Freud created his concept of 'the id' in an effort to help clarify his image of the unconscious. However, paradoxically, in doing so, he created some new conceptual ambiguity -- and a reduced perception/conceptualization of the unconscious.
Problem Number 1: How can the id be viewed as being a metaphysical 'structural container' -- containing the 'instincts' on the one hand -- and then be viewed as the sum total of the instincts themselves on the other hand, not to mention being viewed as a 'primitive, narcissistic, uncivil mind-brain' with the sole function of satisfying these same instincts from a third perspective. That's basically three different views or definitions of the id all rolled into one.
It's like saying, from a male perspective, that the prostate and semen are the same thing, and/or the testicles and sperm are the same thing -- with a primitive, narcissistic, uncivil masculine mind-brain controlling the functions of both which many people jokingly say that there is. How many times have we heard the expression that men have two brains: one above their neck, and the other below their waist.
Consequently, I justified the existence of a distinction between: 1. the id; 2. the id vault; and 'the id ego'. But this doesn't go quite far enough....
Problem 2: In reducing the unconscious to 'the id', Freud screened out -- or at least failed to clearly distinguish (at least to my knowledge) other important elements of the unconscious such as memories and traumacies as well as fantasies and as well as 'functional compartments' that have functions other than that of the id.
What at one time in 'The Interpretation of Dreams' Freud called 'The Dream Censor', I call 'The Dream, (Fantasy, and Nightmare) Weaver' allowing for the fact that 'dream, fantasy, and nightmare symbolization can, and often do in many dreams (the manifest content), both hide and allude to their underlying meaning, fears, and/or wishes (the latent content). I do not subscribe to Freud's one-sided theory that all dreams reflect wish-fulfillments although it might be more appropriately stated that dreams often reflect cathartic emotional releases. Whereas psychoanalysis in its very beginning stage (Breuer and Anna O.) was called 'chimney sweeping' and 'the talking cure', dreams can be viewed as a second type of 'chimney sweeping' using 'hallucinated picture and/or other forms of sensory symbolization' to clear -- or at least temporarily clear -- our 'Shadow-Id' of its day residue with a generally emotional abreaction or cathartic, working-through, release effect...
From an integrative DGB-Gestalt perspective, our dreams and/or nightmares and/or fantasies help us to work through -- or at least temporarily and/or partly work through -- our 'Shadow-Id' emotional unfinished business. In 'Post-Stress Traumacy Syndrome', this 'working through' process may take a long, or very long time -- in fact, we may never completely work through the 'perceived traumacy' in the course of our whole lives....such as in the case of war veterans....Thus, the underlying reason for what Freud called 'the repetition compulsion' -- i.e., we 'repeat' in order to work through either an 'obsessional desire' and/or an 'unfinished, unworked through, 'ego-traumacy' or 'narcissistic (self-esteem) injury'.
The reason that I choose to use the term 'Shadow-Id' rather than just 'Id' is that 'The Shadow-Id' allows for the conceptual visualization of 'memories, traumacies, ego-traumacies, and narcissistic fixations conflating/integrating/synthesizing with id impulses/drives/desires/fantasies'. That is a part of the clinical equation that Freud basically left out when he abandoned his 'reality-traumacy-seduction triadic theory', to be less appropriately be replaced in 1920 with his 'entropy and death instinct theory' although that might in some cases of aging patients be a part of the clinical equation as well. Aging cells, organs, cell-functions, and organ functions lead to less and less energy over time (oxidation and entropy) and eventually death. Our bodies are born from the vitamins and minerals of the land, and to the land, do our vitamins and minerals -- and us -- eventually return.... I almost sound like Freud's mom - and Freud. And the 'constancy principle', 'the conservation of energy', 'entropy theory', 'death instinct theory' -- but I don't abandon reality, traumacy, and sexual traumacy like Freud did.
When our 'Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy' (which I will shorten to 'sieve energy') is 'unbound' or 'leaking' -- like a 'sieve' -- then this 'unbound energy' is going to have an impact on the psychodynamics in 'The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Ego', as well as 'The Central-Mediating Ego', 'The Shadow-Id (Private) Ego', and 'The Personna (Public) Ego', as well as encouraging and/or criticizing elements coming down on us from our 'Superego Complex'.
'Sieve energy' takes the place of Freud's concept of 'libido' (sexual energy) as well as Jung's concept of libido (life energy). In contrast, 'sieve energy' can be any kind of mixture of love, lust, aggression, anger, rage, hate, anxiety, creativity, destruction, construction, deconstruction.....
Sieve energy can surface in the form of different types of 'allusions to immediacy' and/or 'allusions to transference' such as dreams, jokes, fantasies, neurotic symptoms, projections, sublimations....anything that both partly hides and partly alludes to underlying elements of our 'Shadow-Id Complex'...
Sieve energy often tends to come out in an allusionary, partly restrained and censured, partly released, symbolic fashion...in essence, some form of 'compromise-formation'.
However, under the influence of drugs, alcohol, certain stressors -- internal and/or external -- sieve energy can also 'explode' totally unexpectedly like where did this come from? (I'll let you figure out the sexual metaphor involving the prostate...but the same 'explosive principle' applies for love, anger, rage, hate, aggression, violence...)....
When some sort of reaction from a person seems to come totally out of left or right field -- he or she 'freaks' on you, 'flips out' on you, has a hysterical and/or psychotic breakdown, suddenly turns 'sexual' and/or 'aggressive' on you....you can be sure that you are dealing with some sort of underlying 'Shadow-Id Complex' and/or Shadow-Id-Transference Complex' that the person has totally or partly hid from you.
Enough for tonight.
-- dgb, January 21st, 2012...
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Creations...
-- Are Still in Process....
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Traumacies, Impulses, and Their Viscisitudes: Why Concepts Such as 'The Shadow-Id' (SID) and 'The Shadow-Id Vault' (SIV) Are Important Extensions To Freud's Concept of The Id
I'm going back into my archives here....back to June 9th, 2011...in order to pull up an essay that belongs in this network of essays that I am writing now....
Under revision....Jan. 17th, Jan. 21st, 2012...
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What I would like to do in this essay is to compare and contrast the work of Freud in 1894 (The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense), 1895 (Studies in Hysteria), and 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria) with the work of Freud in 1920 (Beyond The Pleasure Principle) and 1923 (The Ego and The Id).
Of particular speculative interest -- and this 'speculation' falls under the category of 'would have', 'could have', 'should have' -- is the question of what might have happened to Psychoanalysis if Freud had written The Ego and The Id in say, 1895 or 1896 rather than in 1923?
Now, obviously, Freud's mindset and abstraction process had not evolved enough in the mid 1890s when he was just getting going with what is usually classified as his 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalytic thinking to have written The Ego and The Id at such an early date.
But what the question does is to direct us to look at how Freud's 1923 conceptuology of 'the ego', 'the id', and 'the superego' would have mixed -- or not mixed -- with his 'pre-Classcial, reality-traumacy-seduction-repression theory'.
You see, me being the 'post-Hegelian, dialectic, integrative bi-polarity thinker' that I am, I look at the question of 'What would have 'Classical' Psychoanalysis have looked like if Freud had integrated all 46 years of his pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic thinking (1903-1939), rather than throwing the first four years of his work into a 'Dissociation Pit' -- like the 'neurotics' and 'neuroses' he was describing in his clients.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Friedrich Nietzsche
These early, pre-1897, classic Psychoanalytic works listed above need to be reconciled, integrated, and harmonized with his later work -- not treated like Psychoanalsysis suddenly developed its own 'neurotic disorder' with Freud 'repressing' -- or in a better choice of words, 'dissociating' -- the first four professional years of his career. (I dislike the Freudian concept of 'repression' because of its reductionistic and non-empirical nature; my own preferable terminology consists of words like: 'alienating', 'dissociating', 'suppressing', 'restraining', 'splitting', 'avoiding'...trying as much as possible to stay away from the concept of repression except in discussing the way that Freud used this term...for the most part reductionistically and non-empirically...and not in the best interests of Psychoanalysis in my opinion.)
Remember, this is the man -- Freud -- who burned many of his most personal letters from Fliess, and presumably, important others. Indeed, he would have most certainly done the same if he had ever gotten a hold of his own letters to Fliess, but history was smiling on historians in this latter case, not on Freud, and thus, we get a truer picture -- not a 'mythological' one -- of what was happeneing during the crucial early development years of Psychoanalysis.
Freud had a very strong wish to keep most of his private life -- strictly private. But all of his most intimate letters to Fliess have made it through World War ll, and into the history books for philosophers, psycho-theorists and psychoanalytic historians like myself to interpret and evaluate as they choose to.
Masson was the 'golden child' of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the early 1980s who was given the 'key to the vault' to publish all of Freud's very intimate letters to Fliess (before then, the ones that seemed to tarnish Freud's reputation in any way were screened out of publication), but when Masson got into these letters, didn't like what he saw -- and said so -- accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' around the issue of real childhood memories, specifically, real childhood sexual assault or 'seduction' memories, the main 'protectors' of The Freudian legacy -- mainly his daughter, Anna Freud, and the highly esteemed senior Freudian loyalist, Kurt Eissler -- were obviously berating themselves for letting Masson into The Freudian Archives in the first place because of the disastrous public relations scandal that followed -- Masson, more specifically, accusing Freud of 'backing away' and 'hiding' from the very 'professionally and politically unpopular' subject of childhood sexual abuse after a very volatile, confrontational meeting of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on April 21st, 1896, in which Freud read his very famous or infamous paper, depending on your perspective, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', which connected childhood sexual assault to the overall 'cause' of hysteria. Krafft-Ebing, the leader of the evening meeting called Freud's paper a 'scientific fairy tale'.
I have followed Masson's path through Freud's complete letters to Fliess through 1895 and 1896 in particular, and some of them don't shine a good light on Freud -- particularly the Emma Ekstein medical atrocity, and arguably, Freud's abandonment of his pre-1897 combined 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory -- especially, IF this 'theory abandonment' reflected a loss of moral courage on Freud's part to stand up to his medical peers and superiors. Granted, they may have had -- indeed, most certainly did have -- 'leverage' over both his professional reputation and his income level relative to 'referring' or 'not referring' patients to him....and Freud had a growing family that he needed to shelter, feed, and clothe -- a type of situation where most of us may have at one point or another in our professional career been told to 'keep something quiet' or risk the consequences...or alternatively, you just know that saying something may not be a good idea relative to keeping your job and/or your career...
Still, regardless, the reputation of both Freud and Psychoanalysis is significantly at stake here. The nuts and bolts of the situation comes down to this moral question: Did Freud turn his back on his clients, particularly his female clients, and betray them -- like Judas? Or did Freud radically change the theory of Psychoanalysis 180 degrees because he believed that this was 'the right' thing to do based on a 're-interpretation of his clinical evidence'?
It is two very complicated, connected questions with both Freud's and Psychoanalysis' reputation and integrity hanging in the balance. It certainly seems like most Psychoanalysts back in the 1980s 'rejected and wrote Masson off as an academic radical' (at least in public, anyway). The position of professional and academic 'non-psychoanalysts' is less clear.
It comes down to whether you believe or not that Freud's whole change in direction of Psychoanalysis from 'reality theory' to 'fantasy theory' was, in effect, a 'cover-up' of chldhood sexual abuse -- or not. The evidence is still not fully clear, and probably never will be. There is evidence to suggest that Freud was in the process of 'changing' his reality theory to fantasy theory as early as December, 1895, which would make the evening of April 21st, 1896 far less dramatically significant.
Freud's creation and writing of 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was also coming hard about this time, and may have also influenced his changeover from reality theory to fantasy theory. There was the Emma Ekstein medical mishap of February, 1895 that was still 'playing in Freud's head -- as 'guilt' -- and from this guilt, may have sprung his concept (or Fliess') of 'longing'....Freud started to call Emma a 'hysterical bleeder' -- a patient who 'bled' because she 'longed' to be back in the presence of her 'male therapist' (presumably Freud), and she 'bled' to 'get his attention'....
That interpretation does not look very good on Freud at all as this was a woman who almost bled to death because Fliess, when he was doing 'the nasal-sexual surgery' (whatever that supposed connection was about) that he shouldn't even have been doing -- left about a foot of medical gauze or more in her nasal cavity, forgot about it, went back from Vienna to Berlin, and it was almost a month later when another doctor, examining Emma's badly infected nasal passage, suddenly found and pulled on the gauze -- and a torrent of blood rushed out after the gauze had been pulled out....And a year later Freud was calling Emma a 'hysterical bleeder'...
All of this is to say that there was 'mixed evidence' as to 'why Freud did what he did' when he started to abandon 'reality theory' for 'fantasy theory'....and some of the evidence isn't good...
Without The Psychoanalytic Establishment ever admitting that Freud may have -- or actually did -- 'screw up' bigtime -- still, it would seem that most Psychoanalysts have quietly left the school of Classical Psychoanalysis in order to pursue one or more other 'sub-schools' of Psychoanalysis -- ones that don't deny 'reality theory', ones that don't deny childhood sexual abuse, ones that quietly discard perhaps the most contentious theory in Psychoanalysis -- 'The Oedipal Complex' which Masson argued was being used to suppress the 'reality' of actual sexual assault memories, and instead being 're-interpreted' by Freud, particularly in a father and daughter case scenario, as his female client's 'own repressed sexual fantasy' relative to her dad -- which Freud viewed as being completely 'normal', a common fantasy amongst all young girls growing up with their respective dads.
That word 'repression' becomes a word impossible to argue -- a self-fulfilling prophecy for the theorist, in this case Freud. Allegedly, only a psychoanalyst has the 'knowledge and experience' to know what is 'repressed' and what is not, leaving everyone outside of Freud's 'Secret Society' in the dark, and in the lurch.
If Freud made two 'big' errors in the evolution of Classical Psychoanalytic Theory, the first 'big mistake' that he made -- before he even abandoned the 'reality-truamacy-seduction theory triad' -- was being 'obsessed' with the word 'repression' For Freud, particularly in his early days, Psychoanalysis was not Psychoanalysis unless it contained the central, linch-pin, idea of 'repression' -- the idea that just happened to make Psychoanalysis a 'Secret Society' with 'psychoanalysts in the 'we know' position and 'outsiders' in the 'they do not know' position...That's how 'pathological religious organizations work'...they are viewed from inside as being beyond criticism from 'outsiders' -- and that is what was taking Freud further and further away from the solid grounding of 'rational-empirical science' as Joseph Breuer was trying to hang onto -- while Freud was 'trying to fly to the moon and back'...
Even if Freud was moving towards 'fantasy theory' on at least partly legitimate clinical grounds, with a 'mixed bag of historical evidence' in this regard, I still share with Masson the basic belief, that regardless of what Freud's motives were at the time -- and some of them don't look very good at all -- Freud did indeed 'screw up' by abandoning his 'reality-traumacy-seduction theory triad' which, up to April 1896, provided the logical, rational-empirical grounding and theoretical foundation of Psychoanalysis.
Unlike Masson, I don't use this argument to say that 'all psychiatry and/or psychotherapy is bad', or that Psychoanalysis should go back to its pre-1897 reality-traumacy-seduction theory completely -- and reject any 'fantasy' theory created and written after 1896....I'm not even sure Masson would totally say this: he did just recently (2010) re-edit Freud's classic work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (and did a good job of it in my opinion).
My theoretical position is that we need to go back -- or at least I need to go back in Psychoanalytic history, combine it with what I know today -- and sort out the respective roles that both 'reality' and 'fantasy' play in people's lives. 'Memories' are important -- and so too are 'fantasies'. What is there relationship to each other -- if any -- and how do they both have a crucial effect on man's individual health and/or 'neurotic and/or psychotic pathology'?
In this regard, we -- or at least 'I' again -- need to re-examine the relative 'health' or 'neurotic pathology' of Classical Psychoanalysis itself.
In regard to any theoretical 'errors' that Freud may have made, I need to go back and find out where these errors may have left -- indeed, did leave -- 'sick points' in Classical Psychoanalysis.
To use another metaphor, we might say that these 'theoretical weaknesses' that Freud left behind him, have left a hole in the side of The Great Ship, Classical Psychoanalysis, that has left it 'teetering' like the Titanic after it started to take in water left by the 'huge, sharp-edged iceberg'...Is Classical Psychoanalysis still floating? Or is it not? I will let you make your own interpretive conclusions regarding this matter -- as I continue to pursue my theoretical investigation, analysis, and 'creative, integrative, 'fix-up'.
I want to repair the ship; others -- including probably most psychoanalysts -- have probably already abandoned. No one wants to touch the 'Classic Psychoanalytic Ship-Titanic' -- at least now, perhaps because it is an historical artifact of history, and once it is changed it is no longer 'Classical' Psychoanalysis -- or admittedly, there are still some very 'anal-retentive diehards' who are still trying to make the old ship float...
Maybe I am being too hard here, maybe I am not but most people would probably now say that Classical Psychoanalysis is a 'relic' from the 'Victorian' era, and that there are other better models of Psychoanalysis that are creatively evolving in the 21st century --like Object Relations and Self-Psychology, and Lacanian Psychoanalyis, and Bionian Psychoanalysis...and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis -- with its concepts of 'The Oedipal Complex' and 'Castration Anxiety' and 'Penis Envy' -- belongs in a Psychoanalytic Museum. Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler would have certainly taken exception to this assertion but how many psychoanalysts are there left who still want to hang on with that 'obsessively fixated, anal-retentive, hanging on bite'....If they are still using a theory 'frozen by time', then they have probably become frozen themselves. I can certainly see Jeffrey Masson nodding his head in agreement from New Zealand -- even if it is me 'imagining' this from the man who called all of today's Psychoanalysis 'sterile'. (He was speaking in the early 80s and probably directing his complaint against 'Classical' Psychoanalysis with its potentially 'pathological' clinical usage of 'The Oedipal Complex, and perhaps its potential waste of time looking for deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper...and still deeper 'associations'...whether 'objective' or 'subjective', 'memories' or 'fantasies'...trust your psychoanalyst in all his or her professional wisdom to 're-interpret' them and/or 're-construct' them...until they are completely in line with 'Classic' Freudian Psychoanaytic Theory...even if this is the cart leading the horse rather than the horse leading the cart...)
Reality vs. fantasy -- we really have to clean up what we know to be the difference.
One is real -- and one is not. And Freud wanted to 'superimpose' the one onto the other. Well, sometimes, to be sure, they are superimposed onto each other....but then the question become: 'HOW'? To the point of a 'repressed sexual fantasy' completely underemining and fabricating an alleged 'sexual assault memory'? Maybe in a very extreme case....But do we really want to believe that this type of 'distortive cerebral activity' happens in all cases of little girls growing up in the same household as their father? A very 'convenient' defense for an 'actual father victimizer' over his much less powerful 'victim' daughter...Now I don't want to stereotype 'victimizers' and 'victims' because often we need to look at this whole problem of 'victimization' 'dialectically' such as in cases of 'domestic violence' where oftentimes men and women are both victims and victimizers in the same scernario leading to the escalation of a domestic conflict into domestic aggression and violence....But in Freud's 'moral challenge' case, we have to wonder whether Freud was indeed throwing a 'smoke and mirrors' theory over top of cases of 'real, cold-blooded, narcissistic reality' involving some fathers actually having sexually victimized their daughters...This would make 'The Oedipal Theory' at least a partly 'pathological' theory, if not more than that...Consequently, the silent abandonment of all or most critical thinking Psychoanalysts from the Sinking Classical Freudian Ship Titanic...and into other ''better floating' ships like The Object Relations Ship, The Self-Psychology Ship, The Bionian Ship, the Lacanian Ship, etc...
