Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
(1903 - 1974)
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
A Transference Analysis of The Freud, Fliess, and Emma Ekstein Medical Fiasco...
The biggest conceptual problem with Freud's concept of 'The Id' is that it
is one-dimensional in the way that it looks at what is happening in the unconscious or subconscius. It is focused on 'instinctual impulses' -- as they arise from the unconscious/subconscious -- but whatever happened to 'repressed traumatic memories' that used to be the sole occupents of the unconscious/subconscious in Freud's theorizing before 1897? Gone off the Psychoanalytic Road Map! Gone off the Psychoanalytic Template!
'Childhood trauma'? What childhood trauma? Classical Psychoanalysis blinds itself against its pre-1897 beginnings..and sees everything with a one-sided 'instinctual impulse' eye... Freud turned his back on his historical and clinical past -- and in so doing, he turned his back on everyone of his clients' traumatic pasts as well...or at least that is what he tried to sell the public, his co-workers, and his students after 1897.
Freud was a brilliantly creative theorist but he was a one-sided, over-generalizer -- and took Classical Psychoanalysis down a one-dimensional path -- the study of 'instincts and their vicissitudes' which, to be sure, was an important realm of study, but at the same time, left out half of what should be the proper, rightful foundation of Psychoanalysis -- specifically, 'traumacy theory', which up until 1896, was the sole foundation of Psychoanalysis (or what today is generally called 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis).
That Freud could leave behind him the hard, clinical and theoretical work he did between, let's say, the winter of 1885-1886, when Freud studied under Charcot and started to learn about 'traumacy theory' in its relation to hysteria, up to 1896, when Freud reduced his traumacy theory to 'the sexual traumacy' theory -- or 'seduction theory' as it is usually called -- remains one of the biggest mysteries of the history of psychoanalysis, and Freud's life. Academics are still debating what actually happened in the spring of 1896, as Freud began his radical conversion over to 'fantasy and instinct theory'.
The 'seduction theory' in particular lasted only about 4 months in the winter and spring of 1896 before it was quickly, sharply, and harshly rejected by Freud like a man or a woman who had quickly, sharply, and harshly rejected Freud. Maybe that is exactly what had happened -- or at least a part of the significant 'psycho-drama' that unfolded in the spring of 1896.
There was significant drama happening in Freud's personal and professional life in the spring of 1896, and shortly thereafter.
Such as:
It is my belief that Freud indeed viewed the two years of 1895 and 1896 as a time period of extreme 'medical guilt' (starting in the spring of 1895 with the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco -- a butchered 'nasal-sexual surgery' conducted by Freud's closest friend Fliess on Emma (and Freud too) that should never have happened, with 'recreational' or 'very loosely prescribed medical' cocaine quite likely being the main source of the whole problem).
Emma Ekstein almost bled to death from nasal hemorrhaging at least two or three times because of a long string of gauze that was left in Emma's nose for a month before it was finally pulled out in the first 'traumatic nasal hemmorhage'...
A year later after living with his medical guilt for over a year -- and I shake my head at this -- Freud was calling Emma an 'hysterical bleeder'....which was Freud's first significant 'conversion' of 'the just rejected, traumacy-seduction theory' to what Freud would utilize from that moment on (as portrayed in a letter to Fliess on May 4th, 1896) -- his brand, spanking new 'instinct-fantasy' theory which also matched up very nicely with the work he was doing in the area of 'screen memories' (where memories were no longer 'real' memories but 'fantasies', or they were 'screens' for other more etiologically important 'repressed memories')....and his 'dream theory' where dreams were being viewed as 'wish fulfillments'.
With his new 'instinct-fantasy', 'wish-fulfillment', and 'screen memory' theory all woven together, the fact that Freud and Fliess almost killed Emma Ekstein became 'non-important'; instead, she became a 'hysterical bleeder' who 'wanted' to bleed so that she could get closer to the two 'professional men' who almost killed her....with 'cocaine' lingering in the middle of this horrific incident that Freud had to 'historically, medically, and psychoanalytically 're-interpret' in the face of the horrific, medical guilt that he had felt for a year....and finally....'narcissistically...he was able to 'widdle it away' with his 'new fantasy-wish-fulfillment' theory... Emma was no longer a surgically victimized and traumatized patient but rather -- a 'hysterical bleeder'.... and Freud's own 'heart, migraine, and nasal problems' that he was experiencing throughout his 30 and 40s -- what were these?: 'hysterical heart, migraine, and nasal problems'?
Come on, people, especially, you Freudian academics out there -- how many times can an academic Freudian scholar turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?
Freud was taking cocaine from 1884 to at least the time of the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco, and indeed, probably til at least the end of 1895...a man doesn't usually get 'heart attacks' in his 30s and 40s unless there is a strong reason for it -- in this case, there is a very strong, likely reason for his heart attacks -- a reason that not too many Freudian scholars want to admit, or at least admit publicly. Ummmh? How about cocaine abuse.
Maybe Peter Swales has gone down this 'cocaine' path before me but it is hard to find information on what exactly he might have said or written now about the Emma Ekstein incident...
Swales did investigate Freud's early 'cocaine papers' (Robert Boynton, May 24th, 1993, The New York Observer...http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=14) but beyond that I don't know what Swales said or wrote in this regard. He seems to have been largely dismissed academically as a 'guerilla psychoanalytic historian' -- although highly respected for his amazing detective work and his ability to find bits and pieces of information that no 'regular, normal' Freudian scholar and historian could find...
Masson has challenged Swales' 'ethical values' as has Swales challenged Masson's ethical values. The two men certainly don't like each other. I will take Masson's corner for the most part, although even Masson has largely 'steered away' from Freud's horrendous cocaine 'misadventures'.
Regardless, within the realm of 'known historical facts', how about the seemingly obvious inference to me from these known historical facts on the duration of Freud's long cocaine use/abuse (as reported in Freud's own letters to Fliess) that cocaine had been slowly poisoning Freud's body since he was 28 til at least 39 (1884 to 1895).
In 1895, when Freud was having 'heart' and 'nasal' problems as well as his 'migranes' and 'pus running out of his nose' -- Freud caught the 'nasal-heart' connection... He just seems to have rather stupidly not figured out the 'cocaine' part of the equation... Cocaine had been circulating through his nose, brain, heart, and the rest of his body for 11 years by then.
Was Freud 'addicted' to cocaine? Of course not -- most of the Freudian scholars will say. He just used it 'occasionally' to 'alleviate' his depression, give him 'energy', and give him more 'stimulus and endurance' -- like the soldiers in World War 1 used it in the trenches to fight longer -- in this same sense, Freud used cocaine late at night to write longer...particularly when he was tired and/or not feeling well...
Does this interpretation of Freud's behavior back then....make me a 'guerilla historian of psychoanalysis'? Should I be lumped in with Swales as having some sort of 'transference axe to grind'? You know what they say...'If the shoe fits, wear it.'...
I would like to think that I have a much greater goal to accomplish here than to simply criticize Freud for medical behaviors that he rightly deserves to be aptly criticized for...Fliess and Freud should have been charged and convicted of 'medical malpractice'...And for Freud, it wasn't the first time that cocaine had interfered with his good judgment in dealing with a patient...In 1891, Freud had had a patient and good friend die on him while he was prescribing cocaine to him...to try to 'cure' an already existing morphine addiction...
Once medically bitten by cocaine, you would think twice shy...and a lot medically wiser four years later...But Freud once again entered into dangerous medical territory...and was bitten again...by the same drug...cocaine....we don't know for sure that Emma was involved in cocaine...but why was she having nasal surgery? And Freud? We know from the Lettters that Fliess was using cocaine medically as well...I'd hazard a guess that some of that 'extra medical cocaine' was being used by Fliess 'recreationally'...
Fliess certainly seemed to have a good understanding of cocaine...Who else (besides Freud) would concoct a 'nasal-sexual theory'....According to Freud, Fliess was going to write a 'Nose and Sex' book (The Complete Letters, p. 172, The February 13th, 1896 Letter ....please tell me that it never got written...or if it did get written...and published...someone explain it to me...
Meanwhile, if it looks like a duck...quacks like a duck...swims like a duck...and has the 'bill' of a duck which might be used to ingest cocaine...leading to 'more energy' and possibly even 'sexual arousal', then perhaps it is a duck taking cocaine...
In my books, Freud, Fliess, and Emma Ekstein were all taking cocaine leading up to the ill fated nasal surgery of February, 1895...
Nothing entirely 'provable' perhaps in a court of law...kind of like The Barry Bonds... and most of the rest...of the baseball steroid cases...just too many 'coincidences' and too many pieces of 'circumstantial evidence'...all coming together in the same time and place...ending in a medical disaster that Freud should have been smart enough to avoid, given his similar experience in the 1880s...
But Freud -- perhaps obsessively, erotically, and neurotically...didn't walk away from this 'underground, out of bounds' nasal-sexual operation that went horribly wrong...and then he invented a 'longing hysterical bleeder' theory to 'narcissistically cover up' his and Fliess' -- and Emma's very real -- medical nightmare... ................................................................................
Physiological Effects of Cocaine
Cocaine produces its powerful high by acting on the brain. But as cocaine travels through the blood, it affects the whole body.
Cocaine is responsible for more U.S. emergency room visits than any other illegal drug. Cocaine harms the brain, heart, blood vessels, and lungs -- and can even cause sudden death. Here's what happens in the body:
Heart. Cocaine is bad for the heart. Cocaine increases heart rate and blood pressure while constricting the arteries supplying blood to the heart. The result can be a heart attack, even in young people without heart disease. Cocaine can also trigger a deadly abnormal heart rhythm called arrhythmia, killing instantly.
Brain. Cocaine can constrict blood vessels in the brain, causing strokes. This can happen even in young people without other risk factors for strokes. Cocaine causes seizures and can lead to bizarre or violent behavior.
Lungs and respiratory system. Snorting cocaine damages the nose and sinuses. Regular use can cause nasal perforation. Smoking crack cocaine irritates the lungs and, in some people, causes permanent lung damage.
Gastrointestinal tract. Cocaine constricts blood vessels supplying the gut. The resulting oxygen starvation can cause ulcers, or even perforation of the stomach or intestines.
Kidneys. Cocaine can cause sudden, overwhelming kidney failure through a process called rhabdomyolysis. In people with high blood pressure, regular cocaine use can accelerate the long-term kidney damage caused by high blood pressure.
Sexual function. Although cocaine has a reputation as an aphrodisiac, it actually may make you less able to finish what you start. Chronic cocaine use can impair sexual function in men and women. In men, cocaine can cause delayed or impaired ejaculation.
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Licit and Illicit Drugs
The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs
by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972
Chapter 35. Cocaine
....Freud wrote to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, on April 21, 1884. "I am procuring some (cocaine) myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion. . . .`3
The account of Freud's experiences which follows is drawn largely from the three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, by Ernest Jones.http://www.ukcia.org/research/cunion/cu35.htm
Freud "tried the effect of a twentieth of a gram [50 milligrams] and found it turned the bad mood he was in into cheerfulness, giving him the feeling of having dined well 'so that there is nothing at all one need bother about,' but without robbing him of any energy for exercise or work." 4
In addition to taking cocaine himself, Freud offered some to his friend and associate, Dr. Ernst von Flcischl-Marxow, who was suffering from an exceedingly painful disease of the nervous system (which was later to prove fatal), and who was addicted to morphine. Freud also prescribed cocaine for a patient with gastric catarrh. The initial results in all three cases were favorable. Freud decided cocaine was "a magical drug," and he wrote his fiancee, Martha:
If it goes well I will write an essay on it and I expect it will win its place in therapeutics by the side of morphium and superior to it. I have other hopes and intentions about it. I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion, and with the most brilliant success.... In short it is only now that I feel I am a doctor, since I have helped one patient and hope to help more. If things go on in this way we need have no concern about being able to come together and to stay in Vienna.5
Freud even sent some of his precious cocaine to Martha, "to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color." Indeed, Dr. Jones writes, "he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients; he gave it to his sisters. In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace." 6
In a subsequent letter to Martha, Freud wrote more on his personal experience with cocaine:
Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. [Italics in original.] In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance. 7
Freud's haste in publishing his findings may astonish twentieth-century readers. On April 21, 1884, he was still only planning to secure some cocaine. On June 18, his essay was completed; and the "Song of Praise" to cocaine was published in the July 1884 issue of the Centralblatt fur die gesammte Therapie.
This essay, Dr. Jones writes, had "a tone that never recurred in Freud's writings, a remarkable combination of objectivity with a personal warmth as if he were in love with the content itself. He used expressions uncommon in a scientific paper such as 'the most gorgeous excitement' that animals display after an injection of cocaine, and administering an 'offering' of it rather than a 'dose'; he heatedly rebuffed the 'slander' that had been published about this precious drug. This artistic presentation must have contributed much to the interest the essay aroused in Viennese and other medical circles. . . . He even gave an account of the religious observances connected with its use, and mentioned the mythical saga of how Manco Capac, the Royal Son of the Sun-God, had sent it as 'a gift from the gods to satisfy the hungry, forify the weary, and make the unfortunate forget their sorrows.' " 8
More to the point, Freud described in detail the effects of small doses of cocaine on his own depression. These included "exhilaration. and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person. . . . You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. . . . In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe that you are under the influence of any drug.... Long intensive mental or physical work is performed without any fatigue.... This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant after-effects that follow exhilaration brought about by alcohol. . . . Absolutely no craving for the further use of cocaine appears after the first, or even after repeated taking of the drug; one feels rather a certain curious aversion to it." 9 Cocaine, Freud concluded, was useful for "those functional states comprised under the name neurasthenia"10 Freud at this time had diagnosed his own depressions as neurasthenic-as well as for indigestion and for the withdrawal of morphine.
Freud also sought to inject cocaine directly into the area of a nerve to block intractable pain. In this he failed, but others succeeded;* and until better agents became available, cocaine was often used as local anesthesia for surgery.
Some of Freud's findings on cocaine as a psychoactive drug were amply confirmed by subsequent research. "The subjective effects of cocaine include an elevation of mood that often reaches proportions of euphoric excitement," Dr. Jaffe reported in Goodman and Gilman's textbook (1965). "It produces a marked decrease in hunger, an indifference to pain, and is reputed to be the most potent anti-fatigue agent known. The user enjoys a feeling of great muscular strength and increased mental capacity and greatly overestimates his capabilities. The euphoria is accompanied by generalized sympathetic stimulation. As is the case with amphetamine, a disturbed personality is not a prerequisite for cocaine-induced euphoria, and the drug is quite effective in relatively normal personalities." 11
Freud's experience, however, proved to be only part of the story. In July 1885, a German authority on morphine addiction named Erlenmever launched the first of a series of attacks on cocaine as an addicting drug. In January 1886 Freud's friend Obersteiner, who had at first favored cocaine, reported that it produced severe mental disturbances similar to those seen in delirium tremens. Other attacks soon followed; and Freud himself was subjected to "grave reproaches." 12 Freud continued to praise cocaine as late as July 1887, when he published a final defense of the drug. But soon thereafter he discontinued all use of it both personally and professionally. Despite the fact that he had been taking cocaine periodically over a three-year span, he appears to have had no difficulty in stopping. His abandonment of cocaine was no doubt influenced in large part by the experience of Dr. von Fleischl-Marxow, the patient with whom Freud had shared his initial gram of cocaine.
* Among those who succeeded, as noted in Chapter 5, was the voting American surgeon, Dr. W. S. Halsted.
Fleischl suffered from multiple tumors of various peripheral nerves - netiromata-which gave him excruciating pain. He took morphine for this pain. At first Freud's cocaine proved a welcome substitute for the morphine-but Fleischl found it necessary to escalate his cocaine dose.
After a year on cocaine he was taking a full gram of it daily'-twenty times the dose Freud himself took from time to time. Indeed, Freud noted, Fleischl had spent $428 for a three-month supply of cocaine, an enormous sum in Vienna in those days. On June 8, 1885, Dr. Jones adds, "Freud wrote that the frightful doses had harmed Fleischl greatly and, although he kept sending Martha cocaine, he warned her against acquiring the habit." Thereafter Fleischl developed a full-fledged cocaine psychosis, "With white snakes creeping over his skin." 13 Freud and other physician friends mirsed Fleischl faithfully, often throughout the long nights, but to little avail. In June 1885 Freud estimated that Fleischl could live six more months at most; he actually survived for six more painwracked years.
Nor was Fleischl's experience unique; subsequent observations were to reveal that repeated use of large doses of cocaine produces a characteristic paranoid psychosis in all or almost all users, and that the tendency to overuse is widespread. A peculiar characteristic of this psychosis is "forinication"-the hallucination that ants, or insects, or (as in Fleischl's case) snakes, are crawling along the skin or under it.
Why was Freud, unlike his friend Fleischl, able to use modest doses of cocaine-30 to 50 milligrams injected under the skin-from time to time for three years without developing either a craving for the drug or a need to escalate the dose? At least three alternative explanations are available. Dr. Jones, a psychoanalyst, believed that it requires an "addictive personality" to establish an addiction; Lacking an addictive personality, he declares, Freud did not become a cocaine addict. (He did, however, become addicted to cigars, as described in Chapter 24.) The other two explanations are pharmacological.
