Everything starts on the principle of 'homeostatic (or dialectic-democratic in philosophy and politics) balance'. This is the same principle that rules the study and practice of medicine (i.e., again, the principle of homeostatic balance).
The balanced mind and body is generally a healthy mind and body, whereas conversely, the 'out of balance' mind and body is generally an unhealthy, neurotic, and/or pathological mind and body.
In medicine, the danger of too many, or the wrong type of, medical drugs (or for that matter, herbs and vitamins) is that the 'intended cure' can become a 'problem in itself' -- sometimes worse than the original problem -- if the 'intended cure' puts the mind and/or body 'out of balance' to a worse degree than was the original situation.
In a multi-billion dollar industry of 'drugs, drugs, and more drugs' the whole 'side effect' problem can very quickly escalate out of control to the point where the drugs by themselves (and/or herbs and vitamins), not properly monitored or integrated or moderated, can generate a 'life-threatening' situation that can become more dangerous and threatening than the original problem before we started looking for that 'magic bullet fix'.
And so it is too with the mind -- and 'cognitive-emotional-behavioral-existential problems'...
Oftentimes, the 'compensatory narcissistic avoidance and/or fixation and/or the whole neurotic-transference-complex' can be worse than the original 'narcissistic (self-esteem) injury or 'psychic/physical trauma'....particularly in early childhood where such trauma -- and the 'neurotic-narcissistic compensations that we attach to them -- are quite likely to create 'life-altering changes in our mind and body...including in our personality, our character structure, and our intra (as well as 'inter')-psychic-dynamics'...
To differing degrees and in different areas, probably most current schools of psychology and psychotherapy live by the principle of 'homeostatic balance': Psychoanalysis, Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Transactional Analysis, and Gestalt Therapy for starters...
The trouble -- or at least part of the trouble -- is that individual schools of psychology and psychotherapy, just like individual people, have their own 'neurotic problems, fixations, and/or complexes'...
Often the 'neurotic complexes' of a school of psychology are a function of the neurotic complexes of their creators and/or leaders...
This is no different than a particular psychoanalyst getting caught up in his or her own 'counter-transference complexes' with a client -- and not being aware of what is happening.
For example, a therapist who was him or herself 'sexually assaulted' as a child must be very careful as to not 'project' his or her own 'counter-transference memories/complexes' onto the therapeutic work of his or her client in such a way that it 'distorts' the client's own work.
The same goes for any therapist who enters the therapeutic situation with any 'pre-ordained, one-sided' theory that can easily distort the reality of the 'client's own experience' which might be quite different than the therapist's pre-ordained, one-sided theory. This goes for both 'The Seduction-Traumacy Theory' and 'The Oedipal-Fantasy-Impulse Theory' -- each 'dialectically ripped apart from each other' -- when it could very well be the case that the two theories are best kept close by each other, indeed, hand in hand to each other, such that the therapist has the flexibility in the clinical situation to think and/or make decisions on the basis of any of the following choices: 1. to remain epistemologically uncommitted to anything the client might say; 2. to believe that the client is telling the truth; 3. to not believing the client is telling the truth; 4. to believe that there may be an element of truth and/or distortion in any assertion and/or memory that the client shares with the therapist; 5. to believe that there is quite likely going to be an element of both 'traumacy' (physical and/or narcissistic/self-esteem injury) and 'compensatory phobic and/or counter-phobic, and/or even reverse-transference impulsive behavior' resulting from the original traumacy....
For example, if a person walks into the clinical office and claims that he or she was a 'victim' in a particular situation, say as a child, then, all else being equal, a therapist should probably take this assertion at face value, and even if there were assertions of 'numerous childhood victimizations' by the same or different people...
However, if the client keeps on reeling off assertions of a 'lifetime of childhood and adult abuse' - as often as this may indeed be the case -- still, there should likely come a point in time in the therapeutic process where the therapist will need to both figure out him or herself, and then describe this process to his or her client, specifically, how the client is at least partly 'self-engineering his or her own victimization process' -- and what the client is 'getting out of this self-victimization process' in terms of 'secondary benefits or gains'.
To bring a little 'Transactional Analysis terminology into the picture, and mix it with my own terminology, the therapist needs to show the client how he or she is getting some sort of 'narcissistic payoff' (secondary gain) from 'playing the type of compensatory transference game that he or she is playing' which may be extremely self-destructive but pathologically/perversely rewarding' at the same time.
