or 7 years old. To be sure, we can -- and will -- meet with a wide assortment of other narcissistic (self-esteem) injuries during the course of our whole lifetime but none seem to be generally as critical to our psychological well-being as the psychological injuries sustained in our first 6 or 7 years of our existence, during our main 'character forming' years. Usually, most narcissistic injuries that we sustain after this point in time can somehow be 'associated with' and 'fit into' our 'Transference-Lifestyle Complex Tempate' in some creative and/or destructive fashion or another. Our lifelong character patterns -- our 're-creation, repetition, and mastery compulsions' -- have been established and will continue to either evolve and/or devolve in some creative and/or destructive fashion or another. Our 'TLC's (Transference-Lifestyle Compulsions/Complexes/Neuroses) can be viewed as our own guided and/or misguided, creative and/or destructive, attempt at 'compensatory self-psychotherapy'. The usually life-long process of a person 'setting up and engineering his or her own transference process' is very much equivalent to a person setting up and engineering his or her own 'medical and/or psychotherapy' program...which is perhaps the main reason why the 'doctor' and/or 'therapist' may be met with so much 'resistance' from the client in the clinical room. There is likely to be a 'conflict in wills' -- a conflict in 'wills to power' -- as both try to compete with each other as to whose 'therapeutic program' they are going to institute and regulate.
As far as the 'splitting of the ego', our psyche becomes and remains partly a 'war zone' from our earliest rejecting encounters and/or relationships. This 'psychological war zone' is easily at least partly 'transferrable' onto others as we welcome or don't welcome them into our own 'Personal, Internalized Transference Scenarios ('PITS' -- or stated differently -- our own 'Obsessive-Compulsive Transference Psychodrama Disorders').
We can play any part: 'superego', 'ego', 'id', 'topdog', 'underdog', 'personna', 'shadow', 'Nurturing Parent', 'Rejecting Parent', 'Good Child', 'Bad Child'...you name it -- if it is a part of our transference psychodrama -- we can play it. Metaphorically speaking (no, I'm not schizophrenic), it is as if we all have 'antennae' and 'radar' attached to our heads such that we easily -- consciously or subconsciously -- pick out people in our lives who 'fit into our personal psychodrama' (as we do into theirs). We call this 'chemistry' -- as long as it is creative and passionate and mutually facilitating....Once it 'flips' over into 'negative transference' and turns into a 'psychological war game', then our 'chemistry' starts to lose its 'attractive, exciting, idealizing apeal (positive transference, love, lust...)
May the transference games begin!
Oh, they are so exciting when they are full of seduction, idealization, love, passion, and lust...
A conflation of egotism, power and sex making our hormones go crazy...off the wall crazy...
But be aware of the dangers of the PITS....our own internalized obsessive-compulsive transference disorders...
They can take us to the top of Mt. Everest...and then drop us -- out of control -- off the same mountain top plunging towards the valley or abyss below...
Transference is not a child's game even though it starts in childhood.
Transference often turns into a 'life or death struggle' for self-esteem, and self-existence...
And the mechanisms of transference are often skewed towards both relationship and self-destruction... Our own negative self-fulfilling prophecy...
Transference turns us all into 'psychological hypocrites'.
Freud had one (rebellious underdog) 'ego state' where he basically had an 'obsessive-compulsion to invade other people's personal privacy'. At the same time, he had another (rejecting topdog) ego state that basically went 'ballistic' (his internalized rejecting dad) when other people tried to invade his own privacy. This is perhaps one of the main reasons why 'hypocrisy' is so prevalent in human behavior. Opposing behavior patterns in our own personality face off against each other in the dynamics of our Transference-Lifestyle Complexes/Conflicts.
Transference turns us all into both serial rejectors and serial victims -- in the mold of our earliest childhood rejections.
Transference turns us all into 'manipulators'. We manipulate people into the 'projective mold' of our own TLCs. And if they don't fit, we 'throw them out' and look for another 'transference partner'.
Transference brings lovers together -- passionately -- and just as often tears them apart, with the same characteristic that brought them together, in attraction, being the main culprit in their later repulsive demise.
