New ending..... Sept. 27th, 2011...
One of Freud's perspectives that radically changed over his long psychological career spanning between about 1890 and 1939 -- almost 50 years -- was his perspective on the 'content' of the unconscious.
First, the unconscious contained 'traumatically repressed' material (1893-1895, 'the traumacy theory'); then it contained 'sexually traumatic repressed' material (1896, 'the seduction theory'); then it contained 'repressed sexual drive' material (1897-1939, 'childhood sexuality', 'the psycho-sexual stages of development', the 'Oedipal' (and 'Electra') Complex, 'the psychopathology of every day life'...).
In 1920, Freud added the factor of 'aggression' into the equation in the form of 'the death instinct' setting up a dualistic interplay between the 'life and death instinct' where before it had been between 'Eros' (the sexual instinct) and 'self-preservation' (ego-defense).
In 1923, Freud created the concept of 'the id' (the 'container' of both the life and death instincts) in contrast to the 'ego' and 'superego' -- both normally defenders of 'civil behavior' and 'self-preservation, although the usual stereotyped conflict set up between 'the ego' and 'the id' is not entirely clearcut because 'the ego instincts' have to be a derrivative of 'the life instincts' which means that the ego has to 'pull its own energy' that it uses to 'fight' or at least 'restrain' the id -- from the id itself. That creates an area of unclarity and confusion unless we simply let this seeming contradiction slide, which I am content to do so.
However, this does suggest that the id, as of Freud's only 1923 formulation, is self-contradictory or significantly in conflict with itself -- both between the life and death instincts, and also between the sexual and self-preservative instincts of which 'the self-preservative instincts' are usually associated with the ego and superego, which in turn create our world of 'ethics, morality, social conscience and guilt' -- which is not the same thing as what we usually mean by 'instinctual impulse' which we have come to associate with 'the id' -- not ethics, morality, social conscience, and guilt. Thus, what before 1923 -- sex vs. self-preservation were usually distinguished by the unconscious vs. the conscious, now after 1923, so such distinction existed any longer. Which is to say, in essence, that all life and death energy -- including what Freud called 'the ego instincts' (i.e., self-preservation) had to, or have to, by this conceptualization, come originally from the id.
To be sure, it is virtually impossible to find complete and perfect 'logical inconsistency' in any philosophical and/or psychological system or paradigm, so as with any theorist, philosopher, psychologist, and/or politician, it is just a matter of time and energy before the 'deconstructionists' find the 'weaknesses, liabilities, and inconsistencies' in Freud's Classical Psychoanalytic System -- as with any other psychological, philosophical, and/or political system.
...........................................................................................................
'Logical inconsistency -- and by extension, hypocrisy -- is the norm in man, not the exception, if not in theory, then in deed. Probably, this is mainly because we all have an "id"!' -- dgb.
.............................................................................................................
So here is a run of different inconsistencies in Freud's theorizing. Firstly, Freud complained about both Jung and Adler 'desexualizing' his theory. In particular, with Jung, Freud accused Jung of desexualizing Freud's concept of 'libido' -- turning it into a more generalized 'life energy' as opposed to Freud's more specifically intended 'sexual energy'.
Now, on the other hand, by the time Freud got to 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' in 1920, and then attempted to integrate 'BPP' with 'The Ego and The Id' in 1923, Freud was basically including 'all forms of human energy and instincts within the confines of the id' because what else is left over once you say that the id is the reservoir of 'both the life and death instincts'?
So, on the one hand, we more or less have this stereotyped view of the id as being like a 'seething caldron of sexual desire and drive' and yet we can see by Freud's definition above that Freud included 'all sexual and non-sexual desires, drives, impulses, instincts' within the confines of the id.
That means -- to be consistent -- both the ego and the superego have to 'draw' their respective energies -- 'the ego instincts' and 'the instincts for self-preservation' -- from the confines of the id. Furthermore -- to be consistent again -- the id does not always follow 'the pleasure principle' like Freud said it did, but rather, at different times due to numerous different interacting factors, the id may choose to abide by 'the pain principle' in order to desire to act out its impulses of 'death, destruction, aggression, and/or violence'. Freud obviously didn't see this inconsistency.
Let's keep going. Obviously, the id cannot logically be defined as both 'the reservoir of life and death instincts' and 'the life and death instincts and energies themselves' -- this too would be inconsistent. We don't define 'coffee' and a 'coffee cup' by the same name -- rather, we use two different names to distinguish the difference between whether we are talking about 'the coffee' or 'the coffee cup'. We need to do the same thing regarding the id -- we can't logically define the id as both 'the instinctual life and death energies' and 'the caldron or reservoir of these life and death instincts' at the same time. Here is the problem:
When Freud starts talking about 'repression' and the 'repression of particular sexual instincts' within 'the confines of the id', then at that point, we are no longer talking about a 'caldron' or a 'reservoir' but rather, we are talking about a 'jail or locked vault within the unconscious'. And since the id is 'not going to lock itself up -- this is the last thing that it wants to do -- therefore, a 'repression or suppression jail' or the metaphor of 'the locked vault' has to involve the work of 'ego defenders' interested in 'civil behavior', 'ethics', and 'self-preservation'.
Thus, we need to distinguish between 'the id' and 'the id vault' -- just as we need to distinguish between 'unbound-free' id energy and 'bound' or 'restrained' or 'vaulted' id energy which is id energy that is being 'defended against' by the ego.
Finally, after the spring of 1896 -- if fully before -- Freud never talked about 'repressed or suppressed or compensatory, or diverted, or perverted, or pathologized traumacy energy'. By 1923, this perspective was simply no longer a part of Freud's perspective relative to how he viewed the unconcious -- even though up to the spring of 1896, it essentially dominated the way that Freud viewed the interaction between the ego and the (unacceptable, repressed) unconscious.
Thus, in effect, relative to Freud's definition of 'the id', there is inconsistency in this very definition of the id: on the one hand, the id is supposed to contain 'all life and death instincts'; but on the other hand, there is no mention of 'the traumacy factor' anymore even though this is where what Freud calls 'the death instinct' is largely born from; i.e., human traumacy and suffering.
Freud passed over this argument in 1920 (in 'BPP), in favor of his 'Dust Thou Art, and Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return' argument -- taken from the book of Genesis, even though Freud, like Marx, was entirely 'anti-religious' (except to the extent that Freud was subconsciously influenced by his mother in this regard). 'Religion was the opium of the masses' was Freud's standard view against religion...
However, not here...
To understand where Freud's conception of 'the death instinct' came from, we have to seek out one of Freud's early 'transference memories' relative to his mother...The memory is written up in Ernest Jones' famous and infamous biography of Freud's life:
.......................................................................................
Another memory (of Freud's) was of his mother assuring him at the age of six that we were made of earth and therefore must return to earth. When he (little Sigmund) expressed his doubts of this unwelcome statement she rubbed her hands together and showed him the dark fragments of epidermis that came there as a specimen of the earth we are made of. His astonishment was unbounded and for the first time he captured some sense of the inevitable. As he put it: "I slowly acquieced in the idea I was later to hear expressed in the words 'Thou owest nature a death.' (Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953, 1981, p. 16).
..............................................................................................
Thus, Freud's 'death instinct theory' can basically be viewed as a 'completion' or 'sublimation' of one of his early transference memories built around an important encounter with his mother in which she acted like an 'astonishing magician' in front of him.
That too, would become part of Freud's lifelong 'transference longing' -- the wish to both be in the presence of an 'astonishing magician' (Charcot, Fliess, Jung)....and the wish to be one himself....
There is no one who 'astonished' the world more than Sigmund Freud did...whatever else we might think of him, Freud was one of the most 'astonishing' figures in Western history.
You see how our 'transference memories' work (Adler called them 'lifestyle' memories but Adler didn't believe in the idea of 'conflict in the personality' whereas I do).
These 'transference memories' do not have to be 'repressed' or 'unconscious' at all -- even though 'psychodynamically' -- we do not usually understand how great an influence they have on our lives.
In Freud's first conscious 'primal scene' transference memory, he busted into his parents' bedroom only to see them 'engaged in some sort of sexual behavior' that his dad definitely did not want young Siggy to see -- so he yelled at him to get out of the room, which little Siggy -- 'shocked out of his little mind by this moment' -- obediently complied to in his action but in his mind, his world was no longer 'innocent', and he would defiantly find out 'what was going on in his parents' master bedroom', even if it took him the rest of his life (which it did because that is how greatly 'transference memories' transform our view of the world and ourselves). From about age 3 or 4 onwards, Freud was aware of 'the sexual factor' in human behavior....it became his number one 'paradigm' and 'focus of fixed, sublimated interest'.
What other theorists have called Freud's 'pansexualism' can also be viewed as 'the projective transference pair of glasses' that Freud had been wearing since he was about 3 or 4 years old...
In short, much of the 'foundational infrastructure' upon which Classical Psychoanalysis was built could -- and still can be -- interpreted from a handful of Freud's 'non-repressed' conscious early 'transference memories', a few more of which we haven't got to yet.
Until then, or the next subject of interest,
Have a great week!
-- dgb, Monday, September 26th, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
A Synopsis of Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going To Go In Our Integration of Freud's Complete Works with Other Post-Freudian Schools of Psychology
Finished! -- Sept 24th, 2011...
One of the problems with writing over a thousand essays on the internet -- within my metaphorical 'Virtual World' here that I just named 'Freud's Hotel', one now of a chain of 'Hegel's Hotels' -- is that oftentimes you forget what you have already written. Or at least I do.
I'm in the process of writing an essay, Google resurfaces an old essay that I wrote last June, and surprise, I find I am still writing on the same subject matter. A little different take perhaps, a slightly different angle, a little more emphasis here as opposed to there -- but still, it is a similar essay on the same subject matter.
Do I drop the essay I am writing -- and delete it -- in favor of what I have already written? Have I become stuck in neutral -- 'fixated' on the same subject matter over and over again, obsessive-compulsively, til death do us part? Or is there still a 'growth point' around the subject matter that I am writing about where I can still better clarify and expand my point of view?
Such is my case with the whole 'Seduction Theory Controversy' -- it has been driving me -- and driving me 'nuts' -- since I was first introduced to the subject matter back in the 1990s by Masson ('Final Analysis', 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory'), and also partly by Janet Malcolm (In The Freud Archives) who Masson sued in 1984 for alleged 'fabricated quotations'.
.........................................................................................
From Wikipedia...
In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute. After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994 on the grounds that, whether or not the quotations were genuine, more evidence was needed to rule against Malcolm. (For the opinion of the Supreme Court that allowed the case to proceed to trial, see the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
................................................................................................
Just because she won, does not mean that Malcolm wasn't guilty as charged. Masson just couldn't put enough court evidence together 'to prove' his case. Ironically, Malcolm wrote and published a book in 1990 -- before the court case even ended in 1994! -- called 'The Journalist and The Murderer' .
The Journalist and the Murderer
The thesis of The Journalist and the Murderer is contained in its first sentence: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."[5]
(My emphasis.)
..............................................................................
Amazing! Sounds like a confession to me as I am sure it did to everyone else who was involved in the court case back at that time...But she still won the case...or at least indirectly...backed by New Yorker money as it looks like it was The New Yorker that was directly being sued....
Speaking of qoutes, here is one that came into my email box this morning.
...............................................................................
Today's Inspirational Quote:
"Never idealize others. They will never live up to your
expectations. (My emphasis.) Don't over-analyze your relationships. Stop
playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by
genuineness."
-- Leo Buscaglia
...........................................................................
I have looked at both sides of The 1980s Seduction Theory Controversy, partly supported -- and railed against -- both sides at different times. I have come down hard on Freud at different times -- harder than even Masson -- mainly because I looked at Freud's cocaine abuse which was still alive around the time of Emma Ekstein's botched surgery in February 1895, and possibly years afterwards.
I mean Freud's cocaine abuse is just as relative to the history of Psychoanalysis as 'the steroid scandal' is relative to the history of baseball. The question needs to be asked -- though no-one else will ask it -- 'Does Freud's work and the finished product of Classical Psychoanalysis lose any credibility because Freud was using and abusing cocaine right through some of the most important years in the history and evolution of Psychoanalysis?
Freud was perhaps the most brilliantly creative theorist who ever lived. And he was a 'risk-taker' who would go into extreme places both physically and conceptually where other scientists, therapists, and theorists wouldn't go near. In the process, Freud had a few botched mishaps that -- looking back at it now -- probably signifcantly damaged the integrity and crediblity of his character. Masson saw this. I saw this. Swailes saw this. Others have seen this and said nothing. All you have to do is read Freud's Complete Letters to Fliess. And yet Freud didn't ask of others anything that he was unwilling to do himself. Freud had the same surgery on his nasal passageway that Emma Ekstein had on hers. Were both tied to cocaine use and abuse? Seems very likely, at least in Freud's case as Freud was showing all the classic symptoms of cocaine abuse back during this time -- heart irregularities, headaches, nasal problems including pus running out of his nose, depression, and feeling better with the use of the drug....
All of this flies in the face of the way most of us -- including me -- would like to 'idealize' Freud. And yet, the closer we get to a person and his or her actual life, the more likely we are to see their 'warts', their liabilities, and their vulnerabilities....Freud is no different. He was who he was -- and that was not always a hero. In 1895 and 1896, Freud looked like he was going to be a 'civil rights leader' for women -- detailing their privately suppressed and repressed abuses at the hands of men...
But for whatever reason, legitimate or not, justified or not -- probably at least 'tainted' -- Freud partly turned his back on women and started to pursue a different line of thinking entirely that seemed to actually further 'supress' and 'repress' the types of masculine sexual abuses that Freud openly brought to the attention of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on April 21st, 1896. For there would be no further talk about 'childhood sexual abuse' and instead his mind would roll into such areas as 'Childhood Sexuality', 'Fantasy Theory', 'Intstinct Theory', 'The Psycho-Sexual Stages of Development, and 'The Oedipal Complex' (which could be used pathologically to actually 'cover up' the real existence of incestuous family relations, particularly between father and daughter...
Now, I don't want to go on til my dying days harping on this whole matter....going back and forth, back and forth, ad nauseum....Mainly I would simply like to 'fix the problem'.....and help Classical Psychoanalysis evolve into something better than the 'stagnant, sterile, and/or bacterial infested pond' that it has more or less has become and remained as since Freud died...
Not too many theorist today -- at least to my awareness -- want to touch Classical Psychoanalysis with a ten foot pole. They either want to leave it completely the way it is. Or they want to move to some other different 'brand' of Psychoanalysis such as Object Relations, Self Psychology, Lacanian Psychoanalysis....or beyond....
In contrast, I want to remain within the basic Classical Freudian model or paradigm and make some significant adjustements to it. Such as bring back elements of 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis (say, 1893 up to May 4th, 1896) and integrate it into the rest of Classical Psychoanalysis.
Here is where we have problems with Freud's Classic Definition and Description of 'The Id'....But not necessarily...
The stereotyped image of the Id is basically a type of 'reservoir of very uncivil and/or deemed unacceptable human impulses' -- particularly of the 'sexual and/or destructive variety'.
The Id is visioned by Freud as either being more or less synonymous with the unconscious which is not a very good way to look at either the Id or The Unconcious....
Instead, more appropriately, the 'rawest form of the Id' should be envisioned as being found in the deepest part of the un/subconcious.
This idea allows for two types of modifications on Classical Freudian Theory. One, distinguishing other elements of the subconscious such as in order of 'depth' from bottom to top in my post-Freudian paradigm:
1. 'The Genetic-Potential-Symbolic (GPS)Self';
2. 'The Black Hole (Chaos, The Apeiron, or Nietzsche's Abyss)' That place where we all most dread to go -- or fall -- under conditions where we lose control of our day to day existence and self; 'Nervous or Psychotic Breakdown Territory'...Can at the same time be our 'Phoenix' of potential new life and the beginning of great new creativity if or when we start to become more 'self-assured' again, and begin to take stock of ourself, our talents, our life dreams, and the direction that we want to go in life that satisfies us -- not the world around us;
3 'The ID or IT' or 'Shadow-Id' (Unbound 'Idian' Life and/or Death Impulse Energy'); The Volcano or Fountain of All Forms of Life and Death Energy to The Self, The Whole Personality, Parts of Which Flow To Different Parts of The Ego and Superego;
4. 'The ID or IT' or 'Shadow-Id' (SID) Vault (Idian Life and/or Death Impulse Energy Bound Up, Vaulted Up, Restrained, Repressed or Suppressed, Defended Against By 'Ego-Defenders' That For The Most Part, Under Normal Conditions, Keep The Most Impermissable Parts of The Self Safely Under 'Lock and Key' Either Permanently or Til The Appropriate Time of Its Perceived 'Safe Release');
5. The Learning and Transference Complexes and Templates (Everything we learn as we evolve, especially important are our 'transference learnings' from early childhood (3 to 7 years old being our 'critical transference memory period', and our critical 'transference relationship' period lasting longer, usually into our teens; Both 'traumacy' theory and 'Oedipal Theory' are totally relevant to our transference period and often intertwine with each other in our psychological and emotional evolution;
6. The Day's 'Existential and/or Transference' Residue (Leftover Meaningful Pieces of The Day's Experience That Become Subject To Night Dream Activity);
7. The Dream Weaver (Creator of our dreams, nightmares, and fantasies that both hide and allude to our 'day's residues' and to our 'transference complexes';
There -- that will give you something to mull over and muse yourself with before we move on.
-- dgb, Sept. 24th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
One of the problems with writing over a thousand essays on the internet -- within my metaphorical 'Virtual World' here that I just named 'Freud's Hotel', one now of a chain of 'Hegel's Hotels' -- is that oftentimes you forget what you have already written. Or at least I do.
I'm in the process of writing an essay, Google resurfaces an old essay that I wrote last June, and surprise, I find I am still writing on the same subject matter. A little different take perhaps, a slightly different angle, a little more emphasis here as opposed to there -- but still, it is a similar essay on the same subject matter.
Do I drop the essay I am writing -- and delete it -- in favor of what I have already written? Have I become stuck in neutral -- 'fixated' on the same subject matter over and over again, obsessive-compulsively, til death do us part? Or is there still a 'growth point' around the subject matter that I am writing about where I can still better clarify and expand my point of view?
Such is my case with the whole 'Seduction Theory Controversy' -- it has been driving me -- and driving me 'nuts' -- since I was first introduced to the subject matter back in the 1990s by Masson ('Final Analysis', 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory'), and also partly by Janet Malcolm (In The Freud Archives) who Masson sued in 1984 for alleged 'fabricated quotations'.
.........................................................................................
From Wikipedia...
In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute. After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994 on the grounds that, whether or not the quotations were genuine, more evidence was needed to rule against Malcolm. (For the opinion of the Supreme Court that allowed the case to proceed to trial, see the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
................................................................................................
Just because she won, does not mean that Malcolm wasn't guilty as charged. Masson just couldn't put enough court evidence together 'to prove' his case. Ironically, Malcolm wrote and published a book in 1990 -- before the court case even ended in 1994! -- called 'The Journalist and The Murderer' .
The Journalist and the Murderer
The thesis of The Journalist and the Murderer is contained in its first sentence: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."[5]
(My emphasis.)
..............................................................................
Amazing! Sounds like a confession to me as I am sure it did to everyone else who was involved in the court case back at that time...But she still won the case...or at least indirectly...backed by New Yorker money as it looks like it was The New Yorker that was directly being sued....
Speaking of qoutes, here is one that came into my email box this morning.
...............................................................................
Today's Inspirational Quote:
"Never idealize others. They will never live up to your
expectations. (My emphasis.) Don't over-analyze your relationships. Stop
playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by
genuineness."
-- Leo Buscaglia
...........................................................................
I have looked at both sides of The 1980s Seduction Theory Controversy, partly supported -- and railed against -- both sides at different times. I have come down hard on Freud at different times -- harder than even Masson -- mainly because I looked at Freud's cocaine abuse which was still alive around the time of Emma Ekstein's botched surgery in February 1895, and possibly years afterwards.