One holds that there must be some biochemical difference-perhaps a difference in enzymes-between people like Freud who can take a particular addicting drug without becoming addicted and people like Fleischl who escalate the dose and become addicted. This hypothetical difference in enzymes may (or may not) be hereditary. The third explanation relates the addiction (or lack of it) to dosages and frequency of use. Because Freud took cocaine only occasionally, according to this theory, he had no need to escalate his dose. And because he did not escalate the dose, he did not become addicted. Some other explanation, of course, may ultimately prove true.
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The essay above was written in 1972 -- 13 years before Masson published the Complete Letters of Freud to Fliess in 1985...in which it can be seen that Freud's 'misadventures' with cocaine extended well beyond July of 1887 as falsely asserted by the author above...indeed, at least into 1895, meaning 11 years of cocaine usage, not 3 or 4 years as asserted by Jones above...And yet Jones, Sulloway (Freud: Biologist of The Mind, with a 1992 edition after The Complete Letters had come out), and others continute to say that Freud was never 'addicted' to cocaine...No...he simply enjoyed the sensation of fresh pus oozing out of his nose...(that was my sarcasm...)...see the letter of May 25th, 1895....'I discharged exceedingly ample amounts of pus and all the while felt splendid'...'(p. 130).
I have to go back and find the quote -- either in 1895 or 1895 -- where Freud wrote Fliess to tell him he had finally 'quit' taking cocaine (whether he actually did stop or not is another question)...
I will just leave you with this ending to a letter by Freud to Fliess on November 29th, 1895.
........................................................
I hope soon to hear many good things of you, wife, child, and sexuality through the nose.
Most cordial greetings.
Your
Sigm.
As the heart improves, many light migraines.
(The Complete Letters, p. 152)
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Migraines, heart attacks, heart arrythmia, depression, nasal infections....
Does anybody really still want to believe that -- even in 1895 -- Freud didn't have a serious cocaine problem?
April 21st was a bad day for Freud. April 21st, 1884 -- the day that Freud wrote his fiance, Martha, to tell her that he was buying cocaine for the first time (to study it 'medically') -- was also the same day in 1896 where Freud's potentially revolutionary paper, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' espousing his historically famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) 'child sexual abuse theory' in relation to hysteria, was universally rejected by all his medical co-workers and superiors.
In my opinion -- the combination of this evening on April 21st, 1896 with the year earlier episode with Fliess and Emma Ekstein, was the beginning of an 'unethical slide downwards' for Freud. Because shortly afterwards, Freud's Seduction Theory would start to become 'buried' or 'repressed' or 'suppressed' (the latter was Masson's choice of words, 1984, 85, 92) under the weight of his advancing 'wishfulfillment', 'instinct-fantasy', 'screen memory', and 'dream' theories....
Wrote Freud afterwards -- before he quickly lost 'faith' in the theory that he believed was so 'revolutionary':
.............................................................................................
A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society met with an icy reception from the asses, and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand-year-old problem, a caput Nili (source of the Nile)! They can go to hell, euphemisitically expressed. (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, Masson, 1985, p. 184, the letter of April 26th, 1896.)
Freud may have been 'arrogant', 'rebellious' and 'anti-establishment' at the time that he initially wrote the letter above -- but it didn't last long. It would seem rather obvious to me (and presumably, Masson) that Freud basically 'succumbed to the attack of the pack of wolves' in the Psychiatry Society (my present day metaphor)...and started to 'ethically cave in' shortly thereafter as his 'patient workload' started to dry up....
The letter from Freud to Fliess of May 4th, 1896 gives us strong indications as to why.
.......................................................................................
'I am as isolated as you would wish me to be. Word was given out to abandon me, for a void is forming all around me. So far I bear it with equanimity. I find it more troublesome that this year for the first time my consulting room is empty, that for weeks on end I see no new faces, cannot begin any new treatments, and that none of the old ones are completed. Things are so difficult and trying that it requires, on the whole, a strong constitution to deal with them. As for Ekstein -- I am taking notes on her history so that I can send it to you -- so far I know only that she bled out of longing. (The Complete Letters, p. 186, the letter of May 4th, 1896.'
....................................................................................................................
I look at May 4th, 1896 as the day that Psychoanalysis became 'neurotic'.
Freud may have believed only a week prior that he had 'found the source of the Nile' but now 'two sources were converging into one' -- Freud was being 'blacklisted' and 'economically crushed' at the same time that he needed an 'excuse to wither away his medical guilt' relative to Emma Ekstein's close brush with death on the medical malpractice of Freud and Fliess.
In the 1880s, Freud can perhaps be excused for his 'experimenting' with cocaine and its potential 'medical properties' because no one knew about its 'addictive properties' and potential dangers until the late 1880s. Still, amidst 'bad reports' coming in on the hazards of cocaine, Freud pushed on, kept prescribing it, kept using it, and one of his patients and good friends, Fleischl, ended up dead in 1891, partly as a result of severe cocaine addiction. But Freud kept using it...almost definitely in my opinion through the whole Emma Ekstein ordeal -- in fact, cocaine was probably the main reason for Fliess and Freud's 'mutual obsession' with 'nasal sexuality' and 'nasal surgery' with poor Emma Ekstein getting into the unfortunate middle of these two 'hair-brained, off the deep end' theorists (my editorial comment).
Indeed, I would even speculate that there was something much more 'erotically -- and pathologocially -- primitive' going on in this whole Emma Ekstein fiasco. Something of a 'transference' nature. We all have 'transference games' that we play and some of these 'games' are not at all nice -- they can be mixed with sadism, cruelty, serial violence...depending on 'the source of the Nile' of the original 'transference memory' which I think I have found here.
Ernest Jones (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953, 1981, Vol., 1, p. 11) writes about an alleged Freudian 'screen memory'....I sniff out 'transference memories' from alleged 'screen memories':
'Freud never alluded in his writings to Emanuel's wife. Pauline, his niece, was on the other hand of some emotional significance. In the screen memory that Dr. Bernfeld unraveled, an amorous attachment to her is manifest, and beyond that an unconscious phantasy of her being raped by John and himself together. Freud himself related how he and his nephew used to treat the little girl cruelly, and one may assume that this included some erotic component -- whether manifest or not. The latter feature is the first sign that Freud's sexual constitution was not exclusively masculine after all, to 'hunt in couples' means sharing one's gratification with someone of one's own sex.'
Also, I have written previously on Freud's earliest childhood recollection -- when he was 3 or 4, he had 'invaded' the 'privacy' of his parents' master bedroom while they were 'getting it on'....Here again, you look at the 'structural, transference dynamics' of 'conscious early memory' -- what Freud would call a 'screen memory' and what I would call a 'transference memory', and you can quickly see that it involved '2 men and a woman' -- in this case, Freud Senior, little Siggy, his mother -- 'the sexual object' of his dad, and soon to be 'the sexual object' of little Siggy within the sexual confines of a 'menage a trois' involving a woman and another male -- and also, Freud's post 1896 'transference sublimated' invention of 'The Oedipal Complex'....
I will take my 'narcissistic bows' on this 'extended transference analysis' of Freud's character because no psychoanalyst has been here before me. Why? Because Freud scared them all away with his concept of 'screen memories' which I now view as a 'defense' on Freud's part to avoid 'the (unconcious, repressed?) analytic interpretation of a 'real transference memory' of lifelong ('serial', 'repetition compulsion') significance that is both being 'hidden' and 'alluded to' by the seemingly 'innocent' little screen (read 'transference') memory.
Anyone want to argue this point?
This latest development here is so excruciatingly important that I have just wiped out the rest of the essay to let you go back and 'chew on' the huge implications of what I just wrote here...which obviously need to be developed much further...
-- dgb, May 1st, 2011, updated, modified July 30th, 31st, Aug. 1st, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
is one-dimensional in the way that it looks at what is happening in the unconscious or subconscius. It is focused on 'instinctual impulses' -- as they arise from the unconscious/subconscious -- but whatever happened to 'repressed traumatic memories' that used to be the sole occupents of the unconscious/subconscious in Freud's theorizing before 1897? Gone off the Psychoanalytic Road Map! Gone off the Psychoanalytic Template!
'Childhood trauma'? What childhood trauma? Classical Psychoanalysis blinds itself against its pre-1897 beginnings..and sees everything with a one-sided 'instinctual impulse' eye... Freud turned his back on his historical and clinical past -- and in so doing, he turned his back on everyone of his clients' traumatic pasts as well...or at least that is what he tried to sell the public, his co-workers, and his students after 1897.
Freud was a brilliantly creative theorist but he was a one-sided, over-generalizer -- and took Classical Psychoanalysis down a one-dimensional path -- the study of 'instincts and their vicissitudes' which, to be sure, was an important realm of study, but at the same time, left out half of what should be the proper, rightful foundation of Psychoanalysis -- specifically, 'traumacy theory', which up until 1896, was the sole foundation of Psychoanalysis (or what today is generally called 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis).
That Freud could leave behind him the hard, clinical and theoretical work he did between, let's say, the winter of 1885-1886, when Freud studied under Charcot and started to learn about 'traumacy theory' in its relation to hysteria, up to 1896, when Freud reduced his traumacy theory to 'the sexual traumacy' theory -- or 'seduction theory' as it is usually called -- remains one of the biggest mysteries of the history of psychoanalysis, and Freud's life. Academics are still debating what actually happened in the spring of 1896, as Freud began his radical conversion over to 'fantasy and instinct theory'.
The 'seduction theory' in particular lasted only about 4 months in the winter and spring of 1896 before it was quickly, sharply, and harshly rejected by Freud like a man or a woman who had quickly, sharply, and harshly rejected Freud. Maybe that is exactly what had happened -- or at least a part of the significant 'psycho-drama' that unfolded in the spring of 1896.
There was significant drama happening in Freud's personal and professional life in the spring of 1896, and shortly thereafter.
Such as:
It is my belief that Freud indeed viewed the two years of 1895 and 1896 as a time period of extreme 'medical guilt' (starting in the spring of 1895 with the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco -- a butchered 'nasal-sexual surgery' conducted by Freud's closest friend Fliess on Emma (and Freud too) that should never have happened, with 'recreational' or 'very loosely prescribed medical' cocaine quite likely being the main source of the whole problem).
Emma Ekstein almost bled to death from nasal hemorrhaging at least two or three times because of a long string of gauze that was left in Emma's nose for a month before it was finally pulled out in the first 'traumatic nasal hemmorhage'...
A year later after living with his medical guilt for over a year -- and I shake my head at this -- Freud was calling Emma an 'hysterical bleeder'....which was Freud's first significant 'conversion' of 'the just rejected, traumacy-seduction theory' to what Freud would utilize from that moment on (as portrayed in a letter to Fliess on May 4th, 1896) -- his brand, spanking new 'instinct-fantasy' theory which also matched up very nicely with the work he was doing in the area of 'screen memories' (where memories were no longer 'real' memories but 'fantasies', or they were 'screens' for other more etiologically important 'repressed memories')....and his 'dream theory' where dreams were being viewed as 'wish fulfillments'.
With his new 'instinct-fantasy', 'wish-fulfillment', and 'screen memory' theory all woven together, the fact that Freud and Fliess almost killed Emma Ekstein became 'non-important'; instead, she became a 'hysterical bleeder' who 'wanted' to bleed so that she could get closer to the two 'professional men' who almost killed her....with 'cocaine' lingering in the middle of this horrific incident that Freud had to 'historically, medically, and psychoanalytically 're-interpret' in the face of the horrific, medical guilt that he had felt for a year....and finally....'narcissistically...he was able to 'widdle it away' with his 'new fantasy-wish-fulfillment' theory... Emma was no longer a surgically victimized and traumatized patient but rather -- a 'hysterical bleeder'.... and Freud's own 'heart, migraine, and nasal problems' that he was experiencing throughout his 30 and 40s -- what were these?: 'hysterical heart, migraine, and nasal problems'?
Come on, people, especially, you Freudian academics out there -- how many times can an academic Freudian scholar turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?
Freud was taking cocaine from 1884 to at least the time of the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco, and indeed, probably til at least the end of 1895...a man doesn't usually get 'heart attacks' in his 30s and 40s unless there is a strong reason for it -- in this case, there is a very strong, likely reason for his heart attacks -- a reason that not too many Freudian scholars want to admit, or at least admit publicly. Ummmh? How about cocaine abuse.
Maybe Peter Swales has gone down this 'cocaine' path before me but it is hard to find information on what exactly he might have said or written now about the Emma Ekstein incident...
Swales did investigate Freud's early 'cocaine papers' (Robert Boynton, May 24th, 1993, The New York Observer...http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=14) but beyond that I don't know what Swales said or wrote in this regard. He seems to have been largely dismissed academically as a 'guerilla psychoanalytic historian' -- although highly respected for his amazing detective work and his ability to find bits and pieces of information that no 'regular, normal' Freudian scholar and historian could find...
Masson has challenged Swales' 'ethical values' as has Swales challenged Masson's ethical values. The two men certainly don't like each other. I will take Masson's corner for the most part, although even Masson has largely 'steered away' from Freud's horrendous cocaine 'misadventures'.
Regardless, within the realm of 'known historical facts', how about the seemingly obvious inference to me from these known historical facts on the duration of Freud's long cocaine use/abuse (as reported in Freud's own letters to Fliess) that cocaine had been slowly poisoning Freud's body since he was 28 til at least 39 (1884 to 1895).
In 1895, when Freud was having 'heart' and 'nasal' problems as well as his 'migranes' and 'pus running out of his nose' -- Freud caught the 'nasal-heart' connection... He just seems to have rather stupidly not figured out the 'cocaine' part of the equation... Cocaine had been circulating through his nose, brain, heart, and the rest of his body for 11 years by then.
Was Freud 'addicted' to cocaine? Of course not -- most of the Freudian scholars will say. He just used it 'occasionally' to 'alleviate' his depression, give him 'energy', and give him more 'stimulus and endurance' -- like the soldiers in World War 1 used it in the trenches to fight longer -- in this same sense, Freud used cocaine late at night to write longer...particularly when he was tired and/or not feeling well...
Does this interpretation of Freud's behavior back then....make me a 'guerilla historian of psychoanalysis'? Should I be lumped in with Swales as having some sort of 'transference axe to grind'? You know what they say...'If the shoe fits, wear it.'...
I would like to think that I have a much greater goal to accomplish here than to simply criticize Freud for medical behaviors that he rightly deserves to be aptly criticized for...Fliess and Freud should have been charged and convicted of 'medical malpractice'...And for Freud, it wasn't the first time that cocaine had interfered with his good judgment in dealing with a patient...In 1891, Freud had had a patient and good friend die on him while he was prescribing cocaine to him...to try to 'cure' an already existing morphine addiction...
Once medically bitten by cocaine, you would think twice shy...and a lot medically wiser four years later...But Freud once again entered into dangerous medical territory...and was bitten again...by the same drug...cocaine....we don't know for sure that Emma was involved in cocaine...but why was she having nasal surgery? And Freud? We know from the Lettters that Fliess was using cocaine medically as well...I'd hazard a guess that some of that 'extra medical cocaine' was being used by Fliess 'recreationally'...
Fliess certainly seemed to have a good understanding of cocaine...Who else (besides Freud) would concoct a 'nasal-sexual theory'....According to Freud, Fliess was going to write a 'Nose and Sex' book (The Complete Letters, p. 172, The February 13th, 1896 Letter ....please tell me that it never got written...or if it did get written...and published...someone explain it to me...
Meanwhile, if it looks like a duck...quacks like a duck...swims like a duck...and has the 'bill' of a duck which might be used to ingest cocaine...leading to 'more energy' and possibly even 'sexual arousal', then perhaps it is a duck taking cocaine...
In my books, Freud, Fliess, and Emma Ekstein were all taking cocaine leading up to the ill fated nasal surgery of February, 1895...
Nothing entirely 'provable' perhaps in a court of law...kind of like The Barry Bonds... and most of the rest...of the baseball steroid cases...just too many 'coincidences' and too many pieces of 'circumstantial evidence'...all coming together in the same time and place...ending in a medical disaster that Freud should have been smart enough to avoid, given his similar experience in the 1880s...
But Freud -- perhaps obsessively, erotically, and neurotically...didn't walk away from this 'underground, out of bounds' nasal-sexual operation that went horribly wrong...and then he invented a 'longing hysterical bleeder' theory to 'narcissistically cover up' his and Fliess' -- and Emma's very real -- medical nightmare... ................................................................................
Physiological Effects of Cocaine
Cocaine produces its powerful high by acting on the brain. But as cocaine travels through the blood, it affects the whole body.
Cocaine is responsible for more U.S. emergency room visits than any other illegal drug. Cocaine harms the brain, heart, blood vessels, and lungs -- and can even cause sudden death. Here's what happens in the body:
Heart. Cocaine is bad for the heart. Cocaine increases heart rate and blood pressure while constricting the arteries supplying blood to the heart. The result can be a heart attack, even in young people without heart disease. Cocaine can also trigger a deadly abnormal heart rhythm called arrhythmia, killing instantly.
Brain. Cocaine can constrict blood vessels in the brain, causing strokes. This can happen even in young people without other risk factors for strokes. Cocaine causes seizures and can lead to bizarre or violent behavior.
Lungs and respiratory system. Snorting cocaine damages the nose and sinuses. Regular use can cause nasal perforation. Smoking crack cocaine irritates the lungs and, in some people, causes permanent lung damage.
