Friday, September 6, 2013
Early Freudian Theory (1893-1896)...and Then Theoretical Overhaul...(Freud As His Own Most Extreme Revisionist...)
Editorially speaking, I believe that the most important ideas that Freud ever wrote -- indeed, the essence and foundation of psychoanalysis -- can be found in his first two essays: 1. The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (1893); and 2. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) which progressively dealt with these three factors related to mental health: 1. reality-based, psychical trauma; 2. unbearable ideas that we perceive as threatening our ego-pride; and 3. a vast array of almost endlessly possible, imaginative 'defenses' that are aimed at avoiding that which we don't want to think about and/or deal with.
These three factors, together, constitute the essence of what Freud labelled as 'defensive hysteria' in 1894 which was the first step to an evolving, more generalized theory of the 'psycho-neuroses'.
Breuer, Charcot, Janet all played a part in influencing Freud's formula but it was Freud's idea of 'defense' that really created a 'new understanding' -- a psychological as opposed to physiological, genetic and/or 'degenerative' understanding -- for both 'hysteria' and eventually for 'all psycho-neuroses' (which did not include what Freud called 'the actual neuroses' -- i.e., 'anxiety neurosis' and 'neurasthenia' -- which Freud believed were more connected to 'here-and-now, immediacy' events as opposed to early childhood psychological events. Today, I would surmise that most psychotherapists would view most client symptoms (and 'causes') as involving both past and present psychological issues that inter-connect with each other.
Freud's first understanding of 'neurosis' was a simple, brilliant understanding of neurosis, which only became complicated and convoluted by the hugely imaginative abilities of clients to 'go to great ends to hide, distort, avoid, suppress, repress, project...whatever their particular 'unbearable idea' was -- stemming out of psychical trauma.
This formula is still just as relevant and meaningful today as it was back in 1894: people hiding 'psychical trauma' and 'unbearable ideas' from both themselves and/or others.
There are three parts in the equation above: again, 1. the psychical trauma; 2. the unbearable idea; and 3. the particular line(s) of defense against this unbearable idea.
The 'psychical trauma' usually starts the whole cycle but not necessarily.
Firstly, there is a definitional problem because psychical trauma' is 'in the mind of the beholder' -- different people react to the same or similar trauma in different ways, and what one person might consider to be a 'major' trauma, someone else might consider to be a 'minor' one. Perhaps Freud was right in this regard in saying that 'psychical reality' trumps 'material reality' (and the two are quite likely to be intimately interconnected and feed on each other).
There is one further problem that the concept of 'psychical trauma' raises and that is this: who determines the 'reality' of the 'psychical reality' -- Freud or the client; the analyst/therapist with his or her 'interpretive-reconstruction' of a material and psychical event; or the client him or herself as she remembers the historical event and his or her reaction to it -- both then and now.
That can create a big ethical problem in the therapeutic relationship.
Finally, there is the factor of 'childhood narcissistic fixation' (including both 'aim' and 'object') that can be partly equated with Freud's 'fantasy theory' and 'pleasure principle' but from my perspective, not totally to the extent that Freud goes 'head over heals into childhood sexual fantasy'. More distinction will need to be worked out in this area.
Many of Freud's case examples up to 1896 reflected an erotic fantasy and narcissistic fixation component being the 'unbearable idea' factor behind their particular hysterical symptom(s), although usually the way he cited these cases, the fantasy was usually an 'adolescent' or 'adult' fantasy; not a childhood one. That is probably to be more expected in the Victorian era with women's fantasies -- or some women's fantasies -- being hampered by the stringent moral codes of the time. The point here is that the 'unacceptable idea' can be either a 'traumatic experience' and/or an 'unaccepted fantasy' -- we might even say, that with some, there might be a psychical traumatic factor in the imagined fantasy which could be quite outside the person's normal range of thinking...
How to reconcile -- or not reconcile -- 'psychical trauma' with 'erotic fantasy' in the proper understanding of the human psyche; this theoretical problem Freud would think long and hard about between 1896 and 1897 before moving forward (or backward) to the 'fantasy' side of the equation to the detriment of the basically abandoned previous triadic 'reality-trauma-seduction' theories. After 1896, the new 'triadic' psychoanalytic theories were his 'fantasy-Oedipus-impulsive drive (id)' theories which more or less completely 'boxed out' his previous triadic theories, particularly the seduction theory.
What stayed the same from his older theories which could now be applied to the new ones were his 1. unbearable or irreconcilable idea theory (which was now fantasy as opposed to trauma based; and 2. his evolving and enlarging theory of 'defence mechanisms' of which he started with 'repression' and, with other important psychoanalysts help, moved on to a whole network of them...I may be adding a few of my own here... introjection, identification, projection, transference, denial, reaction-formation, sublimation, rationalization, intellectualization, approval-seeking/disapproval-avoiding, distancing, dreams, jokes, sarcasm, allusion to immediacy or to transference complexes, displacement, dissociation, psychosis, 'hysterical conversion symptoms' or 'hysterical attacks', obsessive-compulsion-addiction (anal, oral, genital), character disorders (bi-polar disorder or manic-depression, borderline personality, narcissistic personality...)
Editorially speaking, Freud was right in coming to the conclusion that there were some problems with the 'all inclusiveness' of Freud's overly reductionistic trauma and (even more so his) seduction theory which is not to say that they were wrong -- just over-generalized, and/or incapable of explaining everything that Freud wanted to explain in psychoanalysis...
What Freud was wrong in concluding was: first that ALL psychical neuroses are caused by early childhood trauma (1893-1895), and more specifically, early childhood sexual trauma (1895-1896); before reversing his field -- meaning all three of his preceding theories -- by declaring from about 1897 onwards to the end of his career that ALL psychical neuroses are caused by early childhood sexual fantasy, and that first three theories listed above were largely 'mistaken'.
If we can make one negative generalization about Freud, it is perhaps this: that Freud had a habit of moving from one extreme theoretical conclusion to another, over-generalizing in the process, resulting in critics calling his theories 'pan-sexual' and 'reductionistic' -- which they generally were, and still are -- on both sides of the 1896-97 fence, river, chasm, abyss...
No 'either/or' decision needed to be made by Freud in 1896 or anytime afterwards. Freud created an unnecessary conflict for himself -- and for psychoanalysis -- that has driven a wedge and indeed, created an abyss in the middle of orthodox, classical psychoanalysis that is still present today, 117 years later (1896 to 2013).
Editorially interpreting, there has been a rather large 'exodus' from Classical Psychoanalysis to Object Relations and other 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis that do not suffer from the same 'Freudian flaws' that no one within the Psychoanalytic Establishment seems to want to touch and modify in order to reduce its most glaring patriarchal, sexist, Victorian biases -- and the aforementioned 'over-generalized, over-polarized, either/or theories' -- to keep a modified, modernized version of 'Classical' Psychoanalysis 'alive and vibrant, and relevant'.
As Janet Malcolm pointed out in 'In The Freud Archives (1983,84), this puts the Object Relationist theorists on the same basic page as the modern day 'Trauma-Seduction' theorists, most notably Dr. Jeffrey Masson, who both share the common denominator of paying more attention to 'reality and trauma theory' and reducing if not dismissing altogether the theoretical, diagnostic and therapeutic relevance of the Oedipus Complex theory (like Fairbairn et. al ...Winnicott, Guntrip...did)...and many others today as well...
Thus, a dichotomy of contradictions (of the 1896-97 variety) some would say has put a rather significant theoretical and therapeutic 'chasm' or 'abyss' between Classical Psychoanalysis and Object Relations, although, it would seem, that on the whole, psychoanalysis is trying to minimize the significance of this seeming contradiction in respective theories.
'Tolerance', 'diplomacy', 'polite internal disagreement' -- and/or ideally, a 'theoretical bridge' to connect this contradiction in theories -- seems to be the way that this 'abyss' issue has been mainly handled internally lately (to my very limited sample of 'witnessing the cross-dialogue' at the one professional psychoanalytic seminar that I have attended).
Anna Freud was the person who really needed to make -- and should have made -- the necessary adjustments and modifications to her father's outdated, discriminatory theories but she, unfortunately, either could not see the need for this, or simply did not want to try to modify her father's work to make it more 'female friendly' and less one-sidedly extreme in terms of its 'pansexualism' and 'pan-fantasy bias'.
Of course, Anna Freud was born into essentially the same Victorian context and culture as her father lived through, so perhaps we should not be surprised by no 'post-Classical, modern day' adjustments in her time (up to 1982), nor Eissler's time, same reason (up to 1999), nor, by the looks of things, perhaps by anyone at anytime (2013 and still counting...).
Other 'psychoanalytic scholars' have tried to argue that there were no victims of early childhood sexual abuse in Freud's early case studies. If you are prone to believe that one, then just read the two excerpts below that I have included from one of Freud's most passionate and compassionate essays -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) in which Freud 'blew the whistle' on childhood sexual abuse and the 'acute and chronic leftover psychic trauma' to these victims, both female and male -- as well as blowing the whistle on the offending and offensive childhood sexual victimizers who were, more often than not, members of the victims' own family (and perhaps walked among the men of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society who all put up a huge protest against this theory...
Perhaps the fine, upper class, patriarchal men of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society....doth protest too much, methinks...
Freud most certainly did not lack 'moral courage' in the spring of 1896 when he read the paper above to above mentioned Society on the evening of April 21st.
However, did he 'lose this moral courage' shortly after this meeting because of what happened in the meeting? And/or because of Freud's continued sense of guilt and/or fear of professional punishment for the Emma Ekstein ordeal?
That was the million dollar motivational question that Masson threw out at the scholarly world and the general public back in the early 1980s.
Only Masson did not spare any 'moral hammers' in going after Freud's theorized 'loss of moral courage' which Masson turned into a declarative statement -- and then went public with his accusation.
The Psychoanalytic Establishment right up to the top of the hierarchy -- did not want to hear Masson's righteousness towards Freud -- particularly as it came out in Blumenthal's second interview with Masson in the New York Times in the summer of 1981....
It didn't take long afterwards -- October of 1981 -- for Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler, and the 13 member board to vote to end Masson's contract after one year as The Projects Director of The Freud Archives.
Stated Eissler, 'Would you make director of the Archives someone who writes plain nonsense? He must foresee that he cannot get an honorary place here.'
In September of 1981, Anna Freud wrote Masson a anguished but calm, contained, professional letter stemming from the aftermath of Masson's August 1981 second part public interview and a letter of self-justification written from Masson to Anna Freud just before her return letter:
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Dear Jeff Masson,
Your letter came today, and I answer quickly, since I may have to go to hospital in a few days, and that may mean an interruption. I am sorry, though, that my answer will be disappointing to you.
I have to tell you that I was also put off very much by the second article in the New York Times, only my reaction to it was different from Dr. Eissler's. I felt almost certain that the writer of the article had misunderstood you and that the interpretation concerning the seduction theory was his and not yours. I just could not imagine that it could be yours.
Of course, I have not read the lecture you gave in New Haven, but to me it seems out of the question that there is valid proof for the abandonment of the seduction theory for reasons of external rejection, nor can there be any valid sign that in spite of this abandonment it was kept up secretly. In fact, there is abundant proof to the contrary, not only in all the later case histories, but in the whole of the analytic theory altogether. Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of fantasy life, conscious or unconscious fantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards.
I know the Fliess letters so well, but I just cannot imagine what in them led you to this conclusion to which you have come.
I look forward to hearing more from you.
Your sincerely,
Anna Freud
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My own editorial comments...
I can tell you which letters led Masson to the conclusion he came to (that is, his 'Freud lost moral courage' argument -- the April 26th, and May 4th, 1896 letters partly quoted above.
But more than this, Anna Freud was completely, flat, outright wrong in believing that there could have been no fantasy theory without Freud abandoning the seduction theory.
There are obviously different types of fantasies, all 'compensatory' in some fashion in terms of 'looking for the greener grass on the other side of the fence' . But within this general parameter, fantasy is only limited by the limits of the human imagination which is practically limitless. Reality and fantasy can be viewed as polar dialectical twins that co-influence the content and evolution (or 'de-evolution') of each other.
Within the realm of the 'darker' fantasies childhood trauma scenes often play into the content and 'signature characteristics' of adult fantasy scenes, the one often being the intended 'inverse' in some way of the other. Unfortunately, this almost universal human defense mechanism -- 'identification' or more specifically 'identification with the aggressor/victimizer/rejector/abandoner/betrayer...' -- can turn a childhood 'trauma victim' into an 'adult victimizer' in any of a thousand or more different ways, some more ominous than others.
I really do not believe that there are any childhood exceptions (although to be sure I remember what I wrote earlier about the tendency to 'over-generalize' generalizations).
Now, to be sure, sometimes these forms of 'destructive and self-destructive identification patterns and complexes' can be modified and worn away over time (with more positive types of living and loving experiences combined with the learning to go along with it).
Conversely, there are other types of good, loving identifications as well, assuming we received and perceived loving behavior as children from our primary caretakers or 'attachment figures' who are usually our parents.
These polar types of transference-identifications -- both the positive ones and negative ones -- make up the 'signature' aspects of our personality and act like a double-sided ferris wheel ride -- gain, the childhood (and evolving) reality playing into the production of a person's evolving fantasy life. Again, psychoanalysis -- and Freud in particular -- never needed to make an 'either/or' choice that mutually excluded the existence of the other. Freud, and psychoanalysis in general has not thought 'dialectically' enough in this regard, and evolved both theoretically and therapeutically in a fashion where 'reality' and 'fantasy', seduction theory and Oedipus theory, need to be viewed as 'co-influencers' of each other, not 'right' and 'wrong' answers in Freud's head or any one else's.
This points the way to an integration between Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanalysis which should have been made many, many years ago....
Why it wasn't -- or hasn't been -- is beyond me.
Sigmund Freud, all the greatest psychoanalysts, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Brian Bird, Jeffrey Masson, perhaps Ronald Fairbairn was the closest with his concepts of '(attracting)-exciting' and 'rejecting/(ed) objects' was closest -- but all in all, I have listed off some extremely intelligent, famous names -- and none of them could see this 'dialectic connection' between 'trauma' and ' fantasy' .
So I offer psychoanalysis this following gift.... a 'dialectic gift' and 'double inversion theory' of 'reality' and 'fantasy'....Very simple in its simplest version....simple stupid, in fact...
What reality lacked or lacks, fantasy visualizes...and chases...
In 1905 (Three Essays on Sexuality), Freud wrote: 'The (adult) neurosis is the inverse of the (childhood) perversion.'
In 2013, I write: 'The (adult) fantasy/perversion is the inverse of the (childhood) real trauma-(transference) neurosis.
There lies the potential for integrative synthesis between Pre-Psychoanalysis, Classical Psychoanalysis -- and Object Relations and Self Psychology.
Perhaps the potential for a 'compromise olive branch'...
Between, in my view, a morally very courageous man -- Dr. Jeffrey Masson...
And the Psychoanalytic Establishment...as hard as seems to be working to 're-integrate' trauma theory back into its main school of thought -- it still needs to better 'synthesize' what happened in the 1980s into a more 'positive, female friendly' brand of psychoanalysis in the 21st century..
Am I optimistic about the possibility of a 'peace treaty' here ...
Between Psychoanalysis and Dr. Jeffrey Masson?
Am I reaching for an imaginary rainbow here...
A happy ending to The Birth of Tragedy...
Apollo and Dionysus dancing together on the hilltop...
Is it too late?
Are we in 'The Twilight of The (Fading) Idols'?
(Ironically, Twilight of The Idols was written in 1888 in the week of August 26th to September 23rd) 'Synchronicity' perhaps?
The twilight of Freud's -- and Freudian Psychoanalysis' -- fading integrity?
Is it too late to rescue both? Or at least the latter?
The twilight of 'non-closure' on this issue of a 'toxic Oedipus Complex' theory that discriminates particularly against female Classical Psychoanalytic clients?
With no hope for any 'creative, integrative solutions and/or conflict-resolutions?
What Freud called a 'compromise-formation'?
My hours of work on this subject matter has pretty well run its course...
This is perhaps my signature paper on the Seduction-Oedipus Controversy...
My time spent on this massive ethical issue...
Will more or less come to a close in a few minutes here...
I have virtually emptied my soul into this issue since I first read 'Final Analysis' (Masson, 1992), In The Freud Archives (Janet Malcolm, 1983, 84)), and The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (Masson, 1984,85, 92)...
Defending a man who I believe was -- and still is -- more right than wrong..
A complicated issue to be sure...
But psychoanalysis is returning to Freud's earliest trauma theory...
And has to have some means of understanding, diagnosing, and treating incestuous, childhood sexual abuse....
Rather than continuing to worship at the alter of the Oedipus Complex theory...
The Oedipus Complex still has significant value as a form of 'attachment-detachment' theory between children and parents.
But not as a means of suppressing the existence of childhood sexual abuse.
Theories are generalizations, not facts.
Freud treated his Oedipus Complex theory as a fact that basically 'dismissed' the possibility of father-daughter sexual assault, and as a leader of any school of psychology and psychotherapy -- let alone one of the most prominent -- this was totally unacceptable and unethical. His lasting teachings in this regard to thousands of other psychoanalysts who were basically told to 'swallow' or 'introject' this teaching if they wanted to be 'psychoanalysts' (although some, and perhaps a building majority, have come to reject, or at least minimize, this teaching) have essentially turned psychoanalysis into a 'pathological system' of Freud's most biased, one-sided, sexist, patriarchal theories -- worst of which is the Oedipus Complex theory at has been taught for over a hundred years. Freud: Oedipus Complex theory means no father-daughter incest but rather 'incestuous daughter fantasies towards her father'.
How can a psychoanalyst know if there was no adult-child seduction/sexual assault that took place in childhood if The Oedipus Complex theory assumes that there was no such assault to begin with? That's logically putting the cart before the horse.
More than that, it is probably the most unethical passage that Freud ever committed to paper -- or at least to The 24 volumes of The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.
There are a couple of letters written to Fliess in the spring of 1896, quoted above, that rival this passage above.
Theories can be useful but not as personal and professional 'defence mechanisms'.
On an ethical level, Masson was more right than wrong but no one in The Psychoanalytic Establishment wanted to stand up for him, not in the 1980s, not today, not publicly, and privately, who knows?
As a result, Psychoanalysis still has a major 'branding' problem -- with other schools of psychology, with the general public -- and particularly with women who do not view Psychoanalysis as being 'female friendly'.
But worse than this, underneath their branding problem, they still have an 'ethics', 'integrity' and 'content substance' problem...
It may be mainly a 'Freudian, Classical' Psychoanalysis problem, of which more and more psychoanalysts are seemingly 'abandoning ship'....but still...
All psychoanalysts are often still being tarred with the same 'brand' brush...
Toxic unethical issues in Classical Psychoanalysis involving The Oedipus Complex theory 'covering up' the mainly 'abandoned seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theory' and the possibility/probability of 'misdiagnosing' real childhood sexual abuse....affects all of Psychoanalysis...particularly amongst those who do not understand that Object Relations was created, at least partly, to eliminate or downplay the significance of The Oedipus Complex Theory...
'Corporate branding' needs to be 'simple, stupid' that the public can identify with something that is 'good', not 'bad'.
Anna Freud should have 'cut bait' and 'fixed' the Oedipus problem...
But I am not even sure that she could see the 'big picture' other than protecting her dad's image and ideas....
Masson's bringing the 'dirty laundry' of psychoanalysis into the public limelight could have, should have, created the opportunity for Anna Freud to better see the need to make psychoanalysis more 'female and consumer friendly' -- in essence, to 're-brand' an archaically outdated theory -- actually it should never have been defined the way it was defined in the first place....so it was a 'pathological' theory even in The Victorian era, perhaps to 'appease' a network of psychiatrists and neurologists who would have ruined his career if he hadn't found some way of 'abandoning' the seduction theory....But 'this is motivational speculation' -- the same motivational speculation that ended Masson's psychoanalytic career.
And no one can go back into history and get inside Freud's head...
So this remains historical and motivational speculation based primarily on the meeting of April 21st, 1896, and secondly, on Freud's seeming need to alleviate both himself and Fliess from the ongoing guilt of having really messed up and disfigured Emma Ekstein's nasal passage....Does anyone today really buy into Freud's theory that she was a 'hysterical bleeder'. It is extremely unfortunate that Freud's 'fantasy theory' seemed to have been 'creatively born' in the middle of 'professional duress' and 'guilt'...but...it certainly would seem to me that Freud's first 'diagnosis' and 'usage' of his newly born 'fantasy theory' was labelling Emma Ekstein as a 'hysterical bleeder' in the spring of 1896....
Human, all too human...
But what was the ultimate cost?
A toxically tinged Oedipus and Fantasy Theory...
That would/will some day ultimately spell the end of Classical Psychoanalysis...
Perhaps The Psychoanalytic Establishment is going about this the right way...
The slow death of Freudian Classical Psychoanalysis...
While the other 'sub-brands' of Psychoanalysis...
Particularly Object Relations...
Become more and more dominant...