I mean Freud's cocaine abuse is just as relative to the history of Psychoanalysis as 'the steroid scandal' is relative to the history of baseball. The question needs to be asked -- though no-one else will ask it -- 'Does Freud's work and the finished product of Classical Psychoanalysis lose any credibility because Freud was using and abusing cocaine right through some of the most important years in the history and evolution of Psychoanalysis?
Freud was perhaps the most brilliantly creative theorist who ever lived. And he was a 'risk-taker' who would go into extreme places both physically and conceptually where other scientists, therapists, and theorists wouldn't go near. In the process, Freud had a few botched mishaps that -- looking back at it now -- probably signifcantly damaged the integrity and crediblity of his character. Masson saw this. I saw this. Swailes saw this. Others have seen this and said nothing. All you have to do is read Freud's Complete Letters to Fliess. And yet Freud didn't ask of others anything that he was unwilling to do himself. Freud had the same surgery on his nasal passageway that Emma Ekstein had on hers. Were both tied to cocaine use and abuse? Seems very likely, at least in Freud's case as Freud was showing all the classic symptoms of cocaine abuse back during this time -- heart irregularities, headaches, nasal problems including pus running out of his nose, depression, and feeling better with the use of the drug....
All of this flies in the face of the way most of us -- including me -- would like to 'idealize' Freud. And yet, the closer we get to a person and his or her actual life, the more likely we are to see their 'warts', their liabilities, and their vulnerabilities....Freud is no different. He was who he was -- and that was not always a hero. In 1895 and 1896, Freud looked like he was going to be a 'civil rights leader' for women -- detailing their privately suppressed and repressed abuses at the hands of men...
But for whatever reason, legitimate or not, justified or not -- probably at least 'tainted' -- Freud partly turned his back on women and started to pursue a different line of thinking entirely that seemed to actually further 'supress' and 'repress' the types of masculine sexual abuses that Freud openly brought to the attention of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on April 21st, 1896. For there would be no further talk about 'childhood sexual abuse' and instead his mind would roll into such areas as 'Childhood Sexuality', 'Fantasy Theory', 'Intstinct Theory', 'The Psycho-Sexual Stages of Development, and 'The Oedipal Complex' (which could be used pathologically to actually 'cover up' the real existence of incestuous family relations, particularly between father and daughter...
Now, I don't want to go on til my dying days harping on this whole matter....going back and forth, back and forth, ad nauseum....Mainly I would simply like to 'fix the problem'.....and help Classical Psychoanalysis evolve into something better than the 'stagnant, sterile, and/or bacterial infested pond' that it has more or less has become and remained as since Freud died...
Not too many theorist today -- at least to my awareness -- want to touch Classical Psychoanalysis with a ten foot pole. They either want to leave it completely the way it is. Or they want to move to some other different 'brand' of Psychoanalysis such as Object Relations, Self Psychology, Lacanian Psychoanalysis....or beyond....
In contrast, I want to remain within the basic Classical Freudian model or paradigm and make some significant adjustements to it. Such as bring back elements of 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis (say, 1893 up to May 4th, 1896) and integrate it into the rest of Classical Psychoanalysis.
Here is where we have problems with Freud's Classic Definition and Description of 'The Id'....But not necessarily...
The stereotyped image of the Id is basically a type of 'reservoir of very uncivil and/or deemed unacceptable human impulses' -- particularly of the 'sexual and/or destructive variety'.
The Id is visioned by Freud as either being more or less synonymous with the unconscious which is not a very good way to look at either the Id or The Unconcious....
Instead, more appropriately, the 'rawest form of the Id' should be envisioned as being found in the deepest part of the un/subconcious.
This idea allows for two types of modifications on Classical Freudian Theory. One, distinguishing other elements of the subconscious such as in order of 'depth' from bottom to top in my post-Freudian paradigm:
1. 'The Genetic-Potential-Symbolic (GPS)Self';
2. 'The Black Hole (Chaos, The Apeiron, or Nietzsche's Abyss)' That place where we all most dread to go -- or fall -- under conditions where we lose control of our day to day existence and self; 'Nervous or Psychotic Breakdown Territory'...Can at the same time be our 'Phoenix' of potential new life and the beginning of great new creativity if or when we start to become more 'self-assured' again, and begin to take stock of ourself, our talents, our life dreams, and the direction that we want to go in life that satisfies us -- not the world around us;
3 'The ID or IT' or 'Shadow-Id' (Unbound 'Idian' Life and/or Death Impulse Energy'); The Volcano or Fountain of All Forms of Life and Death Energy to The Self, The Whole Personality, Parts of Which Flow To Different Parts of The Ego and Superego;
4. 'The ID or IT' or 'Shadow-Id' (SID) Vault (Idian Life and/or Death Impulse Energy Bound Up, Vaulted Up, Restrained, Repressed or Suppressed, Defended Against By 'Ego-Defenders' That For The Most Part, Under Normal Conditions, Keep The Most Impermissable Parts of The Self Safely Under 'Lock and Key' Either Permanently or Til The Appropriate Time of Its Perceived 'Safe Release');
5. The Learning and Transference Complexes and Templates (Everything we learn as we evolve, especially important are our 'transference learnings' from early childhood (3 to 7 years old being our 'critical transference memory period', and our critical 'transference relationship' period lasting longer, usually into our teens; Both 'traumacy' theory and 'Oedipal Theory' are totally relevant to our transference period and often intertwine with each other in our psychological and emotional evolution;
6. The Day's 'Existential and/or Transference' Residue (Leftover Meaningful Pieces of The Day's Experience That Become Subject To Night Dream Activity);
7. The Dream Weaver (Creator of our dreams, nightmares, and fantasies that both hide and allude to our 'day's residues' and to our 'transference complexes';
There -- that will give you something to mull over and muse yourself with before we move on.
-- dgb, Sept. 24th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Modifications to Classical Psychoanalysis (Part 1): Bridging 'The Schism' Between 'Pre-Classical' and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis: Introducing DGB Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalytic Theory
Still undergoing revision...Oct. 1st, 2011.
A/ Introduction
Good day!
In the next two or three essays to come, I would like to do what no other psychoanalytic theorist has done before me -- unite Freud's pre-1897 'Traumacy Theory' with his post-1896 'Fantasy Theory'....And that is just the tip of the iceberg...
I am of the opinion that if a theorist and/or therapist gets 'too stuck' in one theory -- particularly an 'either/or' theory -- then he or she is going to suffer from the limitations of where the theory ends -- and life continues on. Theories have 'neuroses' -- or 'blindspots' and 'deadends' and 'black holes' -- as well as people; in fact, neuroses in theories can cause neuroses in people to the extent that we try to steer our way through life with a 'theory' that takes us down one of these deadends or drops us in one of these black holes.
Some theorists create 'left-handed' theories of life that may do pretty well at describing a 'left-handed perspective on life'; other theorists -- the 'counter-theorists' -- creat 'right-handed theories of life' which may do pretty well at describing a 'right-handed perspective on life'. The problem comes when a left-handed theory of life tries to explain what is happening on the right-handed side of life -- and visa versa. This is when your 'one-sided' theory of life may end up taking you down that life dead-end -- or dropping you down into that big black hole.
In this regard, every one-sided theory can be said to have a 'death instinct' which is the point at which it takes us down a dead-end and/or drops us into a big black hole. In the words of Hegel, 'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction'. And the extent to which we follow a theory into its area of self-destruction, we too can self-destruct.
Another quote from Hegel...
..................................................................................
Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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The best ways to overcome a theory's blindspots is to either create a 'bi-polar theory' that can more functionally deal with the inherent bi-polarities in life's processes better than one-sided theories...or better still, in a theory of the mind which is what we are most interested in here, and which is about as complicated and multi-faceted as life itself -- a 'multi-bi-polar model of the human mind'... A third possibility is to read all the different theories of the mind that you can read, and then let your creative forces drive you to a place of 'multi-integration' through a process of associating and differentiating, mixing and matching, assimilating, and making sure that everything comes together in a wholistic manner that makes logical, coherent sense.
I have aimed to do apply all three of these strategies listed above.
Life, evolution, and man's brain all function according to the basic principle of Hegel's 'Dialectic Cycle and Bi-Polar Integration Model' -- not that he was the first, or only one to use this model; we can trace bipolar models back to both ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophy (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse) as well as to Hegel's more immediate Gernman predecessors in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling.
We have a bi-polar model that was developed in the early 1900s in physics -- the 'particle-wave' theory -- that explained empirical observations of energy and matter better than either of the two theories could separately, and this became known as 'Quantum Physics'...
If you read history, philosophy, law, economics, psychology, medicine, religion, study cultures....
Two life cycles arguably stand out above all others...
1. The cyclical model of : 'union', 'separation', 'union', 'separation'...
2. And the Hegelian cyclical model of: 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', 'synthesis'....and start all over again at a better or worse stage of evolution...
Let us see where these two models take us in relation to Freud and his hugely perplexing, provocative, and still hugely controversial -- 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory Abandonment Controversy'.
B/ The Traumacy-Seduction Theory Abandonment Controversy...
To be further revised...
Freud remains one of the most enigmatic, provocative, controversial and creative theorists in the history of Western Philosophy-Psychology...
I have probably spent thousands of hours studying and/or writing about Freud and his usually provocative, controversial ideas....and the only philosopher who I have put close to this much amount of time into -- is Hegel, mainly in my writing as opposed to my reading....because his one simple formula has literally endless potential theoretical and therapeutic applications.
So here is another enigma, another paradox relative to studying Freud....
Freud operated from two different philosophical paradigms at the same and/or different times: Aristotle's 'either/or' paradigm' (eg. 'traumacy-seduction' theory vs. 'fantasy-impulse' theory); and 'Hegel's 'dialectic' or 'triadic' paradigm: 1. thesis; 2. anti-or counter-thesis; and 3. synthesis or integration (eg. 'id-superego-ego').
In the case of the first example -- which is now called The Seduction Theory Controversy -- Freud spent about the first 8 years of his psychological career developing The Traumacy Theory (1893-1895) which -- oversimplistically stated -- says that 'psycho-neurotic disorders and/or their connected symptoms' such as what used to be called 'hysteria', and also disorders like 'obsessional neurosis' which today is called 'Obsessional-Compulsive Disorder or 'OCD' are generally, and/or at least partly caused(Freud often didn't 'qualify' his provocative assertions which remains a big part of the present day problem) by 'the repression' of traumatic childhood memories, particularly of a sexual nature, which is the point at which The Traumacy Theory evolved into The Seduction/(Sexual Assault) Theory (1896) -- which again oversimplistically stated -- says that 'hysterical symptoms' can usually (Freud again was prone to making his already provocative theory even more provocative by exchanging such qualifers as 'often' or 'usually' with the more emphatic, dramatic non-qualifier -- 'always') be traced back to 'repressed sexual traumacy memories' in childhood -- relative to 'seductions' and/or 'more aggressive sexual assaults' that 'get lost in the child's memory system' and then come back -- often, years and years later ('the return of the repressed') as some form of 'psycho-neurotic symtom(s)' that may have been 'triggered' by an 'associative event and/or memory' that 'stirred up' the old 'lost or repressed memory'.
Now, just to add my bit of editorial commenting here, this in itself -- meaning Freud's work and theorizing up to the spring of 1896 -- was 'amazing work', enough to make Freud 'The King of All Clinical Psychologists and Psycho-theorists', especially when you qualify Freud's tendency to overgeneralize in order to emphatically and dramatically state his case. My qualifiers today would be that the memories don't always have to be of a 'sexual nature', and they don't always have to be 'repressed' -- and indeed, as Freud would go on to rhetorically argue for the rest of his career after May 1896, the 'so-called memories' don't even have to be 'memories'; indeed, often, particularly in the case of female patients reporting 'seduction memories involving their dad'; the memories can -- and invariably are -- "the patients' own fantasies made to look like real memories when they weren't". This assertion here on the part of Freud, after May 1896, would become the essence of what today is called 'The Seduction Theory Controversy' -- who was seducing who? Did the dad actually seduce the daughter? Or did the daughter fantasize in her head being seduced by her dad -- and then 'repress this fantasy as if it was a real memory'?
Wow! Fully addressed -- even today as opposed to in Victorian Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this issue has the capability of being a 'live firecracker' that probably most writers and theorists would prefer to stay completely away from it -- rather than take a particular side. But that is what Freud did after May 1896 -- he took a side -- the side of 'fantasy' rather than 'memory' -- and then he basically 'buried' the issue, and his old traumacy-seduction theory, like an 'ex-lover gone bad', or like one of his patients would 'bury' one of their traumatic memories and/or fantasies -- whatever it was. Freud had taken us into that 'place' where philosophers and particularly epistemologists have been fighting for years 'Objectivity vs. Subjectivity': Who's right? Who's wrong? I call this the area -- 'The Black Hole of The Kantian Epistemological Split'.
Where Hegel wrote: Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond: Kant who influenced Hegel, would -- if I can stand in for Kant here -- throw back at Hegel: 'Hegel you are an epistemologogical idealist -- whereas I'm an epistemological skeptic -- thus, if you really want to know what the 'truth' is, the truth is this: 'You can never know what the truth is because you can never know if your 'concept' and 'external reality' ever 'correspond' -or 'fully correspong' - in other words, you can never escape the narcissistic bias of your own 'subjectivity'. Nietzsche argued this, even more vehemently than Kant.
Even the best judges in the world can sometimes be wrong about 'what the truth is -- or was' -- leading up to a court case.
Sometimes, only the two who know for sure are the two who were there at the time, and even then, you can have 'narcissistic disagreements' as to what really happened, how it happened, and who's guilty -- or who's more guilty, or maybe they are both partly guilty. Or maybe not. Maybe one is lying or distorting, or maybe they both are, or, or, or....
So how can a therapist always be expected to know for sure what historically 'really happened' in a client's life? This having been said, a 'theory' should never 'always' steer a therapist away from an 'unpopular social, legal, and/or political truth'...Such a theory -- a 'left-handed' or 'right-handed' theory -- generally needs to be brought into 'conflictual-dialectic harmony' with its 'opposing brother or sister' theory...This is what I propose to do here below...
Anyway, regardless of what was going through Freud's mind at the time of his 'changeover' in theory after May, 1896, and we can 'speculate til the cows come home' as theorist after theorist already has...taking opposing sides of The Seduction Theory Controversy.....Indeed, I myself, have approached the issue from opposite sides, from both sides, and even after looking at the historical material over and over again, I am still not sure....I have a general idea of what I think...but it is not written in stone, and probably never will be...
Freud, in 1896, was moving on -- he had his driving 'ID' Theory in his brain which at this point in his career stands for 'Interpretation of Dreams' would eventually lead to his 'Id Theory' in its 'Classical' sense...
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It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good.
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind.
-- Bob Dylan, One Too Many Mornings
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I'll leavin' today
I'll be on my way
Of this I can't say very much
But if you want me to
I can be just like you
And pretend that we never have touched
And if anybody asks me, "Is it easy to forget ?"
I'll say, "It's easily done
You just pick anyone
And pretend that you never have met".
-- Bob Dylan, I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met)
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It was like Freud himself had created two opposing -- or seemingly opposing -- 'thesis' vs. 'anti-thesis' theories of human sexual behavior without being able to find the 'bridge over trouble water' that would successfully integrate the two.
Instead, seemingly almost overnight around May 4th, 1896, Freud started to abandon his hard fought traumacy-seduction theory in favor of his equally provocative and controversial childhood sexuality theory. And so 'Classical' Psychoanalysis was born while 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis was left, metaphorically speaking again, like an ex-lover.
I will share with you some of my own speculations and theories that have passed through my own head as I have tried to address this hugely controversial Freudian issue from all sides...
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To be revised...
Freud did his best to intellectually justify his radical changeover in theory but anyone taking a serious look into Freudian history, and especially Freud's own letters to Fliess, particularly the most disconcerting ones that weren't publicly released until the 1980s after Masson had been give permission by Anna Freud to translate and edit them, has to have some feeling that there may have been 'something rotten that happened in the State of Austria' between 1895 and 1896.
It sure looks like Freud might have been 'covering up the incidence of child abuse in his clinical practice' because nobody wanted to hear what he had to say -- indeed, the May 4th, 1896 letter to Fliess tells us that his clinical room was almost empty, that he had been blackballed by the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, and that patients weren't being referred to him by members of The Society.
To be continued...
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Personally and philosophically, I have much more trouble dealing with Freud's 'either/or' Seduction Theory Controversy than I do dealing with Freud's 'id-superego-ego' model....which still works fairly well and could work even better with some modifications and extensions that I am about to make.
In short, I have 'bi-polarized' Freud's 'Traumacy vs. Impulse' model which now becomes like the 'particle-wave' theory of physics -- a 'dialectic' or 'bipolar' model where the two opposite extremes can 'live comfortably together in the same house' like a husband and wife team who are 'opposites' in their respective character makeup...
In this respect, we now have what I am proposing to call 'The Quantum Traumacy-Impulse or Reality-Fantasy Theory'
It is really quite simple and only requires the human characteristic of 'creative negotiation, compromise, and integration' -- not Freudians and anti-Freudians sniping at each other like soldiers from opposite ideologies in the mountains of Afghanastan....
To the extent that I can, I like to utilize a whole host of similar and/or different ideas from many different theorists and their respective schools or paradigms of psychology...and in this way, I think I can manage to at least partly get 'unstuck' from the 'boxed in liabilities' of any one particular limited paradigm...all of which have their own particular 'death instinct'....
Superseding perhaps all these different philosophical and psychological paradigms is the economic paradigm of 'Capitalism'.
Now I have some idealistic, ethical -- Adam Smith and Ayn Rand -- Capitalism in my blood (partly learned from my father who was the owner of his own business corporation) but I also have some Karl Marx and Erich Fromm 'humanistic-existential socialism' in me as well....another one of my 'bi-polar ideologies'....And when I was in University in the 70s, I read, and was taught, about the work of a good cross-section of 'Anti-Establishment' philosophers -- Karl Marx (Money changes everything...distorts and overpowers any type of 'idealistic ideology'...thus, creating 'false ideologies' that are 'only meant to look good, not be good'), Erich Fromm ('the pathology of normalcy', 'The Sane Society), Thomas Szaz ('The Myth of Mental Illness') R.D. Laing (Paraphased by me...Some people become 'psychologically sick' within the context of a 'psychologically sick' society and can't function properly; others function seemingly 'normally' -- perhaps even 'economically brilliantly'...become 'Capitalist Scholars and/or Capitalist Mythological Heroes' but still carry the 'Narcissistic Capitalist Virus' within them....and make 'others sick around them'...in the process of becoming very wealthy and admired themselves'... And to be fair, there are some 'socialist' and 'communist' leaders who can be, or have been the same....Lenin, Stalin, and Mao tse Tung....to name three....they were what I would call 'Narcissistic Communists'.....Marx struggled between 'humanistic decency and democracy' early in his career....and a more 'dictatorial forceful takeover mentality' later in his career...But I don't think that Marx would have liked anything that Lenin, Stalin, or Mao tse Tung did militarily....I may be wrong...
The point I wish to make here is that all of us -- each and every day we go into work -- often struggle with 'conflict of interest' issues: conflict between our own belief and value system, our own character, integrity, honest, credibility, self-respect -- and something that our place of employment may or may not want us to go that steps beyond our own personal 'integrity' parameters...After a while, we may even give in to the philosophy of: 'If you can't beat them, then join them -- in choices of 'narcissistic self-gratification' over 'ethical right or wrong'...
Are we really so naive -- and caught up in Freud's 'idealized mythology' -- to believe that the same type of 'Capitalist manipulations' weren't happening back in Freud's time as we see around us every day when we go to work?
Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler were undoubtedly seeing Father Freud through 'rose-coloured glasses' -- trying with all their respective and combined power to prevent the idealized legacy of Freud's character -- his ethical integrity and honesty -- from collapsing...It may have forever stayed this way -- i.e., 'mythologically idealized' -- if the full letters from Freud to Fliess had not been translated and published by Masson. At that point, Anna Freud and Eissler must have truly had 'Freudian Blinders' on....becuae there are many letters where Freud doesn't look ethically good at all...
Which is probably the usual state and dynamics of things...The closer we get to someone who we have idealized from afar, the more likely we are to be disappointed, even 'emotionally sunken' and/or extremely angry at what we find....Very few things in life are 'black and white'....Generally good people can make really bad choices that come back to haunt them, and even generally very 'bad' people can sometimes do 'heroically good' things...
Freud's post May 4th, 1896 'abandonment of the seduction theory -- particularly in combination with the less controversial trauamcy theory' -- was so radical, considering the historical fact that Freud had been meticulously developing these two theories since he met Breuer and Charcot in the 1880s -- that any 'normal explanation' of why Freud abandoned these two theories hardly seems to suffice...It's like he had just wiped his memory clean of about the last 8 years of his life and everything that he had clinically observed, interpreted, believed and written in those last 8 years.
It's like Charcot had just hynotized him and 're-programmed his belief and value system so completely that it was almost the exact opposite to what he had believed before he was hypnotized'...
Things like that don't normally just happen to a person, let alone a theorist as stubborn as Freud was unless he is taken into a dungeon and 'brain-washed' and/or 'personally threated' and/or 'traumatically scared half to death'...
Here are some of the historical possibilities of what may or may not have been motivating Freud intensely back in the spring of 1896...
1. The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology was applying economic leverage on Freud after they ridiculed his Seduction Theory which connected 'hysteria' with childhood sexual abuse. In effect, they 'blackballed him' -- which Freud himself stated in his letter of May 4th, 1896 to Fliess, stopped referring patients to him...and his clinical therapy room was all but empty...
2. Freud was still suffering from severe ethical and medical guilt regarding the botched 'nasal surgery' by Fliess on Emma Ekstein in February of 1895, which Freud had recommended to Emma that she have this 'totally unconventional, hare-brained nasal-sexual operation' and referred Emma to Fliess to conduct 'the necessary surgery' which was like referring Emma to Dr. Strangelove...with Freud playing his 'sidekick'...
3. It is highly probable that cocaine was mixed up in the middle of this 'double nasal operation' -- for Freud was having it too, quite possibly to clear out some of the 'cocaine leftovers' and 'pus' that had accumulated in his nasal cavity...Another snort of cocaine after the operation...and he would be just fine...Just read the letters through this whole time of 1895 to 1897 if you don't believe me...Or visit the site...History House: Freud and Cocaine -- The Deal for a more satirical and sarcastic perspective than I have put forward here, but I believe historically more accurate than anything that has come out of The Freudian Establishment....
4. Racing through Freud's mind also about this time was the main content of about 900 pages of 'The Interpretation of Dreams'....This book may indeed be a classic in some of the principle ideas that would later become 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...but between the cocaine and the emerging 'fantasy and dream theory'...Freud might have (conveniently) lost track of 'the reality theory -- and the 'real memory' theory -- that he had been building for the previous 8 years or so...Some how the subject of 'childhood sexual abuse' and Emma's medical mishap got lost in the shuffle until the full Freud to Fliess letters emerged in the 1980s...
Also, if you read 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' closely, I think you will find that you could see some 'tell-tale signs' that Freud's fantasy theory was starting to emerge...on its way to 'Screen Memories' (1899)...in an essay (The Aetiology) that was supposed to be all about 'reality' and 'real childhood sexual abuse'...It was about this...but it looks to me like the 'fantasy' part of Freud was starting to emerge..even before he got his 'ego injured' and his 'income possibly diminished' by The Vienna Society....
The paradoxical irony is that in this area of childhood sexual abuse, Freud should have at least partly stayed the course, stayed steadfast and true...indeed, he would be viewed today as a 'Champion' of The Women's Civil Rights Movement'....where he really should have had his 'butt kicked' -- but didn't -- was in the whole Emma Ekstein medical fiasco, and in his personal and 'professional' use and abuse -- and particularly, prescription -- of cocaine as the 'magic wonder drug of choice for any and all of his patients and supposed friends medical ailments'...'their anti-depression and energy pill all in one'...
There was no excuse for this whatsoever after 1891 when Freud saw one of his supposedly close friend's -- and patient's -- die partly from the cocaine that Freud had been prescribed to him for years, even after most of the rest of the medical community were seeing the bad medical results come in relative to cocaine -- and had abandoned it...
Anyways, Freud may not be the 'ethical allstar' that all of us strive to be able look up to and idealize...but at the same time, he still was probably the greatest -- or at least the most creatively brilliant -- theorist that the Western world has ever known....
And it is this creatively brilliant part of Freud -- and the greater part of his ideas both before and after his abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theory, even sometimes at first blush the seemingly most preposterous ones -- that I continue to ponder on, revise, modify, extend, compensate for, and/or discard altogether or in part...It is here that I have spent my thousands of hours studying Freud -- and will continue do so and try to make his ideas better for the 21st Century...
A little overly ambitious perhaps? Hugely over-ambitious?
Or can I function like the conducter in an orchestra who can bring the many different sections, instruments, and sounds of an orchestra into magnificent harmony with each other?
I can hear them all playing in my head right now....
The question thus becomes: How can I best bring all these integrative sounds alive here and now on paper?
Let's start with a little 'theorizing about theorizing'....and then we will get to 'The Seduction Theory Controversy' -- a controversy that has been alive since the early 1900s and simply will not go away....It remains a 'schism or abyss' -- like The Grand Canyon -- right in the middle of Classical Psychoanalysis (or the orthodox analysts would say between 'Pre-Psychoanalysis' and 'Classical Psychoanalysis').
1. Theorizing About Theorizing (Model-Making, Map-Making)
A theory is supposed to accurately represent that part of life that it is designed to represent...There are 'structural' models that don't move, and there are 'dynamic' models that do move....The first type of model follows 'the nouns' in life; the second type of model follows 'the verbs' in life....
Thus, a theory should be like a 'slave -- or at least a dancing partner to life' -- that part of life that it is supposed to follow...'life leads and the theory follows step by step in its shadow or as its dance partner' if you will.
A theory is like a 'puppet' where we are 'the puppeteer' but we too, like the theory we are making, need to closely observe and follow in the footsteps of that part of life we are following and 'copying' to the best of our ability in the form of our theory or model or 'map'.
Back in 1972, when I was in Grade 12, I took an English class in which I was introduced to the study of 'General Semantics' which was basically the study of 'theory-making' as well a study of 'the use and abuse of language'. The book I was reading is a classic in this regard: S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action (originally written in 1939 with about 7 follow up editions...), which drew its inspiration from a largely unheralded 'philosophy of language and meaning' book called, 'Science and Sanity' (1933, a newer hardcover edition available...), by Alfred Korzybski who I would call the greatest philosopher of language of all time. Some of his ideas are very similar to Wittgenstein's who was alive about the same time, and I am not sure who may of influenced who in this regard...But Korzybski's work, Science and Sanity, was a classic work, the foundation of a school of language philosophy that is still very much alive today with connections to the related schools of psychology called 'Cognitive Therapy' (Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, George Kelly, Donald Meichenbaum...) which I drew together in my Honours Psychology Thesis, written in 1979. Today, I look back at this essay as my first 'model of the human psyche' or that portion of the human psyche that I would now call 'The Central Ego'...
We will come back to this work at a later date.
Korzybski and Hayakawa taught that 'the map is not the territory' (and never will be because maps and theories are never perfect -- they are always inferior 'abstractions' of the real thing that these maps are trying to conceptually copy and accurately represent from that part of 'reality' that they are designed to 'represent').
Always in a theory or model or map we are looking for 'accurate structural (and/or dynamic) repressentation. But, again we will never be perfect because our representations will never be perfect. As a theorist, we have to expect the unexpected, expect the exceptions to the rule. If 'life' makes a 'left hand turn' on us, we have to be willing and able to quickly follow with our 'map' of what has just happened. If on the other hand, life then takes a 'quick right hand turn' on us...and we just keep on going....oblivious to the change that life just pulled on us, well that is going to take our map -- and us -- to 'Nowheresville'....unless or until we make the necessary adjustment and modification in our map...
This book by Hayakawa along with Maxwell Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics' propelled me into the study of psychology in 1974 at The University of Waterloo. There Dr. Meichenbaum took an interest in my interest in General Semantics and I will give you a small sample of my work in this area which extended into my Honours Thesis in 1979. And we will look at my 'old work' on 'The Central Ego' at a later point in time...
Freud could have used a few lessons in General Semantics because he was a terrible logician. He was always (there's an example of an over-generalization just committed by yours truly) jumping ahead of himself and over-generalizing. And then instead of going back and 'modifying' his generalization, he would pulll a 180 degree 'spinerama', a 'Copernican switch', a 'Marxian switch on Hegel', and overgeneralize in the opposite direction.
I said 'always' above in the same type of fashion that Freud would have used the word 'always' in a rhetorical argument aimed at supporting his newest theory, and yet there is only one 'double incident' that I am concerned about here: 1. his short-lived creation of 'The Seduction Theory'; and 2. his radical switchover to 'Fantasy Theory, Instinct Theory, Childhood Sexuality, and The Oedipal Complex' -- the foundational floor of what we now call 'Classical' Psychoanalysis.
Masson's lament in the 1980s is that Freud 'dropped (abandoned, 'suppressed') the real foundational bottom of Psychoanalysis' which was his 1895 'Traumacy' Theory and his 1896 'Seduction' Theory. Indeed, his argument was that virtually all of Psychoanalysis after 1896 was a 'fraud', 'a 'coverup', and a 'false' Psychoanalysis that tried to turn his patients' 'real memories of shocking childhood sexual assaults and seductions' into their own 'wishful sexual fantasies', created when they were a small child, and perhaps exasperated during the onset of puberty, but still initially 'repressed' by the small child because of the 'morally unacceptable' nature of the wishful fantasy, and also a fear of the anger and/or punishment of the parent of the same sex ('castration anxiety' relative to the father in the case of a small boy).
To my understanding, Masson believed and still believes that Psychoanalysis should go back to what Freud had learned and was teaching before 1897 -- i.e., 'Pre-Psychoanalysis' and that would presumably include 'The Interpretation of Dreams', most of which was written around 1896. Most of us, I think, would understand 'dream theory' to be more or less the same thing as 'fantasy theory'; it is just when 'memories' and 'fantasies' start getting conflated together by Freud that Masson started getting upset -- and with good reason in my opinion. Memories are memories and fantasies are fantasies, and for most of us, most of the time, they only start getting conflated together when we reach our 50 or 60s and we've probably lost a few million or billion brain cells...the rest of them are doing overtime...and perhaps getting a little 'fuzzy' on a few things....But most of the memories that really count in our life...we remember all too clearly...
My belief, on the other hand, is that Freud's work before 1897 should be 'properly integrated' with his work after 1896 in a manner that makes all his work between say, 1893 and 1939 -- about 46 years of 'theorizing about the human mind' -- 'internally consistent' or at least 'paradoxically consistent'. In another words, I have opted for a 'multi-bi-polar, multi-dialectic model of the human psyche' that is similar to what physics did in the early 1900s (see below) when 'the particle theory' of energy and matter was integrated with 'the wavelength theory' of energy and matter, creating what we now call 'Quantum Physics'. Applied to the structure and dynamics of the human mind, I have applied the label 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis' to indicate the integration of 'Pre-Classical' (before 1897) Psychoanalysis with 'Classical' (after 1896) Psychoanalysis.
Regardless of which Freudian model you support or don't support, it is important to know where Freud went 'theoretically offside'. Oftentimes, the greatest 'abstracters' and/or 'generalizers' in the world are also the worst abstracters and/or generalizers. I would put Freud into this category. Breuer was a 'careful abstracter' whereas Freud was a 'careless abstracter' which is, I believe, what essentially blew them apart. Freud didn't have the patience for Breuer, and Breuer didn't want to 'jump to conclusions' as quickly as Freud was doing...So when Freud got 'shot down' metaphorically speaking for his Seduction Theory on the evening of April 21st, 1896, Breuer probably wasn't at all surprised and I believe tried to 'limit the professional damage' by qualifying Freud's conclusions...It didn't work...By this time, Freud had stuck his neck out, probably a little too far, and was on his own...Breuer faded into history...
Freud's logic went something like this:
First in the spring of 1896, it was 'all hysterics suffer from childhood sexual abuse'...and then in progressive fashion between, say the spring of 1896 (after April 21st) and 1905, it became more and more: 'all hysterics -- like all people -- engage in the whole gamut of sexual fantasies while they are children, become 'fixated' on one or more particular fantasies, 'repress' this or these fantasies, and then the fantasies eventually get 'disguised as 'hysterical symptoms' in the case of a hysterical patient'...That's quite a Copernican switch! There's some truth to this theory, overplayed like usual by Freud -- it could have been easily integrated with his previous Traumacy-Seduction Theory but Freud believed it was an 'either/or' Aristotlean dilemma where he had to choose the one theory or the other: not an integration of both. Also, there is the more cynical theory that Freud changed theories more for 'personal, and professional narcissistic reasons' which we will go into below. I think it was a combination of all these factors that hit Freud like 'The Perfect Storm' coming together between 1895 and 1899 -- and the theoretical result of 'Classical' Psychoanalysis that has been critiqued and criticized every since...Freud certainly made this part of his life and work a 'complicated maze' for any academic, historian, and/or Freudian scholar to follow...The historical theories just keep coming even some 115 years after the fact...
I even have a theory as to why Freud might have been in such a hurry to get his work out when he should have been a little more patient. Back in the 1880s, when Freud really was a scientist and he was 'experimenting' with the possible medical uses of cocaine, and he made the mistake of sharing his idea with a co-worker that the cocaine could be used in eye surgery as an anaesthetic, this co-worker went ahead while Freud left town, finished the experiment Freud had started, and got the medical credit for the use of cocaine in eye surgery. Freud was plenty mad when he got back into town and found out what happened...
In the psychotherapeutic business, Freud was competing with Janet among others in the early 1890s, the two were quite competitive, had slightly different paradigms that are worth comparing and contrasting at some point, and indeed, Freud would develop a whole string of competitors along the way in his professional career (Adler and Jung in particular), and Freud didn't want any of his competitors to 'beat him to the punch' on whatever his latest discovery was.
In this regard, one way of looking at the Seduction Theory Controversy which has been alive inside and outside of Psychoanalysis for over 100 years now, is to say that is a controversy between two dialectically opposite theories -- both of which were over-generalized (probably for dramatic emphasis. Freud liked to be provocative and controversial -- at least until it started costing him money.)
Let's take a couple of minutes and see how The Seduction Theory Controversy evolved.
2. The Traumacy Theory (Freud, 1893-1895)
Freud, in his early days between 1893 and 1896 was a pretty good model-maker....not perfect like any of are....but he was pretty darn good at what he did....And more than that, he showed promise of being a possible 'Champion' to the Women's Movement...before women really even had any kind of a strong voice in Victorian Vienna....
Freud understood 'hysteria' and 'neurosis' in a way that few people did...maybe Breuer and Charcot partly, Janet more so....but Freud was the brilliant new star on the scene who was starting to revolutionize the very new field of Clinical Psychology....Over in Switzerland, you had Bleuler...born a year after Freud (1857 who died the same year as Freud, 1939)...Bleuler also studied under Charcot, like Freud.
Bleuler gave a positive review to Freud's 'Studies on Hysteria' (1895) but the difference between Freud's work and Bleuler's is that Freud mainly dealt with 'neurotic patients and disorders' whereas Bleuler worked in a Psychiatry Institution in Zurich, Switzerland with mainly 'psychotic' patients and eventually coined the term 'schizophrenia'.
Bleuler used a combination of hypnosis, word association tests, (and probably ink-blot projective tests because I think Jung used them) to combine Freud's work with his own....Carl Jung became his star student...
Freud's 'repression theory' was really at bottom line pretty simple although later on he developed some 'complexities' to it to try to best deal with the criticisms of this theory that he met along the way...
Some patients, according to Freud, have a 'genetic predispostion towards what he called 'conversion hysteria' -- the 'ability' to turn psychological symptoms into 'physical body symptoms' without being able to associatively connect the two...Freud led these types of patients and a few other types as well such as 'phobics' and 'anxiety neurotics', 'obsessive compulsives', and even a few 'paranoid patients' into hypnosis...and then later on 'pressure therapy'...and finally 'free association' all designed to get into the patient's 'unconscious', 'unlock the repression in the unconscious'...and reveal the 'associative connection' between 'the activating traumatic event' and 'the hysterical bodily symptom' or 'phobia' or 'anxiety neurosis' or 'obsessive compulsion' or 'paranoia'....Sometimes, Freud would argue, he would have to follow a whole 'chain of memories backwards in time' -- all associatively connected -- until he finally found the memory he was looking for -- attached to a great deal of 'emotional affect' that when 'released' as in 'abreacted' in an 'emotional catharsis'....voila...this created as Anna O., the first construed psychoanalytic patient, once told her therapist Joseph Breuer, co-writer of 'Studies on Hysteria' with Freud in 1895 before they parted ways mainly because of Freud's 'sexual fixation'...this 'emotional abreaction and catharsis' created -- 'the talking cure'...
For many psychotherapists, this simple but effective form of psychotherapy -- or some fascimile of it -- is still very much in use, and in vogue, today...
For example, I spent about 13 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto, Ontario between 1979 and 1991 doing 'hot seat and empty chair work' as a student trainee in which this basic early Breuer and Freudian formula (without the hypnosis or free association) played an essential part of my training... I have argued before that Freud was a Gestalt Therapist before he was a Psychoanalyst just as Perls was a Psychoanalyst before he was a Gestalt Therapist...What goes around comes around...Anaximander was the first philosopher to basically say that with his theory of 'cosmic justice'...
What is dominant today will return to the 'Shadows' tomorrow, and what is in the Shadows today, will regain Dominance tomorrow....Derrida also made a nice philosophy out of that idea...We 'deconstruct' the dominant in order that the suppressed should rightfully regain its place of 'democratic balance'...
So why did Freud have to go and change a formula that worked?
3. The Seduction Theory (1896)
Freud, like Charcot before him, and even Breuer to a lesser, more careful extent, started to 'generalize' about something that he was seeing in the clinical setting more often than not: 'repressed sexual traumacies' (often 'seductions' or 'more blatant physical 'assaults'); or in some cases, the patient's own 'sexual impulses' -- also, repressed. At first, the latter were largely ignored, particularly in 'hysterics' as Freud concentrated on the 'childhood sexual assault and/or seduction' side of the hysterical puzzle....This culminated in a beautifully written essay in 1896 called 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' where Freud tried to -- as delicately as possible approach the subject of 'family incest' and 'childhood sexual assault' with the father as the most likely 'sexual victimizer'....
However, Freud was getting these types of cases so frequently -- and about this time the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco, written up below, threw a huge 'therapeutic haymaker' at him...and then on April 21st, 1896, Freud read his brand new 'Seduction Theory Paper' to a group of psychiatrists and neurologists who he thought would be pleased with his work....they weren't...in fact, according to Freud in a letter to Fliess on May 4th, 1896, The Psychiatry and Neurology Society had, in effect, 'blackballed' him for a paper that Krafft-Ebing called a 'scientific fairy tale', and Freud's clinical room was virtually empty as doctors had stopped referring patients to him...For whatever the reason -- economic, professional, political, personal guilt...-- or totally legitimate in the way that Freud wrote it up to Fliess and eventually the whole psychoanalytic community -- Freud's brand new 'Seduction Theory' disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, like seemingly almost overnight...