Gastrointestinal tract. Cocaine constricts blood vessels supplying the gut. The resulting oxygen starvation can cause ulcers, or even perforation of the stomach or intestines.
Kidneys. Cocaine can cause sudden, overwhelming kidney failure through a process called rhabdomyolysis. In people with high blood pressure, regular cocaine use can accelerate the long-term kidney damage caused by high blood pressure.
Sexual function. Although cocaine has a reputation as an aphrodisiac, it actually may make you less able to finish what you start. Chronic cocaine use can impair sexual function in men and women. In men, cocaine can cause delayed or impaired ejaculation.
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Licit and Illicit Drugs
The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs
by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972
Chapter 35. Cocaine
....Freud wrote to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, on April 21, 1884. "I am procuring some (cocaine) myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion. . . .`3
The account of Freud's experiences which follows is drawn largely from the three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, by Ernest Jones.http://www.ukcia.org/research/cunion/cu35.htm
Freud "tried the effect of a twentieth of a gram [50 milligrams] and found it turned the bad mood he was in into cheerfulness, giving him the feeling of having dined well 'so that there is nothing at all one need bother about,' but without robbing him of any energy for exercise or work." 4
In addition to taking cocaine himself, Freud offered some to his friend and associate, Dr. Ernst von Flcischl-Marxow, who was suffering from an exceedingly painful disease of the nervous system (which was later to prove fatal), and who was addicted to morphine. Freud also prescribed cocaine for a patient with gastric catarrh. The initial results in all three cases were favorable. Freud decided cocaine was "a magical drug," and he wrote his fiancee, Martha:
If it goes well I will write an essay on it and I expect it will win its place in therapeutics by the side of morphium and superior to it. I have other hopes and intentions about it. I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion, and with the most brilliant success.... In short it is only now that I feel I am a doctor, since I have helped one patient and hope to help more. If things go on in this way we need have no concern about being able to come together and to stay in Vienna.5
Freud even sent some of his precious cocaine to Martha, "to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color." Indeed, Dr. Jones writes, "he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients; he gave it to his sisters. In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace." 6
In a subsequent letter to Martha, Freud wrote more on his personal experience with cocaine:
Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. [Italics in original.] In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance. 7
Freud's haste in publishing his findings may astonish twentieth-century readers. On April 21, 1884, he was still only planning to secure some cocaine. On June 18, his essay was completed; and the "Song of Praise" to cocaine was published in the July 1884 issue of the Centralblatt fur die gesammte Therapie.
This essay, Dr. Jones writes, had "a tone that never recurred in Freud's writings, a remarkable combination of objectivity with a personal warmth as if he were in love with the content itself. He used expressions uncommon in a scientific paper such as 'the most gorgeous excitement' that animals display after an injection of cocaine, and administering an 'offering' of it rather than a 'dose'; he heatedly rebuffed the 'slander' that had been published about this precious drug. This artistic presentation must have contributed much to the interest the essay aroused in Viennese and other medical circles. . . . He even gave an account of the religious observances connected with its use, and mentioned the mythical saga of how Manco Capac, the Royal Son of the Sun-God, had sent it as 'a gift from the gods to satisfy the hungry, forify the weary, and make the unfortunate forget their sorrows.' " 8
More to the point, Freud described in detail the effects of small doses of cocaine on his own depression. These included "exhilaration. and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person. . . . You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. . . . In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe that you are under the influence of any drug.... Long intensive mental or physical work is performed without any fatigue.... This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant after-effects that follow exhilaration brought about by alcohol. . . . Absolutely no craving for the further use of cocaine appears after the first, or even after repeated taking of the drug; one feels rather a certain curious aversion to it." 9 Cocaine, Freud concluded, was useful for "those functional states comprised under the name neurasthenia"10 Freud at this time had diagnosed his own depressions as neurasthenic-as well as for indigestion and for the withdrawal of morphine.
Freud also sought to inject cocaine directly into the area of a nerve to block intractable pain. In this he failed, but others succeeded;* and until better agents became available, cocaine was often used as local anesthesia for surgery.
Some of Freud's findings on cocaine as a psychoactive drug were amply confirmed by subsequent research. "The subjective effects of cocaine include an elevation of mood that often reaches proportions of euphoric excitement," Dr. Jaffe reported in Goodman and Gilman's textbook (1965). "It produces a marked decrease in hunger, an indifference to pain, and is reputed to be the most potent anti-fatigue agent known. The user enjoys a feeling of great muscular strength and increased mental capacity and greatly overestimates his capabilities. The euphoria is accompanied by generalized sympathetic stimulation. As is the case with amphetamine, a disturbed personality is not a prerequisite for cocaine-induced euphoria, and the drug is quite effective in relatively normal personalities." 11
Freud's experience, however, proved to be only part of the story. In July 1885, a German authority on morphine addiction named Erlenmever launched the first of a series of attacks on cocaine as an addicting drug. In January 1886 Freud's friend Obersteiner, who had at first favored cocaine, reported that it produced severe mental disturbances similar to those seen in delirium tremens. Other attacks soon followed; and Freud himself was subjected to "grave reproaches." 12 Freud continued to praise cocaine as late as July 1887, when he published a final defense of the drug. But soon thereafter he discontinued all use of it both personally and professionally. Despite the fact that he had been taking cocaine periodically over a three-year span, he appears to have had no difficulty in stopping. His abandonment of cocaine was no doubt influenced in large part by the experience of Dr. von Fleischl-Marxow, the patient with whom Freud had shared his initial gram of cocaine.
* Among those who succeeded, as noted in Chapter 5, was the voting American surgeon, Dr. W. S. Halsted.
Fleischl suffered from multiple tumors of various peripheral nerves - netiromata-which gave him excruciating pain. He took morphine for this pain. At first Freud's cocaine proved a welcome substitute for the morphine-but Fleischl found it necessary to escalate his cocaine dose.
After a year on cocaine he was taking a full gram of it daily'-twenty times the dose Freud himself took from time to time. Indeed, Freud noted, Fleischl had spent $428 for a three-month supply of cocaine, an enormous sum in Vienna in those days. On June 8, 1885, Dr. Jones adds, "Freud wrote that the frightful doses had harmed Fleischl greatly and, although he kept sending Martha cocaine, he warned her against acquiring the habit." Thereafter Fleischl developed a full-fledged cocaine psychosis, "With white snakes creeping over his skin." 13 Freud and other physician friends mirsed Fleischl faithfully, often throughout the long nights, but to little avail. In June 1885 Freud estimated that Fleischl could live six more months at most; he actually survived for six more painwracked years.
Nor was Fleischl's experience unique; subsequent observations were to reveal that repeated use of large doses of cocaine produces a characteristic paranoid psychosis in all or almost all users, and that the tendency to overuse is widespread. A peculiar characteristic of this psychosis is "forinication"-the hallucination that ants, or insects, or (as in Fleischl's case) snakes, are crawling along the skin or under it.
Why was Freud, unlike his friend Fleischl, able to use modest doses of cocaine-30 to 50 milligrams injected under the skin-from time to time for three years without developing either a craving for the drug or a need to escalate the dose? At least three alternative explanations are available. Dr. Jones, a psychoanalyst, believed that it requires an "addictive personality" to establish an addiction; Lacking an addictive personality, he declares, Freud did not become a cocaine addict. (He did, however, become addicted to cigars, as described in Chapter 24.) The other two explanations are pharmacological.
One holds that there must be some biochemical difference-perhaps a difference in enzymes-between people like Freud who can take a particular addicting drug without becoming addicted and people like Fleischl who escalate the dose and become addicted. This hypothetical difference in enzymes may (or may not) be hereditary. The third explanation relates the addiction (or lack of it) to dosages and frequency of use. Because Freud took cocaine only occasionally, according to this theory, he had no need to escalate his dose. And because he did not escalate the dose, he did not become addicted. Some other explanation, of course, may ultimately prove true.
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The essay above was written in 1972 -- 13 years before Masson published the Complete Letters of Freud to Fliess in 1985...in which it can be seen that Freud's 'misadventures' with cocaine extended well beyond July of 1887 as falsely asserted by the author above...indeed, at least into 1895, meaning 11 years of cocaine usage, not 3 or 4 years as asserted by Jones above...And yet Jones, Sulloway (Freud: Biologist of The Mind, with a 1992 edition after The Complete Letters had come out), and others continute to say that Freud was never 'addicted' to cocaine...No...he simply enjoyed the sensation of fresh pus oozing out of his nose...(that was my sarcasm...)...see the letter of May 25th, 1895....'I discharged exceedingly ample amounts of pus and all the while felt splendid'...'(p. 130).
I have to go back and find the quote -- either in 1895 or 1895 -- where Freud wrote Fliess to tell him he had finally 'quit' taking cocaine (whether he actually did stop or not is another question)...
I will just leave you with this ending to a letter by Freud to Fliess on November 29th, 1895.
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I hope soon to hear many good things of you, wife, child, and sexuality through the nose.
Most cordial greetings.
Your
Sigm.
As the heart improves, many light migraines.
(The Complete Letters, p. 152)
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Migraines, heart attacks, heart arrythmia, depression, nasal infections....
Does anybody really still want to believe that -- even in 1895 -- Freud didn't have a serious cocaine problem?
April 21st was a bad day for Freud. April 21st, 1884 -- the day that Freud wrote his fiance, Martha, to tell her that he was buying cocaine for the first time (to study it 'medically') -- was also the same day in 1896 where Freud's potentially revolutionary paper, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' espousing his historically famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) 'child sexual abuse theory' in relation to hysteria, was universally rejected by all his medical co-workers and superiors.
In my opinion -- the combination of this evening on April 21st, 1896 with the year earlier episode with Fliess and Emma Ekstein, was the beginning of an 'unethical slide downwards' for Freud. Because shortly afterwards, Freud's Seduction Theory would start to become 'buried' or 'repressed' or 'suppressed' (the latter was Masson's choice of words, 1984, 85, 92) under the weight of his advancing 'wishfulfillment', 'instinct-fantasy', 'screen memory', and 'dream' theories....
Wrote Freud afterwards -- before he quickly lost 'faith' in the theory that he believed was so 'revolutionary':
.............................................................................................
A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society met with an icy reception from the asses, and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand-year-old problem, a caput Nili (source of the Nile)! They can go to hell, euphemisitically expressed. (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, Masson, 1985, p. 184, the letter of April 26th, 1896.)
Freud may have been 'arrogant', 'rebellious' and 'anti-establishment' at the time that he initially wrote the letter above -- but it didn't last long. It would seem rather obvious to me (and presumably, Masson) that Freud basically 'succumbed to the attack of the pack of wolves' in the Psychiatry Society (my present day metaphor)...and started to 'ethically cave in' shortly thereafter as his 'patient workload' started to dry up....
The letter from Freud to Fliess of May 4th, 1896 gives us strong indications as to why.
.......................................................................................
'I am as isolated as you would wish me to be. Word was given out to abandon me, for a void is forming all around me. So far I bear it with equanimity. I find it more troublesome that this year for the first time my consulting room is empty, that for weeks on end I see no new faces, cannot begin any new treatments, and that none of the old ones are completed. Things are so difficult and trying that it requires, on the whole, a strong constitution to deal with them. As for Ekstein -- I am taking notes on her history so that I can send it to you -- so far I know only that she bled out of longing. (The Complete Letters, p. 186, the letter of May 4th, 1896.'
....................................................................................................................
I look at May 4th, 1896 as the day that Psychoanalysis became 'neurotic'.
Freud may have believed only a week prior that he had 'found the source of the Nile' but now 'two sources were converging into one' -- Freud was being 'blacklisted' and 'economically crushed' at the same time that he needed an 'excuse to wither away his medical guilt' relative to Emma Ekstein's close brush with death on the medical malpractice of Freud and Fliess.
In the 1880s, Freud can perhaps be excused for his 'experimenting' with cocaine and its potential 'medical properties' because no one knew about its 'addictive properties' and potential dangers until the late 1880s. Still, amidst 'bad reports' coming in on the hazards of cocaine, Freud pushed on, kept prescribing it, kept using it, and one of his patients and good friends, Fleischl, ended up dead in 1891, partly as a result of severe cocaine addiction. But Freud kept using it...almost definitely in my opinion through the whole Emma Ekstein ordeal -- in fact, cocaine was probably the main reason for Fliess and Freud's 'mutual obsession' with 'nasal sexuality' and 'nasal surgery' with poor Emma Ekstein getting into the unfortunate middle of these two 'hair-brained, off the deep end' theorists (my editorial comment).
Indeed, I would even speculate that there was something much more 'erotically -- and pathologocially -- primitive' going on in this whole Emma Ekstein fiasco. Something of a 'transference' nature. We all have 'transference games' that we play and some of these 'games' are not at all nice -- they can be mixed with sadism, cruelty, serial violence...depending on 'the source of the Nile' of the original 'transference memory' which I think I have found here.
Ernest Jones (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953, 1981, Vol., 1, p. 11) writes about an alleged Freudian 'screen memory'....I sniff out 'transference memories' from alleged 'screen memories':
'Freud never alluded in his writings to Emanuel's wife. Pauline, his niece, was on the other hand of some emotional significance. In the screen memory that Dr. Bernfeld unraveled, an amorous attachment to her is manifest, and beyond that an unconscious phantasy of her being raped by John and himself together. Freud himself related how he and his nephew used to treat the little girl cruelly, and one may assume that this included some erotic component -- whether manifest or not. The latter feature is the first sign that Freud's sexual constitution was not exclusively masculine after all, to 'hunt in couples' means sharing one's gratification with someone of one's own sex.'
Also, I have written previously on Freud's earliest childhood recollection -- when he was 3 or 4, he had 'invaded' the 'privacy' of his parents' master bedroom while they were 'getting it on'....Here again, you look at the 'structural, transference dynamics' of 'conscious early memory' -- what Freud would call a 'screen memory' and what I would call a 'transference memory', and you can quickly see that it involved '2 men and a woman' -- in this case, Freud Senior, little Siggy, his mother -- 'the sexual object' of his dad, and soon to be 'the sexual object' of little Siggy within the sexual confines of a 'menage a trois' involving a woman and another male -- and also, Freud's post 1896 'transference sublimated' invention of 'The Oedipal Complex'....
I will take my 'narcissistic bows' on this 'extended transference analysis' of Freud's character because no psychoanalyst has been here before me. Why? Because Freud scared them all away with his concept of 'screen memories' which I now view as a 'defense' on Freud's part to avoid 'the (unconcious, repressed?) analytic interpretation of a 'real transference memory' of lifelong ('serial', 'repetition compulsion') significance that is both being 'hidden' and 'alluded to' by the seemingly 'innocent' little screen (read 'transference') memory.
Anyone want to argue this point?
This latest development here is so excruciatingly important that I have just wiped out the rest of the essay to let you go back and 'chew on' the huge implications of what I just wrote here...which obviously need to be developed much further...
-- dgb, May 1st, 2011, updated, modified July 30th, 31st, Aug. 1st, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
A Quick Overview, Synopsis, and Model of DGB Quantum-Dialectic Personality Theory...
Any personality theory can be divided into 'structures' (nouns) and 'processes' (verbs, action)...
A personality theory -- or a model of the personality -- with its particular number of 'invisible structures' or 'metaphorical organs' or 'compartments' -- is different than any biological study of 'anatomy' in that the study of anatomy is predominantly 'physical' and 'empirically visible' -- if we do an autopsy of a dead person's body we can expect to find a 'heart' and a 'brain' and a 'liver'...and so on...
Not so if we were to do an 'autopsy' of the 'mind' or 'pscyhe' because here everything postulated in terms of 'structures' or 'ego-states' or 'compartments' or 'pscyho-organs' is invisable, and thus, 'metaphysical' -- i.e., 'above physics'.
In this regard, a hardline and hardnose empirical skeptic like David Hume would say -- 'Bah! Humbug!....If it's invisable, it doesn't exist. (Hume didn't know about 'bacteria' and 'viruses' back then, although if he was alive today, he would most definitely argue that they 'exist' because they can be seen under a microscope....
In contrast, a 'Central Ego' or an 'Id' or a 'Superego' -- can't even be seen under any microscope....Thus, 'Commit these 'nonsensical, conceptual postulates' to flames!!....would argue the most stringent skeptic and deconstructive philosopher in the history of Western Philosophy -- the empirical hardliner, David Hume. Hume didn't even believe in the existence of 'The Self' -- because again, it can't be seen....
Obviously, the same stringent empirical logic would be applied to the concept of 'God'... which for self-preservational purposes, Hume kept this argument mainly to himself....He wanted to keep his 'head' as well as his 'mind' -- although, presumably he didn't use the term 'mind' either...because it too would be an 'invisible concept'....so let's just say he wanted to keep his 'brain' as well as his 'head'...There were a lot of religious people in high places walking around who didn't take too kindly to Hume's line of thinking.....Very simple...you chop off his head and you 'cut off his particular line of thinking'....
Things like 'egalitarianism' and 'freedom of speech' and 'democracy', and 'dethroning the Churches of the power they had back then'...were on their way....during the course of 'The Enlightement' -- of which David Hume played an early part -- but, still, you had to be very careful of some of the things you said...and believed...As even today, not everyone was 'open-finded' and 'flexible' and 'accepting' in their thinking...