Or alternatively, the Good Classical Freudian Ship Titanic needs some very serious body work to patch some very large holes caused by a very large, sharp iceberg (The Oedipal Theory and Repression Theory and 'Penis Envy' Theory and 'Castration Anxiety Theory'.... Deconstructing or Self-Destructing under 80 years or more of very hard, critical, outside environmental pounding.....Every theory eventually crumbles under the weight of its own tombstone that it is carrying.....See Freud's Death Instinct...)
Sometimes -- to be sure -- our 'narcissistic biases and desires' can 'distort' the reality of our memories, but more than likely, this is usually done consciously, on purpose for narcissistic motives....Not 'unconsciously and repressively'! Or do we 'defer' to the 'Classical' Psychoanalysts and their self-fulfilling prophecy of 'repression' that can only be properly 'interpreted' by someone 'well-taught and well-trained' within their 'Secret Society'....(brainwashed, anyone?)
I love psychoanalysis -- and Freud -- 'projectively' like I love my father -- it/he just needs/needed to break through some seriously 'anal-retentive, narcissistic, righteous paradigms' that he couldn't see outside of...(kinda like my father...zap...ouch!...did I just say that?...perhaps that makes me a 'dictatorial control freak' as well...in my father's own image...only more of a 'deconstructive anarchist' -- and 'reconstructionist/re-builder' -- at the same time...You gotta love psychoanalysis for its ability to give you enlightening, sometimes harsh, personal insights....A lot of these insights may come with your better and better ability to interpret 'transference and sublimation projections'...more on this integrative concept later...)
Anyways, I am stubborn, and I want to 'fix' Classical Psychoanalysis; not pretend that it doesn't have a problem, or abandon it all together...
I want to freshly integrate 'Pre-Classical' and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis with 70 years of post-Classical psycho-theoretical and psychotherapeutic evolution...And yes, I guess that means that what I am creating here can no longer be right classified as 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...even though I hold onto more parts of it than many...
The name I used to call my 'post-Classical' rendition of Classical Psychoanalysis was 'DGB Psychoanalysis' -- as in 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging' Psychoanlysis. Now I have changed the name to 'Quantum-Dialectic' Psychoanalysis, the idea being that when we creatively engage in a 'democratic-dialectic-gap-bridging' approach to problem-solving and conflict-resolving where 'dominant/suppressive/oppressive masters' and 'suppressed/dissociated/oppressed slaves' -- regardless of whether we are talking about opposing people or opposing ideas and/or theories and/or paradigms -- are taken out of the master/slave paradigm and inserted into a 'dialectically-democratically-dynamically egalitarian paradigm-process', then 'good things can happen in the relationship -- very good things -- and this can result in a 'quantum leap' in the 'quality of our lives'...
Masterr/slave relationships almost always carry an element of either overt and/or covert hostility, aggression, rebellion, anarchy....power and/or revenge seeking...as well as dissociative alienation....the stuff that bad relationships are made out of...They are the seeds of Narcissistic Capitalism and/or visa versa....and in effect, these polar, pathological psycho-dynamics are no different then the same type of variables that also can be connected to Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin -- and probably even Karl Marx in his later years as he became more of an anarchist than a democrat....
Marx did much to describe the plight of the alienated worker, the master/slave relationship as first formulated by Hegel, and its extrapolated connection to the relationship of aristocrat to the working class proletariat, employer to employee, upper to lower class, the widening gap of power and control and money, the 'growing abyss' between the classes, greed and narcissism, covert collusion and manipulation, a lack of tranparency and accountability amongst those who control the 'money vault' -- whether private or public -- a lack of equality and integrity and respect...This whole network of pathological factors are just as relevant -- if not more relevant -- today, then they were back in Marx's time...and to repeat, I believe that Marx became less humanistic and more radically aggressive later in his writing career. His early work remains probably his best work in terms of its 'humanistic-existential value'...which Erich Fromm picked up and ran with...
What we are talking about here -- the difference between the authoritarian personality and the democratic personality, and between the authoritarian relationship and the democratic relationship -- goes right back to the main core of our psycho-dynamic relationship with our parents which is then 'introjected' or 'internalized' into our personality....and we end up having to live with for our entire lives...
If we have had an authoritarian, dictatorial, and or aggressively autocratic parent -- either father or mother -- then it is quite likely that we are going to be struggling with 'power and authority' issues, our whole lives....either as a 'dictator' ourselves, and/or as a person 'submitting to' and/or 'rebelling against' all 'projected dictators'' in our social environment...
Indeed, it can be easily argued that one of, if not the, most important 'core nuclear conflicts' in our personality is going to be the issue of 'control and power' vs. 'giving up or letting go of control and power'....
Offshoots of this 'internal and external power-control conflict' include the conflict between 'competition and co-operation', between 'unity and separation', between 'approach and avoidance', between 'seduction and abandonment', between 'love and power', between narcissism and altruism, between leadership and being led....
And somewhere in this list lies the conflict between 'cold-hearted reality' and 'narcissistic fantasy'....or stated differently...'objective reality' and 'subjective fantasy'....with the reality being that 'subjective narcissistic fantasy' is often going to 'sugar coat' and/or completely replace 'cold-hearted, narcissistic reality'...
Take, for example, a childhood sexual assault....committed by a father against his daughter....a case of 'cold-hearted, narcissistic reality'.....And now we have a relatively young 'radical' doctor who specializes in the treatment of 'hysteria' and he is trying to assert that 'all cases of hysteria are caused by childhood sexual assaults and/or manipulations/seductions of the (usually female) victim, with the victimizer usually being the father, an uncle, a 'friend' of the family, an older brother, or a stranger...
How are the 'good Victorian doctors of Vienna' going to react to such a radical theory and theorist? Suppress him!....Oppress him! Ostrasize him! Exclude him! Dissociate him until he 'comes around' with a 'new theory' that the 'good doctors' could live better with -- one that doesn't 'trumpet' the co-connection between childhood sexual assault and adult hysteria....and which could get some of the 'good doctors' into trouble...politically, legally, and/or professionally...
Was their world really much different than ours today?
We see -- or don't see -- this type of 'Covert, Manipulative, Leverage, Power-Dynamic' going on all the time in private corporations, in the government, in the media...all around us...every day we do or don't go to work...'Power and Dominance vs. Less Power and Suppression, Dissociation, Ostrazization, Opression, Alienation...'...
And so too we see -- or don't see -- this same type of power-dynamics at work in our own personality....
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum...
Where there is power and dominance vs. less power and suppression....
The Suppressed and Ostracized Will Usually Come Back to Haunt Us...See Anaximander...600 and something B.C...
Call this 'The Return of The Suppressed or Ostracized or Dissociated'....
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Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
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Kinda sounds like Freud's 'Death Instinct' -- i.e., all things returning from whence they came (whether that be 'the earth' (Freud and Freud's mother), or 'The Apeiron' -- or 'Chaos' (Anaximander) or possibly 'The Abyss' (Nietzsche)...
It also sounds like Freud's 'Return of The Repressed' which I have re-worded up above....which alternatively can be viewed as a form of 'Cosmic Justice' and 'Cosmic Retribution'...the idea that 'The More Powerful' and 'The Less Powerful' will continually chase each other through Time -- one 'de-volving' and 'losing power' while the other 'evolves' and 'gains more power' until the less powerful becomes more powerful and the more powerful becomes less powerful, the 'two dialectic, opposing and conflicting polarities' switching with each other over time as they both race through time...'taking turns' in the 'light of sunshine' and the 'darkness of the shadows' in life, in death, and being re-born again....'
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How different is this to the 'magical trick' that Freud's mother showed her 'astonished' young boy who was just starting to 'formulate his philosophy of life and death'....to reappear some 58 years later in his 1920 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle'...
'Another memory was of his mother assuring him at the age of six that were made of earth and therefore must return to earth. When he 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 speciment of the earth we are made of. His astonisment was unbounded and for the first time he captured some sense of the inevitable. As he put it: "I slowly acquiesced in the idea I was later to hear expressed in the words 'Thou owest nature a death.'
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-- dgb, June 9th, 2011, some modifications and updates November 26th, 2011, Jan. 17th, 2012....
-- David Gordon Bain
Under revision....Jan. 17th, Jan. 21st, 2012...
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What I would like to do in this essay is to compare and contrast the work of Freud in 1894 (The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense), 1895 (Studies in Hysteria), and 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria) with the work of Freud in 1920 (Beyond The Pleasure Principle) and 1923 (The Ego and The Id).
Of particular speculative interest -- and this 'speculation' falls under the category of 'would have', 'could have', 'should have' -- is the question of what might have happened to Psychoanalysis if Freud had written The Ego and The Id in say, 1895 or 1896 rather than in 1923?
Now, obviously, Freud's mindset and abstraction process had not evolved enough in the mid 1890s when he was just getting going with what is usually classified as his 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalytic thinking to have written The Ego and The Id at such an early date.
But what the question does is to direct us to look at how Freud's 1923 conceptuology of 'the ego', 'the id', and 'the superego' would have mixed -- or not mixed -- with his 'pre-Classcial, reality-traumacy-seduction-repression theory'.
You see, me being the 'post-Hegelian, dialectic, integrative bi-polarity thinker' that I am, I look at the question of 'What would have 'Classical' Psychoanalysis have looked like if Freud had integrated all 46 years of his pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic thinking (1903-1939), rather than throwing the first four years of his work into a 'Dissociation Pit' -- like the 'neurotics' and 'neuroses' he was describing in his clients.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Friedrich Nietzsche
These early, pre-1897, classic Psychoanalytic works listed above need to be reconciled, integrated, and harmonized with his later work -- not treated like Psychoanalsysis suddenly developed its own 'neurotic disorder' with Freud 'repressing' -- or in a better choice of words, 'dissociating' -- the first four professional years of his career. (I dislike the Freudian concept of 'repression' because of its reductionistic and non-empirical nature; my own preferable terminology consists of words like: 'alienating', 'dissociating', 'suppressing', 'restraining', 'splitting', 'avoiding'...trying as much as possible to stay away from the concept of repression except in discussing the way that Freud used this term...for the most part reductionistically and non-empirically...and not in the best interests of Psychoanalysis in my opinion.)
Remember, this is the man -- Freud -- who burned many of his most personal letters from Fliess, and presumably, important others. Indeed, he would have most certainly done the same if he had ever gotten a hold of his own letters to Fliess, but history was smiling on historians in this latter case, not on Freud, and thus, we get a truer picture -- not a 'mythological' one -- of what was happeneing during the crucial early development years of Psychoanalysis.
Freud had a very strong wish to keep most of his private life -- strictly private. But all of his most intimate letters to Fliess have made it through World War ll, and into the history books for philosophers, psycho-theorists and psychoanalytic historians like myself to interpret and evaluate as they choose to.
Masson was the 'golden child' of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the early 1980s who was given the 'key to the vault' to publish all of Freud's very intimate letters to Fliess (before then, the ones that seemed to tarnish Freud's reputation in any way were screened out of publication), but when Masson got into these letters, didn't like what he saw -- and said so -- accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' around the issue of real childhood memories, specifically, real childhood sexual assault or 'seduction' memories, the main 'protectors' of The Freudian legacy -- mainly his daughter, Anna Freud, and the highly esteemed senior Freudian loyalist, Kurt Eissler -- were obviously berating themselves for letting Masson into The Freudian Archives in the first place because of the disastrous public relations scandal that followed -- Masson, more specifically, accusing Freud of 'backing away' and 'hiding' from the very 'professionally and politically unpopular' subject of childhood sexual abuse after a very volatile, confrontational meeting of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on April 21st, 1896, in which Freud read his very famous or infamous paper, depending on your perspective, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', which connected childhood sexual assault to the overall 'cause' of hysteria. Krafft-Ebing, the leader of the evening meeting called Freud's paper a 'scientific fairy tale'.
I have followed Masson's path through Freud's complete letters to Fliess through 1895 and 1896 in particular, and some of them don't shine a good light on Freud -- particularly the Emma Ekstein medical atrocity, and arguably, Freud's abandonment of his pre-1897 combined 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory -- especially, IF this 'theory abandonment' reflected a loss of moral courage on Freud's part to stand up to his medical peers and superiors. Granted, they may have had -- indeed, most certainly did have -- 'leverage' over both his professional reputation and his income level relative to 'referring' or 'not referring' patients to him....and Freud had a growing family that he needed to shelter, feed, and clothe -- a type of situation where most of us may have at one point or another in our professional career been told to 'keep something quiet' or risk the consequences...or alternatively, you just know that saying something may not be a good idea relative to keeping your job and/or your career...
Still, regardless, the reputation of both Freud and Psychoanalysis is significantly at stake here. The nuts and bolts of the situation comes down to this moral question: Did Freud turn his back on his clients, particularly his female clients, and betray them -- like Judas? Or did Freud radically change the theory of Psychoanalysis 180 degrees because he believed that this was 'the right' thing to do based on a 're-interpretation of his clinical evidence'?
It is two very complicated, connected questions with both Freud's and Psychoanalysis' reputation and integrity hanging in the balance. It certainly seems like most Psychoanalysts back in the 1980s 'rejected and wrote Masson off as an academic radical' (at least in public, anyway). The position of professional and academic 'non-psychoanalysts' is less clear.
It comes down to whether you believe or not that Freud's whole change in direction of Psychoanalysis from 'reality theory' to 'fantasy theory' was, in effect, a 'cover-up' of chldhood sexual abuse -- or not. The evidence is still not fully clear, and probably never will be. There is evidence to suggest that Freud was in the process of 'changing' his reality theory to fantasy theory as early as December, 1895, which would make the evening of April 21st, 1896 far less dramatically significant.
Freud's creation and writing of 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was also coming hard about this time, and may have also influenced his changeover from reality theory to fantasy theory. There was the Emma Ekstein medical mishap of February, 1895 that was still 'playing in Freud's head -- as 'guilt' -- and from this guilt, may have sprung his concept (or Fliess') of 'longing'....Freud started to call Emma a 'hysterical bleeder' -- a patient who 'bled' because she 'longed' to be back in the presence of her 'male therapist' (presumably Freud), and she 'bled' to 'get his attention'....
That interpretation does not look very good on Freud at all as this was a woman who almost bled to death because Fliess, when he was doing 'the nasal-sexual surgery' (whatever that supposed connection was about) that he shouldn't even have been doing -- left about a foot of medical gauze or more in her nasal cavity, forgot about it, went back from Vienna to Berlin, and it was almost a month later when another doctor, examining Emma's badly infected nasal passage, suddenly found and pulled on the gauze -- and a torrent of blood rushed out after the gauze had been pulled out....And a year later Freud was calling Emma a 'hysterical bleeder'...
All of this is to say that there was 'mixed evidence' as to 'why Freud did what he did' when he started to abandon 'reality theory' for 'fantasy theory'....and some of the evidence isn't good...
Without The Psychoanalytic Establishment ever admitting that Freud may have -- or actually did -- 'screw up' bigtime -- still, it would seem that most Psychoanalysts have quietly left the school of Classical Psychoanalysis in order to pursue one or more other 'sub-schools' of Psychoanalysis -- ones that don't deny 'reality theory', ones that don't deny childhood sexual abuse, ones that quietly discard perhaps the most contentious theory in Psychoanalysis -- 'The Oedipal Complex' which Masson argued was being used to suppress the 'reality' of actual sexual assault memories, and instead being 're-interpreted' by Freud, particularly in a father and daughter case scenario, as his female client's 'own repressed sexual fantasy' relative to her dad -- which Freud viewed as being completely 'normal', a common fantasy amongst all young girls growing up with their respective dads.
That word 'repression' becomes a word impossible to argue -- a self-fulfilling prophecy for the theorist, in this case Freud. Allegedly, only a psychoanalyst has the 'knowledge and experience' to know what is 'repressed' and what is not, leaving everyone outside of Freud's 'Secret Society' in the dark, and in the lurch.
If Freud made two 'big' errors in the evolution of Classical Psychoanalytic Theory, the first 'big mistake' that he made -- before he even abandoned the 'reality-truamacy-seduction theory triad' -- was being 'obsessed' with the word 'repression' For Freud, particularly in his early days, Psychoanalysis was not Psychoanalysis unless it contained the central, linch-pin, idea of 'repression' -- the idea that just happened to make Psychoanalysis a 'Secret Society' with 'psychoanalysts in the 'we know' position and 'outsiders' in the 'they do not know' position...That's how 'pathological religious organizations work'...they are viewed from inside as being beyond criticism from 'outsiders' -- and that is what was taking Freud further and further away from the solid grounding of 'rational-empirical science' as Joseph Breuer was trying to hang onto -- while Freud was 'trying to fly to the moon and back'...
Even if Freud was moving towards 'fantasy theory' on at least partly legitimate clinical grounds, with a 'mixed bag of historical evidence' in this regard, I still share with Masson the basic belief, that regardless of what Freud's motives were at the time -- and some of them don't look very good at all -- Freud did indeed 'screw up' by abandoning his 'reality-traumacy-seduction theory triad' which, up to April 1896, provided the logical, rational-empirical grounding and theoretical foundation of Psychoanalysis.
Unlike Masson, I don't use this argument to say that 'all psychiatry and/or psychotherapy is bad', or that Psychoanalysis should go back to its pre-1897 reality-traumacy-seduction theory completely -- and reject any 'fantasy' theory created and written after 1896....I'm not even sure Masson would totally say this: he did just recently (2010) re-edit Freud's classic work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (and did a good job of it in my opinion).
My theoretical position is that we need to go back -- or at least I need to go back in Psychoanalytic history, combine it with what I know today -- and sort out the respective roles that both 'reality' and 'fantasy' play in people's lives. 'Memories' are important -- and so too are 'fantasies'. What is there relationship to each other -- if any -- and how do they both have a crucial effect on man's individual health and/or 'neurotic and/or psychotic pathology'?
In this regard, we -- or at least 'I' again -- need to re-examine the relative 'health' or 'neurotic pathology' of Classical Psychoanalysis itself.
In regard to any theoretical 'errors' that Freud may have made, I need to go back and find out where these errors may have left -- indeed, did leave -- 'sick points' in Classical Psychoanalysis.
To use another metaphor, we might say that these 'theoretical weaknesses' that Freud left behind him, have left a hole in the side of The Great Ship, Classical Psychoanalysis, that has left it 'teetering' like the Titanic after it started to take in water left by the 'huge, sharp-edged iceberg'...Is Classical Psychoanalysis still floating? Or is it not? I will let you make your own interpretive conclusions regarding this matter -- as I continue to pursue my theoretical investigation, analysis, and 'creative, integrative, 'fix-up'.
I want to repair the ship; others -- including probably most psychoanalysts -- have probably already abandoned. No one wants to touch the 'Classic Psychoanalytic Ship-Titanic' -- at least now, perhaps because it is an historical artifact of history, and once it is changed it is no longer 'Classical' Psychoanalysis -- or admittedly, there are still some very 'anal-retentive diehards' who are still trying to make the old ship float...