Freud argued that he was getting so many hysterical patients with women accusing their fathers of being 'child abusers' that Freud just couldn't get himself to believe that practically the whole city of Vienna was full of fathers guilty of such offensive behavior...Now the easy counter-argument to that line of thinking on Freud's part is that Freud was dealing with a very 'extreme end of the population of Vienna' -- even for that matter, the 'psychological patient' population...So maybe Freud shouldn't have been as surprised as he wrote to Fliess he was....
Also, apparently, by this point in time in about the summer of 1896, Freud had almost completed his book of 'dreams' -- 'The Interpretation of Dreams' -- that wouldn't be officially published until January, 1900.
'The Interpretation of Dreams' was bringing a whole new style of thinking into Freud's repertoire -- 'fantasy thinking' and 'symbolic thinking' and talking about 'longing' -- which was being 'juxtaposed' against Freud's 'reality thinking' about 'real memories that were alleged to have happened'...And somehow Freud got entangled between the two entirely different modes of thinking -- 'primary (pleasure-principle, fantasy-oriented, dream-oriented) thinking' vs. 'secondary (reality-principle) thinking...where Freud made a conscious or subconscious choice to quit following the 'reality principle' or 'secondary thinking' and instead started to follow 'the pleasure principle' or 'primary thinking...Suddenly, 'childhood sexuality' was born, and 'the oral' and 'anal' and 'phallic' and 'genital' stages of sexual development....and 'The Oedipal Complex'...and 'the polymorphous (multi-sexually) perverted child'...With this there was no more talk about 'perverted fathers' because now he was writing about 'perverted children'...as a 'natural evolution of sexual development'....
Freud had left the unique sexual traumacies of the evolving child, teenager, and finally adult...and instead now was writing about 'species-wide psycho-sexual stages of development' (where he didn't have to face angry professionals about the 'causal factor' of fathers sexually abusing their young ...and older...children...
For whatever reason -- legitmate or 'narcissisticly convenient' -- Freud had left the old 'traumacy and seduction theory a thousand miles behind'...and was now forest deep in the land of 'fantasy and instinctual theory'....
4. The Abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theory....and Freud's Evolution (or 'De-Evolution') into Fantasy-Instinct Theory
In a very strong bipolar, dialectic sense, Pre-Psychoanalysis (before let us say April 26th or May 4th, 1896) and Classical Psychoanalysis (after April 26th or May 4th, 1896) are like opposite brothers or sisters that hate each other because they are so opposite....And yet they came from the same father and mother, and were raised by the same father and mother...The two siblings can clearly see their respective differences but they have a 'blindspot' relative to 'their interconnected family background'.
So father -- as in father Sigmund Freud -- needed to 'reconcile' these 'opposite siblings' in such a manner that they could get along with each other -- even 'complement' each other -- as opposed to wanting to take each other apart, limb by limb....(also comparable to a 'good husband and wife team gone bad' where 'opposites once attracted' and now they 'repel'...or like Kurt Eissler and Jeffrey Masson where Eissler was attracted to Masson because of his 'honesty' and 'idealism' and then later was shockingly repelled by Masson's 'honesty' and 'idealism'...because it involved 'discrediting' Freud....for Freud's 'alleged lack of honesty and integrity'...)
So Pre-Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis continue to have this rather 'dissociated' relationship with each other like 'ego' and 'alter-ego', where Pre-Psychoanalysis is treated like 'Cinderella' and 'locked inside a room' or to give the opposite type of imagery -- like 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Quasimodo)' who 'slinked around the shadows' of Paris, laughed at and ridiculed by the people of Paris who could only see his 'ugly deformity'....all that is, except for the beautiful Esmerelda...who was the only one who showed any compassion and caring for Quasimodo...giving him water after he had been whipped and tied down in the heat...
The irony -- the great irony -- of all of this is that Freud and Psychoanalysis -- the 'champions of unlocking represssions' could not, and/or would not, unlock 'the greatest repression' of Freud's own making...
Thus, 'Cindarella' and 'Quasimodo' -- the Psychoanalytic equivalents of 'The Traumacy Theory' and 'The Seduction Theory' -- have remained either locked away in their 'bedroom' and/or 'the Shadows of Paris' -- and there they have remained since the spring of 1896, which if my arithmetic is right, amounts to 115 years of 'dissociation, suppression and/or repression'. In effect, 'Pre-Psychoanalysis' is 'The It' of Classical Psychoanalysis.
And all of 'King Freud's henchmen', no matter how much they tried (because they weren't trying) couldn't put 'Humpty Dumpty' -- Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis -- back together again...
Pre-Classical Psychoanalysis remains 'The Dissociated Shadow' of Classical Psychoanalysis...
..............................................................................
Friends, Romans, Countrymen,
I come here to honour Sigmund Freud,
Not to roast or vilify him,
Because Sigmund Freud was an honourable man...
At least until he became...
A little overzealous in what drug he prescribed...
And/or what surgery he recommended to a patient...
And/or what clinical observations rose to the surface of his mind...
Or became blocked out in the bottom of his mind...
Depending on his 'most narcissistically useful theory of the moment'...
With Freud, you got the feeling that his 'clinical facts' were being 'discriminately chosen' to fit his present theory; not the other way around.
That's not a good way to be either a scientist or a theorist...
You don't like to hear a theorist using the words 'always' or 'never' when he or she is working on 'partial clinical evidence'.
With Freud, it seemed like he was reaching back into his clinical cases and choosing the particular examples and samples that he wanted to use to support his newest theory.
Today the word 'disorder' is used to replace the word 'neurosis'....
But I still like the word 'neurosis' -- it reminds me both of Freud and Woody Allen...'Neurosis' slides off the tongue a little easier...and besides you can do some 'play on words' with 'neurotic' and 'erotic'...
You can even have a 'neurotic disorder'....or an 'erotic, neurotic disorder'...
Here's a few different types of neuroses that we all can have:
A/ An 'IT' Neurosis 1 and 2:
'IT Neurosis 1': An 'Important Traumacy' Neurosis;
'IT Neurosis 2': Anything inside us that can be referred to as 'IT' -- meaning anything that we suppress, repress, deny, evade, disassociate, disavow, project, reject, sublimate, cremate...and it 'returns from the dead'...
B/ An 'ID' Neurosis as in an 'Impulsive Desire or Drive' Neurosis'
C/ A 'Narcissistic' Neurosis....A person fixated on 'me, myself, and I'...
D/ An 'Oral-Receptive, Approval-Seeking', 'Pleasing' and/or 'Submissive/Masochistic' Neurosis -- pretty straightforward;
E/ 'An Anally Retentive/Righteous/Rebellious/Rejecting/Sadistic/Abandoning/Schizoid' Neurosis'....More on these neurotic derrivatives of the same basic mentality at a later date;
F/ 'An Anally Obsessive-Compulsive ('Counting', 'Locking', 'Repeating'...)vs. an Orally Obsessive-Compulsive (Addictive) Personality (Drugs, Alcohol, Food, Gambling, Sex, Seduction...)
G/ 'Borderline Personality'...On the border between being very 'anally uptight' and 'losing it completely' as in 'going over the edge into a nervous or psychotic breakdown...
H/ Depressive Personality....'A hanging on bite to sadness'...Needs to feel the full grief, close the grief...and move on...
I/ Anxiety Neurosis....'Nervous Nellie'...
J/ Phobias...A severe fear of one particular thing...'claustrophobia' (closed spaces), 'agoraphobia' (open spaces), 'acrophobia' (heights), insects, snakes, etc...
K/ Paranoia.....Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that you are not still trying to get me and somehow do me in...
L/ Psychosis/Schizophrenia....I talk in a different type of symbolic language (dream language) than you usually do during the day...
M/ Bipolar Disorder/Neurosis....There are probably about a hundred different types but the most common is what used to be called 'Manic-Depression' (as in the Jimmy Hendrix song)...I guess the name wasn't 'politically correct' or something but it did a better job of describing the particular back and forth nature of the disorder between 'mania' and 'depression'....I go crazy...and then I crash...and start thinking about all the money I spent while I was manic...and what ever else I did while I was in this stage that could come back to haunt me...
N/ Transference Neurosis...All of us have a bunch of them...We marry a partial surrogate of our mother and/or father...or the opposite...Freud had a 'sibling rivalry' issue and a 'rejecting father' issue...Our earliest conscious memories give the prototypes and templates for later 'transference complexes and neurotic games'...Transference neuroses provide the essential link between our 'traumacy neuroses' and our 'impulsive, obsessive-compulsive neuroses'...In Adlerian language, the first can be linked to 'inferiority or insecurity feelings' and 'particular phobias' while the second can be linked to the 'compensation' or 'overcompensation' or 'specific type of superiority striving' aimed at 'overcoming the traumatic childood transference neurosis...More on this stuff at a later date...
O/ 'Hysteria' the diagnostic category has mainly died out, is not used anymore, but was used back in Freud's time and we will use this term in this context...A 'conversion hysteria' is where a neurotic (psychological) symptom is converted to some type of 'bodily symptom' like a 'paralized leg with no organic or physical reason for the paralysis)...Breuer, Charcot, Janet, Bernheim, Freud...all learned how to use hypnosis and 'the hunt for repressed traumatic memories' to 'release the emotional trauma connected to the memory (abreaction, catharsis) and ideally 'cure' the symptom...although a full-blown hysteric like Anna O. might have a hundred such symtoms...Me thinks that she was finding a 'secondary gain' by creating hysterical symptoms...she loved the attention of the good Doctor Breuer...and loved to keep him busy...in the same way that her father kept her busy....I call this 'transference-reversal'....
...........................................................................................
Well, sometimes otherwise honourable men....
Can still do bad things...
In the course of a lifetime...
It is unreasonable to expect everyone...
To be 'perfectly ethical', 'perfectly moral'....
I know that I am not trying to preach...
From any pedestal of 'ethical or moral superiority'...
There have been at least a handful of ethical actions...
Or non-actions...
That I wish I could go back in time...
And play over again to a different outcome...
For example, my now adult son doesn't like to read...
And I attribute this to the 'hindsight observation and interpretation'...
That when he was very young -- 4 to 7 years old (crucial development years in a child's life)...
And he wanted my attention...
Too often he wouldn't get it...
Because I was too absorbed in whatever I was reading...
To lift my head and pay attention to him...
Nor did I read to him...
My parents tried afterwards...
But by then, it was mainly too late...
His value mind-set had largely been determined for life...
Although, he is always free to choose differently...
If or whenever he wants to...
I'm not holding my breath...
I say this for two reasons....
One reason, as I have already mentioned,
Is that I am not trying to claim any moral superiority...
But just get to the facts of Psychoanalytic history...
Or at least as close to them as I can get....
Some 115 years after the fact...
I mean if I was sitting here theorizing....
Down a certain path, a certain line of thinking...
For some 5 years (which I have been since 2006),
And you, as a reader, had come to expect...
A certain consistency and stability in what I wrote...
In the content of what I wrote...
And then all of a sudden one day,
My whole line of thought, my whole underpinning thesis,
Changed 180 degrees overnight...
A Copernican shift...
Or like what Marx did to Hegel
Only it was me changing my own work that radically...
If you had been following me for those whole five years...
Wouldn't you be rather stunned at the sudden change in direction...
And want to know what happened...
And perhaps be suspicious of stated reasons...
That looked more like self-justifications and rationalizations...
Than real reasons...
I mean Freud was a very smart man...
And to turn seemingly in a matter of days...
From a thesis that stated that...
'All hysterics suffered from childhood sexual abuse'...
To one that stated that...
'No hysterics suffered from childhood sexual abuse'...
How, as a theorist, can you justify such a radical change...
In theory...
And still maintain your credibility....
I mean, April 21st, 1896, Freud still believed in The Seduction Theory..
And by his April 26th, and May 4th letters to Freud...
You could see that Freud's thinking was starting...
To undergo a radical metamorphosis...
Like in The novella by Kafka called 'The Metamorphosis'...
Freud went to bed on April 21st, 1896 -- as a man...
And woke up on the morning of April 22nd, 1896...
Starting to look and feel and write like a 'giant insect'...
On April 26th, and especially May 4th,
Freud was writing to Fliess as 'a giant insect'...
A metaphorical exaggeration perhaps...but you get my point...
On the evening of April 21st, Freud was talking to...
The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society...
Like a man...
And in the letters of April 26th and May 4th to Fliess...
Freud was writing like a giant insect....or a mouse...
Calling Emma Ekstein a 'hysterical bleeder'...
Who 'longed' to bleed for her two therapeutic heroes...
Not a victim of Fliess' and Freud's hare-brained...
Radical 'nasal-sexual' surgery...
That almost killed her...
Kurt Eissler could say what he wanted
About Freud's 'childhood sexuality' theory...
Being even more unpopular than his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory...
But there may have been some fathers in that Vienna Meeting...
Who stopped squirming like worms on a hook...
When Freud opted for his 'childhood sexuality theory'...
Rather than his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory...
And his client referrals and income started coming back in again...
While at the same time Freud's newfound 'longing' or 'fantasy' theory...
Stopped Fliess and Freud from 'squirming like worms on a hook'...
As well....'Two...two mints in one...'
There is not a person here...
That can't be influenced at least to some extent...
By money, politics, the law, our profession...
If 'the screws are tightened enough on us'...
If someone applies enough leverage on us...
If I write an essay here...it takes me almost a week to write it...
And when I have finished writing it...
I look the next morning and see that my article...
Has -- before it even had time to be properly viewed...
In front of the reading public --
Disappeared in the Archives of 'Google Heaven'...
I would likely say to myself, 'Oh, I guess someone didn't...
Like my article...
But then if I spend a hour or so...
Revising the essay...changing its flavour,
Changing its content...
Making it less controversial, more diplomatic...
Less sarcastic and cynical, less 'anti-Freudian'...
More 'palatable' for advertisers, and the general reading public...
I do all of this...and the next time I check for my article...
I find that it is on the 'top of the charts'...on top of the page...
Of some 38 million links...
You don't think that that is going to influence...
At least partly how and what I write?
Let's move on and talk about some Freudian theory...
We need first -- as Freud has done -- to distinguish between...
'Bound' and 'unbound' id energy...
Between 'the id' (as in unbound id energy)
And 'the id reservoir, box, or vault' which is 'restrained and contained'...
Or 'bound'...
Id energy...energy that is prevented from reaching consciousness...
Or if in consciousness...prevented from becoming action...
The Freudian distinction here is usually between...
'Repression' in the unconcious...
And 'suppression' in the concious personality...
Furthermore, to go one step further than Freud...
We need to distinguish between...
'The ID (as in 'Impulsive Drive') Vault'
And 'The IT (as in 'Important Traumacy') Vault...
Which I have previously called a part of 'The SID Vault'...
As in 'Shadow-Id Vault'...
Jung's concept of 'The Shadow' is actually superior...
To Freud's concept of 'The Id' in terms of its general,
Overall theoretical and therapeutic flexibility and useablity...
I will keep Freud's concept of The Id...
But juxtaposed against my concept (or Groddeck's concept)...
Of 'The It' (mine is a little different)...
Or I will continue to use my concept of 'The SID Vault'...
And there you have one part of the bridge...
Between 'Pre-Classical' and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...
I could sit here and vilify Freud...
For giving out cocaine like it was candy...
In the 1880s,
To his friends, his fiancee, his patients...
And to himself of course...
Even after the bad news about what cocaine could do to a person...
Started filtering in...and other doctors had stopped using it...
Freud pressed on with it...
Until one of his patients and good friends,
Died in 1991....
At least partly because of Freud's cocaine prescriptions...
This is usually the year that most Freudian scholars -- at least publicly --
Say that Freud stopped using cocaine...
While Freud's most private letters to Fliess...
Tell us that Freud used cocaine right up to at least 1897...
And possibly years after that...
Perhaps til Freud and Fliess separated in 1904 even..
A shocking difference between official, orthodox, public...
And unofficial private, autobiographical...
Testimony....
The private, autobiographical testimony...
Taking us right into the heart of...
Freud's abandonment of the traumacy-seduction theory...
And the creation of Freud's new 'Fantasy Theory'...
This being the case...
The question has to be asked...
What kind of 'fantasy' was Freud on...
When he wrote these 'turning-point' in the history of Psychoanalysis...
'Fantasy' papers...
'The Interpretation of Dreams', 'Screen Memories',
Even Freud's 'Three Essays on Sexuality'....and 'The Case of Dora'...
At least two of them (Dreams and Sexuality) which are considered 'classic' -- Classical Psychoanalytic -- works...
And I myself have found significant value in these two Freudian works...
To be sure, I am not writing off Freud's Fantasy Theory...
Just 'realigning it' as one 'bipolar half' of my 'bipolar theory'...
Of 'Reality-Fantasy' or 'Traumacy-Fantasy' Theory...
Working both polarities of Freudian Psychoanalysis --
Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis...
Towards the middle....towards creative integration...
So rather than questioning...or vilifying...Freud's motivation...
Which no one will ever know fully...or with certainty...
Or asking the question...
Should we treat Freud like Pete Rose or Barry Bonds...
And pull him out of 'The Psychologists' Hall of Fame'...
Instead putting him in 'The Psychologists' Hall of Shame'...
Freud was still the greatest psychologist who ever lived...
And I simply wish to extend his greatness that much further...
Through all 50 years of his theoretical writing...
Regardless of The Skeletons that Freud carried...
In his 'Personality Closet'...
His 'ID and IT Box'...
I would prefer to work with both his 'Dominant Theory' (Fantasy Theory)...
And his 'Suppressed-Shadow Theory' (Reality-Traumacy-Seduction Theory)..
And find a way in which they can 'sing and dance' together...
Create harmony together...
Like the brass instruments and wind instruments...
In the hands of a good conducter...
Make beautiful harmony together...
If you have a 'left-handed theory',
This theory is obviously not going to properly explain...
'Right-handed reality'...
Nor will a 'right-handed theory'...
Properly explain 'left-handed reality'...
If you have a woman who walks into Psychoanalytic Therapy...
And wants to talk about a past or present 'traumacy'...
What good is a 'fantasy theory' -- at least in and by itself --
To properly understand and/or explain 'traumatic experiences'...
In a person's life...
And if a woman walks into therapy...and eventually tells you...
She was sexually assaulted or molested or seduced as a child...
As an analyst, are you going to sit there and say or believe
That she is 'lying' to your face...
And/or can't tell the difference between...
'Fact' and 'ficticious fantasy'...
Or wants to 'hide' her 'private fantasy'...
Behind a 'traumatic memory'?
That is extremely disrespectful...
And not something that male or female psychoanalysts...
Do to men...
The inequality of the classical psychoanalytic...
Treatment of the sexes...
Jumps out at me...
Like the fantasy vision of Freud...
Attending a women's Victorian 'Suffragete' Meeting..
(Which leading up to April 21st, 1896...
I could have actually seen Freud doing...
Indeed, at the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology...
On April 21st, 1896....
Freud actually was a one man crusader...
Protesting against his female clients' childhood 'suffrage'...)
It would be the one and only time..
He seemed to get the message loud and clear...
From all the professional men in his audience that night...
That 'sexual assault against women -- particularly childhood women'...
Was not a popular 'scientific' topic...
And Freud certainly didn't go back to it much...
If at all...
After that fateful evening...
While at the exact same time...or at least within a week after this meeting...
On April 21st, 1896...
Freud wrote letters to Fliess on April 26th, and May 4th, 1896...
Seemingly (my interpretation along with Masson's)...
Still...riddled with internal guilt over the botched Emma Ekstein...
Nasal Surgery by Fliess a whole year earlier...
But unlike the horror that Freud felt during...
And following an emergency checkup...
After Fliess had gone back to Berlin...
And another doctor pulled about a 'yard' of gauze...
Out from poor Emma's bad infected nasal passages...
Now a year later, Freud was in the process of seemingly...
Denying that neither Fliess nor himself were responsible...
For the hemmorage that almost led to her bleeding to death...
Because now Freud was suggesting that Emma...