My work is very much a spin off of Dr. Eric Berne's best-seller, originally published in 1964, Games People Play.
Eric Berne was very much influenced by the work of Paul Federn who was a part of Freud's inner Vienna circle, a dedicated 'apostle' of Freud who at the same time had some important theoretical and therapeutic disagreements with Freud that he constantly downplayed and yet were extremely important to the evolutionary development of both Object Relations and Transactional Analysis.
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From the internet, google Paul Federn...http://www.answers.com/topic/federn-paul
Paul Federn
Psychoanalysis: Paul Federn |
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Paul Federn, an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst, was born in Vienna on October 13, 1871, and died in New York on May 4, 1950.
The son of a famous Viennese doctor and nephew of a celebrated Prague rabbi, Federn was raised in a family with a longstanding liberal tradition. After receiving his medical diploma in 1895, he interned in general medicine with Hermann Nothnagel, who introduced him to the works of Sigmund Freud. Deeply influenced by Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, in 1904 he devoted himself to psychoanalysis and, with Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and Rudolf Reitler, became one of Freud's early disciples.
Federn was as interested in the analysis of social phenomena as he was in prevention and treatment of disease. In Zur Psychologie der Revolution: die Vaterlose Gesellschaft (On the psychology of revolution: the fatherless society; 1919), he analyzed the challenge to authority by the postwar generation as unconscious parricide aimed at creating a "fatherless society." In line with his interest in applying psychoanalysis to public health, in 1926 he published, together with Heinrich Meng, Das psychoanalytische Volksbuch (Popular psychoanalysis).
Of the Viennese disciples, Federn worked longest with Freud and was highly esteemed by him. He was such a loyal supporter of Freud that he was referred to as the "Apostle Paul" of the psychoanalytic movement. His position within the Psychoanalytic Society continued to grow over the years. In 1922 he helped Eduard Hitschmann and Helene Deutsch establish the Vienna Ambulatorium, and during the 1930s he was one of the coeditors of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and editor of Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Pädagogik. But the most important source of official recognition came from Freud himself, who, in 1924, made him, along with Anna Freud, his official representative and vice president of the Vienna Society, a position he held until 1938.
After emigrating to America in 1938, Federn settled in New York. Though he got recognition for his medical diploma (which he received before 1914), it was not until 1946 that he was officially recognized as a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He committed suicide after the recurrence of what he felt was an incurable cancer.
In addition to ego psychology, Federn was interested in the therapy of psychosis. Even his earliest writings, devoted to the sources of sadism and masochism and typical dream sensations (1914), manifest his interest in the nature and function of the ego, along with considerations of narcissism.
The results of Federn's research took time to come to fruition, since his ideas about the ego required a long period of gestation. In 1926 his important essay "Some Variations in Ego-Feeling" appeared, followed in 1928 by "Narcissism in the Structure of the Ego," and in 1929 by "Das Ich als Subjekt und Objekt im Narzissmus" (The ego as subject and object in narcissism). His phenomenological description of the ego as experience coinciding with "ego feeling" diverged considerably from Freud's structural approach. Although his conclusions were far removed from Freud's, out of loyalty Federn preferred to downplay his own theoretical contributions, such as "ego feeling," the "sense of reality," the "limits" and "states" of the ego, "ego cathexis," the "median" nature of narcissism, and the death drive. For although Freud had a great deal of respect for Federn, he did not value Federn's theoretical proposals very highly.
In his studies of schizophrenic patients, Federn came to the conclusion that, far from being excessively cathected with libido, their egos possessed inadequate cathectic energy. On Federn's hypothesis, contrary to the hypotheses of Freud and Karl Abraham, it was an absence rather than an excess of narcissistic libido that determined the psychotic's problems with the object. As a result, Federn's approach to treating psychotics, described in "The Analysis of Psychotics" (1934) and other important texts he wrote while in America, involved supporting the patient's efforts at integration by trying to prevent the emergence of the repressed and by strengthening the patient's defenses. According to Federn, transference in psychosis should not be interpreted. He felt that it was important to avoid negative transference and to help the psychotic confront problems by means of female support figures.