Maybe I am being too hard here, maybe I am not but most people would probably now say that Classical Psychoanalysis is a 'relic' from the 'Victorian' era, and that there are other better models of Psychoanalysis that are creatively evolving in the 21st century --like Object Relations and Self-Psychology, and Lacanian Psychoanalyis, and Bionian Psychoanalysis...and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis -- with its concepts of 'The Oedipal Complex' and 'Castration Anxiety' and 'Penis Envy' -- belongs in a Psychoanalytic Museum. Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler would have certainly taken exception to this assertion but how many psychoanalysts are there left who still want to hang on with that 'obsessively fixated, anal-retentive, hanging on bite'....If they are still using a theory 'frozen by time', then they have probably become frozen themselves. I can certainly see Jeffrey Masson nodding his head in agreement from New Zealand -- even if it is me 'imagining' this from the man who called all of today's Psychoanalysis 'sterile'. (He was speaking in the early 80s and probably directing his complaint against 'Classical' Psychoanalysis with its potentially 'pathological' clinical usage of 'The Oedipal Complex, and perhaps its potential waste of time looking for deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper...and still deeper 'associations'...whether 'objective' or 'subjective', 'memories' or 'fantasies'...trust your psychoanalyst in all his or her professional wisdom to 're-interpret' them and/or 're-construct' them...until they are completely in line with 'Classic' Freudian Psychoanaytic Theory...even if this is the cart leading the horse rather than the horse leading the cart...)
Reality vs. fantasy -- we really have to clean up what we know to be the difference.
One is real -- and one is not. And Freud wanted to 'superimpose' the one onto the other. Well, sometimes, to be sure, they are superimposed onto each other....but then the question become: 'HOW'? To the point of a 'repressed sexual fantasy' completely underemining and fabricating an alleged 'sexual assault memory'? Maybe in a very extreme case....But do we really want to believe that this type of 'distortive cerebral activity' happens in all cases of little girls growing up in the same household as their father? A very 'convenient' defense for an 'actual father victimizer' over his much less powerful 'victim' daughter...Now I don't want to stereotype 'victimizers' and 'victims' because often we need to look at this whole problem of 'victimization' 'dialectically' such as in cases of 'domestic violence' where oftentimes men and women are both victims and victimizers in the same scernario leading to the escalation of a domestic conflict into domestic aggression and violence....But in Freud's 'moral challenge' case, we have to wonder whether Freud was indeed throwing a 'smoke and mirrors' theory over top of cases of 'real, cold-blooded, narcissistic reality' involving some fathers actually having sexually victimized their daughters...This would make 'The Oedipal Theory' at least a partly 'pathological' theory, if not more than that...Consequently, the silent abandonment of all or most critical thinking Psychoanalysts from the Sinking Classical Freudian Ship Titanic...and into other ''better floating' ships like The Object Relations Ship, The Self-Psychology Ship, The Bionian Ship, the Lacanian Ship, etc...
Or alternatively, the Good Classical Freudian Ship Titanic needs some very serious body work to patch some very large holes caused by a very large, sharp iceberg (The Oedipal Theory and Repression Theory and 'Penis Envy' Theory and 'Castration Anxiety Theory'.... Deconstructing or Self-Destructing under 80 years or more of very hard, critical, outside environmental pounding.....Every theory eventually crumbles under the weight of its own tombstone that it is carrying.....See Freud's Death Instinct...)
Sometimes -- to be sure -- our 'narcissistic biases and desires' can 'distort' the reality of our memories, but more than likely, this is usually done consciously, on purpose for narcissistic motives....Not 'unconsciously and repressively'! Or do we 'defer' to the 'Classical' Psychoanalysts and their self-fulfilling prophecy of 'repression' that can only be properly 'interpreted' by someone 'well-taught and well-trained' within their 'Secret Society'....(brainwashed, anyone?)
I love psychoanalysis -- and Freud -- 'projectively' like I love my father -- it/he just needs/needed to break through some seriously 'anal-retentive, narcissistic, righteous paradigms' that he couldn't see outside of...(kinda like my father...zap...ouch!...did I just say that?...perhaps that makes me a 'dictatorial control freak' as well...in my father's own image...only more of a 'deconstructive anarchist' -- and 'reconstructionist/re-builder' -- at the same time...You gotta love psychoanalysis for its ability to give you enlightening, sometimes harsh, personal insights....A lot of these insights may come with your better and better ability to interpret 'transference and sublimation projections'...more on this integrative concept later...)
Anyways, I am stubborn, and I want to 'fix' Classical Psychoanalysis; not pretend that it doesn't have a problem, or abandon it all together...
I want to freshly integrate 'Pre-Classical' and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis with 70 years of post-Classical psycho-theoretical and psychotherapeutic evolution...And yes, I guess that means that what I am creating here can no longer be right classified as 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...even though I hold onto more parts of it than many...
The name I used to call my 'post-Classical' rendition of Classical Psychoanalysis was 'DGB Psychoanalysis' -- as in 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging' Psychoanlysis. Now I have changed the name to 'Quantum-Dialectic' Psychoanalysis, the idea being that when we creatively engage in a 'democratic-dialectic-gap-bridging' approach to problem-solving and conflict-resolving where 'dominant/suppressive/oppressive masters' and 'suppressed/dissociated/oppressed slaves' -- regardless of whether we are talking about opposing people or opposing ideas and/or theories and/or paradigms -- are taken out of the master/slave paradigm and inserted into a 'dialectically-democratically-dynamically egalitarian paradigm-process', then 'good things can happen in the relationship -- very good things -- and this can result in a 'quantum leap' in the 'quality of our lives'...
Masterr/slave relationships almost always carry an element of either overt and/or covert hostility, aggression, rebellion, anarchy....power and/or revenge seeking...as well as dissociative alienation....the stuff that bad relationships are made out of...They are the seeds of Narcissistic Capitalism and/or visa versa....and in effect, these polar, pathological psycho-dynamics are no different then the same type of variables that also can be connected to Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin -- and probably even Karl Marx in his later years as he became more of an anarchist than a democrat....
Marx did much to describe the plight of the alienated worker, the master/slave relationship as first formulated by Hegel, and its extrapolated connection to the relationship of aristocrat to the working class proletariat, employer to employee, upper to lower class, the widening gap of power and control and money, the 'growing abyss' between the classes, greed and narcissism, covert collusion and manipulation, a lack of tranparency and accountability amongst those who control the 'money vault' -- whether private or public -- a lack of equality and integrity and respect...This whole network of pathological factors are just as relevant -- if not more relevant -- today, then they were back in Marx's time...and to repeat, I believe that Marx became less humanistic and more radically aggressive later in his writing career. His early work remains probably his best work in terms of its 'humanistic-existential value'...which Erich Fromm picked up and ran with...
What we are talking about here -- the difference between the authoritarian personality and the democratic personality, and between the authoritarian relationship and the democratic relationship -- goes right back to the main core of our psycho-dynamic relationship with our parents which is then 'introjected' or 'internalized' into our personality....and we end up having to live with for our entire lives...
If we have had an authoritarian, dictatorial, and or aggressively autocratic parent -- either father or mother -- then it is quite likely that we are going to be struggling with 'power and authority' issues, our whole lives....either as a 'dictator' ourselves, and/or as a person 'submitting to' and/or 'rebelling against' all 'projected dictators'' in our social environment...
Indeed, it can be easily argued that one of, if not the, most important 'core nuclear conflicts' in our personality is going to be the issue of 'control and power' vs. 'giving up or letting go of control and power'....
Offshoots of this 'internal and external power-control conflict' include the conflict between 'competition and co-operation', between 'unity and separation', between 'approach and avoidance', between 'seduction and abandonment', between 'love and power', between narcissism and altruism, between leadership and being led....
And somewhere in this list lies the conflict between 'cold-hearted reality' and 'narcissistic fantasy'....or stated differently...'objective reality' and 'subjective fantasy'....with the reality being that 'subjective narcissistic fantasy' is often going to 'sugar coat' and/or completely replace 'cold-hearted, narcissistic reality'...
Take, for example, a childhood sexual assault....committed by a father against his daughter....a case of 'cold-hearted, narcissistic reality'.....And now we have a relatively young 'radical' doctor who specializes in the treatment of 'hysteria' and he is trying to assert that 'all cases of hysteria are caused by childhood sexual assaults and/or manipulations/seductions of the (usually female) victim, with the victimizer usually being the father, an uncle, a 'friend' of the family, an older brother, or a stranger...
How are the 'good Victorian doctors of Vienna' going to react to such a radical theory and theorist? Suppress him!....Oppress him! Ostrasize him! Exclude him! Dissociate him until he 'comes around' with a 'new theory' that the 'good doctors' could live better with -- one that doesn't 'trumpet' the co-connection between childhood sexual assault and adult hysteria....and which could get some of the 'good doctors' into trouble...politically, legally, and/or professionally...
Was their world really much different than ours today?
We see -- or don't see -- this type of 'Covert, Manipulative, Leverage, Power-Dynamic' going on all the time in private corporations, in the government, in the media...all around us...every day we do or don't go to work...'Power and Dominance vs. Less Power and Suppression, Dissociation, Ostrazization, Opression, Alienation...'...
And so too we see -- or don't see -- this same type of power-dynamics at work in our own personality....
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum...
Where there is power and dominance vs. less power and suppression....
The Suppressed and Ostracized Will Usually Come Back to Haunt Us...See Anaximander...600 and something B.C...
Call this 'The Return of The Suppressed or Ostracized or Dissociated'....
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Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
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Kinda sounds like Freud's 'Death Instinct' -- i.e., all things returning from whence they came (whether that be 'the earth' (Freud and Freud's mother), or 'The Apeiron' -- or 'Chaos' (Anaximander) or possibly 'The Abyss' (Nietzsche)...
It also sounds like Freud's 'Return of The Repressed' which I have re-worded up above....which alternatively can be viewed as a form of 'Cosmic Justice' and 'Cosmic Retribution'...the idea that 'The More Powerful' and 'The Less Powerful' will continually chase each other through Time -- one 'de-volving' and 'losing power' while the other 'evolves' and 'gains more power' until the less powerful becomes more powerful and the more powerful becomes less powerful, the 'two dialectic, opposing and conflicting polarities' switching with each other over time as they both race through time...'taking turns' in the 'light of sunshine' and the 'darkness of the shadows' in life, in death, and being re-born again....'
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How different is this to the 'magical trick' that Freud's mother showed her 'astonished' young boy who was just starting to 'formulate his philosophy of life and death'....to reappear some 58 years later in his 1920 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle'...
'Another memory was of his mother assuring him at the age of six that were made of earth and therefore must return to earth. When he 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 speciment of the earth we are made of. His astonisment was unbounded and for the first time he captured some sense of the inevitable. As he put it: "I slowly acquiesced in the idea I was later to hear expressed in the words 'Thou owest nature a death.'
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-- dgb, June 9th, 2011, some modifications and updates November 26th, 2011, Jan. 17th, 2012....
-- David Gordon Bain
The Newest Edition of The DGB (Multi-Bi-Polar) Model of The Human Psyche (After My Brief Appearance at The Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis For A Scientific Seminar on Sat. May 12, 2012)
The Newest Edition of The DGB Model of The Human Psyche
Sunday, January 8, 2012
1.14. On The Distinction Between 'Screen Memories', 'Lifestyle Memories' -- and 'Transference Memories'
In process, January 15th, 2012...Finished January 21st, 2012....
1. Introduction
What Freud called 'screen memories' from 1899 onwards (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899), Adler, in the 1920s, called 'lifestyle memories', and I, in 2012 (going back to the mid 1980s), call 'transference memories'.
Each name-concept mentioned above involves an assumptive paradigm shift that changes conceptual and theoretical boundaries, and opens up new conceptual and theoretical territory. If the paradigm shift turns out to be theoretically and therapeutically/pragmatically useful, then I say 'go with the paradigm shift' and/or at least open up your mind to the idea of 'bouncing back and forth' between different paradigm assumptions. That's called being open-minded. And/or 'thinking both inside and outside the box.' And/or 'not letting traditional, status-quo, Establishment ideas define and limit you to the prospect and potential for an 'evolutionary advancement in new and better labels, ideas, theories, classification systems, paradigms...'.
In particular, when you open yourself up to the use of 'bi-polarity theories' that reflect a similar 'bi-polarity in life', you advance yourself past the point of being caught up in an Aristolean 'either/or' classification system and/or a Kierkegaardian choice between Theory A vs. Theory B, or political party A vs. B...each focusing on the particular advantages of their end of the bi-polar idea spectrum while downplaying, minimizing, degrading the polar theory of their opposite competitor. Until, one day, someone has the bright idea of integrating the two opposite polar paradigm theories, and very neatly incorporates the best advantages of each, while covering up for the weaknesses of each...
This is what Hegel meant when he said -- and I am paraphrasing -- that 'every (one-sided) idea or theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.
In physics, the key to overcoming the deficiences of both the 'particle theory' and the 'wave theory' of matter and energy lay in 'dialectically integrating' the two theories together, and such is what needs to be done with Freud's pre-1897 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory vs. his post 1896 'fantasy-instinct-impulse' theory, or worded differently, his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory vs. his 'childhood sexual instinct, impulse and fantasy' theory....
Life is continually busting down man-made conceptual and theoretical boundaries...
We either adjust, accept, appreciate, and respect this fact -- or we don't.
Those who persist on righteously and narcissistically holding on -- with a pit bull's bite -- to one-sided, anal-retentive theories that defy and distort life, are holding us all back from 'evolving' to a more Hegelian multi-dialectic-dynamic approach and paradigm of: philosophy, history, psychology, law, politics, economics, biology, physics, chemistry, business, economics, art, music, religion, mythology, spirituality...
Nietzsche's 'healthiest' philosophy book was his first one: 'The Birth of Tragedy' which subscribed to a 'bi-polar' theory that involved integrating his classification system of an 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' lifestyle.
However, after that book, Nietzsche shunned Apollo to 'The Dissociation Pit' -- and even though Nietzsche continued to write an ongoing assortment of brilliant essays/books afterwards, still, they were partly 'de-evolving' into an increasingly one-sided 'Dionysian approach' to life which, in my editorial opinion, will usually end in 'Dionysian-Id self-destruction' if not properly 'balanced' by 'Apollonian, Enlightenment-Ego-and-Superego' characteristics....as trumpeted in Nietzsche's first book....
Whether coincidence or not, the last ten years of Nietzsche's life ended in his own 'existential self-destruction' -- perhaps from falling 'too deeply in love' one too many times (i.e., in the last case, to Lou Andreas Salome) without having the internal 'Apollonian resources' to pull him out of his own self-created 'Romantic Abyss'...Was 'romance' a part of Nietzsche's 'Dionysian Classification System' -- or was Dionysus more fixated on alcohol, seduction, sex, music, and sensual hedonism...
Perhaps Nietzsche forgot about 'Eros' or 'Cupid', as I have too, for the most part, in my larger 'mythological' personality classification system. Regardless, it's good to be 'romantic'...but not to the point of 'romantic self-destruction'....and maybe Nietzsche fell just a little too hard on his last attempt at romance in his life....
2. Screen Memories, Lifestyle Memories, and Transference Memories
a. A 'screen memory' suggests for us to 'look for another deeper, more etiologically (causally) significant memory...because this one you are looking at here is 'a screen memory that is both hiding and alluding to a deeper, repressed memory';
b. A 'lifestyle memory' says 'look right here -- don't go any further -- you have found the diagnostic gold right here' (with an underlying 'Adlerian unity -- as in no conflict -- in the personality' assumptive foundation);
c. A 'transference memory' says 'look here -- you've found the diagnostic gold and don't need to look any further' (but with an operative, Freudian assumptive foundation of 'conflict -- as opposed to unity -- in the personality, or even better, the dialectic idea of 'conflicted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality -- which integrates both Freudian and Adlerian assumptive foundations.
Thus, we arrive at the DGB Multi-Bi-Polarity or Quantum-Dialectic assumptive foundation of 'conficted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality, with different degrees of conflict and/or unity going on at different times in the personality, depending on the context of one's present and past life-situation interacting with each other at different moments in time.
Now, in 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through' (1914), Freud, although he was using the concept of 'screen memory' (as in 'dig deeper for a more important, 'repressed' memory), still stated quite assertively that that there was essential, diagnostic information to be obtained from a screen memory (so much so, in my editorial opinion that this type of memory rightly deserves to be called a 'transference memory' rather than, or in addition to, being called a Freudian 'screen memory'.
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In the words of Freud:
In some cases, I have had an impression that the familiar childhood amnesia, which is theoretically so important to us, is completely counterbalanced by screen memories. Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories. It is simply a question of knowing how to extract it out of them by analysis. They represent the forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of a dream represents the dream-thoughts. (Freud, Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through', Edited by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, S.E. Vol. Xll, p. 148.)
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Freud, as early as 1895, claimed that 'hysterical (read also: neurotic) symptoms were overdetermined' (Freud, Studies on Hysteria, V. 2, p. 263 and 290, and in 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria), Freud asserted that memories are like a 'geneological tree' (1896, p. 198), that they are 'associatively connected' to each other (1896, p. 198), 'co-operated' with each other (1896, p. 202), and, in this regard, were structurally and psycho-dynamically similar to each other...Freud said that both the memories and the symptoms could be put together like a 'child's picture puzzle' (1896, p. 205), and that, 'the contents of the infantile scenes (the 'lowest common denominator' of all the 'memory links and associations' of which at this point in Freud's theorizing were considered both 'real' and 'unconscious/repressed' -- soon to change after 1896, in fact, maybe even partly changing in the midst of this essay, my editorial addition) turn out to be indispensible supplements to the associative and logical framework of the neurosis, whose insertion makes its course of development for the first time evident, or even, as we might often say, self-evident' (1896, p. 205).
You can see this 'co-operation of memories' illustrated in some of Freud's collection of conscious early memories between the ages of 3 and 7, the general time period that I am talking about when I use the term 'conscious early memories', and which Freud includes under the category of 'screen memories'.
Adler didn't follow Freud into his 'repression' or 'childhood amnesia' assumption, and instead, used 'conscious early memories' which he also called 'lifestyle memories' as one of his main diagnostic, psychological interpretive tools. I have followed Adler's lead in this regard -- Adler learned from Freud, and I learned indirectly from Adler (i.e., through 'The Adler Institute of Ontario' back in the early 1980s) , but neither Adler nor I were/are impressed with Freud's general theory of 'repression/childhood amnesia', and have, more or less, eliminated this type of thinking from our respective theoretical perspectives. In my case, not entirely as illustrated by my own two case examples of the 'reports' cited below which can be viewed as belonging to my own childhood 'sea of amnesia'.
There are however, what Adler called 'reports' (of events as recited usually by family members) that may or may not be personally remembered. And these can cause some 'mental confusion' as we may become confused as to whether we actually remember these (usually early childhood) events, or whether we don't. I have two reports of this type in my life: 1. an event where I stood up in a Church Congregation at about 4 or 5 years old and naming all the countries in the world that my dad pointed to on a globe (I couldn't come close to that now.) 2. an event where my dad said I reported another child stealing from a storeowner, and the storeowner thanking my dad for raising such an 'honest' child. (That was in my 'naive, innocent, unjaded early days before I learned how the Narcissistic Capitalist world works. Now I focus on politicians 'stealing' from taxpayers, and corporate owners 'stealing' from their employees...perhaps as partly 'learned' in that first store experience that I don't remember....)
'Reports' are kind of 'nebulous, skaky transference diagnostic tools' -- not entirely meaningless, but not as trusted as a 'vivid conscious childhood memory' which is likely to have much stronger diagnostic, 'transference structural and psycho-dynamic memory, fantasy, and obsessive impulse and repetition associations' attached to it.
