Reconstructed and expanded again, October 17th, 2011...
Friedrich Nietzsche, born October 15th, 1844....Died August 25th, 1900...
Maybe I am not doing proper justice to Nietzsche here...but I thought I would pay tribute to him on his birthday by combining two of his more famous quotes...and then adding a little more...
However, before we get there, below is an assortment of original Nietzschean quotes from the website 'Brainy Quotes'...
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Here is one that I really like....
All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Another one I like...
Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.
Friedrich Nietzsche
And an assortment more...
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions. (This one sounds like Hegel and/or Nietzsche from his first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy'. -- dgb)
Friedrich Nietzsche
This one has a zinger attached to it...
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
They keep coming...
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fear is the mother of morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Here's the other quote I was looking for...the first and the last one, often highlighted on the tv show, Criminal Minds
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche
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And now for my integrative creation....for better or for worse...I think I have something worthwhile to add here....
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If we stare too long or too deeply into our own private Abyss, our 'Id Vault' or 'Shadow', we may find a 'Monster' that stares back at us....(Or perhaps the ghost of Nietzsche still trying to free himself from the Abyss of his own insanity)...a 'Monster' -- symbolic or real --ready to pull us down with him....or ready to jump up, out of our Abyss, and into our Conscious Personality...our 'Conscious Ego-as-a-Whole'....to bring either darkness to the light of our day...or conversely....to bring 'light' and 'healing' to the darkness of our day...
Our 'Monster' can be a 'Bad Guy' who brings us nothing but bad will, destruction and self-destruction....and/or our 'Monster'...our 'Id' or 'It' or 'Shadow' can sometimes be a'Superhero' who has the potential to 'cure us' of our 'neurosis' and/or 'psychopathology' or even to cure the 'socio-neurosis' and/or 'socio-psychopathology' of a whole culture that cannot or will not see its own 'neurotic cultural blindspot' or 'centre of socio-psychopathology'....Erich Fromm called this 'the pathology of normalcy' and R.D. Laing and Thomas Szaz -- as well as many other well-known socio-psychologists -- spent much of their professional careers emphasizing the 'neurotic and/or pathological cultural factors' involved in 'individual neurosis and psychopathology' that can be like 'the canary in the coal mine'...
Only there may be thousands and thousands of 'canaries' showing basically the same pathological symtoms -- metaphorically speaking, 'lack of oxygen, vibrancy, passion, movement, and life' -- for example, some form of 'existential neurosis', 'chronic depression', 'covert, overt, and/or displaced/transferred anxiety and/or rage', etc...
Our 'monster from our abyss' could be our own personal 'Compensatory Superhero' to protect us against those might be trying to 'squeeze the existential life and passion out of us'...
These 'cultural pathologies -- disguised as 'cultural norms and written or unwritten laws' in a society that may not be 'normal' at all -- may indeed be hostile to human growth and wellness -- and, in their cultural pathology, these sociopathological norms may contribute to the growth of individual 'psychopathology', 'neurosis', 'mental illness', physical illness, the imprisonment and/or institutionalization of men and women who do not deserve to be imprisoned or institutionalized, and the suppression, repression, oppression... of upper, middle, and/or lower classes for the same or different reasons...
'The Monster', the 'Bad Guy' or 'The Bad Guy turned Superhero' -- such as Nietzsche in his hayday with his 'rhetorically hard-hitting Hammer' -- can be either 'bad' or 'good' depending on the context of the situation -- and what is being 'rhetorically hammered away at' (i.e., 'deconstructed'), metaphorically speaking, of course.
Every 'corrupt' or 'narcissistically pathological' culture needs a 'Bad Guy-Superhero' to stand up with courage against all that needs to be 'culturally detoxified and cleansed'...and against all those with power who abuse and exploit that power, and do not want to see the status-quo changed...who profit or otherwise benefit from the status-quo the way it is -- in ways that are conspiring to hurt and/or even kill innocent people in the process...
