March 8th, 2014
Essay 2: The Project as a Whole -- At Least Within The Field of Philosophy-Psychology-Psychoanalysis-Neo-Psychoanalysis
My goal, my vision, my sought after multi-integration -- at least within the field of clinical psychology, personality theory, psychological health and pathology, and psychotherapy -- is ambitious: to integrate my own 40 years of academic study in this realm of investigation, including the underlying foundations of philosophy, in such a manner that it all will come together into a 'coherent, multi-integrative-dialectic (quantum) whole'.
There are two names that I will give to this project, one: Hegel's Hotel: DGB (Multi-Dialectic-Multi-Integrative -- or Quantum) Philosophy-Psychology';
The second is a subset of the first above, and that is: 'DGB (Multi-Dialectic-Multi-Integrative -- or Quantum) Psychoanalysis and Neo-Psychoanalysis'.
Together, they make up the name of this project -- 'The DGB Quantum Philosophy-Psychology and (Multi-Dialectic-Multi-Interactive-Multi-Integrative)Psychoanalytic-Neo-Psychoanalytic Project'.
The 'Hegel's Hotel' part of this name makes up the assumptive-philosophical paradigm that drives this whole idealistic, evolutionary-multi-dialectic-mutative-integrative process -- a 'triadic' process that can best be simplified by the following 'classic' Hegelian formula which Hegel never actually stated in the fashion that he is generally given credit for, and yet it was both the implicit and partly explicit driving force behind one of the greatest philosophical masterpieces in Western history (G.W. Hegel, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit', 1807).
Hegel's dialectical-interactive-integrative formula is usually cited as: 1. thesis; 2. anti-thesis; 3. synthesis -- with more modern writers such as Stephen Covey in his best-selling book, 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People', 1989,1990, devoting most of his book to the idea of 'Thinking Win-Win' (Habit 4); 'Seeking First to Be Understood, Then to Understand' (Habit 5); and 'Creatively Synergizing' (Habit 6) -- all three of which can be viewed as modern day applications of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'. Well, not quite. Not even Hegel was what I would call a 'dialectically-interactive-egalitarian-think-win-win-seek-first-to-understand-then-to- be-understood-creatively-synergize-your-differences' type of thinker. Neither was Freud. Neither was Anna Freud. Neither was Kurt Eissler. Neither was Masson. Because if they were, they would have worked out their conflicted difference in more creative-synergetic harmony.
For argument sake, there are two types of choices or decisions that a person can make:
1. An 'either/or' choice;
2. A 'think-win-win-seek-first-to-understand-then-to-be-understood-creatively-synergize-your-differences' choice (or set of choices) with a mutually motivated, co-operative partner.
Well, so many times we have in life a competitive as opposed to a co-operative partner, and an authoritarian, unilateral thinker as opposed to a dialectically-egalitarian-interactive-integrative thinker. The first type of thinker -- even if he or she 'wins' and/or 'dominates' but at the expense of the other person or group 'losing' and/or 'being dominated, suppressed, oppressed, repressed' is going to be dealing with covert, underlying resistance, rebellion, civil anarchy leaving the so-called 'win' tainted, tarnished, toxic, which the authoritarian, unilateral type of thinker having to deal with all this 'nuclear fallout' after the 'blow by' the less powerful resistor or resistant group.
Our second oldest known Western philosopher -- Anaximander -- talked and wrote about this type of 'conflict resolution' and created the original idea of 'The Shadow', 'Chaos', or 'The Apeiron' (the latter being Anaxamander's choice of terms) and the idea of 'Cosmic Justice' -- 'what goes around, comes around' with the Suppressed-Oppressed-Repressed-Enraged' Inferior Power, regaining strength, energy, and power in 'The Shadows of The Apeiron' until, one day, this Suppressed Power 'forces' its way up into the light of day again -- Centre Stage of a New Psycho-Drama -- in which the old power conflict will be played out again to a new and/or similar old conflict-resolution.
This philosophical view of Anaxamander's foreshadowed by about 2400 to 2500 years, and more, the evolutionary and revolutionary work of Hegel, Marx, Breuer, Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung, Foucault, Derrida, Perls... 'Evolutionary Deconstructionism' taught the reverse of the theory of gravity (what goes up, must come down -- like a man jumping); in contrast, first Anaximander, then the rest mentioned above taught the reverse (what goes down, must come up -- like a volcano exploding, or a dam breaking, or a Boston Tea Party...or a War of Independence or a Civil War)...
The human personality is often an internal civil war between a frightening, irresistible force, and a resisting, defending, compensating wall. And so began the work of Freud -- and the birth of Psychoanalysis.
This 'psychological truism' is as true today as it was when Freud first started writing about this phenomenon in 1893 and 1894. I call it the 'central core' of Psychoanalysis -- all types of Psychoanalysis, but particularly 'Pre-Classical' (1893-1896) and 'Classical' (1897-1939).