Was an 'hysterical bleeder'..who 'bled out of longing'...
To see in loving fashion...
Her two 'Keystone Therapists'....
Who had butchered her...
And almost ended her 'hysteria' once and for all...
It was on these two days -- April 26th and May 4th --
That Freud's 'Fantasy Theory'...was in the process...
Of being born...
Because how much further a jump was it...
To argue that a woman who had been sexually assaulted as a child...
Had 'fabricated' and 'ficticiously fantasized'...
The whole childhood sexual assault and/or seduction...
Memory...
The supposed 'memory' now became a 'fantasy'...
Shared by all women as children...
And 'unconsciously distorted from fantasy to alleged memory'...
Did Freud actually get one case...
Of a woman who actually fabricated a memory...
And then he generalized from this one case to the whole female sex?
Or did he generalize from the Emma Ekstein 'hysterical bleeder' case...
The woman who bled because 'she longed for him'...'pined for him'?
Which just happened to get him off the 'medical hook' for that creative explanation....
Just like Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory...
Got all the professional men of Vienna off the hook...
For any possible 'family transgressions and secrets'...
Most notably perhaps...even Fliess himself...
Whose son became a psychoanalyst...and wrote...
In words quoted from Masson in 'In The Freud Archives' (I have to be careful as Janet Malcolm seemed to have a propensity for stretching Masson's quotes into her own 'fictional creations'...)
Said Fliess' son, 'People are made sick by real traumacies; not by fantasies.'...which seems to have been the quote that propelled Masson right into the middle of The Seduction Theory Controversy
(See Masson, The Assault on Truth:
Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory)...
I may not totally agree with him...
'Fantasies' can motivate a person to do a lot of 'sick things'...
But it is usually on the heels of some sort of childhood traumacy...
That got him eventually to the 'compensatory' fantasy...
Every theory needs to carry this 'caveat emptor'...
'Things can always be different'...
Every theory carries the seeds to its own self-destruction...
Every theory carries 'the death instinct' inside it...
'The death instinct' comes alive when the theory...
Can't keep up with life's every movement, evolution...
Endless mutations...
And permutations...
When a therapist is involved...
In bringing the death instinct alive in a theory...
By using it when it is not relevant...
Then the therapist is a part of the problem...
Not the solution...
When the best judges in the land
Can't always get the 'historical truth' right...
What makes you think that a therapist or a theorist...
Can do the job better?
What makes us think that we are the 'King or Queen of Truth'?
A theory? A left or right-handed theory?
That has 'boxed our mindset in'?
And closed our mind off...
From other outside and/or bi-polar...
Possibilities of Finding Truth...
Elsewhere...
And/or in the 'convergement' of two opposite theories...
Coming together in the same space and time...
Having access to lots of other possible theoretical paradigms...
And/or at least a good 'bipolar, dialectic one'....
May be a better way to go...
To save traumacy theory for traumacies...
And fantasy theory for theories...
And catching some human behavior...
In the crossfire of both...
Such as...
The fantasy being the reverse of the traumacy...
As a 'compensatory defense mechanism'...
Like the superiorty or security striving...
Being the reverse of the inferiority or insecurity feeling...
Phobia and counter-phobia riding together on the same saddle...
The counter-phobia being the intended self-therapy for the phobia..
Little Siggy Freud is chased out of his parents' bedroom
By his dad -- his main childhood 'transference rejector'...
For what little Siggy had just shockingly witnessed...
His parents doing...or his dad doing to his mom...
Completely non-understandable for a 3 year old tyke...
Theories already abounding in his little tyke mind...
Was daddy peeing on mommy?
That's certainly what it looked like....
Perched over top of her like that...
For 80 more years the Freudian theories would keep coming...
For better and/or for worse...
As little Siggy ended up spending...
Almost his whole adult life...
Symbolically or metaphorically...
'Staring in his patients' bedroom doors'...
His female patients lying on his 'professional couch'...
Like his mother lay across 'the primal bed'...
This is where Freud really got 'The Oedipal Complex Theory' from...
Either directly or indirectly....consciously or subconsciously...
The Oedipal Complex actually has significant value here...
Not as a 'cover-up' for childhood sexual assaults...
Amazingly...coincidently of course...
All of these problems that Freud was having...
In the spring of 1896...
Nobody wanting to hear about childhood sexual assault...
The real messy Emma Ekstein case...
Freud's absence of patients...
And income....
Seemed to all magically 'blow away'...
Like 'in the wind'...
When Freud stopped writing about childhood sexual assaults..
And their connection to hysteria...
And obviously,
Freud started getting patients referred to him again...
The Emma Ekstein case...
As messy as it was...
Finally started to 'blow away into history'...
Only to be unlocked again...
With the release of ALL of Freud's most private letters...
To Wilhelm Fliess...
Indeed, Freud's character and integrity...
And honesty and credibility...
Only started to be questioned with the release
Of his full private letters...
If Anna Freud had known that she was about to...
Open Pandora's Box...
She would have obviously never released Freud's letters...
To Masson...or to anyone else...
I finally found a quote that I have been looking for for some time now...
It is a private letter written to Jeffrey Masson when he had started his 'anti-Freudian campaign' after having gone through all of Freud's most private letters...I found this in 'In The Freud Archives, by Janet Malcolm (who Masson later sued for 'misquoting' him...)...
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Of course, I have not read the lecture you gave in New Haven, but to me it seems out of the question that there is valid proof for the abandonment of the seduction theory for reasons of external rejection, nor can there be any valid sign that in spite of this abandonment it was kept up secretly. In fact, there is abundent proof to the contrary, not only in all of the later case histories, but in the whole of the analytic theory altogether. Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of fantasy life, conscious or unconscious fantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards (italics added by Janet Malcolm, author of In The Freud Archives, pg.62-63)....
I know the Fliess letters so well, but I just cannot imagine what in them led you to this conclusion to which you have come.
I look forward to hearing more from you.
Yours sincerely,
Anna Freud
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With all due respect Ms. Anna Freud....and it is obviousy almost 20 years too late now for you to find any type of decent closure on this matter...but try reading the letters of April 26th and May 4th, 1896...again...and tell me that you don't see what Masson, myself, and a host of other readers and historians have seen -- that these were not Freud's finest Winston Churchill-like hours...
And Eissler wrote to Masson as well when Masson had just stirred up this major hornet's nest by what he was quoted as saying to The New York Times....
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'You propose here -- without documentation -- the existence of a trait in Freud's character which implies a grave accusation against his reliability, honesty, and solidity. Not even his worst enemies have ever claimed that he evolved theories in order to make his person acceptable to the academic community. If you want to escape criticism, you have to present solid and convincing documentation.'
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Well, duh! Come on Dr. Eissler, you are a much smarter man than that even if you were fiercely and blindly loyal to the old man...The critical documents were locked up in a tomb for over 40 years so how could any other Freudian and/or anti-Freudian historian and/or scholar and/or student comment on Freud's character in the way that Masson did -- without seeing these infamous letters? -- dgb
I used to think that Freud was reliable, honest, and solid too....until I read the Freud to Fliess letters.....particularly as pertained to the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco... Once all the letters were out in the open for the whole world to see....these three letters in particular did not shine a good light on Freud's character....Things had changed. Freud had moved into a 'self-preservation panic and defense mode'.....and come out of it using the classic Freudian defense mechanism of 'denial' -- and 'cover-up'.
Max Schur could see this. Masson could see this. Swailes probably saw this. I saw this. Even Janet Malcolm -- protector of the Freudian status-quo -- could see this. Why do you think Sigmund Freud wanted the Fliess letters destroyed -- and would have destroyed them in a minute had he gotten hold of them?
If there was cocaine involved in the Freud-Fliess-Ekstein medical disaster, then that would make the whole Emma Ekstein fiasco ten times worse because Freud had already seen one of his friends/patients die while he was prescribing him cocaine back in 1891.
In Canada here, one of our best politicians, Jack Layton, just died...and one journalist wrote about Layton (using hockey terminology) that Layton always 'played the puck, not the man'. While that characteristic is admirable, there comes a point when we all have to be accountable for our own behavior -- particularly for appalling behavior. And Sigmund Freud really messed up between the Emma Ekstein operation in February, 1895, and the time of these three letters in April and May, 1896.
For Freud to write to Fliess on April 26th, 1896,
....First of all, Ekstein. I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing, and probably occurred at the sexually relevant times (the woman, out of resistance, has not yet supplied me with the dates)....(The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, pg. 183, Translated and Edited by Jeffrey Masson)....
when Fliess and Freud almost killed the poor woman through a medical surgery that they had no business conducting, is simply apalling therapeutic and ethical medical behavior.
He and Fliess simply blew it, big time....
I am sure that Freud was appalled at himself....and perhaps even Fliess although he was so 'love-smitten' by Fliess that he was trying to cover Fliess' hind end even before his own. It turns out that Emma Ekstein was not only the 'sacrifical lamb' during the operation (although to be fair, Freud had the same operation done by Fliess on his own nasal passages during the same visit...he too probably had to have some of the 'cocaine boulders' taken out of his own nose so that he could breathe better, and let all the pus drain out from behind the boulders...sorry, but I can't help but be a little sarcastic...)
There simply are no more rocks for Sigmund Freud to hide behind....not Kurt Eissler, not his daughter Anna Freud, not Janet Malcolm.....
In the immortal words of Bob Dylan...
Yes, how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
-- Blowing in The Wind, Bob Dylan
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And...
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked...'
-- It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, Bob Dylan
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And...
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll -- By Bob Dylan
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Friends, Romans, Countrymen...
I come here to honour Freud,
Not to vilify him,
Because Freud was an honourable man...
Can we even say that Freud was generally a 'good' man...
Who got caught doing a couple, or perhaps even more than a couple, of very 'bad deeds'... His legacy would certainly seem to me to be compromised... To me, he kind of emerges as more of a 'Bobby Bonds' character type now....a little more...or more than a little more...
'Anally toxic'...
However,
I will leave it for each of you to decide for yourselves...
And I still have the greatest of respect for his overall work...
And creative brilliance...
I don't want to go back to Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory...
I just want to properly integrate 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis with the rest of Classical Psychoanalysis...
Let me just quickly begin to show you how...and then we will call it a day for this essay...
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In the early 1900s, a host of different scientists started developing 'the paradigm of quantum mechanics or quantum physics.
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Development of the field was done by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and many others. Ironically, Albert Einstein had serious theoretical issues with quantum mechanics and tried for many years to disprove or modify it. See...About.com Physics
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Little did anyone properly appreciate -- least of all Freud -- that the scientists listed above working on the development of Quantum Physics were using a 'Hegelian Paradigm' of 'thesis-counter-thesis-synthesis'.
1. Thesis: Particle Theory; 2. Wave Theory; 3. Synthesis: Wave-Particle Duality Theory
Freud could have easily applied the same type of Heglian and Quantum Dialectic Logic to 'The Traumacy-Fantasy Schism' that he had created in Classical Psychoanalysis. But unfortunately -- he didn't.
1. Thesis: Traumacy-Seduction Theory; 2. Counter-Thesis: 'Fantasy-Impulse Theory'; 3. Synthesis: 'Traumacy-Fantasy Duality Theory' -- or 'Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
So here is another name for what I am doing here: 'DGB Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalytic Theory'.
The key DGB Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalytic formula here runs as follows:
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'The adult transference fantasy-impulse is generally the inverse or the reverse of the childhood transference traumacy memory and/or relationship. Sometimes the prototype of the adult transference fantasy-impulse can be found right there in one of the person's earliest childhood memories; othertimes, it has to be surmised and interpreted from later events, symptoms, fantasy-impulse-drives, sublimations, projections, and/or repetition compulsions.' -- dgb., September 11, 2011.
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In the 1980s, I called this 'universal transference phenomenon' (Brian Bird) -- 'transference reversal'. As will be developed later, every 'transference reversal complex' can be seen to have at least two components to it: a) a 'positive transference reversal fantasy-impulse complex'; and b) a 'negative transference reversal fantasy-impulse complex'.
Aldo Carotenuto, author of 'Kant's Dove: The History of Transference in Psychoanalysis' (1986, 1991), noting the possible underpinnings of Adlerian Theory in the transference phenomenon, called it 'The Handicap Challenge'.
We all have self-perceived 'handicaps' in our character makeup that we strive to overcome with 'increased or supervalent cerebral activity'. (Adler, Freud -- working in harmony with each other, November 7th, 1906, 'The Minutes of The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society', Chapter 5, pgs. 36-47.)
Happier times...November 7th, 1906...Freud and Adler on the same page together...Ah, if it could have only stayed that way...
Maybe, through my integrative post-Hegelian spirit and work...
I can at least partly bring them back in harmony together...
At least that is my 'fantasy meets reality' intent...
-- dgb, Sept 14th, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
A/ Introduction
Good day!
In the next two or three essays to come, I would like to do what no other psychoanalytic theorist has done before me -- unite Freud's pre-1897 'Traumacy Theory' with his post-1896 'Fantasy Theory'....And that is just the tip of the iceberg...
I am of the opinion that if a theorist and/or therapist gets 'too stuck' in one theory -- particularly an 'either/or' theory -- then he or she is going to suffer from the limitations of where the theory ends -- and life continues on. Theories have 'neuroses' -- or 'blindspots' and 'deadends' and 'black holes' -- as well as people; in fact, neuroses in theories can cause neuroses in people to the extent that we try to steer our way through life with a 'theory' that takes us down one of these deadends or drops us in one of these black holes.
Some theorists create 'left-handed' theories of life that may do pretty well at describing a 'left-handed perspective on life'; other theorists -- the 'counter-theorists' -- creat 'right-handed theories of life' which may do pretty well at describing a 'right-handed perspective on life'. The problem comes when a left-handed theory of life tries to explain what is happening on the right-handed side of life -- and visa versa. This is when your 'one-sided' theory of life may end up taking you down that life dead-end -- or dropping you down into that big black hole.
In this regard, every one-sided theory can be said to have a 'death instinct' which is the point at which it takes us down a dead-end and/or drops us into a big black hole. In the words of Hegel, 'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction'. And the extent to which we follow a theory into its area of self-destruction, we too can self-destruct.
Another quote from Hegel...
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Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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The best ways to overcome a theory's blindspots is to either create a 'bi-polar theory' that can more functionally deal with the inherent bi-polarities in life's processes better than one-sided theories...or better still, in a theory of the mind which is what we are most interested in here, and which is about as complicated and multi-faceted as life itself -- a 'multi-bi-polar model of the human mind'... A third possibility is to read all the different theories of the mind that you can read, and then let your creative forces drive you to a place of 'multi-integration' through a process of associating and differentiating, mixing and matching, assimilating, and making sure that everything comes together in a wholistic manner that makes logical, coherent sense.
I have aimed to do apply all three of these strategies listed above.
Life, evolution, and man's brain all function according to the basic principle of Hegel's 'Dialectic Cycle and Bi-Polar Integration Model' -- not that he was the first, or only one to use this model; we can trace bipolar models back to both ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophy (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse) as well as to Hegel's more immediate Gernman predecessors in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling.
We have a bi-polar model that was developed in the early 1900s in physics -- the 'particle-wave' theory -- that explained empirical observations of energy and matter better than either of the two theories could separately, and this became known as 'Quantum Physics'...
If you read history, philosophy, law, economics, psychology, medicine, religion, study cultures....
Two life cycles arguably stand out above all others...
1. The cyclical model of : 'union', 'separation', 'union', 'separation'...
2. And the Hegelian cyclical model of: 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', 'synthesis'....and start all over again at a better or worse stage of evolution...
Let us see where these two models take us in relation to Freud and his hugely perplexing, provocative, and still hugely controversial -- 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory Abandonment Controversy'.
B/ The Traumacy-Seduction Theory Abandonment Controversy...
To be further revised...
Freud remains one of the most enigmatic, provocative, controversial and creative theorists in the history of Western Philosophy-Psychology...
I have probably spent thousands of hours studying and/or writing about Freud and his usually provocative, controversial ideas....and the only philosopher who I have put close to this much amount of time into -- is Hegel, mainly in my writing as opposed to my reading....because his one simple formula has literally endless potential theoretical and therapeutic applications.
So here is another enigma, another paradox relative to studying Freud....
Freud operated from two different philosophical paradigms at the same and/or different times: Aristotle's 'either/or' paradigm' (eg. 'traumacy-seduction' theory vs. 'fantasy-impulse' theory); and 'Hegel's 'dialectic' or 'triadic' paradigm: 1. thesis; 2. anti-or counter-thesis; and 3. synthesis or integration (eg. 'id-superego-ego').
In the case of the first example -- which is now called The Seduction Theory Controversy -- Freud spent about the first 8 years of his psychological career developing The Traumacy Theory (1893-1895) which -- oversimplistically stated -- says that 'psycho-neurotic disorders and/or their connected symptoms' such as what used to be called 'hysteria', and also disorders like 'obsessional neurosis' which today is called 'Obsessional-Compulsive Disorder or 'OCD' are generally, and/or at least partly caused(Freud often didn't 'qualify' his provocative assertions which remains a big part of the present day problem) by 'the repression' of traumatic childhood memories, particularly of a sexual nature, which is the point at which The Traumacy Theory evolved into The Seduction/(Sexual Assault) Theory (1896) -- which again oversimplistically stated -- says that 'hysterical symptoms' can usually (Freud again was prone to making his already provocative theory even more provocative by exchanging such qualifers as 'often' or 'usually' with the more emphatic, dramatic non-qualifier -- 'always') be traced back to 'repressed sexual traumacy memories' in childhood -- relative to 'seductions' and/or 'more aggressive sexual assaults' that 'get lost in the child's memory system' and then come back -- often, years and years later ('the return of the repressed') as some form of 'psycho-neurotic symtom(s)' that may have been 'triggered' by an 'associative event and/or memory' that 'stirred up' the old 'lost or repressed memory'.
Now, just to add my bit of editorial commenting here, this in itself -- meaning Freud's work and theorizing up to the spring of 1896 -- was 'amazing work', enough to make Freud 'The King of All Clinical Psychologists and Psycho-theorists', especially when you qualify Freud's tendency to overgeneralize in order to emphatically and dramatically state his case. My qualifiers today would be that the memories don't always have to be of a 'sexual nature', and they don't always have to be 'repressed' -- and indeed, as Freud would go on to rhetorically argue for the rest of his career after May 1896, the 'so-called memories' don't even have to be 'memories'; indeed, often, particularly in the case of female patients reporting 'seduction memories involving their dad'; the memories can -- and invariably are -- "the patients' own fantasies made to look like real memories when they weren't". This assertion here on the part of Freud, after May 1896, would become the essence of what today is called 'The Seduction Theory Controversy' -- who was seducing who? Did the dad actually seduce the daughter? Or did the daughter fantasize in her head being seduced by her dad -- and then 'repress this fantasy as if it was a real memory'?
Wow! Fully addressed -- even today as opposed to in Victorian Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this issue has the capability of being a 'live firecracker' that probably most writers and theorists would prefer to stay completely away from it -- rather than take a particular side. But that is what Freud did after May 1896 -- he took a side -- the side of 'fantasy' rather than 'memory' -- and then he basically 'buried' the issue, and his old traumacy-seduction theory, like an 'ex-lover gone bad', or like one of his patients would 'bury' one of their traumatic memories and/or fantasies -- whatever it was. Freud had taken us into that 'place' where philosophers and particularly epistemologists have been fighting for years 'Objectivity vs. Subjectivity': Who's right? Who's wrong? I call this the area -- 'The Black Hole of The Kantian Epistemological Split'.
Where Hegel wrote: Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond: Kant who influenced Hegel, would -- if I can stand in for Kant here -- throw back at Hegel: 'Hegel you are an epistemologogical idealist -- whereas I'm an epistemological skeptic -- thus, if you really want to know what the 'truth' is, the truth is this: 'You can never know what the truth is because you can never know if your 'concept' and 'external reality' ever 'correspond' -or 'fully correspong' - in other words, you can never escape the narcissistic bias of your own 'subjectivity'. Nietzsche argued this, even more vehemently than Kant.