Freud had more than a handful of conscious early transference memories which he did and he didn't put much stock into. If you keep hammering the importance of 'repressed early childhood memories', how many theorists/therapists trained in your school of psychology and psychotherapy are going to take a serious look at the 'lifesyle or transference significance' of conscious early memories. Adler did -- and he called them 'lifestyle memories'. I do, and I bring these 'lifestyle memories' back into a Freudian and post-Freudian 'conflict model/paradigm' of the personality, and interpret/analyze them from my own post-Freudian, post-Adlerian 'paradoxical, dialectic, multi-bi-polar, perspective.
Two of the more important conscious early transference memories in Freud's life were: 1. his 'primal master bedroom scene' memory relative to his busting in on his parents when he was 3 or 4 years old while they were having sex, and being yelled at by his father to get out of the room immediately (I have interpreted this memory in a number of other different essays such as 'The First True Case of Psychoanalysis'); and 2. his 'magician memory' where his mom told little Siggy that we all are born from the earth and will return to the earth, and to demonstrate this, she rubbed her hands and produced some dark specimens of epidermis to a first skeptical, then astonished, but believing, little Siggy. Sounds like Freud's early childhood assumptive basis for what would much later in his life become 'the principle of constancy', 'the conservation of energy', 'the law of entropy', and from 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' -- 'the nirvana' and 'death instinct' principle. Not to mention Freud's 'narcissistic, transference fixation' with always looking for a 'magician' in his life (Breuer, Charcot, Bernheim, Fliess, Jung...) as well as 'astonishing' the world by metaphorically being one himself.
We will leave this subject of 'childhood transference memory interpreting' for now, as I want to go back over my still evolving DGB model of the Psyche/Personality. There are a few modifications and changes that I would like to add. We will do this in my next essay. And my model of the psyche needs to be connected to my theory of 'transference memories' and their psycholoigical interpretation....
Join me there!
-- dgb, January 21st, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
1. Introduction
What Freud called 'screen memories' from 1899 onwards (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899), Adler, in the 1920s, called 'lifestyle memories', and I, in 2012 (going back to the mid 1980s), call 'transference memories'.
Each name-concept mentioned above involves an assumptive paradigm shift that changes conceptual and theoretical boundaries, and opens up new conceptual and theoretical territory. If the paradigm shift turns out to be theoretically and therapeutically/pragmatically useful, then I say 'go with the paradigm shift' and/or at least open up your mind to the idea of 'bouncing back and forth' between different paradigm assumptions. That's called being open-minded. And/or 'thinking both inside and outside the box.' And/or 'not letting traditional, status-quo, Establishment ideas define and limit you to the prospect and potential for an 'evolutionary advancement in new and better labels, ideas, theories, classification systems, paradigms...'.
In particular, when you open yourself up to the use of 'bi-polarity theories' that reflect a similar 'bi-polarity in life', you advance yourself past the point of being caught up in an Aristolean 'either/or' classification system and/or a Kierkegaardian choice between Theory A vs. Theory B, or political party A vs. B...each focusing on the particular advantages of their end of the bi-polar idea spectrum while downplaying, minimizing, degrading the polar theory of their opposite competitor. Until, one day, someone has the bright idea of integrating the two opposite polar paradigm theories, and very neatly incorporates the best advantages of each, while covering up for the weaknesses of each...
This is what Hegel meant when he said -- and I am paraphrasing -- that 'every (one-sided) idea or theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.
In physics, the key to overcoming the deficiences of both the 'particle theory' and the 'wave theory' of matter and energy lay in 'dialectically integrating' the two theories together, and such is what needs to be done with Freud's pre-1897 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory vs. his post 1896 'fantasy-instinct-impulse' theory, or worded differently, his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory vs. his 'childhood sexual instinct, impulse and fantasy' theory....
Life is continually busting down man-made conceptual and theoretical boundaries...
We either adjust, accept, appreciate, and respect this fact -- or we don't.
Those who persist on righteously and narcissistically holding on -- with a pit bull's bite -- to one-sided, anal-retentive theories that defy and distort life, are holding us all back from 'evolving' to a more Hegelian multi-dialectic-dynamic approach and paradigm of: philosophy, history, psychology, law, politics, economics, biology, physics, chemistry, business, economics, art, music, religion, mythology, spirituality...
Nietzsche's 'healthiest' philosophy book was his first one: 'The Birth of Tragedy' which subscribed to a 'bi-polar' theory that involved integrating his classification system of an 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' lifestyle.
However, after that book, Nietzsche shunned Apollo to 'The Dissociation Pit' -- and even though Nietzsche continued to write an ongoing assortment of brilliant essays/books afterwards, still, they were partly 'de-evolving' into an increasingly one-sided 'Dionysian approach' to life which, in my editorial opinion, will usually end in 'Dionysian-Id self-destruction' if not properly 'balanced' by 'Apollonian, Enlightenment-Ego-and-Superego' characteristics....as trumpeted in Nietzsche's first book....
Whether coincidence or not, the last ten years of Nietzsche's life ended in his own 'existential self-destruction' -- perhaps from falling 'too deeply in love' one too many times (i.e., in the last case, to Lou Andreas Salome) without having the internal 'Apollonian resources' to pull him out of his own self-created 'Romantic Abyss'...Was 'romance' a part of Nietzsche's 'Dionysian Classification System' -- or was Dionysus more fixated on alcohol, seduction, sex, music, and sensual hedonism...
Perhaps Nietzsche forgot about 'Eros' or 'Cupid', as I have too, for the most part, in my larger 'mythological' personality classification system. Regardless, it's good to be 'romantic'...but not to the point of 'romantic self-destruction'....and maybe Nietzsche fell just a little too hard on his last attempt at romance in his life....
2. Screen Memories, Lifestyle Memories, and Transference Memories
a. A 'screen memory' suggests for us to 'look for another deeper, more etiologically (causally) significant memory...because this one you are looking at here is 'a screen memory that is both hiding and alluding to a deeper, repressed memory';
b. A 'lifestyle memory' says 'look right here -- don't go any further -- you have found the diagnostic gold right here' (with an underlying 'Adlerian unity -- as in no conflict -- in the personality' assumptive foundation);
c. A 'transference memory' says 'look here -- you've found the diagnostic gold and don't need to look any further' (but with an operative, Freudian assumptive foundation of 'conflict -- as opposed to unity -- in the personality, or even better, the dialectic idea of 'conflicted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality -- which integrates both Freudian and Adlerian assumptive foundations.
Thus, we arrive at the DGB Multi-Bi-Polarity or Quantum-Dialectic assumptive foundation of 'conficted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality, with different degrees of conflict and/or unity going on at different times in the personality, depending on the context of one's present and past life-situation interacting with each other at different moments in time.
Now, in 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through' (1914), Freud, although he was using the concept of 'screen memory' (as in 'dig deeper for a more important, 'repressed' memory), still stated quite assertively that that there was essential, diagnostic information to be obtained from a screen memory (so much so, in my editorial opinion that this type of memory rightly deserves to be called a 'transference memory' rather than, or in addition to, being called a Freudian 'screen memory'.
..................................................................................
In the words of Freud:
In some cases, I have had an impression that the familiar childhood amnesia, which is theoretically so important to us, is completely counterbalanced by screen memories. Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories. It is simply a question of knowing how to extract it out of them by analysis. They represent the forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of a dream represents the dream-thoughts. (Freud, Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through', Edited by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, S.E. Vol. Xll, p. 148.)
......................................................................................................
Freud, as early as 1895, claimed that 'hysterical (read also: neurotic) symptoms were overdetermined' (Freud, Studies on Hysteria, V. 2, p. 263 and 290, and in 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria), Freud asserted that memories are like a 'geneological tree' (1896, p. 198), that they are 'associatively connected' to each other (1896, p. 198), 'co-operated' with each other (1896, p. 202), and, in this regard, were structurally and psycho-dynamically similar to each other...Freud said that both the memories and the symptoms could be put together like a 'child's picture puzzle' (1896, p. 205), and that, 'the contents of the infantile scenes (the 'lowest common denominator' of all the 'memory links and associations' of which at this point in Freud's theorizing were considered both 'real' and 'unconscious/repressed' -- soon to change after 1896, in fact, maybe even partly changing in the midst of this essay, my editorial addition) turn out to be indispensible supplements to the associative and logical framework of the neurosis, whose insertion makes its course of development for the first time evident, or even, as we might often say, self-evident' (1896, p. 205).
You can see this 'co-operation of memories' illustrated in some of Freud's collection of conscious early memories between the ages of 3 and 7, the general time period that I am talking about when I use the term 'conscious early memories', and which Freud includes under the category of 'screen memories'.
Adler didn't follow Freud into his 'repression' or 'childhood amnesia' assumption, and instead, used 'conscious early memories' which he also called 'lifestyle memories' as one of his main diagnostic, psychological interpretive tools. I have followed Adler's lead in this regard -- Adler learned from Freud, and I learned indirectly from Adler (i.e., through 'The Adler Institute of Ontario' back in the early 1980s) , but neither Adler nor I were/are impressed with Freud's general theory of 'repression/childhood amnesia', and have, more or less, eliminated this type of thinking from our respective theoretical perspectives. In my case, not entirely as illustrated by my own two case examples of the 'reports' cited below which can be viewed as belonging to my own childhood 'sea of amnesia'.
There are however, what Adler called 'reports' (of events as recited usually by family members) that may or may not be personally remembered. And these can cause some 'mental confusion' as we may become confused as to whether we actually remember these (usually early childhood) events, or whether we don't. I have two reports of this type in my life: 1. an event where I stood up in a Church Congregation at about 4 or 5 years old and naming all the countries in the world that my dad pointed to on a globe (I couldn't come close to that now.) 2. an event where my dad said I reported another child stealing from a storeowner, and the storeowner thanking my dad for raising such an 'honest' child. (That was in my 'naive, innocent, unjaded early days before I learned how the Narcissistic Capitalist world works. Now I focus on politicians 'stealing' from taxpayers, and corporate owners 'stealing' from their employees...perhaps as partly 'learned' in that first store experience that I don't remember....)
'Reports' are kind of 'nebulous, skaky transference diagnostic tools' -- not entirely meaningless, but not as trusted as a 'vivid conscious childhood memory' which is likely to have much stronger diagnostic, 'transference structural and psycho-dynamic memory, fantasy, and obsessive impulse and repetition associations' attached to it.
Freud had more than a handful of conscious early transference memories which he did and he didn't put much stock into. If you keep hammering the importance of 'repressed early childhood memories', how many theorists/therapists trained in your school of psychology and psychotherapy are going to take a serious look at the 'lifesyle or transference significance' of conscious early memories. Adler did -- and he called them 'lifestyle memories'. I do, and I bring these 'lifestyle memories' back into a Freudian and post-Freudian 'conflict model/paradigm' of the personality, and interpret/analyze them from my own post-Freudian, post-Adlerian 'paradoxical, dialectic, multi-bi-polar, perspective.
Two of the more important conscious early transference memories in Freud's life were: 1. his 'primal master bedroom scene' memory relative to his busting in on his parents when he was 3 or 4 years old while they were having sex, and being yelled at by his father to get out of the room immediately (I have interpreted this memory in a number of other different essays such as 'The First True Case of Psychoanalysis'); and 2. his 'magician memory' where his mom told little Siggy that we all are born from the earth and will return to the earth, and to demonstrate this, she rubbed her hands and produced some dark specimens of epidermis to a first skeptical, then astonished, but believing, little Siggy. Sounds like Freud's early childhood assumptive basis for what would much later in his life become 'the principle of constancy', 'the conservation of energy', 'the law of entropy', and from 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' -- 'the nirvana' and 'death instinct' principle. Not to mention Freud's 'narcissistic, transference fixation' with always looking for a 'magician' in his life (Breuer, Charcot, Bernheim, Fliess, Jung...) as well as 'astonishing' the world by metaphorically being one himself.
We will leave this subject of 'childhood transference memory interpreting' for now, as I want to go back over my still evolving DGB model of the Psyche/Personality. There are a few modifications and changes that I would like to add. We will do this in my next essay. And my model of the psyche needs to be connected to my theory of 'transference memories' and their psycholoigical interpretation....
Join me there!
-- dgb, January 21st, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
1.13. Bridging The Gap Between Pre-Psychoanalytic 'Reality-Traumacy' Theory and Classical Psychoanalytic 'Fantasy-Impulse' Theory
New essay....in process....January 14th/2012....
A distinction between three types of choices can be made:
1. An 'Aristotlean Either/Or Classification Choice';
Eg. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
2. A 'Kierkegaardian Either/Or Existential Choice';
Eg. Should I get married, or should I not?
3. A 'Hegelian Dialectic-Integrative Choice';
Eg. The Democrats and Republicans compromising on some legislative bill in order to get it passed into law....
A Hegelian choice involves synthesizing two or more seemingly opposing choices -- a 'compromise-solution' of sorts but ideally with the 'best of both worlds integrated into one 'dialectically interactive but cohesive unit or paradigm'....
Is integrating pre-1897 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory with post 1896 'Fantasy-Impulse Theory' going to give us a superior form of Psychoanalysis than either 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis or 'Classical' Psychoanalysis' taken separately? That is the dialectically posed question here....
A distinction between three types of choices can be made:
1. An 'Aristotlean Either/Or Classification Choice';
Eg. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
2. A 'Kierkegaardian Either/Or Existential Choice';
Eg. Should I get married, or should I not?
3. A 'Hegelian Dialectic-Integrative Choice';
Eg. The Democrats and Republicans compromising on some legislative bill in order to get it passed into law....
A Hegelian choice involves synthesizing two or more seemingly opposing choices -- a 'compromise-solution' of sorts but ideally with the 'best of both worlds integrated into one 'dialectically interactive but cohesive unit or paradigm'....
Is integrating pre-1897 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory with post 1896 'Fantasy-Impulse Theory' going to give us a superior form of Psychoanalysis than either 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis or 'Classical' Psychoanalysis' taken separately? That is the dialectically posed question here....
1.12. On The Similarity Between 'The Mind-Psyche-Self's' Immune System and The Mind-Body's Immune System
The 'mind's defense system' and the 'body's defense system' work essentially the same way -- and for that matter, so does our 'computer's defense system'. And for that matter, so does our 'legal-civil defense system', and our 'military defense system'.
All of them can be said to use 'vaults' or 'prisons' to 'lock up the bad guys' -- or the 'viruses' and 'bacteria' -- or the 'dangerous thoughts, impulses, drives, obsessions, fantasies, and/or potential actions'....
In our 'psychic immune system', we all have ' superego and ego-defenders' who are like 'soldiers' or 'prison guards' who watch to make sure the 'prisoners don't escape' from 'The Shadow-Id Vault' -- the 'vault comprised of locked-up, misbehaving thoughts, impulses, drives, obsessions, fantasies, and/or potential actions'.
Now, introduce an 'existential or immediacy stressor' -- say, a loss of job, loss of income, loss of spouse, insufficient income to meet all our bills, and/or a huge bill unexpectedly landing on our desk -- say a lawyer's bill, a vet's bill, a dentist's bill, a doctor's bill, a tax bill... -- without the funds to take care of it...
Immediacy stressors can lead to 'upsets' or 'imbalances' in the mind-body's immune system, spawned by loss of hope, loss of spirit, loss of optimism, 'deflation of the ego'....Sometimes -- oftentimes -- this type of stess can spawn 'compensatory impulses' of either an angry, vengeful... and/or the sensual, pleasure-seeking variety...Indeed, often 'hard internal and/or external stressors' can trigger the onset of a whole host of possible 'addictions' -- food, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc...These are what I call 'oral obsessions' or 'oral addictions' -- they all involve the act of 'consuming' or 'receiving' pleasure -- or, at least, this is their intent.
So you wander down to your favorite 'watering hole' -- knock down a couple of 'quick cocktails', your 'ego defenders/prison guards' start to get a little 'tipsey' on the job while they are supposed to be 'working' -- and 'the inmates of your asylum, your Shadow-Id Vault' start to get a little excited that the guards 'are losing control of themselves and the 'door to the vault' -- and this is when you start to get 'The SIEVE Effect' -- Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy starting to 'escape' the vault and head upwards in the psyche, up towards the control system of 'The Central Ego'...Now, if your 'prsison guards' start to get really drunk, you could get a complete 'evacuation' of The Shadow-Id Vault -- and a 'flooding upwards' of the 'free inmates from your asylum', until you get, in effect, what might be metaphorically viewed as a 'Storming of The Bastille'...at which point you become a much more 'unpredictable patron of your local watering hole'...your behavior reflecting perhaps, more and more of the 'contents' of your 'Shadow-Id Vault and/or Ego', or worded otherwise, your 'Narcissistic-Dionysian Ego' as opposed to your 'Apollonian Ego' which used to be much more in control before you sucked down three cocktails...
If 'food' is your 'compensatory impulse of choice', then you are likely going to put on weight unless you exercise a lot, have a fast metabolism, and/or 'throw it back up again'...
If 'drug addiction' is your compensatory impulse of choice, then it will depend on whether you prefer the 'social and/or sexual type' or the 'anti-social, anal-schizoid, oral fantasy' type...The first type are usually done in couples or groups and/or parties; the latter type is more often done in metaphorical 'bat caves' where you disappear for 6 or 12 or 24 hours at a time before 're-surfacing again'..Alcohol can also serve this type of 'loner' addiction...
'Gambling' of course is likely only going to make your money problem worse...Then there are the people with lots of money -- who don't have a problem with money -- until gambling creates a money problem where there was none before...
This analysis is rather short, sharp, and pointed as well as all 'metaphorical' but I think the message is still important. The mind and body function similarly -- and dialectically -- not detached, different, and apart....
Enough said on this subject for now...This can be viewed, more or less, as an extension or extrapolation of 'Classic Freudian Theory'...
-- dgb, Jan. 8th, 2012...
-- David Gordon Bain
All of them can be said to use 'vaults' or 'prisons' to 'lock up the bad guys' -- or the 'viruses' and 'bacteria' -- or the 'dangerous thoughts, impulses, drives, obsessions, fantasies, and/or potential actions'....
In our 'psychic immune system', we all have ' superego and ego-defenders' who are like 'soldiers' or 'prison guards' who watch to make sure the 'prisoners don't escape' from 'The Shadow-Id Vault' -- the 'vault comprised of locked-up, misbehaving thoughts, impulses, drives, obsessions, fantasies, and/or potential actions'.
Now, introduce an 'existential or immediacy stressor' -- say, a loss of job, loss of income, loss of spouse, insufficient income to meet all our bills, and/or a huge bill unexpectedly landing on our desk -- say a lawyer's bill, a vet's bill, a dentist's bill, a doctor's bill, a tax bill... -- without the funds to take care of it...
Immediacy stressors can lead to 'upsets' or 'imbalances' in the mind-body's immune system, spawned by loss of hope, loss of spirit, loss of optimism, 'deflation of the ego'....Sometimes -- oftentimes -- this type of stess can spawn 'compensatory impulses' of either an angry, vengeful... and/or the sensual, pleasure-seeking variety...Indeed, often 'hard internal and/or external stressors' can trigger the onset of a whole host of possible 'addictions' -- food, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc...These are what I call 'oral obsessions' or 'oral addictions' -- they all involve the act of 'consuming' or 'receiving' pleasure -- or, at least, this is their intent.