Between Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud we have the 'Dialectic-Triadic-Evolutionary-Romantic-Post-Modern-Threesome' of modern day philosophy-psychology and psychoanalysis-neo-psychoanalysis. Nietzsche rejected his Hegelian roots (The Birth of Tragedy or BT) but BT was one of Nietzsche's finest legacies -- the first bridge between Hegel and Freud. Each of us has a 'Dionysian Id' (our 'erupting volcano'), an 'Apollonian Ego and/or Superego' (our resisting, defending wall), and our 'symptoms' or 'compromise-formations' between them. The way this psycho-drama plays itself out inside of us can lead us to a 'sterile world and path of over-anal-retentive-defensiveness and compensation'; or conversely, an oral-genital obsessive-compulsive-addictive world or path of lack of impulse control and related self-destruction; or, if we don't play out either of these 'Polar Births of Tragedy', we might actually find a more 'homeostatically and dialectically balanced, reasonably harmonious, middle ground between them.
That is the 'binding force' behind my whole philosophical-psychological work here as summed up by the name and the metaphysical metaphor which labels it: Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy-Psychology: Project for a Greater, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Interactive-Multi-Integrative -- Quantum -- Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis and Neo-Psychoanalysis.
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B/ Guiding Metaphysical Integrative Concepts and Theories
The first realm of study -- particularly the 'philosophical' implications and applications of what I intend to create here -- extend primarily outwards from the starting point of the human personality into all of the 'cultural extensions' of the human personality including: business, economics, politics, art...; whereas the second realm of study focuses mainly on the study of man's 'mind-brain', using a combination of 'interpreted and generalized, metaphysical psycho-structures and psycho-dynamics or psycho-processes' as 'guiding fictions' but, at the same time, as 'useful cognitive-language tools' that are being used because of their 'close structural, associative, and dynamic similarity' to 'what actually seems to be going on' in the human mind-brain -- based on 'yours truly here's' life experiences, perceptions, interpretations, generalizations, and judgments, and the above mentioned 40 years of both therapeutic experience and clinical study...
Using my own integrative 'realistic guiding fictions' of both metaphysical concepts and psycho-dynamic theories, as tools then -- hopefully, I will bring into play here with as much simplicity, clarity, and coherence as I can muster together on these pages, a 'psycho-dynamically old-new brand of evolutionary and integrative neo-psychoanalysis and philosophy-psychology that will advance the cause of clinical psychology, personality theory, neurosis and psychopathology, psychotherapy, and wellness psychology'.
'Integrative' becomes the key word here because I intend to draw my knowledge, insights, and integrative theoretical creations from 'any' and 'all' schools of philosophy and psychology that have made a significant impact on my mind-brain during my 42 year (1972-2014) 'voyage'.
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C/ The Integration of 'Psyche' and 'Soma'
One of my goals of integration involves the integration of the human 'psyche' with the human 'soma' (that is, human psychology with human physiology, chemistry, bio-chemistry, hormonal interplay, neurology and neuro-psychology, etc.).
Not that I have any special expertise or knowledge in biology but what I have noticed over the years is that man's 'psychological defense system' functions very much like his 'biological defence system' (our 'immune system'), so I will be extrapolating on this comparison over the course of these essays.
Freud himself, in 1895, tried to bring biology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and physiology into the 'same room' as psychology -- integrating everything together in one essay -- but never completed the project, never completely figure out, as has anyone else, how a 'neuron firing' becomes a 'thought' and/or visa versa.
Regardless, this unfinished 1895 essay, 'Project for A Scientific Psychology', became the foundation for much of what Freud wrote over the next 44 years until the end of his life.
I would like to add some ideas to what Freud worked hard on but never finished 119 years ago.
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D/ Six Foundational 'Sub-Schools' of Psychoanalysis
These are the six major 'sub-schools' of Psychoanalysis that I will be working with and drawing from in the essays that follow:
1. Freudian 'Pre-(Classical) Psychoanalysis' (1893-1896);
2. 'Classical' Freudian Psychoanalysis (1897-1939);
3. Object Relations (Starting with Kleinian Object Relations, the 1920s, 30s, until Klein's death, but still seemingly going strong today...include also, the work of: Fairbairn, Winnicott, Erickson, Guntrip, and many other Object Relations theorists...);
4. Self Psychology (launched by Heinz Kohut in the 1950s, and onwards....introduced the important concept of 'narcissistic transferences'...and as an extension of Object Relations brought into play the idea of 'Self-Object Relations'...)
5. Bionian Psychoanalysis (Bion launched his own unique brand of 'Object Relations' in the 1950s...with some intriguing concepts and theories to consider...)
6. Lacanian Psychoanalysis started off as a provocative and controversial sub-school of psychoanalysis -- 'unaccepted' by the international body -- but has now been accepted into 'the fold', and is being taught as a recognized sub-school of psychoanalysis.