Anyways, I part company from the still esteemed David Hume...I am not as hardline an empiricist or skeptic or deconstructionist as Mr. Hume... Still, I respect his line of thinking....even as I disagree and go another way...
Man thinks in terms of 'metaphors' all the time -- 'Hegel's Hotel' is a metaphor -- and any personality theorist who thinks in terms of 'structures' and 'compartments' and 'pscyho-organs' is thinking in terms of metaphors...
We can get sick or healthy using metaphors -- and 'good' or 'bad' 'associations'...
When we use 'metaphors' and 'associations' and 'generalizations' -- we are playing a type of 'epistemological' and/or 'ethical' fitting game....
Our metaphors, associations and generalizations have got to be useful, functional...or else....do what David Hume told us to do...'Commit them to flames!' (before they commit you to flames!)....
Freud used 3 'metaphorical organs' or 'compartments' in the psyche: 1. The Id; 2. The Ego; and 3. The Superego -- all of them 'invisible' of course -- and inferred and 'structuralized' in terms of certain repetitively and clinically observed cognitively- judging (the Superego) vs. emotionally and behaviorally impulsive (the Id) vs. 'cognitively-mediating', 'problem-solving', 'conflict-resolving', and 'compromise-forming' functions (the Ego).
Then Melanie Klein came along and offered a completely different point of view -- the idea of an 'internalized object' where an internalized object could be further subdivided into an 'internalized father' and an 'internalized mother' and then a 'good internalized father' as opposed to a 'bad internalized father' (and similarly with the 'internalized mother'). Here all associated cognitive-emotional-behavioral functions of the 'internal object' were contained in the same 'ego-state' or what I would further sub-classify into a 'superego-state', a 'central ego state', and an 'underego state'. Then, rather than, or in addition to, talking about 'internalized fathers and mothers', we could also -- which I have chosen to do -- go the 'multi-bi-polar route' and now what used to be 'The Superego' -- and what would quite likely have Freud turning over in his grave if he were to be able to telepathically hear or read about this from his final 'resting point' (maybe Melanie Klein can transfer the news to Dr. Freud and make it more palatable to him...) -- I have 'split' into 4 'Sub-Superegos': 1. The Altruistic-Nurturing Superego; 2. The Narcissistic-Self-Interested Superego; 3. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Superego; and 4. The Apollonian-Righteous-(Rejecting) Superego.
You can see the influence of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy (Dionysus vs. Apollo) in this configuration, as well as Freud's distinction between the 'Primary' (Dionysian) and Secondary (Apollonian) Process. Then there is the 'Narcissistic-Altruistic Bi-polar Superego Split'.
To bring in another metaphor, there is basically a 'parliament of the personality' that is being built up here that includes: 1. 'The Minister of Nurturing and Support' (The Altruistic-Nurturing Superego); 2. 'The Minister of Narcissism (or Egotistic Self-Centredness) (The Narcissistic Superego); 3. The Minister of Pleasure, Sensuality, and Sexuality (The Dionysian Superego); 4. The Minister of Ethical Righteousness, Morality, and Defense (The Apollonian Superego).
The 'Mid-Zone Region' consists of 3 separate parts: 5. a 'Debating' or 'Therapy' Room which I also call: 'The Gestalt Room' or 'The Psycho-Drama Room' or 'The Bi-Polar Debating Room') and which is overseen by 6. 'The Central Ego' (which is like 'The Manager' or 'The Vice President' or 'The Chief Advisor' of 'The Corporation' or 'The Parliament' and who answers only to 7. 'The President' or 'The Chief Executive Officer' or 'The Prime Minister') which in the personality is 'the First Person -- 'I' -- as in 'Self' -- the final resting place of 'behavioral accountability'.
In a healthy person, the 'I' or 'The Self' is in control of both 'The Central Ego'...and the rest of the personality...but sometimes 'dissociated', 'isolated', 'alienated', 'suppressed', 'repressed' parts of the Self 'break loose' -- like 'criminals breaking out of prison', or like 'inmates going crazy in an asylum'....or The Central Ego and/or President are 'too weak' to handle an 'out of control, internal civil war' -- often because The Central Ego, and/or President and/or Apollonian Superego is too harsh, restrictive, and authoritarian -- or alternatively, too 'liberally permissive'...
We all have 'inmates' in our personality. In DGB Psychology, they are 'contained', 'locked up' for the most part, in our 'Shadow-Id Complex (SIC) Compartment' -- or 'SIC Bay' ....(The name here has changed from past papers where I used the names 'SID Complex', 'The SID Compartment', and 'SIGGY's Cave' .) Our SIC Bay is listed and described further down the 'ladder of the personality here' -- in the unconscious -- but first we have 4 different 'splits in the Underego' to talk about...and then 'The Dream Weaver'...
The 'Underego' can be divided into four 'special interest splits': 8. The Apollonian-Rebellious Underego; 9. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Underego; 10. The Narcissistic/Selfish Underego; and 11. The Altruistic-Co-operative (Compliant, Pleasing, Approval-Seeking, Disapproval-Avoiding) Underego.
12. is 'The Dream Weaver' -- the part of our personality that 'weaves' our dreams, fantasies, nightmares, and creations together, using perceived material from both above it on the personality ladder -- and below it....
13. Is 'SIC Bay' (or 'The Isolation Ward' or 'The Quarantine Quarters').....a combination of our past and present 'traumacies' and 'phantasies' (both positive and negative fantasies)...a combination of 'oral' and/or 'anal' impulses -- they could be Dionysian impulses, Narcissistic impulses, Altruistic Impulses, Rebellious Impulses, Secret Traumacies, Ghosts from our past....'transferences', 'compensations', 'defenses', mixed with 'perceived needs', complexes...which it may take a good psychologist/psychotherapist and/or 'psycho-theorist' (like me) to help sort out for you...
14. Is our 'Personal Transference Template' -- all our childhood memories that are still impacting our present day personality, particularly the most pleasant and/or unpleasant memories that have been 'woven' into our unique 'transference complexes'...'the serial signature' of our personality...
15. Is our 'Mythological Chamber' where we visit all our ancient 'Archetypes', 'picture symbols', 'Greek and Roman Gods'....and/or other Cultural Gods and/or symbols....
16. Is our 'Genetic Potential Self' -- the self that 'God/Nature/Our Creator' meant us to be...spiritually this may be referred to as our 'Soul'...
17. The other newest member of my personality-team here is our 'Apeiron' or worded otherwise, our 'Chaotic (Undifferentiated, Cosmic) Bi-polar Cave'...(or our CBC)...here because of my fascination with Anaximander's 2560 year old 'Cosmology'. Biblically, our CBC can be referred to as our internalized or introjected 'Noah's Ark' where everything starting from 'protons' and 'electrons' starts to move through our body and our personality '2 by 2'.
In this regard, bi-polar evolutionary elements start to slowly differentiate themselves from each other as they begin to climb up our 'Personality Ladder'...right up into our conscious personality, or alternatively might be stuck 'underground in the un/subconscious' of the personality such as never leaving The CBC here, or perhaps a little higher up in SIC Bay, where a particular bi-polar element triggers alarm bells in our 'Psychological Defense System (PDS)' -- 'danger!, danger!' 'hold this thing down before it goes any further'...and so it gets 'locked up'.... but then at night..when our PDS is not on full conscious alert, our Dream Weaver sneaks in, grabs a hold of it and 'weaves' it into one of our dreams...or nightmares...
Or under the influence of alcohol, this 'dissociated bi-polar element' escapes from SIC Bay....shoots its way up to the conscious personality, and 'overwhelms' the Central Ego....
In such a fashion, we get 'Bi-Polar Disorder (BPD)'. Essentially, every type of 'neurotic disorder' is some type of BPD including 'Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)' of which I differentiate between Anal/Apollonian OCDs and Oral/Dionysian OCDs which again -- if a person is 'stuck' in an 'Apollonian OCD' or a 'Dionysian OCD' -- is a type of Bi-Polar Disorder. 'Psychosis' is when a person 'loses control' not only of 'reality' but also his or her 'Mythological Chamber' which 'spills out' symbolic-mythological material, becomes mixed in with 'personal transference material/complexes', shoots up further through SIC bay but is impossible to control there, and 'continues to shoot up further like an exploding volcano' overwhelming our conscious personality....
'Borderline Disorder' is where a person generally utilizes some form of Anal OCD (a very 'anal-retentive' type of personality and lifestyle) to prevent some form of 'psychosis' from exploding up into the conscious personality. This used to be called a 'nervous or psychotic breakdown'....
Again, a good psychologist/psychotherapist will need to work with a combination of the mythological and/or transference material to make sense of everything that is happening...and why an 'explosion from SIC Bay' is happening now in the person's life...What was the 'recent and/or current stressor' that has 'over-tipped' the previous, precarious 'homeostaitic-dialectic balance' -- such that 'civil disorder' has broken out in the personality? It is not uncommon for 'extreme anal-retentiveness and self-restraint' finally 'exploding outwards one day' in 'oral impulsiveness'...like in 'Manic Depression' -- the old more specific name for what is currently called 'Bi-Polar Disorder'.
There you go -- the current 17 part DGB model of the personality -- and a brief description of how the different parts interact with each other...
There is a lot of Western History, Philosophy, and Psychology in this short synopsis of my DGB Personality Model -- with influences from Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Spinoza, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Adler, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Erich Fromm, Eric Berne, Foucault, Derrida, Masson...
I have been building models of the personality for over 30 years now, starting with my first one called 'Evaluation and Health' which was my Honours Thesis in Psychology in 1979. That model was primarily a model of the activities of 'The Central Ego'. I knew when I finished that essay that I had a lot more research and learning to do in order to understand the more sub/unconsconsicous elements of the personality. I didn't expect it to take 32 years! However, if you go back and look at Freud's timetable, he presented his first major essay on the 'personality' in 1894 (The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence). It wasn't until 1923 -- 29 years later -- that Freud finally produced his last major model of the personality that has become the famous triadic model of 'Classical Psychoanalysis' (Id, Ego, Superego that reflects the Hegelian 'classic dialectic equation' of Thesis, Anti-Thesis, and Synthesis with Fichte, Schopenhauer, and mainly Nietzsche bridging the gap -- Apollo vs. Dionysus.)
From the vantage point of Hegel's Hotel, I think I would look at this little essay here as being my own 'rough equivalent' to 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' (1920) and 'The Ego and The Id' (1923). There are a 'ton of Freudian influences' in this little paper that you can't see yet: from essays like 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894), 'The Dynamics of The Transference' (1912), 'On Narcissism' (1914)...plus all the other influences mentioned above, most significantly, Anaximander's 'Cosmology' and Philosophy of 'The Apeiron (Chaos, The Shadow) and his philosophy of 'evolutionary bi-polar conflict'...Heraclitus' and Lao Tse's respective philosophies of 'opposites needing each other', Jung's concept of 'The Collective Unconscious' and his psychology of mythology, Adler's concept of 'lifestyle', 'conscious early recollections', 'inferiority and superiority complexes', Eric Berne's 'Transactional Analysis' and 'Games People Play', Fairbairn's 'rejecting' and 'exciting' objects, Erich Fromm's 'Man For Himself' and 'The Sane Society', Alfred Korzybski's 'Science and Sanity', S.I. Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought in Action' -- many of these influences were highly visible in my 1979 essay on what I would now call 'The Central Ego'...and 'Ego Psychology'...
The essay obviously needs to be extrapolated on, embellished, so that you might understand everything that is 'covertly hidden' -- assuming you are interested in pursusing where I am going -- as I put more meat on top of the skeleton that is this essay.These will need to be organized and fleshed out over the coming month or so...
I still want to completely re-write my 1979 essay, Evaluation and Health, as my contribution to 'Ego Psychology' and 'The Psychology of The Central Ego'...
Plus we have more work to do in other areas of Psychoanalysis...
Outside of Psychoanalysis and Psychology, I need to go back into the history of philosophy and finish a collection of different essays for each major time period and the major philosophers of my personal interest within each major time period...
I still probably need a good year or two to finish Hegel's Hotel...
One last thing. The model above of the personality is by necessity and abstraction -- 'generic' in its composition. It can be 'customized' in an assortment of different -- and opposing -- ways, depending on individual client need. There's none of this 'either/or' 'Oedipal-Instinct Theory' vs. 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory' garbage (at least in its overgeneralized, abstractive bi-polarity) because both traumacy-seduction and instinct-fantasy theory will be available for therapeutic usage depending on the particular individual client's details and needs....
And as for using 17 'metaphorical compartments' in the personality as opposed to Gestalt Therapy's '2 compartments' or Classical Psychoanalysis' '3 compartments'.
if this is too big and cumbersome a model to work with, no one here is saying that you need to work with all aspects of the model at the same time -- you might want to focus on 1, 2, 3, or 4 different areas in one sitting such as: 1. SIC Bay, 2. The Gestalt (Bi-Polarity) Therapy Room, The Apollonian Superego (or 'The Minister of Defense') and the client's 'Central Ego' overseeing -- and learning from -- the whole 'awareness' and 'contact' therapy process...And if you want, you can add 'mythological Gods' to the therapy process...
A quick example here. The therapist might say to his or her client. 'I think that your Cupid (or Venus or Aphrodite...) is locked up in SIC Bay. You are surrounding him with 'Character Armour' such that he can't get out....
Unless you want to live in an 'emotional wasteland', you have to let Cupid out, and let him do his thing, let him influence your Central Ego...Otherwise, both you and the people around you who you most care about -- and love -- are not going to see any of your love...
Bettter still, you might have the client experience this insight himself by 'acting out' a 'bi-polar-double-hot seat dialogue' in which 'Cupid' and 'Apollo' confront each other...
Either way, Mother Teresa would be 'guiding over the lesson' from the therapy session...
....................................................................................
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
-- Mother Teresa
.........................................................................................
-- dgb, April 26th-27th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
A personality theory -- or a model of the personality -- with its particular number of 'invisible structures' or 'metaphorical organs' or 'compartments' -- is different than any biological study of 'anatomy' in that the study of anatomy is predominantly 'physical' and 'empirically visible' -- if we do an autopsy of a dead person's body we can expect to find a 'heart' and a 'brain' and a 'liver'...and so on...
Not so if we were to do an 'autopsy' of the 'mind' or 'pscyhe' because here everything postulated in terms of 'structures' or 'ego-states' or 'compartments' or 'pscyho-organs' is invisable, and thus, 'metaphysical' -- i.e., 'above physics'.
In this regard, a hardline and hardnose empirical skeptic like David Hume would say -- 'Bah! Humbug!....If it's invisable, it doesn't exist. (Hume didn't know about 'bacteria' and 'viruses' back then, although if he was alive today, he would most definitely argue that they 'exist' because they can be seen under a microscope....
In contrast, a 'Central Ego' or an 'Id' or a 'Superego' -- can't even be seen under any microscope....Thus, 'Commit these 'nonsensical, conceptual postulates' to flames!!....would argue the most stringent skeptic and deconstructive philosopher in the history of Western Philosophy -- the empirical hardliner, David Hume. Hume didn't even believe in the existence of 'The Self' -- because again, it can't be seen....
Obviously, the same stringent empirical logic would be applied to the concept of 'God'... which for self-preservational purposes, Hume kept this argument mainly to himself....He wanted to keep his 'head' as well as his 'mind' -- although, presumably he didn't use the term 'mind' either...because it too would be an 'invisible concept'....so let's just say he wanted to keep his 'brain' as well as his 'head'...There were a lot of religious people in high places walking around who didn't take too kindly to Hume's line of thinking.....Very simple...you chop off his head and you 'cut off his particular line of thinking'....
Things like 'egalitarianism' and 'freedom of speech' and 'democracy', and 'dethroning the Churches of the power they had back then'...were on their way....during the course of 'The Enlightement' -- of which David Hume played an early part -- but, still, you had to be very careful of some of the things you said...and believed...As even today, not everyone was 'open-finded' and 'flexible' and 'accepting' in their thinking...
Anyways, I part company from the still esteemed David Hume...I am not as hardline an empiricist or skeptic or deconstructionist as Mr. Hume... Still, I respect his line of thinking....even as I disagree and go another way...
Man thinks in terms of 'metaphors' all the time -- 'Hegel's Hotel' is a metaphor -- and any personality theorist who thinks in terms of 'structures' and 'compartments' and 'pscyho-organs' is thinking in terms of metaphors...
We can get sick or healthy using metaphors -- and 'good' or 'bad' 'associations'...
When we use 'metaphors' and 'associations' and 'generalizations' -- we are playing a type of 'epistemological' and/or 'ethical' fitting game....
Our metaphors, associations and generalizations have got to be useful, functional...or else....do what David Hume told us to do...'Commit them to flames!' (before they commit you to flames!)....
Freud used 3 'metaphorical organs' or 'compartments' in the psyche: 1. The Id; 2. The Ego; and 3. The Superego -- all of them 'invisible' of course -- and inferred and 'structuralized' in terms of certain repetitively and clinically observed cognitively- judging (the Superego) vs. emotionally and behaviorally impulsive (the Id) vs. 'cognitively-mediating', 'problem-solving', 'conflict-resolving', and 'compromise-forming' functions (the Ego).