Freud could have been one of those Courageous-Bad Guy-Superheroes' (and still partly was one) but he either ran out of ethical-moral courage (Masson's thesis) and/or he simply had other 'fish to fry' -- namely his Dream Theory, Fantasy Theory, Instinctual Impulse Theory, Childhood Sexuality Theory, Oedipal Theory...-- that he thought (he was mistaken) opposed his Traumacy and Seduction Theories...
Professionally speaking, it was not Freud's 'traumacy theory' that his scientific co-workers and superiors were 'all bent out of shape about'...For example, on November 29th, 1895, Freud writes to Fliess that 'I am in top working form, have nine to eleven hours of hard work, six to eight analytic cases a day -- the most beautiful things, of course, all sorts of new material.'
It was not Freud's and Breuer's 'traumacy theory' that was causing the good doctors of Vienna grief but rather Freud's sliding more and more into the 'sexual traumacy etiology' formula -- which evolved into 'The Seduction Theory' of early 1896: Freud theorized -- much to chagrin of his co-author of 'Studies on Hysteria', Breuer, who Freud was becoming more and more estranged from -- that his adult patients had been 'sexually assaulted' and/or, more lightly put, 'seduced' as young children, and that it was 'the repression' of this childhood memory of a 'real event' (or series of memories of such events) that was the underlying 'essential cause' of 'hysteria'. This was the part of Freud's theory -- not entirely supported by even Breuer (Breuer thought that Freud was 'overgeneralizing' which he was, and furthermore, Breuer was more 'politically attuned' to what kind of 'reaction' Freud was going to get if he launched this new theory -- uncompromised and unconditionalized -- on the scientfic community. On both counts, Breuer was right, and on the evening of April 21st, 1896, Freud took the full wrath and ridicule of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society...the leader, Krafft-Ebing, again calling Freud's newest essay and theory a 'scientific fairy tale'....
However, there were underlying 'ethical' (and/or narcissistic, unethical) reasons, at work amongst the scientific community, some of which they would own up to, and some of which, perhaps they wouldn't.
First and foremost, none of the doctors of Vienna wanted to 'probe into the privacy of their patiencts' sexual lives'. There was also the issue of how much 'reality story' a therapist/doctor was getting from his 'hysterical client' vs. how much 'fantasy story' the therapist/doctor might be getting from his patient, with neither the patient nor the well-intentioned doctor perhaps being able to 'sort out what was what' -- how much was 'reality story' and how much was 'fantasy story'. Perhaps, in the end, this too became Freud's own biggest conundrum.
Beneath that, there was the 'unadmitted potential conspiracy theory' advanced by Masson that none of the 'good doctors' wanted anything to do with the legal ramifications of Freud's 'childhood sexual assault' theory, nor in particular, might some of the doctors want anyone prying into their own private sexual lives, and what they might be doing behind their own closed doors at home.
Has any of this really changed today?
The only theory I am prepared to advance at this point in time is that there was a 'Perfect Storm' coming together in the spring of 1896:
1. Freud's advancing 'Dream and Fantasy Theory', some of it perhaps more influenced by Fliess than academics have usually given him credit for. Fliess might have been a far more intelligent man than most of the academics have surmised -- intelligent, assertive, persuasive, self-confident, narcissistic -- even if he and/or some/many of his 'seemingly hare-brained, offside' theories didn't go anywhere except perhaps down a 'neurotic, pathological trail' that Freud unbelievably followed, like a little puppy dog or like a man completely intoxicated and/or in love -- 'starry-eyed, approval-seeking, and submissive' in the context of another man's perceived intellectual superiority and willingness to stand alone in the face of significant social and professional confrontation and ostracism brought on by the man's 'outrageous, risky, new theories' that others are dumbfounded by, and/or abhorred by....There were some heavy-duty, over-idealized and over-idolized 'projective transferences' going on here that suggest that Freud was looking through a mirror at his 'idealized, narcissistic, self'...and Freud for the better part of seventeen years between 1887 and 1904 basically used Fliess as his own private 'psychoanalyst';
2. The Emma Ekstein medical fiasco of February, 1895, with Freud and Fliess as her unintentional 'medical victimizers' -- the incident didn't seem to bother Fliess much even though it was he who left 'the long piece of gauze' in her nasal cavity without telling anyone, and then headed back from Vienna to Berlin. Freud was much more bothered by it -- for the better part of a year he was riddled with guilt -- until, under Fliess' influence -- on April 26th, 1896, Freud writes to Fliess...