Beyond psychoanalysis, there are many different 'post' and 'neo' schools of psychoanalysis that we will also be looking at including schools created by Adler, Jung, Horney, Fromm, Perls, Berne, Janov...
Digging back before Psychoanalysis we have many schools of philosophy (although they usually weren't, and aren't, referred to as 'schools' of philosophy) that have either directly or indirectly influenced psychoanalysis or simply pre-dated psychoanalysis with similar ideas...starting in ancient Greece and China and evolving forward: Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Goethe, and the contemporary philosophers of psychoanalysis such as Foucault and Derrida...
This is a huge project....but the project has been evolving online for over six years now.....so now it's just a matter of presenting a more coherent, organized, value-laden, package....
Let's see if I can put everything together in a meaningful manner for you and me both...
-- dgb, March 9th, updated April 1st, 2014,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic-Gap-Bridging-Synergies...
-- Are Now In Process...
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Essay 1: Project for a Greater, Multi-Integrative, Humanistic-Existential, Psychoanalysis and Neo-Psychoanalysis
Updated, April 3rd-4th, 2014....
We live in a competitive, 'either/or' world of choices -- which includes philosophical choices, psychological choices, business choices, financial choices, political choices, ethical choices, narcissistic choices, life-changing choices, simple choices, and the like....
We also live in a world of co-operative choices -- and probably even more common than this -- 'partly competitive-partly co-operative' choices where we aim to negotiate differences favorable towards what we want (or maybe we choose not to attempt to negotiate towards 'middle ground', if we are 'dug in by our heels' in terms of getting totally what we want) -- and what we want includes what we want both 'intra-psychically' and 'inter-personally' -- I.e., within ourselves first, and then within our encounters and/or relationships with other people second.
At this point, many factors can come into play such as: power, control, leverage...or the lack therof, narcissism, hedonism, less often altruism unless we really care about the other person and/or maintaining a long-term relationship with the person...
We can make a distinction between 'narcissistic negotiating' (where we are looking to get the best deal possible for ourselves) vs. 'egalitarian negotiating' where we are looking for a 'fair' or 'equal' deal where both ourselves and our fellow negotiator go home happy, and/or where our 'co-operator and/or competitor' in the negotiation deal want to continue to make further negotiated deals with us because they were happy with the results of the first deal.
In this latter regard, we can talk about 'mutual value-driven deals' -- deals that are negotiated towards a common ground of mutual engagement, interaction, co-operation as well as some greater or lesser level of competition, aimed at some degree of integration or synthesis where both parties involved in the 'conflict-negotiation' aim to reach some kind of 'mutually-driven, value-driven, two-way, compromise-formation' that ideally benefits both parties, maybe not to the utmost degree or to a 'perfect compromise', but certainly such that the two parties want to come back to the 'negotiating table' again in the future with each other in order to negotiate other 'mutual value-driven' deals.
When this fails to happen, we can either end up in a 'total impasse' in which both parties go their separate ways without getting what they want, or perhaps a negotiated deal is arrived at, but because one party has more leverage than the other, or is simply a better negotiator than the other, the result is that one party feels that he or she did not get the 'sufficient value' that they were looking for at the negotiating table, such that this person or group of person either vows not to return to 'do business' with this other party, and/or if there is an ongoing relationship between these two parties, such as in an employer/employee relationship, there may be negative spin-offs from the deal such that the party that did not feel he or she got 'sufficient value' from the deal, and thus feels like he or she is being exploited, will take out his or her animosity in some form of chronic and/or acute 'passive-aggression' (lateness, sickness, drop in spirit/morale, sabotage, less than stellar performance, eventually leaving from, or being fired by the company....)
Thus, negotiating compromises that have sufficient value for both parties in the arrived at compromise-formation such that both parties want to continue to develop their relationship with each other, is a vital life-skill for any person or group of persons in terms of meeting our personal, inter-personal, professional, business, financial, philosophical, psychological, political and/or any other type of perceived want or need that brings two or more parties to the negotiating table in the first place.
Negotiating is a hugely important individual life-skill and this does not necessarily mean narcissistically and/or manipulatively negotiating deals to the point where we get a 'total short-term win' to the point of losing a potential long-term negotiating partner. In this regard, a distinction can be made between 'short-term narcissistic negotiation victories' to the point of losing potential long-term friends, lovers, family members, business customers....vs. 'long-term, mutually value-laden, dialectically stabilizing, harmonizing, win-win, negotiation victories' where both parties go home happy to the point of wanting to return to the bargaining table with this particular negotiating partner...
A few of the top obstacles to this latter type of win-win negotiation style and victory are: individual and/or group narcissism, greed, hedonism, pride (just think of the 7 deadly 'sins' listed in the bible, any type of highly contentious speculation and/or interpretation, moral-ethical righteousness...grounded or ungrounded...