Every characteristic -- in its extreme -- carries the seeds to its own self-destruction (and the relationship self-destruction)...
Not to be a complete cynic here....some people do work through their negative transferences...
Our TLC's are the psychological tightropes that we all live our lives by....If we conquer the tightrope, we feel great!!! If we fall off the tightrope or strangle ourselves in the tightrope...well the ending isn't so exciting and happy...
It is like walking into a casino....
If we win, especially if we win big, we are ecstatic!!
But the odds are that more times we are going to lose in a casino than win...
And when we walk out of the casino with barely a dollar in our wallet, seduced and then ransacked, and then keep going back, over and over again, with usually the same negative result, we may or may finally see that the 'cost' of going into the casino is not worth the potential 'benefit'....
And so it is with our TLC's...
We can play our transference games subconsciously....with some idea of what is going on...
And celebrate when we 'beat our negative transferences'....
But more often than not, we are going to probably end up back in the same negative space again...
The space of our own negative self-fulfilling prophecy...
The space of our own negative transference scenario...
If we subconsciously or consciously think we are going to be rejected, then we most likely will be...
Or we may triumph briefly in our 'handicap challenge' only to be defeated again down the line...
Us human beings are remarkably, creatively -- and destructively -- resourceful.
We all (am I overgeneralizing?) have an endless variety of ways of turning a 'positive' into a 'negative' and a 'negative' into a 'worse negative' and a 'worse negative' into a 'worst nightmare negative'...
All fitted nicely and snugly into our own unique network of TLCs...
We all have choices here epecially once we understand more fully the 'pscho-dynamics' and 'potential payoffs' and 'worst nightmares' of the particular TLCs we play...
We can play our transferences...
We can let our transferences play us...
Or we can get off the transference merry-go-round or roller coaster...
In the end, -- if we want to go here -- it all comes down to a 'cost' vs. 'benefit' analysis...
And whether we really have the strength of will-power to get off our generally lifelong transference ride -- or not....
If you are attracted to a 'a man with violent tendencies...' and stereotype yourself as the 'victim'...him being the 'victimizer'...
You might have all the support in the world behind you in the form of your friends, and the police, and women's organizations, and politicians...
But behind all of this community support,
Perhaps the real personal growth starts when you ask yourself,
'Why can I not leave this man'?
And perhaps even,
How am I a 'victimizer' as well as a 'victim'?
These are not necessarily 'politically popular' or 'politically correct' questions...
But if this has been a 'repetitive, life-long process' for you,
Then perhaps you need to move beyond and below 'political correctness'...
In order to get to a deeper understanding of yourself...and what this very dangerous, pathological TLC is all about?
We are all accountable and responsible to and for ourselves in the way that we may or may not 'subconsciously' walk into 'toxic situations' and 'toxic relationships'...and even contribute to their evolution or shall we say 'de-evolution'...
In Western Society, we are so quick to label, classify, and stereotype -- 'victimizer' and 'victim'...
This is our 'either/or' system of justice...
A more 'wholistic, dialectic view of the truth' and of 'justice' -- particularly as it pertains to 'domestic violence' -- views all of us as potential and/or partial victimizers and/or victims...
Many incidents of domestic violence involve 'double assaults'...an exchange of pushing, shoving, and/or hitting...Is it right to put 80 or 90 percent of the blame on one sex?
One person instigates or provokes, the other retaliates, the first person ups the stakes, ups the 'trash talk', and the second person follows suit...this is the beginning of potential domestic violence escalating its way up the ladder -- until someone breaks -- and pushes or strikes...Who's guilty? The first person who breaks? The instigator? The retaliator? The trash-talker? Both were trash-talking...Who's innocent? The first person to dial 911?
Most men are not going to pick up the phone to report female assaults...Like many rapes, many female domestic assaults -- where the woman, not the man, is the assaulter -- go unreported....
Are men and women treated differently upon arrest? Men, if they are arrested for domestic assault, get evicted from their homes? How many women get evicted from their homes if they are charged with domestic assault? What are the statistics for men and women being charged and convicted of 'domestic assault'? 90/10 in favor of men being more likely to be charged and convicted?
