I am about to embark on a critique of as many of Freud's most important and famous essays, ideas, theories, counter-theories, and their derrivatives as I can get to.
Now, I am in a bit of a quandry here. I need to do some explaining before I start this ambitious enterprise.
Firstly, I am not a psychoanalyst. I have never seen a psychoanalyst, and never stepped a foot inside a psychoanalytic training session -- never became seiously interested in Psychoanalysis until about the mid 80s (although I do remember one Psychoanalytic course standing out for me while I was studying psychology at The University of Waterloo from 1974 to 1978,
Back when I was more of a 'formal post-undergraduate student' in the 1980s, (I had graduated from The University of Waterloo with an Honours B.A. in psychology in 1979), Psychoanalysis wasn't close enough to the top of my value priority list -- Gestalt Therapy and Adlerian Therapy were both higher up on my 'value priority totem pole'.
Indeed, when I became involved with both latter institutes, both 'schools' of psychotherapy -- i.e., The Gestalt Institute between 1979 and 1991, and The Adlerian Institute in 1980 and 1981 -- I viewed myself primarily as a 'humanistic-existential' and 'cognitive-general semantic' psycho-theorist; not a Psychoanalytic theorist.
Psychoanalysis remained in the 'id-shadow' of my thinking. Until, let us say about the mid-1980s. From reading a particular Gestalt Therapy book, I became more exposed to Jung and Hegel, which created more interest with me in both 'dialectic thinkers' -- indeed, Freud, Jung, and Perls had all been 'dualistically' and 'dialectically' influenced by Hegel, either directly and/or indirectly. In between Hegel and Freud, Nietzsche in his first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' can be viewed as the 'bridge' between Hegel and Freud.
By studying Perls, Adler, and Jung, I couldn't help but get 're-involved' with Freud -- and integrating the ideas of all of them -- with Freud functioning as the 'hub' of the wheel with various types of different 'spokes' generating outwards from Freud at different angles and in partly different directions. Still, Freud could be seen as the hub that held all the spokes together that made up the 'multi-dialectic wholism, unity -- and functionality' -- of the wheel.
What was starting to come together for me in the mid 80s to early 90s was 'GAP Theory and Therapy' -- as in 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy' -- with Jungian Psychology entering more into the equation over about the last two or three years with papers I have written here in Hegel's Hotel on 'Gods, Myths, and Psychologists' (2008-2011).
In the early 1990s, I wandered into the middle of The Psychoanalytic-Masson Seduction Theory Controversy, reading Masson's two books, 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory', and 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst, as well as Janet Malcolm's controversial book (which I didn't know was controversial until about 10 or more years later): In The Freud Archives.
Dr. Jeffrey Masson used to be The Projects Director of The Freud Archive for a very short period about 1982, until his very provocative and controversial ideas about the main reason why Freud started abandoning or 'suppressing' The Seduction Theory shortly after his own provocative and controversial essay on the connection between 'hysteria' and 'childhood sexual abuse' stunned doctors back at the time, the leader of the professional group Freud read this 1896 paper to (The Aetiology of Hysteria) calling Freud's essay a 'scientific fairy tale'.
Masson claimed that Freud 'lost moral courage' shortly afterwards because of the potentially coercive, intimdating effect that they could have on his professional career as a clinical psychologist.
I emailed Masson for the first time back in the 1990s after Masson had taken up his new career in New Zealand as an animal psychologist specializing in the 'emotions of animals'. My email relationship with Dr. Masson started off sporadically -- as I sought to gain his trust and respect -- gained momentum over the last few years, culminating in a short email interview I did with him on his up-to-date thoughts and feelings relative to those very emotionally volatile years in the 1980s before and after he left the Psychoanalytic Institute -- and now seems to have fallen off the map again as I opened up the subject of 'Freud and his cocaine use -- particularly in 1895 when it seems very likely to me that it played a crucial role in the Emma Ekstein, Freud, and Fliess Nasal Surgery Fiasco'. Whether it was this issue or something else -- I was going through some of my own personal traumacies about six months ago -- it seemed rather obvious to me that Dr. Masson didn't want to stir up any new controversies around the issue of Freud and cocaine -- which I can hardly blame him -- 10 years of professional and litigation 'Hell' is way more than enough for any man or woman to endure -- and besides, Masson had just finished editing and had published a beautiful new hardcover edition of Freud's 1899 (1900) classic work, 'The Interpretation of Dreams'.
Anyways, over the last two or three years, I have become progressively more and more interested in Psychoanalysis -- and integrating Freud's pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory ideas with his later post-1896 Classical Psychoanalytic ideas that include the theories of: Childhood Sexuality, Fantasy Theory, Screen Memory Theory (1899), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality including his controversial Oedipal Theory (1905), Transference Theory (1912), Narcissistic Theory (1914), Life and Death Instinct Theory (1920), Ego Superego, and The Id Theory (19230, and the beginning of Object Relations Theory (The Splitting of The Ego, 1938).
I want to integrate all 50 years of Freud's clinical work and theorizing -- not just the work he did after 1896.
I am a post-Hegelian Dialectic Integrative Theorist -- and integrating theories is probably what I do best in the world -- and am certainly most passionate about.
The name of my particular 'school' of psychology can be called either:
1. GAP-DGB Multi-Dialectic-Integrative (MDI) Philosophy-Psychology (or Psychoanalysis); and/or any shorter version of the above...
My 'school of philosophy-psychology' -- at least as it applies here -- is primarily 'Psychoanalytic' in its content, structure, and psycho-dynamic process. But since I am not formally trained in Psychoanalysis, I will use the term loosely as a base of comparison and contrast between Classical Psychoanalysis and Quantum Psychoanalysis -- or I will use some shorter form of either of the two names above.