Then Melanie Klein came along and offered a completely different point of view -- the idea of an 'internalized object' where an internalized object could be further subdivided into an 'internalized father' and an 'internalized mother' and then a 'good internalized father' as opposed to a 'bad internalized father' (and similarly with the 'internalized mother'). Here all associated cognitive-emotional-behavioral functions of the 'internal object' were contained in the same 'ego-state' or what I would further sub-classify into a 'superego-state', a 'central ego state', and an 'underego state'. Then, rather than, or in addition to, talking about 'internalized fathers and mothers', we could also -- which I have chosen to do -- go the 'multi-bi-polar route' and now what used to be 'The Superego' -- and what would quite likely have Freud turning over in his grave if he were to be able to telepathically hear or read about this from his final 'resting point' (maybe Melanie Klein can transfer the news to Dr. Freud and make it more palatable to him...) -- I have 'split' into 4 'Sub-Superegos': 1. The Altruistic-Nurturing Superego; 2. The Narcissistic-Self-Interested Superego; 3. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Superego; and 4. The Apollonian-Righteous-(Rejecting) Superego.
You can see the influence of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy (Dionysus vs. Apollo) in this configuration, as well as Freud's distinction between the 'Primary' (Dionysian) and Secondary (Apollonian) Process. Then there is the 'Narcissistic-Altruistic Bi-polar Superego Split'.
To bring in another metaphor, there is basically a 'parliament of the personality' that is being built up here that includes: 1. 'The Minister of Nurturing and Support' (The Altruistic-Nurturing Superego); 2. 'The Minister of Narcissism (or Egotistic Self-Centredness) (The Narcissistic Superego); 3. The Minister of Pleasure, Sensuality, and Sexuality (The Dionysian Superego); 4. The Minister of Ethical Righteousness, Morality, and Defense (The Apollonian Superego).
The 'Mid-Zone Region' consists of 3 separate parts: 5. a 'Debating' or 'Therapy' Room which I also call: 'The Gestalt Room' or 'The Psycho-Drama Room' or 'The Bi-Polar Debating Room') and which is overseen by 6. 'The Central Ego' (which is like 'The Manager' or 'The Vice President' or 'The Chief Advisor' of 'The Corporation' or 'The Parliament' and who answers only to 7. 'The President' or 'The Chief Executive Officer' or 'The Prime Minister') which in the personality is 'the First Person -- 'I' -- as in 'Self' -- the final resting place of 'behavioral accountability'.
In a healthy person, the 'I' or 'The Self' is in control of both 'The Central Ego'...and the rest of the personality...but sometimes 'dissociated', 'isolated', 'alienated', 'suppressed', 'repressed' parts of the Self 'break loose' -- like 'criminals breaking out of prison', or like 'inmates going crazy in an asylum'....or The Central Ego and/or President are 'too weak' to handle an 'out of control, internal civil war' -- often because The Central Ego, and/or President and/or Apollonian Superego is too harsh, restrictive, and authoritarian -- or alternatively, too 'liberally permissive'...
We all have 'inmates' in our personality. In DGB Psychology, they are 'contained', 'locked up' for the most part, in our 'Shadow-Id Complex (SIC) Compartment' -- or 'SIC Bay' ....(The name here has changed from past papers where I used the names 'SID Complex', 'The SID Compartment', and 'SIGGY's Cave' .) Our SIC Bay is listed and described further down the 'ladder of the personality here' -- in the unconscious -- but first we have 4 different 'splits in the Underego' to talk about...and then 'The Dream Weaver'...
The 'Underego' can be divided into four 'special interest splits': 8. The Apollonian-Rebellious Underego; 9. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Underego; 10. The Narcissistic/Selfish Underego; and 11. The Altruistic-Co-operative (Compliant, Pleasing, Approval-Seeking, Disapproval-Avoiding) Underego.
12. is 'The Dream Weaver' -- the part of our personality that 'weaves' our dreams, fantasies, nightmares, and creations together, using perceived material from both above it on the personality ladder -- and below it....
13. Is 'SIC Bay' (or 'The Isolation Ward' or 'The Quarantine Quarters').....a combination of our past and present 'traumacies' and 'phantasies' (both positive and negative fantasies)...a combination of 'oral' and/or 'anal' impulses -- they could be Dionysian impulses, Narcissistic impulses, Altruistic Impulses, Rebellious Impulses, Secret Traumacies, Ghosts from our past....'transferences', 'compensations', 'defenses', mixed with 'perceived needs', complexes...which it may take a good psychologist/psychotherapist and/or 'psycho-theorist' (like me) to help sort out for you...
14. Is our 'Personal Transference Template' -- all our childhood memories that are still impacting our present day personality, particularly the most pleasant and/or unpleasant memories that have been 'woven' into our unique 'transference complexes'...'the serial signature' of our personality...
15. Is our 'Mythological Chamber' where we visit all our ancient 'Archetypes', 'picture symbols', 'Greek and Roman Gods'....and/or other Cultural Gods and/or symbols....
16. Is our 'Genetic Potential Self' -- the self that 'God/Nature/Our Creator' meant us to be...spiritually this may be referred to as our 'Soul'...
17. The other newest member of my personality-team here is our 'Apeiron' or worded otherwise, our 'Chaotic (Undifferentiated, Cosmic) Bi-polar Cave'...(or our CBC)...here because of my fascination with Anaximander's 2560 year old 'Cosmology'. Biblically, our CBC can be referred to as our internalized or introjected 'Noah's Ark' where everything starting from 'protons' and 'electrons' starts to move through our body and our personality '2 by 2'.
In this regard, bi-polar evolutionary elements start to slowly differentiate themselves from each other as they begin to climb up our 'Personality Ladder'...right up into our conscious personality, or alternatively might be stuck 'underground in the un/subconscious' of the personality such as never leaving The CBC here, or perhaps a little higher up in SIC Bay, where a particular bi-polar element triggers alarm bells in our 'Psychological Defense System (PDS)' -- 'danger!, danger!' 'hold this thing down before it goes any further'...and so it gets 'locked up'.... but then at night..when our PDS is not on full conscious alert, our Dream Weaver sneaks in, grabs a hold of it and 'weaves' it into one of our dreams...or nightmares...
Or under the influence of alcohol, this 'dissociated bi-polar element' escapes from SIC Bay....shoots its way up to the conscious personality, and 'overwhelms' the Central Ego....
In such a fashion, we get 'Bi-Polar Disorder (BPD)'. Essentially, every type of 'neurotic disorder' is some type of BPD including 'Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)' of which I differentiate between Anal/Apollonian OCDs and Oral/Dionysian OCDs which again -- if a person is 'stuck' in an 'Apollonian OCD' or a 'Dionysian OCD' -- is a type of Bi-Polar Disorder. 'Psychosis' is when a person 'loses control' not only of 'reality' but also his or her 'Mythological Chamber' which 'spills out' symbolic-mythological material, becomes mixed in with 'personal transference material/complexes', shoots up further through SIC bay but is impossible to control there, and 'continues to shoot up further like an exploding volcano' overwhelming our conscious personality....
'Borderline Disorder' is where a person generally utilizes some form of Anal OCD (a very 'anal-retentive' type of personality and lifestyle) to prevent some form of 'psychosis' from exploding up into the conscious personality. This used to be called a 'nervous or psychotic breakdown'....
Again, a good psychologist/psychotherapist will need to work with a combination of the mythological and/or transference material to make sense of everything that is happening...and why an 'explosion from SIC Bay' is happening now in the person's life...What was the 'recent and/or current stressor' that has 'over-tipped' the previous, precarious 'homeostaitic-dialectic balance' -- such that 'civil disorder' has broken out in the personality? It is not uncommon for 'extreme anal-retentiveness and self-restraint' finally 'exploding outwards one day' in 'oral impulsiveness'...like in 'Manic Depression' -- the old more specific name for what is currently called 'Bi-Polar Disorder'.
There you go -- the current 17 part DGB model of the personality -- and a brief description of how the different parts interact with each other...
There is a lot of Western History, Philosophy, and Psychology in this short synopsis of my DGB Personality Model -- with influences from Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Spinoza, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Adler, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Erich Fromm, Eric Berne, Foucault, Derrida, Masson...
I have been building models of the personality for over 30 years now, starting with my first one called 'Evaluation and Health' which was my Honours Thesis in Psychology in 1979. That model was primarily a model of the activities of 'The Central Ego'. I knew when I finished that essay that I had a lot more research and learning to do in order to understand the more sub/unconsconsicous elements of the personality. I didn't expect it to take 32 years! However, if you go back and look at Freud's timetable, he presented his first major essay on the 'personality' in 1894 (The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence). It wasn't until 1923 -- 29 years later -- that Freud finally produced his last major model of the personality that has become the famous triadic model of 'Classical Psychoanalysis' (Id, Ego, Superego that reflects the Hegelian 'classic dialectic equation' of Thesis, Anti-Thesis, and Synthesis with Fichte, Schopenhauer, and mainly Nietzsche bridging the gap -- Apollo vs. Dionysus.)
From the vantage point of Hegel's Hotel, I think I would look at this little essay here as being my own 'rough equivalent' to 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' (1920) and 'The Ego and The Id' (1923). There are a 'ton of Freudian influences' in this little paper that you can't see yet: from essays like 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894), 'The Dynamics of The Transference' (1912), 'On Narcissism' (1914)...plus all the other influences mentioned above, most significantly, Anaximander's 'Cosmology' and Philosophy of 'The Apeiron (Chaos, The Shadow) and his philosophy of 'evolutionary bi-polar conflict'...Heraclitus' and Lao Tse's respective philosophies of 'opposites needing each other', Jung's concept of 'The Collective Unconscious' and his psychology of mythology, Adler's concept of 'lifestyle', 'conscious early recollections', 'inferiority and superiority complexes', Eric Berne's 'Transactional Analysis' and 'Games People Play', Fairbairn's 'rejecting' and 'exciting' objects, Erich Fromm's 'Man For Himself' and 'The Sane Society', Alfred Korzybski's 'Science and Sanity', S.I. Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought in Action' -- many of these influences were highly visible in my 1979 essay on what I would now call 'The Central Ego'...and 'Ego Psychology'...
The essay obviously needs to be extrapolated on, embellished, so that you might understand everything that is 'covertly hidden' -- assuming you are interested in pursusing where I am going -- as I put more meat on top of the skeleton that is this essay.These will need to be organized and fleshed out over the coming month or so...
I still want to completely re-write my 1979 essay, Evaluation and Health, as my contribution to 'Ego Psychology' and 'The Psychology of The Central Ego'...
Plus we have more work to do in other areas of Psychoanalysis...
Outside of Psychoanalysis and Psychology, I need to go back into the history of philosophy and finish a collection of different essays for each major time period and the major philosophers of my personal interest within each major time period...
I still probably need a good year or two to finish Hegel's Hotel...
One last thing. The model above of the personality is by necessity and abstraction -- 'generic' in its composition. It can be 'customized' in an assortment of different -- and opposing -- ways, depending on individual client need. There's none of this 'either/or' 'Oedipal-Instinct Theory' vs. 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory' garbage (at least in its overgeneralized, abstractive bi-polarity) because both traumacy-seduction and instinct-fantasy theory will be available for therapeutic usage depending on the particular individual client's details and needs....
And as for using 17 'metaphorical compartments' in the personality as opposed to Gestalt Therapy's '2 compartments' or Classical Psychoanalysis' '3 compartments'.
if this is too big and cumbersome a model to work with, no one here is saying that you need to work with all aspects of the model at the same time -- you might want to focus on 1, 2, 3, or 4 different areas in one sitting such as: 1. SIC Bay, 2. The Gestalt (Bi-Polarity) Therapy Room, The Apollonian Superego (or 'The Minister of Defense') and the client's 'Central Ego' overseeing -- and learning from -- the whole 'awareness' and 'contact' therapy process...And if you want, you can add 'mythological Gods' to the therapy process...
A quick example here. The therapist might say to his or her client. 'I think that your Cupid (or Venus or Aphrodite...) is locked up in SIC Bay. You are surrounding him with 'Character Armour' such that he can't get out....
Unless you want to live in an 'emotional wasteland', you have to let Cupid out, and let him do his thing, let him influence your Central Ego...Otherwise, both you and the people around you who you most care about -- and love -- are not going to see any of your love...
Bettter still, you might have the client experience this insight himself by 'acting out' a 'bi-polar-double-hot seat dialogue' in which 'Cupid' and 'Apollo' confront each other...
Either way, Mother Teresa would be 'guiding over the lesson' from the therapy session...
....................................................................................
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
-- Mother Teresa
.........................................................................................
-- dgb, April 26th-27th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Monday, April 25, 2011
If There is One Thing Good To Be Said About Global Capitalism...
If there is one thing good to say about Global Capitalism...it is perhaps this:
I am suffering such that millions of people in some of the poorest countries in the world --- who are much more impovertized and desparate than me -- can work -- and at least take something home to feed their families...
-- dgb, April 25th, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
I am suffering such that millions of people in some of the poorest countries in the world --- who are much more impovertized and desparate than me -- can work -- and at least take something home to feed their families...
-- dgb, April 25th, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
Don't Let A Theory Over-Rule You, Over-run You...
Don't let a theory over-rule you, over-run you, and squash your open-mindedness, squash your ability to see outside your own particular restrictive, one-sided box; let the facts lead you to an undetermined conclusion -- don't let your theory lead you to a pre-determined conclusion.
-- dgb, April 25th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- dgb, April 25th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Who Were Some of The Greatest 'Healers' -- in The Spirit of Jesus Christ -- In The 19th and 20th Centuries?
I would like to take this essay to honour some of the greatest female healers in the history of civilization...Included in my list today are: Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell...and Princess Diana...
................................................
I think Mother Teresa had a deeper insight -- and a more intense empathy -- into the 'reality', not the 'fantasy', of 'human neurosis' than Freud did...And with all due respect to Freud, I think she was by far the greater healer...
Not surprisingly in my opinion, Mother Teresa's insight into human suffering and 'neurosis' -- a name that she probably would never even use -- came mainly from a similar place -- traumacy theory -- where Freud had started his investigations into psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic healing in the early 1890s, not after he abandoned this position/perspective/theory after 1896. Mother Teresa, to my knowledge, was never interested in 'human fantasy theory' -- perhaps more of a product of the middle and upper class where people have more time, money, and energy to fantasize...-- no, she was too busy trying to encourage, support, and give people hope and love in the deepest depths of their suffering...
You saw some of this in Freud's work up to 1896 -- his 'empathy' for traumatized and/or victimized 'hysterical' women...But after 1896, something changed -- I think it was a combination of the Emma Ekstein nasal surgery fiasco and near tragedy, as well as the scientific meeting of April, 1896, where Freud learned directly and indirectly in no uncertain terms that 'patriarchal power ruled', that he was 'overpowered and outmatched', and if 'you can't beat them, you join them'.
Women like Mother Teresa -- and Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, Princess Diana -- were too busy 'working the trenches' trying to help and heal people in their highest states of misery, to think about 'political correctness'...and/or their own 'self-preservation'..
Mother Teresa burned a type, an intensity, a depth and a breadth of love that none of us are likely to come close to duplicating... If there is a connection here to the 'altruistic idealism' of Christianity -- or any other religion -- then I have the deepest of respect for any man or woman who can burn the fire and spiritual-religious idealism of their particular religion to the applied depth and breadth of these women...
.................................................................
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
Mother Teresa
I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?
Mother Teresa
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Mother Teresa
If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
Mother Teresa
(If you can't help a hundred people, then help just one. -- dgb)
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
Mother Teresa
......................................................
Florence Nightingale Quotes
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/florence_nightingale.html
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Florence Nightingale
I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.
Florence Nightingale
I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.
Florence Nightingale
So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.
Florence Nightingale
The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
Florence Nightingale
The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.
Florence Nightingale
Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
...........................................................
Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (pronounced /ˈflÉ’rÉ™ns ˈnaɪtɨŋɡeɪl/, historically [ˈflɒɾəns]; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. A Christian universalist, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale
Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.
...................................................
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”
Edith Cavell
....................................................
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cavell
Edith Louisa Cavell ( /ˈkævÉ™l/; 4 December 1865 – 12 October 1915) was a British nurse and humanitarian. She is celebrated for saving the lives of casualties from all sides without distinction and in helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I, for which she was arrested. She was court-martialled and found guilty of treason. She was sentenced to death and shot by firing squad. She received worldwide sympathetic press coverage.
She is well-known for her statement that "patriotism is not enough." Her strong Anglican beliefs propelled her to help all those who needed it, both German and Allied soldiers. She was quoted as saying, "I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved".[1] Cavell was also an influential pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium.
........................................
Mother Teresa From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa
Mother Teresa in Calcutta
Religion Catholic
Order Missionaries of Charity
Personal
Nationality Albanian, Indian
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu
August 26, 1910(1910-08-26)
Üsküb, Vilayet of Kosovo, Ottoman Empire (today's Skopje)
Died September 5, 1997(1997-09-05) (aged 87)
Calcutta, India
Signature of Mother Teresa
Senior posting
Title Superior General
Period in office 1950–1997
Successor Nirmala Joshi
Mother Teresa (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu[1] (pronounced [aɡˈnÉ›s ˈɡɔndÊ’a bÉ”jaˈdÊ’iu]), was a Catholic nun of Albanian[2][3] ethnicity and Indian citizenship,[4] who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India in 1950. For over 45 years she ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying, while guiding the Missionaries of Charity's expansion, first throughout India and then in other countries. Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.[5][6]
By the 1970s, she was internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary and book Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programs, orphanages, and schools.