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'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).'
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Ouch! This, to me, reads like Freud himself having difficulty separating 'reality theory' from 'fantasy theory'....'rationalization', 'justification', 'denial'...seemed to have been his relevant 'defence mechanisms'...for what seems like a pretty clear-cut story of two 'medically offside doctors' in this case engaging in an application of Fliess' brand new 'nasal-sexual theory' that Freud bought into and which may have had more to do with their shared 'cocaine misadventures' than anything else that makes sense (and quite possibly, knowing Freud's propensity for 'giving out cocaine like candy in his earlier years' perhaps even Emma Ekstein was involved). Horrifically, Ekstein almost bled to death due to another unsuspecting doctor, weeks later, arriving at the scene of Emma's infected nasal passage that wouldn't heal (Fliess was long gone back to Berlin) -- and pulling at something in her nasal passage that shockingly became visible as the 'lost gauze in her nasal passage' that Fliess put in there -- and then forgot about. Freud put together this 'longing' theory in his April 26th and May 4th letters to Fliess, this 'longing' theory became the essence of Freud's evolving 'fantasy' and 'wish-fulfillment' theory which lay at the heart of his thesis in 'The Interpretation of Dreams', also his new, evolving theory of hysteria...and the essence of what is still known today as 'Classical' Psychoanalysis, built on the ashes of Freud's earlier 'traumacy, sexual traumacy, and/or seduction theories';
3. The Scientific Meeting of the evening of April 21st, 1896 seems to have been the 'icing on the cake' for the demise of the 'traumacy-seduction theories'....Freud partly held on a little longer but by the fall of 1897, he no longer believed in the traumacy and seduction theories; in their place he was just in the process of creating his new 'childhood sexuality' and 'Oedipal' theories...and the rest is history...
Freud could have been a Hero for The Women's Rights Movement, and instead, for whatever the reason, he ended up seemingly 'betraying' The Women's Rights Movement, seemingly betraying his female clients -- at least betraying a trust in their credibiltiy to deliver to him, 'true, reality-based memories' -- and in particular, Freud betrayed those women amongst his clients, and indeed, those female clients belonging to the whole history of Psychoanalysis after 1897 who actually were sexually assaulted as children...and treated like they were not...
Ah, Freud could have been a greater hero than he was if only he had known how to 'put Humpty Dumpty back together again -- properly -- which he did not'...
In order to have done this, Freud would have had to hang in there more forcefully with his 'traumacy' and 'seduction' theories which of course he did not -- perhaps he started to 'lose moral courage in the light of The Emma Ekstein affair, and/or in light of professional, political, and economic leverage possibly being used against him 'to help motivate him' -- shall we call it 'negative reinforcement' -- to change his latest 'scientific fairy tale theory', after April 21st, 1896.
We will never know for sure.
Freud's 'Abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theories' remains an essentially, unsolved mystery except in the eyes of those academics and professionals who hang hard on Freud's reasons to Fliess, and later publicly written up reasons for doing what he did back in his obviously very stressful spring of 1896... In one letter to Fliess -- I cannot find the exact letter right now -- Freud wrote that he was 'morally exhausted'....But did he 'morally cave'....or did he hang in there strong enough to do what he thought was 'morally, theoretically, and clinically right' -- that is the question! One thing for sure, he did not write much about childhood sexual abuse for the rest of his life...it is hard not to say that he knew 'which side of his bread was buttered on'....Would any of us have been any different under the extenuating circumstances where none of his professional co-workers and superiors wanted to read or hear about what he had to say in this department? Not that the whole subject matter of 'childhood sexuality' was anymore welcomed, but at least it didn't have any possible 'legal ramifications' attached to it...
