I'm going to bring my model of the personality back a little closer to Freud's classical model as he was developing it between 1920 and 1923. Included in my rendition, however, are some of Freud's earliest thoughts on traumacy theory (1893-1896), and his later mid period thoughts, concepts, theories, (1905-1915) on primary and secondary process, transference, narcissism...
Two differences between my brand of thinking and Freud's are: 1. I am more of a 'dialectic interactive-integrative thinker' than Freud who, by distinction, was more of an 'either/or dualistic or reductionist theorist'. For Freud, it was basically either 'you understand it my way -- or you are not a psychoanalyst'. This was partly in his right as he was the original creator of psychoanalysis, but still, his 'theoretical reductionism' stifled and stagnated much potential evolutionary growth; and 2. I prefer the term/concept of 'dissociation' as opposed to 'repression'. Thus, there can be 'unconscious, preconscious or conscious dissociation' -- which may or may not be 'purposeful ego-defenses' -- they may or may not be simply 'cognitive un-awarenesses'; whereas there can only be one type of repression -- 'unconscious repression' which is basically, by Freud's definition, 'purposeful, unconscious repression'.
As I have mentioned in a previous paper, I would have been fine differentiating between -- but still including as Psychoanalysis: 1. Freud's Classical Psychoanalysis; 2. Rank's 'Birth Trauma' and 'Creative' Psychoanalysis; 3. Abraham's 'Pre-Oedipal' Psychoanalysis; 4. Adler's 'Inferiority and Superiority Complex' Psychoanalysis; and 5. Jung's 'Mythological' Psychoanalysis; 6. Wilhelm Reich's 'Character Armour' Psychoanalysis; as well as 7. Klein's Object Relations; 8. Fairbairn's ('Rejecting' vs. 'Exciting') Object Relations; 9. Winnicott-Guntrip's 'Good Enough Mothering' Psychoanalysis; 10. Kohut's Self (Narcissistic) Psychoanalysis; 11. Lacan's (Linguistic-Semantic?) Psychoanalysis; 12. Bion's 'Alpha'/'Beta' Psychoanalysis; and 13. Horney's 'Basic Needs' Psychoanalysis; 14. Fromm's'Marxist-Socialist' Humanistic-Existentiial Psychoanalysis; and 15. Perls' Gestalt Therapy-Psychoanalysis -- without the 'analysis'....'let go of your mind and come to your senses'...16. Berne's 'Tranactional' (Psycho)Analysis; 17. Janov's 'Primal Scream' (Psychoanalysis)...18. General Semantics and Cognitive-(Behavior) Therapy; 19. Maxwell Maltz's and then 20. Nathaniel Branden's 'Self-Esteem' Therapy; 21. Abraham Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs' Humanistic Psychology....
Whoever I have missed has not sufficently influenced me to this date...Sullivan and Erickson, for example, and/or whoever I am still unfamiliar with...or just plain forgotten...22. Carl Rogers 'Client-Centered' or 'Congruence' Psychotherapy; 23. Rollo May's 'Existential Psychotherapy and 24. Victor Frankl's 'Logotherapy'...
This sets up 25. 'GAP-DGB Multi-Dialectic (or Quantum), Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis and/or Philosophy-Psychology'.
The model itself has changed again, which I will give my reasons for shortly...
From top to bottom the model looks like this...
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The Latest GAP-DGB Model of The Personality
A/ Ego States
i) Adult Superego States
1. The Nurturing-Altruistic Superego;
2. The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Superego;
3. The Distancing Superego;
4. The Righteous-Critical Superego
ii) Adult Ego States
5. The Conscious Private-Shadow Ego;
6. The Central, Decision-Making Ego;
7. The Public-Persona Ego;
8. The Romantic-Spiritual Ego;
iii) Stereotyped Childhood Under-ego States
09. The Nurturing-Altruistic (Approval-Seeking/Disapproval-Avoiding, Compliant, Pleasing) Under-ego;
10. The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Underego;
11. The Distancing Under-ego;
12. The Righteous-Critical Under-ego;
B/ Mainly Pre-Conscious/Subconscious/Unconscious Elements
13. The Dream-(Fantasy-Nightmare-Creative) Process (Symbolic Existential Statements, Impulses, Fears...)
14. The Shadow-Id-Ego Sanctuary (Compensatory Safety and Pleasure Centers, 'The Elusive, Secondary Womb-Sanctuary);
15. 'Released' or 'Escaped' Shadow-Id-Ego-Superego Elements;
16. The Shadow-Id-Ego-Superego Vault (Holder of Perceived Dangerous or Unbearable Ideas, 'Dominating' vs. 'Suppressed'/Submissive' Contradictory Impulses... );
17. The Evolving Shadow-Id-Ego-Superego and Romantic-Spiritual-Sensory Center (Before 'Splitting');
18. The Anxiety-Provoking-Chaotic-Apeiron-Nietzschean-Abyss-With-Evolving Contradictory-Paradoxical-Id-Ego-Superego Elements (The Birth of Existential Tragedies and Unresolved Life Paradoxes... Apollo vs. Dionysus, yin vs. yang, passivity vs. activity, life vs. death, narcissism vs. altruism, estrogen vs. testosterone, superego vs. underego, topdog vs. underdog, Gods vs. humans, perfection vs. imperfection, unity vs. separation, love vs. hate, anxiety vs. anger, creativity vs. aggression, mania vs. depression, superiority complexes vs. inferiority complexes....);
19. Life Experiences, Evolving Memory Templates, and Obsessive-Compulsive-Serial Repetition, Transference Templates and Complexes
21. The Genetic-Existential Potential Self.
This is my modified, revised, extended rendition of Freud's 1920 classic essay, 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' and his 1923 classic essay, 'The Ego and The Id'.