....................................................
Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can.
Princess Diana
Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Princess Diana
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.
Princess Diana
Everyone of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.
Princess Diana
Family is the most important thing in the world.
Princess Diana
HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug: Heaven knows they need it.
Princess Diana
Hugs can do great amounts of good - especially for children.
Princess Diana
I don't even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.
Princess Diana
I don't go by the rule book... I lead from the heart, not the head.
Princess Diana
I don't want expensive gifts; I don't want to be bought. I have everything I want. I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.
Princess Diana
I knew what my job was; it was to go out and meet the people and love them.
Princess Diana
I like to be a free spirit. Some don't like that, but that's the way I am.
Princess Diana
I live for my sons. I would be lost without them.
Princess Diana
I think like any marriage, especially when you've had divorced parents like myself; you want to try even harder to make it work.
Princess Diana
I think the biggest disease the world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give. I am very happy to do that, I want to do that.
Princess Diana
I want my boys to have an understanding of people's emotions, their insecurities, people's distress, and their hopes and dreams.
Princess Diana
I want to walk into a room, be it a hospital for the dying or a hospital for the sick children, and feel that I am needed. I want to do, not just to be.
Princess Diana
I wear my heart on my sleeve.
Princess Diana
I will fight for my children on any level so they can reach their potential as human beings and in their public duties.
Princess Diana
....................................................
-- dgb, Easter Sunday, April 24th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
................................................
I think Mother Teresa had a deeper insight -- and a more intense empathy -- into the 'reality', not the 'fantasy', of 'human neurosis' than Freud did...And with all due respect to Freud, I think she was by far the greater healer...
Not surprisingly in my opinion, Mother Teresa's insight into human suffering and 'neurosis' -- a name that she probably would never even use -- came mainly from a similar place -- traumacy theory -- where Freud had started his investigations into psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic healing in the early 1890s, not after he abandoned this position/perspective/theory after 1896. Mother Teresa, to my knowledge, was never interested in 'human fantasy theory' -- perhaps more of a product of the middle and upper class where people have more time, money, and energy to fantasize...-- no, she was too busy trying to encourage, support, and give people hope and love in the deepest depths of their suffering...
You saw some of this in Freud's work up to 1896 -- his 'empathy' for traumatized and/or victimized 'hysterical' women...But after 1896, something changed -- I think it was a combination of the Emma Ekstein nasal surgery fiasco and near tragedy, as well as the scientific meeting of April, 1896, where Freud learned directly and indirectly in no uncertain terms that 'patriarchal power ruled', that he was 'overpowered and outmatched', and if 'you can't beat them, you join them'.
Women like Mother Teresa -- and Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, Princess Diana -- were too busy 'working the trenches' trying to help and heal people in their highest states of misery, to think about 'political correctness'...and/or their own 'self-preservation'..
Mother Teresa burned a type, an intensity, a depth and a breadth of love that none of us are likely to come close to duplicating... If there is a connection here to the 'altruistic idealism' of Christianity -- or any other religion -- then I have the deepest of respect for any man or woman who can burn the fire and spiritual-religious idealism of their particular religion to the applied depth and breadth of these women...
.................................................................
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
Mother Teresa
I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?
Mother Teresa
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Mother Teresa
If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
Mother Teresa
(If you can't help a hundred people, then help just one. -- dgb)
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
Mother Teresa
......................................................
Florence Nightingale Quotes
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/florence_nightingale.html
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Florence Nightingale
I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.
Florence Nightingale
I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.
Florence Nightingale
So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.
Florence Nightingale
The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
Florence Nightingale
The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.
Florence Nightingale
Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
...........................................................
Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (pronounced /ˈflÉ’rÉ™ns ˈnaɪtɨŋɡeɪl/, historically [ˈflɒɾəns]; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. A Christian universalist, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale
Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.
...................................................
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”
Edith Cavell
....................................................
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cavell
Edith Louisa Cavell ( /ˈkævÉ™l/; 4 December 1865 – 12 October 1915) was a British nurse and humanitarian. She is celebrated for saving the lives of casualties from all sides without distinction and in helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I, for which she was arrested. She was court-martialled and found guilty of treason. She was sentenced to death and shot by firing squad. She received worldwide sympathetic press coverage.
She is well-known for her statement that "patriotism is not enough." Her strong Anglican beliefs propelled her to help all those who needed it, both German and Allied soldiers. She was quoted as saying, "I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved".[1] Cavell was also an influential pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium.
........................................
Mother Teresa From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa
Mother Teresa in Calcutta
Religion Catholic
Order Missionaries of Charity
Personal
Nationality Albanian, Indian
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu
August 26, 1910(1910-08-26)
Üsküb, Vilayet of Kosovo, Ottoman Empire (today's Skopje)
Died September 5, 1997(1997-09-05) (aged 87)
Calcutta, India
Signature of Mother Teresa
Senior posting
Title Superior General
Period in office 1950–1997
Successor Nirmala Joshi
Mother Teresa (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu[1] (pronounced [aɡˈnÉ›s ˈɡɔndÊ’a bÉ”jaˈdÊ’iu]), was a Catholic nun of Albanian[2][3] ethnicity and Indian citizenship,[4] who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India in 1950. For over 45 years she ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying, while guiding the Missionaries of Charity's expansion, first throughout India and then in other countries. Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.[5][6]
By the 1970s, she was internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary and book Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programs, orphanages, and schools.
....................................................
Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can.
Princess Diana
Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Princess Diana
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.
Princess Diana
Everyone of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.
Princess Diana
Family is the most important thing in the world.
Princess Diana
HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug: Heaven knows they need it.
Princess Diana
Hugs can do great amounts of good - especially for children.
Princess Diana
I don't even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.
Princess Diana
I don't go by the rule book... I lead from the heart, not the head.
Princess Diana
I don't want expensive gifts; I don't want to be bought. I have everything I want. I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.
Princess Diana
I knew what my job was; it was to go out and meet the people and love them.
Princess Diana
I like to be a free spirit. Some don't like that, but that's the way I am.
Princess Diana
I live for my sons. I would be lost without them.
Princess Diana
I think like any marriage, especially when you've had divorced parents like myself; you want to try even harder to make it work.
Princess Diana
I think the biggest disease the world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give. I am very happy to do that, I want to do that.
Princess Diana
I want my boys to have an understanding of people's emotions, their insecurities, people's distress, and their hopes and dreams.
Princess Diana
I want to walk into a room, be it a hospital for the dying or a hospital for the sick children, and feel that I am needed. I want to do, not just to be.
Princess Diana
I wear my heart on my sleeve.
Princess Diana
I will fight for my children on any level so they can reach their potential as human beings and in their public duties.
Princess Diana
....................................................
-- dgb, Easter Sunday, April 24th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Saturday, April 23, 2011
The Greatest Cure in The World for 'Capitalism'...
Dialectic-(Democratic)-Homeostatic Balance (DHB) will always be disturbed, disrupted, bent out of shape and balance, by individual and group narcissistic bias, manipulation, money and power.
Restoring the DHB group (i.e., self, relationship, family, community, corporate, government, institutional) balance will always demand that 'fair-minded, ethical, DHB thinking and feeling' people will in the end defeat 'narcissistically blinded and/or bent out of shape' people in a rhetorical war of words -- or something unfortunately worse -- a political, economic and/or physical war of 'will to power'. Obviously, sometimes the 'good guys' don't always win -- or win in the first attempt. Some narcissistic dictators and/or manipulators may take years to finally 'defeat'. But in the end, generally, 'what goes around comes around'... The second oldest known philosopher in Greek history -- Anaximander gave us that last 'priceless and timeless gem' of ancient wisdom.
In this regard, we can all choose to be a part of the 'narcissistic individual and/or group problem' or we can step above this -- see other people beyond what we see in the closest mirror -- and be a part of an 'ethical, humanistic-existential conflict-negotiating and resolving team'.
Where do you draw the line between being an ethical, humanistic-existential negotiator vs. being a 'one-sided, narcissitic negotiator' who doesn't care a flying flip about the person you are negotiating with?
Ideally, you are supposed to be able to stand up for your own self, your own rights and wishes, while the other person looks after his or her own self, rights and wishes...And the 'finalized deal' is where each person in the deal meets somewhere in the 'middle' and agrees on this 'middle'.
But what do you do about fraudulent sellers and negotiators, people on the other side of the bargaining negotiation table who have told you something that isn't true, or know something about what he or she is selling that you don't -- and ethically should. Perhaps the salesman/woman knows that the car he/she is about to sell you has an engine that is about to blow up, and by rights, this is where you need to due your 'due dilligence' and have your own mechanic check the car, and/or get a warrenty, take it out for a good test drive, and/or work with a sales person who you feel comfortable that you can trust that he or she actually cares about you as well as, or on top of, or instead of, how much he or she wants to get rid of a 'bad car for the maximum possible price'.
The difference between 'narcissistic capitalism' and 'ethical-dialectic-democratic-humanistic-existential capitalism' basically comes down to the following two questions:
1, Should I, or should I not be -- ethical?
2. How can I make this deal a 'win-win' deal where both of us walk out of the deal happier than when we walked into it, and, thus, both of us wanting to do business with each other again?
Ethics and integrity are never perfect, and narcissistic impulses are often strong -- indeed, a legitimate part of our everyday self-wants, self-needs, and self-expression as long as they don't cross social-ethical boundaries...into the realm of the unethical, the corrupt, the greedy, and/or the criminal...
Greed is almost an inherent vice -- or at least a potential inherent vice -- in human nature. Certainly, it has been around since as far back as recorded human history goes -- back to 'pillaging-plundering' tribes..
The simplest definition of both 'narcissitic capitalism' and 'pathological narcissism' is not caring a 'rat's ....' about the person and/or people around you who you are affecting...
Unfortunately, narcissistic capitalism breeds more and more narcissitic capitalists...in government, on Wall Street and Bay Street, in private corporations, in sellers and buyers, in lawyers who encourage their clients to be fraudulent in order to get a bigger insurance claim of which they get a percentage of, in family lawyers who are paid to get as much as they possibly can for their clients, at the expense of lives that are destroyed on the opposite side of the bargaining table...'Sorry, I had the better lawyer...you should have spent more on a better lawyer...I get the four bedroom house with the children, and you, if you are lucky, can maybe afford to rent a room in a house...and hopefully still have enough money left for at least food'...Or in other case scenarios, both sides are destroyed in a fight where only the lawyers go home with the 'spoils'...
Who doesn't want to be rich? Not too many of us...Being with money is, all else being equal, a much better life than being without money...I've experienced life on 'both sides of the track' -- or at least what I call 'middle class poverty' where you may live in a nice or at least decent place...but you can't afford to do anything else, and even keeping up with your bills becomes a struggle that sometimes -- or every day -- you fear losing... The war of diminishing 'take home income'...and increasing expenses...a combination of inflation and a floundering economy where the people at the top still manage to find a way to pull strings and get a bigger and bigger piece of the pie...Call it a mixture of global capitalism and corporate collusion, even government-corporate collusion...
Beware the biggest political party donators...and lobbyists...they are not 'donating out of the goodness of their hearts'...they are thinking about colluding and cashing in on another deal...
Narcissistic capitalists and narcissistic people in general worship the same Greek God -- 'Narcissus'... even if they don't know it...because the signature characteristic of the narcissistic personality is not to be able to see beyond the closest mirror....and we are all narcissistic to some extent...
I'm sure even Mother Teresa looked in the mirror...but that brings us back to The Spirit of Jesus Christ...and in this case, the woman who so completely lived in the Spirit of Jesus Christ -- Mother Teresa...
We idealize -- and idolize -- Gods, either because we are like them...or we want to be more like them...Often, they respresent our 'missing half'...We live too much of a 'narcissistic life'...and then we go to Church to 'learn' how to be more 'all loving' like Jesus Christ...or Mother Teresa...
I am going to write an essay one day on Mother Teresa... I read some of her quotes a few minutes ago that started to make me cry... Being Easter, I think it is entirely fitting that I share these with you...
.............................................
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. Mother Teresa
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.
Mother Teresa
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
Mother Teresa
I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
Mother Teresa
I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor? Mother Teresa
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. Mother Teresa
If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one. Mother Teresa
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it. Mother Teresa
Intense love does not measure, it just gives. Mother Teresa
Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. Mother Teresa
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. Mother Teresa
Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God - the rest will be given. Mother Teresa
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go. Mother Teresa
Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work. Mother Teresa
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. Mother Teresa
Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action. Mother Teresa
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home. Mother Teresa
Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand. Mother Teresa
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mother_teresa.html
........................................................
The next time you go into a business deal -- or any other encounter and/or relationship at all, for that matter...
Imagine that you have Narcissus looking over your one shoulder...
And both Jesus Christ and Mother Teresa looking over your other shoulder...
Then go ahead and make your 'deal'...
I fathom a guess...
That that would be the greatest cure in the world...
For 'Capitalism'...
Or for any other ideology in the world...
For that matter...
In Hegel's Hotel...
'God' symbolizes 'self-strength' and 'self-assertion'...
Whereas 'Jesus Christ' more fully symbolizes 'empathy, social sensitivity, and loving/caring about others...'
In Hegel's Hotel, both God and Jesus Christ -- like Narcissus (The Greeek God of Self-Interest) and 'Altruissus' (The DGB God of Social Interest)-- flow together and dialectically unite into a 'Holy Trinity' -- 'The Holy Spirit' being the 'creative, dialectic union between self-and-social interest and love' in a way that helps to build a better world for both ourselves and the people we share this world with...because we all need each other in good times -- and especially in bad times...
Idealistic? Of course...
Realistic?
As Mother Teresa would say,
........................................
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. Mother Teresa
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Each one of them/us is Jesus in disguise.
Mother Teresa
.............................
-- dgb, April 23rd-24th, 2011.
-- Where Dialectic-Gap-Briding Negotiations...
-- And Amazing, Creative Integrations...
-- Can -- and do -- happen...
Restoring the DHB group (i.e., self, relationship, family, community, corporate, government, institutional) balance will always demand that 'fair-minded, ethical, DHB thinking and feeling' people will in the end defeat 'narcissistically blinded and/or bent out of shape' people in a rhetorical war of words -- or something unfortunately worse -- a political, economic and/or physical war of 'will to power'. Obviously, sometimes the 'good guys' don't always win -- or win in the first attempt. Some narcissistic dictators and/or manipulators may take years to finally 'defeat'. But in the end, generally, 'what goes around comes around'... The second oldest known philosopher in Greek history -- Anaximander gave us that last 'priceless and timeless gem' of ancient wisdom.
In this regard, we can all choose to be a part of the 'narcissistic individual and/or group problem' or we can step above this -- see other people beyond what we see in the closest mirror -- and be a part of an 'ethical, humanistic-existential conflict-negotiating and resolving team'.
Where do you draw the line between being an ethical, humanistic-existential negotiator vs. being a 'one-sided, narcissitic negotiator' who doesn't care a flying flip about the person you are negotiating with?
Ideally, you are supposed to be able to stand up for your own self, your own rights and wishes, while the other person looks after his or her own self, rights and wishes...And the 'finalized deal' is where each person in the deal meets somewhere in the 'middle' and agrees on this 'middle'.
But what do you do about fraudulent sellers and negotiators, people on the other side of the bargaining negotiation table who have told you something that isn't true, or know something about what he or she is selling that you don't -- and ethically should. Perhaps the salesman/woman knows that the car he/she is about to sell you has an engine that is about to blow up, and by rights, this is where you need to due your 'due dilligence' and have your own mechanic check the car, and/or get a warrenty, take it out for a good test drive, and/or work with a sales person who you feel comfortable that you can trust that he or she actually cares about you as well as, or on top of, or instead of, how much he or she wants to get rid of a 'bad car for the maximum possible price'.
The difference between 'narcissistic capitalism' and 'ethical-dialectic-democratic-humanistic-existential capitalism' basically comes down to the following two questions:
1, Should I, or should I not be -- ethical?
2. How can I make this deal a 'win-win' deal where both of us walk out of the deal happier than when we walked into it, and, thus, both of us wanting to do business with each other again?
Ethics and integrity are never perfect, and narcissistic impulses are often strong -- indeed, a legitimate part of our everyday self-wants, self-needs, and self-expression as long as they don't cross social-ethical boundaries...into the realm of the unethical, the corrupt, the greedy, and/or the criminal...
Greed is almost an inherent vice -- or at least a potential inherent vice -- in human nature. Certainly, it has been around since as far back as recorded human history goes -- back to 'pillaging-plundering' tribes..
The simplest definition of both 'narcissitic capitalism' and 'pathological narcissism' is not caring a 'rat's ....' about the person and/or people around you who you are affecting...
Unfortunately, narcissistic capitalism breeds more and more narcissitic capitalists...in government, on Wall Street and Bay Street, in private corporations, in sellers and buyers, in lawyers who encourage their clients to be fraudulent in order to get a bigger insurance claim of which they get a percentage of, in family lawyers who are paid to get as much as they possibly can for their clients, at the expense of lives that are destroyed on the opposite side of the bargaining table...'Sorry, I had the better lawyer...you should have spent more on a better lawyer...I get the four bedroom house with the children, and you, if you are lucky, can maybe afford to rent a room in a house...and hopefully still have enough money left for at least food'...Or in other case scenarios, both sides are destroyed in a fight where only the lawyers go home with the 'spoils'...