And take over...
.....................................................................................
You were right from your side,
I was right from mine,
We're just one too many mornings,
And a thousand miles behind.
-- Bob Dylan (One Too Many Mornings)
........................................................................................
You choose...
But before you do...
Read these two excerpts below from The Aetiology of Hysteria, and I think you will certainly see where Masson was coming from....the clinical material reported by Freud in 1896 -- before he 'abandoned' the seduction theory -- was just too shockingly, tragically, and concretely reported to be construed as anything other than a patient's real, personal nightmare -- the idea of it being any patient's 'childhood fantasy' is, in my opinion, ethically disgusting...
..........................................................................................................
'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 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. (my editorial comment: it is hugely revealing that Freud lumps the second example in with the second because the second example is an abstraction and an allusion to Freud's first conscious early memory which in Ernest Jones' biography is treated as being 'trivial'. In contrast, as Freud hints at here, I view this allusion to Freud's first memory as the most important 'transference memory' in Freud's long life.)
And later on in the same 1896 paper, this next section is even more shocking...but morally compassionate and courageous...
'For the idea of these infantile sexual scenes is very repellent to the feelings of a sexually normal individual; they include all the the abuses known to debauched and impotent persons, among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes. For physicians, astonishment at this soon gives way to complete understanding. People who have no hesitation in satisfying their sexual desires upon children cannot be expected to jib at finer shades in the methods of obtaining that satisfaction; and the sexual impotence which is inherent in children inevitably forces them into the same substitutive actions as those to which adults descend if they become impotent. All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations -- on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs -- all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, in countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail. Where the relation is between two children postulates a previous seduction of one of them by an adult. The psychical consequences of these child-relations are quite extraordinarily far-fetching; the two individuals remain linked by an invisible bond throughout the whole of their lives.' (S.E. V. 3, p. 214-215).
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Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.
-- Bob Dylan (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll)
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-- dgb, Sept 6th, 2013,
= David Gordon Bain
Editorially speaking, I believe that the most important ideas that Freud ever wrote -- indeed, the essence and foundation of psychoanalysis -- can be found in his first two essays: 1. The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (1893); and 2. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) which progressively dealt with these three factors related to mental health: 1. reality-based, psychical trauma; 2. unbearable ideas that we perceive as threatening our ego-pride; and 3. a vast array of almost endlessly possible, imaginative 'defenses' that are aimed at avoiding that which we don't want to think about and/or deal with.
These three factors, together, constitute the essence of what Freud labelled as 'defensive hysteria' in 1894 which was the first step to an evolving, more generalized theory of the 'psycho-neuroses'.
Breuer, Charcot, Janet all played a part in influencing Freud's formula but it was Freud's idea of 'defense' that really created a 'new understanding' -- a psychological as opposed to physiological, genetic and/or 'degenerative' understanding -- for both 'hysteria' and eventually for 'all psycho-neuroses' (which did not include what Freud called 'the actual neuroses' -- i.e., 'anxiety neurosis' and 'neurasthenia' -- which Freud believed were more connected to 'here-and-now, immediacy' events as opposed to early childhood psychological events. Today, I would surmise that most psychotherapists would view most client symptoms (and 'causes') as involving both past and present psychological issues that inter-connect with each other.
Freud's first understanding of 'neurosis' was a simple, brilliant understanding of neurosis, which only became complicated and convoluted by the hugely imaginative abilities of clients to 'go to great ends to hide, distort, avoid, suppress, repress, project...whatever their particular 'unbearable idea' was -- stemming out of psychical trauma.
This formula is still just as relevant and meaningful today as it was back in 1894: people hiding 'psychical trauma' and 'unbearable ideas' from both themselves and/or others.
There are three parts in the equation above: again, 1. the psychical trauma; 2. the unbearable idea; and 3. the particular line(s) of defense against this unbearable idea.
The 'psychical trauma' usually starts the whole cycle but not necessarily.
Firstly, there is a definitional problem because psychical trauma' is 'in the mind of the beholder' -- different people react to the same or similar trauma in different ways, and what one person might consider to be a 'major' trauma, someone else might consider to be a 'minor' one. Perhaps Freud was right in this regard in saying that 'psychical reality' trumps 'material reality' (and the two are quite likely to be intimately interconnected and feed on each other).
There is one further problem that the concept of 'psychical trauma' raises and that is this: who determines the 'reality' of the 'psychical reality' -- Freud or the client; the analyst/therapist with his or her 'interpretive-reconstruction' of a material and psychical event; or the client him or herself as she remembers the historical event and his or her reaction to it -- both then and now.
That can create a big ethical problem in the therapeutic relationship.
Finally, there is the factor of 'childhood narcissistic fixation' (including both 'aim' and 'object') that can be partly equated with Freud's 'fantasy theory' and 'pleasure principle' but from my perspective, not totally to the extent that Freud goes 'head over heals into childhood sexual fantasy'. More distinction will need to be worked out in this area.
Many of Freud's case examples up to 1896 reflected an erotic fantasy and narcissistic fixation component being the 'unbearable idea' factor behind their particular hysterical symptom(s), although usually the way he cited these cases, the fantasy was usually an 'adolescent' or 'adult' fantasy; not a childhood one. That is probably to be more expected in the Victorian era with women's fantasies -- or some women's fantasies -- being hampered by the stringent moral codes of the time. The point here is that the 'unacceptable idea' can be either a 'traumatic experience' and/or an 'unaccepted fantasy' -- we might even say, that with some, there might be a psychical traumatic factor in the imagined fantasy which could be quite outside the person's normal range of thinking...
How to reconcile -- or not reconcile -- 'psychical trauma' with 'erotic fantasy' in the proper understanding of the human psyche; this theoretical problem Freud would think long and hard about between 1896 and 1897 before moving forward (or backward) to the 'fantasy' side of the equation to the detriment of the basically abandoned previous triadic 'reality-trauma-seduction' theories. After 1896, the new 'triadic' psychoanalytic theories were his 'fantasy-Oedipus-impulsive drive (id)' theories which more or less completely 'boxed out' his previous triadic theories, particularly the seduction theory.
What stayed the same from his older theories which could now be applied to the new ones were his 1. unbearable or irreconcilable idea theory (which was now fantasy as opposed to trauma based; and 2. his evolving and enlarging theory of 'defence mechanisms' of which he started with 'repression' and, with other important psychoanalysts help, moved on to a whole network of them...I may be adding a few of my own here... introjection, identification, projection, transference, denial, reaction-formation, sublimation, rationalization, intellectualization, approval-seeking/disapproval-avoiding, distancing, dreams, jokes, sarcasm, allusion to immediacy or to transference complexes, displacement, dissociation, psychosis, 'hysterical conversion symptoms' or 'hysterical attacks', obsessive-compulsion-addiction (anal, oral, genital), character disorders (bi-polar disorder or manic-depression, borderline personality, narcissistic personality...)
Editorially speaking, Freud was right in coming to the conclusion that there were some problems with the 'all inclusiveness' of Freud's overly reductionistic trauma and (even more so his) seduction theory which is not to say that they were wrong -- just over-generalized, and/or incapable of explaining everything that Freud wanted to explain in psychoanalysis...
What Freud was wrong in concluding was: first that ALL psychical neuroses are caused by early childhood trauma (1893-1895), and more specifically, early childhood sexual trauma (1895-1896); before reversing his field -- meaning all three of his preceding theories -- by declaring from about 1897 onwards to the end of his career that ALL psychical neuroses are caused by early childhood sexual fantasy, and that first three theories listed above were largely 'mistaken'.
If we can make one negative generalization about Freud, it is perhaps this: that Freud had a habit of moving from one extreme theoretical conclusion to another, over-generalizing in the process, resulting in critics calling his theories 'pan-sexual' and 'reductionistic' -- which they generally were, and still are -- on both sides of the 1896-97 fence, river, chasm, abyss...
No 'either/or' decision needed to be made by Freud in 1896 or anytime afterwards. Freud created an unnecessary conflict for himself -- and for psychoanalysis -- that has driven a wedge and indeed, created an abyss in the middle of orthodox, classical psychoanalysis that is still present today, 117 years later (1896 to 2013).
Editorially interpreting, there has been a rather large 'exodus' from Classical Psychoanalysis to Object Relations and other 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis that do not suffer from the same 'Freudian flaws' that no one within the Psychoanalytic Establishment seems to want to touch and modify in order to reduce its most glaring patriarchal, sexist, Victorian biases -- and the aforementioned 'over-generalized, over-polarized, either/or theories' -- to keep a modified, modernized version of 'Classical' Psychoanalysis 'alive and vibrant, and relevant'.
As Janet Malcolm pointed out in 'In The Freud Archives (1983,84), this puts the Object Relationist theorists on the same basic page as the modern day 'Trauma-Seduction' theorists, most notably Dr. Jeffrey Masson, who both share the common denominator of paying more attention to 'reality and trauma theory' and reducing if not dismissing altogether the theoretical, diagnostic and therapeutic relevance of the Oedipus Complex theory (like Fairbairn et. al ...Winnicott, Guntrip...did)...and many others today as well...
Thus, a dichotomy of contradictions (of the 1896-97 variety) some would say has put a rather significant theoretical and therapeutic 'chasm' or 'abyss' between Classical Psychoanalysis and Object Relations, although, it would seem, that on the whole, psychoanalysis is trying to minimize the significance of this seeming contradiction in respective theories.
'Tolerance', 'diplomacy', 'polite internal disagreement' -- and/or ideally, a 'theoretical bridge' to connect this contradiction in theories -- seems to be the way that this 'abyss' issue has been mainly handled internally lately (to my very limited sample of 'witnessing the cross-dialogue' at the one professional psychoanalytic seminar that I have attended).
Anna Freud was the person who really needed to make -- and should have made -- the necessary adjustments and modifications to her father's outdated, discriminatory theories but she, unfortunately, either could not see the need for this, or simply did not want to try to modify her father's work to make it more 'female friendly' and less one-sidedly extreme in terms of its 'pansexualism' and 'pan-fantasy bias'.
Of course, Anna Freud was born into essentially the same Victorian context and culture as her father lived through, so perhaps we should not be surprised by no 'post-Classical, modern day' adjustments in her time (up to 1982), nor Eissler's time, same reason (up to 1999), nor, by the looks of things, perhaps by anyone at anytime (2013 and still counting...).
Other 'psychoanalytic scholars' have tried to argue that there were no victims of early childhood sexual abuse in Freud's early case studies. If you are prone to believe that one, then just read the two excerpts below that I have included from one of Freud's most passionate and compassionate essays -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) in which Freud 'blew the whistle' on childhood sexual abuse and the 'acute and chronic leftover psychic trauma' to these victims, both female and male -- as well as blowing the whistle on the offending and offensive childhood sexual victimizers who were, more often than not, members of the victims' own family (and perhaps walked among the men of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society who all put up a huge protest against this theory...
Perhaps the fine, upper class, patriarchal men of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society....doth protest too much, methinks...
Freud most certainly did not lack 'moral courage' in the spring of 1896 when he read the paper above to above mentioned Society on the evening of April 21st.
However, did he 'lose this moral courage' shortly after this meeting because of what happened in the meeting? And/or because of Freud's continued sense of guilt and/or fear of professional punishment for the Emma Ekstein ordeal?
That was the million dollar motivational question that Masson threw out at the scholarly world and the general public back in the early 1980s.
Only Masson did not spare any 'moral hammers' in going after Freud's theorized 'loss of moral courage' which Masson turned into a declarative statement -- and then went public with his accusation.
The Psychoanalytic Establishment right up to the top of the hierarchy -- did not want to hear Masson's righteousness towards Freud -- particularly as it came out in Blumenthal's second interview with Masson in the New York Times in the summer of 1981....
It didn't take long afterwards -- October of 1981 -- for Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler, and the 13 member board to vote to end Masson's contract after one year as The Projects Director of The Freud Archives.
Stated Eissler, 'Would you make director of the Archives someone who writes plain nonsense? He must foresee that he cannot get an honorary place here.'
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Dear Jeff Masson,
Your letter came today, and I answer quickly, since I may have to go to hospital in a few days, and that may mean an interruption. I am sorry, though, that my answer will be disappointing to you.
I have to tell you that I was also put off very much by the second article in the New York Times, only my reaction to it was different from Dr. Eissler's. I felt almost certain that the writer of the article had misunderstood you and that the interpretation concerning the seduction theory was his and not yours. I just could not imagine that it could be yours.
Of course, I have not read the lecture you gave in New Haven, but to me it seems out of the question that there is valid proof for the abandonment of the seduction theory for reasons of external rejection, nor can there be any valid sign that in spite of this abandonment it was kept up secretly. In fact, there is abundant proof to the contrary, not only in all the later case histories, but in the whole of the analytic theory altogether. Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of fantasy life, conscious or unconscious fantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards.
I know the Fliess letters so well, but I just cannot imagine what in them led you to this conclusion to which you have come.
I look forward to hearing more from you.
Your sincerely,
Anna Freud
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My own editorial comments...
I can tell you which letters led Masson to the conclusion he came to (that is, his 'Freud lost moral courage' argument -- the April 26th, and May 4th, 1896 letters partly quoted above.
But more than this, Anna Freud was completely, flat, outright wrong in believing that there could have been no fantasy theory without Freud abandoning the seduction theory.
There are obviously different types of fantasies, all 'compensatory' in some fashion in terms of 'looking for the greener grass on the other side of the fence' . But within this general parameter, fantasy is only limited by the limits of the human imagination which is practically limitless. Reality and fantasy can be viewed as polar dialectical twins that co-influence the content and evolution (or 'de-evolution') of each other.
Within the realm of the 'darker' fantasies childhood trauma scenes often play into the content and 'signature characteristics' of adult fantasy scenes, the one often being the intended 'inverse' in some way of the other. Unfortunately, this almost universal human defense mechanism -- 'identification' or more specifically 'identification with the aggressor/victimizer/rejector/abandoner/betrayer...' -- can turn a childhood 'trauma victim' into an 'adult victimizer' in any of a thousand or more different ways, some more ominous than others.
I really do not believe that there are any childhood exceptions (although to be sure I remember what I wrote earlier about the tendency to 'over-generalize' generalizations).
Now, to be sure, sometimes these forms of 'destructive and self-destructive identification patterns and complexes' can be modified and worn away over time (with more positive types of living and loving experiences combined with the learning to go along with it).
Conversely, there are other types of good, loving identifications as well, assuming we received and perceived loving behavior as children from our primary caretakers or 'attachment figures' who are usually our parents.
These polar types of transference-identifications -- both the positive ones and negative ones -- make up the 'signature' aspects of our personality and act like a double-sided ferris wheel ride -- gain, the childhood (and evolving) reality playing into the production of a person's evolving fantasy life. Again, psychoanalysis -- and Freud in particular -- never needed to make an 'either/or' choice that mutually excluded the existence of the other. Freud, and psychoanalysis in general has not thought 'dialectically' enough in this regard, and evolved both theoretically and therapeutically in a fashion where 'reality' and 'fantasy', seduction theory and Oedipus theory, need to be viewed as 'co-influencers' of each other, not 'right' and 'wrong' answers in Freud's head or any one else's.
This points the way to an integration between Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanalysis which should have been made many, many years ago....
Why it wasn't -- or hasn't been -- is beyond me.
Sigmund Freud, all the greatest psychoanalysts, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Brian Bird, Jeffrey Masson, perhaps Ronald Fairbairn was the closest with his concepts of '(attracting)-exciting' and 'rejecting/(ed) objects' was closest -- but all in all, I have listed off some extremely intelligent, famous names -- and none of them could see this 'dialectic connection' between 'trauma' and ' fantasy' .
So I offer psychoanalysis this following gift.... a 'dialectic gift' and 'double inversion theory' of 'reality' and 'fantasy'....Very simple in its simplest version....simple stupid, in fact...
What reality lacked or lacks, fantasy visualizes...and chases...
In 1905 (Three Essays on Sexuality), Freud wrote: 'The (adult) neurosis is the inverse of the (childhood) perversion.'
In 2013, I write: 'The (adult) fantasy/perversion is the inverse of the (childhood) real trauma-(transference) neurosis.
There lies the potential for integrative synthesis between Pre-Psychoanalysis, Classical Psychoanalysis -- and Object Relations and Self Psychology.
Perhaps the potential for a 'compromise olive branch'...
Between, in my view, a morally very courageous man -- Dr. Jeffrey Masson...
And the Psychoanalytic Establishment...as hard as seems to be working to 're-integrate' trauma theory back into its main school of thought -- it still needs to better 'synthesize' what happened in the 1980s into a more 'positive, female friendly' brand of psychoanalysis in the 21st century..
Am I optimistic about the possibility of a 'peace treaty' here ...
Between Psychoanalysis and Dr. Jeffrey Masson?
Am I reaching for an imaginary rainbow here...
A happy ending to The Birth of Tragedy...
Apollo and Dionysus dancing together on the hilltop...
Is it too late?
Are we in 'The Twilight of The (Fading) Idols'?
(Ironically, Twilight of The Idols was written in 1888 in the week of August 26th to September 23rd) 'Synchronicity' perhaps?
The twilight of Freud's -- and Freudian Psychoanalysis' -- fading integrity?
Is it too late to rescue both? Or at least the latter?
The twilight of 'non-closure' on this issue of a 'toxic Oedipus Complex' theory that discriminates particularly against female Classical Psychoanalytic clients?
With no hope for any 'creative, integrative solutions and/or conflict-resolutions?
What Freud called a 'compromise-formation'?
My hours of work on this subject matter has pretty well run its course...
This is perhaps my signature paper on the Seduction-Oedipus Controversy...
My time spent on this massive ethical issue...
Will more or less come to a close in a few minutes here...
I have virtually emptied my soul into this issue since I first read 'Final Analysis' (Masson, 1992), In The Freud Archives (Janet Malcolm, 1983, 84)), and The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (Masson, 1984,85, 92)...
Defending a man who I believe was -- and still is -- more right than wrong..
A complicated issue to be sure...
But psychoanalysis is returning to Freud's earliest trauma theory...
And has to have some means of understanding, diagnosing, and treating incestuous, childhood sexual abuse....
Rather than continuing to worship at the alter of the Oedipus Complex theory...
The Oedipus Complex still has significant value as a form of 'attachment-detachment' theory between children and parents.
But not as a means of suppressing the existence of childhood sexual abuse.
Theories are generalizations, not facts.
Freud treated his Oedipus Complex theory as a fact that basically 'dismissed' the possibility of father-daughter sexual assault, and as a leader of any school of psychology and psychotherapy -- let alone one of the most prominent -- this was totally unacceptable and unethical. His lasting teachings in this regard to thousands of other psychoanalysts who were basically told to 'swallow' or 'introject' this teaching if they wanted to be 'psychoanalysts' (although some, and perhaps a building majority, have come to reject, or at least minimize, this teaching) have essentially turned psychoanalysis into a 'pathological system' of Freud's most biased, one-sided, sexist, patriarchal theories -- worst of which is the Oedipus Complex theory at has been taught for over a hundred years. Freud: Oedipus Complex theory means no father-daughter incest but rather 'incestuous daughter fantasies towards her father'.
How can a psychoanalyst know if there was no adult-child seduction/sexual assault that took place in childhood if The Oedipus Complex theory assumes that there was no such assault to begin with? That's logically putting the cart before the horse.
More than that, it is probably the most unethical passage that Freud ever committed to paper -- or at least to The 24 volumes of The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.
There are a couple of letters written to Fliess in the spring of 1896, quoted above, that rival this passage above.
Theories can be useful but not as personal and professional 'defence mechanisms'.
On an ethical level, Masson was more right than wrong but no one in The Psychoanalytic Establishment wanted to stand up for him, not in the 1980s, not today, not publicly, and privately, who knows?
As a result, Psychoanalysis still has a major 'branding' problem -- with other schools of psychology, with the general public -- and particularly with women who do not view Psychoanalysis as being 'female friendly'.
But worse than this, underneath their branding problem, they still have an 'ethics', 'integrity' and 'content substance' problem...
It may be mainly a 'Freudian, Classical' Psychoanalysis problem, of which more and more psychoanalysts are seemingly 'abandoning ship'....but still...
All psychoanalysts are often still being tarred with the same 'brand' brush...
Toxic unethical issues in Classical Psychoanalysis involving The Oedipus Complex theory 'covering up' the mainly 'abandoned seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theory' and the possibility/probability of 'misdiagnosing' real childhood sexual abuse....affects all of Psychoanalysis...particularly amongst those who do not understand that Object Relations was created, at least partly, to eliminate or downplay the significance of The Oedipus Complex Theory...
'Corporate branding' needs to be 'simple, stupid' that the public can identify with something that is 'good', not 'bad'.
Anna Freud should have 'cut bait' and 'fixed' the Oedipus problem...
But I am not even sure that she could see the 'big picture' other than protecting her dad's image and ideas....