Do we really believe that this is an accurate assessment of the ratio of who is being 'violent' in the domestic household? A woman loses her temper, goes ballistic on the man, red with rage, chasing him first into this room, then into that room, finally cornering him somewhere, acusing him of this, accusing him of that, continually invading his personal space no matter how hard he tries to avoid her, inciting him to finally lose his temper, to finally break, to finally push her away from him...and she says (or thinks), 'Gotcha!....You S.O.B.' (See Eric Berne, Games People Play, 1964) 'You're going to jail!!! 'Do not pass Go'! Straight from my 911 call....
And guess who is going to be 'judged' as to needing 'counseling' and needing an 'anger management program'? Not likely the woman who, red with rage, went 'Postal' on the man, and chased him from room to room, cornering him in some room in the house, the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen....No, she gets a 'Get out of jail free' card while the man is charged and either convicted and sent to jail, or if he is a first time offender, he does his 'anger management program'....
I do not wish to polarize the issue of 'civil rights between the sexes' anymore than it is already polarized.
To be sure, I am well aware that a thousand horror stories could easily be recounted to me by members of both sexes.
But I am still of the strong belief that there are some fundamental injustices and 'reverse-discrimations' going on here -- systemically -- both overtly and covertly -- against men.
At some point the issue of 'invasion of personal space' needs to be addressed by civil rights leaders of both sexes...
Men and women should both have a right to their own 'personal space' within their own home. And if one person's personal space is continually being 'invaded' to the point of intimidation and/or non-privacy, this, I speculate, is a very common 'precursor' to domestic violence . Especially, if there is alcohol involved. A man (or a woman for that matter although she is heavily protected by 911) shouldn't have to run off and spend all night in the local donut shop every time his wife or girlfriend decides to 'lose it' on him and 'start pushing his buttons until he breaks'...
Do we really believe that there is 'equality' going on here between the sexes?
Or is that a 'politically correct myth' that is being force fed upon us?
Are men losing more and more of their civil rights when the 'accuser' is a woman?
Violence should be legally unacceptable regardless of what sex it comes from...
The 'precursors' of domestic violence -- jealousy, possessiveness, unfaithfulnes, lateness, financial stress, trash-talking, instigation, retaliation, transfernce -- these should all be more fully understood and investigated if we really want to get a handle on the 'causes' of 'domestic violence'....
And no man should be charged, convicted, and/or punished with a crime that a woman would not be similarly charged, convicted, and punished with...
Anymore than a woman should be paid less than a man for doing the same work as a man...
Or anymore than a woman should not be allowed to vote...
Otherwise, the 'pretense of equality' is a sham...
Sorry, I wandered away from 'transference' into the issue of 'domestic violence' and 'civil rights between the sexes' here -- a 'personal and political sore spot' for me....
If you have a 'serial wife hitter', that most definitely is likely to be a transference issue stemming back to the man's childhood and what he likely saw his dad doing. (Mel Gibson certainly isn't doing himself -- or men in general -- any favors these days.)
But women too can have 'transference domestic violence issues'...easily determined by the fact that a woman keeps getting entangled over the course of her life with different 'violent men'...
Yesterday I heard a story from a woman at a housing shelter who was telling me that there was a couple that had just arrived there who had been sleeping on a beach in Toronto -- and were beaten up and robbed by 5 girls. Violence -- particularly today -- comes in all shapes and sizes, and both sexes.
And transference issues and domestic violence issues definitely do connect.
So too, on a different level, do civil rights issues between men and women. Because there is nothing that is going to enrage a man more than for him to believe that he is being scapegoated, labeled, and/or taking all the punishment for something his wife or girlfriend instigated and escalated to the point where she basically 'pushed his buttons' and 'manipulated' him until he 'broke'.
In this regard, we still have a long way to go to get things right on this 'domestic violence' and 'civil rights' issue between the sexes. Both as they are connected to the issue of 'transference' and the 'transference games we play' -- and apart from these same games.