1a. Classical Psychoanalysis focuses on the clash between unconscious or repressed instinctual impulses (coming from 'the id') on the one hand, and a concerted 'restraint or defense' against these impulses arising into consciousness on the other hand, and/or being acted on -- this defense comes from a combination of the activities of 'the superego' and/or 'the ego' -- until the ego can ideally find a more satisfactory and satisfying arrangement -- a 'compromise-formation' and/or a more complete release of the instinctual impulse in a more satisfactory place and/or at a more satisfactory time. This instinctual release ideally results in the temporary 'homeostatic/dialectic balance' (the Freudian 'constancy' principle) between the id and the superego/ego until the arrival of a new instinctual impulse throws the person/organism/psyche out of balance again.
In human neurosis, a satisfactory compromise-formation between ego and id is never really achieved. Either the id overpowers the ego (which I call a Narcissistic-Dionysian Neurosis) or the superego and ego overpower the id to the point of an absence or lack of instinctual release in the organism, resulting in a 'deadening of the psyche/self/organism' (which I call an Apollonian Over-Self-Control Neurosis).
Within this 'neurotic bi-polarity spectrum', you can also get alternations between the two of them -- which is generally called 'bi-polar disorder' or 'manic depression'. You can also get different names for different subsets of neuroses in this bi-polar spectrum such as: distancing (anal schizoid) neuroses; anxiety neuroses, approval-seeking neuroses, phobias, obsessions, OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) Borderline Personality Disorder, and more...
Human neurosis can generally be summed up in the sentence: 'I am (or a significant part of my personality is) not wanted here, not invited, not liked, not accepted, not appreciated, not acknowleged, not relevant...
Transactional Analysis summed up the overarching idea above under two polar headings: 1. You're okay, I'm not okay'; 2. I'm okay, you're not okay'; or the two condensed together: 3. You're not okay, I'm not okay.
This applies to Freud himself just as much as it applies to anyone and everyone else...
Freud once said that you had/have to be a psychoanalyst in order to properly understand what comes out of 'the depths of the unconscious' and particularly the 'dynamics of repression'...
I say, Well, repression is still a very controversial concept and subject matter that sometimes (often) defies what many theorists would call 'good rational-empiricism'. It can easily become a 'circular concept' with no apparent foundational basis except in the eyes and ears of the theorist who 'believes in the existence of repression in the first place'. Thus, 'repression' became a concept that was most easily accepted when Freud was 'preaching to his own Freudian choir'. Many more 'rationally-empirically minded theorists' (including myself) became very skeptical about the concept -- which if the philosopher, David Hume had every seen it -- would have probably said 'should be committed to flames'. I am not as 'empirically extremist' as David Hume was but still I tend to generally look at this concept with a very skeptical eye, depending partly on the context of what the case material is under discussion....
A psychoanalyist says, 'You are repressed.' You reply, 'I am not repressed.' And the psychoanalyst then uses your 'resistance' as further evidence that 'you are repressed'. That is what you call 'circular reasoning'. (Of course, there remains the opposite possibility that 'I am repressed -- and don't know it -- which could change if I was willing to commit thousands of dollars to my own personal psychoanalysis. I am not.
How do you ever 'prove' the existence of a 'repression' except for the psychoanalyst's 'interpretation' as such, and how do you distinguish it from the much more common and more easily validated concept/phenomenon of 'suppression' -- or 'conscious dissociation'?
All of the concepts of 'suppression', 'subconscious', and 'dissociation' have more 'tangible rational empiricism' attached to them than Freud's concept of 'repression' -- or even his concept of 'unconscious'. James Strachey, the main editor of Freud's Standard 24 Volume Edition, says that one of the main reasons that Freud introduced the concept of 'the id' in 1923 was to help avoid all the ambiguity of the concept of 'the unconscious'.
However, Freud's concept of 'the id' -- created in 1923 in his famous essay, 'The Ego and The Id' -- undid some theoretical problems while opening up some new ones....Each and every 'classification system' will have its own particular 'gaps'.
I use the term 'unconscious' but often hesitatingly, and generally speaking, I am much more comfortable with the concept of 'subconscious'. I don't think I will ever use the concept of 'repression'. I believe in 'the psychology of defense' but, generally speaking, I do not support the 'psychology of repression'.
Does this take me out of the 'domain of Psychoanalysis'? The Psychoanalytic Establishment would obviously say 'yes' immediately, further supported by the fact that I have no formal training in Psychoanalysis. But The Psychoanalytic Establishment and Institute is partly like 'Hotel California' -- once you get in, you can't get out, because you become 'locked into their particular paradigm' which includes Freud's own 'transference neurosis' relative to his father which affected all of his professonal and personal relations as well as his most basic psychoanalytic assumptions.
When Freud was alive, you had to be like Melanie Klein (no one else was) -- female and perceived as non-threatening -- in order to 'break through the wall of Freud's paradigm' -- and no man has 'broken through the neurotic paradigm of Freud's father-transference neurosis in Classical Psychoanalysis' unless he has either left Psychoanalysis completely (Adler, Jung, Reich, Rank, Ferenczi, Horney, Sullivan, Erickson, Fromm, Perls, Masson...and many more...) or followed 'Melanie Klein's skirt' into the paradigm of Object Relations and Self-Psychology.
Most of Object Relations and all of Self-Psychology developed after Freud had died. But for a few years, it seems possible that there was perhaps a 'running positive dialectic' between Freud and Melanie Klein where Freud may have actually been partly influenced by Klein's work in a way that Pierre Janet never could. You see, 'Object Relations' -- a 'sub-school' of Psychoanalysis -- founded mainly by Melanie Klein, was an extension of Pierre Janet's ideas of 'the splitting of the ego', 'the alter-ego', and 'the dissociated personality' where 'ego' and 'alter-ego' are 'dissociated', 'alientated', 'disconnected' from each other.