So you wander down to your favorite 'watering hole' -- knock down a couple of 'quick cocktails', your 'ego defenders/prison guards' start to get a little 'tipsey' on the job while they are supposed to be 'working' -- and 'the inmates of your asylum, your Shadow-Id Vault' start to get a little excited that the guards 'are losing control of themselves and the 'door to the vault' -- and this is when you start to get 'The SIEVE Effect' -- Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy starting to 'escape' the vault and head upwards in the psyche, up towards the control system of 'The Central Ego'...Now, if your 'prsison guards' start to get really drunk, you could get a complete 'evacuation' of The Shadow-Id Vault -- and a 'flooding upwards' of the 'free inmates from your asylum', until you get, in effect, what might be metaphorically viewed as a 'Storming of The Bastille'...at which point you become a much more 'unpredictable patron of your local watering hole'...your behavior reflecting perhaps, more and more of the 'contents' of your 'Shadow-Id Vault and/or Ego', or worded otherwise, your 'Narcissistic-Dionysian Ego' as opposed to your 'Apollonian Ego' which used to be much more in control before you sucked down three cocktails...
If 'food' is your 'compensatory impulse of choice', then you are likely going to put on weight unless you exercise a lot, have a fast metabolism, and/or 'throw it back up again'...
If 'drug addiction' is your compensatory impulse of choice, then it will depend on whether you prefer the 'social and/or sexual type' or the 'anti-social, anal-schizoid, oral fantasy' type...The first type are usually done in couples or groups and/or parties; the latter type is more often done in metaphorical 'bat caves' where you disappear for 6 or 12 or 24 hours at a time before 're-surfacing again'..Alcohol can also serve this type of 'loner' addiction...
'Gambling' of course is likely only going to make your money problem worse...Then there are the people with lots of money -- who don't have a problem with money -- until gambling creates a money problem where there was none before...
This analysis is rather short, sharp, and pointed as well as all 'metaphorical' but I think the message is still important. The mind and body function similarly -- and dialectically -- not detached, different, and apart....
Enough said on this subject for now...This can be viewed, more or less, as an extension or extrapolation of 'Classic Freudian Theory'...
-- dgb, Jan. 8th, 2012...
-- David Gordon Bain
Saturday, January 7, 2012
1.11. On The Seeming Absurdity of The Often Brutal Dialectic Interplay Between 'Being and Nothingness', and Within 'The Master-Slave Relationship'
Finished...Jan. 7th, 2012
I go to bed most nights feeling more and more like Doestevsky, or at least some character in a Doestevsky novel -- like 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', or 'Notes From The Underground'. It is the first time in my life that I have seriously felt like this. Call it a product of 'The Trial' or 'The Stranger' -- getting older, feeling it, and not being where you want to be.
Or call it 'PMS-C Disorder' if you will -- 'Pessimism, Misery and Miserable Attitude, Skepticism -- Cynicism'.
Hegel's Hotel is built on a combination of love, reason, passion, idealism -- and the personal experience of elements of its opposite polarity -- moral, social and personal, democratic rage and outrage, as well as a sense of 'powerlessness', ineffectualness', self and social alienation, on top of a 'socio-economic meltdown' -- and behind all of this, a lack of sufficient and necessary 'will to self-empowerment'. Except what I can muster up in Hegel's Hotel here...
You don't usually write 5,000 or 10,000 pages of philosophy, psychology, economics, law, business, and/or politics without something seriously gnawing at you from 'The Shadow of Your Spirit and Soul...
Sometimes, what may 'sieve out' of your Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy' (SIEVE) through its 'transference-sublimation' into your work, at other times can rush or flood out, like The Mississippi or Red River during the springtime. You could call this a 'Shadow Rush' or a 'Shadow Flood' which may take many forms of 'High Psycho-Drama' -- a 'rage rush', a 'grief rush', a 'panic rush', a 'nervous breakdown', a 'psychotic meltdown'... We could be talking about anything from a Nietzsche 'love meltdown' -- at least that is how I heard it interpreted recently -- to a Ted Bundy murder spree....
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Lou Andreas-Salomé (born Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé, Russian: Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 – 5 January 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished western luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke.
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I just finished watching the film When Nietzsche Wept (based on the book of the same title). It’s an interesting story that mixes some historical figures and events with Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychology. Although the movie has its flaws, it’s worth watching if you’re interested in any of these topics.
Revealing the story won’t ruin the experience, so here is a synopsis. Nietzsche suffers migraines and is depressed and suicidal due to a broken heart. The girl that broke his heart asks Dr. Josef Breuer (Freud’s mentor) to help him recover using both medicine and his new “talk therapy.” She has no romantic interest in Nietzsche, but she cares for him and believes that he will produce something great for mankind in the future.
The relationship between Breuer and Nietzsche proves mutually beneficial. Breuer helps Nietzsche recover, and Nietzsche helps Breuer overcome his own demons. They become friends in the end, and Nietzsche finally recognizes and confides his greatest fear to Breuer: he doesn’t want to die alone. And Nietzsche wept.
For all his complex ideas about ethics, social order, and the Ubermensch, at the most basic level, Nietzsche is simply a lonely guy. Of course, this is a gross oversimplification, but this idea is useful nonetheless. Philosophers come in all flavors, but they are plagued by the same occupational hazards, loneliness/alienation being the most common.
This got me thinking about the terrible toll loneliness takes on many visionary creators, whether they are thinkers, artists, or writers. They care about the world, yet they often express it in terms that people do not or cannot understand or appreciate. Their social ineptness or aloofness makes them difficult to love, and their insecurities make it difficult for them to accept love. Loneliness drives some to self-destruct, sometimes taking others with them, yet many simply vanish like shadows. Rare are those that weathered the storm and live long enough to receive acknowledgment within their lifetimes.
If only this were not true. Think of how many careers were cut short prematurely? How much richer would humanity be if these people had made their contributions, both great and small? Would a more stable Nietzsche be less brilliant, or would his thoughts be more balanced and accessible? Sadly, we will never know the answers to any of these questions.
Surely all creators want to live to see their work recognized; if only they would do more to help themselves. Or is this asking too much? Perhaps what drives creation invariably inhibits healthy social interaction as well; it is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t know. But I do know that everyone can use a friend at some point, even the father of the Ubermensch......................................................................................................................................
Life is a strange integrative -- and non-integrative -- mix of co-operation and competition.
Narcissistic Capitalism often exasperates the 'competition' end of things -- as well as 'dissociating' the 'harmonious co-operation' end of things....
Power and money often distorts, perverts, poisons the truth -- and yet makes it real anyway -- creating a 'smoke and mirrors' show, an 'ideological and/or marketing fascade' where we really don't know who to trust, or what to trust, because the people we want to trust, want our money or our time and labour -- more than they want our friendship, our well-being, and our goodwill. Thus, narcissistic capitalism breeds a very lonely, alienated, 'Lord of The Flies', world....making it all the more important to hang on tight to our family, friends, and loved ones...Because once you lose your family, friends, loved ones -- what do you have left? -- a very, isolated, lonely, alienated existence -- and sometimes a 'moral rage and outrage' against the type of 'Narcissistic Corporate and Government Environment' that created such an isolated, lonely, alienated world we live in....with people not really caring about each other's problems -- we have enough of our own -- and going into the 'marketplace' each day to often 'rob and plunder' each other, to greater and lesser extents...
In this context, we try to find something meaningful in life....maybe we can find something meaningful in our work, and/or we 'cringe and defend ourselves' through each day, in order to get home to find something meaningful with our family, friends, loved ones, at night...And/or when that goes, what do you have left? A spiritless soul?
Or perhaps a 'spiritless soul' in a 'spiritless environment' -- still striving for a 'spiritual soul and a spiritual existence'....a dangerous, conflicted, ambivalent existence....and a dangerous 'abyss crossing' from a largely meaningless and spiritless existence to a more 'meaningful and spirited one' where we can perhaps feel more like a 'Superman' or 'Superwoman' with an effectual 'Will to Power and Self-Empowerment'...
And then maybe we have our Schopenhaurean, or Doestevskean, or Kierkegaardean'
moments when we shake our personal heads at the 'absurdity' of it all -- this often rather brutal dialectic interplay between 'Being and Nothingness'...
.......................................................................................
Last Thoughts on Woodie Guthrie
-- Bob Dylan
.........................................................................................
I find my spirit in 'Hegel's Hotel'....
Freud found his spirit in 'Psychoanalysis'....
How did Freud 'lose his spirit' -- before he 're-found it' -- in Psychoanalysis?
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this essay...soon to come...
-- dgb, Jan. 7th, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations....
-- Are Still in Process....
I go to bed most nights feeling more and more like Doestevsky, or at least some character in a Doestevsky novel -- like 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', or 'Notes From The Underground'. It is the first time in my life that I have seriously felt like this. Call it a product of 'The Trial' or 'The Stranger' -- getting older, feeling it, and not being where you want to be.
Or call it 'PMS-C Disorder' if you will -- 'Pessimism, Misery and Miserable Attitude, Skepticism -- Cynicism'.
Hegel's Hotel is built on a combination of love, reason, passion, idealism -- and the personal experience of elements of its opposite polarity -- moral, social and personal, democratic rage and outrage, as well as a sense of 'powerlessness', ineffectualness', self and social alienation, on top of a 'socio-economic meltdown' -- and behind all of this, a lack of sufficient and necessary 'will to self-empowerment'. Except what I can muster up in Hegel's Hotel here...
You don't usually write 5,000 or 10,000 pages of philosophy, psychology, economics, law, business, and/or politics without something seriously gnawing at you from 'The Shadow of Your Spirit and Soul...
Sometimes, what may 'sieve out' of your Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy' (SIEVE) through its 'transference-sublimation' into your work, at other times can rush or flood out, like The Mississippi or Red River during the springtime. You could call this a 'Shadow Rush' or a 'Shadow Flood' which may take many forms of 'High Psycho-Drama' -- a 'rage rush', a 'grief rush', a 'panic rush', a 'nervous breakdown', a 'psychotic meltdown'... We could be talking about anything from a Nietzsche 'love meltdown' -- at least that is how I heard it interpreted recently -- to a Ted Bundy murder spree....
.................................................................................................................
Lou Andreas-Salomé (born Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé, Russian: Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 – 5 January 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished western luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke.
.............................................................................................................................
When Nietzsche Wept
By: Justarius on Apr 17 2009Category: Works
0 comments
I just finished watching the film When Nietzsche Wept (based on the book of the same title). It’s an interesting story that mixes some historical figures and events with Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychology. Although the movie has its flaws, it’s worth watching if you’re interested in any of these topics.
Revealing the story won’t ruin the experience, so here is a synopsis. Nietzsche suffers migraines and is depressed and suicidal due to a broken heart. The girl that broke his heart asks Dr. Josef Breuer (Freud’s mentor) to help him recover using both medicine and his new “talk therapy.” She has no romantic interest in Nietzsche, but she cares for him and believes that he will produce something great for mankind in the future.
The relationship between Breuer and Nietzsche proves mutually beneficial. Breuer helps Nietzsche recover, and Nietzsche helps Breuer overcome his own demons. They become friends in the end, and Nietzsche finally recognizes and confides his greatest fear to Breuer: he doesn’t want to die alone. And Nietzsche wept.
For all his complex ideas about ethics, social order, and the Ubermensch, at the most basic level, Nietzsche is simply a lonely guy. Of course, this is a gross oversimplification, but this idea is useful nonetheless. Philosophers come in all flavors, but they are plagued by the same occupational hazards, loneliness/alienation being the most common.
This got me thinking about the terrible toll loneliness takes on many visionary creators, whether they are thinkers, artists, or writers. They care about the world, yet they often express it in terms that people do not or cannot understand or appreciate. Their social ineptness or aloofness makes them difficult to love, and their insecurities make it difficult for them to accept love. Loneliness drives some to self-destruct, sometimes taking others with them, yet many simply vanish like shadows. Rare are those that weathered the storm and live long enough to receive acknowledgment within their lifetimes.
If only this were not true. Think of how many careers were cut short prematurely? How much richer would humanity be if these people had made their contributions, both great and small? Would a more stable Nietzsche be less brilliant, or would his thoughts be more balanced and accessible? Sadly, we will never know the answers to any of these questions.
Surely all creators want to live to see their work recognized; if only they would do more to help themselves. Or is this asking too much? Perhaps what drives creation invariably inhibits healthy social interaction as well; it is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t know. But I do know that everyone can use a friend at some point, even the father of the Ubermensch.
Life is a strange integrative -- and non-integrative -- mix of co-operation and competition.
Narcissistic Capitalism often exasperates the 'competition' end of things -- as well as 'dissociating' the 'harmonious co-operation' end of things....
Power and money often distorts, perverts, poisons the truth -- and yet makes it real anyway -- creating a 'smoke and mirrors' show, an 'ideological and/or marketing fascade' where we really don't know who to trust, or what to trust, because the people we want to trust, want our money or our time and labour -- more than they want our friendship, our well-being, and our goodwill. Thus, narcissistic capitalism breeds a very lonely, alienated, 'Lord of The Flies', world....making it all the more important to hang on tight to our family, friends, and loved ones...Because once you lose your family, friends, loved ones -- what do you have left? -- a very, isolated, lonely, alienated existence -- and sometimes a 'moral rage and outrage' against the type of 'Narcissistic Corporate and Government Environment' that created such an isolated, lonely, alienated world we live in....with people not really caring about each other's problems -- we have enough of our own -- and going into the 'marketplace' each day to often 'rob and plunder' each other, to greater and lesser extents...
In this context, we try to find something meaningful in life....maybe we can find something meaningful in our work, and/or we 'cringe and defend ourselves' through each day, in order to get home to find something meaningful with our family, friends, loved ones, at night...And/or when that goes, what do you have left? A spiritless soul?
Or perhaps a 'spiritless soul' in a 'spiritless environment' -- still striving for a 'spiritual soul and a spiritual existence'....a dangerous, conflicted, ambivalent existence....and a dangerous 'abyss crossing' from a largely meaningless and spiritless existence to a more 'meaningful and spirited one' where we can perhaps feel more like a 'Superman' or 'Superwoman' with an effectual 'Will to Power and Self-Empowerment'...
And then maybe we have our Schopenhaurean, or Doestevskean, or Kierkegaardean'
moments when we shake our personal heads at the 'absurdity' of it all -- this often rather brutal dialectic interplay between 'Being and Nothingness'...
.......................................................................................
Last Thoughts on Woodie Guthrie
- Songwriters: Bob Dylan
When your head gets twisted and your mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When you're laggin' behind and losin' your pace
In a slow motion crawl of life's busy race
No matter what you're doing, if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of your cup
If the winds got you sideways with, with one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slippin' and the feelin' is gone
And your train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the woods' easy findin' but you're lazy to fetch it
And your sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know it's wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from your pony are slippin'
And your rope is a slidin' 'cause your hands are a drippin'
And your sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And your sky cries water and your drain pipes a pourin'
And the lightnin's a flashin' and the thunders a crashin'
And the windows are rattlin' and breakin'
And the roof tops a shakin'
And your whole world's a slammin' and bangin'
And your minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
And to yourself, you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born?"
And you start gettin' chills and you're jumpin' from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And you're knee-deep in the dark water with your hands in the air
And the whole world's a watchin' with a window peek stare
And your good gal leaves and she's long gone a flyin'
And your heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And your jackhammer falls from your hand to your feet
And you need it badly but it lays on the street
And your bells bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think your ears might been hurt
Or your eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterday's rush
When you were faked out, an fooled white facin' a four flush
And all the time you were holdin' three queens
And it's makin' you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine
And there's somethin' on your mind you wanna be sayin'
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on your tongue and sealed in your head
And it bothers you badly when you're layin' in bed
And no matter how you try, you just can't say it
And you're scared to your soul, you just might forget it
And your eyes get swimmy from the tears in your head
And your pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion's mouth opens and your starin' at his teeth
And his jaws start closin' with you underneath
And you're flat on your belly with your hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign
And you say to yourself, ‽Just what am I doin'?
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hangin', on this pathway I'm strollin'
In the space I'm takin', in this air I'm inhalin'"
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard?
Why am I walkin', where am I runnin'?
What am I sayin', what am I knowin'
On this guitar I'm playin', on this banjo I'm frailin'?
On this mandolin I'm strummin'
In the song I'm singin', in the tune I'm hummin'
In the words I'm writin', in the words that I'm thinkin'
In this ocean of hours, I'm all the time drinkin'
Who am I helpin', what am I breakin'?
What am I givin', what am I takin'?
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground or make your heart pound
But then again, you know why they're around
Just waitin' for a chance to slip and drop down
'Cause sometimes you hear 'em when the night times comes creepin'
And you fear that they might catch you a sleepin'
And you jump from your bed, from your last chapter of dreamin'
And you can't remember for the best of your thinkin'
If that was you in the dream that was screamin'
And you know that it's somethin' special you're needin'
And you know that there's no drug that'll do for the healin'
And no liquor in the land to stop your brain from bleedin'
And you need somethin' special
Yeah, you need somethin' special, all right
You need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That's been bangin' and boomin' and blowin' forever
That knows your troubles a hundred times over
You need a Greyhound bus that don't bar no race
That won't laugh at your looks, your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rollin' long after the bubblegum craze
You need somethin' to open up a new door
To show you somethin' you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need somethin' to open your eyes
You need somethin' to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that you're standin', that space that you're sittin'
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy, no matter how many times
You might get kicked
You need somethin' special all right
You need somethin' special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said or maybe you heard
On some windy corner, 'round a wide-angled curve
But that's what you need, man and you need it bad
And your trouble is you know it too good
'Cause you look and you start gettin' the chills
'Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain't on that dim lit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Rantin' and ravin' and takin' your money
And you thinks it's funny
No, you can't find it in no night club or no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell, you're bound to tell
That no matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a gonna find it on your ticket stub
No and it ain't in the rumors people are tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in no cardboard box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes
And it ain't in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knockin' and tappin' in Christmas wrappin'
Sayin', ‽Ain't I pretty?†and ‽Ain't I cute?" and "Look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cryâ€
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
No, you'll not, now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made out a paper mache
And inside it the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses
And it ain't in the fifty star generals and flipped out phonies
Who'd turn you in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind your back, my friend
The one's that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can't find it either in the no talent fools
That run around gallant and make all rules for the ones that got talent
And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent
But think they do and think they're foolin' you
The ones who jump on the wagon
Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of money and chicks
And you yell to yourself and you throw down your hat
Sayin', "Christ, do I gotta be like that?
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty, that stuff ain't real"
No, but that ain't your game, it ain't your race
You can't hear your name, you can't see your face
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that you're seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a burnin'?
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'?
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'?
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere?
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You'll find God in the church of your choice
You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion, I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both in Grand Canyon, sundown
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When you're laggin' behind and losin' your pace
In a slow motion crawl of life's busy race
No matter what you're doing, if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of your cup
If the winds got you sideways with, with one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slippin' and the feelin' is gone
And your train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the woods' easy findin' but you're lazy to fetch it
And your sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know it's wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from your pony are slippin'
And your rope is a slidin' 'cause your hands are a drippin'
And your sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And your sky cries water and your drain pipes a pourin'
And the lightnin's a flashin' and the thunders a crashin'
And the windows are rattlin' and breakin'
And the roof tops a shakin'
And your whole world's a slammin' and bangin'
And your minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
And to yourself, you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born?"