Who doesn't want to be rich? Not too many of us...Being with money is, all else being equal, a much better life than being without money...I've experienced life on 'both sides of the track' -- or at least what I call 'middle class poverty' where you may live in a nice or at least decent place...but you can't afford to do anything else, and even keeping up with your bills becomes a struggle that sometimes -- or every day -- you fear losing... The war of diminishing 'take home income'...and increasing expenses...a combination of inflation and a floundering economy where the people at the top still manage to find a way to pull strings and get a bigger and bigger piece of the pie...Call it a mixture of global capitalism and corporate collusion, even government-corporate collusion...
Beware the biggest political party donators...and lobbyists...they are not 'donating out of the goodness of their hearts'...they are thinking about colluding and cashing in on another deal...
Narcissistic capitalists and narcissistic people in general worship the same Greek God -- 'Narcissus'... even if they don't know it...because the signature characteristic of the narcissistic personality is not to be able to see beyond the closest mirror....and we are all narcissistic to some extent...
I'm sure even Mother Teresa looked in the mirror...but that brings us back to The Spirit of Jesus Christ...and in this case, the woman who so completely lived in the Spirit of Jesus Christ -- Mother Teresa...
We idealize -- and idolize -- Gods, either because we are like them...or we want to be more like them...Often, they respresent our 'missing half'...We live too much of a 'narcissistic life'...and then we go to Church to 'learn' how to be more 'all loving' like Jesus Christ...or Mother Teresa...
I am going to write an essay one day on Mother Teresa... I read some of her quotes a few minutes ago that started to make me cry... Being Easter, I think it is entirely fitting that I share these with you...
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Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. Mother Teresa
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.
Mother Teresa
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
Mother Teresa
I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
Mother Teresa
I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor? Mother Teresa
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. Mother Teresa
If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one. Mother Teresa
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it. Mother Teresa
Intense love does not measure, it just gives. Mother Teresa
Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. Mother Teresa
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. Mother Teresa
Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God - the rest will be given. Mother Teresa
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go. Mother Teresa
Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work. Mother Teresa
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. Mother Teresa
Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action. Mother Teresa
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home. Mother Teresa
Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand. Mother Teresa
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mother_teresa.html
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The next time you go into a business deal -- or any other encounter and/or relationship at all, for that matter...
Imagine that you have Narcissus looking over your one shoulder...
And both Jesus Christ and Mother Teresa looking over your other shoulder...
Then go ahead and make your 'deal'...
I fathom a guess...
That that would be the greatest cure in the world...
For 'Capitalism'...
Or for any other ideology in the world...
For that matter...
In Hegel's Hotel...
'God' symbolizes 'self-strength' and 'self-assertion'...
Whereas 'Jesus Christ' more fully symbolizes 'empathy, social sensitivity, and loving/caring about others...'
In Hegel's Hotel, both God and Jesus Christ -- like Narcissus (The Greeek God of Self-Interest) and 'Altruissus' (The DGB God of Social Interest)-- flow together and dialectically unite into a 'Holy Trinity' -- 'The Holy Spirit' being the 'creative, dialectic union between self-and-social interest and love' in a way that helps to build a better world for both ourselves and the people we share this world with...because we all need each other in good times -- and especially in bad times...
Idealistic? Of course...
Realistic?
As Mother Teresa would say,
........................................
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. Mother Teresa
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Each one of them/us is Jesus in disguise.
Mother Teresa
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-- dgb, April 23rd-24th, 2011.
-- Where Dialectic-Gap-Briding Negotiations...
-- And Amazing, Creative Integrations...
-- Can -- and do -- happen...
Friday, April 22, 2011
A Very Brief Synopsis of The History and Evolution of Epistemology, and The Evolving DGB Theory of Mental-Physical, Subjective-Objective Parallelism...
Finished...
The whole 'mind-body', 'subjective-objective' conundrum has driven many a philosopher crazy -- philosophers who are a lot smarter than I am....
If anything, I have this philosophy -- 'when in doubt, stay out' -- meaning stay out of any intellectual problem and/or debate that is too 'subjectively and/or objectively insurmountable to tackle and conquer' (unless you are 'cognitively masochistic' and actually want to be 'driven crazy').
It's like, would I dare try to climb Mt. Everest at my advanced age, with my present lack of physical conditioning, and lack of climbing skills and experience? No -- obviously not -- not unless I have suicidal tendencies, and want to end my life somewhere in the first 100 or 200 metres or so trying to climb up such a prohibitive mountain in such a sorry state of physical conditioning.... Now, if I had been raised in the mountains of Tibet and been taught how to climb mountains as a Sherpa...then, obviously, things would be different...)
Okay, back to my own domain that I do think I know something about -- philosophy, psychology -- and 'cognition'...And maybe I am actually trying to 'climb and conquer' the 'twin Mt. Everests' of philosophy/epistemology -- the 'cognitive conundrum' of the 'mind-body' and 'subjective-objective' splits....Where does 'the mind' start and 'the brain' end (and visa versa)? And, where does our 'subjective world' stop and our 'objective world' begin (and visa versa)?
I opt for an expistemological position that might be called 'dialectic-structural-dynamic parallelism-interactionism-and-integrationism'.
Now, I am not sure to what extent this 'epistemological position or perspective' has been developed and/or called a different name by some other individual and/or 'school' of epistelogist(s) -- I would need to do more research into the evolutionary history of 'epistemology' -- but I can tell you who my main philosophical mentors are, which, if you have been reading my work, you probably already know: Anaximander, Heraclitus ('dynamic-process-oriented-epistemologist)-Parmenides ('subjective-epistemological-structuralist'), Plato ('subjective-epistemological-idealist')-Aristotle (empirical-observational-scientific-empistemological realist)-Spinoza(subjective-objective-rational-empirical-wholist-pantheist-idealist)-Locke('rational-empirical integrative epistemologist'), Hume ('skeptical-empirical-reductionist-deconstructionist-extremist'), Kant('skeptical-non-objectivist-subjective-metaphysicist'), Fichte(subjective-reductionist-extremist), Schelling('dialectic-romantic-post-Spionzian-wholist'), Hegel (dialectic-historical-determinist-subjective-epistemologist-and-idealistic-integrative-extremist), Marx (dialectical-empirical-materialist-anti-materialist-extremist), Schopenhauer(narcissistic epistemological-cosmic-extremist), Nietzsche('subjective-narcissistic-relativist-epistemologist-skepticist-deconstructionist'), Bertrand Russell (common-sense-no-nonsense-structural-dynamic-rational-empiricist), Wittgenstein ('structual-dynamic-uncommon-sense-brilliant-academic-elephant-in-the-room-epistemologist-and-deconstructionist'), Koryzybski ('no-nonsense, common-sense, intensional-extensional-structural-dynamic-rational-empirical-epistemologist), Foucault ('subjective-narcissistic-power-epistemologist'), Derrida ('subjective epistemological deconstructionist'), Ayn Rand ('objective epistemological extremist')...
My favorite epistemologist: Alfred Korzybski, Polish, (1879-1950) -- the founder of General Semantics (and possibly influenced by some combination of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein) -- gets my top vote...
.....................................................................................................
From the internet....
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.” -- Alfred Korzybski
...........................................................................................................
Now, back to my theory of 'structural-dynamic-rational-empirical-interactionist-integrationist-epistemological-parallelism'....
Think of the 'brain'. The brain is a 'physical-empirical-organic' object. If a forensic scientist does an autopsy on a dead person or animal -- and opens up the 'head' and 'skull' -- he will almost 100 percent definitely find a 'brain' (unless someone has been there before him to already have taken it out, or the animal is so minutely small, that the 'brain' of the animal is 'empirically undetectable', perhaps even under a microscope....Do all animals have brains? I posed that question to the internet...Here is what I got....)
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Do all animals have brains?
(Lansing State Journal, September 8,1993)
A brian is defined as the principal ganglion of an animal's nervous system. A ganglion is a collection of nerve cells that process information. It receives information from nerve fibers that extend throughout the body of an animal and also may be affected by a variety of hormones. The level of complexity of a central ganglion roughly parallels the anatomical complexity of the organism as a whole.
Multicellular organisms need to coordinate the activities of their individual cells. Most animals use a system of specialized cells, called neurons, to help coordinate the activities of different tissues. The exceptions include sea sponges, which are a rather like a loose collection of cells. Other primitive animals such as jelly fish, do have neurons organized into networks.
While all of these organisms can sense their environment in some way and respond to it, they do not have brains. Only animals with distinct body cavities possess brains. This includes life forms as diverse as earth worms, clams, fish, insects, birds, and of course, human beings. As a general rule, animals with more tissue types have more intricate brains.
Both invertebrate and vertebrate animals can have complex brains. Of the invertebrates, squid an octopuses have the most developed brains, in part to process information coming from their highly sophisticated eyes. A medium sized octopus will have a brain containing over 100 million neurons, and can show learning behavior. Still, this is a far cry form mammalian brains that contain on the order of 10 billion neurons.
Our human brains are remarkably facile in learning, dependable in recollecting and can be quite creative in thinking and expressing a variety of thoughts and emotions.
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~sciencet/ask_st/090893.html
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Now the second, bi-polar, half of the first question about the 'empirical existence of the brain' in animals, and particularly in man, becomes this:
Does man have a 'mind', and if so, what is it?
This becomes a much more difficult question because what we generally call 'the mind' is essentially 'invisable' and contains 'invisible thoughts' rather than 'bio-chemical, physical, firing neurons or nerve cells'....The idea that 'physical, empirical nerve cells can somehow contain, transport, and communicate invisible, non-empirical thoughts- ideas' -- is one of the most amazing, explanation-defying, mysteries of life....and one that no scientist, philosopher, and/or psychologist has been able to completely get his or her head around...
Freud tried to understand the 'nature and essence of the physical-ideational connection in 'The Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895) -- and he gave up, although many of the ideas contained within this early work became the central foundation of all of his 1895 and later philosophy-psychology that we have come now to call either 'Pre-Classical' or 'Classical' Psychoanalysis'....depending on whether we are talking about his work written either before 1897 ('Pre-Classical-Traumatic Psychoanalysis') or after 1896 ('Classical-Instinctual Psychoanalysis').
The reason that Freud failed to complete his 'Scientific Project' was because it was essentially 'reductionistic' and 'unilaterally one-sided' in its approach. Freud was walking a philosophical tightrope between Aristotle and Hegel. The Aristolean part of Freud's thinking was 'empirical' -- and even 'empirically extremist, one-sided, and reductionistic' in the more direct and immediate influence of the famous German phsyiologist at that time, Ernst Brucke -- the main scientific influence behind Freud's 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'...
However, ironically and paradoxically, Freud was not a very good 'scientist' -- he was far too much of an 'obsessive-abstractionist' to be a good scientist -- because Freud was 'constantly losing sight of the earth below him' that he was trying to 'fly high, high above'....both metaphorically and literally as the 'cocaine' he was still absorbing into his body in 1895 (from 1884 -- some 12 years of cocaine use/abuse)...probably wasn't helping Freud 'come back to earth'...which his 'polarized-more common sense-and scientifically-grounded-friend, co-worker, and mentor', Joseph Breuer, in the end, failed to bring back...
I should compromise these remarks...Freud was a far more creative and brilliant theorist than Breuer -- Freud's 'double-sided and essentially non-integrated theory of traumacy, impulse, and defense' remains the cornerstone of probably all 'individual schools of psychotherapy' that exist today... whereas Breuer's theory of 'hysteria and hypnoid states' has essentially disappeared into 'historical oblivion'....This is what generally happens, sooner or later, to 'bad -- non-useful -- ideas'...
On the other side of the 'pseudo-scientific coin', Freud was 'obsessed with the sexual etiology of all neuroses'...However, this theory became much easier to defend -- via 'definitional and circular reasoning' -- when Freud 'interpreted' almost everything 'sexually'...except, of course, his 'smoking a cigar'...and his famous 'After all gentlemen, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar', quote....
'Dora' -- one of his pseudonyms for a particular client -- had a 'cough' in her throat, and to this, Freud attached an 'instinctual desire' of her wanting 'oral sex'....Remember that, all of my dear readers, out there, who may have a 'cough' that seems to have no 'organic, empirical explanation' for the cough... In Dora's case, this is what 'allegedly' made the 'cough' -- 'hysterical' -- its lack of 'emprical, organic explanation'....I have a better 'psychoanalytic explanation' -- although I have to go back over the concrete details of the case material, and I am 'speculating' more than 100 years removed from the actual clinical case (somewhere between 1900 and 1905 -- 1905 being when it was published).
Freud had the closest contact with all of the actual clinical details of the case -- but by this time, Freud was extremely 'narcissistically biased and blinded by the subjective boundaries and limitations of his one-sided, instinctual theory'.... His earlier Pre-Psychoanalytic Traumacy Theory (1895) had been left far behind...like dust in the wind...in the words of Bob Dylan...'one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind'...
A lot of young girls that Freud was treating back then were in effect 'nurses to their own fathers', some of whom had bacterial and/or viral infections like tuburculosis...resulting in 'coughs'....of the sort that Dora, if she was actually attending to her sick father in this regard, might 'identify with the symptom(s) of her sick father'...like Anna O. also...back in the 1880s...I have to review the exact details of the case in this regard...
I was partly waylaid.....let's get back to the main 'epistemological' elments of what I am talking about here...
Our 'brain' has a 'physical existence'....it's existence is 'empirically based'...
Our 'mind' has 'no physical existence'...'it's existence is 'metaphysically based' -- 'beyond physics', based in 'conceptuology' -- without a solid, empirically based, visible 'organic structure' supporting its existence... It's existence is based on 'personal and/or community assumptionism' -- and has more of a 'spiritual connection' to the idea of 'The Self' which is also 'metaphysically -- not physically/empirically/observationally --based'....
Our 'brain' pertains to the realm of 'physiology' and 'neurology' and 'biochemistry'...
Our 'mind' pertains to the realms of concepts and ideas and thoughts and beliefs and values....none of which are directly and empirically visible...which does not mean that they do not exist...It is just that they 'exist' in a 'non-empirical, invisible world' that most of us believe in but that none of us can 'empirically prove'....
However, even so-called 'empirical proofs' have their limitations as our 'senses are limited, prone to mistakes some time, and narcissistically biased by their owners'...
Kant went so far as to say that we 'Kant Know' our so-called 'objective ('noumenal' in his words) world' because it is a world that is beyond our senses...
Thus, in 'Kant's World', there is really no such thing as 'physics' -- just 'metaphysics'...However, Kant was extremely 'anal-retentive', 'perfectionistic', and 'uncompromising'....If I see this box of Kleenex in front of me on my desk, I 'assume' the 'physical existence' of this box of Kleenex to be 'empirically and observationally proven'....If I pull a couple of Kleenexes out of the box and 'blow my nose' with them, I am not 'blowing my nose' with 'metaphysics'...The Kleenex does have an 'observable and feelable structural substance to it'... It belongs to the world of 'physics', not 'metaphysics'...Similarily, our 'brain' belongs to the world of 'physics' while our 'mind' belongs to the world of 'metaphysics'...And our 'brain' and our 'mind' have a mysterious interconnection to them -- if my 'brain' is 'damaged' in some fashion, then so too, my 'mind' and my 'thinking' is likely to also be 'damaged' in the particular area of the brain that is 'associated and interconnected' with the type of thinking that comes out of this area of the brain... Or I could start to have massive 'migraines' or 'headaches' that stop me from WANTING to think...I'd sooner just lie down, take an aspirin or two, perhaps put a cloth on my head, and either watch tv or go to sleep...
Thus, the dialectic-integrative concept of 'mind-brain' is born...emphasizing the dialectic interaction and integration between the two of them...
Now let us move on to the concept of 'parallelism' before we stop for the day...
The 'psyche' is another 'metaphysical' concept in that it is 'physically invisable'...
However, we can 'parallel' the existence and the functioning of 'the human psyche' (in the metaphysical world) to the 'human body' (in the physical world). If we say that they 'function similarily' -- and yet in two different dimensions -- then this is 'parallelism' as opposed to 'reductionism' which attempts to say that the one is simply an 'extension of the other'...Paralllelism says that the two types of 'organs' in two different dimensions (say, the 'brain' and the 'mind' or 'the body' and 'the psyche') -- one visable and the other invisable -- 'function along similar structural and dynamic patterns'; whereas 'reductionism' says that the two different dimensions -- of 'visability' and 'invisability' -- function on the exact same principles of the one...usually 'materialist reductionism' and/or 'scientific-empirical reductionism'....Or like Berkley and Hume argued -- as well as the 'Behaviorists' today, 'the invisable dimension simply does not exist'...'If you can't see it, it doesn't exist'...
When I use a 'parallelist model' of the human psyche, I compare it to the functioning of the human body....'Defenses' are like 'white blood cells' and 'impulses' are like 'red blood cells' unless the 'impulses' are 'defensive' in nature...
Similarily, I say that the human psyche is like the body in that it has 'metaphysical organs' like 'The Central Ego' and 'SIGGY's Cave' where 'SIGGY' is an anacronym that stands for: 'Secret Interest Groups and Ghosts of Yesterday'....I also call this 'metaphysical organ' 'The Shadow-Id Group' (SIG) Compartment'....Another largely unconscious metaphysical organ is 'The Dream-Fantasy-Nightmare Catcher/Weaver'...