With all due respect to Freud, the idea of 'the splitting of the ego' which Freud finally acknowledged and accepted towards the end of his career -- and stated that the idea seemed both strangely old and new at the same time (I wonder why) -- and the associated ideas of 'alter-ego' and 'dissociation between opposing ego-states' -- all of these ideas were much more 'theoretically and therapeutically useful' (at least in this author's strong editorial opinion) than Freud's 'hanging on concept' of 'repression'.
Perhaps even 'the Id' should be viewed as having an 'ego-state' extension that I would/do call 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic (selfish, egotistic, sensual, sexual) Ego' ('DNE' for short). The DNE can in turn be 'split' into 'The DNS' and 'The DNU' -- i.e., 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underdog or Underego', and 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Topdog or Superego'. Thus, you can have 'vertical splits' and 'horizontal splits' in the personality: 'superego' vs. 'underego' being an example of a 'vertical power split', and 'Approval-Seeking Underego' vs. 'Dionsysian-Narcissistic Underego' being an example of a 'horizontal power split'.
In my frame of thinking following this line of thinking, I differentiate between 'six auxilliary ego-states' and 'one Central (Mediating, Executive) Ego.
...........................................................................................................
The Gap-DGB Integrative (Psychoanalytic) Model of The Psyche
The six auxilliary ego-states are:
1. The Nurturing-Supportive Superego (NSS);
2. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Superego (DNS);
3. The Righteous-Rejecting Superego (RRS);
4. The Approval-Seeking Underego (ASU);
5. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underego (DNU);
6. The Righteous-Rejecting (Rebellious) Underego (RRU).
And the main decision-making ego-state is...
7. The Central (Mediating-Executive) Ego (CE)
Working downwards into the subconscious/unconscious, we have
8. The Dream Catcher/Weaver (DCW);
9. The Shadow-Id (Secret Interests) (SI)
10. The Personal Transference-Lifestyle Template (PTLT);
11. The Mythological-Symbolic Archetype Template (MSAT)
12. The Genetic Potential Self Template (GPST);
................................................................................................
The difference between 'repression' and 'suppression' is extremely important because it is easy to conflate, condense, and confuse the two together.
I 'suppress' what I am afraid to ask or tell you -- the concept of 'suppression' is easily validated by self-experience. But 'suppression' implies that I know very well what I want to ask or tell you. In the case of a 'suppressed memory' as opposed to a 'repressed memory', I remember the 'memory' all too clearly -- I am just embarrassed and/or otherwise reluctant to share it with you. A 'repressed memory' implies that I don't remember the memory at all -- which raises doubts about its very existence or is it a 'conceptual construction' created by Freud to explain a phenomena that he couldn't otherwise explain (such as hysteria, or anxiety neurosis, or obsessional neurosis...)?
For much of Freud's career, Freud viewed 'repression' as 'the defense' associated with ALL human neurosis, until he finally realized -- or admitted -- that were many other 'psychological defenses' at man's disposal such as: introjection, identification, projection, displacement, denial, transference, dissociation, retroflection (which is used a lot in Gestalt Therapy) and one that Adler added which is much more important to the etiology of neurosis, and more pervasive than Freud's concept of repression -- and that is the concept of 'compensation'. But even more important and pervasive to the etiology of all neurosis is the concept of 'transference'.
I see 'transference' as the over or under-riding 'defense mechanism' in all neuroses, and every other defense mechanism is a subset of transference.
I distinguish between: 'identification transferences', 'introjective transferences', 'projective transferences', 'compensatory transferences', 'positive transferences', 'negative transferences', 'oral transferences', 'anal transferences', 'genital transferences', 'distancing transferences', 'anal-schizoid transferences', 'anal-rejecting transferences', 'oral-nurturing transferences', 'narcissistic transferences', 'anti-narcissistic transferences', 'altruistic transferences', 'impulse-desire-fantasy transferences', 'impulse-restraint transferences' 'anxiety transferences', 'rebellious transferences', 'violent transferences'... and on and on we could go...
The concept of 'transference' is totally Psychoanalysis as are the concepts of 'narcissism', 'defense', 'projection', 'introjection', 'identification', and most of the other concepts listed above. So how can you call my work anything but 'psychoanalytic' other than perhaps the 'extensions' and 'disagreements' that I have with The Psychoanalytic Establishment...And oh yes, my 'lack of formal training' -- or shall we call that 'brain-washing'?
So call me an 'underground psychoanalytic theorist' if you will -- operating outside the walls of The Psychoanalytic Establishment, and even operating outside of 'The Academic Establishment'. I admire Spinoza's philosophical approach: Don't lock me into any kind of 'Establishment' that is going to try to 'muzzle my thinking' -- or at least the 'public demonstration of my thinking' .
As soon as you become affiliated with any kind of 'organization' or 'institution' or 'political party' or 'religious denomination' or 'corporation' or 'school of thought', you become subject -- and often a 'slave' -- to the organization's agenda and particular brand of 'group think'.
At times 'group think' can be 'enlivening' and 'multi-dialectically challenging and evolutionary'. But this is probably by far the exception rather than the rule. Much more often, 'group think' becomes synonomous with 'no think' or thinking inside a 'stagnant paradigm', or worse a 'dangerous or even evil paradigm'.
The worst cases of 'group think' that come quickly to mind are 'Nazi Germany', 'McCarthyism', 'Witch Hunting', 'The Reign of Terror', any form of 'racial cleansing', 'stereotyping', 'discrimination', 'reverse-discrimination', 'religious extremism', 'political extremism', 'righteous trash-talking', any form of 'supremacy thinking that is socially divisive and exclusionist, let alone violent', 'narcissistic collusions that are non-democratic and exclusionist', 'political and corporate conflict of interests', 'lobbyist special-interest groups that do not have to face up to their 'bi-polar, anti-special interest group' in an open, democratic forum. (All lobbyist groups should have to operate through public, open, democratic forums.)