And you start gettin' chills and you're jumpin' from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And you're knee-deep in the dark water with your hands in the air
And the whole world's a watchin' with a window peek stare
And your good gal leaves and she's long gone a flyin'
And your heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And your jackhammer falls from your hand to your feet
And you need it badly but it lays on the street
And your bells bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think your ears might been hurt
Or your eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterday's rush
When you were faked out, an fooled white facin' a four flush
And all the time you were holdin' three queens
And it's makin' you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine
And there's somethin' on your mind you wanna be sayin'
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on your tongue and sealed in your head
And it bothers you badly when you're layin' in bed
And no matter how you try, you just can't say it
And you're scared to your soul, you just might forget it
And your eyes get swimmy from the tears in your head
And your pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion's mouth opens and your starin' at his teeth
And his jaws start closin' with you underneath
And you're flat on your belly with your hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign
And you say to yourself, ‽Just what am I doin'?
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hangin', on this pathway I'm strollin'
In the space I'm takin', in this air I'm inhalin'"
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard?
Why am I walkin', where am I runnin'?
What am I sayin', what am I knowin'
On this guitar I'm playin', on this banjo I'm frailin'?
On this mandolin I'm strummin'
In the song I'm singin', in the tune I'm hummin'
In the words I'm writin', in the words that I'm thinkin'
In this ocean of hours, I'm all the time drinkin'
Who am I helpin', what am I breakin'?
What am I givin', what am I takin'?
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground or make your heart pound
But then again, you know why they're around
Just waitin' for a chance to slip and drop down
'Cause sometimes you hear 'em when the night times comes creepin'
And you fear that they might catch you a sleepin'
And you jump from your bed, from your last chapter of dreamin'
And you can't remember for the best of your thinkin'
If that was you in the dream that was screamin'
And you know that it's somethin' special you're needin'
And you know that there's no drug that'll do for the healin'
And no liquor in the land to stop your brain from bleedin'
And you need somethin' special
Yeah, you need somethin' special, all right
You need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That's been bangin' and boomin' and blowin' forever
That knows your troubles a hundred times over
You need a Greyhound bus that don't bar no race
That won't laugh at your looks, your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rollin' long after the bubblegum craze
You need somethin' to open up a new door
To show you somethin' you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need somethin' to open your eyes
You need somethin' to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that you're standin', that space that you're sittin'
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy, no matter how many times
You might get kicked
You need somethin' special all right
You need somethin' special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said or maybe you heard
On some windy corner, 'round a wide-angled curve
But that's what you need, man and you need it bad
And your trouble is you know it too good
'Cause you look and you start gettin' the chills
'Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain't on that dim lit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Rantin' and ravin' and takin' your money
And you thinks it's funny
No, you can't find it in no night club or no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell, you're bound to tell
That no matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a gonna find it on your ticket stub
No and it ain't in the rumors people are tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in no cardboard box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes
And it ain't in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knockin' and tappin' in Christmas wrappin'
Sayin', ‽Ain't I pretty?†and ‽Ain't I cute?" and "Look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cryâ€
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
No, you'll not, now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made out a paper mache
And inside it the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses
And it ain't in the fifty star generals and flipped out phonies
Who'd turn you in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind your back, my friend
The one's that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can't find it either in the no talent fools
That run around gallant and make all rules for the ones that got talent
And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent
But think they do and think they're foolin' you
The ones who jump on the wagon
Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of money and chicks
And you yell to yourself and you throw down your hat
Sayin', "Christ, do I gotta be like that?
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty, that stuff ain't real"
No, but that ain't your game, it ain't your race
You can't hear your name, you can't see your face
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that you're seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a burnin'?
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'?
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'?
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere?
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You'll find God in the church of your choice
You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion, I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both in Grand Canyon, sundown
-- Bob Dylan
.........................................................................................
I find my spirit in 'Hegel's Hotel'....
Freud found his spirit in 'Psychoanalysis'....
How did Freud 'lose his spirit' -- before he 're-found it' -- in Psychoanalysis?
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this essay...soon to come...
-- dgb, Jan. 7th, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations....
-- Are Still in Process....
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
1.10. The Evolving DGB Multi-Dialectic Integrative Model of The Psyche -- As Compared and Contrasted With Freud's Classic Model
Finished!...Jan. 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 2012...
A/ Introduction: A Contrast Between Fichte's Conceptualization of 'The Ego' and Freud's Conceptualization of The Ego and What The Difference Means Relative To Modifying and Extending Freud's Model of The Psyche
As far as my research goes back, and as I have indicated in other essays, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the first (German) philosopher who I know of to use the concept of 'ego' which effectively is a synonym for 'self' in the way that he used it. I am not sure whether or not Kant used the concept of 'ego' before Fichte. Regardless, other than Descartes and the other rational idealists (Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz) -- and even including the rational idealists, Fichte was the first philosopher to really focus in on 'the subjectivity of the human ego or self'. I don't know if Fichte has ever been called 'the father of phenomenology' but if he hasn't, perhaps he should.
If 'ego' in German -- up until Freud started to use it -- meant 'self' or 'psyche', then perhaps we should not get too 'freaked out' if we consider both 'the id' and 'the superego' to be separate 'conceptual and/or phenomenological divisions or compartments of the ego' -- or, in two or four words, separate 'ego states' with separate 'ego-functions' that conceptually divide each of these ego states from how ever many separate ego states we may conceptualize....
In this regard, perhaps Freud might have been better served by calling 'the id' -- 'The Narcissistic Ego' or 'The Dionysian Ego', or 'The Hedonistic (Pleasure-Seeking, Pain-Avoiding) Ego'....even though, with the last label, there are 'different types and levels of both pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding' -- some of which are deemed more 'morally and/or socially and/or legally acceptable' than others, meaning that some may be deemed more 'acceptable' to our internal Superego than others...
However, Freud chose to use the term 'id' which I believe has been translated into English as 'The It' which means that Freud considered the id to be a 'dissociated and/or repressed compart of The Self, The Psyche -- or The Ego....(in The Fichtean sense).
Worded otherwise, the id might be considered to be a 'primitive, uncivil, mainly dissociated compartment of the ego'... But of course, Freud didn't want this potential 'semantic confusion' between 'the id' and 'the ego'.....Regardless, this potential for confusion still stands -- because 'the id' is a particular set of 'ego functions' that are often 'dissociated' from the rest of the ego because they are deemed too 'primitive, too uncivil, too unsocial' to share with ourselves even, let alone anyone in our public world.
Thus, by this type of semantic analysis of the two concepts -- and particularly, the philosophical history of 'the ego' -- Freud was getting it 'backwards' when he stated that 'the ego was a more evolutionarily advanced derivative of the more primitive id'; rather, the id probably could have, and should have, been better conceptualized as the first primitive, evolutionary stage of the ego. In this regard, the id would also have been viewed as our first, most primitive and often uncivil 'ego state' with a particular set of 'self-contained biological and psychological ego functions built around our most demanding internal needs, impulses, drives...'
Now, to be clear, this wasn't Freud's perspective back in 1923 when he created these three concepts of 'id', 'ego', and 'superego'; rather, this is my perspective now looking back on these three concepts now from a different light -- the light that I am shining on them now.
So let me be absolutely clear in this regard: I view the 'id' as being an 'ego-state' involving a particular set of 'ego functions'. So much for 'Classical' Psychoanalysis....as I just turned it upside down like Freud did in 1896.
So with this in mind, and without further ado, let me quickly go over the newest version of my DGB model of the psyche....Let it be clear that this model didn't come out of the workwork or visit me during a dream -- it has been 40 years in the making starting with the first two 'psychology' books I read in 1972; Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics'; and Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought And Action'...
Along the way, this model has picked up influences from Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Fritz Perls, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Eric Berne, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Heinz Kohut, Jeffrey Masson, not to mention such noted Western (and one Eastern) philosophers as Anaximander, Lao Tse, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Spinoza, Sir Francis Bacon, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Doestevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida....This model has been a 'slow train coming'....
2/ The DGB Model Of The Psyche
Ba./ The More Conscious Elements of The Personality...
I have broken down Freud's 'superego' into three parts or three 'superego-states':
1. 'The Nurturing Superego' (Transactional Analysis would call this our 'Nurturing, Internalized Parent');
2. The 'Narcissistic Superego' (An internal 'superego-state' we like to go in order to mix 'power and pleasure' or, often more specifically, 'power and sex');
3. 'The Righteous Superego' (Transactional Analysis calls this 'superego state' our 'Critical Parent' -- looking to enforce 'ethical, legal, religious, theoretical, and/or practical rules' of subjectively construed 'good conduct' -- the problem is that 'ethical, legal, religious, theoretical, and/or practical righteousness' can be construed in a million different ways depending on the individual State, Institution, Corporation, Culture, Religion, or Individual...);
4. 'The Shadow-Id-Ego' (That part that burns inside us but we don't generally let loose..except sometimes consciously or subconsciously, in 'allusions to immediacy'...)
5. 'The Central Ego' (That mediates between all other element of the 'whole ego or self', and particularly here between The Shadow-Id Ego and The Personna Ego);
6. 'The Personna Ego'(which communicates with the outside world, usually holding 'Shadow-Id' elements back, or at least partly back for purposes of 'social diplomacy');
A new set of 'ego-states' -- or more precisely, 'underego states' -- has been developed based on 'object relations' studies to contrast against the 'superego states' listed above; and these are:
7. 'The Nurturing Underego' (appeases and pleases our superego states and/or our Central Ego);
8. 'The Narcissistic Underego' (aims to 'wrestle' power, egotism, pleaure, sex...away from the superego states); and
9. 'The Righteous Underego' (aims to wrestle power and righteousness away from the superego states);
Moving into the more subconscious elements of the personality, we have:
C/
10. 'The Dream Weaver' (DW...weaves our dreams, fantasies, artistic creations, and nightmares together while we are awake or sleeping);
11. 'The Transference-Lifestyle Template' (TLT)....our learnings from the past in order to deal better with the present and future than we have in the past...includes the Jungian concepts of 'Anima' and 'Animus' as well as 'Archetypes' in modified forms...as well as memories and learning of all types);
12. 'The Subconscious Shadow-Id Vault' (Bound Subconscious Shadow-Id Energy just forming and starting to consciously articulate itself...);
13. 'Our Terrifying Abyss of Perceived Existential Self-Failure and/or Loss of Self-Identity Combined With A Mixture of Such Emotios as: Panic, Anxiety, Existential Guilt, Moral Guilt, Depression, Grief, Anger, Rage, Hate, Aggression, Violence...';
14. Our Internal Place of Celebratory Self-Achievement and/or Spiritual Renewal based on 'peak moments';
15. Our Genetic, Potential Self or GPS (Our genetic skills, existential potentials, mythological symbols, and whatever else has been passed onto us by genetics/hereditary....in order to best 'actualize' or 'fulfill' our evolving existence...
Now, metaphorically speaking, we have a 'huge 15 room post-Freudian-Jungian-Adlerian-Gestalt... fully renovated mansion' to work inside of as opposed to a 'much smaller 3 room Classic, Victorian Freudian House -- unrenovated and very much in need of 21st century renovation...'.
For some -- or many -- of you, your immediate complaint may be that the model is too big, too cumersome, too convoluted, too complicated, too wordy awkward with the terminology...Yet what can be more awkward than Jung's use of the terms 'anima' and 'animus' -- I still have to look them up to re-establish which one is the 'Father Transference Figure' (FTF) and which one is the Mother Transference Figure (MTF)...I would prefer to use the shortforms 'FTF' and 'MTF' -- or lengthen them out -- and then there should be quicker clarity.
The model can be viewed as basically the same Freudian Classical Model -- surrounded by an Object Relations Model. With more of a 'basement foundation' in terms of our 'transference templates and the transference complexes within these templates' and how to become more aware of what they are.
We can go the 'mythological route' if we find that useful. The 'Nurturing Superego' could be construed as being 'built partly from the archetype images' of 'Gaia' (Mother of The Earth) and/or 'Hera' (Mother of Marriage and Family). In similar fashion, 'The Righteous Superego' could be construed as being built partly from the archetype image of 'Apollo' as our 'Shadow-Id-Ego' could be construed as being built partly from the archetype image of 'Dionysus'. Likewise our 'Narcissistic Ego' could obviously be construed as being built partly from the archetype mythological figure of 'Narcissus'. (Narcissus -- egotism, selfishness, self-centredness -- and Dionysus -- hedonism, pleasure-seeking, sensuality, sexuality, 'addictive bliss' -- generally have a close relationship connection between each other, although not necessarily).
There's also a 'Transactional Analysis' influence, and a 'Guntrip-Object Relations' influence, in terms of the idea of the 'schizoid personality' often erecting a sophisticated network of 'anal ego defenses' in order to fend off the potential 'panic reaction' to the overwhelming awareness of an underlying 'schizoid void or abyss of no self and no self-esteem'. This is based on the premise of 'extreme dissociation' between our 'Social Personna' and our 'Shadow-Id-Ego' (in my terminology) -- our Shadow-Id-Ego representing 'the heart and soul of our personality -- both creatively and destructively' in a way that either brings us into contact and congruence with our GPS -- in terms of a self-perception of our 'meaningful existential self-achievements' and resulting sense of 'self-fulfillment' or 'self-actualization' -- or not. (This Guntrip influence extends also into my Jungian and Frommian 'humanistic-existential' influence.
Anyway, for those of you who are quick to judge, I say....'Be patient.....let's see how the model works itself out....It can always be reduced if parts of it are not particularly useful in a particular case, as the model is full of multiple bi-polarities, and as a therapist, you will likely want to only work on one bi-polarity at a time....like a 'topdog-underdog' (superego-underego) polarity or a 'narcissistic-altruistic' polarity, or a 'personna-shadow' polarity', or a 'nurturing-righteous' polarity or a 'passive-aggressive' polarity, or a 'Dionysian-Apollonian' polarity, or an 'Enlightenment-Romantic' polarity...
Let's see how our new model works compared to the old one...
And then we can make further adjustments to the model as we go along, if need be...
And of course, the model will become easier to work with, the more you understand it, and become familiar with using it, assuming you are open-minded enough to want to give it a try...
We need some case examples and more definitive notes of descriptive clarification and extrapolation...
Coming soon...
-- dgb, January 4th, 5th, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
A/ Introduction: A Contrast Between Fichte's Conceptualization of 'The Ego' and Freud's Conceptualization of The Ego and What The Difference Means Relative To Modifying and Extending Freud's Model of The Psyche
As far as my research goes back, and as I have indicated in other essays, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the first (German) philosopher who I know of to use the concept of 'ego' which effectively is a synonym for 'self' in the way that he used it. I am not sure whether or not Kant used the concept of 'ego' before Fichte. Regardless, other than Descartes and the other rational idealists (Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz) -- and even including the rational idealists, Fichte was the first philosopher to really focus in on 'the subjectivity of the human ego or self'. I don't know if Fichte has ever been called 'the father of phenomenology' but if he hasn't, perhaps he should.
If 'ego' in German -- up until Freud started to use it -- meant 'self' or 'psyche', then perhaps we should not get too 'freaked out' if we consider both 'the id' and 'the superego' to be separate 'conceptual and/or phenomenological divisions or compartments of the ego' -- or, in two or four words, separate 'ego states' with separate 'ego-functions' that conceptually divide each of these ego states from how ever many separate ego states we may conceptualize....
In this regard, perhaps Freud might have been better served by calling 'the id' -- 'The Narcissistic Ego' or 'The Dionysian Ego', or 'The Hedonistic (Pleasure-Seeking, Pain-Avoiding) Ego'....even though, with the last label, there are 'different types and levels of both pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding' -- some of which are deemed more 'morally and/or socially and/or legally acceptable' than others, meaning that some may be deemed more 'acceptable' to our internal Superego than others...
However, Freud chose to use the term 'id' which I believe has been translated into English as 'The It' which means that Freud considered the id to be a 'dissociated and/or repressed compart of The Self, The Psyche -- or The Ego....(in The Fichtean sense).
Worded otherwise, the id might be considered to be a 'primitive, uncivil, mainly dissociated compartment of the ego'... But of course, Freud didn't want this potential 'semantic confusion' between 'the id' and 'the ego'.....Regardless, this potential for confusion still stands -- because 'the id' is a particular set of 'ego functions' that are often 'dissociated' from the rest of the ego because they are deemed too 'primitive, too uncivil, too unsocial' to share with ourselves even, let alone anyone in our public world.
Thus, by this type of semantic analysis of the two concepts -- and particularly, the philosophical history of 'the ego' -- Freud was getting it 'backwards' when he stated that 'the ego was a more evolutionarily advanced derivative of the more primitive id'; rather, the id probably could have, and should have, been better conceptualized as the first primitive, evolutionary stage of the ego. In this regard, the id would also have been viewed as our first, most primitive and often uncivil 'ego state' with a particular set of 'self-contained biological and psychological ego functions built around our most demanding internal needs, impulses, drives...'
Now, to be clear, this wasn't Freud's perspective back in 1923 when he created these three concepts of 'id', 'ego', and 'superego'; rather, this is my perspective now looking back on these three concepts now from a different light -- the light that I am shining on them now.
So let me be absolutely clear in this regard: I view the 'id' as being an 'ego-state' involving a particular set of 'ego functions'. So much for 'Classical' Psychoanalysis....as I just turned it upside down like Freud did in 1896.
So with this in mind, and without further ado, let me quickly go over the newest version of my DGB model of the psyche....Let it be clear that this model didn't come out of the workwork or visit me during a dream -- it has been 40 years in the making starting with the first two 'psychology' books I read in 1972; Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics'; and Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought And Action'...
Along the way, this model has picked up influences from Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Fritz Perls, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Eric Berne, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Heinz Kohut, Jeffrey Masson, not to mention such noted Western (and one Eastern) philosophers as Anaximander, Lao Tse, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Spinoza, Sir Francis Bacon, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Doestevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida....This model has been a 'slow train coming'....
2/ The DGB Model Of The Psyche
Ba./ The More Conscious Elements of The Personality...
I have broken down Freud's 'superego' into three parts or three 'superego-states':
1. 'The Nurturing Superego' (Transactional Analysis would call this our 'Nurturing, Internalized Parent');
2. The 'Narcissistic Superego' (An internal 'superego-state' we like to go in order to mix 'power and pleasure' or, often more specifically, 'power and sex');
3. 'The Righteous Superego' (Transactional Analysis calls this 'superego state' our 'Critical Parent' -- looking to enforce 'ethical, legal, religious, theoretical, and/or practical rules' of subjectively construed 'good conduct' -- the problem is that 'ethical, legal, religious, theoretical, and/or practical righteousness' can be construed in a million different ways depending on the individual State, Institution, Corporation, Culture, Religion, or Individual...);
4. 'The Shadow-Id-Ego' (That part that burns inside us but we don't generally let loose..except sometimes consciously or subconsciously, in 'allusions to immediacy'...)
