Still being re-worked....significant changes still in process....it should be completed by the end of Sunday February Feb. 26th, 2012...
Hold your judgments until it is finished, hopefully, tomorrow....dgb, Sat. Feb. 25th, 2012.
I will definitely have to go back over this essay at a later date and try to eliminate all its redundancies caused mainly by writing the essay over two separate weekends....This turned out to be a much longer essay than I planned it to be...it needs to be cut down....dgb, Sunday Feb. 26th, 2012.
1/ Introduction : The Life of A Superman or Superwoman
In this essay, plain and simple, we will explore both the parameters of Freud's creative imagination and brilliance, and at the same time, the limits of this creative briliance, and/or the neurotic force of his personal ego-defenses that hampered -- and shadowed -- his creative brilliance, and partly tanked it.
I am continually amazed by Freud's creative brilliance -- both before and after the critical winter of 1895-1896 when Freud started to turn psychoanalysis upside down, or some might say, right side up. Freud had an astonishing capacity to synthesize old and new ideas but the one 'synthesis' that Freud most needed to make was the one that he never did make -- and that was the synthesis of his 'pre-1897 theories with his 'post-1896' theories. Between 1896 and 1897, there was a 'creative integrative need for a bridge' between his pre-1897 'Reality' Theory and his post-1896 'Fantasy' Theory -- that he never made. That was Freud's major failure in building Psychoanalysis.
As you probably well know by now, I am a 'Multi-Integrative-Dialectic' (MID) or 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging' (DGB) theorist who takes great pleasure in building connective bridges that other theorists before me -- including Freud -- miss.
That is the whole prinicple, the whole paradigm, of Hegel's Hotel and it applies not only to Psychoanalysis but also to the whole evolution and integration of Western Philosophy-Psychology. Whenever one philospher takes his or her particular philosophy too hard one way (for example, Hegel), and then someone else comes back hard in an opposing way (Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche...), I come into the scene in historical hindsight with my own particular 'post-Hegelian-Humanistic-Existential paradigm', and see if I can 'creatively synthesize' the particular conflicting parties....
A massive theoretical idea and undertaking -- hugely time-consuming -- a non-ending task really, and a metaphor of life because, like life in general, as soon as we 'solve' one problem, or 'resolve' one conflict, there is another one, sure as the night follows the day, always ready to take its place....
Imagination and creativity -- taken together -- is perhaps our most important tool in this regard.
If we confine ourselves strictly to our 'memories' -- particularly our most 'negative, traumatic, gut and heart-wrenching ones' -- then we don't succeed because we are 'mesmerized' and 'blinded' by our past failure(s). stuck in our 'remembered trauma' like a deer caught in the headlights of a fast-approaching vehicle, and we feel incapable of 'mobilizing our necessary resources to 'get around or through our present problem and/or conflict'.
This is the essence of 'anxiety neurosis' or in the opposite case scenario, a 'narcissistic neurosis' where we don't want to get around or through our present problem, because we don't even view it as a problem -- rather there is either 'pleasure' and/or a 'lack of anticipated pain and anguish' attached to our present status quo position that keeps up doing what we do (and/or alternatively, not doing what we should be doing). This is the plight of the 'narcissistic neurotic' or the 'obsessive-compulsive neurotic' or the 'addictive neuroitic' who feels obsessively compelled to continue his or her present line of action (or inaction) even if he or she 'abstractly knows' that it is ultimately going to end in some greater or lesser degree of 'self-destruction' a kind of 'death wish or death instinct' -- but continues to do it anyway.
If we allow our 'imagination and creativity' to 'run wild and free' when it is most needed -- and then, aided by the knowledge, wisdom, and context of our past failures as well as what we need to do to get past our past failures, to get over the 'hump' or 'around the bend' of our past failures and 'likely negative self-concept', as well as the need for a proper grounding in 'Apollonian structure, order, and self-discipline -- then, if we are persistant enough, sometimes even obstinate and aggressive enough -- if we keep 'pounding the rock' as Coach Dwayne Casey would say -- we give ourselves a chance to succeed where in the past we have failed.