Back to 'Psychoanalysis'...
In the case of a 'conscious' memory, a 'conscious memory' can also be called a 'subconscious memory' if it is 'psychodynamically alive' in our subconscious (or even in our unconscious) and yet, if someone asks us to recall this particular memory, we can usually recall it within a few minutes, given the right 'prompter' and/or 'association'.
So 'defining' Psychoanalysis can be -- indeed, usually is -- a very subjective, narcissistic-righteous matter.
Freud had a very 'anal-retentive' habit of defining it 'extremely tightly' according to his own parameters (which paradoxically sometimes changed 180 degrees like his still controversial switchover from 'The Traumacy-Seduction Theory' to 'The Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory'). If Freud had said 'the world was flat', I am sure that would have been included in 'The Freudian Bible of Classical Psychoanalysis'.
Freud did a brutal job (meaning no job) of reconciling his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory with his post 1897 evolving Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Symbolic-Oedipal Theory. He just 'dumped' the first as if it never existed -- that it came from nowhere -- and then developed an 'opposite thesis'. I guess he could do that fairly easily because in 1897 he had no following -- just three volumes of work in The Standard 24 volume Edition to support his work during this time period, and Joseph Breuer 'one too many evenings and a thousand miles left behind'...
But that is why you have me here: to integrate what Freud did not know how to properly integrate. Dialectically integrate. That is why you have me 'trumpeting' the metaphorical structure of Hegel's Hotel as a larger and more useful 'multi-dialectic-humanistic-existential, philosophical and psychological paradigm' -- than 'Freud's Classical Hotel'.
If I am coming down hard on Freud here -- like thousands before me -- it is not because I do not respect Freud. Because I do. Indeed, I believe that he was one of the creatively most brilliant thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. But this still doesn't mean that he wasn't commonly -- wrong. And stuck inside a cultural Victorian paradigm, not to mention the theoretical paradigms of his own making.
In Victorian society, masturbation was commonly -- and/or at least publicly -- viewed as 'self-abuse'. So for Freud, stuck inside this Victorian paradigm, ending such 'neuroses' as 'neurasthenia' (chronic depleted energy) would logically involve 'stopping self abuse' -- i.e., stopping masturbation. (Maybe the opposite prescription might have been more appropriate.) In Victorian culture, 'castration anxiety' sounds like it was a very real -- and scary -- phenomenon, especially for a small boy growing up. 'If you keep wanking your thing there, little Siggy, daddy's going to cut it off!'
Personally, I think I partly understand Freud better than he understood himself -- and a thousand psychoanalysts after him have purported to understand him, such as the one and only Ernest Jones -- because such 'biographers' of Freud were all 'psychoanalyzing' Freud according to Freud's own theoretical parameters and assumptions. 'Towing the company' line if you will. 'Upholding the corporate image'. 'Giving Freud -- and all psychoanalysts -- what he and they wanted to hear.'
How can you possibly get any kind of significantly different understanding of Freud unless you have someone who is willing and/or able to see some of the 'deficiencies', 'liabilities', and 'limitations' of these same parameters and assumptions that Freud -- and all Classical Psychoanalysts -- have been locked inside for over 100 years?
I like 'Hegel's Hotel' better than 'Freud's Hotel' because Hegel's Hotel incorporates a better assortment of assumptions, parameters, paradigms, and 'glasses' than those that Freud was using at the time he was theorizing, and that essentially all, or most, Classical Psychoanalysts -- like 'good corporate employees' -- have been using since.
This is not to say that Classical Psychoanalysis has not evolved since Freud died -- it's just that some of the most important assumptions that Freud was using -- and that Classical Psychoanalysis continues to use with little to no modifications and/or updated extensions since Freud died -- are also some of his most flawed assumptions. Like 'Childhood Sexuality Theory' and 'Fantasy Theory' and 'Oedipal Theory'-- without their bipolar 'alter-ego' theory: 'Traumacy-Seduction-Assault Theory'.
The two theories are still clamoring to be integrated. And without trying to be arrogant, I am probably the only theorist with enough of the right type of 'outside knowledge' and (read Adlerian Theory, Gestalt Theory, Transactional Analysis Theory...) -- and internal focus and creativity -- to properly do it.
If this makes me an 'egotist' and/or a 'narcissist', I can live with that. So was Freud. So was Masson. So are most professional athletes. You have to be an 'egotist' to get to the top of whatever 'mountain' you are trying to climb.
Like Ayn Rand would write, that simply means that /I/you/we believe in the strength and power of my/your/our skills and abilities....the skills and abilities that can make us all 'Supermen' and/or 'Superwomen' to the upper threshold of how high these skills and abilities can take us, just as long as we work hard enough, persevere enough, and meet the challenge of any and all obstacles in order to to get to where we want to go...our 'end visualization', our 'end fantasy', whatever that might be...
Not too many 'classical psychoanalysts' had'have the courage to 'think outside the classical box' -- at least publicly -- and if they did/do, then they were/are no longer likely considered to be 'Classical Psychoanalysts'. In Spinozian style, they were/are 'ex-communicated'. They were/are -- 'excluded'. Just look at Masson's rebellion against Freud in the 1980s. Masson stood up for what he believed was right -- and for that -- he is no longer a 'Psychoanalyst', let alone 'The Project Director of The Freud Archives'.
But alas things can change. Resentments can smooth over. 'Dissociations' can 'melt away', given the right circumstances, over time -- and 'bridges' and 'integrations' can start to take their place.