5. 'The Central Ego' (That mediates between all other element of the 'whole ego or self', and particularly here between The Shadow-Id Ego and The Personna Ego);
6. 'The Personna Ego'(which communicates with the outside world, usually holding 'Shadow-Id' elements back, or at least partly back for purposes of 'social diplomacy');
A new set of 'ego-states' -- or more precisely, 'underego states' -- has been developed based on 'object relations' studies to contrast against the 'superego states' listed above; and these are:
7. 'The Nurturing Underego' (appeases and pleases our superego states and/or our Central Ego);
8. 'The Narcissistic Underego' (aims to 'wrestle' power, egotism, pleaure, sex...away from the superego states); and
9. 'The Righteous Underego' (aims to wrestle power and righteousness away from the superego states);
Moving into the more subconscious elements of the personality, we have:
C/
10. 'The Dream Weaver' (DW...weaves our dreams, fantasies, artistic creations, and nightmares together while we are awake or sleeping);
11. 'The Transference-Lifestyle Template' (TLT)....our learnings from the past in order to deal better with the present and future than we have in the past...includes the Jungian concepts of 'Anima' and 'Animus' as well as 'Archetypes' in modified forms...as well as memories and learning of all types);
12. 'The Subconscious Shadow-Id Vault' (Bound Subconscious Shadow-Id Energy just forming and starting to consciously articulate itself...);
13. 'Our Terrifying Abyss of Perceived Existential Self-Failure and/or Loss of Self-Identity Combined With A Mixture of Such Emotios as: Panic, Anxiety, Existential Guilt, Moral Guilt, Depression, Grief, Anger, Rage, Hate, Aggression, Violence...';
14. Our Internal Place of Celebratory Self-Achievement and/or Spiritual Renewal based on 'peak moments';
15. Our Genetic, Potential Self or GPS (Our genetic skills, existential potentials, mythological symbols, and whatever else has been passed onto us by genetics/hereditary....in order to best 'actualize' or 'fulfill' our evolving existence...
Now, metaphorically speaking, we have a 'huge 15 room post-Freudian-Jungian-Adlerian-Gestalt... fully renovated mansion' to work inside of as opposed to a 'much smaller 3 room Classic, Victorian Freudian House -- unrenovated and very much in need of 21st century renovation...'.
For some -- or many -- of you, your immediate complaint may be that the model is too big, too cumersome, too convoluted, too complicated, too wordy awkward with the terminology...Yet what can be more awkward than Jung's use of the terms 'anima' and 'animus' -- I still have to look them up to re-establish which one is the 'Father Transference Figure' (FTF) and which one is the Mother Transference Figure (MTF)...I would prefer to use the shortforms 'FTF' and 'MTF' -- or lengthen them out -- and then there should be quicker clarity.
The model can be viewed as basically the same Freudian Classical Model -- surrounded by an Object Relations Model. With more of a 'basement foundation' in terms of our 'transference templates and the transference complexes within these templates' and how to become more aware of what they are.
We can go the 'mythological route' if we find that useful. The 'Nurturing Superego' could be construed as being 'built partly from the archetype images' of 'Gaia' (Mother of The Earth) and/or 'Hera' (Mother of Marriage and Family). In similar fashion, 'The Righteous Superego' could be construed as being built partly from the archetype image of 'Apollo' as our 'Shadow-Id-Ego' could be construed as being built partly from the archetype image of 'Dionysus'. Likewise our 'Narcissistic Ego' could obviously be construed as being built partly from the archetype mythological figure of 'Narcissus'. (Narcissus -- egotism, selfishness, self-centredness -- and Dionysus -- hedonism, pleasure-seeking, sensuality, sexuality, 'addictive bliss' -- generally have a close relationship connection between each other, although not necessarily).
There's also a 'Transactional Analysis' influence, and a 'Guntrip-Object Relations' influence, in terms of the idea of the 'schizoid personality' often erecting a sophisticated network of 'anal ego defenses' in order to fend off the potential 'panic reaction' to the overwhelming awareness of an underlying 'schizoid void or abyss of no self and no self-esteem'. This is based on the premise of 'extreme dissociation' between our 'Social Personna' and our 'Shadow-Id-Ego' (in my terminology) -- our Shadow-Id-Ego representing 'the heart and soul of our personality -- both creatively and destructively' in a way that either brings us into contact and congruence with our GPS -- in terms of a self-perception of our 'meaningful existential self-achievements' and resulting sense of 'self-fulfillment' or 'self-actualization' -- or not. (This Guntrip influence extends also into my Jungian and Frommian 'humanistic-existential' influence.
Anyway, for those of you who are quick to judge, I say....'Be patient.....let's see how the model works itself out....It can always be reduced if parts of it are not particularly useful in a particular case, as the model is full of multiple bi-polarities, and as a therapist, you will likely want to only work on one bi-polarity at a time....like a 'topdog-underdog' (superego-underego) polarity or a 'narcissistic-altruistic' polarity, or a 'personna-shadow' polarity', or a 'nurturing-righteous' polarity or a 'passive-aggressive' polarity, or a 'Dionysian-Apollonian' polarity, or an 'Enlightenment-Romantic' polarity...
Let's see how our new model works compared to the old one...
And then we can make further adjustments to the model as we go along, if need be...
And of course, the model will become easier to work with, the more you understand it, and become familiar with using it, assuming you are open-minded enough to want to give it a try...
We need some case examples and more definitive notes of descriptive clarification and extrapolation...
Coming soon...
-- dgb, January 4th, 5th, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
Monday, January 2, 2012
1.9. On The Connection Between Conscious Early Memories, Traumacy Neuroses, Identification Neuroses, Fantasy Neuroses, and Different Types of Obsessional Neuroses (Part 1)
Finished..., January 2nd, 2012....
A pre-warning to my readers that some of the material in this essay may be disconcerting as we brush briefly on the topic of 'childhood sexual assaults' -- the focus of Freud's attention in 1896 -- before he changed the focus of his attention to the topic of 'childhood sexuality, sexual fantasy, and sexual fixation' shortly thereafter....The issue of 'childhood sexual assaults' is never easy to approach, but to a psychotherapist in particular, needs to be approached, in order to deal with it properly... I do not profess to be any kind of expert on any kind of sexual assault; however, as a theorist, I certainly do know something about 'biased theoretical and therapeutic results' based on 'biased, one-sided, discriminatory theories' -- and this will be the main focus of our discussion in this essay. -- dgb, Jan. 2nd, 2012.
...........................................................................................
There is only one way I know to effectively show the differences between: Pre-Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Humanistic-Existential Psychology... -- and DGB Quantum-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology which synthesizes elements of all of these different schools of philosophy-psychology into one, big, multi-cohesive package....Too big a package? Too impossible a task? Well, read up...and then judge for yourself...
We will go back to Freud's conscious early memories, and childhood relationships to collect the information that we need -- or at least a significant portion of it -- and then we will do an 'abbreviated transference analysis' of Freud's various 'obsessional neuroses', 'dissociation neuroses', 'traumacy neuroses', 'identification neuroses', 'fantasy neuroses'....based on the information that has been collected...
There will still be elements of information missing -- specific information about Freud's relationship with his mom, and particularly his dad....but we will go with what we have which is still significant enough to build a strong 'transference case of traumacy, fantasy, and obsessional neuroses' here...
The only difference between a 'complex' and a 'neurosis' in my work here is that a complex includes both 'positive' and 'negative' consequences attached to a particular 'transference neurosis', the latter of which accentuates the 'negative' aspect of a particular 'transference complex'...
Now, if you are a psychoanalyst reading this essay -- or any psychotherapist engaged in, and 'biased by', a particular 'brand' or 'school' or 'sub-school' of psychology -- then you are going to have to 'step outside of your own conceptual and theoretical box' here...or you might as well stop reading....A closed mind is not going to get you anywhere except the same place that you have already been...That may be good enough for you, or if you are open-minded enough, then you might find something here that you like better...or as an 'addition' to your current 'psychotherapeutic box of conceptual, theoretical, and practical tools'...
Next, regarding the concept of 'repression' -- I don't use it; in 37 years of studying various schools of psychology, and engaging in hundreds of hours of different forms of group personal growth and psychotherapy workshops...I have never come across what I would consider to be a case example of a 'repression'....Maybe some therapists have, maybe Freud did in his work with clients who were diagnosed as 'hysterics' or 'obsessional neurotics' or 'paranoid'...or maybe Freud was fooling himself as to just how 'buried' these so called 'critical' memories and/or fantasies were, and/or whether some weren't even a product of his own 'biased interpretive reconstructions'....
I don't know, and I am not going to debate the 'reality' or 'fantasy' of 'repression' -- not here, not probably anywhere -- 'repression' is simply a concept and a theory that I have not found meaningful, useful, practical in my work... Believe differently if you wish...but we are going down a different path here....
I have found Alfred Adler's concept and theory of the 'dianostic use' of 'conscious early memories' as 'lifestyle indicators' to be much more practical....except that I have taken Adler's work and brought it back into a 'psychoanalytic context'....to talk about 'transference memories' rather than 'lifestyle memories'....
What Freud called 'screen memories' that both 'hide' and 'allude' to other more etiologically (causally) significant 'repressed memories and/or fantasies', I call 'transference memories'...and I dig no deeper...
Here is an example of 'screen memory bias' in Ernest Jones' 'classic' biography of Freud (1953, 1981, 'The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, V. 1, p. 7), as Jones recites some of Freud's earliest conscious memories:
..........................................................................
'Among the (consciously) remembered ones are a few, banal enough in themselves, which are of interest only in standing out in a sea of amnesia. One was of penetrating into his parents' bedroom out of (sexual) curiosity and being ordered out by an irate father.'
...................................................................................................
Now you have to understand that psychoanalysts like Jones, Eissler, and Anna Freud were loyal to Sigmund Freud to a fault....each of them were important in their own right, but at the same time, each of them were like 'lemmings' following their 'over-idealized leader' over the cliff of his own private and public neuroses....and simply his unwillingness to be anywhere close to 'transparent' relative to his own private life, his own 'psycho-analyzed' life, and his own 'sexual interests/obsessions'.....Some of these he would 'allude to in the third person' and/or through 'fake clients' who were in fact himself as 'disguised' through his own 'transference projections' that can be found throughout his work.... I'm not intending to be too hard on Freud here because how many of us would want our 'private traumatic and fantasy worlds' exposed to the general public....
It is much easier to be a 'closet voyeur' relative to someone else's private sexual life -- and/or scandals -- than it is to be completely transparent relative to our own most private, narcissistic injuries, fantasies, and activities....and Freud was no different in this regard....
As much as Freud wanted to know every little tidbit of his clients' most private sexual lives, he certainly didn't want to expose his own inner, narcissistic world to nearly the same degree of scrutiny...Indeed, at times, he did everything possible to keep the public out of his own private life...he would put up 'smoke and mirrors shows'...or conversely, be oblivious to the psycho-dynamics and results of his own transference neuroses, which is unlikely....Or it might have been pieces of both...
To be sure, if Freud had had a chance, to be sure, he would have destroyed his letters to Fliess...but history was on our side in this regard...and plus...once we have a good handle on Freud's private transference material -- as interpreted by a more 'objective, open-minded source', i.e., 'me', then we can start to much more easily see his 'transference projections' scattered thoughout almost 50 years of his written work...
Let's start by analyzing one of Freud's earlier transference projections, to be found in 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896, in which Freud took a rather diametrically opposite point of view relative to the conscious early memory that Jones cited above....In between 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria) and 1953 (Jones' first publication of Freud's biography), was the little essay called 'Screen Memories' (1899), and the complete 'paradigm shift' that Freud was 'evolving through' (or 'de-evolving' through) in his partial to full abandonment of his 'repressed memory-traumacy-seduction theory' in favor of his later fancied and dominant 'fantasy-childood sexuality-Oedipal Theory'....
In 1896, however, Freud still believed in the 'traumatic-etiological effect' of memories on the later evolution of adult neuroses... And the passage below was in 'the heart of Freud's later abandoned 'repressed childhood seduction/sexual assault theory'...although his own personal transference-projection was not 'repressed' here; simply 'dissociated' and 'alluded to' in the third person...
But first, we need a little more 'warm-up' here to a better understanding of the psycho-dynamics going on in Freud's head as he wrote 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'...
The Aetiology of Hysteria is a complicated and perplexing essay -- perhaps not so easily stereotyped as Freud's most articulate, but most short-lived, essay on his infamous Seduction Theory... otherwise, worded as Freud's 'Repressed Early Childhood Memory of a Sexual Assault' Theory...
I suggest that this essay was actually 'The Bridge' to Freud's already evolving and soon to come 'Childhood Sexuality Theory'....
The line that gives Freud away, and the fact that he is already in conflict over a 'chldhood pain' vs. 'childhood pleasure' theory of hysteria....indeed, has been since December 1895, months before he wrote this essay...is this one:
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'But have we not a right to assume that even the age of childhood is not wanting in slight sexual excitations, that later sexual development may perhaps be decisively influenced by childhood experiences?' (Freud, Sigmund, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', S.E. V. 111, p.202.)
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There is a 'slow train coming' here....and the train of thought that is coming is 'childhood sexuality' in its own infancy in Freud's always freshly percolating brain...
In fact, the line above takes some steam out of Masson's theory of 'Freud losing moral courage around his theory of childhood sexual assault' -- although, to be sure, not entirely -- because it shows that Freud is stuck in a 'theoretical quandry' at this moment in psychoanalytic history, stuck between two opposing theories of hysteria that don't seem to support each other: 1. a 'pain' theory of hysteria, and from this, the idea of a 'repressed memory of a traumatic sexual assault encounter (or series of them) in early childhood'; and 2. a 'pleasure' theory of hysteria where 'the repressed memory is one of renounced or dissociated pleasure' -- that 'returns from the repressed' at a later time and place once 'puberty, sexual hormones, and an associated teenage or adult sexual encounter 're-stimulates the old, repressed memory' in the form of 'teenage or adult hysterical symptoms that are both hiding and alluding to the old, childhood repressed memory' -- or 'fantasy' once Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex Theory', starting in a letter to Fliess on October 15th, 1897, and later fully published in 'Three Essays on Sexuality' (1905).
We all tend to associate childhood -- or even teenage or adult -- sexual assaults, but especially early childhood sexual assaults, with 'physical and emotional pain' as well as 'righteous, moral disgust and horror' from an adult's perspective looking back at what happened, but what Freud seems to be intimating here -- even though he still talks about 'brutal childhood rapes' in the quotation I will cite below -- is the type of case of 'childhood manipulation and seduction' where a child may not necessarily understand things 'morally' yet, in fact, may even find some pleasure in the experiences of his or her own body in the participation of the childhoood sexual encounter. (Freud had already come to this conclusion in the case of boys being the 'active manipulators' as opposed to 'the more passive victims' that young girls were more likely to be, and he had classified the difference between 'hysteria' and 'obsession' as a 'passive' vs. 'active' ramification of the childhood encounter -- in the boy's case, developing an 'obsessional neurosis' years later involved an act of 'moral guilt' and 'self-reproachment' for the 'lustful underlying enactment of the sexual impulse...and, according to Freud, any awareness of this was 'repressed' as well...).
In the young girl's case, Freud was starting to believe -- even as he was deep into The Seduction Theory -- that the child who felt some element of 'pleasure' in the early encounter, starts to get a 'fuller sense of the moral implications' of what happened to her at a later date -- and then has to try to sort out the 'pleasurable' vs. the 'painful' elements of the 'psychic conflict', which then 'triggers' the 'repression' (or 'dissociation' in my words) -- a 'conflict avoidance', an 'attempted burial' or 'renouncement' of the psychic conflict -- which later becomes 're-awakened' by an 'associated' teenage sexual experience...and a 'return of the repressed' via the 'hysterical symtoms'....
This 'understanding' of hysteria would become very different to Freud's original understanding of the hysterical conflict as 'childhood sexual and emotional pain' conflicting with later 'normal teenage sexual impulses and/or encounters'...with 'repression' (or 'dissociation') once again 'pushing the conflict' back into the world of the 'repressed unconcious'....in effect, 'sweeping the conflict under the carpet' so as not to have to deal with it....until the 'hysterical symptoms' started showing up in place of the conflict...
So which was it? Childhood pain, or childhood pleasure? Mixing with moral and emotional pain later? Or mixing with normal teenage sexual impulses later? Freud was partly 'stuck' here between December of 1895 and May 1896.
Still, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' was dominantly a 'Childhood Sexual Assault/Seduction Theory' -- mainly by the father, or alternatively by someone in the family, or close to the family, or a stranger...perpretating the manipulation and/or the actual physcial assault on a pre-puberty girl...In the quote below, Freud talks about the 'traumas' of childhood sexual memories -- including, by 'transference projective interpretation', Freud's own earliest conscious memory....
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In some cases, no doubt, we are concerned with experiences which must be regarded as severe traumas -- an attempted rape, perhaps, which reveals to the immature girl at a blow all the brutality of sexual desire, or the involuntary witnessing of sexual acts between parents, which at one and the same time uncovers unsuspected ugliness and wounds childish and moral sensibilities alike, and so on. But in other cases the experiences are astonishingly trivial. In one of my women patients it turned out that her neurosis was based on the experience of a boy of her acquaintance stroking her hand tenderly and, at another time, pressing his knee against her dress as they sat side by side at table, while his expression let her see that he was doing something forbidden. For another young lady, simply hearing a riddle which suggested an obscene answer had been enough to provoke her first anxiety attack and with it to start the illness. (p. 200-201)
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What this quotation shows, I believe, is two things: 1. Freud wavering in and out of 'trauma theory' because 'traumacy' wasn't explaining the cases of 'forbidden sexual excitations'; and 2. still dominated -- or mainly dominated -- by his 'traumacy-seduction' theory, Freud still believed that these 'teenage memories' were 'associated' as what he would call 'screen memories' in 1899 with pre-puberty childhood sexual manipulation, exploitation, and/or more brutal rape -- but even here, Freud was also starting to think of 'early childhood sexual excitations' which would become the heart of his soon to come 'childhood sexuality theory'...
Now, stepping outside of the seduction theory, we also have a case of Freud -- by 'third person allusion' -- describing his own earliest childhood memory of seeing his parents engaging in a sexual act as being 'severely traumatic' as contrasted with Jones writing it off -- i.e., dismissing it -- some 57 years later (1953) as only a 'conscious' memory in a 'sea of amnesia' of other, presumably much more important, 'unconscious, repressed memories' that were much more worthy of our time and their 'psycho-dynamic impact' on Freud's evolving character structure...Oh, what a difference a major 'paradigm shift' makes...
Now before we come back to the memory, let's try to summarize what we can take out of what was going through Freud's head in the winter/spring of 1895-96....
Freud was caught up in a theoretical 'connundrum' between 'pleasure' and 'pain' -- and how to etiologically explain 'hysteria',
Specifically, Freud believed at this time that 'hysteria split the difference'; i.e., it involved a 'psychic conflict between pain and pleasure' (as for example, in the case of a brutal childhood rape conflicting years later with 'normal adolescent sexual desires'); or pleasure and pain' (as in 'childhood sexual excitations' being 'punished' and 'buried' by later teenage 'moral or superego-based guilt'). Freud was moving from a position of 'childhood sexual assault/manipulation/seduction usually with an adult or older sibling victimizer' in the case of hysteria, to a position of 'chilhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and activities' -- 'buried' my 'moral-superego guilt' -- with the 'compromise-formation' being 'teenage/adult hysterical symptoms' that both hide and allude to the underlying childhood sexual assaults in the about to be abandoned seduction theory, or the underlying childhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and/or activities in the soon-to-come theory of 'childhood sexuality'...
What Freud couldn't properly piece together -- or at least didn't so publicly -- is that this didn't need to be a 'mutually exclusive, Aristolean choice that was cemented into one over-riding; it could have been a 'Hegelian dialectic-integrative choice', and/or simply a situation where different clinical cases were yielding different clinical data whereby both sets of data needed to be accounted for by a 'bipolar-dialectic theory'....