Masson's bringing the 'dirty laundry' of psychoanalysis into the public limelight could have, should have, created the opportunity for Anna Freud to better see the need to make psychoanalysis more 'female and consumer friendly' -- in essence, to 're-brand' an archaically outdated theory -- actually it should never have been defined the way it was defined in the first place....so it was a 'pathological' theory even in The Victorian era, perhaps to 'appease' a network of psychiatrists and neurologists who would have ruined his career if he hadn't found some way of 'abandoning' the seduction theory....But 'this is motivational speculation' -- the same motivational speculation that ended Masson's psychoanalytic career.
And no one can go back into history and get inside Freud's head...
So this remains historical and motivational speculation based primarily on the meeting of April 21st, 1896, and secondly, on Freud's seeming need to alleviate both himself and Fliess from the ongoing guilt of having really messed up and disfigured Emma Ekstein's nasal passage....Does anyone today really buy into Freud's theory that she was a 'hysterical bleeder'. It is extremely unfortunate that Freud's 'fantasy theory' seemed to have been 'creatively born' in the middle of 'professional duress' and 'guilt'...but...it certainly would seem to me that Freud's first 'diagnosis' and 'usage' of his newly born 'fantasy theory' was labelling Emma Ekstein as a 'hysterical bleeder' in the spring of 1896....
Human, all too human...
But what was the ultimate cost?
A toxically tinged Oedipus and Fantasy Theory...
That would/will some day ultimately spell the end of Classical Psychoanalysis...
Perhaps The Psychoanalytic Establishment is going about this the right way...
The slow death of Freudian Classical Psychoanalysis...
While the other 'sub-brands' of Psychoanalysis...
Particularly Object Relations...
Become more and more dominant...
And take over...
.....................................................................................
You were right from your side,
I was right from mine,
We're just one too many mornings,
And a thousand miles behind.
-- Bob Dylan (One Too Many Mornings)
........................................................................................
You choose...
But before you do...
Read these two excerpts below from The Aetiology of Hysteria, and I think you will certainly see where Masson was coming from....the clinical material reported by Freud in 1896 -- before he 'abandoned' the seduction theory -- was just too shockingly, tragically, and concretely reported to be construed as anything other than a patient's real, personal nightmare -- the idea of it being any patient's 'childhood fantasy' is, in my opinion, ethically disgusting...
..........................................................................................................
'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 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. (my editorial comment: it is hugely revealing that Freud lumps the second example in with the second because the second example is an abstraction and an allusion to Freud's first conscious early memory which in Ernest Jones' biography is treated as being 'trivial'. In contrast, as Freud hints at here, I view this allusion to Freud's first memory as the most important 'transference memory' in Freud's long life.)
And later on in the same 1896 paper, this next section is even more shocking...but morally compassionate and courageous...
'For the idea of these infantile sexual scenes is very repellent to the feelings of a sexually normal individual; they include all the the abuses known to debauched and impotent persons, among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes. For physicians, astonishment at this soon gives way to complete understanding. People who have no hesitation in satisfying their sexual desires upon children cannot be expected to jib at finer shades in the methods of obtaining that satisfaction; and the sexual impotence which is inherent in children inevitably forces them into the same substitutive actions as those to which adults descend if they become impotent. All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations -- on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs -- all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, in countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail. Where the relation is between two children postulates a previous seduction of one of them by an adult. The psychical consequences of these child-relations are quite extraordinarily far-fetching; the two individuals remain linked by an invisible bond throughout the whole of their lives.' (S.E. V. 3, p. 214-215).
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Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.
-- Bob Dylan (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll)
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-- dgb, Sept 6th, 2013,
= David Gordon Bain
Sunday, July 21, 2013
A Birth of Tragedy or Synergy? Towards an Integration of Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis (Summary Thoughts on The Seduction-Oedipus Controversy): Part 1
Revisions: Aug. 3rd., 5th, 6th, 12th, 16th, 22nd, 23rd, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st, Sept. 3rd, 2013...
Vol. 1, Ed. 1., Sept 3rd, 2013
Part 1
Is it better to 'philosophize with a hammer' -- Nietzsche ('Twilight of The Idols', 1889), Freud ('The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896), Masson ('The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory', 1984, 85, 92)?
Or is it better to philosophize more diplomatically -- a 'compromise-formation' between saying what we want to say while at the same time 'couching' the way we say or write it.
To philosophize with a hammer -- or to philosophize with a diplomat's 'delicate tact'?
Politically, professionally, and/or personally, people may not be ready to hear what we have to say, may be attached or over-attached to their own paradigm of perspective, or, may simply, for narcissistic and/or righteous reasons, not want to hear what we are saying.
From our own perspective as a writer or speaker, there is the risk that if we state what we want to state too brazenly, too abruptly, too bluntly, too much 'hammer', not enough 'couching', we may completely put off the people we are addressing to the point that negative consequences can come back to hurt us in terms of derailing our professional career, our job, and our financial well-being.
Not always -- or even generally -- an easy choice.
Freud lectured to a group of professionals in the spring of 1896 with political clout over his career -- The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society -- on his newest paper entitled 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- a paper that centred on the very sensitive, and still very sensitive, issue of childhood sexual abuse. Freud believed at the time that instances of childhood sexual abuse were at the bottom of every case of hysteria that he had treated.
The Society certainly did not like that thesis, for reasons of either 'scientific disbelief' and/or just something that the fine doctors of Vienna did not want to hear at this point in time -- or more likely in my editorial opinion -- ever,
Obviously, therapists and clinical psychologist professionals today are much more aware of the existence and scary prevalence of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse -- but still, it is not a subject that most people are going to feel comfortable engaging in unless it is on some type of conference dedicated to this subject matter.
Well, Freud approached the topic on the night of April 21st, 1896 in front of The Vienna Society both with compassion for the victims he was talking about -- and, at the same time, also partly in a manner that can best be described as 'psychologizing with a hammer' that either shocked the medical doctors out of their seats, assuming that they were not prepared for Freud's thesis of that night (I don't know how many had any inkling of what was to come in the evening before the evening started), or if they were prepared, then they ambushed him rhetorically, sarcastically, ridiculingly with collusive pre-meditation, as opposed to ad-libbed spontaneity.
One way or the other, Freud got his ears filled with stinging remarks that night, and wrote to Fliess about it on April 26th, 1896. Wrote Freud:
'A lecture on the etiology of hysteria at the psychiatric society was given an icy reception by the asses and a strange evaluation by Krafft-Ebing: "It sounds like a scientific fairy tale." And this, after one has demonstrated to them the solution of a more than a thousand year old problem, a caput Nili (source of the Nile). They can go to hell, euphemistically expressed.' (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, p.184).
Well, Freud certainly did not 'lack moral courage' from April 21 to April 26th, 1896, based on both the essay that he read and wrote up at this time, or visa versa, that can still be found in the Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Works, and also at the back of Masson's 'The Assault on Truth; Freud Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (as his 'childhood sexual assault theory came to be called). Nor did Freud 'lack moral courage' up to his letter to Fliess on April 26th, 1896... But what about afterwards?
The trouble is, that Freud rarely talked or wrote about childhood sexual abuse with any kind of passion, righteousness, or substance after this meeting of April 21st, 1896. Or did he? Again, this question is not beyond contention. There were some passages in the Introductory Lectures of 1916 where Freud did not deny the existence of real childhood sexual abuse -- just not in the case of daughters relative to their fathers or step-fathers (where Freud believed that the Oedipus Complex Fantasy dominated -- i.e., the daughter's unconscious erotic fantasy towards her father distorted into what she believed was a 'real memory').
You could see this line of thinking, this line of logic, being applied to the Emma Ekstein case in the two letters of April 26th and May 4th, 1896, Freud was starting to apply his new, Fliess influenced, 'longing' theory -- worded otherwise, we can call this the beginning of Freud's 'fantasy theory'(the wrong case to start with) -- and by the fall of 1897, Freud first mentioned his idea of the Oedipus Complex theory -- which would start to greatly diminish the importance of Freud's pre-1897 triadic 'reality-trauma-seduction' theory' which would recede more and more into the background, indeed, largely disappearing out of existence to all major extents and purposes for the rest of Freud's career -- 1897 to 1939.
Wrote Freud in the 1916 Introductory Lectures, V. 16, p. 368 (and quoted by Masson in 'The Assault on Truth':
'The phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of neuroses it is psychical reality which the decisive kind.'
Now, paradoxically and ironically, it can be asked: 'Whose 'psychic reality' is it anyway? -- the therapeutic client who states her memory of childhood sexual abuse as she remembers it?; or Freud as he 're-interprets' or 're-constructs' this memory and turns it into an 'Oedipal fantasy' (i.e., Freud's own interpretation of the daughter-client's unconscious erotic fantasy towards her father that she allegedly 'distorted' into a memory. This is where the concept of 'unconscious' can become very dangerous -- very easily reflecting the therapist's own psychical reality and projected onto the client in a manner that may actually 'violate' the client's own psychical -- and 'material reality', i.e., childhood sexual abuse history -- not 'clarify' and 'enlighten' the client of any 'erotic fantasy' towards her father). I just read this problem expressed this way.
One of the gravest dangers afflicting our culture in general and the field of mental health in particular is the assault on human subjectivity; the decreasing interest in honoring and valuing people's experience. In the craze to map the brain and prescribe pills for psychological disorders, the field of mental health is not only getting hijacked, it is losing its soul. (Jeffrey Rubin, Phd., Why Mental Health Is Losing Its Soul?)
By my standards, the Oedipus Complex does not have to be scrapped altogether but it most certainly should be re-defined. And it should never rule out the possibility of real childhood sexual abuse -- that is a case of putting the cart before the horse; not the horse before the cart.
Shame on Freud for forgetting -- or at least not properly applying -- the wisdom of one of his first mentors...
'Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing.' -- Charcot
It is very clear that Freud 'forgot' this piece of advice in the following passage taken from the 1916 Introductory Lectures, p. 370, and quoted by Masson in 'The Assault on Truth':
It was, and still is, a very, very unethical passage relative to Freud ruling out -- by theoretical assumption -- childhood sexual abuse in the case of female clients reporting childhood sexual incidents with their father which Freud 'automatically assumed' to be their unconscious 'Oedipus Complex Fantasy' at work.
'Phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories. Fortunately, however, they are nevertheless not real as often as seemed at first to be shown by the findings of analysis. Seduction by an older child or by one of the same age is even more frequent than by an adult; and if in the case of girls who produced such an event in the story of their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there can be not doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it. A phantasy of being seduced when no seduction has occurred is usually employed by a child to screen the auto-erotic period of his sexual activity.' (Masson, The Assault on Truth, 1992, p. 196, Afterword).
From my perspective it is okay -- indeed, very useful -- for an analyst/therapist to think of the Oedipus Complex fantasy as an idealized image of each of our parents' respectively, but not to the point of ruling out possible incidents of real childhood sexual abuse and/or other form of psychical trauma.
At this point, things start to get much more complicated, analytically and Freud, I believe, had it partly right -- but not right enough.
The 'polar-twin' of this 'idealized, exciting image of each of our parents' (also identifiable as the 'good internal object' and subject to 'positive, sometimes, romantic and/or erotic transference-projective-perceptions from the child-adolescent-adult-client' onto the therapist or some other adult 'surrogate' of the idealized parent), is the 'bad, rejecting and rejected internal object' which can leave the surrogate therapist/analyst or other adult person subject to 'negative, hostile transference projective-perceptions from the child-adolescent-adult-client' (Freud, Klein, Fairbairn)
Thus, the Oedipus Complex should be treated as an 'ambivalent, love-hate, good-bad object, positive-negative transference' that again does not rule out the possible existence of any form of childhood trauma and/or abuse.
Which begs the question that Dr. Jeffrey Masson rhetorically started to ask in the early 1980s to both the Psychoanalytic Establishment and the public at large in lectures, interviews, magazine articles, and finally his book, 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984,85, 92) of this time period.
Did Freud 'lose moral courage' after the spring of 1896 regarding his professionally unaccepted and unwanted childhood sexual abuse theory?
Masson certainly believed -- and still believes -- that he did. And for the most part, so do I although I can also see elements of Freud's 'longing-fantasy' theory evolving from his work -- particularly his work in the area of dreams -- but perhaps also partly to try to absolve his and Fliess' culpability in the Emma Ekstein 'nasal surgery' of the spring of 1895 that was still bothering Freud in the spring of 1896 as Freud called Emma a 'hysterical bleeder' who essentially bled out of 'longing' to see her therapist -- i.e., Freud -- if or when he was otherwise unavailable. This theory of hysteria -- the beginning of his longing-fantasy theory in the spring of 1896 certainly smacks of 'narcissistic conflict of interest' -- and a personal-professional 'defence mechanism' on Freud's part (with Fliess' influencing help) -- perhaps intermixed with Freud's changing clinical beliefs at this time -- clinical factors and private narcissistic bias merging into Freud's 'new source of the Nile'...
Masson certainly didn't tread lightly over these very possible 'narcissistic biases' listed above -- the April 21st, 1896 Vienna Society meeting combined with with Freud's letter to Fliess of May 4th, 1896 where Freud stated to Fliess his belief that he was being 'professionally blackballed' by an absence of patient referrals from members of The Vienna Soceity; and the 1895-1896 Fliess-Freud-Emma Ekstein.medical fiasco where it certainly seemed that Freud was looking for a 'good enough reason' that could be used by Freud and Fliess to escape 'medical accountability' for Emma' ongoing 'bleeding problems' and eventually 'facial disfigurement'.
Whether justified or not, The Psychoanalytic Establishment certainly didn't like Masson's theory of 'Freud's loss of moral courage' in 1896, any more than the Vienna Society liked Freud's seduction theory back in the spring of 1896. Do we again point to 'narcissistic conflict of interest' as the main political and professional culprit here -- essentially no different in the spring and fall of 1981 than in the spring of 1896? I think that a strong case can be made here.
It was certainly a theory that neither Dr. Kurt Eissler (one of Freud's strongest loyalists) nor Anna Freud (certainly wanting to protect the legacy of her father's professional integrity) wanted to hear from Masson -- even if there was some potentially real substance to it -- anymore than The Vienna Society wanted to hear Freud's theory of childhood sexual abuse. And to be sure, Masson wasn't 'couching' his argument at all -- he was historically theorizing with a hammer. Not shockingly, to Masson's his psychoanalytic career self-destruction. Within a few months in the summer and fall of 1981, Masson didn't have his highly esteemed job as 'The Projects Director of The Freud Archives' any more. Shortly after, he was out of psychoanalysis altogether.
So I ask you once again, Is it better to philosophize and theorize with a hammer? Or should our statements be assertive without being 'hammer-like', or should they be even more 'gentle' but not ingratiating, say, like a 'therapeutic cushion'...
In the end, perhaps it comes down to a combination of 'value-priority' and 'context'-- our 'belief in truth' combined with the 'courage to say what we believe' vs. toning our assertions down somewhat for purposes of political, professional and economic self-preservation', and/or in another context, to not help send an 'unstable client' over the edge.
As I go through the early years of Freud's theorizing -- from 1893 to 1896 -- which I believe contain most of Freud's best theorizing -- his most down to earth, most common sense, most concretely reasoned theories, most 'reality-based' theories (given Freud's career long tendency to over-generalize and aim to be 'shockingly dramatic' in whatever his newest theory was) -- I want you to decide for yourself today, some 32 years after Masson split company with his psychoanalytic co-workers, whether you think Masson's argument of 'Freud losing moral courage' has any merit to it, or not?
Or whether you think Freud simply changed from one set of triadic theories (reality-trauma-seduction theory, up to say 1897) to (after 1896, childhood sexual fantasy-Oedipal Complex-impulse-desire-drive theory) because he believed that the 'clinical data' justified what he was doing?
And finally, is there any room for integration, synthesis, synergy here?
Or must this 1896-97 radical overhaul in theories -- and the Massonian-Psychoanalysis scandal of the 1980s -- forever end in 'either/or' impasse and, in effect, tragedy, although Masson has made a nice career for himself in the area of animal psychology in New Zealand.
Was anything learned from all that turmoil and rhetoric in the 1980s and early 1990s?
Has Psychoanalysis evolved at all from it?
I think they have. I think that they have become more 'comparative', more 'modern', and more integrative in terms of more easily 'moving in and out of the different 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis?
However, through this all, there remains the question: Is 'Classical, Freudian Psychoanalysis' still a viable, meaningful, relevant 'sub-school' of Contemporary Psychoanalysis?
Or does it need to be archived and locked up in a museum at the Freud house in England, or elsewhere? Is it like the 'particle' theory in physics -- simply outdated, in and by itself. Or can Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis be modified, updated, and integrated, synthesized, synergized in the same way that the particle theory was eventually integrated with 'wavelength theory' -- and then evolved into 'quantum physics'...which itself may be starting to become outdated...
Thesis, counter-thesis, and synthesis...
Although not stated in exactly those words, that remains the main essence and substance today -- the main legacy -- of G.W. Hegel's 'dialectic logic and dialectic integration theory'.
One way or the other -- and you can decide as you may, if you have not already -- let me take you quickly through the years 1893 to 1896 and the factors that may or may not have played a part in such a major overhaul in supposedly 'opposing' sets of theories.
And that is the kicker for me -- the reason I have invested so much energy into this theoretical and historical problem.
For the question I have always asked myself, from the time I became involved in this controversy after learning who Masson was in the early 1990s, and what the controversy was all about, was and still remains this: Can the two theories be harmoniously integrated? Synthesized? Synergized?
With me being a self-labelled post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, post-Freudian, post-Adlerian, post-Gestaltian...post-everything-that-came-before-me...
I like to say that I don't belong to any one school of philosophy and/or psychology...and yet I partly belong to all of them...or at least those that have left a theoretical impact on me -- and my combined integrative work bears testimony to this.
Creative debate, negotiation, and integrative-synergetic interplay and solutions...
That is almost invariably my goal here in Hegel's Hotel...
And no different when it comes to the history, evolution, -- self-division and reintegration -- in Psychoanalysis...
When someone posits A and not B, or causality in one direction but not the other, turn things around and posit them the other way...
This is effectively what Freud did in 1896...
But I am not advocating 'cutting off your left hand' in order to 'start focusing on using your right hand'...
And then trying to argue that 'there was never any value in working with the left hand to to begin with'...
It takes two hands clappin', if you want a 'noise' to happen...
And likewise, 'reality-trauma-seduction theory needs fantasy-Oedipus (defined my way, not Freud's reductionistic way)-and-impulse-defense theory' in order to function effectively towards a 'wholistic' Neo-Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis...
Read all of Freud from 1893 to 1939 and make this a crucial part of your more integrative perspective; don't read a 'truncated, reductionistic' Freud from 1900 to 1939...
Theoretically and therapeutically, you have to be able to walk before you can either run or fly...
If you want to rule like 'Zeus', you need to be grounded, stabilized, and attached to 'Gaia' (Greek Goddess of Earth), 'Hera' (Goddess of Marriage and Family), and 'Hestia' (Goddess of hearth and home) first...
If we have no loving maternal role models in our earliest, most formative years...
Well, it is quite likely that we will be looking for these 'missing human role models' -- our own personal renditions of Gaia, Hera, and Hestia -- our whole lives, 'homeless' and 'ungrounded' inside our own minds and bodies...
Well, this is what Classical Psychoanalysis is like without what Freud wrote between 1893 and 1896...
Without 1893 to 1896 'Pre-Psychoanalysis', post 1897 Classical Psychoanalysis is a 'dissociated, neurotic' psychoanalysis.
And that is probably because of the two 'trauma neuroses' that Freud sustained in the spring of 1895 and 1896 consecutively and continually...the Emma Ekstein mishap in the spring of 1895, carrying over to the spring of 1896, and the 'rejecting doctors' of April 21st, 1896...
I call it a double case of personal 'Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder'...
Projected 'professionally' into Classical Psychoanalysis as a 'Colossal Defence Mechanism'...
If this is true, like I believe it to be true, then we need to 'undo' the neurosis by 'undoing the defence mechanism'...
And that means re-integrating Freud's earliest psychoanalytic work between 1893 and 1896 back into 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...
For the purpose of clarification, for the time being at least, I will call this 'Neo-Classical, Freudian Psychoanalysis'...
Let's re-visit 1893 to 1896....
And in addition to re-summarizing Freud's main thoughts in this time period...
I will add some of my own theoretical modifications, terminology, concepts, and theories...
Because what Freud did in 1923 -- i.e., create a structural, topographical and psycho-dynamic model of the personality in 'The Ego and The Id'...
He didn't do before 1897....
Building from 'The Ego and The Id'...
I will do it for him...
In fact, I am excited about the prospect of doing this...
I have started in this direction in previous essays...
But there is a new train coming...
Stay with me...
And jump on board for the ride!
...................................................................
'It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions -- but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract 'either/or', and keeps to the concrete.' -- G.W. Hegel (1830, Shorter Logic)
'Life is the concept which realizes itself only through self-division and reunification.' -- G.W. Hegel (1830, Philosophy of Nature)
.............................................................................
-- dgb, Aug. 23rd, 26th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st, Sept. 3rd, Sept. 6th, 2013
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dream it! Go for it! Believe in yourself!