This is Hegel's World. This is Hegel's Hotel. 'Thesis'. 'Anti-thesis'. And finally -- 'synthesis'...'integration'...'either/or', 'right or wrong' melting away into a more harmonious, dialectic union...Perhaps with an 'agreement to disagree'. Or perhaps with a 'compromise towards the middle'. But most importantly, with more 'tolerance' and 'acceptance' for the right of any individual to 'disagree' with 'group think'. And not to be condemned for this...ex-communicated...excluded...
Freud was The Great Excluder...
I wrote already that he got this 'transference-characteristic' from his dad...
How come Freud couldn't see this clearly? Or could he? How come most Classical Psychoanalysts 'minimized' the 'negative transference' relationship between Freud and his dad? Or couldn't see it -- and worse, what the negative repercussions on Classical Psychoanalysis were.
Why? Because most Psychoanalysts -- read in particular Ernest Jones (his biography of Freud) -- did what Freud did. And Freud 'minimized' his dad. Sigmund 'excluded' his dad like his dad excluded -- and minimized -- little Siggy.
Most academics agree that the case of 'Anna O' is the first 'case' of Psychoanalyis. I agree -- in part.
But the 'template' case -- the case on which all of Psychoanalysis rests -- is little Sigmund's first, early childhood -- conscious -- memory.
And Freud -- and thousands of psychoanalysts -- continue to 'walk right around this first conscious memory of little Sigmund', like 'lemmings that follow their leader over a cliff'. I am partly sorry if I am coming across as being overly harsh here, or 'unfair to some more rebellious, individual thinking, psychoanalysts' but in the end we are all responsible and accountable for our own personal and collective 'transference neuroses' -- and doing something about them -- otherwise, why call 'Psychoanalysis' a 'first-rate form of psychotherapy'?
Psychoanalysts have to start thinking about 'conscious early memories' not as 'screen memories' that both hide and allude to other more important 'repressed memories and/or fantasies' but rather as important 'transference memories' in and by themselves. And for that, Psychoanalysts can thank Adler indirectly -- through me. Because what I am doing here is essentially turning 'Adlerian lifestyle and conscious early memory theory' back into an 'updated' form of 'Classical Transference Theory'. Which is so psychodynamically different than 'standard Freudian Classical Transference Theory' that many would ask, how can it possibly be called 'Classical' -- in which case I propose the alternative names of 'Quantum-Integrative Transference Theory' and 'Quantum-Integrative Psychoanalysis'.
'Screen Memories' (1899) is the worst paper that Freud ever wrote -- and Jones loved it....lap, lap, lap... while as Masson argued and I am paraphrasing, Freud was starting to 'conflate' and 'confuse' 'symbolic dream and fantasy material' with 'cold, hard, remembered reality'.
I am sure that Jones had his character strengths -- he did, I believe, support the growth and career of Fritz Perls when Freud wanted nothing to do with Perls because of the latter's 'rebellious' paper on 'Oral (as opposed to 'Anal') Resistances...
Freud excluded and excommunicated all significant 'male rebellers' just like his father 'excluded and excommunicated' little Sigmund...
Freud was a great rebel himself -- but once he achieved power -- he squashed all masculine rebellion in his ranks... This was a major part of his 'topdog/underdog transference bi-polarity and neurosis'... His 'excluding topdog' was his 'introjected dad'; and his 'rebellious underdog' was little Sigmund 'proving to his dad -- and to the world -- that he would find out all his dad's -- and his mom's -- private, most hidden sexual secrets -- with or without the help of his dad...and by transference extension -- with or without the help of his clients/patients, and the world at large.
Oh, yes. The memory. The conscious memory that has been so overlooked by so many psychoanalysts claiming to 'know all the hidden secrets of the mind'...And yet you all let Dr. Freud pull one over on you....as he pulled one over on himself...
Step out of Dr. Freud's 'false paradigm', gentlemen -- and gentlewomen.
Even Freud could -- and still continues to -- lead you down false corridors.
Even Freud could make serious 'false connections'.
Why would an 'archaeologist dig deep' if what he or she is looking for -- some 'supposedly hidden treasure' -- is sitting on the ground right in front of his or her eyes -- and nose?
Why would a psychoanalyst 'dig deep' into a client's unconscious if the answer to 'the riddle of the Sphynx' of the client's personality is lying right in front of the psychoanalyst's ears in an 'ignored', 'minimized', 'excluded' conscious early memory...
Note once again that I am partly Adlerian trained....and I would not have arrived at my own 'transference answer' to the riddle of the Sphynx of Freud's character if I had not been Adlerian trained. I superimposed 'Adlerian Lifestyle and Conscious Early Memory Theory' onto Classical Psychoanalysis.
Indeed, what I am doing here is superimposing the theoretical and therapeutic templates of all of Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, and Pre-Classical Freudian Theory -- right back where they belong on top of the template of Classical Psychoanalysis.
Because I am not -- at least in this essay -- and Hegel's Hotel in general -- an exclusionist. In the philosophy and psychology ideas, I am aiming to be much more of an inclusionist and an integrationist.
Now, obviously, I am going to exclude that which I do not believe to be important and/or value-laden. But most certainly, my flexibility, my liberal openess, is much greater than Freud's fixed, anal-retentive theoretical and therapeutic boundaries.
There is no one else in the world who is capable of doing what I am doing here for two reasons: 1. no one has exactly the same 'knowledge template' that I am carrying in my brain; and 2. just as importantly, no one is carrying exactly the same 'transference template' that I am carrying in my brain that demands that I push this story, that I push the integration of the history of Western Philosophy and Clinical Psychology to my vision and version of its evolutionary conclusion...push 'Hegel's Hotel' to its evolutionary conclusion...which will only be fleeting, because all essays are 'thought bites' that have a context in time and place, and even Hegel's Hotel which has already been in the works for 5 years since July, 2006, I believe, and I hope will be finished by March 3rd, 2012, will also be a six year 'thought bite' by the time it is finished if my estimate is accurate...with part of it aging -- like me...