And it is here that we enter the highly contentious, highly righteous, highly interpretive, 'Seduction Theory Controversy' that blew Jeffrey Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment apart in the early 1980s, and goes back to a very early point in psychoanalytic history (1893-1899) where Freud suddenly 'reversed his theoretical tracks' -- 180 degrees -- and said that all his hard work over the first 3 to 4 years of his professional, psychoanalytic or pre-psychoanalytic life -- was basically a 'mistake'... He had gotten his client interpretations and generalizations about 'hysteria' and 'obsession' and 'neurosis', and his clients' early childhood memories, almost all wrong, or at least 180 degrees 'wrong'.
Now, to be sure, many of Freud's earliest ideas were carried forward into his later work, but there remained the highly provocative and controversial issue -- regarding that sometimes 'very gray' area of human existence -- specifically concerning the hugely important issue of 'knowledge' and 'epistemology' and 'what was knowledge' and what was 'pseudo-or-false knowledge', what was 'real' and what was 'distortion', what was 'real' and what was 'fiction', what was 'real' and what was 'fantasy', and to what extent, in personal experiences and memories or non-memories of experiences, did the two 'polar entities' -- 'reality' and 'fantasy', 'truth' and 'fiction', 'the objective' and 'the subjective' -- 'conflate' and/or 'collude' with each other in what a psychoanalyst or any other therapist, for that matter, was 'hearing' from his client in the therapy room...was he or she hearing 'reality' or 'fantasy', 'truth' or 'fiction', or somewhere in between? And to what extent, in between? And how much might this vary from client to client? Or could 'solid, righteous, iron-clad generalizations' be put into place? At bottom line, was the issue of 'childhood sexual abuse' -- an uncomfortable subject to talk about, hugely so back in Victorian Vienna, and to be quite frank, not that much better today... Not only the actual phenomenon is a huge 'human taboo', and today, punishable by long potential jail sentences, but even talking about the subject is not something that most of us would 'like' to do if we don't have to....And 'cover ups' or 'attempted cover-ups' are likely to be almost everywhere that the 'real phenomenon exists' -- just think of Penn State University. And now think of Vienna, Austria, 1896.
It is here that Jeffrey Masson's explosive protest against The Psychoanalytic Establishment and what he called 'Freud's Suppression of His Infamous Seduction Theory' (meaning Freud's real or alleged 'cover-up' of real or imagined childhood sexual abuse in Vienna families) that created the 'clinical evidence' for his professionally read 'Seduction (Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory' before the Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on the evening of April 21st, 1896 -- it is here that 'The Unstoppable Force' (Jeffrey Masson) collided with 'The Inpenetratable Wall' (The Psychoanalytic Establishment), with most notably, Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, at the top of the International Psychoanalytic hierarchy.
The highly respected Freud-loyalist, Kurt Eissler, a close friend of Masson's before this controversy broke out into the public eye, was in the second position of the hierarchy, and Jeffrey Masson had just been promoted to the third highest position in the hierarchy as 'The Projects Director of The Freud Archives' -- which is how he was granted full access to Freud's most private, and non-public, letters, particularly to Wilhelm Fliess, which involved intimate details surrounding Freud's 'abandonment' of his pre-1897 'reality-trauma-seduction' network of inter-connected theories at the expense of his newly evolving, post-1896, 'instinctual drive, fantasy, wish, 'screen memories', childhood sexuality, The Psycho-Sexual Stages of Development, Oedipus Complex...' network of inter-connected theories...
The 1980s 'moral conflict and resulting impasse' between Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment, surrounding Freud's 'motivation' in the 1896-1899 time period' -- i.e., Masson accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' -- still exists today, some 30 plus years after this highly contentious and provocative issue was first made public in a series of newspaper interviews, and Janet Malcolm's highly entertaining but editorially controversial book (In The Freud Archives, 1983, 1985) on this subject matter.
I, haphazardly, on one of my many visits to a downtown Toronto bookstore, picked up two of Masson's books, not knowing who the author was (but seemingly rebellious against an 'anal-retentive psychoanalytic orthodoxy' -- my first interpretation and judgment of the polar conflict between the two competing factions, which made the unknown author appealing to me, consequently, my purchase of his two books that I was looking at: 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (1990, 1991); and 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984, 1985, 1992).
For me, Jeffrey Masson's exodus out of psychoanalysis was ironically my ticket into psychoanalysis, at least in terms of igniting my passion for studying psychoanalysis, and examining it, editorializing on it, renovating and integrating it -- particularly relative to the controversial years of between 1895 and 1899 -- and from the outside looking in as opposed to the inside looking out.
While Masson was deconstructing -- or at least trying to -- Classical Psychoanalysis throughout the early 1980s and early 1990s, I was learning, or at least partly learning, Gestalt Therapy at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto (off and on, from 1979 to 1991), and Adlerian Psychology at The Adlerian Institute of Ontario for two years (1980-81).
Everyone has at least a partly unique and idiosyncratic view of the world -- formed mainly from our early childhood experiences and how we react to them, generalize about them, are motivated by them; but also partly based on our later levels and types of experiences, educational training, and again, how we react to these experiences and this training, generalize about them, and are motivated by them, as we continue to evolve and move along our adult path.