The paradoxical part of this whole theoretical and therapeutic conundrum is that you can reach back into most of Freud's and Breuer's case histories and find just as much 'fantasy theory' as you can 'reality theory'...women suppressing their 'fantasies' as well as their 'traumacies'...both 'sexual' and 'non-sexual', 'romantic' and 'non-romantic'...the minute you try to 'compartmentalize' human thinking, feeling, and acting, you are bound to be dissappointed unless you decide to use 'multi-bi-polar compartments' because, otherwise, 'human behavior' will always 'slip outside of your theorized compartments' -- even your/my 'multi-bi-polar ones'....But at least my 'multi-bi-polar compartments' can capture more human behavior than either of Freud's 'reality theory' or 'fantasy theory' taken separately....
You cannot separate man from either of his 'real perceptions' or his 'fantasized perceptions' and try to pretend that you have a theory that covers 'the all of human behavior'...That's what Freud tried to do -- first going the one way, then the opposite way, like physisists first postulated the 'particle theory' of matter and then 'the wave theory' until one 'dialectically integrative' physicist -- I have forgotten which one at this moment -- came up with the brilliant idea of integrating the two opposing theories together in what became known as 'Quantum Physics'....
Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis unfortunately never evolved that far -- at least until now, and what you are reading here -- 'the anal retentive, introjecting' Classical Psychoanalysts continued to buy into the fossilized 'Classical' version of what Freud gave us, and the 'smarter, more flexible, evolving psychoanalysts opted out of Classical Psychoanalysis, and into Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Bionian Psychoanalysis, or whatever else...
And I am doing what someone should have done a long time ago -- 're-integrating a split personality in Psychoanalysis' -- or today it might be called 'dissociative identity disorder'....'Fantasy' Psychoanalysis (1896-1939) was -- and still is -- the alter-ego of 'Reality Psychoanalysis' (1893-1896)...And Freud couldn't put the two together properly....thus, Psychoanalysis became 'dissociated' from its 'Central, Reality-Processing, Ego -- or that part of the Central Ego dealing with the proper perception, interpretation, and evaluation of reality' once Freud fell in love with 'Instinct Theory, Fantasy Theory, Dream Theory, Childhood Sexuality Theory, and of course...'The Oedipal Complex'....Perhaps Freud's 'Narcissistic Theory' was meant as a 'compromise-formation' between 'ego and self-esteem theory' (Adler) on the one hand, and his sexually based theories on the other hand. Also, Freud's 'death instinct' theory was purposely or non-purposedly used to go back and 'cover up' where Freud's earlier 'Traumacy Theory' went AWOL...
Even Freud had his 'Abysses' and 'Monsters' and he did not always handle them properly...
What have you got holed up down there in your Abyss, or 'locked up in your 'Id Vault'? -- a 'good, life energy' that you are 'over-suppressing', 'over-restraining'? Or a 'toxic, death or destructive energy' that may need the help of a good therapist to help you 'detoxify' and 'heal' it slowly?
If we have 'over-suppressed life energy' trapped down in our Abyss, in our Id Vault, then with or without help, we need to bring it up out of 'The Shadow' of our personality and into our 'Conscious Ego Domain' -- into your interactions with the world to give our life more of the 'passion, intensity, vibrancy, and engagement' that we all need to live a 'full life', not a 'half a life' or an 'estranged life'.
On the other hand, if our Abysss or Id Vault is full of 'toxic, transference complexes', then it would be prudent to be a lot more careful -- probably with professional help -- in the way that we deal with and aim to 'detoxify' or 'tame' these 'bad Monster transference complexes'.