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations and Creations...
Are Still in Progress....
..........................................................................................
Vol. 1, Ed. 1., Sept 3rd, 2013
Part 1
Is it better to 'philosophize with a hammer' -- Nietzsche ('Twilight of The Idols', 1889), Freud ('The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896), Masson ('The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory', 1984, 85, 92)?
Or is it better to philosophize more diplomatically -- a 'compromise-formation' between saying what we want to say while at the same time 'couching' the way we say or write it.
To philosophize with a hammer -- or to philosophize with a diplomat's 'delicate tact'?
Politically, professionally, and/or personally, people may not be ready to hear what we have to say, may be attached or over-attached to their own paradigm of perspective, or, may simply, for narcissistic and/or righteous reasons, not want to hear what we are saying.
From our own perspective as a writer or speaker, there is the risk that if we state what we want to state too brazenly, too abruptly, too bluntly, too much 'hammer', not enough 'couching', we may completely put off the people we are addressing to the point that negative consequences can come back to hurt us in terms of derailing our professional career, our job, and our financial well-being.
Not always -- or even generally -- an easy choice.
Freud lectured to a group of professionals in the spring of 1896 with political clout over his career -- The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society -- on his newest paper entitled 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- a paper that centred on the very sensitive, and still very sensitive, issue of childhood sexual abuse. Freud believed at the time that instances of childhood sexual abuse were at the bottom of every case of hysteria that he had treated.
The Society certainly did not like that thesis, for reasons of either 'scientific disbelief' and/or just something that the fine doctors of Vienna did not want to hear at this point in time -- or more likely in my editorial opinion -- ever,
Obviously, therapists and clinical psychologist professionals today are much more aware of the existence and scary prevalence of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse -- but still, it is not a subject that most people are going to feel comfortable engaging in unless it is on some type of conference dedicated to this subject matter.
Well, Freud approached the topic on the night of April 21st, 1896 in front of The Vienna Society both with compassion for the victims he was talking about -- and, at the same time, also partly in a manner that can best be described as 'psychologizing with a hammer' that either shocked the medical doctors out of their seats, assuming that they were not prepared for Freud's thesis of that night (I don't know how many had any inkling of what was to come in the evening before the evening started), or if they were prepared, then they ambushed him rhetorically, sarcastically, ridiculingly with collusive pre-meditation, as opposed to ad-libbed spontaneity.
One way or the other, Freud got his ears filled with stinging remarks that night, and wrote to Fliess about it on April 26th, 1896. Wrote Freud:
'A lecture on the etiology of hysteria at the psychiatric society was given an icy reception by the asses and a strange evaluation by Krafft-Ebing: "It sounds like a scientific fairy tale." And this, after one has demonstrated to them the solution of a more than a thousand year old problem, a caput Nili (source of the Nile). They can go to hell, euphemistically expressed.' (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, p.184).
Well, Freud certainly did not 'lack moral courage' from April 21 to April 26th, 1896, based on both the essay that he read and wrote up at this time, or visa versa, that can still be found in the Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Works, and also at the back of Masson's 'The Assault on Truth; Freud Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (as his 'childhood sexual assault theory came to be called). Nor did Freud 'lack moral courage' up to his letter to Fliess on April 26th, 1896... But what about afterwards?
The trouble is, that Freud rarely talked or wrote about childhood sexual abuse with any kind of passion, righteousness, or substance after this meeting of April 21st, 1896. Or did he? Again, this question is not beyond contention. There were some passages in the Introductory Lectures of 1916 where Freud did not deny the existence of real childhood sexual abuse -- just not in the case of daughters relative to their fathers or step-fathers (where Freud believed that the Oedipus Complex Fantasy dominated -- i.e., the daughter's unconscious erotic fantasy towards her father distorted into what she believed was a 'real memory').
You could see this line of thinking, this line of logic, being applied to the Emma Ekstein case in the two letters of April 26th and May 4th, 1896, Freud was starting to apply his new, Fliess influenced, 'longing' theory -- worded otherwise, we can call this the beginning of Freud's 'fantasy theory'(the wrong case to start with) -- and by the fall of 1897, Freud first mentioned his idea of the Oedipus Complex theory -- which would start to greatly diminish the importance of Freud's pre-1897 triadic 'reality-trauma-seduction' theory' which would recede more and more into the background, indeed, largely disappearing out of existence to all major extents and purposes for the rest of Freud's career -- 1897 to 1939.
Wrote Freud in the 1916 Introductory Lectures, V. 16, p. 368 (and quoted by Masson in 'The Assault on Truth':
'The phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of neuroses it is psychical reality which the decisive kind.'
Now, paradoxically and ironically, it can be asked: 'Whose 'psychic reality' is it anyway? -- the therapeutic client who states her memory of childhood sexual abuse as she remembers it?; or Freud as he 're-interprets' or 're-constructs' this memory and turns it into an 'Oedipal fantasy' (i.e., Freud's own interpretation of the daughter-client's unconscious erotic fantasy towards her father that she allegedly 'distorted' into a memory. This is where the concept of 'unconscious' can become very dangerous -- very easily reflecting the therapist's own psychical reality and projected onto the client in a manner that may actually 'violate' the client's own psychical -- and 'material reality', i.e., childhood sexual abuse history -- not 'clarify' and 'enlighten' the client of any 'erotic fantasy' towards her father). I just read this problem expressed this way.
One of the gravest dangers afflicting our culture in general and the field of mental health in particular is the assault on human subjectivity; the decreasing interest in honoring and valuing people's experience. In the craze to map the brain and prescribe pills for psychological disorders, the field of mental health is not only getting hijacked, it is losing its soul. (Jeffrey Rubin, Phd., Why Mental Health Is Losing Its Soul?)
By my standards, the Oedipus Complex does not have to be scrapped altogether but it most certainly should be re-defined. And it should never rule out the possibility of real childhood sexual abuse -- that is a case of putting the cart before the horse; not the horse before the cart.
Shame on Freud for forgetting -- or at least not properly applying -- the wisdom of one of his first mentors...
'Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing.' -- Charcot
It is very clear that Freud 'forgot' this piece of advice in the following passage taken from the 1916 Introductory Lectures, p. 370, and quoted by Masson in 'The Assault on Truth':
It was, and still is, a very, very unethical passage relative to Freud ruling out -- by theoretical assumption -- childhood sexual abuse in the case of female clients reporting childhood sexual incidents with their father which Freud 'automatically assumed' to be their unconscious 'Oedipus Complex Fantasy' at work.
'Phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories. Fortunately, however, they are nevertheless not real as often as seemed at first to be shown by the findings of analysis. Seduction by an older child or by one of the same age is even more frequent than by an adult; and if in the case of girls who produced such an event in the story of their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there can be not doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it. A phantasy of being seduced when no seduction has occurred is usually employed by a child to screen the auto-erotic period of his sexual activity.' (Masson, The Assault on Truth, 1992, p. 196, Afterword).
At this point, things start to get much more complicated, analytically and Freud, I believe, had it partly right -- but not right enough.
The 'polar-twin' of this 'idealized, exciting image of each of our parents' (also identifiable as the 'good internal object' and subject to 'positive, sometimes, romantic and/or erotic transference-projective-perceptions from the child-adolescent-adult-client' onto the therapist or some other adult 'surrogate' of the idealized parent), is the 'bad, rejecting and rejected internal object' which can leave the surrogate therapist/analyst or other adult person subject to 'negative, hostile transference projective-perceptions from the child-adolescent-adult-client' (Freud, Klein, Fairbairn)
Thus, the Oedipus Complex should be treated as an 'ambivalent, love-hate, good-bad object, positive-negative transference' that again does not rule out the possible existence of any form of childhood trauma and/or abuse.
Which begs the question that Dr. Jeffrey Masson rhetorically started to ask in the early 1980s to both the Psychoanalytic Establishment and the public at large in lectures, interviews, magazine articles, and finally his book, 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984,85, 92) of this time period.
Did Freud 'lose moral courage' after the spring of 1896 regarding his professionally unaccepted and unwanted childhood sexual abuse theory?
Masson certainly believed -- and still believes -- that he did. And for the most part, so do I although I can also see elements of Freud's 'longing-fantasy' theory evolving from his work -- particularly his work in the area of dreams -- but perhaps also partly to try to absolve his and Fliess' culpability in the Emma Ekstein 'nasal surgery' of the spring of 1895 that was still bothering Freud in the spring of 1896 as Freud called Emma a 'hysterical bleeder' who essentially bled out of 'longing' to see her therapist -- i.e., Freud -- if or when he was otherwise unavailable. This theory of hysteria -- the beginning of his longing-fantasy theory in the spring of 1896 certainly smacks of 'narcissistic conflict of interest' -- and a personal-professional 'defence mechanism' on Freud's part (with Fliess' influencing help) -- perhaps intermixed with Freud's changing clinical beliefs at this time -- clinical factors and private narcissistic bias merging into Freud's 'new source of the Nile'...
Masson certainly didn't tread lightly over these very possible 'narcissistic biases' listed above -- the April 21st, 1896 Vienna Society meeting combined with with Freud's letter to Fliess of May 4th, 1896 where Freud stated to Fliess his belief that he was being 'professionally blackballed' by an absence of patient referrals from members of The Vienna Soceity; and the 1895-1896 Fliess-Freud-Emma Ekstein.medical fiasco where it certainly seemed that Freud was looking for a 'good enough reason' that could be used by Freud and Fliess to escape 'medical accountability' for Emma' ongoing 'bleeding problems' and eventually 'facial disfigurement'.
Whether justified or not, The Psychoanalytic Establishment certainly didn't like Masson's theory of 'Freud's loss of moral courage' in 1896, any more than the Vienna Society liked Freud's seduction theory back in the spring of 1896. Do we again point to 'narcissistic conflict of interest' as the main political and professional culprit here -- essentially no different in the spring and fall of 1981 than in the spring of 1896? I think that a strong case can be made here.
It was certainly a theory that neither Dr. Kurt Eissler (one of Freud's strongest loyalists) nor Anna Freud (certainly wanting to protect the legacy of her father's professional integrity) wanted to hear from Masson -- even if there was some potentially real substance to it -- anymore than The Vienna Society wanted to hear Freud's theory of childhood sexual abuse. And to be sure, Masson wasn't 'couching' his argument at all -- he was historically theorizing with a hammer. Not shockingly, to Masson's his psychoanalytic career self-destruction. Within a few months in the summer and fall of 1981, Masson didn't have his highly esteemed job as 'The Projects Director of The Freud Archives' any more. Shortly after, he was out of psychoanalysis altogether.
So I ask you once again, Is it better to philosophize and theorize with a hammer? Or should our statements be assertive without being 'hammer-like', or should they be even more 'gentle' but not ingratiating, say, like a 'therapeutic cushion'...
In the end, perhaps it comes down to a combination of 'value-priority' and 'context'-- our 'belief in truth' combined with the 'courage to say what we believe' vs. toning our assertions down somewhat for purposes of political, professional and economic self-preservation', and/or in another context, to not help send an 'unstable client' over the edge.
As I go through the early years of Freud's theorizing -- from 1893 to 1896 -- which I believe contain most of Freud's best theorizing -- his most down to earth, most common sense, most concretely reasoned theories, most 'reality-based' theories (given Freud's career long tendency to over-generalize and aim to be 'shockingly dramatic' in whatever his newest theory was) -- I want you to decide for yourself today, some 32 years after Masson split company with his psychoanalytic co-workers, whether you think Masson's argument of 'Freud losing moral courage' has any merit to it, or not?
Or whether you think Freud simply changed from one set of triadic theories (reality-trauma-seduction theory, up to say 1897) to (after 1896, childhood sexual fantasy-Oedipal Complex-impulse-desire-drive theory) because he believed that the 'clinical data' justified what he was doing?
And finally, is there any room for integration, synthesis, synergy here?
Or must this 1896-97 radical overhaul in theories -- and the Massonian-Psychoanalysis scandal of the 1980s -- forever end in 'either/or' impasse and, in effect, tragedy, although Masson has made a nice career for himself in the area of animal psychology in New Zealand.
Was anything learned from all that turmoil and rhetoric in the 1980s and early 1990s?
Has Psychoanalysis evolved at all from it?
I think they have. I think that they have become more 'comparative', more 'modern', and more integrative in terms of more easily 'moving in and out of the different 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis?
However, through this all, there remains the question: Is 'Classical, Freudian Psychoanalysis' still a viable, meaningful, relevant 'sub-school' of Contemporary Psychoanalysis?
Or does it need to be archived and locked up in a museum at the Freud house in England, or elsewhere? Is it like the 'particle' theory in physics -- simply outdated, in and by itself. Or can Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis be modified, updated, and integrated, synthesized, synergized in the same way that the particle theory was eventually integrated with 'wavelength theory' -- and then evolved into 'quantum physics'...which itself may be starting to become outdated...
Thesis, counter-thesis, and synthesis...
Although not stated in exactly those words, that remains the main essence and substance today -- the main legacy -- of G.W. Hegel's 'dialectic logic and dialectic integration theory'.
One way or the other -- and you can decide as you may, if you have not already -- let me take you quickly through the years 1893 to 1896 and the factors that may or may not have played a part in such a major overhaul in supposedly 'opposing' sets of theories.
And that is the kicker for me -- the reason I have invested so much energy into this theoretical and historical problem.
For the question I have always asked myself, from the time I became involved in this controversy after learning who Masson was in the early 1990s, and what the controversy was all about, was and still remains this: Can the two theories be harmoniously integrated? Synthesized? Synergized?
With me being a self-labelled post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, post-Freudian, post-Adlerian, post-Gestaltian...post-everything-that-came-before-me...
I like to say that I don't belong to any one school of philosophy and/or psychology...and yet I partly belong to all of them...or at least those that have left a theoretical impact on me -- and my combined integrative work bears testimony to this.
Creative debate, negotiation, and integrative-synergetic interplay and solutions...
That is almost invariably my goal here in Hegel's Hotel...
And no different when it comes to the history, evolution, -- self-division and reintegration -- in Psychoanalysis...
When someone posits A and not B, or causality in one direction but not the other, turn things around and posit them the other way...
This is effectively what Freud did in 1896...
But I am not advocating 'cutting off your left hand' in order to 'start focusing on using your right hand'...
And then trying to argue that 'there was never any value in working with the left hand to to begin with'...
It takes two hands clappin', if you want a 'noise' to happen...
And likewise, 'reality-trauma-seduction theory needs fantasy-Oedipus (defined my way, not Freud's reductionistic way)-and-impulse-defense theory' in order to function effectively towards a 'wholistic' Neo-Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis...
Read all of Freud from 1893 to 1939 and make this a crucial part of your more integrative perspective; don't read a 'truncated, reductionistic' Freud from 1900 to 1939...
Theoretically and therapeutically, you have to be able to walk before you can either run or fly...
If you want to rule like 'Zeus', you need to be grounded, stabilized, and attached to 'Gaia' (Greek Goddess of Earth), 'Hera' (Goddess of Marriage and Family), and 'Hestia' (Goddess of hearth and home) first...
If we have no loving maternal role models in our earliest, most formative years...
Well, it is quite likely that we will be looking for these 'missing human role models' -- our own personal renditions of Gaia, Hera, and Hestia -- our whole lives, 'homeless' and 'ungrounded' inside our own minds and bodies...
Well, this is what Classical Psychoanalysis is like without what Freud wrote between 1893 and 1896...
Without 1893 to 1896 'Pre-Psychoanalysis', post 1897 Classical Psychoanalysis is a 'dissociated, neurotic' psychoanalysis.
And that is probably because of the two 'trauma neuroses' that Freud sustained in the spring of 1895 and 1896 consecutively and continually...the Emma Ekstein mishap in the spring of 1895, carrying over to the spring of 1896, and the 'rejecting doctors' of April 21st, 1896...
I call it a double case of personal 'Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder'...
Projected 'professionally' into Classical Psychoanalysis as a 'Colossal Defence Mechanism'...
If this is true, like I believe it to be true, then we need to 'undo' the neurosis by 'undoing the defence mechanism'...
And that means re-integrating Freud's earliest psychoanalytic work between 1893 and 1896 back into 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...
For the purpose of clarification, for the time being at least, I will call this 'Neo-Classical, Freudian Psychoanalysis'...
Let's re-visit 1893 to 1896....
And in addition to re-summarizing Freud's main thoughts in this time period...
I will add some of my own theoretical modifications, terminology, concepts, and theories...
Because what Freud did in 1923 -- i.e., create a structural, topographical and psycho-dynamic model of the personality in 'The Ego and The Id'...
He didn't do before 1897....
Building from 'The Ego and The Id'...
I will do it for him...
In fact, I am excited about the prospect of doing this...
I have started in this direction in previous essays...
But there is a new train coming...
Stay with me...
And jump on board for the ride!
...................................................................
'It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions -- but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract 'either/or', and keeps to the concrete.' -- G.W. Hegel (1830, Shorter Logic)
'Life is the concept which realizes itself only through self-division and reunification.' -- G.W. Hegel (1830, Philosophy of Nature)
.............................................................................
-- dgb, Aug. 23rd, 26th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st, Sept. 3rd, Sept. 6th, 2013
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dream it! Go for it! Believe in yourself!
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations and Creations...
Are Still in Progress....
..........................................................................................
Sunday, July 7, 2013
DGB Philosophy-Psychology and Synergetic Psychoanalysis: Editorial Comments on The Charcot Obituary (1893)
Good day!
In one of Freud's earliest precursor papers to the beginning of psychoanalysis, Freud wrote an obituary on one of his main 'traumacy theory' teachers -- Jean-Martin Charcot -- a few days after Charcot died in 1893. Freud studied under Charcot in Paris between October of 1885 and February of 1886.
In terms of psychoanalysis, it was probably the main turning point in Freud's life because it motivated his shift in interest and excitement from neuropathology to psychopathology -- from physical science to psychology. (Strachey, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. 3., p. 9).
Most important from this obituary, in my opinion, is a partly negative judgment I hold of Freud.
Charcot gave Freud and the other students present a lesson in theory-making that certainly caught Freud's attention but, at the same time, the lesson that he caught, time and time again, over the span of his 45 year writing and teaching career, Freud did not abide by. Indeed, it was probably Freud's primary weakness as a theory-creator -- his perceived 'reductionism' and/or 'one-sided theories'.
Freud was constantly jumping from theory to theory and seemingly the more shocking the theory was, the better he liked it: his sexuality theories, his childhood sexual abuse theory (the seduction theory), his repression theory, his displacement and 'transfer of energy' theory, his 'false connection' theory, his childhood sexuality theory, his 'all dreams are wishes' theory, his Oedipus theory, his psycho-sexual stages of development theory, his 'neurosis is the inverse of the perversion' theory, his 'castration anxiety' theory, his 'penis envy' theory...
One of the main reasons that Breuer and Freud split from each other is that Freud grew impatient with Breuer as Breuer was constantly cautioning Freud of his 'limited sample of clinical evidence' and his 'jumping to premature conclusions and over-generalizations' -- such as his ill-fated 'seduction theory'.
The lesson from Charcot went something like this: As Freud wrote in the Charcot obituary, when one of the students was showing doubts and objected to one of Charcot's clinical innovations, he bluntly stated to Charcot: 'But that can't be true, it contradicts the Young-Helmholtz theory.' Charcot did not reply 'So much the worse for the theory, clinical facts come first' or words to that effect; but he did say something which made a great impression on us: (English translation)...'Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing.'
Breuer was like Freud's alter-ego -- 'opposites both attract and repel'. Breuer was much more theoretically conservative and clinically grounded than Freud whereas Freud was much more creatively imaginative than Charcot but often to a fault in 'trying to go too far, climb too high, on insufficient clinical evidence'.
Charcot -- for Freud -- offered the best of both worlds. He was clinically grounded. But at the same time, he was continually shocking and amazing people -- most notably Freud -- and this is what probably most endeared Charcot to his lifelong heart. Not many -- if any -- other men fit into this same category -- of maintaining Freud's lifelong respect and affection.
I have a 'transference theory-explanation' for this: Charcot reminded Freud more of Freud's mother than he did of his father. Our early transference relationships with key people -- particularly our mother and father -- generate a 'template' in our subconscious by which we often interpret and evaluate all our other relationships. I make one 'transference distinction' that neither Freud nor Psychoanalysis never did -- specifically, I distinguish between 'transference relationships' and 'transference encounter-memories'.
Our transference encounter-memories tend to often if not usually 'co-operate' with our transference relationships -- both on the same page -- but not always. And the memory does not have to be a 'repressed' one or even an 'unconscious' one. It can be a conscious or pre-conscious one (subconscious but easily brought back to our conscious awareness) -- as the following 'conscious transference memory' cited below from Ernest Jones' biography of Freud is a perfect example:
(The) '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 specimen of the earth we are made of. His astonishment was unbounded and for the first time he captured some sense of the inevitable. (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953, 1981, p. 16).