Another metaphysical organ is our 'Personal Impulsive Transference Template'...our 'PITT'...
Another metaphysical organ is our 'Genetic Mythological-Symbolic Unconscious' (our 'GMSU') which is pretty well the same concept as Jung's 'Collective Unconscious'...
Another metaphysical organ is our 'Genetic Potential Self' -- our 'GPS'....
To summarize...in DGB terminology...we have 5 unconcious/subconscious/preconscious 'metaphysical organs' in the psyche, starting from the deepest level of the unconscious and working upwards into the conscious personality:
1. The Genetic Potential Self (GPS);
2. The Mythological-Symbolic Unconscious (MSU);
3. The Personal Impulsive Transference Template (PITT);
4. The SIG ('Secret Interest Group' or 'Shadow-Id Group') Compartment or SIGGY's Cave (Secret Interest Group and Ghosts from Yesterday);
5. The Dream-Fantasy-Nightmare Catcher/Weaver (DFNW);
In the conscious personality, we have 10 different 'ego compartments' or 'metaphysical sub-organs' that make up 'The Ego-as-a-Whole'...
Including....4 different 'Super-ego-States', 4 'Under-ego-States', and 2 'Mid-Zone-Ego-States';
A/ Different Superego States
6. The Nurturing Superego;
7. The Dionysian Superego;
8. The Narcissistic Superego;
9. The Righteous Superego;
B/ Different Underego States;
10. The Nurturing (Approval-seeking, Compliant) Underego;
11. The Dionysian Underego;
12. The Narcissistic Underego;
13. The Righteous-Rebellious Underego;
And Two 'Mid-Zone' Ego-States...
14. The Dialectically Integrative (Bi-polar/Bi-partisan) Ego-State;
15. The Central-Mediating-Executive (CME) Ego-State...
That is enough for today...
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
The whole 'mind-body', 'subjective-objective' conundrum has driven many a philosopher crazy -- philosophers who are a lot smarter than I am....
If anything, I have this philosophy -- 'when in doubt, stay out' -- meaning stay out of any intellectual problem and/or debate that is too 'subjectively and/or objectively insurmountable to tackle and conquer' (unless you are 'cognitively masochistic' and actually want to be 'driven crazy').
It's like, would I dare try to climb Mt. Everest at my advanced age, with my present lack of physical conditioning, and lack of climbing skills and experience? No -- obviously not -- not unless I have suicidal tendencies, and want to end my life somewhere in the first 100 or 200 metres or so trying to climb up such a prohibitive mountain in such a sorry state of physical conditioning.... Now, if I had been raised in the mountains of Tibet and been taught how to climb mountains as a Sherpa...then, obviously, things would be different...)
Okay, back to my own domain that I do think I know something about -- philosophy, psychology -- and 'cognition'...And maybe I am actually trying to 'climb and conquer' the 'twin Mt. Everests' of philosophy/epistemology -- the 'cognitive conundrum' of the 'mind-body' and 'subjective-objective' splits....Where does 'the mind' start and 'the brain' end (and visa versa)? And, where does our 'subjective world' stop and our 'objective world' begin (and visa versa)?
I opt for an expistemological position that might be called 'dialectic-structural-dynamic parallelism-interactionism-and-integrationism'.
Now, I am not sure to what extent this 'epistemological position or perspective' has been developed and/or called a different name by some other individual and/or 'school' of epistelogist(s) -- I would need to do more research into the evolutionary history of 'epistemology' -- but I can tell you who my main philosophical mentors are, which, if you have been reading my work, you probably already know: Anaximander, Heraclitus ('dynamic-process-oriented-epistemologist)-Parmenides ('subjective-epistemological-structuralist'), Plato ('subjective-epistemological-idealist')-Aristotle (empirical-observational-scientific-empistemological realist)-Spinoza(subjective-objective-rational-empirical-wholist-pantheist-idealist)-Locke('rational-empirical integrative epistemologist'), Hume ('skeptical-empirical-reductionist-deconstructionist-extremist'), Kant('skeptical-non-objectivist-subjective-metaphysicist'), Fichte(subjective-reductionist-extremist), Schelling('dialectic-romantic-post-Spionzian-wholist'), Hegel (dialectic-historical-determinist-subjective-epistemologist-and-idealistic-integrative-extremist), Marx (dialectical-empirical-materialist-anti-materialist-extremist), Schopenhauer(narcissistic epistemological-cosmic-extremist), Nietzsche('subjective-narcissistic-relativist-epistemologist-skepticist-deconstructionist'), Bertrand Russell (common-sense-no-nonsense-structural-dynamic-rational-empiricist), Wittgenstein ('structual-dynamic-uncommon-sense-brilliant-academic-elephant-in-the-room-epistemologist-and-deconstructionist'), Koryzybski ('no-nonsense, common-sense, intensional-extensional-structural-dynamic-rational-empirical-epistemologist), Foucault ('subjective-narcissistic-power-epistemologist'), Derrida ('subjective epistemological deconstructionist'), Ayn Rand ('objective epistemological extremist')...
My favorite epistemologist: Alfred Korzybski, Polish, (1879-1950) -- the founder of General Semantics (and possibly influenced by some combination of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein) -- gets my top vote...
.....................................................................................................
From the internet....
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.” -- Alfred Korzybski
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Now, back to my theory of 'structural-dynamic-rational-empirical-interactionist-integrationist-epistemological-parallelism'....
Think of the 'brain'. The brain is a 'physical-empirical-organic' object. If a forensic scientist does an autopsy on a dead person or animal -- and opens up the 'head' and 'skull' -- he will almost 100 percent definitely find a 'brain' (unless someone has been there before him to already have taken it out, or the animal is so minutely small, that the 'brain' of the animal is 'empirically undetectable', perhaps even under a microscope....Do all animals have brains? I posed that question to the internet...Here is what I got....)
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Do all animals have brains?
(Lansing State Journal, September 8,1993)
A brian is defined as the principal ganglion of an animal's nervous system. A ganglion is a collection of nerve cells that process information. It receives information from nerve fibers that extend throughout the body of an animal and also may be affected by a variety of hormones. The level of complexity of a central ganglion roughly parallels the anatomical complexity of the organism as a whole.
Multicellular organisms need to coordinate the activities of their individual cells. Most animals use a system of specialized cells, called neurons, to help coordinate the activities of different tissues. The exceptions include sea sponges, which are a rather like a loose collection of cells. Other primitive animals such as jelly fish, do have neurons organized into networks.
While all of these organisms can sense their environment in some way and respond to it, they do not have brains. Only animals with distinct body cavities possess brains. This includes life forms as diverse as earth worms, clams, fish, insects, birds, and of course, human beings. As a general rule, animals with more tissue types have more intricate brains.
Both invertebrate and vertebrate animals can have complex brains. Of the invertebrates, squid an octopuses have the most developed brains, in part to process information coming from their highly sophisticated eyes. A medium sized octopus will have a brain containing over 100 million neurons, and can show learning behavior. Still, this is a far cry form mammalian brains that contain on the order of 10 billion neurons.
Our human brains are remarkably facile in learning, dependable in recollecting and can be quite creative in thinking and expressing a variety of thoughts and emotions.
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~sciencet/ask_st/090893.html
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Now the second, bi-polar, half of the first question about the 'empirical existence of the brain' in animals, and particularly in man, becomes this:
Does man have a 'mind', and if so, what is it?
This becomes a much more difficult question because what we generally call 'the mind' is essentially 'invisable' and contains 'invisible thoughts' rather than 'bio-chemical, physical, firing neurons or nerve cells'....The idea that 'physical, empirical nerve cells can somehow contain, transport, and communicate invisible, non-empirical thoughts- ideas' -- is one of the most amazing, explanation-defying, mysteries of life....and one that no scientist, philosopher, and/or psychologist has been able to completely get his or her head around...
Freud tried to understand the 'nature and essence of the physical-ideational connection in 'The Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895) -- and he gave up, although many of the ideas contained within this early work became the central foundation of all of his 1895 and later philosophy-psychology that we have come now to call either 'Pre-Classical' or 'Classical' Psychoanalysis'....depending on whether we are talking about his work written either before 1897 ('Pre-Classical-Traumatic Psychoanalysis') or after 1896 ('Classical-Instinctual Psychoanalysis').
The reason that Freud failed to complete his 'Scientific Project' was because it was essentially 'reductionistic' and 'unilaterally one-sided' in its approach. Freud was walking a philosophical tightrope between Aristotle and Hegel. The Aristolean part of Freud's thinking was 'empirical' -- and even 'empirically extremist, one-sided, and reductionistic' in the more direct and immediate influence of the famous German phsyiologist at that time, Ernst Brucke -- the main scientific influence behind Freud's 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'...
However, ironically and paradoxically, Freud was not a very good 'scientist' -- he was far too much of an 'obsessive-abstractionist' to be a good scientist -- because Freud was 'constantly losing sight of the earth below him' that he was trying to 'fly high, high above'....both metaphorically and literally as the 'cocaine' he was still absorbing into his body in 1895 (from 1884 -- some 12 years of cocaine use/abuse)...probably wasn't helping Freud 'come back to earth'...which his 'polarized-more common sense-and scientifically-grounded-friend, co-worker, and mentor', Joseph Breuer, in the end, failed to bring back...
I should compromise these remarks...Freud was a far more creative and brilliant theorist than Breuer -- Freud's 'double-sided and essentially non-integrated theory of traumacy, impulse, and defense' remains the cornerstone of probably all 'individual schools of psychotherapy' that exist today... whereas Breuer's theory of 'hysteria and hypnoid states' has essentially disappeared into 'historical oblivion'....This is what generally happens, sooner or later, to 'bad -- non-useful -- ideas'...
On the other side of the 'pseudo-scientific coin', Freud was 'obsessed with the sexual etiology of all neuroses'...However, this theory became much easier to defend -- via 'definitional and circular reasoning' -- when Freud 'interpreted' almost everything 'sexually'...except, of course, his 'smoking a cigar'...and his famous 'After all gentlemen, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar', quote....
'Dora' -- one of his pseudonyms for a particular client -- had a 'cough' in her throat, and to this, Freud attached an 'instinctual desire' of her wanting 'oral sex'....Remember that, all of my dear readers, out there, who may have a 'cough' that seems to have no 'organic, empirical explanation' for the cough... In Dora's case, this is what 'allegedly' made the 'cough' -- 'hysterical' -- its lack of 'emprical, organic explanation'....I have a better 'psychoanalytic explanation' -- although I have to go back over the concrete details of the case material, and I am 'speculating' more than 100 years removed from the actual clinical case (somewhere between 1900 and 1905 -- 1905 being when it was published).
Freud had the closest contact with all of the actual clinical details of the case -- but by this time, Freud was extremely 'narcissistically biased and blinded by the subjective boundaries and limitations of his one-sided, instinctual theory'.... His earlier Pre-Psychoanalytic Traumacy Theory (1895) had been left far behind...like dust in the wind...in the words of Bob Dylan...'one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind'...
A lot of young girls that Freud was treating back then were in effect 'nurses to their own fathers', some of whom had bacterial and/or viral infections like tuburculosis...resulting in 'coughs'....of the sort that Dora, if she was actually attending to her sick father in this regard, might 'identify with the symptom(s) of her sick father'...like Anna O. also...back in the 1880s...I have to review the exact details of the case in this regard...
I was partly waylaid.....let's get back to the main 'epistemological' elments of what I am talking about here...
Our 'brain' has a 'physical existence'....it's existence is 'empirically based'...
Our 'mind' has 'no physical existence'...'it's existence is 'metaphysically based' -- 'beyond physics', based in 'conceptuology' -- without a solid, empirically based, visible 'organic structure' supporting its existence... It's existence is based on 'personal and/or community assumptionism' -- and has more of a 'spiritual connection' to the idea of 'The Self' which is also 'metaphysically -- not physically/empirically/observationally --based'....
Our 'brain' pertains to the realm of 'physiology' and 'neurology' and 'biochemistry'...
Our 'mind' pertains to the realms of concepts and ideas and thoughts and beliefs and values....none of which are directly and empirically visible...which does not mean that they do not exist...It is just that they 'exist' in a 'non-empirical, invisible world' that most of us believe in but that none of us can 'empirically prove'....
However, even so-called 'empirical proofs' have their limitations as our 'senses are limited, prone to mistakes some time, and narcissistically biased by their owners'...
Kant went so far as to say that we 'Kant Know' our so-called 'objective ('noumenal' in his words) world' because it is a world that is beyond our senses...
Thus, in 'Kant's World', there is really no such thing as 'physics' -- just 'metaphysics'...However, Kant was extremely 'anal-retentive', 'perfectionistic', and 'uncompromising'....If I see this box of Kleenex in front of me on my desk, I 'assume' the 'physical existence' of this box of Kleenex to be 'empirically and observationally proven'....If I pull a couple of Kleenexes out of the box and 'blow my nose' with them, I am not 'blowing my nose' with 'metaphysics'...The Kleenex does have an 'observable and feelable structural substance to it'... It belongs to the world of 'physics', not 'metaphysics'...Similarily, our 'brain' belongs to the world of 'physics' while our 'mind' belongs to the world of 'metaphysics'...And our 'brain' and our 'mind' have a mysterious interconnection to them -- if my 'brain' is 'damaged' in some fashion, then so too, my 'mind' and my 'thinking' is likely to also be 'damaged' in the particular area of the brain that is 'associated and interconnected' with the type of thinking that comes out of this area of the brain... Or I could start to have massive 'migraines' or 'headaches' that stop me from WANTING to think...I'd sooner just lie down, take an aspirin or two, perhaps put a cloth on my head, and either watch tv or go to sleep...
Thus, the dialectic-integrative concept of 'mind-brain' is born...emphasizing the dialectic interaction and integration between the two of them...
Now let us move on to the concept of 'parallelism' before we stop for the day...
The 'psyche' is another 'metaphysical' concept in that it is 'physically invisable'...
However, we can 'parallel' the existence and the functioning of 'the human psyche' (in the metaphysical world) to the 'human body' (in the physical world). If we say that they 'function similarily' -- and yet in two different dimensions -- then this is 'parallelism' as opposed to 'reductionism' which attempts to say that the one is simply an 'extension of the other'...Paralllelism says that the two types of 'organs' in two different dimensions (say, the 'brain' and the 'mind' or 'the body' and 'the psyche') -- one visable and the other invisable -- 'function along similar structural and dynamic patterns'; whereas 'reductionism' says that the two different dimensions -- of 'visability' and 'invisability' -- function on the exact same principles of the one...usually 'materialist reductionism' and/or 'scientific-empirical reductionism'....Or like Berkley and Hume argued -- as well as the 'Behaviorists' today, 'the invisable dimension simply does not exist'...'If you can't see it, it doesn't exist'...
When I use a 'parallelist model' of the human psyche, I compare it to the functioning of the human body....'Defenses' are like 'white blood cells' and 'impulses' are like 'red blood cells' unless the 'impulses' are 'defensive' in nature...
Similarily, I say that the human psyche is like the body in that it has 'metaphysical organs' like 'The Central Ego' and 'SIGGY's Cave' where 'SIGGY' is an anacronym that stands for: 'Secret Interest Groups and Ghosts of Yesterday'....I also call this 'metaphysical organ' 'The Shadow-Id Group' (SIG) Compartment'....Another largely unconscious metaphysical organ is 'The Dream-Fantasy-Nightmare Catcher/Weaver'...
Another metaphysical organ is our 'Personal Impulsive Transference Template'...our 'PITT'...
Another metaphysical organ is our 'Genetic Mythological-Symbolic Unconscious' (our 'GMSU') which is pretty well the same concept as Jung's 'Collective Unconscious'...
Another metaphysical organ is our 'Genetic Potential Self' -- our 'GPS'....
To summarize...in DGB terminology...we have 5 unconcious/subconscious/preconscious 'metaphysical organs' in the psyche, starting from the deepest level of the unconscious and working upwards into the conscious personality:
1. The Genetic Potential Self (GPS);
2. The Mythological-Symbolic Unconscious (MSU);
3. The Personal Impulsive Transference Template (PITT);
4. The SIG ('Secret Interest Group' or 'Shadow-Id Group') Compartment or SIGGY's Cave (Secret Interest Group and Ghosts from Yesterday);
5. The Dream-Fantasy-Nightmare Catcher/Weaver (DFNW);
In the conscious personality, we have 10 different 'ego compartments' or 'metaphysical sub-organs' that make up 'The Ego-as-a-Whole'...
Including....4 different 'Super-ego-States', 4 'Under-ego-States', and 2 'Mid-Zone-Ego-States';
A/ Different Superego States
6. The Nurturing Superego;
7. The Dionysian Superego;
8. The Narcissistic Superego;
9. The Righteous Superego;
B/ Different Underego States;
10. The Nurturing (Approval-seeking, Compliant) Underego;
11. The Dionysian Underego;
12. The Narcissistic Underego;
13. The Righteous-Rebellious Underego;
And Two 'Mid-Zone' Ego-States...
14. The Dialectically Integrative (Bi-polar/Bi-partisan) Ego-State;
15. The Central-Mediating-Executive (CME) Ego-State...
That is enough for today...
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
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