Even the best judges in the world can sometimes be wrong about 'what the truth is -- or was' -- leading up to a court case.
Sometimes, only the two who know for sure are the two who were there at the time, and even then, you can have 'narcissistic disagreements' as to what really happened, how it happened, and who's guilty -- or who's more guilty, or maybe they are both partly guilty. Or maybe not. Maybe one is lying or distorting, or maybe they both are, or, or, or....
So how can a therapist always be expected to know for sure what historically 'really happened' in a client's life? This having been said, a 'theory' should never 'always' steer a therapist away from an 'unpopular social, legal, and/or political truth'...Such a theory -- a 'left-handed' or 'right-handed' theory -- generally needs to be brought into 'conflictual-dialectic harmony' with its 'opposing brother or sister' theory...This is what I propose to do here below...
Anyway, regardless of what was going through Freud's mind at the time of his 'changeover' in theory after May, 1896, and we can 'speculate til the cows come home' as theorist after theorist already has...taking opposing sides of The Seduction Theory Controversy.....Indeed, I myself, have approached the issue from opposite sides, from both sides, and even after looking at the historical material over and over again, I am still not sure....I have a general idea of what I think...but it is not written in stone, and probably never will be...
Freud, in 1896, was moving on -- he had his driving 'ID' Theory in his brain which at this point in his career stands for 'Interpretation of Dreams' would eventually lead to his 'Id Theory' in its 'Classical' sense...
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It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good.
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind.
-- Bob Dylan, One Too Many Mornings
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I'll leavin' today
I'll be on my way
Of this I can't say very much
But if you want me to
I can be just like you
And pretend that we never have touched
And if anybody asks me, "Is it easy to forget ?"
I'll say, "It's easily done
You just pick anyone
And pretend that you never have met".
-- Bob Dylan, I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met)
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It was like Freud himself had created two opposing -- or seemingly opposing -- 'thesis' vs. 'anti-thesis' theories of human sexual behavior without being able to find the 'bridge over trouble water' that would successfully integrate the two.
Instead, seemingly almost overnight around May 4th, 1896, Freud started to abandon his hard fought traumacy-seduction theory in favor of his equally provocative and controversial childhood sexuality theory. And so 'Classical' Psychoanalysis was born while 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis was left, metaphorically speaking again, like an ex-lover.
I will share with you some of my own speculations and theories that have passed through my own head as I have tried to address this hugely controversial Freudian issue from all sides...
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To be revised...
Freud did his best to intellectually justify his radical changeover in theory but anyone taking a serious look into Freudian history, and especially Freud's own letters to Fliess, particularly the most disconcerting ones that weren't publicly released until the 1980s after Masson had been give permission by Anna Freud to translate and edit them, has to have some feeling that there may have been 'something rotten that happened in the State of Austria' between 1895 and 1896.
It sure looks like Freud might have been 'covering up the incidence of child abuse in his clinical practice' because nobody wanted to hear what he had to say -- indeed, the May 4th, 1896 letter to Fliess tells us that his clinical room was almost empty, that he had been blackballed by the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, and that patients weren't being referred to him by members of The Society.
To be continued...
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Personally and philosophically, I have much more trouble dealing with Freud's 'either/or' Seduction Theory Controversy than I do dealing with Freud's 'id-superego-ego' model....which still works fairly well and could work even better with some modifications and extensions that I am about to make.
In short, I have 'bi-polarized' Freud's 'Traumacy vs. Impulse' model which now becomes like the 'particle-wave' theory of physics -- a 'dialectic' or 'bipolar' model where the two opposite extremes can 'live comfortably together in the same house' like a husband and wife team who are 'opposites' in their respective character makeup...
In this respect, we now have what I am proposing to call 'The Quantum Traumacy-Impulse or Reality-Fantasy Theory'
It is really quite simple and only requires the human characteristic of 'creative negotiation, compromise, and integration' -- not Freudians and anti-Freudians sniping at each other like soldiers from opposite ideologies in the mountains of Afghanastan....
To the extent that I can, I like to utilize a whole host of similar and/or different ideas from many different theorists and their respective schools or paradigms of psychology...and in this way, I think I can manage to at least partly get 'unstuck' from the 'boxed in liabilities' of any one particular limited paradigm...all of which have their own particular 'death instinct'....
Superseding perhaps all these different philosophical and psychological paradigms is the economic paradigm of 'Capitalism'.
Now I have some idealistic, ethical -- Adam Smith and Ayn Rand -- Capitalism in my blood (partly learned from my father who was the owner of his own business corporation) but I also have some Karl Marx and Erich Fromm 'humanistic-existential socialism' in me as well....another one of my 'bi-polar ideologies'....And when I was in University in the 70s, I read, and was taught, about the work of a good cross-section of 'Anti-Establishment' philosophers -- Karl Marx (Money changes everything...distorts and overpowers any type of 'idealistic ideology'...thus, creating 'false ideologies' that are 'only meant to look good, not be good'), Erich Fromm ('the pathology of normalcy', 'The Sane Society), Thomas Szaz ('The Myth of Mental Illness') R.D. Laing (Paraphased by me...Some people become 'psychologically sick' within the context of a 'psychologically sick' society and can't function properly; others function seemingly 'normally' -- perhaps even 'economically brilliantly'...become 'Capitalist Scholars and/or Capitalist Mythological Heroes' but still carry the 'Narcissistic Capitalist Virus' within them....and make 'others sick around them'...in the process of becoming very wealthy and admired themselves'... And to be fair, there are some 'socialist' and 'communist' leaders who can be, or have been the same....Lenin, Stalin, and Mao tse Tung....to name three....they were what I would call 'Narcissistic Communists'.....Marx struggled between 'humanistic decency and democracy' early in his career....and a more 'dictatorial forceful takeover mentality' later in his career...But I don't think that Marx would have liked anything that Lenin, Stalin, or Mao tse Tung did militarily....I may be wrong...
The point I wish to make here is that all of us -- each and every day we go into work -- often struggle with 'conflict of interest' issues: conflict between our own belief and value system, our own character, integrity, honest, credibility, self-respect -- and something that our place of employment may or may not want us to go that steps beyond our own personal 'integrity' parameters...After a while, we may even give in to the philosophy of: 'If you can't beat them, then join them -- in choices of 'narcissistic self-gratification' over 'ethical right or wrong'...
Are we really so naive -- and caught up in Freud's 'idealized mythology' -- to believe that the same type of 'Capitalist manipulations' weren't happening back in Freud's time as we see around us every day when we go to work?
Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler were undoubtedly seeing Father Freud through 'rose-coloured glasses' -- trying with all their respective and combined power to prevent the idealized legacy of Freud's character -- his ethical integrity and honesty -- from collapsing...It may have forever stayed this way -- i.e., 'mythologically idealized' -- if the full letters from Freud to Fliess had not been translated and published by Masson. At that point, Anna Freud and Eissler must have truly had 'Freudian Blinders' on....becuae there are many letters where Freud doesn't look ethically good at all...
Which is probably the usual state and dynamics of things...The closer we get to someone who we have idealized from afar, the more likely we are to be disappointed, even 'emotionally sunken' and/or extremely angry at what we find....Very few things in life are 'black and white'....Generally good people can make really bad choices that come back to haunt them, and even generally very 'bad' people can sometimes do 'heroically good' things...
Freud's post May 4th, 1896 'abandonment of the seduction theory -- particularly in combination with the less controversial trauamcy theory' -- was so radical, considering the historical fact that Freud had been meticulously developing these two theories since he met Breuer and Charcot in the 1880s -- that any 'normal explanation' of why Freud abandoned these two theories hardly seems to suffice...It's like he had just wiped his memory clean of about the last 8 years of his life and everything that he had clinically observed, interpreted, believed and written in those last 8 years.
It's like Charcot had just hynotized him and 're-programmed his belief and value system so completely that it was almost the exact opposite to what he had believed before he was hypnotized'...
Things like that don't normally just happen to a person, let alone a theorist as stubborn as Freud was unless he is taken into a dungeon and 'brain-washed' and/or 'personally threated' and/or 'traumatically scared half to death'...
Here are some of the historical possibilities of what may or may not have been motivating Freud intensely back in the spring of 1896...
1. The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology was applying economic leverage on Freud after they ridiculed his Seduction Theory which connected 'hysteria' with childhood sexual abuse. In effect, they 'blackballed him' -- which Freud himself stated in his letter of May 4th, 1896 to Fliess, stopped referring patients to him...and his clinical therapy room was all but empty...
2. Freud was still suffering from severe ethical and medical guilt regarding the botched 'nasal surgery' by Fliess on Emma Ekstein in February of 1895, which Freud had recommended to Emma that she have this 'totally unconventional, hare-brained nasal-sexual operation' and referred Emma to Fliess to conduct 'the necessary surgery' which was like referring Emma to Dr. Strangelove...with Freud playing his 'sidekick'...
3. It is highly probable that cocaine was mixed up in the middle of this 'double nasal operation' -- for Freud was having it too, quite possibly to clear out some of the 'cocaine leftovers' and 'pus' that had accumulated in his nasal cavity...Another snort of cocaine after the operation...and he would be just fine...Just read the letters through this whole time of 1895 to 1897 if you don't believe me...Or visit the site...History House: Freud and Cocaine -- The Deal for a more satirical and sarcastic perspective than I have put forward here, but I believe historically more accurate than anything that has come out of The Freudian Establishment....
4. Racing through Freud's mind also about this time was the main content of about 900 pages of 'The Interpretation of Dreams'....This book may indeed be a classic in some of the principle ideas that would later become 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...but between the cocaine and the emerging 'fantasy and dream theory'...Freud might have (conveniently) lost track of 'the reality theory -- and the 'real memory' theory -- that he had been building for the previous 8 years or so...Some how the subject of 'childhood sexual abuse' and Emma's medical mishap got lost in the shuffle until the full Freud to Fliess letters emerged in the 1980s...
Also, if you read 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' closely, I think you will find that you could see some 'tell-tale signs' that Freud's fantasy theory was starting to emerge...on its way to 'Screen Memories' (1899)...in an essay (The Aetiology) that was supposed to be all about 'reality' and 'real childhood sexual abuse'...It was about this...but it looks to me like the 'fantasy' part of Freud was starting to emerge..even before he got his 'ego injured' and his 'income possibly diminished' by The Vienna Society....
The paradoxical irony is that in this area of childhood sexual abuse, Freud should have at least partly stayed the course, stayed steadfast and true...indeed, he would be viewed today as a 'Champion' of The Women's Civil Rights Movement'....where he really should have had his 'butt kicked' -- but didn't -- was in the whole Emma Ekstein medical fiasco, and in his personal and 'professional' use and abuse -- and particularly, prescription -- of cocaine as the 'magic wonder drug of choice for any and all of his patients and supposed friends medical ailments'...'their anti-depression and energy pill all in one'...
There was no excuse for this whatsoever after 1891 when Freud saw one of his supposedly close friend's -- and patient's -- die partly from the cocaine that Freud had been prescribed to him for years, even after most of the rest of the medical community were seeing the bad medical results come in relative to cocaine -- and had abandoned it...
Anyways, Freud may not be the 'ethical allstar' that all of us strive to be able look up to and idealize...but at the same time, he still was probably the greatest -- or at least the most creatively brilliant -- theorist that the Western world has ever known....
And it is this creatively brilliant part of Freud -- and the greater part of his ideas both before and after his abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theory, even sometimes at first blush the seemingly most preposterous ones -- that I continue to ponder on, revise, modify, extend, compensate for, and/or discard altogether or in part...It is here that I have spent my thousands of hours studying Freud -- and will continue do so and try to make his ideas better for the 21st Century...
A little overly ambitious perhaps? Hugely over-ambitious?
Or can I function like the conducter in an orchestra who can bring the many different sections, instruments, and sounds of an orchestra into magnificent harmony with each other?
I can hear them all playing in my head right now....
The question thus becomes: How can I best bring all these integrative sounds alive here and now on paper?
Let's start with a little 'theorizing about theorizing'....and then we will get to 'The Seduction Theory Controversy' -- a controversy that has been alive since the early 1900s and simply will not go away....It remains a 'schism or abyss' -- like The Grand Canyon -- right in the middle of Classical Psychoanalysis (or the orthodox analysts would say between 'Pre-Psychoanalysis' and 'Classical Psychoanalysis').
1. Theorizing About Theorizing (Model-Making, Map-Making)
A theory is supposed to accurately represent that part of life that it is designed to represent...There are 'structural' models that don't move, and there are 'dynamic' models that do move....The first type of model follows 'the nouns' in life; the second type of model follows 'the verbs' in life....
Thus, a theory should be like a 'slave -- or at least a dancing partner to life' -- that part of life that it is supposed to follow...'life leads and the theory follows step by step in its shadow or as its dance partner' if you will.
A theory is like a 'puppet' where we are 'the puppeteer' but we too, like the theory we are making, need to closely observe and follow in the footsteps of that part of life we are following and 'copying' to the best of our ability in the form of our theory or model or 'map'.
Back in 1972, when I was in Grade 12, I took an English class in which I was introduced to the study of 'General Semantics' which was basically the study of 'theory-making' as well a study of 'the use and abuse of language'. The book I was reading is a classic in this regard: S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action (originally written in 1939 with about 7 follow up editions...), which drew its inspiration from a largely unheralded 'philosophy of language and meaning' book called, 'Science and Sanity' (1933, a newer hardcover edition available...), by Alfred Korzybski who I would call the greatest philosopher of language of all time. Some of his ideas are very similar to Wittgenstein's who was alive about the same time, and I am not sure who may of influenced who in this regard...But Korzybski's work, Science and Sanity, was a classic work, the foundation of a school of language philosophy that is still very much alive today with connections to the related schools of psychology called 'Cognitive Therapy' (Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, George Kelly, Donald Meichenbaum...) which I drew together in my Honours Psychology Thesis, written in 1979. Today, I look back at this essay as my first 'model of the human psyche' or that portion of the human psyche that I would now call 'The Central Ego'...
We will come back to this work at a later date.
Korzybski and Hayakawa taught that 'the map is not the territory' (and never will be because maps and theories are never perfect -- they are always inferior 'abstractions' of the real thing that these maps are trying to conceptually copy and accurately represent from that part of 'reality' that they are designed to 'represent').
Always in a theory or model or map we are looking for 'accurate structural (and/or dynamic) repressentation. But, again we will never be perfect because our representations will never be perfect. As a theorist, we have to expect the unexpected, expect the exceptions to the rule. If 'life' makes a 'left hand turn' on us, we have to be willing and able to quickly follow with our 'map' of what has just happened. If on the other hand, life then takes a 'quick right hand turn' on us...and we just keep on going....oblivious to the change that life just pulled on us, well that is going to take our map -- and us -- to 'Nowheresville'....unless or until we make the necessary adjustment and modification in our map...
This book by Hayakawa along with Maxwell Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics' propelled me into the study of psychology in 1974 at The University of Waterloo. There Dr. Meichenbaum took an interest in my interest in General Semantics and I will give you a small sample of my work in this area which extended into my Honours Thesis in 1979. And we will look at my 'old work' on 'The Central Ego' at a later point in time...
Freud could have used a few lessons in General Semantics because he was a terrible logician. He was always (there's an example of an over-generalization just committed by yours truly) jumping ahead of himself and over-generalizing. And then instead of going back and 'modifying' his generalization, he would pulll a 180 degree 'spinerama', a 'Copernican switch', a 'Marxian switch on Hegel', and overgeneralize in the opposite direction.
I said 'always' above in the same type of fashion that Freud would have used the word 'always' in a rhetorical argument aimed at supporting his newest theory, and yet there is only one 'double incident' that I am concerned about here: 1. his short-lived creation of 'The Seduction Theory'; and 2. his radical switchover to 'Fantasy Theory, Instinct Theory, Childhood Sexuality, and The Oedipal Complex' -- the foundational floor of what we now call 'Classical' Psychoanalysis.
Masson's lament in the 1980s is that Freud 'dropped (abandoned, 'suppressed') the real foundational bottom of Psychoanalysis' which was his 1895 'Traumacy' Theory and his 1896 'Seduction' Theory. Indeed, his argument was that virtually all of Psychoanalysis after 1896 was a 'fraud', 'a 'coverup', and a 'false' Psychoanalysis that tried to turn his patients' 'real memories of shocking childhood sexual assaults and seductions' into their own 'wishful sexual fantasies', created when they were a small child, and perhaps exasperated during the onset of puberty, but still initially 'repressed' by the small child because of the 'morally unacceptable' nature of the wishful fantasy, and also a fear of the anger and/or punishment of the parent of the same sex ('castration anxiety' relative to the father in the case of a small boy).
To my understanding, Masson believed and still believes that Psychoanalysis should go back to what Freud had learned and was teaching before 1897 -- i.e., 'Pre-Psychoanalysis' and that would presumably include 'The Interpretation of Dreams', most of which was written around 1896. Most of us, I think, would understand 'dream theory' to be more or less the same thing as 'fantasy theory'; it is just when 'memories' and 'fantasies' start getting conflated together by Freud that Masson started getting upset -- and with good reason in my opinion. Memories are memories and fantasies are fantasies, and for most of us, most of the time, they only start getting conflated together when we reach our 50 or 60s and we've probably lost a few million or billion brain cells...the rest of them are doing overtime...and perhaps getting a little 'fuzzy' on a few things....But most of the memories that really count in our life...we remember all too clearly...
My belief, on the other hand, is that Freud's work before 1897 should be 'properly integrated' with his work after 1896 in a manner that makes all his work between say, 1893 and 1939 -- about 46 years of 'theorizing about the human mind' -- 'internally consistent' or at least 'paradoxically consistent'. In another words, I have opted for a 'multi-bi-polar, multi-dialectic model of the human psyche' that is similar to what physics did in the early 1900s (see below) when 'the particle theory' of energy and matter was integrated with 'the wavelength theory' of energy and matter, creating what we now call 'Quantum Physics'. Applied to the structure and dynamics of the human mind, I have applied the label 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis' to indicate the integration of 'Pre-Classical' (before 1897) Psychoanalysis with 'Classical' (after 1896) Psychoanalysis.
Regardless of which Freudian model you support or don't support, it is important to know where Freud went 'theoretically offside'. Oftentimes, the greatest 'abstracters' and/or 'generalizers' in the world are also the worst abstracters and/or generalizers. I would put Freud into this category. Breuer was a 'careful abstracter' whereas Freud was a 'careless abstracter' which is, I believe, what essentially blew them apart. Freud didn't have the patience for Breuer, and Breuer didn't want to 'jump to conclusions' as quickly as Freud was doing...So when Freud got 'shot down' metaphorically speaking for his Seduction Theory on the evening of April 21st, 1896, Breuer probably wasn't at all surprised and I believe tried to 'limit the professional damage' by qualifying Freud's conclusions...It didn't work...By this time, Freud had stuck his neck out, probably a little too far, and was on his own...Breuer faded into history...
Freud's logic went something like this:
First in the spring of 1896, it was 'all hysterics suffer from childhood sexual abuse'...and then in progressive fashion between, say the spring of 1896 (after April 21st) and 1905, it became more and more: 'all hysterics -- like all people -- engage in the whole gamut of sexual fantasies while they are children, become 'fixated' on one or more particular fantasies, 'repress' this or these fantasies, and then the fantasies eventually get 'disguised as 'hysterical symptoms' in the case of a hysterical patient'...That's quite a Copernican switch! There's some truth to this theory, overplayed like usual by Freud -- it could have been easily integrated with his previous Traumacy-Seduction Theory but Freud believed it was an 'either/or' Aristotlean dilemma where he had to choose the one theory or the other: not an integration of both. Also, there is the more cynical theory that Freud changed theories more for 'personal, and professional narcissistic reasons' which we will go into below. I think it was a combination of all these factors that hit Freud like 'The Perfect Storm' coming together between 1895 and 1899 -- and the theoretical result of 'Classical' Psychoanalysis that has been critiqued and criticized every since...Freud certainly made this part of his life and work a 'complicated maze' for any academic, historian, and/or Freudian scholar to follow...The historical theories just keep coming even some 115 years after the fact...