In the memory above, Freud's mom acted much like an 'astonishing magician' -- in effect, creating something out of nothing, or making something magically appear. Freud used the word 'magic' and 'magician' significantly in some of his most notable relationships -- specifically, Charcot and Fliess, and possibly Jung as well. In a letter to Fliess, Freud opened the letter, 'Dear Magician',
Based partly on Jungian theory, we might at least partly say that Freud had the 'archetype ideal' of a 'magician' inside of his psyche. Not from his 'collective unconscious' but rather from the childhood memory cited above.
In the Charcot obituary, Freud wrote:
'If Charcot was so much more fortunate in this respect we must put it down to the personal qualities of the man -- to the magic that emanated from his looks and from his voice, to the kindly openness which characterized his manner as soon as his relations with someone had overcome the stage of initial strangeness, to the willingness which he put everything at the disposal of his pupils, and to his life-long loyalty to them.' (Freud, SE, V.3, Charcot, p. 16).
In my interpretive opinion, Freud could have been writing about his mother in the passage above. This is what I call a 'transference projection' and a 'transference-immediacy-encounter relationship' (or a 'TIE' relationship where there is an 'associate tie' between our childhood transference figure or object and our adult transference surrogate figure or object. In 1895 (Studies in Hysteria), Freud stated that 'transference' (his first use of this term) involved a 'false connection' between a past and present figure. Well, that is not always true. A distinction can be made between 'contactful' TIE relationships and 'distorted' or 'non-contactful' TIE relationships. A TIE relationship with an adult surrogate of a past relationship can have either 'positive' and/or 'negative' and/or 'ambivalent' energy attached to it which is the essence of the importance of 'analyzing the nature of the transference or TIE relationship between, for example, husband and wife, and/or client and therapist/analyst.
The most important point to be made here is that 'encounter-memories' can be used as poignant examples of the 'template nature and psycho-dynamics' of any adult surrogate transference encounter and/or relationship.
-- dgb, July 7th, 2013,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations, Integrations, and Creations...
Are Still in Process...
In one of Freud's earliest precursor papers to the beginning of psychoanalysis, Freud wrote an obituary on one of his main 'traumacy theory' teachers -- Jean-Martin Charcot -- a few days after Charcot died in 1893. Freud studied under Charcot in Paris between October of 1885 and February of 1886.
In terms of psychoanalysis, it was probably the main turning point in Freud's life because it motivated his shift in interest and excitement from neuropathology to psychopathology -- from physical science to psychology. (Strachey, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. 3., p. 9).
Most important from this obituary, in my opinion, is a partly negative judgment I hold of Freud.
Charcot gave Freud and the other students present a lesson in theory-making that certainly caught Freud's attention but, at the same time, the lesson that he caught, time and time again, over the span of his 45 year writing and teaching career, Freud did not abide by. Indeed, it was probably Freud's primary weakness as a theory-creator -- his perceived 'reductionism' and/or 'one-sided theories'.
Freud was constantly jumping from theory to theory and seemingly the more shocking the theory was, the better he liked it: his sexuality theories, his childhood sexual abuse theory (the seduction theory), his repression theory, his displacement and 'transfer of energy' theory, his 'false connection' theory, his childhood sexuality theory, his 'all dreams are wishes' theory, his Oedipus theory, his psycho-sexual stages of development theory, his 'neurosis is the inverse of the perversion' theory, his 'castration anxiety' theory, his 'penis envy' theory...
One of the main reasons that Breuer and Freud split from each other is that Freud grew impatient with Breuer as Breuer was constantly cautioning Freud of his 'limited sample of clinical evidence' and his 'jumping to premature conclusions and over-generalizations' -- such as his ill-fated 'seduction theory'.
The lesson from Charcot went something like this: As Freud wrote in the Charcot obituary, when one of the students was showing doubts and objected to one of Charcot's clinical innovations, he bluntly stated to Charcot: 'But that can't be true, it contradicts the Young-Helmholtz theory.' Charcot did not reply 'So much the worse for the theory, clinical facts come first' or words to that effect; but he did say something which made a great impression on us: (English translation)...'Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing.'
Breuer was like Freud's alter-ego -- 'opposites both attract and repel'. Breuer was much more theoretically conservative and clinically grounded than Freud whereas Freud was much more creatively imaginative than Charcot but often to a fault in 'trying to go too far, climb too high, on insufficient clinical evidence'.
Charcot -- for Freud -- offered the best of both worlds. He was clinically grounded. But at the same time, he was continually shocking and amazing people -- most notably Freud -- and this is what probably most endeared Charcot to his lifelong heart. Not many -- if any -- other men fit into this same category -- of maintaining Freud's lifelong respect and affection.
I have a 'transference theory-explanation' for this: Charcot reminded Freud more of Freud's mother than he did of his father. Our early transference relationships with key people -- particularly our mother and father -- generate a 'template' in our subconscious by which we often interpret and evaluate all our other relationships. I make one 'transference distinction' that neither Freud nor Psychoanalysis never did -- specifically, I distinguish between 'transference relationships' and 'transference encounter-memories'.
Our transference encounter-memories tend to often if not usually 'co-operate' with our transference relationships -- both on the same page -- but not always. And the memory does not have to be a 'repressed' one or even an 'unconscious' one. It can be a conscious or pre-conscious one (subconscious but easily brought back to our conscious awareness) -- as the following 'conscious transference memory' cited below from Ernest Jones' biography of Freud is a perfect example:
(The) '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 specimen of the earth we are made of. His astonishment was unbounded and for the first time he captured some sense of the inevitable. (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953, 1981, p. 16).
In the memory above, Freud's mom acted much like an 'astonishing magician' -- in effect, creating something out of nothing, or making something magically appear. Freud used the word 'magic' and 'magician' significantly in some of his most notable relationships -- specifically, Charcot and Fliess, and possibly Jung as well. In a letter to Fliess, Freud opened the letter, 'Dear Magician',
Based partly on Jungian theory, we might at least partly say that Freud had the 'archetype ideal' of a 'magician' inside of his psyche. Not from his 'collective unconscious' but rather from the childhood memory cited above.
In the Charcot obituary, Freud wrote:
'If Charcot was so much more fortunate in this respect we must put it down to the personal qualities of the man -- to the magic that emanated from his looks and from his voice, to the kindly openness which characterized his manner as soon as his relations with someone had overcome the stage of initial strangeness, to the willingness which he put everything at the disposal of his pupils, and to his life-long loyalty to them.' (Freud, SE, V.3, Charcot, p. 16).
In my interpretive opinion, Freud could have been writing about his mother in the passage above. This is what I call a 'transference projection' and a 'transference-immediacy-encounter relationship' (or a 'TIE' relationship where there is an 'associate tie' between our childhood transference figure or object and our adult transference surrogate figure or object. In 1895 (Studies in Hysteria), Freud stated that 'transference' (his first use of this term) involved a 'false connection' between a past and present figure. Well, that is not always true. A distinction can be made between 'contactful' TIE relationships and 'distorted' or 'non-contactful' TIE relationships. A TIE relationship with an adult surrogate of a past relationship can have either 'positive' and/or 'negative' and/or 'ambivalent' energy attached to it which is the essence of the importance of 'analyzing the nature of the transference or TIE relationship between, for example, husband and wife, and/or client and therapist/analyst.
The most important point to be made here is that 'encounter-memories' can be used as poignant examples of the 'template nature and psycho-dynamics' of any adult surrogate transference encounter and/or relationship.
-- dgb, July 7th, 2013,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations, Integrations, and Creations...
Are Still in Process...
Saturday, May 4, 2013
An Overall Look At The Freudian Paradigm and Its Relevance or Non-Relevance to Contemporary Clinical Theory and Therapy: Part 1: GAP-DGB Narcissistic Fixation-Fantasy-Transference Theory
Finished!...July 6/13 (previous renditions: June 7, 8, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, July 5, 2013...)
.....................................................................................................................................
A/ Introduction: Is Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis Still Relevant Today? Does It Need To Be Kept The Same, Buried, or Re-Constructed, Re-Vitalized Relative To 21st Century Culture, Values, and Interpretations?
1. Foundational Assumptions
Good day!
Let me quickly share with you my overall thesis regarding psychoanalysis -- specifically Freudian Psychoanalysis -- which today is only a very limited part of what Contemporary Psychoanalysis is teaching.
Let's imagine that you are looking at a very old, Victorian house built in the early 1900s. It is a stunning house -- full of features that you would not find in a house built today. And yet there are a number of fundamental flaws in the house that could cost a lot of money to fix, right down to the very foundation of the house. Do you try to fix it, restore it, renovate it?
Do you change -- or at least modify -- the design of the house to make it more foundationally and fundamentally sound? To make it a viable, working house in the 21st century? But, in so doing, you garner the wrath of the 'historical preservationists' who wish to keep the design and the architecture of the original building -- without anything -- I mean ANYTHING -- being changed to tarnish the 'historical value' of its original structure. Maybe turn it into a 'museum' -- a historical museum -- that may lean precariously to one side like The Leaning Tower of Pisa -- but still, you are keeping the original structure of the original building fully in tact without even any minor modifications to it?
The house might not be good for anything 'functionally relevant today', but still, you can walk through it and enjoy its original architecture.
A distinction could be made between two 'conflicting factions' -- the 'historical preservationists' vs. the 'contemporary functionalists' -- with competing aims: the first, to completely preserve the original structure and architecture of the house; the second to make minor and/or major modifications, even architectural changes, to the structure and internal working functions of the house to make it a more 'viable, functionally working' house for the 21st century.
Well, I belong to this second group. Call me a contemporary functionalist who still loves much of the original architecture of the original house but not to the point that the house is becoming less and less functionally viable as the years have rolled on, and into the 21st century.
Dr. Jeffrey Masson, the former Projects Director of The Freud Archives, was once quoted as saying that he would 'open up the windows' of The Freud House and let some fresh air into the house -- and by that comment, I am sure that he was referring as much to Freud's metaphorically 'outdated, Victorian, Patriarchal, psycho-analytic house' as he was to the one he actually spent a lot of time in, going over all of Freud's early, un-publicized letters.
If I was Dr. Masson -- who I most obviously am not -- I would feel 'unfinished' regarding his 'deconstructionist opinions' of Freud's 'Classical' Psychoanalysis after 1896, and I would want to write a final, follow-up book to his 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory'; and 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst'. I would probably want to call his last book: 'Beyond The Assault on Truth: New-Old Psychoanalysis -- Reconstructed and Re-Vitalized'.
Now, I consider myself to be somewhat of a 'student' of Dr. Masson's. It was Masson's two books cited above, as well as the book not written by himself that Masson definitely didn't like because he claimed he was repetitively misquoted in the book, 'In The Freud Archives' by Janet Malcolm, that 'hooked' me to the whole issue at stake (i.e., 'The Seduction -- Childhood Sexual Abuse -- Theory Controversy') as well as the entire, general field and study of Psychoanalysis.
The results of my 'recreational' labor on and off over the last 20 years or so can be found in the essays that I have already written, as well as the new essays to follow.
I stated partly in my online interview of Dr. Masson back in 2010 that I consider myself to be a 'multi-integrative' psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic thinker' who wanted -- and still wants -- to show the world that ALL of Freud's some 46 years of professional theorizing can be brought logically and cohesively in line with the two theories that Freud thought were 'mutually exclusive and contradictory' -- i.e., his pre-1897 combined 'reality-traumacy-seduction-acquired learning' theory vs. his post-1896 more biologically oriented 'fantasy-childhood sexuality-instinct-Oedipus' theory.
That goal -- to integrate what I consider to be the best of the psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic ideas that are out there today, available to any passionate, motivated student of psychology -- still remains my intent as of this moment. Many of the ideas have evolved on this site over the last number of years. I will now take you the next step forward.
Let's see if I can re-state some of the main ideas that I have already incorporated into my 'GAP-DGB Philosophy-Psychology and Neo-Psychoanalytic Paradigm' ('GAP' standing for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalysis as well as 'the gaps that I have aimed to close' between these theories -- and all other theories that I have aimed to integrate, which is part of what the 'DGB' stands for -- 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging').
My overall aim is to communicate in as clear, simple, and understandable a language as possible, while also clearly distinguishing the difference between Freud's ideas and the ideas that I am presenting now as my own modifications and/or more radical departures from Freud's 'Pre-' (before 1897) and/or 'Classical' (after 1896) Psychoanalysis...
Let's start with my own particular brand of Dialectic Trauma-Fantasy Theory -- built significantly from Freud's 1894 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' which I view as Freud's best theoretical essay. Freud was (by the math of the publication date) 38 years old when he wrote this essay. In contrast, Freud was 67 years old when he wrote one of his most famous theoretical essays -- 'The Ego and The Id' -- in 1923. The first was written before Freud largely abandoned his 'traumacy theory' in the years of 'Pre'-Psychoanalysis (1892 to 1896, again); whereas the latter was written in what, for our purposes here, I will call the 4th stage of Classical Psychoanalysis:
For our purposes here, again, let us distinguish between these five stages of Classical Psychoanalysis:
Stage 1: Instinct-Fantasy Theory: 'Screen Memories' (1899), 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1899/1900), 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' (1901), 'Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious' (1905), 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' (1905), Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1901/1905)
Stage 2: Transference Theory: 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912)
Stage 3: Narcissism: 'On Narcissism' (1914);
Stage 4: Life and Death Instinct Theory and The Topography of The Psyche: 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920), 'The Ego and The Id' (1923);
Stage 5: 'Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense' (1938), 'An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1938).
Now, if we were to include 'Pre'-Psychoanalysis within the context of 'Classical' Psychoanalysis which I will now give the name 'Greater Classical' Psychoanalysis to, then we can differentiate (for our purposes here) SEVEN stages of GAP-DGB Greater Classical Neo-Psychoanalysis (GCNP) which are:
Stage 1: 'Narcissistic Fixation-Fantasy-Transference (NFFT)' and 'Transference-Immediacy-Encounter' (TIE)' Theory and Therapy;
Stage 2: Narcissistic-Altruistic-Humanistic-Existential-Romantic-Spiritual (NAHERS) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 3: 'The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense' (SEPD) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 4: Central Ego (Language, Meaning, Logic, Mediation, Conflict Resolution and Problem-Solving) (CE) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 5: Immediacy Awareness and Direct Contact-Communication (IA/DCC) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 6: Lifestyle and Life-Skill (LSLS) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 7: Neo-Hegelian (Thinking-Both-Inside-and-Outside-The-Box) Dialectic Theory and Therapy.
Now, to be clear, there have been many, many 'Freudian Revisionists' before me -- Adler, Jung, Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Horney, Fromm, Erickson, Sullivan, Berne, Perls, Janov...to name some of the most prominant, most of whom I have been somewhat to significantly influenced by...
However, none of them, to my knowledge, have attempted to create a 'Greater Classical' (Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanalysis -- integrated) brand of 'Neo-Psychoanalysis'.
I will start this process off today with a brief introductory exposition of GAP-DGB 'Traumacy-Fantasy-Transference' (TFT) Theory...in conjunction with 'The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense' and GAP-DGB Personality and Character Structure Theory....
This exposition combines Freud's 'The Ego and The Id' (EI) (1923) with his much earlier 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (NPD), as well as integrating my own interpretations, judgments, and outside influences relative to both.
Here is my 10 Stage 'Trauma-Fantasy-Transference' Model...
Which topologically connects with what I view as the subconscious (unconscious and preconscious) dynamics and structures of the personality-psyche-self.
.................................................................................................................
A/ The More Subconscious (Unconscious and Pre-Conscious) Structures and Psycho-Dynamics of The Personality
1. Reality-Trauma and/or Narcissistic Fixation...(Fright, Panic, Mortification...Curiosity, Interest, Excitement, Obsessive-Compulsion);
2. The First Abyss (Collapse of Value, Self-Image, Self-Esteem...);
3. The Trauma Landing Pit and Partial Safe Haven (Dependency Ledge);
4. The Second, Deeper Abyss (A Drop Off The Partial Safe Haven/Dependency Ledge);
5. Chaos (Complete Disorganization, Entropy);
6. The Genetic Potential Self (GPS, Predispositions, Skills, Talents, Archetypes, Myths...);
7. The Shadow-Id-Ego (our completely raw, uncivil, creative, destructive, paradoxical shadow-id-ego...);
8. The Apeiron (an organizing, associating, differentiating, dissociating ego-structure and process in the subconscious that evolves out of The Shadow-Id-Ego and towards more sophisticated, civil, uncivil, and mixed, conscious ego functions and ego-states...)
9. The Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT) Templates (emotional and non-emotional learning generalizations, distinctions, introjections and identifications, compensations, projections, sublimations, displacements, reaction formations...);
10. The Shadow-Id-Ego Vault (The SIEV -- locked up memories, energy, fantasies, affects, impulses...);
11. Escaped, Released, Disguised...Shadow-Id-Ego (ShIE) Complexes, and Transference-Immediacy Complexes ('TICs');
12. The Subconscious Energy and MLT Conversion-Ego (The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense...converts energy into different, more conscious, classifiable 'ego-states'...)...
Such as:
B/ The More Conscious Ego-States and Ego-Functions In The Personality-Psyche-Self:
13. The Body Ego (conversion hysteria, psychological body symptoms, body self-esteem issues...);
14. The Fantasy Ego (schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucinations, dreams, nightmares, day-dreams, fantasies, creative sublimation...);
15. The Feeling Ego, Romantic Ego, and Phenomenology of Spirit (Anxiety Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Existential Neurosis, Panic, Rage, Grief, Love, Lust...);
16. The Righteous-Critical-Ethical Underego;
17. The Narcissistic-Pleasure-Seeking Underego;
18. The Approval-Seeking/Disapproval-Avoiding Underego;
19. The Conscious Shadow-Id-Ego;
20. The Central Decision-Making Ego;
21. The Social Ego;
22. The Righteous-Critical-Ethical Superego;
23. The Narcissistic-Pleasure-Seeking Superego;
24. The Nurturing-Encouraging Superego;
C/ The Lifestyle and Life-skill Ego-States/Functions:
25. The Business and Finance Ego;
26. The Marriage and Family Ego;
27. The Friendship Ego;
28. The Community Ego;
29. The Philosophy-Psychology-Politics Ego;
30. The Recreation and Leisure Ego.
That will suffice for today...
Perhaps it is too many 'lists' and 'classification compartments' thrown at you at once...
Perhaps -- at this early point in time -- you cannot see the forest for the trees, or alternatively, the trees for the forest....
There are a lot of years -- and probably thousands of hours -- of work being packed into this little essay like a can of sardines....
Specifically, about 40 years of work for the most part in my recreational hours, including: 2 years of high school (1973-74, introduced to 'Psycho-Cybernetics' by Maxwell Maltz, and 'Language in Thought and Action', S.I. Hayakawa); 5 years of university studying primarily humanistic-existential psychology and cognitive therapy integrated with general semantics which resulted in my honours psychology thesis marked by the highly esteemed cognitive-behavior therapist, Dr. Donald Meichenbaum; 2 years of Adlerian psychology at the Adlerian Institute of Ontario associated with The Adlerian Institute in Chicago, and run through The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto (1980-81); 12 years on and off at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto under the directorship of first, Jorge Rosner, and then Joanne Greenham (1979 to 1991); 22 years of self studies in Western Philosophy and Psychoanalysis impassioned mainly by a combination of studies in Gestalt Therapy, Jungian Psychology, and Hegelian Philosophy, then all philosophy; then, my running into Dr. Jeffrey Masson's detailed work in The Freud Archives and afterwards through the 1980s, including his controversial conclusions regarding Freud's 'losing moral courage' relative to Freud's mysterious abandonment of his traumacy-seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theory after 1896 in favor of his later childhood sexuality, instinct, fantasy, Oedipus theory....
My theory of traumacy-fantasy-transference theory is rather 'dialectically complex' combining elements of Freud's work both before and after 1896, and including my learnings from both Adlerian Theory and Gestalt Theory. as well as Object Relations, Self-Psychology and Transactional Analysis.
This synthesis of ideas needs much further exposition and clarification, especially as it pertains to my spin-off of Janet's and Freud's and Klein's and Fairbairn's...related theories of 'the splitting of the ego in the process of defense'.....Freud both started and ended his long professional career in psychoanalysis (let's say here, 1893-1938, i.e., 45 years, writing about 'the splitting of consciousness' and 'the splitting of the ego' (1893-94, and then 1938 just before he died) in between spending about another 43 years (1894-1938) writing about 'repression' which is basically about 'the splitting of conscious from unconscious elements in the personality...
We will talk more about this subject matter when I offer my synopsis and editorial opinions on Freud's obituary of Charcot (1893), his essay, 'On The Psychical Mechanisms of The Phenomena of Hysteria' (1893), and 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894).
Until then,
Have a good evening....
-- dgb, July 6th, 2013...
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap Bridging Negotiations, Integrations, and Creations...
-- Are Still in Process...
.....................................................................................................................................
A/ Introduction: Is Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis Still Relevant Today? Does It Need To Be Kept The Same, Buried, or Re-Constructed, Re-Vitalized Relative To 21st Century Culture, Values, and Interpretations?