Regarding my own personal transference template, consisting of a network of associated transference 'complexes' and/or 'neuroses', two of them seem to have associative connections with Freud's 'network of transference complexes and neuroses': 1. his 'father-transference complex'; and 2. his 'first conscious memory transference complex' in which he was evicted from the doorway of his parents' master bedroom for 'intruding' at the wrong time. My first conscious memory was very similar although connected with my friend's mother who was very angry at me for pushing her front doorbell more times 'than I should have, too early in the morning'.
Add these two transference similarities to my partial Adlerian training in 'interpreting conscious early memories' from an Adlerian 'lifesyle' perspective, and you have the three most important ingredients that explain why I have been better able to interpret Freud's 'first conscious memory-transference complex' better than anyone before me, particularly any 'Inside The Freudian Box Classical Psychoanalyst'.
Freud copied (introjected, identified with) his dad's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego' around the issue of 'exclusionism'.
And in similar fashion, Classical Psychoanalysis copied (introjected, identified with) Sigmund Freud's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego around this same issue of 'exclusionism'. That makes Classical Psychoanalysis a product of Sigmund Freud's own 'exclusionism-abandonment transference neurosis'.
For those of you who are not familiar with little Sigmund's first conscious memory, he 'busted in on his parents in their bedroom while they were doing the nasty'....and little Sigmund's father screamed at him to get out...(just as the woman/mother in my first conscious memory screamed at me to leave her front door).
A pretty understandable reaction by Sigmund's father...given the circumstances and his likely embarrassment, but that sure didn't help little Siggy any...He needed an explanation..
Indeed, little Siggy ended up spending the rest of his life -- via his transference complex -- vicariously trying to understand perfectly what exactly had transpired in his parents' bedroom...and he was certainly no stranger years and years later to 'his patients' resistance to telling the truth about their sexual secrets'... Indeed, from a transference perspective, he entirely expected it...It was 'deja-vu' for little Siggy turned big Sigmund...the beginning of a very long 'repetition compulsion' and 'mastery compulsion'.
Freud unconsciously re-created his own transference projection scene...the surrogate scene of his earliest conscious memory...The bed was 're-created' as the couch, and the female hysterical patients had become 'transference surrogates' to his mother lying on the bed...Was this his own private 'Oedipal Complex' playing itself out? Freud's own 'narcissistic transference fantasy' relative to 'surrogates' of his mother? Well, part of the transference component was certainly attached to his mother.
At what point the 'erotic' component of transference enters into the picture is a point of debate. Is the erotic component early childhood based, or does it enter into the picture as puberty turns on our 'sexual hormones'?
In DGB conceptuology, 'sublimation' is a 'transference projection phenomenon' first and foremost, with the 'sexual component' being a subset of the transference complex.
'Truth' often has two 'dialectical polar halves' attached to it, and it is very, very common for most of us to miss one of these 'polar halves'...In the family...in our schools...in our ruling political party, in the court system, in philosophy, in psychology...'the squeeky wheel gets the oil while the silent wheel remains in the Shadows of Non-Attention'...the dominant paradigm gets the sunshine, gets the spotlight, gets the goodies, while the 'invisible paradigm' gets lost in The Shadows of Non-Attention...not getting its share of the 'goodies'...and/or the 'equal rights' in many cases...
This was the philosophical brilliance of Anaxamander who foreshadowed the philosophy of Hegel, Derrida, and Foucault over two thousand years before the latter three philosophers came into existence. and this Freud could not see very well before, during, and after his abandonment of his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory. It is possible that Freud was at least partly 'overly naive' coming into 1896, or shortly thereafter...
Was he overly naive to believe that all his female hysterical patients had been either 'sexually assaulted' or 'manipulated' and 'seduced' as children? Or were some of his female clients manipulating and lying to him? Or both?
This could have been a significant part of Freud's theoretical and therapeutic dilemma back around 1896-1897? Was Freud right or wrong to take his female clients' assertions regarding their childhood history of sexual abuse at face value? And/or were some or all of his female clients hiding their own narcissistic sexual fantasies behind these assertions of childhood sexual abuse?
Or was there another over-riding disturbing network of political, economic, and professional factors? Did the men who had power over the future of Freud's career essentially intimidate and coerce Freud into 'shutting his story down, shutting his theory of childhood sexual abuse down'?
And what if Freud was getting a complicated and confusing mixture of clinical behaviors and symptoms? Freud's whole theory of 'repression' and 'the pleasure-unpleasure' theory hinged on the idea that his clients were 'hiding the unbearable past' from themselves through the process of 'repression' (excluding traumatic memories from their consciousness). Freud's whole theory leading up to 1896 rested on 'making these unconscious, repressed traumatic memories conscious'...And then presto, the 'hysterical symptom associated with the traumatic, repressed memory, now conscious again, disappeared!'
However, there were complications to this nice, tidy story, with a happy ending...
For example, sometimes a 'hysterical' (neurotic) patient could keep a therapist busy for a lifetime with the continual creation of a vast array of new physical symtoms...Just read the Anna O. case, and see how busy she kept pooer Dr. Joseph Breur in what is generally viewed as the 'first psychoanalytic case'...Not to mention when she started to have 'erotic fantasies' of poor, Dr. Breuer, and told him that she was 'carrying his child'! (Presumably, she wasn't.)
Then there were an assortment of other cases where patients were fantasizing having 'romantic-sexual liasions' with bosses' and the like...Human, all too human...
So you can maybe start to see how Freud was getting into an entangled mess between trying to sort out the workings of 'human sexual traumacy' vs. the workings of 'human sexual fantasy'. The one certainly did not necessarily preclude or exclude the other. But Freud was building up an 'either/or' case for the stronger of the two theories.