By this point in time, speaking from the vantage point of a psychoanalytic and/or neo-psychoanalytic point of view, and also from someone educationally trained to understand 'transferences' but as much as from the outside looking into psychoanalysis as from the inside looking out from psychoanalysis -- i.e., with educational training in Language (General Semantics) and Cognitive Therapy, Humanistic-Existentialism, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, and some elements of Jungian Psychology -- we can say two things: one, that by adulthood and particularly after the main bulk of a person's educational training, the person -- meaning any person -- including Freud -- including you, the reader -- and including myself -- are already well along our 'transference path of destiny' which is very resistant to change, for better or for worse; and two, for a psychological theorist -- albeit constructionist and/or deconstructionist -- like Freud, like Adler, like Jung, like Perls, like Masson, and like a relative unknown such as myself, these 'transference idiosyncrasies' are going to show up in the individual theorist's work under what I call, using a 'conflation' or 'confluence' of two psychoanalytic terms -- 'transference sublimation'.
Our transference sublimation is what gives our 'professional career, or work, or non-work path in life' its individual uniqueness or 'profile', and its distinctiveness or set of 'signature transference distinctions' from all others who walk on this planet. First, we had fingerprint signatures; then we had DNA signatures; and now, not totally new, but certainly still in its earlier stages of evolutionary development, we have our 'transference signatures' -- indeed, an 'internal template of unique transference signature distinctions' that make up our 'transference profile' -- laid out originally in Freud's classic essay, 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912), and similar, but different (because of a difference in underlying philosophical and psychological assumptions), to what Adler conceptualized as our 'lifestyle' and to what Brian Bird, in the 1970s, called 'the universal phenomenon of transference'.
Now, hopefully, if everything goes as expected, I will be using my own broad, integrative knowledge stemming from a combination of my imagination and my willingness to 'transgress any and all conceptual and theoretical boundaries' (one might say a part of my own transference signature), I will be able in a portion of the essays to follow to convey this knowledge of 'how to better understand an individual person's -- or read, 'client's' -- unique 'set of transference distinctions and overall transference profile'...
For anyone who has watch the television program 'Criminal Minds', this is the type of analysis that the 'criminal profilers' do on the show, but within the specialized arena of 'catching serial -- read 'transference -- criminals'; whereas, I come from a different experiential and educational background, am looking to expand this type of knowledge -- as 'customized' by yours truly -- to apply to a variety of different 'specialized and/or more general arenas and settings' -- for hopefully 'the right ethical reasons' because there is an issue of 'ethics' here that needs to be seriously contemplated and discussed/debated relative to issues of 'personal privacy' and the like -- we all know, that it is bad enough that our privacy is being invaded each and every day as we sit on our computer or cell phone and type away...
We are going to assume, for the time being and probably for the duration of this set of essays, that this type of 'transference profiling' is meant for the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client -- anything else, will need to be discussed and debated at a future time...
And this is only one area of psychoanalysis and/or neo-psychoanalysis that still can be significantly developed...
This is all part of my 40 plus educational development -- combined with my unique transference profile -- that has led me to this point in my personal evolutionary path, right here and now.
My coincidentally and/or non-coincidentally bumping into Masson's psychoanalytic work in the early to mid 1990s ('Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst', 1992; and 'The Assault on Truth': Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory') -- two highly controversial -- to the point of 'scandalous' -- books based on Masson's editorial opinions of being involved with Psychoanalysis at the highest level in the early 1980s, and more specifically, having read Freud's most intimate and personal, 'out of the public's eye', correspondence (mainly personal letters from Freud to Fliess in the period of time that Psychoanalysis' was first being developed during the 1990s) -- well, this new 'historical knowledge and/or editorialized back into history knowledge' coming into my mind-brain, partly changed the 'trajectory' of my 'transference profile and motivation', as I suddenly became obsessed with the history and evolution of the early part of psychoanalysis that Masson was writing and protesting against --i.e., Freud's alleged partial or full abandonment of his early (pre-1897) 'Pre-Psychoanalytic, trauma and seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theories' in favor of his newly evolving (1895? 1896?, and definitely,1897, onwards...) 'Classical' -- 'drive, fantasy, childhood sexuality, Oedipus and Dream theories...'
And here we are today...
By the time I had started delving more seriously into the history and evolution of psychoanalysis in the mid 1990s, I had already partly dipped into Jungian Psychology which, along with Gestalt Therapy, led me into the dialectic philosophy of Hegel -- one of the main bridges between Western/Eastern philosophy and Western psychology -- and from the dialectic logic and process of Hegelian philosophy (stated most simply as a triadic process: 1. thesis; 2. anti-thesis; and 3. synthesis which today has become popularized as 'synergy' and 'the synergetic win-win process'), I had a 'method', a 'process' by which to think both 'inside the box and outside the box at the same time' which can also be viewed as an extension of the Gestalt 'hot seat and empty chair method' into the philosophy and psychology of ideas, concepts, theories, paradigms -- and their dialectic integration.