-- dgb, July 13th-14th, 2010
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
In this essay, I want to pull together three central concepts in DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis: 1. Narcissism; 2. Transference; and 3. The Splitting of The Ego.
.....................................................................................................................................
1. Narcissism:
The concept of 'narcissism' holds several advantages over its 'competing' concepts (such as: hedonism/pleasure, sexuality, libido, self-interest, selfishness, egotism, arrogance, power, revenge, superiority striving...) in that it incorporates all of these different concepts into one concept -- narcissism -- and in this fashion allows us to integrate Freudian and Adlerian concepts much easier in a way that potentially makes both schools of psychology stronger as they 'compromise' on their conceptual differences. In human behavior, we usually find a mixture of pleasure-seeking, sexuality, and egotism (self-esteem issues). Freud covered the first of these areas very well (pleasure-seeking and sexuality -- as well as the 'restaint', the 'resistance', and/or the 'defense' against them); while Adler was the first to put his finger on the critical factor of self-esteem (the triadic relationship between 'inferiority feelings', 'compensation', and 'superiority striving').
The concept of narcissism 'kills both birds -- both aspects of human behavior -- with one conceptual stone, and that stone is 'narcissism'. The opposite of narcissism is 'altruism' -- the generous giving to, and caring about others... Altruism is not generally tied up to human psychopathology. Narcissism is. Thus, any discussion of human psychopathology has to centre around the concept of narcissism. Altruism, for the most part, will be discussed at a later time.
2. Transference:
The Freudian concept of 'transference' is very similar to the Adlerian concept of 'lifestyle' with a couple of significant differences in over-riding or under-riding assumptions that keep these two concepts separated from each other, such as: a) the Freudian assumption of conflict in the personality vs. the Adlerian assumption of 'unity in the personality. I opt for the assumption of 'conflicted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality. How's that for a 'working compromise' between the two schools of psychology which definitely works for me?; and b) the Freudian assumption of 'repressed memories', 'distorted memories', and 'screen memories' vs. the Adlerian assumption of 'conscious early memories reflecting a person's lifestyle' (complex -- my addition). Sometimes I will use the integrative concept of 'Transference-Lifestyle Complexes' which leads to the following DGB formula: In general, if we had more 'TLC' in the world (as in 'Tender, Loving, Care'), then we would have less pathological 'TLC's' (as in 'Transference-Lifestyle Complexes). Why? Because most TLC's are built as 'compensatory defenses' against childhood rejections (self-esteem injuries, narcissistic injuries, traumatic, ego-deflating childhood memories of painful encounters...Not all TLC's are built from childhood rejections but most of the most pathological ones are.
3. The Splitting of The Ego
For our purposes here, the ego 'splits' -- either figuratively or literally, take your choice -- in childhood for one or more of three different reasons: a) functional expedience, division of labor, specialization of sub-cognitive-emotional-behavioral functions; b) painful childhood rejections; and/or c) 'narcissistic fixation'. Items b) and c) usually occur together as it is almost a 'psychological given' that a 'perceived painful childhood rejection' (narcissistic injury, self-esteem injury, ego-traumacy...) will become a lifelong 'narcissistic fixation'.
Think of a 'physical injury'. We cut our finger. Our mind-brain-body swings into 'overdrive'. This what Adler, in 1906, called 'supervalent cerebral activity'. The mind-brain-body rushes 'clotting factors' down to the site of the injury to 'clot' the wound before we bleed to death and/or 'opportunistic outside invaders (germs, microbes, bacteria, viruses..) can take advantage of the situation to find easy access into our bloodstream. Which is why our 'immune system' is also given instructions to 'rush down to the site of the injury' to 'protect this new point of bodily weakness and vulnerablity'.