1. Foundational Assumptions
Good day!
Let me quickly share with you my overall thesis regarding psychoanalysis -- specifically Freudian Psychoanalysis -- which today is only a very limited part of what Contemporary Psychoanalysis is teaching.
Let's imagine that you are looking at a very old, Victorian house built in the early 1900s. It is a stunning house -- full of features that you would not find in a house built today. And yet there are a number of fundamental flaws in the house that could cost a lot of money to fix, right down to the very foundation of the house. Do you try to fix it, restore it, renovate it?
Do you change -- or at least modify -- the design of the house to make it more foundationally and fundamentally sound? To make it a viable, working house in the 21st century? But, in so doing, you garner the wrath of the 'historical preservationists' who wish to keep the design and the architecture of the original building -- without anything -- I mean ANYTHING -- being changed to tarnish the 'historical value' of its original structure. Maybe turn it into a 'museum' -- a historical museum -- that may lean precariously to one side like The Leaning Tower of Pisa -- but still, you are keeping the original structure of the original building fully in tact without even any minor modifications to it?
The house might not be good for anything 'functionally relevant today', but still, you can walk through it and enjoy its original architecture.
A distinction could be made between two 'conflicting factions' -- the 'historical preservationists' vs. the 'contemporary functionalists' -- with competing aims: the first, to completely preserve the original structure and architecture of the house; the second to make minor and/or major modifications, even architectural changes, to the structure and internal working functions of the house to make it a more 'viable, functionally working' house for the 21st century.
Well, I belong to this second group. Call me a contemporary functionalist who still loves much of the original architecture of the original house but not to the point that the house is becoming less and less functionally viable as the years have rolled on, and into the 21st century.
Dr. Jeffrey Masson, the former Projects Director of The Freud Archives, was once quoted as saying that he would 'open up the windows' of The Freud House and let some fresh air into the house -- and by that comment, I am sure that he was referring as much to Freud's metaphorically 'outdated, Victorian, Patriarchal, psycho-analytic house' as he was to the one he actually spent a lot of time in, going over all of Freud's early, un-publicized letters.
If I was Dr. Masson -- who I most obviously am not -- I would feel 'unfinished' regarding his 'deconstructionist opinions' of Freud's 'Classical' Psychoanalysis after 1896, and I would want to write a final, follow-up book to his 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory'; and 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst'. I would probably want to call his last book: 'Beyond The Assault on Truth: New-Old Psychoanalysis -- Reconstructed and Re-Vitalized'.
Now, I consider myself to be somewhat of a 'student' of Dr. Masson's. It was Masson's two books cited above, as well as the book not written by himself that Masson definitely didn't like because he claimed he was repetitively misquoted in the book, 'In The Freud Archives' by Janet Malcolm, that 'hooked' me to the whole issue at stake (i.e., 'The Seduction -- Childhood Sexual Abuse -- Theory Controversy') as well as the entire, general field and study of Psychoanalysis.
The results of my 'recreational' labor on and off over the last 20 years or so can be found in the essays that I have already written, as well as the new essays to follow.
I stated partly in my online interview of Dr. Masson back in 2010 that I consider myself to be a 'multi-integrative' psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic thinker' who wanted -- and still wants -- to show the world that ALL of Freud's some 46 years of professional theorizing can be brought logically and cohesively in line with the two theories that Freud thought were 'mutually exclusive and contradictory' -- i.e., his pre-1897 combined 'reality-traumacy-seduction-acquired learning' theory vs. his post-1896 more biologically oriented 'fantasy-childhood sexuality-instinct-Oedipus' theory.
That goal -- to integrate what I consider to be the best of the psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic ideas that are out there today, available to any passionate, motivated student of psychology -- still remains my intent as of this moment. Many of the ideas have evolved on this site over the last number of years. I will now take you the next step forward.
Let's see if I can re-state some of the main ideas that I have already incorporated into my 'GAP-DGB Philosophy-Psychology and Neo-Psychoanalytic Paradigm' ('GAP' standing for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalysis as well as 'the gaps that I have aimed to close' between these theories -- and all other theories that I have aimed to integrate, which is part of what the 'DGB' stands for -- 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging').
My overall aim is to communicate in as clear, simple, and understandable a language as possible, while also clearly distinguishing the difference between Freud's ideas and the ideas that I am presenting now as my own modifications and/or more radical departures from Freud's 'Pre-' (before 1897) and/or 'Classical' (after 1896) Psychoanalysis...
Let's start with my own particular brand of Dialectic Trauma-Fantasy Theory -- built significantly from Freud's 1894 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' which I view as Freud's best theoretical essay. Freud was (by the math of the publication date) 38 years old when he wrote this essay. In contrast, Freud was 67 years old when he wrote one of his most famous theoretical essays -- 'The Ego and The Id' -- in 1923. The first was written before Freud largely abandoned his 'traumacy theory' in the years of 'Pre'-Psychoanalysis (1892 to 1896, again); whereas the latter was written in what, for our purposes here, I will call the 4th stage of Classical Psychoanalysis:
For our purposes here, again, let us distinguish between these five stages of Classical Psychoanalysis:
Stage 1: Instinct-Fantasy Theory: 'Screen Memories' (1899), 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1899/1900), 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' (1901), 'Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious' (1905), 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' (1905), Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1901/1905)
Stage 2: Transference Theory: 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912)
Stage 3: Narcissism: 'On Narcissism' (1914);
Stage 4: Life and Death Instinct Theory and The Topography of The Psyche: 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920), 'The Ego and The Id' (1923);
Stage 5: 'Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense' (1938), 'An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1938).
Now, if we were to include 'Pre'-Psychoanalysis within the context of 'Classical' Psychoanalysis which I will now give the name 'Greater Classical' Psychoanalysis to, then we can differentiate (for our purposes here) SEVEN stages of GAP-DGB Greater Classical Neo-Psychoanalysis (GCNP) which are:
Stage 1: 'Narcissistic Fixation-Fantasy-Transference (NFFT)' and 'Transference-Immediacy-Encounter' (TIE)' Theory and Therapy;
Stage 2: Narcissistic-Altruistic-Humanistic-Existential-Romantic-Spiritual (NAHERS) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 3: 'The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense' (SEPD) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 4: Central Ego (Language, Meaning, Logic, Mediation, Conflict Resolution and Problem-Solving) (CE) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 5: Immediacy Awareness and Direct Contact-Communication (IA/DCC) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 6: Lifestyle and Life-Skill (LSLS) Theory and Therapy;
Stage 7: Neo-Hegelian (Thinking-Both-Inside-and-Outside-The-Box) Dialectic Theory and Therapy.
Now, to be clear, there have been many, many 'Freudian Revisionists' before me -- Adler, Jung, Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Horney, Fromm, Erickson, Sullivan, Berne, Perls, Janov...to name some of the most prominant, most of whom I have been somewhat to significantly influenced by...
However, none of them, to my knowledge, have attempted to create a 'Greater Classical' (Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanalysis -- integrated) brand of 'Neo-Psychoanalysis'.
I will start this process off today with a brief introductory exposition of GAP-DGB 'Traumacy-Fantasy-Transference' (TFT) Theory...in conjunction with 'The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense' and GAP-DGB Personality and Character Structure Theory....
This exposition combines Freud's 'The Ego and The Id' (EI) (1923) with his much earlier 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (NPD), as well as integrating my own interpretations, judgments, and outside influences relative to both.
Here is my 10 Stage 'Trauma-Fantasy-Transference' Model...
Which topologically connects with what I view as the subconscious (unconscious and preconscious) dynamics and structures of the personality-psyche-self.
.................................................................................................................
A/ The More Subconscious (Unconscious and Pre-Conscious) Structures and Psycho-Dynamics of The Personality
1. Reality-Trauma and/or Narcissistic Fixation...(Fright, Panic, Mortification...Curiosity, Interest, Excitement, Obsessive-Compulsion);
2. The First Abyss (Collapse of Value, Self-Image, Self-Esteem...);
3. The Trauma Landing Pit and Partial Safe Haven (Dependency Ledge);
4. The Second, Deeper Abyss (A Drop Off The Partial Safe Haven/Dependency Ledge);
5. Chaos (Complete Disorganization, Entropy);
6. The Genetic Potential Self (GPS, Predispositions, Skills, Talents, Archetypes, Myths...);
7. The Shadow-Id-Ego (our completely raw, uncivil, creative, destructive, paradoxical shadow-id-ego...);
8. The Apeiron (an organizing, associating, differentiating, dissociating ego-structure and process in the subconscious that evolves out of The Shadow-Id-Ego and towards more sophisticated, civil, uncivil, and mixed, conscious ego functions and ego-states...)
9. The Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT) Templates (emotional and non-emotional learning generalizations, distinctions, introjections and identifications, compensations, projections, sublimations, displacements, reaction formations...);
10. The Shadow-Id-Ego Vault (The SIEV -- locked up memories, energy, fantasies, affects, impulses...);
11. Escaped, Released, Disguised...Shadow-Id-Ego (ShIE) Complexes, and Transference-Immediacy Complexes ('TICs');
12. The Subconscious Energy and MLT Conversion-Ego (The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense...converts energy into different, more conscious, classifiable 'ego-states'...)...
Such as:
B/ The More Conscious Ego-States and Ego-Functions In The Personality-Psyche-Self:
13. The Body Ego (conversion hysteria, psychological body symptoms, body self-esteem issues...);
14. The Fantasy Ego (schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucinations, dreams, nightmares, day-dreams, fantasies, creative sublimation...);
15. The Feeling Ego, Romantic Ego, and Phenomenology of Spirit (Anxiety Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Existential Neurosis, Panic, Rage, Grief, Love, Lust...);
16. The Righteous-Critical-Ethical Underego;
17. The Narcissistic-Pleasure-Seeking Underego;
18. The Approval-Seeking/Disapproval-Avoiding Underego;
19. The Conscious Shadow-Id-Ego;
20. The Central Decision-Making Ego;
21. The Social Ego;
22. The Righteous-Critical-Ethical Superego;
23. The Narcissistic-Pleasure-Seeking Superego;
24. The Nurturing-Encouraging Superego;
C/ The Lifestyle and Life-skill Ego-States/Functions:
25. The Business and Finance Ego;
26. The Marriage and Family Ego;
27. The Friendship Ego;
28. The Community Ego;
29. The Philosophy-Psychology-Politics Ego;
30. The Recreation and Leisure Ego.
That will suffice for today...
Perhaps it is too many 'lists' and 'classification compartments' thrown at you at once...
Perhaps -- at this early point in time -- you cannot see the forest for the trees, or alternatively, the trees for the forest....
There are a lot of years -- and probably thousands of hours -- of work being packed into this little essay like a can of sardines....
Specifically, about 40 years of work for the most part in my recreational hours, including: 2 years of high school (1973-74, introduced to 'Psycho-Cybernetics' by Maxwell Maltz, and 'Language in Thought and Action', S.I. Hayakawa); 5 years of university studying primarily humanistic-existential psychology and cognitive therapy integrated with general semantics which resulted in my honours psychology thesis marked by the highly esteemed cognitive-behavior therapist, Dr. Donald Meichenbaum; 2 years of Adlerian psychology at the Adlerian Institute of Ontario associated with The Adlerian Institute in Chicago, and run through The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto (1980-81); 12 years on and off at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto under the directorship of first, Jorge Rosner, and then Joanne Greenham (1979 to 1991); 22 years of self studies in Western Philosophy and Psychoanalysis impassioned mainly by a combination of studies in Gestalt Therapy, Jungian Psychology, and Hegelian Philosophy, then all philosophy; then, my running into Dr. Jeffrey Masson's detailed work in The Freud Archives and afterwards through the 1980s, including his controversial conclusions regarding Freud's 'losing moral courage' relative to Freud's mysterious abandonment of his traumacy-seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theory after 1896 in favor of his later childhood sexuality, instinct, fantasy, Oedipus theory....
My theory of traumacy-fantasy-transference theory is rather 'dialectically complex' combining elements of Freud's work both before and after 1896, and including my learnings from both Adlerian Theory and Gestalt Theory. as well as Object Relations, Self-Psychology and Transactional Analysis.
This synthesis of ideas needs much further exposition and clarification, especially as it pertains to my spin-off of Janet's and Freud's and Klein's and Fairbairn's...related theories of 'the splitting of the ego in the process of defense'.....Freud both started and ended his long professional career in psychoanalysis (let's say here, 1893-1938, i.e., 45 years, writing about 'the splitting of consciousness' and 'the splitting of the ego' (1893-94, and then 1938 just before he died) in between spending about another 43 years (1894-1938) writing about 'repression' which is basically about 'the splitting of conscious from unconscious elements in the personality...
We will talk more about this subject matter when I offer my synopsis and editorial opinions on Freud's obituary of Charcot (1893), his essay, 'On The Psychical Mechanisms of The Phenomena of Hysteria' (1893), and 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894).
Until then,
Have a good evening....
-- dgb, July 6th, 2013...
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap Bridging Negotiations, Integrations, and Creations...
-- Are Still in Process...
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Utilizing 'Pre-Classical' and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis as A Hub or Base for a More Multi-Dialectic (Hegelian Based), Pluralistic, Integrative, Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis
Re-written May 1, 2013....
My partly inside, mainly outside observations and interpretations of contemporary psychoanalysis is that there is a generally concerted attempt to integrate all the major different 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis within the full spectrum of teaching psychoanalysis 'as a whole' to new students and/or already practising therapists/analysts. To what extent this 'integration' has progressed is a debatable point -- I would say, generally speaking, that all the different 'paradigms' of psychoanalytic thought are being taught with some element of 'cross-talk' between the different paradigms but not to the extent of someone actually trying to sit down and create a logically coherent integrative system of psychoanalysis. Mainly, that is what I am trying to do here from a primarily 'outsider's' perspective. Nothing official. Nothing sanctioned by any psychoanalytic establishment. But still, my effort as as what I will call an 'underground psychoanalytic thinker' who can gravitate into most of the major sub-schools of psychoanalytic thought (Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut...) and the 'post' and/or 'neo' psychoanalytic paradigms of thought as well (Adler, Jung, Rank, Horney, Fromm, Berne, Perls, Janov, Masson...).
The Psychoanalytic School that I am partly familiar with (The Toronto Psychoanalytic School) is presently re-looking at Traumacy Theory from different psychoanalytic sub-school angles -- which I view as a 'good thing' (the failure of which was Masson's biggest criticism against The Psychoanalytic Establishment back in the 1980s -- i.e., their ignoring, denying, suppressing, dissociating Freud's combined 'Reality-Traumacy-Seduction (RTS) Theories' just like Freud largely did, and told his co-workers and students to do; at best after 1897, his traumacy theory lay in the 'shadows' of his thinking; at worst, it was completely run off the rails by his evolving Childhood Sexualty, Fantasy, and Oedipal Theories until he started to look at 'the war neuroses' and 're-visited' his traumacy theory on this basis (later to become a function of 'the death instinct' in, and after, 1920).
Now, with my not being a part of the overall psychoanalytic establishment or any part of it (other than being a possible 'in and out student' ), I have all the freedom in the world to assert my integrative ideas and not have anyone to answer to relative to any 'breach of psychoanalytic standard thinking' , especially when it comes to the very 'anally tight' Classical Psychoanalytic Paradigm', of which I totally intend to tear down a few conceptual theories and barriers that prevent Classical Psychoanalysis from becoming integrated with Object Relations, Self Psychology, and possibly other sub-schools of Psychoanalysis, not to mention other outside schools of therapeutic thought. To me, this project is like the liberation and integration of Germany through the process of tearing down the Berlin Wall.
Personally, I like many elements of Classical Psychoanalysis including the Classic Freudian distinction between 'oral characteristics' (bringing in, internalizing, introjecting perceived environmental nutrients) vs. 'anal characteristics' (rejecting, shutting out, 'spitting out', 'shitting out' perceived environmental toxins).
Consequently, I will use these two 'bodily metaphors' in the psychological domain like Freud and his co-workers did. This is not one of the areas of Classical Freudian Theory that I reject. Other areas, briefly already mentioned, I do reject. (its patriarchism, its sexism, its pan-sexualism, its pan-childhood sexuality, its pan-fantasy theory, and its pan-Oedipal theory, its diminuation of Freud's earlier trumpeted reality-traumacy-seduction theory...)
I want to bring Classical Psychoanalysis back to life in a much refurbished, much expanded and integrated fashion.
Excuse me for a little bit of 'narcissistic trumpeting' here, but I view myself as one of the most creative, unorthodox, underground, Classical-non-Classical Psychoanalytic thinkers that you will ever have the opportunity to read -- inside or outside Psychoanalysis. Now, obviously, the 'proof is in the pudding', and I leave it to you, my valued readers, to judge how much potential value you may or may not find in what I hope you are about to read.
However, I warn you ahead of time: Be prepared for the unexpected, the highly unorthodox, and a variety of uniquely different 'integrated and synergized ideas' that you will find in the essays that follow and that you will find nowhere else, as you debate internally whether what you are reading 'is or is not Psychoanalysis?' Is it 'botched psychoanalysis'? Non-psychoanalysis? Or 'progressive, evolutionary integrative psychoanalysis?
I wont' accept the first evaluative interpretation. But betweein the last two, you can take your pick. Both argumentive 'sides of the fence' are equally relevant, as anything that might have been called 'The Psychoanaltyic Fence' or 'The Psychoanalytic Wall' or 'The Freudian Psychoanalytic Wall' is essentially being torn or bulldozed down here -- just like The Berlin Wall was brought down in 1990.
Like The Berlin Wall, Freud's 'Pre-Psychoanalytic' Wall of The Winter-Spring of 1895-96 should be called 'The Wall of Shame' -- regardless of what Freud's inner motivations were -- because it essentially 'neurotically dissociated' pre-1897 Freudian 'childhood reality-traumacy thinking' from post-1896 'childhood fantasy-Oedipal' thinking. The two sets of Freudian theories -- the first largely rejected, dissociated, disowned; and the second trumpeted as 'the better choice' between the two competing theories for the rest of Freud's professional career -- well, they still both need to be much better integrated in a manner that is logically consistent with actual human thinking, feeling, wanting, and doing. Just like the 'neurotic' needs to become a 'more whole person', so too, Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis, between the two of them, need to 'come together' (in the words of John Lennon) to become a 'more wholistic 1893 to 1939 Classical Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy'.
The two polar opposite sides of Freudian 1895-96 thinking still need to be 'functionally integrated and synergized' today using the 'dialectic-interactive-integrative logic' of Classic Hegelian, and my rendition of Post-Hegelian-DGB 'multi-dialectic-pluralistic, thinking'.
What I am aiming to do here -- and I think I will be able to show you how important this integration is to the future of Psychoanalysis or 'Post-Neo-DGB Psychoanalysis' -- is to create a new 'Dialectically Integrative Psychoanalytic Premise and Paradigm' based on the synergized assumptive logic of 'Freud's Reality-Traumacy-Seduction-Fantasy-Oedipal-Impulse-Thinking' -- within all of us -- which indeed is paradoxical and dichotomous. Because that is how we all think through the sum total of all our introjections, identifications, projections, sublimations, compensations, defences, transferences...
Well, not in all of us when it comes to the Freudian meaning of 'Seduction' which means 'the sexual seduction, manipulation, and/or flat out 'rape' of a child, usually by an adult, most commonly by the father, sometimes by an older child, all of which can be lumped under the category of '(Sexual) Traumacy Theory' relative to the victimized child -- assuming the child experienced the event as 'traumatic' which we cannot totally assume for sure in all the myriad of different types of cases...
For some children, the experience or experiences might become viewed as 'traumatic' years later under the influence of greater self and/or social awareness of what unpleasurably and/or pleasurably experienced in his or her much earlier years.
In contrast to the category of '(Sexual) Reality-Traumacy Theory', I will create a new category of thinking relative to the label of 'Seduction' and this will include any and/or all type(s) of human thinking, feeling, desiring, wanting, doing, whereby a person is consciously/unconsciously seeking to 'seduce' an adult transference figure/object who is deemed to be a 'symbolic surrogate of an early childhood transference figure/object with the defining Fairbairnian characteristics of exemplifying the features of a 'rejecting-exciting object'.
In what I am now thinking of calling (forgive me) 'DGB Quantum-Paradoxical, Post-Classical, Multi-Dialectic-Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis' (shorten it any way you want to), my integration of The Fairbairnian based 'rejecting-exciting object' becomes the heir to the Oedipal Complex -- and we all have one (a single, double, or more Oedipal Complex and resulting Rejecting-Exciting Internalized Childhood Object That Becomes Projected into Our Adult Encounters and Relationships -- our mom, our dad, and/or anyone else who happened to be 'psycho-dynamically meaningful to us, good, bad, and/or indifferent' in our earliest, most vulnerable evolving childhood years.
Oh, what a tangled web we leave,
When at first we practice to deceive,
Projected surrogates of early childhood mentors,
Resented and/or hated transference figures
From our past,
Real people -- we think we love, and/or have loved...