Maybe some of these negative forces shouldn't be released at all -- and in the worst case scenarios -- it may be the person himself who needs to be 'institutionalized' if he or she has shown an inability to 'restrain toxic id forces' in his or her personality that are capable of unleashing 'harmful destruction' on either the world and/or on him or herself. We see this type of person -- the worst of the worst -- in horrific newspaper articles, journals, and/or books, on any 'Criminal Minds' show that we may happen to watch...'the violent serial victimizers'...
Nietzsche's 'Abyss' and 'Monster' were the precursors to Freud's 'Id'....and Jung's 'Shadow'...
When I was writing my earliest papers on 'Transference' back in the 1980s, I once was going to title the largest of these papers: 'Transference: Taming The Dragon'....the idea being that the 'tail of the dragon' was our 'childhood traumatic memories' and 'the head of the dragon was our 'here-and-now transference projections, identifications, compensations, reaction-formations, re-creations, repetition-compulsions, sublimations, dissociations, complexes, ego-games...'.
Our 'transference complexes and/or games' are largely subconscious, very obsessive-compulsive, very addictive, and at times, can be highly destructive and/or self-destructive...or the reverse....brilliantly creative, enlightening, constructive to the ongoing evolution of man and society....
Freud at the toddler age of 3 or 4 was prevented by his dad from 'being enlightened' on just exactly what he saw when he busted in unexpectedly to his parents' bedroom....He spent most of his entire adult life addressing the issue of 'sexuality' relative to 'normal' and 'neurotic' human behavior, spending thousands of hours on this subject matter, 'enlightening himself' where his dad wouldn't...
Alfred Adler had a case of 'rickets' that prevented him from walking until he was four years old, and Adler also came close to dying of pneumonia when he was four years old...Hearing the doctor say to his father, 'Your boy is lost' due to the pneumonia, it was at this young age that Adler decided he was going to be a physician.
Furthermore, Adler introduced Freud and The Vienna Circle to the idea of 'organ inferiority' and 'organ compensation' that later, after Adler had separated from Freud, Adler turned into two of his most important concepts -- 'the inferiority feeling' and 'the (compensatory) striving for superiority' (which can be in either a positive and/or a negative, 'neurotic' or 'pathological' way)...
The closest Freud came to Adler's concept of 'compensation' and 'superiority striving' was towards 1920 (particularly in 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle', 1920), when Freud started writing about 'the mastery compulsion' but unfortunately Freud left this path and went 'the death instinct' path instead....Bad choice -- Freud would have been better off advancing the idea of 'the mastery compulsion', particularly if he hadn't become 'professionally neurotic' himself because then he could have reached back into his 'full bag of theoretical and therapeutic wisdom' and advanced a theory like this (with Adler's help):
1. 'Traumatic and/or Narcissistic Early Childhood Transference Memory and/or Relationship' leads to....
2. 'Inferiority Feeling and Complex' ('Lifelong Narcissistic/Self-Esteem Injury) which leads to...
3. 'Compensatory Superiority Striving of Different But Interconnected Types (Melanie Klein's 'Positions'; Eric Berne's 'Ego States' such as: 'The Approval-Seeking Child' Position, 'The Angry, Schizoid Child' Position, 'The Angry, Aggressive Child' Position, 'The Narcissistic, Hedonistic, Rebellious Child' Position, 'The Nurturing (and/or 'Approval-Seeking') Parent' Position, 'The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Parent' Position, 'The Righteous, Ethical Parent' Position...)
Usually one of these particular 'ego-positions or states' tends to dominate and becomes what Adler called the person's 'life style (plan)', or what Jung called 'The Personna'...while another particular 'opposing position' (alter-ego) becomes 'suppressed' or 'dissociated' and is pushed back into the 'The Id Vault', 'The Abyss', 'The Shadow'....of the subconscious or 'the strongly restrained conscious (alter-ego)'...