1. Repression of sexual traumacy/seduction/assault? Or;
2. Repression of sexual fantasy.
It should be noted that not all of Freud's (or Breuer's) patients traumacies were of a 'sexual' nature. Anna O. stopped drinking liguids when she saw her dog drinking out of her cup or bowel. This memory was brought back to her awareness through 'hypnosis' and 'the talking cure' and she started drinking again. But Freud was locked into the 'sexual etiology'. Breuer was a much more cautious, rational-empirical scientist than Freud and was far more careful than Freud with his generalizations and theories...
However, no-one heard much from Breuer after he and Freud split company. Breuer's theoretical caution was less exciting and less shocking than Freud's dramatic exclamations and explanations...It wasn't as 'newsworthy' as Freud's brash statements, and to be fair to Freud, not as creatively brilliant in many cases...It was Freud who wrote the 24 volume Standard Edition, not Breuer.
Freud was perplexed -- and amazed -- by women's (and men's) sexual secrets.
Aren't we all oftentimes?
Sexual traumacy or sexual fantasy?
What was going on? Which way was Freud to go? Stuck inside Aristotlean logic, he set the whole dichotomy up as an 'either/or' choice. Big mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistate in Freud's career -- at least on the theoretical front. What he needed to do -- and what he didn't do -- was to 'dialectically embrace' the alleged dichotomy and figure out how both sides of the quandry contributed to a larger, 'Bi-Polar, Dialectic Truth', or 'Dialectic Bi-Polar Wholism'.
Freud could see the one 'polar truth' before 1897 but not the other; then, slowly, after 1897, Freud could see the 'opposite polar truth' (wishful fantasy) but not the original one (traumacy, seduction, assault) that he had spent the first 10 years of his professional career learning. What was that if it was not 'professional repression'? The irony of the whole matter is that both existed before 1897, and both existed after 1897.
You show, or tell me, of one person who has lived on this earth for even 5 years who has not experienced the twin polarities of 'traumacy' and 'fantasy', and I will agree to the Freudian concept of 'repression'!
Back between the summer of 1896 and say 1905, it was Freud who was 'The Grand Represser'. (After 1905, he became 'The Grand Excluder' -- as in excluding anyone -- or any male -- from Psychoanalysis who didn't agree with his 'childhood sexuality' , 'sexual fantasy' and 'Oedipal Theory'.
Did political, economic, and professional 'convenience' or 'or perceived necessity' contort and distort and 'unobjectify' Freud's brain? Freud wouldn't be the first to succumb to such a pressure? I am not trying to make excuses for Freud, or even assert that this is what necessarily happened -- Masson put out such a 'theory' in the 1980s, and for this he lost his job and his career. Is it possible that Masson chose to not ethically back down -- where Freud did?
Nobody -- not men or women (Freud had no huge 'women's movement' supporting him back then) -- wanted to hear publicly about 'child sexual abuse' in the 1890s. It was easier to blame the child than it was to blame the father, or the uncle, or the family friend... And nothing had really changed by the 1980s. It was obvious that The Psychoanalytic Establishment still did not want to publicly talk about child sexual abuse when confronted Classical Psychoanalysis on this account. Worse still, was Masson 'theorizing' that it was quite possible/likely that 'Freud lost moral courage'.
Meanwhile, there was a huge article in The Globe and Mail less than a week ago saying that women in prision were not getting the 'mental health' help that they needed -- whereas there were more avenues along this line already in place for men in prison.
I believe the estimates of 'childhood sexual abuse' I saw in the article amongst women in prison and/or amongst other women seeking psychiatric help was up in the 50 percentile, or probably even significantly higher. There was something that was bringing these 'hysterical women' or 'neurotic women with physical symptoms that seemed to go hand in hand with their mental processes' into Freud's practice in the 1890s, and it wasn't all about their 'repressed or suppressed erotic fantasies' (although this did seem to often play a part).
And still in the 1980s, The Psychoanalytic Establishment did not want to talk about how Freud's Oedipal Complex was leading analysts away from diagnosing 'real childhood sexual abuse', not 'figments of their patients Oedipal imagination'.
This might 'defame' Freud's character to say that Freud made such a huge theoretical, diagnostic, and therapeutic blunder! Is it any different today in 2011 or is The Psychoanalytic Establishment still hanging on with a 'Classical Freudian Oedipal hanging on pitbull bite'? Perhaps the more Psychoanalysts who move into Object Relations and Self Psychology, the less they have to stand up as an organization and actually publicly confront this 'ugly' problem.
I still like, and have no problem of using, The Oedipal Complex in my own theoretical work. But not to the 'literal' sense that Freud did. And not to the extent of 'diagnostically and therapeutically distorting a client's childhood reality'.
Economic, political, legal, and professional pressures can have a huge impact in all of us -- and turn us all away from 'the truth', at least as we personally believe in it.
How many of us don't engage in this type of practise every single day we go to work when we tell our boss 'what he or she wants to hear' or conversely, 'suppress' telling him or her what he or she doesn't want to hear?
How can we expect anyone to 'engage in freedom of speech' and 'tell his or her boss' what they really believe when the 'unemployment line' looms so large -- particularly in a bad recession -- as a 'very real factual possibility, a factual truth'?
It was very possible that Freud was no different. But since we are dealing with -- and 'speculating' about -- what 'was going through Freud's own mind at the time' -- none of us will ever know definitively. That is one secret -- his 'ethical innocence and/or guilt' -- that Freud probably took to the grave with him. Now, the 'ethical ramifications' of his decision still lies out in the open - - or at least partly in the open -- for all to see, and judge. Nobody -- other than a working pscyhoanalyst (and his or her clients) -- knows exactly what transpires behind closed psychoanalytic doors... and how many psychoanalysts may actually believe in the client experiential 'validity' of childhood and/or teenage sexual manipulation/assault, in this case, that case, or in many cases....and still 'tow the public company pathological anal-retentive Freudian Oedipal line'...