Thus, I arrived at the metaphor that I have been using for about eight years now to label my type of philosophical and psychological thinking -- 'Hegel's Hotel'.
Actually my choice of name and title for my philosophical and psychological work goes back to that same period in the early to mid 1990s, but my writing online started, if I remember correctly, back in 2006.
When I did my online interview with Jeffrey Masson back in 2010 (google... Hegel's Hotel, The Jeffrey Masson Interview), this was the one main area of divergence in our respective paradigms of thinking: Dr. Masson was arguing for basically a return to Freud's pre-1897 'reality-trauma-seduction theory'; whereas I was arguing for a synthesis of Freud's respective Reality or RTS theory and his post-1895 evolving 'Impulsive Drive-Fantasy-Oedipus-Childhood Sexuality' Set of Theories. It is this 'evolving synthesis' between the pre-1897 Freud and the post-1896 Freud that will be the main subject of the essays that follow.
Chief among my new 'synthesis' and the resulting 'renovations' to what I will call 'Greater Classical Psychoanalysis (1893-1939) or 'GCP' will be my re-working of Freud's 'id theory' and what I will call the 'vicissitudes of the id' which include such new concepts as: 1. 'the id-ego'; 2. 'the id vault'; 3. 'id-ego compromise formations'; 4. 'allusions to id fantasies'; 5. 'the idian topdog' as distinguishable from 'the idian underdog'....
In fact, if you are a Freudian loyalist or scholar, or simply 'sufficiently educated student of Freud', do you really think that you can make any distinction between what I am calling here 'The Idian-Ego' and what could also be called 'The Narcissistic Ego'....Freud, himself, in around 1914, 1915, made the distinction between what he called 'The Pleasure Ego' and 'The Reality Ego' -- a foreshadowing of his later (1923) distinction between 'The Ego' and 'The Id'.
It is time 'we' -- I will loosely call myself a 'student of Freud' -- get back to the German idea, as defined in Freud's earliest work, that 'ego' means 'self' and, as such, 'the id' -- being a significant part of 'the self' -- is also a significant part of the ego -- and/or an 'ego-state', or an 'ego-compartment' -- defined, at least partly, like the id currently is, as a 'primal, uncivilized, narcissistic ego-state' within the confines of 'the wholistic ego' or 'Self' (here I am integrating Greater Classical Psychoanalysis with Object Relations and Self Psychology, as well).
I will leave things at that for today....I am trying to keep my essays shorter and simpler for blog-reading...but this should give you an idea of where I am going with my project here...
I will also be inter-mixing brief editorial essays on Freud's work from start to finish, essay by essay, as organized in James Strachey's Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Works. I may not get to all of them but I will certainly get to the essays that have made the most significant impact on me.
As mentioned above, Freud called his 1895 aborted project which still turned out to foreshadow most of his later work, 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'.
I will call my project here: 'Project for a Greater, Multi-Integrative, Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis and Neo-Psychoanalysis'.
Let's get going!
-- dgb, March 31st, April 4th, 2014,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Essays...
-- Are Now in Process...
We live in a competitive, 'either/or' world of choices -- which includes philosophical choices, psychological choices, business choices, financial choices, political choices, ethical choices, narcissistic choices, life-changing choices, simple choices, and the like....
We also live in a world of co-operative choices -- and probably even more common than this -- 'partly competitive-partly co-operative' choices where we aim to negotiate differences favorable towards what we want (or maybe we choose not to attempt to negotiate towards 'middle ground', if we are 'dug in by our heels' in terms of getting totally what we want) -- and what we want includes what we want both 'intra-psychically' and 'inter-personally' -- I.e., within ourselves first, and then within our encounters and/or relationships with other people second.
At this point, many factors can come into play such as: power, control, leverage...or the lack therof, narcissism, hedonism, less often altruism unless we really care about the other person and/or maintaining a long-term relationship with the person...
We can make a distinction between 'narcissistic negotiating' (where we are looking to get the best deal possible for ourselves) vs. 'egalitarian negotiating' where we are looking for a 'fair' or 'equal' deal where both ourselves and our fellow negotiator go home happy, and/or where our 'co-operator and/or competitor' in the negotiation deal want to continue to make further negotiated deals with us because they were happy with the results of the first deal.
In this latter regard, we can talk about 'mutual value-driven deals' -- deals that are negotiated towards a common ground of mutual engagement, interaction, co-operation as well as some greater or lesser level of competition, aimed at some degree of integration or synthesis where both parties involved in the 'conflict-negotiation' aim to reach some kind of 'mutually-driven, value-driven, two-way, compromise-formation' that ideally benefits both parties, maybe not to the utmost degree or to a 'perfect compromise', but certainly such that the two parties want to come back to the 'negotiating table' again in the future with each other in order to negotiate other 'mutual value-driven' deals.