I even have a theory as to why Freud might have been in such a hurry to get his work out when he should have been a little more patient. Back in the 1880s, when Freud really was a scientist and he was 'experimenting' with the possible medical uses of cocaine, and he made the mistake of sharing his idea with a co-worker that the cocaine could be used in eye surgery as an anaesthetic, this co-worker went ahead while Freud left town, finished the experiment Freud had started, and got the medical credit for the use of cocaine in eye surgery. Freud was plenty mad when he got back into town and found out what happened...
In the psychotherapeutic business, Freud was competing with Janet among others in the early 1890s, the two were quite competitive, had slightly different paradigms that are worth comparing and contrasting at some point, and indeed, Freud would develop a whole string of competitors along the way in his professional career (Adler and Jung in particular), and Freud didn't want any of his competitors to 'beat him to the punch' on whatever his latest discovery was.
In this regard, one way of looking at the Seduction Theory Controversy which has been alive inside and outside of Psychoanalysis for over 100 years now, is to say that is a controversy between two dialectically opposite theories -- both of which were over-generalized (probably for dramatic emphasis. Freud liked to be provocative and controversial -- at least until it started costing him money.)
Let's take a couple of minutes and see how The Seduction Theory Controversy evolved.
2. The Traumacy Theory (Freud, 1893-1895)
Freud, in his early days between 1893 and 1896 was a pretty good model-maker....not perfect like any of are....but he was pretty darn good at what he did....And more than that, he showed promise of being a possible 'Champion' to the Women's Movement...before women really even had any kind of a strong voice in Victorian Vienna....
Freud understood 'hysteria' and 'neurosis' in a way that few people did...maybe Breuer and Charcot partly, Janet more so....but Freud was the brilliant new star on the scene who was starting to revolutionize the very new field of Clinical Psychology....Over in Switzerland, you had Bleuler...born a year after Freud (1857 who died the same year as Freud, 1939)...Bleuler also studied under Charcot, like Freud.
Bleuler gave a positive review to Freud's 'Studies on Hysteria' (1895) but the difference between Freud's work and Bleuler's is that Freud mainly dealt with 'neurotic patients and disorders' whereas Bleuler worked in a Psychiatry Institution in Zurich, Switzerland with mainly 'psychotic' patients and eventually coined the term 'schizophrenia'.
Bleuler used a combination of hypnosis, word association tests, (and probably ink-blot projective tests because I think Jung used them) to combine Freud's work with his own....Carl Jung became his star student...
Freud's 'repression theory' was really at bottom line pretty simple although later on he developed some 'complexities' to it to try to best deal with the criticisms of this theory that he met along the way...
Some patients, according to Freud, have a 'genetic predispostion towards what he called 'conversion hysteria' -- the 'ability' to turn psychological symptoms into 'physical body symptoms' without being able to associatively connect the two...Freud led these types of patients and a few other types as well such as 'phobics' and 'anxiety neurotics', 'obsessive compulsives', and even a few 'paranoid patients' into hypnosis...and then later on 'pressure therapy'...and finally 'free association' all designed to get into the patient's 'unconscious', 'unlock the repression in the unconscious'...and reveal the 'associative connection' between 'the activating traumatic event' and 'the hysterical bodily symptom' or 'phobia' or 'anxiety neurosis' or 'obsessive compulsion' or 'paranoia'....Sometimes, Freud would argue, he would have to follow a whole 'chain of memories backwards in time' -- all associatively connected -- until he finally found the memory he was looking for -- attached to a great deal of 'emotional affect' that when 'released' as in 'abreacted' in an 'emotional catharsis'....voila...this created as Anna O., the first construed psychoanalytic patient, once told her therapist Joseph Breuer, co-writer of 'Studies on Hysteria' with Freud in 1895 before they parted ways mainly because of Freud's 'sexual fixation'...this 'emotional abreaction and catharsis' created -- 'the talking cure'...
For many psychotherapists, this simple but effective form of psychotherapy -- or some fascimile of it -- is still very much in use, and in vogue, today...
For example, I spent about 13 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto, Ontario between 1979 and 1991 doing 'hot seat and empty chair work' as a student trainee in which this basic early Breuer and Freudian formula (without the hypnosis or free association) played an essential part of my training... I have argued before that Freud was a Gestalt Therapist before he was a Psychoanalyst just as Perls was a Psychoanalyst before he was a Gestalt Therapist...What goes around comes around...Anaximander was the first philosopher to basically say that with his theory of 'cosmic justice'...
What is dominant today will return to the 'Shadows' tomorrow, and what is in the Shadows today, will regain Dominance tomorrow....Derrida also made a nice philosophy out of that idea...We 'deconstruct' the dominant in order that the suppressed should rightfully regain its place of 'democratic balance'...
So why did Freud have to go and change a formula that worked?
3. The Seduction Theory (1896)
Freud, like Charcot before him, and even Breuer to a lesser, more careful extent, started to 'generalize' about something that he was seeing in the clinical setting more often than not: 'repressed sexual traumacies' (often 'seductions' or 'more blatant physical 'assaults'); or in some cases, the patient's own 'sexual impulses' -- also, repressed. At first, the latter were largely ignored, particularly in 'hysterics' as Freud concentrated on the 'childhood sexual assault and/or seduction' side of the hysterical puzzle....This culminated in a beautifully written essay in 1896 called 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' where Freud tried to -- as delicately as possible approach the subject of 'family incest' and 'childhood sexual assault' with the father as the most likely 'sexual victimizer'....
However, Freud was getting these types of cases so frequently -- and about this time the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco, written up below, threw a huge 'therapeutic haymaker' at him...and then on April 21st, 1896, Freud read his brand new 'Seduction Theory Paper' to a group of psychiatrists and neurologists who he thought would be pleased with his work....they weren't...in fact, according to Freud in a letter to Fliess on May 4th, 1896, The Psychiatry and Neurology Society had, in effect, 'blackballed' him for a paper that Krafft-Ebing called a 'scientific fairy tale', and Freud's clinical room was virtually empty as doctors had stopped referring patients to him...For whatever the reason -- economic, professional, political, personal guilt...-- or totally legitimate in the way that Freud wrote it up to Fliess and eventually the whole psychoanalytic community -- Freud's brand new 'Seduction Theory' disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, like seemingly almost overnight...
Freud argued that he was getting so many hysterical patients with women accusing their fathers of being 'child abusers' that Freud just couldn't get himself to believe that practically the whole city of Vienna was full of fathers guilty of such offensive behavior...Now the easy counter-argument to that line of thinking on Freud's part is that Freud was dealing with a very 'extreme end of the population of Vienna' -- even for that matter, the 'psychological patient' population...So maybe Freud shouldn't have been as surprised as he wrote to Fliess he was....
Also, apparently, by this point in time in about the summer of 1896, Freud had almost completed his book of 'dreams' -- 'The Interpretation of Dreams' -- that wouldn't be officially published until January, 1900.
'The Interpretation of Dreams' was bringing a whole new style of thinking into Freud's repertoire -- 'fantasy thinking' and 'symbolic thinking' and talking about 'longing' -- which was being 'juxtaposed' against Freud's 'reality thinking' about 'real memories that were alleged to have happened'...And somehow Freud got entangled between the two entirely different modes of thinking -- 'primary (pleasure-principle, fantasy-oriented, dream-oriented) thinking' vs. 'secondary (reality-principle) thinking...where Freud made a conscious or subconscious choice to quit following the 'reality principle' or 'secondary thinking' and instead started to follow 'the pleasure principle' or 'primary thinking...Suddenly, 'childhood sexuality' was born, and 'the oral' and 'anal' and 'phallic' and 'genital' stages of sexual development....and 'The Oedipal Complex'...and 'the polymorphous (multi-sexually) perverted child'...With this there was no more talk about 'perverted fathers' because now he was writing about 'perverted children'...as a 'natural evolution of sexual development'....
Freud had left the unique sexual traumacies of the evolving child, teenager, and finally adult...and instead now was writing about 'species-wide psycho-sexual stages of development' (where he didn't have to face angry professionals about the 'causal factor' of fathers sexually abusing their young ...and older...children...
For whatever reason -- legitmate or 'narcissisticly convenient' -- Freud had left the old 'traumacy and seduction theory a thousand miles behind'...and was now forest deep in the land of 'fantasy and instinctual theory'....
4. The Abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theory....and Freud's Evolution (or 'De-Evolution') into Fantasy-Instinct Theory
In a very strong bipolar, dialectic sense, Pre-Psychoanalysis (before let us say April 26th or May 4th, 1896) and Classical Psychoanalysis (after April 26th or May 4th, 1896) are like opposite brothers or sisters that hate each other because they are so opposite....And yet they came from the same father and mother, and were raised by the same father and mother...The two siblings can clearly see their respective differences but they have a 'blindspot' relative to 'their interconnected family background'.
So father -- as in father Sigmund Freud -- needed to 'reconcile' these 'opposite siblings' in such a manner that they could get along with each other -- even 'complement' each other -- as opposed to wanting to take each other apart, limb by limb....(also comparable to a 'good husband and wife team gone bad' where 'opposites once attracted' and now they 'repel'...or like Kurt Eissler and Jeffrey Masson where Eissler was attracted to Masson because of his 'honesty' and 'idealism' and then later was shockingly repelled by Masson's 'honesty' and 'idealism'...because it involved 'discrediting' Freud....for Freud's 'alleged lack of honesty and integrity'...)
So Pre-Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis continue to have this rather 'dissociated' relationship with each other like 'ego' and 'alter-ego', where Pre-Psychoanalysis is treated like 'Cinderella' and 'locked inside a room' or to give the opposite type of imagery -- like 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Quasimodo)' who 'slinked around the shadows' of Paris, laughed at and ridiculed by the people of Paris who could only see his 'ugly deformity'....all that is, except for the beautiful Esmerelda...who was the only one who showed any compassion and caring for Quasimodo...giving him water after he had been whipped and tied down in the heat...
The irony -- the great irony -- of all of this is that Freud and Psychoanalysis -- the 'champions of unlocking represssions' could not, and/or would not, unlock 'the greatest repression' of Freud's own making...
Thus, 'Cindarella' and 'Quasimodo' -- the Psychoanalytic equivalents of 'The Traumacy Theory' and 'The Seduction Theory' -- have remained either locked away in their 'bedroom' and/or 'the Shadows of Paris' -- and there they have remained since the spring of 1896, which if my arithmetic is right, amounts to 115 years of 'dissociation, suppression and/or repression'. In effect, 'Pre-Psychoanalysis' is 'The It' of Classical Psychoanalysis.
And all of 'King Freud's henchmen', no matter how much they tried (because they weren't trying) couldn't put 'Humpty Dumpty' -- Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis -- back together again...
Pre-Classical Psychoanalysis remains 'The Dissociated Shadow' of Classical Psychoanalysis...
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Friends, Romans, Countrymen,
I come here to honour Sigmund Freud,
Not to roast or vilify him,
Because Sigmund Freud was an honourable man...
At least until he became...
A little overzealous in what drug he prescribed...
And/or what surgery he recommended to a patient...
And/or what clinical observations rose to the surface of his mind...
Or became blocked out in the bottom of his mind...
Depending on his 'most narcissistically useful theory of the moment'...
With Freud, you got the feeling that his 'clinical facts' were being 'discriminately chosen' to fit his present theory; not the other way around.
That's not a good way to be either a scientist or a theorist...
You don't like to hear a theorist using the words 'always' or 'never' when he or she is working on 'partial clinical evidence'.
With Freud, it seemed like he was reaching back into his clinical cases and choosing the particular examples and samples that he wanted to use to support his newest theory.
Today the word 'disorder' is used to replace the word 'neurosis'....
But I still like the word 'neurosis' -- it reminds me both of Freud and Woody Allen...'Neurosis' slides off the tongue a little easier...and besides you can do some 'play on words' with 'neurotic' and 'erotic'...
You can even have a 'neurotic disorder'....or an 'erotic, neurotic disorder'...
Here's a few different types of neuroses that we all can have:
A/ An 'IT' Neurosis 1 and 2:
'IT Neurosis 1': An 'Important Traumacy' Neurosis;
'IT Neurosis 2': Anything inside us that can be referred to as 'IT' -- meaning anything that we suppress, repress, deny, evade, disassociate, disavow, project, reject, sublimate, cremate...and it 'returns from the dead'...
B/ An 'ID' Neurosis as in an 'Impulsive Desire or Drive' Neurosis'
C/ A 'Narcissistic' Neurosis....A person fixated on 'me, myself, and I'...
D/ An 'Oral-Receptive, Approval-Seeking', 'Pleasing' and/or 'Submissive/Masochistic' Neurosis -- pretty straightforward;
E/ 'An Anally Retentive/Righteous/Rebellious/Rejecting/Sadistic/Abandoning/Schizoid' Neurosis'....More on these neurotic derrivatives of the same basic mentality at a later date;
F/ 'An Anally Obsessive-Compulsive ('Counting', 'Locking', 'Repeating'...)vs. an Orally Obsessive-Compulsive (Addictive) Personality (Drugs, Alcohol, Food, Gambling, Sex, Seduction...)
G/ 'Borderline Personality'...On the border between being very 'anally uptight' and 'losing it completely' as in 'going over the edge into a nervous or psychotic breakdown...
H/ Depressive Personality....'A hanging on bite to sadness'...Needs to feel the full grief, close the grief...and move on...
I/ Anxiety Neurosis....'Nervous Nellie'...
J/ Phobias...A severe fear of one particular thing...'claustrophobia' (closed spaces), 'agoraphobia' (open spaces), 'acrophobia' (heights), insects, snakes, etc...
K/ Paranoia.....Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that you are not still trying to get me and somehow do me in...
L/ Psychosis/Schizophrenia....I talk in a different type of symbolic language (dream language) than you usually do during the day...
M/ Bipolar Disorder/Neurosis....There are probably about a hundred different types but the most common is what used to be called 'Manic-Depression' (as in the Jimmy Hendrix song)...I guess the name wasn't 'politically correct' or something but it did a better job of describing the particular back and forth nature of the disorder between 'mania' and 'depression'....I go crazy...and then I crash...and start thinking about all the money I spent while I was manic...and what ever else I did while I was in this stage that could come back to haunt me...
N/ Transference Neurosis...All of us have a bunch of them...We marry a partial surrogate of our mother and/or father...or the opposite...Freud had a 'sibling rivalry' issue and a 'rejecting father' issue...Our earliest conscious memories give the prototypes and templates for later 'transference complexes and neurotic games'...Transference neuroses provide the essential link between our 'traumacy neuroses' and our 'impulsive, obsessive-compulsive neuroses'...In Adlerian language, the first can be linked to 'inferiority or insecurity feelings' and 'particular phobias' while the second can be linked to the 'compensation' or 'overcompensation' or 'specific type of superiority striving' aimed at 'overcoming the traumatic childood transference neurosis...More on this stuff at a later date...
O/ 'Hysteria' the diagnostic category has mainly died out, is not used anymore, but was used back in Freud's time and we will use this term in this context...A 'conversion hysteria' is where a neurotic (psychological) symptom is converted to some type of 'bodily symptom' like a 'paralized leg with no organic or physical reason for the paralysis)...Breuer, Charcot, Janet, Bernheim, Freud...all learned how to use hypnosis and 'the hunt for repressed traumatic memories' to 'release the emotional trauma connected to the memory (abreaction, catharsis) and ideally 'cure' the symptom...although a full-blown hysteric like Anna O. might have a hundred such symtoms...Me thinks that she was finding a 'secondary gain' by creating hysterical symptoms...she loved the attention of the good Doctor Breuer...and loved to keep him busy...in the same way that her father kept her busy....I call this 'transference-reversal'....
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Well, sometimes otherwise honourable men....
Can still do bad things...
In the course of a lifetime...
It is unreasonable to expect everyone...
To be 'perfectly ethical', 'perfectly moral'....
I know that I am not trying to preach...
From any pedestal of 'ethical or moral superiority'...
There have been at least a handful of ethical actions...
Or non-actions...
That I wish I could go back in time...
And play over again to a different outcome...
For example, my now adult son doesn't like to read...
And I attribute this to the 'hindsight observation and interpretation'...
That when he was very young -- 4 to 7 years old (crucial development years in a child's life)...
And he wanted my attention...
Too often he wouldn't get it...
Because I was too absorbed in whatever I was reading...
To lift my head and pay attention to him...
Nor did I read to him...
My parents tried afterwards...
But by then, it was mainly too late...
His value mind-set had largely been determined for life...
Although, he is always free to choose differently...
If or whenever he wants to...
I'm not holding my breath...
I say this for two reasons....
One reason, as I have already mentioned,
Is that I am not trying to claim any moral superiority...
But just get to the facts of Psychoanalytic history...
Or at least as close to them as I can get....
Some 115 years after the fact...
I mean if I was sitting here theorizing....
Down a certain path, a certain line of thinking...
For some 5 years (which I have been since 2006),
And you, as a reader, had come to expect...
A certain consistency and stability in what I wrote...
In the content of what I wrote...
And then all of a sudden one day,
My whole line of thought, my whole underpinning thesis,
Changed 180 degrees overnight...
A Copernican shift...
Or like what Marx did to Hegel
Only it was me changing my own work that radically...
If you had been following me for those whole five years...
Wouldn't you be rather stunned at the sudden change in direction...
And want to know what happened...
And perhaps be suspicious of stated reasons...
That looked more like self-justifications and rationalizations...
Than real reasons...
I mean Freud was a very smart man...
And to turn seemingly in a matter of days...
From a thesis that stated that...
'All hysterics suffered from childhood sexual abuse'...
To one that stated that...
'No hysterics suffered from childhood sexual abuse'...
How, as a theorist, can you justify such a radical change...
In theory...
And still maintain your credibility....
I mean, April 21st, 1896, Freud still believed in The Seduction Theory..
And by his April 26th, and May 4th letters to Freud...
You could see that Freud's thinking was starting...
To undergo a radical metamorphosis...
Like in The novella by Kafka called 'The Metamorphosis'...
Freud went to bed on April 21st, 1896 -- as a man...
And woke up on the morning of April 22nd, 1896...
Starting to look and feel and write like a 'giant insect'...
On April 26th, and especially May 4th,
Freud was writing to Fliess as 'a giant insect'...
A metaphorical exaggeration perhaps...but you get my point...
On the evening of April 21st, Freud was talking to...
The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society...
Like a man...
And in the letters of April 26th and May 4th to Fliess...
Freud was writing like a giant insect....or a mouse...
Calling Emma Ekstein a 'hysterical bleeder'...
Who 'longed' to bleed for her two therapeutic heroes...
Not a victim of Fliess' and Freud's hare-brained...
Radical 'nasal-sexual' surgery...
That almost killed her...
Kurt Eissler could say what he wanted
About Freud's 'childhood sexuality' theory...
Being even more unpopular than his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory...
But there may have been some fathers in that Vienna Meeting...
Who stopped squirming like worms on a hook...
When Freud opted for his 'childhood sexuality theory'...
Rather than his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory...
And his client referrals and income started coming back in again...
While at the same time Freud's newfound 'longing' or 'fantasy' theory...
Stopped Fliess and Freud from 'squirming like worms on a hook'...
As well....'Two...two mints in one...'
There is not a person here...
That can't be influenced at least to some extent...
By money, politics, the law, our profession...
If 'the screws are tightened enough on us'...
If someone applies enough leverage on us...
If I write an essay here...it takes me almost a week to write it...
And when I have finished writing it...
I look the next morning and see that my article...
Has -- before it even had time to be properly viewed...