Well, the 'psyche' (or 'mind-brain-body') does the same thing in the event of a 'psychological' or 'narcissistic' (self-esteem) injury -- a psychological traumacy. The most critical narcissistic injuries tend to take place in early childhood up to about 6 or 7 years old. To be sure, we can -- and will -- meet with a wide assortment of other narcissistic (self-esteem) injuries during the course of our whole lifetime but none seem to be generally as critical to our psychological well-being as the psychological injuries sustained in our first 6 or 7 years of our existence, during our main 'character forming' years. Usually, most narcissistic injuries that we sustain after this point in time can somehow be 'associated with' and 'fit into' our 'Transference-Lifestyle Complex Tempate' in some creative and/or destructive fashion or another. Our lifelong character patterns -- our 're-creation, repetition, and mastery compulsions' -- have been established and will continue to either evolve and/or devolve in some creative and/or destructive fashion or another. Our 'TLC's (Transference-Lifestyle Compulsions/Complexes/Neuroses) can be viewed as our own guided and/or misguided, creative and/or destructive, attempt at 'compensatory self-psychotherapy'. The usually life-long process of a person 'setting up and engineering his or her own transference process' is very much equivalent to a person setting up and engineering his or her own 'medical and/or psychotherapy' program...which is perhaps the main reason why the 'doctor' and/or 'therapist' may be met with so much 'resistance' from the client in the clinical room. There is likely to be a 'conflict in wills' -- a conflict in 'wills to power' -- as both try to compete with each other as to whose 'therapeutic program' they are going to institute and regulate.
As far as the 'splitting of the ego', our psyche becomes and remains partly a 'war zone' from our earliest rejecting encounters and/or relationships. This 'psychological war zone' is easily at least partly 'transferrable' onto others as we welcome or don't welcome them into our own 'Personal, Internalized Transference Scenarios ('PITS' -- or stated differently -- our own 'Obsessive-Compulsive Transference Psychodrama Disorders').
We can play any part: 'superego', 'ego', 'id', 'topdog', 'underdog', 'personna', 'shadow', 'Nurturing Parent', 'Rejecting Parent', 'Good Child', 'Bad Child'...you name it -- if it is a part of our transference psychodrama -- we can play it. Metaphorically speaking (no, I'm not schizophrenic), it is as if we all have 'antennae' and 'radar' attached to our heads such that we easily -- consciously or subconsciously -- pick out people in our lives who 'fit into our personal psychodrama' (as we do into theirs). We call this 'chemistry' -- as long as it is creative and passionate and mutually facilitating....Once it 'flips' over into 'negative transference' and turns into a 'psychological war game', then our 'chemistry' starts to lose its 'attractive, exciting, idealizing apeal (positive transference, love, lust...)
May the transference games begin!
Oh, they are so exciting when they are full of seduction, idealization, love, passion, and lust...
A conflation of egotism, power and sex making our hormones go crazy...off the wall crazy...
But be aware of the dangers of the PITS....our own internalized obsessive-compulsive transference disorders...
They can take us to the top of Mt. Everest...and then drop us -- out of control -- off the same mountain top plunging towards the valley or abyss below...
Transference is not a child's game even though it starts in childhood.
Transference often turns into a 'life or death struggle' for self-esteem, and self-existence...
And the mechanisms of transference are often skewed towards both relationship and self-destruction... Our own negative self-fulfilling prophecy...
Transference turns us all into 'psychological hypocrites'.
Freud had one (rebellious underdog) 'ego state' where he basically had an 'obsessive-compulsion to invade other people's personal privacy'. At the same time, he had another (rejecting topdog) ego state that basically went 'ballistic' (his internalized rejecting dad) when other people tried to invade his own privacy. This is perhaps one of the main reasons why 'hypocrisy' is so prevalent in human behavior. Opposing behavior patterns in our own personality face off against each other in the dynamics of our Transference-Lifestyle Complexes/Conflicts.
Transference turns us all into both serial rejectors and serial victims -- in the mold of our earliest childhood rejections.
Transference turns us all into 'manipulators'. We manipulate people into the 'projective mold' of our own TLCs. And if they don't fit, we 'throw them out' and look for another 'transference partner'.
Transference brings lovers together -- passionately -- and just as often tears them apart, with the same characteristic that brought them together, in attraction, being the main culprit in their later repulsive demise.