Although the response to Federn's ego psychology was limited, he had several illustrious followers, including Edoardo Weiss and Hermann Nunberg, along with a small group of American analysts such as Bertram D. Lewin, I. Peter Glauber, and Martin Bergmann. In psychiatry the influence of his ideas is obvious. His ideas also served as a foundation for the transactional analysis of Eric Berne, who refers to the theory of "ego states." Weiss was responsible for the posthumous publication of Federn's writings, Ego Psychology and the Psychoses (1952), a book that contributed greatly to spreading the ideas of one of the earliest and most faithful pioneers of psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Federn, Ernst. (1972). Thirty-five years with Freud. Journal of Clinical Psychology, suppl. 32, 18-34.Federn, Paul. (1914). On dreams of flying. In Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (Ed.), The first freudians (pp. 121-128). New York: Jason Aronson.
——. (1919). Zur psychologie der revolution: die vaterlose gesellschaft. Vienna: Anzengruber-Verlag.
——. (1926). Some variations in ego-feeling. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7, 434-444.
——. (1928). Narcissism in the structure of the ego. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 401-419.
——. (1934). The analysis of psychotics. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 15, 209-214.
——. (1952). Ego-psychology and the psychoses (Edoardo Weiss, Ed.). New York: Basic Books.
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Eric Berne rebelled against Classical Psychoanalysis, indulged more in the area of Object Relations, taking some of Paul Federn's ideas -- particularly the idea of 'ego states' -- and his own concept of 'game playing' (I don't know his influences here) -- and voila -- thus, was created the beginning of Transactional Analysis.
From one of the inside pages of my paperback 1967 edition of Berne's Games People Play, I quote:
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No book in recent years has had such phenomenal success as Dr. Eric Berne's Games People Play.
Originally published in the summer of 1964, the book sold, over the next three years, more than 600,000 copies in the original cloth edition at $5.00. It remained on The New York Times' best-seller list for over two years -- longer than any nonfiction book over the preceding decade.
What has made this book so amazingly popular? It is probably because people have recognized their own actions and reactions in the games Dr. Berne has investigated and explored -- the games we play with each other almost every day of our lives.
As Dr. Berne has said, 'Most people, in most of their family and business relationships, are constantly playing games with each other. What's more, they are striving -- often unconsciously -- for an emotional 'payoff' which is startlingly different from what they might rationally expect to get from winning or losing their game. Here is an intriguing phenomenon which everyone has observed at one time or another... But never, until Dr. Berne, have we had anything like Games People Play.
Dr. Berne wittily christens and lucidly explains for you 120 of the games which people jump, fall or get pushed into (including such common pastimes as Frigid Man, Protective PTA, Blemish, and Now I've Got You, You...S.O.B.) And he gives you the tried and proven, intellectually elegant anti-game with which to liberate yourself from each game whenever you say so.
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I take Transactional Analysis back to Classical Psychoanalysis, back to Object Relations, mix it with the 'existentialism' of Gestalt Therapy and the 'teleology' (purposefulness) of Adlerian Psychology -- in effect, take all the 'rejected and rejecting wayward sons and daughters' of Classical Psychoanalysis back into the original Freudian Family -- a more liberal thinking Freudian Family under the roof of Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy-Psychology -- and this is what I am calling DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis.
As far as Eric Berne's direct and/or indirect influence on my own work, I have simply taken Berne's idea of 'games playing' one step further. Here they are called 'transference games' which can be connected to 'transference scripts' which in turn can be connected to 'transference (usually traumatic) memories' and their 'narcissistic compensations', 'primary and secondary gains' or 'creative and/or destructive, partly or fully, ego-satisfying narcissistic payoffs'.
I will leave you with this integrative theoretical and therapeutic connection until we pursue this line of thinking at a later date...
A few other thoughts to leave you with on this hot July day....
We are all serial rejectors in the particular style of our earliest remembered rejections. -- dgb.
Our greatest fears of rejection and our greatest capacity to reject others in the same way that we have been rejected from our earliest childhood memories -- both of these capacities and potentialities existentially play themselves out in our 'transference attraction-rejection games' which unfortunately generally play themselves out in our most intimate -- and 'anti-intimate' -- relationships: i.e., between husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, ex-lover and ex-lover...as well as in its original childhood rendition perhaps between father and son, mother and daughter, mother and son, father and daughter, brother and brother, sister and sister, brother and sister, child and stranger...In all of these different scenarios, from the ego-traumacy of early encounters and early relationships, arises man's greatest potential to seriously -- and purposely albeit often subconsciously -- emotionally and/or physically hurt his fellow man...In its worst form, this psychological rule of thumb can perhaps best be summarized as: 'What comes around, goes around.' - dgb.
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"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel
that crushed it."
-- Mark Twain
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-- dgb, July 8th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Progress...