The existence of childhood sexual assault does not rule out the existence of what might be called 'normal and/or abnormal childhood sexual activity' that may or may not include an 'assault'...Are you going to accuse a 7 year old boy of sexually assaulting a 5 year old girl? What parent hasn't seen his or her child 'playing with him or herself'?
Why did this ever have to be an 'either/or' battle in Freud's mind?
Because at this point in Freud's career, he was 'stuck inside an Aristotlean Paradigm, an Aristiolean, either/or mindset'? And Psychoanalysis paid the price as both Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his Childhood Sexuality and Fantasy-Impulse Theory where inherently self-destructive in their own 'limited unilateralness'; together they become a much better theory when they are treated as a 'Dialectic-Bipolar Theory -- in the same way as the bipolar 'Particle-Wave Theory' in physics is superior to either The Particle Theory or The Wave Theory -- taken separately and unilaterally....
Every clinical case needs to be treated differently before we start 'imposing our often righteous, narcissistic, unilateral theories' onto this clinical evidence....Otherwise, your theory will self-destruct just as soon as their is a clinical case of someone who does not fit inside your unilateral, limited conceptual theory and paradigm'...He or she simply has lived a life and experienced something that 'fits outside the boundary or boundaries of the theory you so dearly worship to the point of ignoring or manipulating or distorting your clinical evidence to mold the person's experiences to inappropriately fit into your model'.
And thqat is what Freud did...He wasn't perfect...and neither are any of us....Most important of all -- concepts and theories are never perfect because 'life will eventually crash and bury your beloved theory'....And mine too....(although my dialectic theory is superior to either side of Freud's 'mutually exclusive, either/or' theory here because it accounts for both potential sides of this same 'pleasure-pain-conflict' -- and even the two sides of the conflict 'conflated' together into 'one approach-avoidant, neurotic complex'...)
What we need to do is to 'see' the different types of psychic conflicts that Freud describes above as, for the most part, 'complex, paradoxical, integrative conflicts involving both traumatic and obsessional fantasy factors played off against each other -- thus, their 'paradoxical nature'.....attraction and repulsion blending together into one complex neurosis.....
And this is the type of neurosis that I will show you how to 'diagnose' and 'interpet' in Part 2 of this essay....with all these different factors coming together and playing off each other....conscious early memories, narcissistic injuries, compensations, and fixations, traumatic childhood memories, exciting childhood memories, identification neuroses, compensatory neuroses, compromise-formations, different types of obsessional neuroses and transference neuroses...you name it, and we will try to cover it, some in the next essay, and some beyond...
Happy New Year,
-- dgb, January 2nd, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiatons...
-- Are Still in Process....
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A pre-warning to my readers that some of the material in this essay may be disconcerting as we brush briefly on the topic of 'childhood sexual assaults' -- the focus of Freud's attention in 1896 -- before he changed the focus of his attention to the topic of 'childhood sexuality, sexual fantasy, and sexual fixation' shortly thereafter....The issue of 'childhood sexual assaults' is never easy to approach, but to a psychotherapist in particular, needs to be approached, in order to deal with it properly... I do not profess to be any kind of expert on any kind of sexual assault; however, as a theorist, I certainly do know something about 'biased theoretical and therapeutic results' based on 'biased, one-sided, discriminatory theories' -- and this will be the main focus of our discussion in this essay. -- dgb, Jan. 2nd, 2012.
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There is only one way I know to effectively show the differences between: Pre-Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Humanistic-Existential Psychology... -- and DGB Quantum-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology which synthesizes elements of all of these different schools of philosophy-psychology into one, big, multi-cohesive package....Too big a package? Too impossible a task? Well, read up...and then judge for yourself...
We will go back to Freud's conscious early memories, and childhood relationships to collect the information that we need -- or at least a significant portion of it -- and then we will do an 'abbreviated transference analysis' of Freud's various 'obsessional neuroses', 'dissociation neuroses', 'traumacy neuroses', 'identification neuroses', 'fantasy neuroses'....based on the information that has been collected...
There will still be elements of information missing -- specific information about Freud's relationship with his mom, and particularly his dad....but we will go with what we have which is still significant enough to build a strong 'transference case of traumacy, fantasy, and obsessional neuroses' here...
The only difference between a 'complex' and a 'neurosis' in my work here is that a complex includes both 'positive' and 'negative' consequences attached to a particular 'transference neurosis', the latter of which accentuates the 'negative' aspect of a particular 'transference complex'...
Now, if you are a psychoanalyst reading this essay -- or any psychotherapist engaged in, and 'biased by', a particular 'brand' or 'school' or 'sub-school' of psychology -- then you are going to have to 'step outside of your own conceptual and theoretical box' here...or you might as well stop reading....A closed mind is not going to get you anywhere except the same place that you have already been...That may be good enough for you, or if you are open-minded enough, then you might find something here that you like better...or as an 'addition' to your current 'psychotherapeutic box of conceptual, theoretical, and practical tools'...
Next, regarding the concept of 'repression' -- I don't use it; in 37 years of studying various schools of psychology, and engaging in hundreds of hours of different forms of group personal growth and psychotherapy workshops...I have never come across what I would consider to be a case example of a 'repression'....Maybe some therapists have, maybe Freud did in his work with clients who were diagnosed as 'hysterics' or 'obsessional neurotics' or 'paranoid'...or maybe Freud was fooling himself as to just how 'buried' these so called 'critical' memories and/or fantasies were, and/or whether some weren't even a product of his own 'biased interpretive reconstructions'....
I don't know, and I am not going to debate the 'reality' or 'fantasy' of 'repression' -- not here, not probably anywhere -- 'repression' is simply a concept and a theory that I have not found meaningful, useful, practical in my work... Believe differently if you wish...but we are going down a different path here....
I have found Alfred Adler's concept and theory of the 'dianostic use' of 'conscious early memories' as 'lifestyle indicators' to be much more practical....except that I have taken Adler's work and brought it back into a 'psychoanalytic context'....to talk about 'transference memories' rather than 'lifestyle memories'....
What Freud called 'screen memories' that both 'hide' and 'allude' to other more etiologically (causally) significant 'repressed memories and/or fantasies', I call 'transference memories'...and I dig no deeper...
Here is an example of 'screen memory bias' in Ernest Jones' 'classic' biography of Freud (1953, 1981, 'The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, V. 1, p. 7), as Jones recites some of Freud's earliest conscious memories:
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'Among the (consciously) remembered ones are a few, banal enough in themselves, which are of interest only in standing out in a sea of amnesia. One was of penetrating into his parents' bedroom out of (sexual) curiosity and being ordered out by an irate father.'
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Now you have to understand that psychoanalysts like Jones, Eissler, and Anna Freud were loyal to Sigmund Freud to a fault....each of them were important in their own right, but at the same time, each of them were like 'lemmings' following their 'over-idealized leader' over the cliff of his own private and public neuroses....and simply his unwillingness to be anywhere close to 'transparent' relative to his own private life, his own 'psycho-analyzed' life, and his own 'sexual interests/obsessions'.....Some of these he would 'allude to in the third person' and/or through 'fake clients' who were in fact himself as 'disguised' through his own 'transference projections' that can be found throughout his work.... I'm not intending to be too hard on Freud here because how many of us would want our 'private traumatic and fantasy worlds' exposed to the general public....
It is much easier to be a 'closet voyeur' relative to someone else's private sexual life -- and/or scandals -- than it is to be completely transparent relative to our own most private, narcissistic injuries, fantasies, and activities....and Freud was no different in this regard....
As much as Freud wanted to know every little tidbit of his clients' most private sexual lives, he certainly didn't want to expose his own inner, narcissistic world to nearly the same degree of scrutiny...Indeed, at times, he did everything possible to keep the public out of his own private life...he would put up 'smoke and mirrors shows'...or conversely, be oblivious to the psycho-dynamics and results of his own transference neuroses, which is unlikely....Or it might have been pieces of both...
To be sure, if Freud had had a chance, to be sure, he would have destroyed his letters to Fliess...but history was on our side in this regard...and plus...once we have a good handle on Freud's private transference material -- as interpreted by a more 'objective, open-minded source', i.e., 'me', then we can start to much more easily see his 'transference projections' scattered thoughout almost 50 years of his written work...
Let's start by analyzing one of Freud's earlier transference projections, to be found in 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896, in which Freud took a rather diametrically opposite point of view relative to the conscious early memory that Jones cited above....In between 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria) and 1953 (Jones' first publication of Freud's biography), was the little essay called 'Screen Memories' (1899), and the complete 'paradigm shift' that Freud was 'evolving through' (or 'de-evolving' through) in his partial to full abandonment of his 'repressed memory-traumacy-seduction theory' in favor of his later fancied and dominant 'fantasy-childood sexuality-Oedipal Theory'....
In 1896, however, Freud still believed in the 'traumatic-etiological effect' of memories on the later evolution of adult neuroses... And the passage below was in 'the heart of Freud's later abandoned 'repressed childhood seduction/sexual assault theory'...although his own personal transference-projection was not 'repressed' here; simply 'dissociated' and 'alluded to' in the third person...
But first, we need a little more 'warm-up' here to a better understanding of the psycho-dynamics going on in Freud's head as he wrote 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'...
The Aetiology of Hysteria is a complicated and perplexing essay -- perhaps not so easily stereotyped as Freud's most articulate, but most short-lived, essay on his infamous Seduction Theory... otherwise, worded as Freud's 'Repressed Early Childhood Memory of a Sexual Assault' Theory...
I suggest that this essay was actually 'The Bridge' to Freud's already evolving and soon to come 'Childhood Sexuality Theory'....
The line that gives Freud away, and the fact that he is already in conflict over a 'chldhood pain' vs. 'childhood pleasure' theory of hysteria....indeed, has been since December 1895, months before he wrote this essay...is this one:
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'But have we not a right to assume that even the age of childhood is not wanting in slight sexual excitations, that later sexual development may perhaps be decisively influenced by childhood experiences?' (Freud, Sigmund, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', S.E. V. 111, p.202.)
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There is a 'slow train coming' here....and the train of thought that is coming is 'childhood sexuality' in its own infancy in Freud's always freshly percolating brain...
In fact, the line above takes some steam out of Masson's theory of 'Freud losing moral courage around his theory of childhood sexual assault' -- although, to be sure, not entirely -- because it shows that Freud is stuck in a 'theoretical quandry' at this moment in psychoanalytic history, stuck between two opposing theories of hysteria that don't seem to support each other: 1. a 'pain' theory of hysteria, and from this, the idea of a 'repressed memory of a traumatic sexual assault encounter (or series of them) in early childhood'; and 2. a 'pleasure' theory of hysteria where 'the repressed memory is one of renounced or dissociated pleasure' -- that 'returns from the repressed' at a later time and place once 'puberty, sexual hormones, and an associated teenage or adult sexual encounter 're-stimulates the old, repressed memory' in the form of 'teenage or adult hysterical symptoms that are both hiding and alluding to the old, childhood repressed memory' -- or 'fantasy' once Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex Theory', starting in a letter to Fliess on October 15th, 1897, and later fully published in 'Three Essays on Sexuality' (1905).
We all tend to associate childhood -- or even teenage or adult -- sexual assaults, but especially early childhood sexual assaults, with 'physical and emotional pain' as well as 'righteous, moral disgust and horror' from an adult's perspective looking back at what happened, but what Freud seems to be intimating here -- even though he still talks about 'brutal childhood rapes' in the quotation I will cite below -- is the type of case of 'childhood manipulation and seduction' where a child may not necessarily understand things 'morally' yet, in fact, may even find some pleasure in the experiences of his or her own body in the participation of the childhoood sexual encounter. (Freud had already come to this conclusion in the case of boys being the 'active manipulators' as opposed to 'the more passive victims' that young girls were more likely to be, and he had classified the difference between 'hysteria' and 'obsession' as a 'passive' vs. 'active' ramification of the childhood encounter -- in the boy's case, developing an 'obsessional neurosis' years later involved an act of 'moral guilt' and 'self-reproachment' for the 'lustful underlying enactment of the sexual impulse...and, according to Freud, any awareness of this was 'repressed' as well...).
In the young girl's case, Freud was starting to believe -- even as he was deep into The Seduction Theory -- that the child who felt some element of 'pleasure' in the early encounter, starts to get a 'fuller sense of the moral implications' of what happened to her at a later date -- and then has to try to sort out the 'pleasurable' vs. the 'painful' elements of the 'psychic conflict', which then 'triggers' the 'repression' (or 'dissociation' in my words) -- a 'conflict avoidance', an 'attempted burial' or 'renouncement' of the psychic conflict -- which later becomes 're-awakened' by an 'associated' teenage sexual experience...and a 'return of the repressed' via the 'hysterical symtoms'....
This 'understanding' of hysteria would become very different to Freud's original understanding of the hysterical conflict as 'childhood sexual and emotional pain' conflicting with later 'normal teenage sexual impulses and/or encounters'...with 'repression' (or 'dissociation') once again 'pushing the conflict' back into the world of the 'repressed unconcious'....in effect, 'sweeping the conflict under the carpet' so as not to have to deal with it....until the 'hysterical symptoms' started showing up in place of the conflict...
So which was it? Childhood pain, or childhood pleasure? Mixing with moral and emotional pain later? Or mixing with normal teenage sexual impulses later? Freud was partly 'stuck' here between December of 1895 and May 1896.
Still, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' was dominantly a 'Childhood Sexual Assault/Seduction Theory' -- mainly by the father, or alternatively by someone in the family, or close to the family, or a stranger...perpretating the manipulation and/or the actual physcial assault on a pre-puberty girl...In the quote below, Freud talks about the 'traumas' of childhood sexual memories -- including, by 'transference projective interpretation', Freud's own earliest conscious memory....
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In some cases, no doubt, we are concerned with experiences which must be regarded as severe traumas -- an attempted rape, perhaps, which reveals to the immature girl at a blow all the brutality of sexual desire, or the involuntary witnessing of sexual acts between parents, which at one and the same time uncovers unsuspected ugliness and wounds childish and moral sensibilities alike, and so on. But in other cases the experiences are astonishingly trivial. In one of my women patients it turned out that her neurosis was based on the experience of a boy of her acquaintance stroking her hand tenderly and, at another time, pressing his knee against her dress as they sat side by side at table, while his expression let her see that he was doing something forbidden. For another young lady, simply hearing a riddle which suggested an obscene answer had been enough to provoke her first anxiety attack and with it to start the illness. (p. 200-201)
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What this quotation shows, I believe, is two things: 1. Freud wavering in and out of 'trauma theory' because 'traumacy' wasn't explaining the cases of 'forbidden sexual excitations'; and 2. still dominated -- or mainly dominated -- by his 'traumacy-seduction' theory, Freud still believed that these 'teenage memories' were 'associated' as what he would call 'screen memories' in 1899 with pre-puberty childhood sexual manipulation, exploitation, and/or more brutal rape -- but even here, Freud was also starting to think of 'early childhood sexual excitations' which would become the heart of his soon to come 'childhood sexuality theory'...
Now, stepping outside of the seduction theory, we also have a case of Freud -- by 'third person allusion' -- describing his own earliest childhood memory of seeing his parents engaging in a sexual act as being 'severely traumatic' as contrasted with Jones writing it off -- i.e., dismissing it -- some 57 years later (1953) as only a 'conscious' memory in a 'sea of amnesia' of other, presumably much more important, 'unconscious, repressed memories' that were much more worthy of our time and their 'psycho-dynamic impact' on Freud's evolving character structure...Oh, what a difference a major 'paradigm shift' makes...
Now before we come back to the memory, let's try to summarize what we can take out of what was going through Freud's head in the winter/spring of 1895-96....
Freud was caught up in a theoretical 'connundrum' between 'pleasure' and 'pain' -- and how to etiologically explain 'hysteria',
Specifically, Freud believed at this time that 'hysteria split the difference'; i.e., it involved a 'psychic conflict between pain and pleasure' (as for example, in the case of a brutal childhood rape conflicting years later with 'normal adolescent sexual desires'); or pleasure and pain' (as in 'childhood sexual excitations' being 'punished' and 'buried' by later teenage 'moral or superego-based guilt'). Freud was moving from a position of 'childhood sexual assault/manipulation/seduction usually with an adult or older sibling victimizer' in the case of hysteria, to a position of 'chilhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and activities' -- 'buried' my 'moral-superego guilt' -- with the 'compromise-formation' being 'teenage/adult hysterical symptoms' that both hide and allude to the underlying childhood sexual assaults in the about to be abandoned seduction theory, or the underlying childhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and/or activities in the soon-to-come theory of 'childhood sexuality'...
What Freud couldn't properly piece together -- or at least didn't so publicly -- is that this didn't need to be a 'mutually exclusive, Aristolean choice that was cemented into one over-riding; it could have been a 'Hegelian dialectic-integrative choice', and/or simply a situation where different clinical cases were yielding different clinical data whereby both sets of data needed to be accounted for by a 'bipolar-dialectic theory'....
The existence of childhood sexual assault does not rule out the existence of what might be called 'normal and/or abnormal childhood sexual activity' that may or may not include an 'assault'...Are you going to accuse a 7 year old boy of sexually assaulting a 5 year old girl? What parent hasn't seen his or her child 'playing with him or herself'?
Why did this ever have to be an 'either/or' battle in Freud's mind?
Because at this point in Freud's career, he was 'stuck inside an Aristotlean Paradigm, an Aristiolean, either/or mindset'? And Psychoanalysis paid the price as both Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his Childhood Sexuality and Fantasy-Impulse Theory where inherently self-destructive in their own 'limited unilateralness'; together they become a much better theory when they are treated as a 'Dialectic-Bipolar Theory -- in the same way as the bipolar 'Particle-Wave Theory' in physics is superior to either The Particle Theory or The Wave Theory -- taken separately and unilaterally....
Every clinical case needs to be treated differently before we start 'imposing our often righteous, narcissistic, unilateral theories' onto this clinical evidence....Otherwise, your theory will self-destruct just as soon as their is a clinical case of someone who does not fit inside your unilateral, limited conceptual theory and paradigm'...He or she simply has lived a life and experienced something that 'fits outside the boundary or boundaries of the theory you so dearly worship to the point of ignoring or manipulating or distorting your clinical evidence to mold the person's experiences to inappropriately fit into your model'.
And thqat is what Freud did...He wasn't perfect...and neither are any of us....Most important of all -- concepts and theories are never perfect because 'life will eventually crash and bury your beloved theory'....And mine too....(although my dialectic theory is superior to either side of Freud's 'mutually exclusive, either/or' theory here because it accounts for both potential sides of this same 'pleasure-pain-conflict' -- and even the two sides of the conflict 'conflated' together into 'one approach-avoidant, neurotic complex'...)
What we need to do is to 'see' the different types of psychic conflicts that Freud describes above as, for the most part, 'complex, paradoxical, integrative conflicts involving both traumatic and obsessional fantasy factors played off against each other -- thus, their 'paradoxical nature'.....attraction and repulsion blending together into one complex neurosis.....
And this is the type of neurosis that I will show you how to 'diagnose' and 'interpet' in Part 2 of this essay....with all these different factors coming together and playing off each other....conscious early memories, narcissistic injuries, compensations, and fixations, traumatic childhood memories, exciting childhood memories, identification neuroses, compensatory neuroses, compromise-formations, different types of obsessional neuroses and transference neuroses...you name it, and we will try to cover it, some in the next essay, and some beyond...
Happy New Year,
-- dgb, January 2nd, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiatons...
-- Are Still in Process....
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