From the 'intra-psychic dynamics' of our different 'ego-states' interacting with each other, and their 'projection' into 'our external world encounters' so too follows the particular dynamics of our 'transference ego-complexes and games'...which we often tend to either play out 'neurotically and erotically with our chosen love partner' or alternatively often play out in 'authoritarian employer/employee relations' or even 'family or friendship relationships' and very often also through 'the sublimation of our transference work energies'....
Such is 'The Universal Nature of Transference Intra-Psychic and Inter-Social Dynamics'
In order to 'tame our transference dragon' -- Nietzsche's Monster -- we need to be able to fully understand all of the 'characteristics' of our dragon and how it can pull us down into our own Private Abyss, our Private Hell...or alternatively, 'break loose' -- like in a 'prison break' (often under the influence of alcohol, drugs, stress, rejection, loss...) and visit us up in our 'Conscious Ego' from the depths of our 'Id Vault'...or 'Nietzschean Abyss' or the 'place of residence' ('Hell') of our 'Faustian Devil'...
Ideally speaking, once we have a full transference understanding of our own unique particular dragon....and its particular strengths, attractions, repulsions, and dangers....
Then perhaps we might be able to look down into our own Private Abyss...and not be quite so afraid...
When we look face to face with our own private dragon...
Perhaps we really have 'tamed' it....
Perhaps we can say to ourselves -- and mean it -- 'I am not going to play this silly, destructive 'Transference Dragon' game anymore...
It may be exciting, scary, dangerous, exhillarating when we win....
But I am tired and getting too old to keep falling off this 'Dragon Roller Coaster game of love and hate...serial seduction and abandonment... lust, power, sexual conquest, and/or rejection...The Don Juan Syndrome, Sexual Addiction, Serial Seductionism and its Neandrathal Cousin -- Serial Sexual Assault....often attractive men in either looks and/or charismatic charm....coming from a subjectively perceived position of 'narcissistic sexual power' and/or its opposite -- with the 'partial id monster' of a rejecting and/or abandoning female transference figure in his childhood (usually the mother) playing a dominant role in this type of man's 'transference psycho-dynamics'.....
Maybe there is an interconnection between our sexual hormones and our Transference Dragon....as our sexual hormones start to slow up, so too does our Transference (Love and Lust) Dragon start to get a little more lethargic....Personally, I would say that 'transference dynamics' tend to escalate and/or remain steady between about 20 and 50 and then start to de-escalate after that with more transference awareness and/or less transference energy....or simply the reluctance to continue to get involved in this type of 'rocky, unstable, high psycho-drama' fashion...
Maybe...
Or maybe not...
Battling with our 'transference dragons' is usually more or less...
A lifelong process....
Those first five or six years are pretty darn critical...
A network of early childhood experiences turned into a network of 'transference learning templates' that create our own private...
'Semi-psychic determinism'...
A ready-made path with a predictable destination and outcome...
Is easier to travel...perhaps...
Than trying to thrash our way through dense, new, uncut forest...with no paths to direct our way...
And no known destination and/or outcome...
New territory can be scary, anxiety-provoking...
With rough terrain,
Mountains...
And new, uncharted abysses...
At four or five years old....
We can make the definitive decision...subconsciously...
That the devil we do know is better than the devil we don't know...
And/or we can bounce back and forth between 'opposite types of devils'...
Or we can play it safe and do our best to 'bury all devils' way down below...
Big life decisions for a four or five year old....
Who certainly doesn't have an 'adult range of experiences' nor an 'adult more logical reasoning process' upon which to draw....
These fast made, early childhood 'prototype', 'template', 'transference' decisions,
Get 'cemented' in fast...
And don't change much over time...
They remain our 'lifelong buddies' -- and/or 'monsters'...
Our 'Bainian Transference Dragons' or 'Nietzschean Abyss Monsters' from down below...
Nietzsche led the way into 'The Psychic Abyss'...
And Freud (The Id) and Jung (The Shadow) followed where Nietzsche left off....
-- dgb, October 15th, 16th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
My son was born on October 15th, 1984...