In front of the reading public --
Disappeared in the Archives of 'Google Heaven'...
I would likely say to myself, 'Oh, I guess someone didn't...
Like my article...
But then if I spend a hour or so...
Revising the essay...changing its flavour,
Changing its content...
Making it less controversial, more diplomatic...
Less sarcastic and cynical, less 'anti-Freudian'...
More 'palatable' for advertisers, and the general reading public...
I do all of this...and the next time I check for my article...
I find that it is on the 'top of the charts'...on top of the page...
Of some 38 million links...
You don't think that that is going to influence...
At least partly how and what I write?
Let's move on and talk about some Freudian theory...
We need first -- as Freud has done -- to distinguish between...
'Bound' and 'unbound' id energy...
Between 'the id' (as in unbound id energy)
And 'the id reservoir, box, or vault' which is 'restrained and contained'...
Or 'bound'...
Id energy...energy that is prevented from reaching consciousness...
Or if in consciousness...prevented from becoming action...
The Freudian distinction here is usually between...
'Repression' in the unconcious...
And 'suppression' in the concious personality...
Furthermore, to go one step further than Freud...
We need to distinguish between...
'The ID (as in 'Impulsive Drive') Vault'
And 'The IT (as in 'Important Traumacy') Vault...
Which I have previously called a part of 'The SID Vault'...
As in 'Shadow-Id Vault'...
Jung's concept of 'The Shadow' is actually superior...
To Freud's concept of 'The Id' in terms of its general,
Overall theoretical and therapeutic flexibility and useablity...
I will keep Freud's concept of The Id...
But juxtaposed against my concept (or Groddeck's concept)...
Of 'The It' (mine is a little different)...
Or I will continue to use my concept of 'The SID Vault'...
And there you have one part of the bridge...
Between 'Pre-Classical' and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...
I could sit here and vilify Freud...
For giving out cocaine like it was candy...
In the 1880s,
To his friends, his fiancee, his patients...
And to himself of course...
Even after the bad news about what cocaine could do to a person...
Started filtering in...and other doctors had stopped using it...
Freud pressed on with it...
Until one of his patients and good friends,
Died in 1991....
At least partly because of Freud's cocaine prescriptions...
This is usually the year that most Freudian scholars -- at least publicly --
Say that Freud stopped using cocaine...
While Freud's most private letters to Fliess...
Tell us that Freud used cocaine right up to at least 1897...
And possibly years after that...
Perhaps til Freud and Fliess separated in 1904 even..
A shocking difference between official, orthodox, public...
And unofficial private, autobiographical...
Testimony....
The private, autobiographical testimony...
Taking us right into the heart of...
Freud's abandonment of the traumacy-seduction theory...
And the creation of Freud's new 'Fantasy Theory'...
This being the case...
The question has to be asked...
What kind of 'fantasy' was Freud on...
When he wrote these 'turning-point' in the history of Psychoanalysis...
'Fantasy' papers...
'The Interpretation of Dreams', 'Screen Memories',
Even Freud's 'Three Essays on Sexuality'....and 'The Case of Dora'...
At least two of them (Dreams and Sexuality) which are considered 'classic' -- Classical Psychoanalytic -- works...
And I myself have found significant value in these two Freudian works...
To be sure, I am not writing off Freud's Fantasy Theory...
Just 'realigning it' as one 'bipolar half' of my 'bipolar theory'...
Of 'Reality-Fantasy' or 'Traumacy-Fantasy' Theory...
Working both polarities of Freudian Psychoanalysis --
Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis...
Towards the middle....towards creative integration...
So rather than questioning...or vilifying...Freud's motivation...
Which no one will ever know fully...or with certainty...
Or asking the question...
Should we treat Freud like Pete Rose or Barry Bonds...
And pull him out of 'The Psychologists' Hall of Fame'...
Instead putting him in 'The Psychologists' Hall of Shame'...
Freud was still the greatest psychologist who ever lived...
And I simply wish to extend his greatness that much further...
Through all 50 years of his theoretical writing...
Regardless of The Skeletons that Freud carried...
In his 'Personality Closet'...
His 'ID and IT Box'...
I would prefer to work with both his 'Dominant Theory' (Fantasy Theory)...
And his 'Suppressed-Shadow Theory' (Reality-Traumacy-Seduction Theory)..
And find a way in which they can 'sing and dance' together...
Create harmony together...
Like the brass instruments and wind instruments...
In the hands of a good conducter...
Make beautiful harmony together...
If you have a 'left-handed theory',
This theory is obviously not going to properly explain...
'Right-handed reality'...
Nor will a 'right-handed theory'...
Properly explain 'left-handed reality'...
If you have a woman who walks into Psychoanalytic Therapy...
And wants to talk about a past or present 'traumacy'...
What good is a 'fantasy theory' -- at least in and by itself --
To properly understand and/or explain 'traumatic experiences'...
In a person's life...
And if a woman walks into therapy...and eventually tells you...
She was sexually assaulted or molested or seduced as a child...
As an analyst, are you going to sit there and say or believe
That she is 'lying' to your face...
And/or can't tell the difference between...
'Fact' and 'ficticious fantasy'...
Or wants to 'hide' her 'private fantasy'...
Behind a 'traumatic memory'?
That is extremely disrespectful...
And not something that male or female psychoanalysts...
Do to men...
The inequality of the classical psychoanalytic...
Treatment of the sexes...
Jumps out at me...
Like the fantasy vision of Freud...
Attending a women's Victorian 'Suffragete' Meeting..
(Which leading up to April 21st, 1896...
I could have actually seen Freud doing...
Indeed, at the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology...
On April 21st, 1896....
Freud actually was a one man crusader...
Protesting against his female clients' childhood 'suffrage'...)
It would be the one and only time..
He seemed to get the message loud and clear...
From all the professional men in his audience that night...
That 'sexual assault against women -- particularly childhood women'...
Was not a popular 'scientific' topic...
And Freud certainly didn't go back to it much...
If at all...
After that fateful evening...
While at the exact same time...or at least within a week after this meeting...
On April 21st, 1896...
Freud wrote letters to Fliess on April 26th, and May 4th, 1896...
Seemingly (my interpretation along with Masson's)...
Still...riddled with internal guilt over the botched Emma Ekstein...
Nasal Surgery by Fliess a whole year earlier...
But unlike the horror that Freud felt during...
And following an emergency checkup...
After Fliess had gone back to Berlin...
And another doctor pulled about a 'yard' of gauze...
Out from poor Emma's bad infected nasal passages...
Now a year later, Freud was in the process of seemingly...
Denying that neither Fliess nor himself were responsible...
For the hemmorage that almost led to her bleeding to death...
Because now Freud was suggesting that Emma...
Was an 'hysterical bleeder'..who 'bled out of longing'...
To see in loving fashion...
Her two 'Keystone Therapists'....
Who had butchered her...
And almost ended her 'hysteria' once and for all...
It was on these two days -- April 26th and May 4th --
That Freud's 'Fantasy Theory'...was in the process...
Of being born...
Because how much further a jump was it...
To argue that a woman who had been sexually assaulted as a child...
Had 'fabricated' and 'ficticiously fantasized'...
The whole childhood sexual assault and/or seduction...
Memory...
The supposed 'memory' now became a 'fantasy'...
Shared by all women as children...
And 'unconsciously distorted from fantasy to alleged memory'...
Did Freud actually get one case...
Of a woman who actually fabricated a memory...
And then he generalized from this one case to the whole female sex?
Or did he generalize from the Emma Ekstein 'hysterical bleeder' case...
The woman who bled because 'she longed for him'...'pined for him'?
Which just happened to get him off the 'medical hook' for that creative explanation....
Just like Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory...
Got all the professional men of Vienna off the hook...
For any possible 'family transgressions and secrets'...
Most notably perhaps...even Fliess himself...
Whose son became a psychoanalyst...and wrote...
In words quoted from Masson in 'In The Freud Archives' (I have to be careful as Janet Malcolm seemed to have a propensity for stretching Masson's quotes into her own 'fictional creations'...)
Said Fliess' son, 'People are made sick by real traumacies; not by fantasies.'...which seems to have been the quote that propelled Masson right into the middle of The Seduction Theory Controversy
(See Masson, The Assault on Truth:
Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory)...
I may not totally agree with him...
'Fantasies' can motivate a person to do a lot of 'sick things'...
But it is usually on the heels of some sort of childhood traumacy...
That got him eventually to the 'compensatory' fantasy...
Every theory needs to carry this 'caveat emptor'...
'Things can always be different'...
Every theory carries the seeds to its own self-destruction...
Every theory carries 'the death instinct' inside it...
'The death instinct' comes alive when the theory...
Can't keep up with life's every movement, evolution...
Endless mutations...
And permutations...
When a therapist is involved...
In bringing the death instinct alive in a theory...
By using it when it is not relevant...
Then the therapist is a part of the problem...
Not the solution...
When the best judges in the land
Can't always get the 'historical truth' right...
What makes you think that a therapist or a theorist...
Can do the job better?
What makes us think that we are the 'King or Queen of Truth'?
A theory? A left or right-handed theory?
That has 'boxed our mindset in'?
And closed our mind off...
From other outside and/or bi-polar...
Possibilities of Finding Truth...
Elsewhere...
And/or in the 'convergement' of two opposite theories...
Coming together in the same space and time...
Having access to lots of other possible theoretical paradigms...
And/or at least a good 'bipolar, dialectic one'....
May be a better way to go...
To save traumacy theory for traumacies...
And fantasy theory for theories...
And catching some human behavior...
In the crossfire of both...
Such as...
The fantasy being the reverse of the traumacy...
As a 'compensatory defense mechanism'...
Like the superiorty or security striving...
Being the reverse of the inferiority or insecurity feeling...
Phobia and counter-phobia riding together on the same saddle...
The counter-phobia being the intended self-therapy for the phobia..
Little Siggy Freud is chased out of his parents' bedroom
By his dad -- his main childhood 'transference rejector'...
For what little Siggy had just shockingly witnessed...
His parents doing...or his dad doing to his mom...
Completely non-understandable for a 3 year old tyke...
Theories already abounding in his little tyke mind...
Was daddy peeing on mommy?
That's certainly what it looked like....
Perched over top of her like that...
For 80 more years the Freudian theories would keep coming...
For better and/or for worse...
As little Siggy ended up spending...
Almost his whole adult life...
Symbolically or metaphorically...
'Staring in his patients' bedroom doors'...
His female patients lying on his 'professional couch'...
Like his mother lay across 'the primal bed'...
This is where Freud really got 'The Oedipal Complex Theory' from...
Either directly or indirectly....consciously or subconsciously...
The Oedipal Complex actually has significant value here...
Not as a 'cover-up' for childhood sexual assaults...
Amazingly...coincidently of course...
All of these problems that Freud was having...
In the spring of 1896...
Nobody wanting to hear about childhood sexual assault...
The real messy Emma Ekstein case...
Freud's absence of patients...
And income....
Seemed to all magically 'blow away'...
Like 'in the wind'...
When Freud stopped writing about childhood sexual assaults..
And their connection to hysteria...
And obviously,
Freud started getting patients referred to him again...
The Emma Ekstein case...
As messy as it was...
Finally started to 'blow away into history'...
Only to be unlocked again...
With the release of ALL of Freud's most private letters...
To Wilhelm Fliess...
Indeed, Freud's character and integrity...
And honesty and credibility...
Only started to be questioned with the release
Of his full private letters...
If Anna Freud had known that she was about to...
Open Pandora's Box...
She would have obviously never released Freud's letters...
To Masson...or to anyone else...
I finally found a quote that I have been looking for for some time now...
It is a private letter written to Jeffrey Masson when he had started his 'anti-Freudian campaign' after having gone through all of Freud's most private letters...I found this in 'In The Freud Archives, by Janet Malcolm (who Masson later sued for 'misquoting' him...)...
...............................................................................
Of course, I have not read the lecture you gave in New Haven, but to me it seems out of the question that there is valid proof for the abandonment of the seduction theory for reasons of external rejection, nor can there be any valid sign that in spite of this abandonment it was kept up secretly. In fact, there is abundent proof to the contrary, not only in all of the later case histories, but in the whole of the analytic theory altogether. Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of fantasy life, conscious or unconscious fantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards (italics added by Janet Malcolm, author of In The Freud Archives, pg.62-63)....
I know the Fliess letters so well, but I just cannot imagine what in them led you to this conclusion to which you have come.
I look forward to hearing more from you.
Yours sincerely,
Anna Freud
...........................................................................................................
With all due respect Ms. Anna Freud....and it is obviousy almost 20 years too late now for you to find any type of decent closure on this matter...but try reading the letters of April 26th and May 4th, 1896...again...and tell me that you don't see what Masson, myself, and a host of other readers and historians have seen -- that these were not Freud's finest Winston Churchill-like hours...
And Eissler wrote to Masson as well when Masson had just stirred up this major hornet's nest by what he was quoted as saying to The New York Times....
.........................................................................................
'You propose here -- without documentation -- the existence of a trait in Freud's character which implies a grave accusation against his reliability, honesty, and solidity. Not even his worst enemies have ever claimed that he evolved theories in order to make his person acceptable to the academic community. If you want to escape criticism, you have to present solid and convincing documentation.'
............................................................
Well, duh! Come on Dr. Eissler, you are a much smarter man than that even if you were fiercely and blindly loyal to the old man...The critical documents were locked up in a tomb for over 40 years so how could any other Freudian and/or anti-Freudian historian and/or scholar and/or student comment on Freud's character in the way that Masson did -- without seeing these infamous letters? -- dgb
I used to think that Freud was reliable, honest, and solid too....until I read the Freud to Fliess letters.....particularly as pertained to the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco... Once all the letters were out in the open for the whole world to see....these three letters in particular did not shine a good light on Freud's character....Things had changed. Freud had moved into a 'self-preservation panic and defense mode'.....and come out of it using the classic Freudian defense mechanism of 'denial' -- and 'cover-up'.
Max Schur could see this. Masson could see this. Swailes probably saw this. I saw this. Even Janet Malcolm -- protector of the Freudian status-quo -- could see this. Why do you think Sigmund Freud wanted the Fliess letters destroyed -- and would have destroyed them in a minute had he gotten hold of them?
If there was cocaine involved in the Freud-Fliess-Ekstein medical disaster, then that would make the whole Emma Ekstein fiasco ten times worse because Freud had already seen one of his friends/patients die while he was prescribing him cocaine back in 1891.
In Canada here, one of our best politicians, Jack Layton, just died...and one journalist wrote about Layton (using hockey terminology) that Layton always 'played the puck, not the man'. While that characteristic is admirable, there comes a point when we all have to be accountable for our own behavior -- particularly for appalling behavior. And Sigmund Freud really messed up between the Emma Ekstein operation in February, 1895, and the time of these three letters in April and May, 1896.
For Freud to write to Fliess on April 26th, 1896,
....First of all, Ekstein. I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing, and probably occurred at the sexually relevant times (the woman, out of resistance, has not yet supplied me with the dates)....(The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, pg. 183, Translated and Edited by Jeffrey Masson)....
when Fliess and Freud almost killed the poor woman through a medical surgery that they had no business conducting, is simply apalling therapeutic and ethical medical behavior.
He and Fliess simply blew it, big time....
I am sure that Freud was appalled at himself....and perhaps even Fliess although he was so 'love-smitten' by Fliess that he was trying to cover Fliess' hind end even before his own. It turns out that Emma Ekstein was not only the 'sacrifical lamb' during the operation (although to be fair, Freud had the same operation done by Fliess on his own nasal passages during the same visit...he too probably had to have some of the 'cocaine boulders' taken out of his own nose so that he could breathe better, and let all the pus drain out from behind the boulders...sorry, but I can't help but be a little sarcastic...)
There simply are no more rocks for Sigmund Freud to hide behind....not Kurt Eissler, not his daughter Anna Freud, not Janet Malcolm.....
In the immortal words of Bob Dylan...
Yes, how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
-- Blowing in The Wind, Bob Dylan
......................................................
And...
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked...'
-- It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, Bob Dylan
................................................................................................
And...
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll -- By Bob Dylan
...................................................................................
Friends, Romans, Countrymen...
I come here to honour Freud,
Not to vilify him,
Because Freud was an honourable man...
Can we even say that Freud was generally a 'good' man...
Who got caught doing a couple, or perhaps even more than a couple, of very 'bad deeds'... His legacy would certainly seem to me to be compromised... To me, he kind of emerges as more of a 'Bobby Bonds' character type now....a little more...or more than a little more...
'Anally toxic'...
However,
I will leave it for each of you to decide for yourselves...
And I still have the greatest of respect for his overall work...
And creative brilliance...
I don't want to go back to Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory...
I just want to properly integrate 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis with the rest of Classical Psychoanalysis...
Let me just quickly begin to show you how...and then we will call it a day for this essay...
......................................................................
In the early 1900s, a host of different scientists started developing 'the paradigm of quantum mechanics or quantum physics.
.......................................................................................................
Development of the field was done by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and many others. Ironically, Albert Einstein had serious theoretical issues with quantum mechanics and tried for many years to disprove or modify it. See...About.com Physics
.............................................................................................
What's Special About Quantum Physics?:
In the realm of quantum physics, observing something actually influences the physical processes taking place. Light waves act like particles and particles act like waves (called wave particle duality). Matter can go from one spot to another without moving through the intervening space (called quantum tunnelling). Information moves instantly across vast distances. In fact, in quantum mechanics we discover that the entire universe is actually a series of probabilities. Fortunately, it breaks down when dealing with large objects, as demonstrated by the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment.
See...About.com Physics
................................................................
Little did anyone properly appreciate -- least of all Freud -- that the scientists listed above working on the development of Quantum Physics were using a 'Hegelian Paradigm' of 'thesis-counter-thesis-synthesis'.
1. Thesis: Particle Theory; 2. Wave Theory; 3. Synthesis: Wave-Particle Duality Theory
Freud could have easily applied the same type of Heglian and Quantum Dialectic Logic to 'The Traumacy-Fantasy Schism' that he had created in Classical Psychoanalysis. But unfortunately -- he didn't.
1. Thesis: Traumacy-Seduction Theory; 2. Counter-Thesis: 'Fantasy-Impulse Theory'; 3. Synthesis: 'Traumacy-Fantasy Duality Theory' -- or 'Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
So here is another name for what I am doing here: 'DGB Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalytic Theory'.
The key DGB Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalytic formula here runs as follows:
...............................................................................................
'The adult transference fantasy-impulse is generally the inverse or the reverse of the childhood transference traumacy memory and/or relationship. Sometimes the prototype of the adult transference fantasy-impulse can be found right there in one of the person's earliest childhood memories; othertimes, it has to be surmised and interpreted from later events, symptoms, fantasy-impulse-drives, sublimations, projections, and/or repetition compulsions.' -- dgb., September 11, 2011.
...........................................................................................
In the 1980s, I called this 'universal transference phenomenon' (Brian Bird) -- 'transference reversal'. As will be developed later, every 'transference reversal complex' can be seen to have at least two components to it: a) a 'positive transference reversal fantasy-impulse complex'; and b) a 'negative transference reversal fantasy-impulse complex'.
Aldo Carotenuto, author of 'Kant's Dove: The History of Transference in Psychoanalysis' (1986, 1991), noting the possible underpinnings of Adlerian Theory in the transference phenomenon, called it 'The Handicap Challenge'.
We all have self-perceived 'handicaps' in our character makeup that we strive to overcome with 'increased or supervalent cerebral activity'. (Adler, Freud -- working in harmony with each other, November 7th, 1906, 'The Minutes of The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society', Chapter 5, pgs. 36-47.)
Happier times...November 7th, 1906...Freud and Adler on the same page together...Ah, if it could have only stayed that way...
Maybe, through my integrative post-Hegelian spirit and work...
I can at least partly bring them back in harmony together...
At least that is my 'fantasy meets reality' intent...
-- dgb, Sept 14th, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
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