And/or loving transference figures -- and real people --
We think we hate, and/or have hated,
This is the essence of our inherent battle,
With our own internal and external,
Engaging and/or dissociating,
Rejecting-rejected-
Attracting-exciting,
Emotionally and libidonously cathected,
Transference figures, objects, people...
From our childhood past,
And the real, live, present-day people,
Who continue to 're-awaken these ghosts and skeletons',
From our past,
And the essence,
The intensity,
The passion, the excitement,
The anxiety, the panic, the guilt,
The acute despair and/or chronic depression,
The hope and/or hopelessness,
Of our 'internally-introjected' childhood self-object world,
Into our 'externally-projected' adult self-object world,
This is the essence of 'The Quantum-Paradoxical-Chaotic Psychoanalysis'...
That I will attempt to communicate to you,
In these essays to follow...
Let me be clear at this point that I seek neither the 'approval' of The PE or that of Dr. Jeffrey Masson as I seek to 'dialectically bridge the gap' between their previously opposite perspectives on 'The Freudian Wall of 1895-96'.
I am seeking to 'triangulate truth, value, and The Psychoanalytic Dialectic Path' through the Hegelian Dialectic Logical Process of: 1. Thesis; 2. Counter (or Anti) Thesis; and Dialectic Synthesis-Synergy. The idea here is to 'work' both 'polar perspectives of opinion' towards 'the dialectically integrative middle'.
All of my philosophical and psychological influences are important here, including Freud himself, Adler, Jung, Perls, Klein, Fairbairn, Fromm, Horney, Rank, Guntrip, Bird, Kohut -- all of these brilliant theorists have been 'introjected' into my 'unconscious blending machine' and come out in the fashion that you will see developed below...Consequently, my 'post-Hegelian' concept of 'multi-dialectic-pluralistic integration and synergy'.
With special mention and credit to Jeffrey Masson because without his influence, I most likely would never have become aware of 'The Seduction Theory Controversy', let alone have become 'obsessed' with it -- and ultimately, obsessed with the study of psychoanalysis as a whole...
Thus, ultimately, even though our 'solutions' to the Seduction Theory Controversy and to the 'various plights and theoretical issues' of Classical Psychoanalysis may differ -- my 'solution' being much more 'dialectically integrative and synergetic' than Masson's (his solutions pointing more unilaterally backwards to Freud's earliest writing between 1893 and 1896 during a time when Freud's 'reality, traumacy, and seduction theories' dominated, not his 'childhood sexuality, fantasy, and Oedipal theories' of post-1896) -- still, this essay is, first and foremost, a tribute to the man who 'motivationally inspired and engaged me', to work myself 'obsessionally forward' to this 'creative place' that I have found here...
That has been a time period of about 20 years -- dating back for me from about 1993 to the present...after my own theoretical learnings and therapeutic experiences within The Adlerian Institute (1980-81), and The Gestalt Institute of Toronto (1979-1991).
Thus, I had already established significant outside influences in Humanistic-Existential Philosophy and Psychology (including my learnings from The University of Waterloo between 1974 and 1979) before I started to seriously focus in the early 1990s until now on the study of Psychoanalysis.
In essence, what I am offering up below is my 'bridge' between Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment -- which at least on the surface of things -- neither of the two opposing conflicted sides from the 1980s seems to be remotely interested in coming to any kind of 'creative compromise-agreement' and/or 'aggreement to disagree' relative to what I call 'The Controversy and The Psychoanalytic Dissociation Caused by The Freudian Wall of post-1896'.
One psychoanalytic thinker -- I think it was Stekel -- wrote that 'all fear is ultimately a fear of death.' (I think that Freud disagreed with that assertion -- thought that it essentially had no meaning.) I would add that some fears have much to do with the fear of injury, and perhaps even more importantly, 'fear of self-esteem or narcissistic-egotistical injury': more specifically, fear of failure, looking foolish, social dissociation, self-dissociation, self-rejection, inferiority feelings, self-hate, not being as 'brilliant in reality as one projected from one's own fantasy life'....in other words, 'opening up the curtains of one's own self-delusions'...and bearing the consequences of not meeting one's own lofty expectations...
This is where one simply has to 'existentially jump' from the cliff of 'non-being' onto the 'tightrope of Nietzschean risking' as one climbs or walks the tightrope, and looks (or doesn't look) down at the 'existential abyss looming far down below' of potentially perceived 'acute' failure, shock, panic, despair, and/or more 'chronic' guilt, anxiety, and/or depresssion...
To repeat, in the context of 'Pre-Classical' (pre-1897) vs. 'Classical' (post-1896) Psychoanalysis, what I do differently than what Freud did starting in the winter of 1895-1896 is, I utilize the working premise and assumption of The Hegelian Dialectic, indeed, 'The Multi-Dialectic-Pluralistic-Integrative' premise.
This means that I embrace contradiction in the fashion that Hegel taught us how to embrace contradiction -- and then creatively integrate and synergize the opposite polarities on the spectrum of this seeming contradiction that 'respects and values both opposite polarities as being essential to the nature of the same 'bi-polar truth, value, homeostatic balance, harmony, and co-existence'. Both bipolar truths are essential to the same dialectical spectrum-process...
In this type of 'bipolar or multi-bipolar theory building', we have an important method by which to more 'accurately and functionally build our concepts, theories, paradigms, so that they more 'structurally and dynamically represent the actual structures, characteristics, and dynamics of nature.
In physics, just as Freud was 'locked in internal conflict' weighing between his 1893-96 'reality-traumacy-seduction theories' and his newly arising 'childhood sexuality, fantasy, and Oedipal theories', and finally opting for the latter theoretical triad', so too was physics 'locked in internal conflict' between its previous 'particle theory of energy', its later 'wave theory of energy' -- neither of the two which were completely appropriate and functional in their 'representative predictions'; this being the case, physicists finally worked themselves out of this theoretical conundrum and logjam and created the 'dialectically integrative and synergetic theory' of 'particle-wave theory' -- which became the beginning of 'Quantum Physics'....and physics has never looked back since... Add a little 'Chaos Theory' to further synthesize and synergize Quantum Theory into 'Quantum-Chaos Theory' which has attracted me to the name of 'DGB Quantum-Chaos Psychoanalytic and Post-Psychoanalytic Theory'...and maybe that will give you an abstract, general idea of the direction I am travelling here -- or maybe not.
Contradistinctively, psychoanalytic thinkers have always looked back -- back to the winter and spring of 1895-1896 -- because the Freudian conundrum/impasse/ logjam of 'The Rising Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory Triad' vs. The Falling 'Reality-Traumacy-Seduction Theory Triad' was never -- and still has never been -- properly resolved.
The reason: Because no psychoanalytic thinker (until me) has approached the controversy as being a 'dialectical problem' that needs to be worked out dialectically, interactively, integratively, and synergetically as 'two opposites truths on the same bipolar, dialectic spectrum' that are indeed, oftentimes, integratively and/or dysfunctionally-dissociatively 'meshed together' in our own personal, clinical realities -- both 'the reality/traumacy' and the 'compensatory/defensive fantasy' co-exist together in the 'same chldhood and adulthood transference template-complex'.
In adulthood, I call these 'symptom formations' -- 'TICs' which stands for 'Transference-Immediacy Constructions (or Complexes)'.
A therapist can use these TICs or 'TIPs' (Transference-Immediacy-Projections) or 'TIPS' (Transference-Immediacy-Projective-Sublimations') as a part of what Freud called the 'Royal Road To The Unconscious' which in this context means the 'Royal Road Backwards Into Our Childhood Traumacy-Fantasy, Paradoxical, Conflicted, Transference Templates'...
At this point, I will suggest that you either read my earlier paper, 'The First True Case of Psychoanalysis', or read it after this essay as an addendum.
At this point also, I will introduce and 'introject' some Adlerian Theory relative to the 'interpretation of conscious early memories' as 'lifestyle memories' into my own breed of highly unorthodox integrative GestaltAdlerian-Psychoanalytic (GAP) thinking, which in turn introduces my highly unorthodox concept of 'transference memories' or 'transference-lifestyle memories' which also can be interpreted from the same conscious early childhood memories in all of our unique, individual lives that Adlerians use in their diagnosis of a particular client's 'lifestyle (template/complex)' -- meaning our own earliest conscious childhood memories if we ever walked into an Adlerian Therapist's office (as I have).
A person's earliest conscious memory can, generally speaking, in my language here, be viewed as his or her most important -- i.e., diagnostically most fruitful -- transference (TM) or transference-lifestyle memory (TLM) and resulting 're-creation and repetition compulsions' such as TICs, TIPs, and TIPS.
A schizophrenic person's hallucinations can be diagnostically view and utilized as a TIP (in the sense defined above).
We might also consider utilizing the term 'SHIE (i.e., Shadow-Superego-Id-Ego) Compromise-Formations and/or Complex-Compulsions' which are highly likely to be integrated or 'meshed' with Transference-Immediacy Projections (TIPs)...
In my day-to-day experiences and communications with 'autistically diagnosed young men and women', and a 'Down Syndrome' young woman, I have come to view their 'repetitive phrases' as 'repetition TIP compulsions' -- meaning that these repetitive phrases can be viewd as 'the conflicted symptom' within which 'transference and immediacy material converge in a narcissistically fixated manner' harking back in a re-awakened format to some earlier 'unfinished situation' (Perls, Gestalt Therapy).
Hallucinations, repetitive phases, hysterical and obsessional body symptoms, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, jokes, sarcasm, choices of profession, essays, books, artistic creations...can all be viewed as 'TIPs' and/or as 'Allusions to Transference-Immediacy Compromises' meaning that these 'potential diagnostic symptoms' can all be viewed as both 'hiding and alluding to a combination of transference and immediacy material'.
The relationship between a therapist and his or her client/patient -- this is not a transference relationship but rather a 'transference-immediacy' relationship that both borrows from the past and projects the past into the present while at the same time processing the relevancy of the immediacy of the present into the 'transference psychodynamics of the past'.
Unconsciously, the client is thinking, 'Does this therapist of mine in the here and now remind me of my 'most relevant and loved/hated/rejecting/exciting childhood transference figure/object? Or not? Can I find some way of intertwining the two of them together such that my therapist becomes a 'surrogate projective reincarnation' of my early childhood transference object? Or not? Can I 'earn' the type of love from this adult transference figure that I never properly got from my early childhood rejecting transference figure/object?
In terms of 'counter-transference', the same process -- albeit perhaps more consciously -- is also likely going on inside the therapist's mind in a way that may or may not trigger transference reactions on the part of the therapist as well....positive and/or negative, love and/or hate...
Much is changing in Psychoanalyis, even as some seek to hold onto the past.
Is psychoanalysis considering getting rid of the famous Freudian 'couch'? Have some psychoanalysts already gotten rid of it? Is the 'Oedipal Complex' still a viable concept, or is it not? Has 'traumacy theory' become central to Psychoanalysis again, or has it not? How do you integrate 'traumacy (reality, seduction) theory' with 'fantasy (childhood sexuality) theory'? Or do you? Do psychoanalysts still have to choose one or the either? Or can they pick and choose one or the other relative to the context of the client and the case they are dealing with? Or does a psychoanalyst have to pick between being 'either/or' a Classical Psychoanalyst or an Object Relationist? Or a Lacanian Psychoanalyst? Or a Bionian Psychoanalyst? Or a Kohutian Self-Psychologist?
Can a psychoanalyst choose on a whim, or on an educated surmisal, to be a Classical Psychoanalyst in one client case, a Self Psychologist in another case, an Object Relationist in another case, a Bionian in another case, a Lacanian in another?...Or even, more liberally and more flexibly, make these types of 'theoretical or paradigm choices' moment by moment, depending on the type of clinical material that is reaching the Psychoanalysts eyes and/or ears? Can a psychoanalyst become an 'eclectic psychoanalyst' within his own school of psychology -- with so many different 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis arising within psychoanalysis, just like within clinical psychology in general?
Here is the thing. Theories are by definition speculative generalizations of some portion of reality. They are always going to be partly wrong. Theorists -- they often tend to get so caught up in whatever theory has them 'wrapped up in a passionate ball and frenzy' that they forget that theories are not facts; they are generalized 'models' or 'maps' of reality that all have 'dead ends' -- or meet with dead ends -- somewhere in life's most perplexing and/or chaotic moments', and/or at the point that another concept, another theory, another paradigm, another map or model, might better 'explain' or 'help us to understand' the same 'life moment or experience or event or reality' that the first theory has reached a 'dead end' against.
Those theorists who continue to use their 'narcissistically and/or righteously bound or cathected theory' in an area of life where theory no no longer works, for lack of a better description, can be called 'dead end theorists'. Like lemmings, they chase their 'narcissistically cathected and fixated theory' over the proverbial cliff...
Freud was such a theorist -- wound up tighter in his own theories than a child's spinning top. Unable and/or unwilling to 'think outside of his own theoretical boxes'....
Which, of course, drove many of his co-workers crazy (loosely speaking) -- Adler, Rank, Stekel, Jung...who saw some things quite differently, created different theories, based on a combination of their own experiences, influences, and no doubt 'unique, personal transference material' -- only to be shut out and shut down (or so he tried) by Freud for 'thinking wild, unorthodox, unFreudian, thoughts and theories'...
From the counter-Freudian foundational premises of Freud's co-workers and ex-co-workers, I posit that we all have to learn -- if we have not already -- how to be accountable and responsible for our own Id impulses and their multi-faceted vicissitudes and compromise-formations...not determinisitically perceived as being like dandelions being blown around helplessly by the wind...or like driftwood floating on an ocean of discontent...
We all need to learn how to better embrace our biological-rational-empirical-romantic-spiritual nature and continue to find better and better ways to unite all these 'differerent and sometimes divided spirits' within us in a way that is worthy of a celebration of our own lives as well as a spreading 'Good Karma' to others...
Someone needs to make Classical Psychoanalysis more optimistic, more hopeful, more romantic, more spiritual, more humanistic-existential, more dialectically integrated, more pluralistic, more available to the middle class -- and in this regard, someone needs to go back into Classical Psychoanalysis and rattle its walls, shake down its assumptive foundation...
Potentially creative classical psychoanalysts are 'hog-tied' -- they cannot touch Classical Psychoanalysis because it is not to be touched except within the boundaries of orthodox Freudian boundaries. Thus, we see it slowly die, mummified by Psychoanalytic leaders in the same tradition as the 'very anal-retientive' Freuds themselves -- i.e., the Master and his daughter -- and unless someone at the top of the Psychoanalytic Establishment Hierarchy is prepared to 'open up the windows' of the Freud House (in Masson's words), well, then, let's all have a ceremony and bury Classical Psychoanalysis...Because, as it stands, teetering in its Victorian Structure, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it is no good for any clients in the 21st Century....it is perhaps more 'neurotic' and 'pathological' than any of its clients -- and it has been since Freud basically turned his back on his pre-1897 Reality-Traumacy-Seduction Theory....
Neurosis is generally traumatically based on exclusion, dissociation, suppression, repression, opression...
Well, if this is true, someone at the top of the Psychoanalytic Establishment needs to 'break down the 1897 Freudian Wall' -- like The Berlin Wall -- so that Pre-1897 Freudian Psychoanalysis is 'freed' from its post-1897 oppression...
What Freud wrote before 1897 continues to come back to 'haunt' Classical Psychoanalysis, like the ghost of a murdered person, like the 'memory' and/or the 'id impulse' of a neurotically dissociated perosn....
Either bury Classical Psychoanalysis or free it....
And you can only 'free' it if or when the leaders of The Psychoanalytic Establishment stop treating Classical Psychoanalysis like it is priceless china from the Ming Dynasty...
Either that, or....
You have to get some clever, creative underground, unorthodox psychoanalytic thinker....
To show them how it is done...
I think that that is my calling card...
All theories have to come to a dead end sooner or later, and either die on the dead-end street,
Or the 'wall' of the theory at the dead-end of the theory has to be torn down, has to be 'deconstructed' and the 'road extended' ...into new conceptual-theoretical territory 'outside the box', on the 'other side of the dead end street'....
'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.' -- Hegel.
'Until it meets its soul-mate -- the other half of its bipolar spectrum theory -- and engages, interacts, confronts, compromises, integrates, synergizes....in this manner it becomes reconstructed as a 'triangulation of truth' with fresh, new value, new meaning, a New Dialectic Path, on its way to interacting and integrating with Other Dialectic Paths....like the spokes meeting at the hub of a wheel...'The Multi-Dialectic-Pluralistic-Integrative-Synergetic Wheel' that keeps man and society propelling forward towards new Creative Solutions and Resolutions and 'Good Karma Evolution'; not 'Unilateral, Anally Constipated, I've Got Blinders On and I Can't See You, Bad Karma De-Evolution'...
Have I begun to successfully communicate this idea of 'Hegelian Dialectic Philosophy -- Reincarnated?
It is not new...
Just re-worked...
As Classical Psychoanalysis will be,
In the essays soon to come...
dgb, April 13th, 2013,
David Gordon Bain,
Dialectical Gap-Bridging Theories....
Are Still in Process...
My partly inside, mainly outside observations and interpretations of contemporary psychoanalysis is that there is a generally concerted attempt to integrate all the major different 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis within the full spectrum of teaching psychoanalysis 'as a whole' to new students and/or already practising therapists/analysts. To what extent this 'integration' has progressed is a debatable point -- I would say, generally speaking, that all the different 'paradigms' of psychoanalytic thought are being taught with some element of 'cross-talk' between the different paradigms but not to the extent of someone actually trying to sit down and create a logically coherent integrative system of psychoanalysis. Mainly, that is what I am trying to do here from a primarily 'outsider's' perspective. Nothing official. Nothing sanctioned by any psychoanalytic establishment. But still, my effort as as what I will call an 'underground psychoanalytic thinker' who can gravitate into most of the major sub-schools of psychoanalytic thought (Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut...) and the 'post' and/or 'neo' psychoanalytic paradigms of thought as well (Adler, Jung, Rank, Horney, Fromm, Berne, Perls, Janov, Masson...).
The Psychoanalytic School that I am partly familiar with (The Toronto Psychoanalytic School) is presently re-looking at Traumacy Theory from different psychoanalytic sub-school angles -- which I view as a 'good thing' (the failure of which was Masson's biggest criticism against The Psychoanalytic Establishment back in the 1980s -- i.e., their ignoring, denying, suppressing, dissociating Freud's combined 'Reality-Traumacy-Seduction (RTS) Theories' just like Freud largely did, and told his co-workers and students to do; at best after 1897, his traumacy theory lay in the 'shadows' of his thinking; at worst, it was completely run off the rails by his evolving Childhood Sexualty, Fantasy, and Oedipal Theories until he started to look at 'the war neuroses' and 're-visited' his traumacy theory on this basis (later to become a function of 'the death instinct' in, and after, 1920).
Now, with my not being a part of the overall psychoanalytic establishment or any part of it (other than being a possible 'in and out student' ), I have all the freedom in the world to assert my integrative ideas and not have anyone to answer to relative to any 'breach of psychoanalytic standard thinking' , especially when it comes to the very 'anally tight' Classical Psychoanalytic Paradigm', of which I totally intend to tear down a few conceptual theories and barriers that prevent Classical Psychoanalysis from becoming integrated with Object Relations, Self Psychology, and possibly other sub-schools of Psychoanalysis, not to mention other outside schools of therapeutic thought. To me, this project is like the liberation and integration of Germany through the process of tearing down the Berlin Wall.
Personally, I like many elements of Classical Psychoanalysis including the Classic Freudian distinction between 'oral characteristics' (bringing in, internalizing, introjecting perceived environmental nutrients) vs. 'anal characteristics' (rejecting, shutting out, 'spitting out', 'shitting out' perceived environmental toxins).
Consequently, I will use these two 'bodily metaphors' in the psychological domain like Freud and his co-workers did. This is not one of the areas of Classical Freudian Theory that I reject. Other areas, briefly already mentioned, I do reject. (its patriarchism, its sexism, its pan-sexualism, its pan-childhood sexuality, its pan-fantasy theory, and its pan-Oedipal theory, its diminuation of Freud's earlier trumpeted reality-traumacy-seduction theory...)
I want to bring Classical Psychoanalysis back to life in a much refurbished, much expanded and integrated fashion.
Excuse me for a little bit of 'narcissistic trumpeting' here, but I view myself as one of the most creative, unorthodox, underground, Classical-non-Classical Psychoanalytic thinkers that you will ever have the opportunity to read -- inside or outside Psychoanalysis. Now, obviously, the 'proof is in the pudding', and I leave it to you, my valued readers, to judge how much potential value you may or may not find in what I hope you are about to read.
However, I warn you ahead of time: Be prepared for the unexpected, the highly unorthodox, and a variety of uniquely different 'integrated and synergized ideas' that you will find in the essays that follow and that you will find nowhere else, as you debate internally whether what you are reading 'is or is not Psychoanalysis?' Is it 'botched psychoanalysis'? Non-psychoanalysis? Or 'progressive, evolutionary integrative psychoanalysis?