Every characteristic -- in its extreme -- carries the seeds to its own self-destruction (and the relationship self-destruction)...
Not to be a complete cynic here....some people do work through their negative transferences...
Our TLC's are the psychological tightropes that we all live our lives by....If we conquer the tightrope, we feel great!!! If we fall off the tightrope or strangle ourselves in the tightrope...well the ending isn't so exciting and happy...
It is like walking into a casino....
If we win, especially if we win big, we are ecstatic!!
But the odds are that more times we are going to lose in a casino than win...
And when we walk out of the casino with barely a dollar in our wallet, seduced and then ransacked, and then keep going back, over and over again, with usually the same negative result, we may or may finally see that the 'cost' of going into the casino is not worth the potential 'benefit'....
And so it is with our TLC's...
We can play our transference games subconsciously....with some idea of what is going on...
And celebrate when we 'beat our negative transferences'....
But more often than not, we are going to probably end up back in the same negative space again...
The space of our own negative self-fulfilling prophecy...
The space of our own negative transference scenario...
If we subconsciously or consciously think we are going to be rejected, then we most likely will be...
Or we may triumph briefly in our 'handicap challenge' only to be defeated again down the line...
Us human beings are remarkably, creatively -- and destructively -- resourceful.
We all (am I overgeneralizing?) have an endless variety of ways of turning a 'positive' into a 'negative' and a 'negative' into a 'worse negative' and a 'worse negative' into a 'worst nightmare negative'...
All fitted nicely and snugly into our own unique network of TLCs...
We all have choices here epecially once we understand more fully the 'pscho-dynamics' and 'potential payoffs' and 'worst nightmares' of the particular TLCs we play...
We can play our transferences...
We can let our transferences play us...
Or we can get off the transference merry-go-round or roller coaster...
In the end, -- if we want to go here -- it all comes down to a 'cost' vs. 'benefit' analysis...
And whether we really have the strength of will-power to get off our generally lifelong transference ride -- or not....
If you are attracted to a 'a man with violent tendencies...' and stereotype yourself as the 'victim'...him being the 'victimizer'...
You might have all the support in the world behind you in the form of your friends, and the police, and women's organizations, and politicians...
But behind all of this community support,
Perhaps the real personal growth starts when you ask yourself,
'Why can I not leave this man'?
And perhaps even,
How am I a 'victimizer' as well as a 'victim'?
These are not necessarily 'politically popular' or 'politically correct' questions...
But if this has been a 'repetitive, life-long process' for you,
Then perhaps you need to move beyond and below 'political correctness'...
In order to get to a deeper understanding of yourself...and what this very dangerous, pathological TLC is all about?
We are all accountable and responsible to and for ourselves in the way that we may or may not 'subconsciously' walk into 'toxic situations' and 'toxic relationships'...and even contribute to their evolution or shall we say 'de-evolution'...
In Western Society, we are so quick to label, classify, and stereotype -- 'victimizer' and 'victim'...
This is our 'either/or' system of justice...
A more 'wholistic, dialectic view of the truth' and of 'justice' -- particularly as it pertains to 'domestic violence' -- views all of us as potential and/or partial victimizers and/or victims...
Many incidents of domestic violence involve 'double assaults'...an exchange of pushing, shoving, and/or hitting...Is it right to put 80 or 90 percent of the blame on one sex?
One person instigates or provokes, the other retaliates, the first person ups the stakes, ups the 'trash talk', and the second person follows suit...this is the beginning of potential domestic violence escalating its way up the ladder -- until someone breaks -- and pushes or strikes...Who's guilty? The first person who breaks? The instigator? The retaliator? The trash-talker? Both were trash-talking...Who's innocent? The first person to dial 911?
Most men are not going to pick up the phone to report female assaults...Like many rapes, many female domestic assaults -- where the woman, not the man, is the assaulter -- go unreported....
Are men and women treated differently upon arrest? Men, if they are arrested for domestic assault, get evicted from their homes? How many women get evicted from their homes if they are charged with domestic assault? What are the statistics for men and women being charged and convicted of 'domestic assault'? 90/10 in favor of men being more likely to be charged and convicted?