We give ourselves the chance, using our 'Will to Self-Empowerment', to be an 'Existential Superman or Superwoman' -- our Nietzschean Existential Challenge.
We use 'rope' or 'ladders' -- or any other 'tool's we need and/or have -- to climb across our existential abysses and up our existential mountains in life, preferably without looking down, because that could be our nemesis, until we finally cross all of our life's barriers, at least all of the ones that are 'blocking' us from this, our chosen, existential goal, and particularly all of our own self-made barriers, our 'fear and trembling' that makes us feel weak at the knees, and if we have embraced enough of our will and passion, been intensely focused enough, applied all of our knowledge, our good and bad past experiences, and our mind and skillset to meet our 'existential challlenge', then we might finally one day be able to look up from our intense focus, gasp at the lack of air around us, spin at the 'dizzying height' that we have climbed to, exalt in the fact that there is nowhere else to climb to -- at least on this mountain -- and celebrate our 'existential freedom and the amazing extent of our Creator-given capabilities', and the fact that we 'beat' all of the challenges, the obstacles, and the traumacies that life had to throw at us....We not only survived -- but we 'survived with a flourish'! At which point we can either 'retire', take a break -- or if our willpower and passion still burns within us, move on to our next life challenge.
This is the life of Nietzsche's much exalted 'Superman or Superwoman'.
What Freud could do amazingly well -- I can do better! (Or so I believe, taking into account his indirect mentorship and fully appreciating my advantage of some 70 odd more years of philosophical and psychological evolution.)
If I didn't believe this within myself, then I wouldn't be sitting here writing this essay at 3:00 in the morning... Without such an 'existential challenge', I would turn off my computer and go back to bed, back to sleep, to wake up at a more comfortable hour.
Without such an existential challenge -- and the belief that I can succeed, I would more likely say to myself: 'Let someone else challenge Freud, the King of Psychoanalysis. I will sit back, watch, and let someone else endure all the grief, the pain, the perceived failures, the self-discipline, and all the thousands of hours that it takes to be 'great' at whatever one drives to be great at -- if we so choose. Usually there are personal transference factors involved that go back to early childhood memories.
If we don't, then we become a 'couch-potato' or we work just hard enough to get by and perhaps to become 'decent' or 'good but not great' at what we do...and/or we exalt vicariously in the triumph of someone else who had the discipline. the will power, the passion and the firepower that we didn't -- or don't....in order to become the Superman or Superwoman of our desires and drives...
Otherwise, we can just sit back and let others do all the hard work, and fantasize about what we could have maybe been, if only this had happened...or that...or this...Ifs, buts, reasons and excuses don't fulfill our dreams...but they are a heck of a lot easier to engage in...
Some people dream -- and then follow up on their dreams by 'doing' what they need to do in order to fulfill their dreams; others follow up their dreams with excuses...and never 'do'...never risk failing, never risk being rejected, never risk the anxiety of climbing over top of their deepest personal fears and abysses...These are our 'existential anxiety neurotics' and I know very well what it is like to be there...Again, it is a lot easier to fantasize than to do...
Ifs, buts, excuses, and ego-defenses deconstruct dreams...and their fulfillment....(although sometimes we can say or do the wrong thing, or say too much, and this too can deconstruct our dreams if it is significant enough -- that is why we have 'ego-defenses' in the first place -- to protect us from our most morally inappropriate desires and drives, emulating from our 'Shadow-Id'.
Don't let your passions destroy your dreams. (I read that on a park sign the other day.)
Which brings us back to the winter of 'Freud's discontent' -- 1895-1896...
The winter of Freud's 'theoretical unclarity'...
Or was it the winter and spring of Freud's 'moral guilt based on ethical impropriety'?