Without the meat and potatoes of Freud's 'wonderful prose'...
My prose here consists of just the bare bones, just the bare bones...
Some of the particulars, we have addressed in past essays such as my distinction between Freud's concept of the Id and my more 'holistic' concept of the Shadow-Id-Ego-(Superego).
Remember, if you can recall reading this, that Freud argued that 'the Ego was born from the Id'. (I will have to dig out the quote -- probably from 1923, 'The Ego and The Id' and/or from 'The New Introductory Lectures' (1932-1936). According to Freud, the newborn baby is all 'narcissism, all hedonism, all pleasure-seeking'. I understand where Freud is coming from in that statement but it is still a one-sided approach to the philosophy-psychology of the newborn infant. It can be just as easily argued that the newborn infant is crying for his or her own safety, own survival...and that maternal nurturing and maternal nourishment in the form of 'touch' and 'milk' are not only pleasurable -- they are also essential to the newborn baby's survival, and healthy survival. Thus, Freud's distinction between the 'pleasure principle' and the 'reality principle' or 'the survival instinct' (also discussed as the distinction between the 'pleasure instincts' and the 'ego instincts') -- is at least partly a non-starting philosophical assumption, especially if you are a dialectic thinker. Because Freud is over-looking -- dissociating himself and his psychology from -- 'the dialectical interaction and integrative connection between the pleasure-unpleasure principle and the reality or survival principle'.
Furthermore, since historically, Freud's -- or rather Fichte's -- concept of 'the ego' goes much further back in Western history than Freud's 1923 concept of 'the id', and since 'the ego' is another word for 'the self' or 'The Self' -- or at least it was before Freud started to give it a stricter meaning -- the question must be asked, 'What is the Id if it is not part of the Self, or alternatively speaking, a part of 'the Ego' -- the 'Wholistic Ego'. The Id -- in German -- means 'the It' -- or existentially speaking, 'The Alien' -- as in a 'creature' or a 'brain' within us that is by definition, 'alienated' from us, foreign to us, dissociated from us...
Colloquially and partly jokingly (partly not), we often speak of 'having two brains' -- one above the neck, and one below the waist. When Freud wrote 'Civilization and its Discontents', Freud had in mind the general 'tension', 'disharmony', and/or 'disconnect' between our 'civil' (ego and superego functions) and 'uncivil' (id functions) selves -- between that part of ourselves that wants live safely in society, and that part which wants to 'defy' and 'rebel' against society's laws, rules, moral, ethics, in the interests of satisfying our more basic, uncivil, biological, narcissistic instincts, drives, impulses...
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Civilization and Its Discontents
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Civilization and Its Discontents | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Sigmund Freud |
| Country | Austria |
| Language | German |
| Subject(s) | Political philosophy |
| Genre(s) | Nonfiction |
| Publisher | Verlag |
| Publication date | 1930 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 127 |
| ISBN | 978-0-393-30158-8 |
| Preceded by | The Future of an Illusion |
| Followed by | Moses and Monotheism |
Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"). It is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works.[1]
Contents[hide] |
[edit]Overview
In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such rules are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.
Freud's theory is based on the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. Most notable are the desires for sex, and the predisposition to violent aggression towards authority figures and towards sexual competitors, which both obstruct the gratification of a person's instincts.
[edit]
Freud's basic premise about the conflict between the individual's 'instinctual tensions' and his or her 'moral-ethical-civil' choices...but still, there are other ways of linguistically and/or semantically making the same point without introducing the concept of 'the id' as being something 'dissociated' from the rest of the personality, which may or may not be the case.
A distinction can be made between 'The Dionysian or Narcissistic or Hedonistic or Pleasure Ego' and contradistinctively, 'The Apollonian Righteous Ego' without having to step outside the boundaries of 'the ego' -- or 'The Whole Ego-Self'. Freud, in fact, did this in 1914, nine years before he created the concept of 'The Id'. Freud could have even created the concept of 'The Idian (Dionysian-Hedonistic-Narcissistic-Pleasure) Ego', and not 'leaped outside' of the parameters of 'the ego' as in 'Whole Self'. 'The Id' is most definitely a part of The Whole Self, and some people identify much more easily with their 'Idian or Narcissistic Ego' than others do...The idea in GAP-DGB Psychoanalysis is that 'the id is a part of the ego, and the ego is a part of the id, and sometimes they work in harmony with each other, sometimes they don't.'
Thus, the whole idea of 'The Shadow-Id-Ego' is that there is an essential part of the whole personality -- in fact, all of it -- that originates in 'Chaos', 'The Apeiron', 'The Shadows', 'Traumacy and Compensatory Impulsive Drive', that 'splits' into either 'the ego' and 'the id' or worded better, in my opinion, 'The Idian (or Idian-Dionysian-Narcissistic-Hedonistic-Pleasure) Ego' and 'The Apollonian, Civil, Righteous Ego', and moves upwards towards the light or darkness of day, the light or darkness of the personality, depending on the individual 'loving or hating' contents of the personality, its positive, caring, and/or negative, toxic contents of the personality...
Tracing this 'snakes' and 'ladders' movement of the various 'vicissitudes' of The Idian-Dionysian Ego vs. The Apollonian-Righteous Ego, as they work either in harmony and/or in conflict with each other, up and down the 'conscious-subconscious spectrum' and through the 'association-dissociation spectrum' is the job of a good psychoanalyst...
And that is where I will leave you today.
Next up -- my modified, extended, revised edition of another of Freud's classic essays, 'Dynamics of The Transference' (1912).
-- dgb, Sept. 15-16, 2012....
-- David Gordon Bain