Do we really believe that this is an accurate assessment of the ratio of who is being 'violent' in the domestic household? A woman loses her temper, goes ballistic on the man, red with rage, chasing him first into this room, then into that room, finally cornering him somewhere, acusing him of this, accusing him of that, continually invading his personal space no matter how hard he tries to avoid her, inciting him to finally lose his temper, to finally break, to finally push her away from him...and she says (or thinks), 'Gotcha!....You S.O.B.' (See Eric Berne, Games People Play, 1964) 'You're going to jail!!! 'Do not pass Go'! Straight from my 911 call....
And guess who is going to be 'judged' as to needing 'counseling' and needing an 'anger management program'? Not likely the woman who, red with rage, went 'Postal' on the man, and chased him from room to room, cornering him in some room in the house, the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen....No, she gets a 'Get out of jail free' card while the man is charged and either convicted and sent to jail, or if he is a first time offender, he does his 'anger management program'....
I do not wish to polarize the issue of 'civil rights between the sexes' anymore than it is already polarized.
To be sure, I am well aware that a thousand horror stories could easily be recounted to me by members of both sexes.
But I am still of the strong belief that there are some fundamental injustices and 'reverse-discrimations' going on here -- systemically -- both overtly and covertly -- against men.
At some point the issue of 'invasion of personal space' needs to be addressed by civil rights leaders of both sexes...
Men and women should both have a right to their own 'personal space' within their own home. And if one person's personal space is continually being 'invaded' to the point of intimidation and/or non-privacy, this, I speculate, is a very common 'precursor' to domestic violence . Especially, if there is alcohol involved. A man (or a woman for that matter although she is heavily protected by 911) shouldn't have to run off and spend all night in the local donut shop every time his wife or girlfriend decides to 'lose it' on him and 'start pushing his buttons until he breaks'...
Do we really believe that there is 'equality' going on here between the sexes?
Or is that a 'politically correct myth' that is being force fed upon us?
Are men losing more and more of their civil rights when the 'accuser' is a woman?
Violence should be legally unacceptable regardless of what sex it comes from...
The 'precursors' of domestic violence -- jealousy, possessiveness, unfaithfulnes, lateness, financial stress, trash-talking, instigation, retaliation, transfernce -- these should all be more fully understood and investigated if we really want to get a handle on the 'causes' of 'domestic violence'....
And no man should be charged, convicted, and/or punished with a crime that a woman would not be similarly charged, convicted, and punished with...
Anymore than a woman should be paid less than a man for doing the same work as a man...
Or anymore than a woman should not be allowed to vote...
Otherwise, the 'pretense of equality' is a sham...
Sorry, I wandered away from 'transference' into the issue of 'domestic violence' and 'civil rights between the sexes' here -- a 'personal and political sore spot' for me....
If you have a 'serial wife hitter', that most definitely is likely to be a transference issue stemming back to the man's childhood and what he likely saw his dad doing. (Mel Gibson certainly isn't doing himself -- or men in general -- any favors these days.)
But women too can have 'transference domestic violence issues'...easily determined by the fact that a woman keeps getting entangled over the course of her life with different 'violent men'...
Yesterday I heard a story from a woman at a housing shelter who was telling me that there was a couple that had just arrived there who had been sleeping on a beach in Toronto -- and were beaten up and robbed by 5 girls. Violence -- particularly today -- comes in all shapes and sizes, and both sexes.
And transference issues and domestic violence issues definitely do connect.
So too, on a different level, do civil rights issues between men and women. Because there is nothing that is going to enrage a man more than for him to believe that he is being scapegoated, labeled, and/or taking all the punishment for something his wife or girlfriend instigated and escalated to the point where she basically 'pushed his buttons' and 'manipulated' him until he 'broke'.
In this regard, we still have a long way to go to get things right on this 'domestic violence' and 'civil rights' issue between the sexes. Both as they are connected to the issue of 'transference' and the 'transference games we play' -- and apart from these same games.
-- dgb, July 13th-14th, 2010
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
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