When this fails to happen, we can either end up in a 'total impasse' in which both parties go their separate ways without getting what they want, or perhaps a negotiated deal is arrived at, but because one party has more leverage than the other, or is simply a better negotiator than the other, the result is that one party feels that he or she did not get the 'sufficient value' that they were looking for at the negotiating table, such that this person or group of person either vows not to return to 'do business' with this other party, and/or if there is an ongoing relationship between these two parties, such as in an employer/employee relationship, there may be negative spin-offs from the deal such that the party that did not feel he or she got 'sufficient value' from the deal, and thus feels like he or she is being exploited, will take out his or her animosity in some form of chronic and/or acute 'passive-aggression' (lateness, sickness, drop in spirit/morale, sabotage, less than stellar performance, eventually leaving from, or being fired by the company....)
Thus, negotiating compromises that have sufficient value for both parties in the arrived at compromise-formation such that both parties want to continue to develop their relationship with each other, is a vital life-skill for any person or group of persons in terms of meeting our personal, inter-personal, professional, business, financial, philosophical, psychological, political and/or any other type of perceived want or need that brings two or more parties to the negotiating table in the first place.
Negotiating is a hugely important individual life-skill and this does not necessarily mean narcissistically and/or manipulatively negotiating deals to the point where we get a 'total short-term win' to the point of losing a potential long-term negotiating partner. In this regard, a distinction can be made between 'short-term narcissistic negotiation victories' to the point of losing potential long-term friends, lovers, family members, business customers....vs. 'long-term, mutually value-laden, dialectically stabilizing, harmonizing, win-win, negotiation victories' where both parties go home happy to the point of wanting to return to the bargaining table with this particular negotiating partner...
A few of the top obstacles to this latter type of win-win negotiation style and victory are: individual and/or group narcissism, greed, hedonism, pride (just think of the 7 deadly 'sins' listed in the bible, any type of highly contentious speculation and/or interpretation, moral-ethical righteousness...grounded or ungrounded...
And it is here that we enter the highly contentious, highly righteous, highly interpretive, 'Seduction Theory Controversy' that blew Jeffrey Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment apart in the early 1980s, and goes back to a very early point in psychoanalytic history (1893-1899) where Freud suddenly 'reversed his theoretical tracks' -- 180 degrees -- and said that all his hard work over the first 3 to 4 years of his professional, psychoanalytic or pre-psychoanalytic life -- was basically a 'mistake'... He had gotten his client interpretations and generalizations about 'hysteria' and 'obsession' and 'neurosis', and his clients' early childhood memories, almost all wrong, or at least 180 degrees 'wrong'.
Now, to be sure, many of Freud's earliest ideas were carried forward into his later work, but there remained the highly provocative and controversial issue -- regarding that sometimes 'very gray' area of human existence -- specifically concerning the hugely important issue of 'knowledge' and 'epistemology' and 'what was knowledge' and what was 'pseudo-or-false knowledge', what was 'real' and what was 'distortion', what was 'real' and what was 'fiction', what was 'real' and what was 'fantasy', and to what extent, in personal experiences and memories or non-memories of experiences, did the two 'polar entities' -- 'reality' and 'fantasy', 'truth' and 'fiction', 'the objective' and 'the subjective' -- 'conflate' and/or 'collude' with each other in what a psychoanalyst or any other therapist, for that matter, was 'hearing' from his client in the therapy room...was he or she hearing 'reality' or 'fantasy', 'truth' or 'fiction', or somewhere in between? And to what extent, in between? And how much might this vary from client to client? Or could 'solid, righteous, iron-clad generalizations' be put into place? At bottom line, was the issue of 'childhood sexual abuse' -- an uncomfortable subject to talk about, hugely so back in Victorian Vienna, and to be quite frank, not that much better today... Not only the actual phenomenon is a huge 'human taboo', and today, punishable by long potential jail sentences, but even talking about the subject is not something that most of us would 'like' to do if we don't have to....And 'cover ups' or 'attempted cover-ups' are likely to be almost everywhere that the 'real phenomenon exists' -- just think of Penn State University. And now think of Vienna, Austria, 1896.
It is here that Jeffrey Masson's explosive protest against The Psychoanalytic Establishment and what he called 'Freud's Suppression of His Infamous Seduction Theory' (meaning Freud's real or alleged 'cover-up' of real or imagined childhood sexual abuse in Vienna families) that created the 'clinical evidence' for his professionally read 'Seduction (Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory' before the Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on the evening of April 21st, 1896 -- it is here that 'The Unstoppable Force' (Jeffrey Masson) collided with 'The Inpenetratable Wall' (The Psychoanalytic Establishment), with most notably, Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, at the top of the International Psychoanalytic hierarchy.