I wont' accept the first evaluative interpretation. But betweein the last two, you can take your pick. Both argumentive 'sides of the fence' are equally relevant, as anything that might have been called 'The Psychoanaltyic Fence' or 'The Psychoanalytic Wall' or 'The Freudian Psychoanalytic Wall' is essentially being torn or bulldozed down here -- just like The Berlin Wall was brought down in 1990.
Like The Berlin Wall, Freud's 'Pre-Psychoanalytic' Wall of The Winter-Spring of 1895-96 should be called 'The Wall of Shame' -- regardless of what Freud's inner motivations were -- because it essentially 'neurotically dissociated' pre-1897 Freudian 'childhood reality-traumacy thinking' from post-1896 'childhood fantasy-Oedipal' thinking. The two sets of Freudian theories -- the first largely rejected, dissociated, disowned; and the second trumpeted as 'the better choice' between the two competing theories for the rest of Freud's professional career -- well, they still both need to be much better integrated in a manner that is logically consistent with actual human thinking, feeling, wanting, and doing. Just like the 'neurotic' needs to become a 'more whole person', so too, Pre-Classical and Classical Psychoanalysis, between the two of them, need to 'come together' (in the words of John Lennon) to become a 'more wholistic 1893 to 1939 Classical Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy'.
The two polar opposite sides of Freudian 1895-96 thinking still need to be 'functionally integrated and synergized' today using the 'dialectic-interactive-integrative logic' of Classic Hegelian, and my rendition of Post-Hegelian-DGB 'multi-dialectic-pluralistic, thinking'.
What I am aiming to do here -- and I think I will be able to show you how important this integration is to the future of Psychoanalysis or 'Post-Neo-DGB Psychoanalysis' -- is to create a new 'Dialectically Integrative Psychoanalytic Premise and Paradigm' based on the synergized assumptive logic of 'Freud's Reality-Traumacy-Seduction-Fantasy-Oedipal-Impulse-Thinking' -- within all of us -- which indeed is paradoxical and dichotomous. Because that is how we all think through the sum total of all our introjections, identifications, projections, sublimations, compensations, defences, transferences...
Well, not in all of us when it comes to the Freudian meaning of 'Seduction' which means 'the sexual seduction, manipulation, and/or flat out 'rape' of a child, usually by an adult, most commonly by the father, sometimes by an older child, all of which can be lumped under the category of '(Sexual) Traumacy Theory' relative to the victimized child -- assuming the child experienced the event as 'traumatic' which we cannot totally assume for sure in all the myriad of different types of cases...
For some children, the experience or experiences might become viewed as 'traumatic' years later under the influence of greater self and/or social awareness of what unpleasurably and/or pleasurably experienced in his or her much earlier years.
In contrast to the category of '(Sexual) Reality-Traumacy Theory', I will create a new category of thinking relative to the label of 'Seduction' and this will include any and/or all type(s) of human thinking, feeling, desiring, wanting, doing, whereby a person is consciously/unconsciously seeking to 'seduce' an adult transference figure/object who is deemed to be a 'symbolic surrogate of an early childhood transference figure/object with the defining Fairbairnian characteristics of exemplifying the features of a 'rejecting-exciting object'.
In what I am now thinking of calling (forgive me) 'DGB Quantum-Paradoxical, Post-Classical, Multi-Dialectic-Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis' (shorten it any way you want to), my integration of The Fairbairnian based 'rejecting-exciting object' becomes the heir to the Oedipal Complex -- and we all have one (a single, double, or more Oedipal Complex and resulting Rejecting-Exciting Internalized Childhood Object That Becomes Projected into Our Adult Encounters and Relationships -- our mom, our dad, and/or anyone else who happened to be 'psycho-dynamically meaningful to us, good, bad, and/or indifferent' in our earliest, most vulnerable evolving childhood years.
Oh, what a tangled web we leave,
When at first we practice to deceive,
Projected surrogates of early childhood mentors,
Resented and/or hated transference figures
From our past,
Real people -- we think we love, and/or have loved...
And/or loving transference figures -- and real people --
We think we hate, and/or have hated,
This is the essence of our inherent battle,
With our own internal and external,
Engaging and/or dissociating,
Rejecting-rejected-
Attracting-exciting,
Emotionally and libidonously cathected,
Transference figures, objects, people...
From our childhood past,
And the real, live, present-day people,
Who continue to 're-awaken these ghosts and skeletons',
From our past,
And the essence,
The intensity,
The passion, the excitement,
The anxiety, the panic, the guilt,
The acute despair and/or chronic depression,
The hope and/or hopelessness,
Of our 'internally-introjected' childhood self-object world,
Into our 'externally-projected' adult self-object world,
This is the essence of 'The Quantum-Paradoxical-Chaotic Psychoanalysis'...
That I will attempt to communicate to you,
In these essays to follow...
Let me be clear at this point that I seek neither the 'approval' of The PE or that of Dr. Jeffrey Masson as I seek to 'dialectically bridge the gap' between their previously opposite perspectives on 'The Freudian Wall of 1895-96'.
I am seeking to 'triangulate truth, value, and The Psychoanalytic Dialectic Path' through the Hegelian Dialectic Logical Process of: 1. Thesis; 2. Counter (or Anti) Thesis; and Dialectic Synthesis-Synergy. The idea here is to 'work' both 'polar perspectives of opinion' towards 'the dialectically integrative middle'.
All of my philosophical and psychological influences are important here, including Freud himself, Adler, Jung, Perls, Klein, Fairbairn, Fromm, Horney, Rank, Guntrip, Bird, Kohut -- all of these brilliant theorists have been 'introjected' into my 'unconscious blending machine' and come out in the fashion that you will see developed below...Consequently, my 'post-Hegelian' concept of 'multi-dialectic-pluralistic integration and synergy'.
With special mention and credit to Jeffrey Masson because without his influence, I most likely would never have become aware of 'The Seduction Theory Controversy', let alone have become 'obsessed' with it -- and ultimately, obsessed with the study of psychoanalysis as a whole...
Thus, ultimately, even though our 'solutions' to the Seduction Theory Controversy and to the 'various plights and theoretical issues' of Classical Psychoanalysis may differ -- my 'solution' being much more 'dialectically integrative and synergetic' than Masson's (his solutions pointing more unilaterally backwards to Freud's earliest writing between 1893 and 1896 during a time when Freud's 'reality, traumacy, and seduction theories' dominated, not his 'childhood sexuality, fantasy, and Oedipal theories' of post-1896) -- still, this essay is, first and foremost, a tribute to the man who 'motivationally inspired and engaged me', to work myself 'obsessionally forward' to this 'creative place' that I have found here...
That has been a time period of about 20 years -- dating back for me from about 1993 to the present...after my own theoretical learnings and therapeutic experiences within The Adlerian Institute (1980-81), and The Gestalt Institute of Toronto (1979-1991).
Thus, I had already established significant outside influences in Humanistic-Existential Philosophy and Psychology (including my learnings from The University of Waterloo between 1974 and 1979) before I started to seriously focus in the early 1990s until now on the study of Psychoanalysis.
In essence, what I am offering up below is my 'bridge' between Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment -- which at least on the surface of things -- neither of the two opposing conflicted sides from the 1980s seems to be remotely interested in coming to any kind of 'creative compromise-agreement' and/or 'aggreement to disagree' relative to what I call 'The Controversy and The Psychoanalytic Dissociation Caused by The Freudian Wall of post-1896'.
One psychoanalytic thinker -- I think it was Stekel -- wrote that 'all fear is ultimately a fear of death.' (I think that Freud disagreed with that assertion -- thought that it essentially had no meaning.) I would add that some fears have much to do with the fear of injury, and perhaps even more importantly, 'fear of self-esteem or narcissistic-egotistical injury': more specifically, fear of failure, looking foolish, social dissociation, self-dissociation, self-rejection, inferiority feelings, self-hate, not being as 'brilliant in reality as one projected from one's own fantasy life'....in other words, 'opening up the curtains of one's own self-delusions'...and bearing the consequences of not meeting one's own lofty expectations...
This is where one simply has to 'existentially jump' from the cliff of 'non-being' onto the 'tightrope of Nietzschean risking' as one climbs or walks the tightrope, and looks (or doesn't look) down at the 'existential abyss looming far down below' of potentially perceived 'acute' failure, shock, panic, despair, and/or more 'chronic' guilt, anxiety, and/or depresssion...
To repeat, in the context of 'Pre-Classical' (pre-1897) vs. 'Classical' (post-1896) Psychoanalysis, what I do differently than what Freud did starting in the winter of 1895-1896 is, I utilize the working premise and assumption of The Hegelian Dialectic, indeed, 'The Multi-Dialectic-Pluralistic-Integrative' premise.
This means that I embrace contradiction in the fashion that Hegel taught us how to embrace contradiction -- and then creatively integrate and synergize the opposite polarities on the spectrum of this seeming contradiction that 'respects and values both opposite polarities as being essential to the nature of the same 'bi-polar truth, value, homeostatic balance, harmony, and co-existence'. Both bipolar truths are essential to the same dialectical spectrum-process...
In this type of 'bipolar or multi-bipolar theory building', we have an important method by which to more 'accurately and functionally build our concepts, theories, paradigms, so that they more 'structurally and dynamically represent the actual structures, characteristics, and dynamics of nature.
In physics, just as Freud was 'locked in internal conflict' weighing between his 1893-96 'reality-traumacy-seduction theories' and his newly arising 'childhood sexuality, fantasy, and Oedipal theories', and finally opting for the latter theoretical triad', so too was physics 'locked in internal conflict' between its previous 'particle theory of energy', its later 'wave theory of energy' -- neither of the two which were completely appropriate and functional in their 'representative predictions'; this being the case, physicists finally worked themselves out of this theoretical conundrum and logjam and created the 'dialectically integrative and synergetic theory' of 'particle-wave theory' -- which became the beginning of 'Quantum Physics'....and physics has never looked back since... Add a little 'Chaos Theory' to further synthesize and synergize Quantum Theory into 'Quantum-Chaos Theory' which has attracted me to the name of 'DGB Quantum-Chaos Psychoanalytic and Post-Psychoanalytic Theory'...and maybe that will give you an abstract, general idea of the direction I am travelling here -- or maybe not.
Contradistinctively, psychoanalytic thinkers have always looked back -- back to the winter and spring of 1895-1896 -- because the Freudian conundrum/impasse/ logjam of 'The Rising Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory Triad' vs. The Falling 'Reality-Traumacy-Seduction Theory Triad' was never -- and still has never been -- properly resolved.
The reason: Because no psychoanalytic thinker (until me) has approached the controversy as being a 'dialectical problem' that needs to be worked out dialectically, interactively, integratively, and synergetically as 'two opposites truths on the same bipolar, dialectic spectrum' that are indeed, oftentimes, integratively and/or dysfunctionally-dissociatively 'meshed together' in our own personal, clinical realities -- both 'the reality/traumacy' and the 'compensatory/defensive fantasy' co-exist together in the 'same chldhood and adulthood transference template-complex'.
In adulthood, I call these 'symptom formations' -- 'TICs' which stands for 'Transference-Immediacy Constructions (or Complexes)'.
A therapist can use these TICs or 'TIPs' (Transference-Immediacy-Projections) or 'TIPS' (Transference-Immediacy-Projective-Sublimations') as a part of what Freud called the 'Royal Road To The Unconscious' which in this context means the 'Royal Road Backwards Into Our Childhood Traumacy-Fantasy, Paradoxical, Conflicted, Transference Templates'...
At this point, I will suggest that you either read my earlier paper, 'The First True Case of Psychoanalysis', or read it after this essay as an addendum.
At this point also, I will introduce and 'introject' some Adlerian Theory relative to the 'interpretation of conscious early memories' as 'lifestyle memories' into my own breed of highly unorthodox integrative GestaltAdlerian-Psychoanalytic (GAP) thinking, which in turn introduces my highly unorthodox concept of 'transference memories' or 'transference-lifestyle memories' which also can be interpreted from the same conscious early childhood memories in all of our unique, individual lives that Adlerians use in their diagnosis of a particular client's 'lifestyle (template/complex)' -- meaning our own earliest conscious childhood memories if we ever walked into an Adlerian Therapist's office (as I have).
A person's earliest conscious memory can, generally speaking, in my language here, be viewed as his or her most important -- i.e., diagnostically most fruitful -- transference (TM) or transference-lifestyle memory (TLM) and resulting 're-creation and repetition compulsions' such as TICs, TIPs, and TIPS.
A schizophrenic person's hallucinations can be diagnostically view and utilized as a TIP (in the sense defined above).
We might also consider utilizing the term 'SHIE (i.e., Shadow-Superego-Id-Ego) Compromise-Formations and/or Complex-Compulsions' which are highly likely to be integrated or 'meshed' with Transference-Immediacy Projections (TIPs)...
In my day-to-day experiences and communications with 'autistically diagnosed young men and women', and a 'Down Syndrome' young woman, I have come to view their 'repetitive phrases' as 'repetition TIP compulsions' -- meaning that these repetitive phrases can be viewd as 'the conflicted symptom' within which 'transference and immediacy material converge in a narcissistically fixated manner' harking back in a re-awakened format to some earlier 'unfinished situation' (Perls, Gestalt Therapy).
Hallucinations, repetitive phases, hysterical and obsessional body symptoms, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, jokes, sarcasm, choices of profession, essays, books, artistic creations...can all be viewed as 'TIPs' and/or as 'Allusions to Transference-Immediacy Compromises' meaning that these 'potential diagnostic symptoms' can all be viewed as both 'hiding and alluding to a combination of transference and immediacy material'.
The relationship between a therapist and his or her client/patient -- this is not a transference relationship but rather a 'transference-immediacy' relationship that both borrows from the past and projects the past into the present while at the same time processing the relevancy of the immediacy of the present into the 'transference psychodynamics of the past'.
Unconsciously, the client is thinking, 'Does this therapist of mine in the here and now remind me of my 'most relevant and loved/hated/rejecting/exciting childhood transference figure/object? Or not? Can I find some way of intertwining the two of them together such that my therapist becomes a 'surrogate projective reincarnation' of my early childhood transference object? Or not? Can I 'earn' the type of love from this adult transference figure that I never properly got from my early childhood rejecting transference figure/object?
In terms of 'counter-transference', the same process -- albeit perhaps more consciously -- is also likely going on inside the therapist's mind in a way that may or may not trigger transference reactions on the part of the therapist as well....positive and/or negative, love and/or hate...
Much is changing in Psychoanalyis, even as some seek to hold onto the past.
Is psychoanalysis considering getting rid of the famous Freudian 'couch'? Have some psychoanalysts already gotten rid of it? Is the 'Oedipal Complex' still a viable concept, or is it not? Has 'traumacy theory' become central to Psychoanalysis again, or has it not? How do you integrate 'traumacy (reality, seduction) theory' with 'fantasy (childhood sexuality) theory'? Or do you? Do psychoanalysts still have to choose one or the either? Or can they pick and choose one or the other relative to the context of the client and the case they are dealing with? Or does a psychoanalyst have to pick between being 'either/or' a Classical Psychoanalyst or an Object Relationist? Or a Lacanian Psychoanalyst? Or a Bionian Psychoanalyst? Or a Kohutian Self-Psychologist?
Can a psychoanalyst choose on a whim, or on an educated surmisal, to be a Classical Psychoanalyst in one client case, a Self Psychologist in another case, an Object Relationist in another case, a Bionian in another case, a Lacanian in another?...Or even, more liberally and more flexibly, make these types of 'theoretical or paradigm choices' moment by moment, depending on the type of clinical material that is reaching the Psychoanalysts eyes and/or ears? Can a psychoanalyst become an 'eclectic psychoanalyst' within his own school of psychology -- with so many different 'sub-schools' of psychoanalysis arising within psychoanalysis, just like within clinical psychology in general?
Here is the thing. Theories are by definition speculative generalizations of some portion of reality. They are always going to be partly wrong. Theorists -- they often tend to get so caught up in whatever theory has them 'wrapped up in a passionate ball and frenzy' that they forget that theories are not facts; they are generalized 'models' or 'maps' of reality that all have 'dead ends' -- or meet with dead ends -- somewhere in life's most perplexing and/or chaotic moments', and/or at the point that another concept, another theory, another paradigm, another map or model, might better 'explain' or 'help us to understand' the same 'life moment or experience or event or reality' that the first theory has reached a 'dead end' against.
Those theorists who continue to use their 'narcissistically and/or righteously bound or cathected theory' in an area of life where theory no no longer works, for lack of a better description, can be called 'dead end theorists'. Like lemmings, they chase their 'narcissistically cathected and fixated theory' over the proverbial cliff...
Freud was such a theorist -- wound up tighter in his own theories than a child's spinning top. Unable and/or unwilling to 'think outside of his own theoretical boxes'....
Which, of course, drove many of his co-workers crazy (loosely speaking) -- Adler, Rank, Stekel, Jung...who saw some things quite differently, created different theories, based on a combination of their own experiences, influences, and no doubt 'unique, personal transference material' -- only to be shut out and shut down (or so he tried) by Freud for 'thinking wild, unorthodox, unFreudian, thoughts and theories'...
From the counter-Freudian foundational premises of Freud's co-workers and ex-co-workers, I posit that we all have to learn -- if we have not already -- how to be accountable and responsible for our own Id impulses and their multi-faceted vicissitudes and compromise-formations...not determinisitically perceived as being like dandelions being blown around helplessly by the wind...or like driftwood floating on an ocean of discontent...
We all need to learn how to better embrace our biological-rational-empirical-romantic-spiritual nature and continue to find better and better ways to unite all these 'differerent and sometimes divided spirits' within us in a way that is worthy of a celebration of our own lives as well as a spreading 'Good Karma' to others...
Someone needs to make Classical Psychoanalysis more optimistic, more hopeful, more romantic, more spiritual, more humanistic-existential, more dialectically integrated, more pluralistic, more available to the middle class -- and in this regard, someone needs to go back into Classical Psychoanalysis and rattle its walls, shake down its assumptive foundation...
Potentially creative classical psychoanalysts are 'hog-tied' -- they cannot touch Classical Psychoanalysis because it is not to be touched except within the boundaries of orthodox Freudian boundaries. Thus, we see it slowly die, mummified by Psychoanalytic leaders in the same tradition as the 'very anal-retientive' Freuds themselves -- i.e., the Master and his daughter -- and unless someone at the top of the Psychoanalytic Establishment Hierarchy is prepared to 'open up the windows' of the Freud House (in Masson's words), well, then, let's all have a ceremony and bury Classical Psychoanalysis...Because, as it stands, teetering in its Victorian Structure, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it is no good for any clients in the 21st Century....it is perhaps more 'neurotic' and 'pathological' than any of its clients -- and it has been since Freud basically turned his back on his pre-1897 Reality-Traumacy-Seduction Theory....
Neurosis is generally traumatically based on exclusion, dissociation, suppression, repression, opression...
Well, if this is true, someone at the top of the Psychoanalytic Establishment needs to 'break down the 1897 Freudian Wall' -- like The Berlin Wall -- so that Pre-1897 Freudian Psychoanalysis is 'freed' from its post-1897 oppression...
What Freud wrote before 1897 continues to come back to 'haunt' Classical Psychoanalysis, like the ghost of a murdered person, like the 'memory' and/or the 'id impulse' of a neurotically dissociated perosn....
Either bury Classical Psychoanalysis or free it....
And you can only 'free' it if or when the leaders of The Psychoanalytic Establishment stop treating Classical Psychoanalysis like it is priceless china from the Ming Dynasty...
Either that, or....
You have to get some clever, creative underground, unorthodox psychoanalytic thinker....
To show them how it is done...
I think that that is my calling card...
All theories have to come to a dead end sooner or later, and either die on the dead-end street,
Or the 'wall' of the theory at the dead-end of the theory has to be torn down, has to be 'deconstructed' and the 'road extended' ...into new conceptual-theoretical territory 'outside the box', on the 'other side of the dead end street'....
'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.' -- Hegel.
'Until it meets its soul-mate -- the other half of its bipolar spectrum theory -- and engages, interacts, confronts, compromises, integrates, synergizes....in this manner it becomes reconstructed as a 'triangulation of truth' with fresh, new value, new meaning, a New Dialectic Path, on its way to interacting and integrating with Other Dialectic Paths....like the spokes meeting at the hub of a wheel...'The Multi-Dialectic-Pluralistic-Integrative-Synergetic Wheel' that keeps man and society propelling forward towards new Creative Solutions and Resolutions and 'Good Karma Evolution'; not 'Unilateral, Anally Constipated, I've Got Blinders On and I Can't See You, Bad Karma De-Evolution'...
Have I begun to successfully communicate this idea of 'Hegelian Dialectic Philosophy -- Reincarnated?
It is not new...
Just re-worked...
As Classical Psychoanalysis will be,
In the essays soon to come...
dgb, April 13th, 2013,
David Gordon Bain,
Dialectical Gap-Bridging Theories....
Are Still in Process...
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