Not too many of us will ever know that realm of 'psychoanalytic-client privacy' as well...unless psychoanlysts and/or clients start going public with their personal stories... I'm not counting on it...
At best, Freud was too much an Aristotlean 'either/or' thinker, who couldn't get his head around 'dialectic engagement and integration'. He had the right idea with the concept of 'compromise formations'.
However, he didn't properly understand the dynamics of the transference except in his own 'tightly restricted, anal-retentive paradigm' of 'relationship transference between therapist and client'. Brian Bird hadn't written his paper on the 'universality of the transference' yet. That wouldn't happen until the 1960s.
Because of Freud's 'abandonment of the traumacy-seduction theory' and his evolving 'fixation' with 'fantasy theory', Freud -- nor any psychoanalytic theorist since -- until me -- has centred on the concept of 'transference memory'. (Actually, I have to give significant creative and chonological credit to both Alfred Adler, founder of Adlerian Psychology and the creator of the idea of 'conscious early memories as lifestyle memomies', as well as Arthur Janov, author of 'The Primal Scream').
In Psychoanalysis, we hear of 'transference relationships' but we never hear about 'transference encounters' -- and by logical association -- 'transference memories' (concious and/or unconscious).
Yet here is the future of Classical Psychoanalysis -- if Classical Psychoanalysis is to have any future.
From the idea of 'dialectic engagement, negotiation, and integration' -- comes the name of 'Quantum' Psychaoanalysis -- just as previously, in the realm of Physics, and 'thermogenics' -- 'particle' theory was integrated with its anti-thesis, 'wave' theory, to get 'Quantum Theory'.
Likewise here, 'Traumacy-Seduction-Manipulation-Assault' Theory becomes integrated with 'Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory' to become 'Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
We have heard that every 'killer returns to the scene of his crime'. I don't know how true it is or not. But the same idea applies here.
Because, metaphorically and symbolically speaking, every 'neurotically traumatized child' returns to the scene of his 'childhood traumacy-transference scene' over and over and over again...This is what Freud ended up calling the 'repetition compulsion'. But Freud didn't properly understand the repetition complulsion -- he almost did with his concept of 'the mastery compulsion' but perhaps thought he was getting too close to 'Adlerian Theory' (the inferiority complex and superiority striving). Instead, Freud made the mistake of connecting the repetition compulsion to his evolving idea of 'The Death Instinct' (Beyond The Pleaaure Principle, 1920).
The repetition compulsion is often tied to 'death', 'destruction', and/or 'self-destruction', but only in the context of 'psychologically fighting for life', and the 'healing' of one's 'traumatic-transference neurosis'.
The traumatic-transference progression and/or regression goes like this: 1. chilhood traumacy; 2. 'Traumacy-tranference Memory'; 3. 'Compensation', 'Master Compulsion'; and 4. the creation of a 'Traumacy-Transference Fantasy Template' often 'cathected' with romantic and/or sexual energy of a supreme force; that is 5. 'Projected onto an adult 'surrogate transference figure' and this transference erotic love fantasy reigns supreme until one day, one's adult 'surrogate transference lover 'rejects us' in a style that unconsciously on purpose reminds us of our initial childhood traumacy-transference rejection, and childhood traumacy transference rejector (abandoner, betrayer, excluder, assaulter, manipulator...); and then 6. we suddenly and radically change 180 degrees in our thinking and feeling, like Freud did in 1896, and enter a 'heavy negative transference phase' of our 'transference love relationship' ,'heavily cathected with childhood negative energy'; and often end up 7. 'doing unto our rejector what our childhood and/or adult rejector did unto us, or we think our adult surrogate transference figure is about to do to us'...This is what I call 'negative transference identification', 'identification with the rejector, abandoner, betrayer, assaulter, aggressor, manipuator, excluder'.... and it often ends many 'transfernce relationships... This is what I call our full 'transference complex, neurosis, and/or game'. (as in Berne's 'Games People Play' -- meaning for the most part, 'The Positive and Negative Transference Games That We Play'...To stop playing the game (which many people don't want to do because of its heavy romantic-sexual component), we have to come to a full conscious understanding of the psycho-dyanmics of our trnasference complex/neurosis/game, and be able to consciousl choose to 'get off the transference ferris wheel, off the transference roller coaster, off the transference merry-go-round', which by the time we finish our unique, particular good and bad ride is often not very 'merry'....
Freud never got here...although he came close sometimes in different ways...'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896; 'The Dynamics of The Transference', 1912; 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' 1920...
The psycho-sexual secrets of men and women...
Did not usually come easy to Freud,
Nor to any psychotherapist,
Like a Christmas present from client to therapist, with a nice, neat, tidy ribbon and bow attached to it...
No, more often these secrets come together from different 'life experiences, built into psychological compensatory pieces -- woven together, subconsciously into a psycho-sexual transfernce whole'...
It is not only where we have come from with our childhoood transferences, but also, where we are trying to get to subconsiously or unconsciously, in order to 'subjectively feel more whole again'...
But Freud already knew this deep in his own subconscious,
He just couldn't quite completely figure out the psycho-dynamics of his own unconscious (or was unwilling to publicly share all of his private awenesses)...
Regardless, for his clients too, he couldn't quite put all their different psychological pieces together,
Trying as hard -- indeed, obsessing as hard -- as he did....
Where did this 'transference obsession' come from?
From the first time he busted...
Into his parents' bedroom,
This is why Freud's first conscious memory can easily be declared...
The 'first true case of Psychoanalysis'...
-- dgb, Jan. 30th-31st, Feb. 1st, Feb. 3rd., 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Posted by david gordon bain at 10:39 AM