The highly respected Freud-loyalist, Kurt Eissler, a close friend of Masson's before this controversy broke out into the public eye, was in the second position of the hierarchy, and Jeffrey Masson had just been promoted to the third highest position in the hierarchy as 'The Projects Director of The Freud Archives' -- which is how he was granted full access to Freud's most private, and non-public, letters, particularly to Wilhelm Fliess, which involved intimate details surrounding Freud's 'abandonment' of his pre-1897 'reality-trauma-seduction' network of inter-connected theories at the expense of his newly evolving, post-1896, 'instinctual drive, fantasy, wish, 'screen memories', childhood sexuality, The Psycho-Sexual Stages of Development, Oedipus Complex...' network of inter-connected theories...
The 1980s 'moral conflict and resulting impasse' between Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment, surrounding Freud's 'motivation' in the 1896-1899 time period' -- i.e., Masson accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' -- still exists today, some 30 plus years after this highly contentious and provocative issue was first made public in a series of newspaper interviews, and Janet Malcolm's highly entertaining but editorially controversial book (In The Freud Archives, 1983, 1985) on this subject matter.
I, haphazardly, on one of my many visits to a downtown Toronto bookstore, picked up two of Masson's books, not knowing who the author was (but seemingly rebellious against an 'anal-retentive psychoanalytic orthodoxy' -- my first interpretation and judgment of the polar conflict between the two competing factions, which made the unknown author appealing to me, consequently, my purchase of his two books that I was looking at: 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (1990, 1991); and 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984, 1985, 1992).
For me, Jeffrey Masson's exodus out of psychoanalysis was ironically my ticket into psychoanalysis, at least in terms of igniting my passion for studying psychoanalysis, and examining it, editorializing on it, renovating and integrating it -- particularly relative to the controversial years of between 1895 and 1899 -- and from the outside looking in as opposed to the inside looking out.
While Masson was deconstructing -- or at least trying to -- Classical Psychoanalysis throughout the early 1980s and early 1990s, I was learning, or at least partly learning, Gestalt Therapy at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto (off and on, from 1979 to 1991), and Adlerian Psychology at The Adlerian Institute of Ontario for two years (1980-81).
Everyone has at least a partly unique and idiosyncratic view of the world -- formed mainly from our early childhood experiences and how we react to them, generalize about them, are motivated by them; but also partly based on our later levels and types of experiences, educational training, and again, how we react to these experiences and this training, generalize about them, and are motivated by them, as we continue to evolve and move along our adult path.
By this point in time, speaking from the vantage point of a psychoanalytic and/or neo-psychoanalytic point of view, and also from someone educationally trained to understand 'transferences' but as much as from the outside looking into psychoanalysis as from the inside looking out from psychoanalysis -- i.e., with educational training in Language (General Semantics) and Cognitive Therapy, Humanistic-Existentialism, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, and some elements of Jungian Psychology -- we can say two things: one, that by adulthood and particularly after the main bulk of a person's educational training, the person -- meaning any person -- including Freud -- including you, the reader -- and including myself -- are already well along our 'transference path of destiny' which is very resistant to change, for better or for worse; and two, for a psychological theorist -- albeit constructionist and/or deconstructionist -- like Freud, like Adler, like Jung, like Perls, like Masson, and like a relative unknown such as myself, these 'transference idiosyncrasies' are going to show up in the individual theorist's work under what I call, using a 'conflation' or 'confluence' of two psychoanalytic terms -- 'transference sublimation'.
Our transference sublimation is what gives our 'professional career, or work, or non-work path in life' its individual uniqueness or 'profile', and its distinctiveness or set of 'signature transference distinctions' from all others who walk on this planet. First, we had fingerprint signatures; then we had DNA signatures; and now, not totally new, but certainly still in its earlier stages of evolutionary development, we have our 'transference signatures' -- indeed, an 'internal template of unique transference signature distinctions' that make up our 'transference profile' -- laid out originally in Freud's classic essay, 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912), and similar, but different (because of a difference in underlying philosophical and psychological assumptions), to what Adler conceptualized as our 'lifestyle' and to what Brian Bird, in the 1970s, called 'the universal phenomenon of transference'.
Now, hopefully, if everything goes as expected, I will be using my own broad, integrative knowledge stemming from a combination of my imagination and my willingness to 'transgress any and all conceptual and theoretical boundaries' (one might say a part of my own transference signature), I will be able in a portion of the essays to follow to convey this knowledge of 'how to better understand an individual person's -- or read, 'client's' -- unique 'set of transference distinctions and overall transference profile'...
For anyone who has watch the television program 'Criminal Minds', this is the type of analysis that the 'criminal profilers' do on the show, but within the specialized arena of 'catching serial -- read 'transference -- criminals'; whereas, I come from a different experiential and educational background, am looking to expand this type of knowledge -- as 'customized' by yours truly -- to apply to a variety of different 'specialized and/or more general arenas and settings' -- for hopefully 'the right ethical reasons' because there is an issue of 'ethics' here that needs to be seriously contemplated and discussed/debated relative to issues of 'personal privacy' and the like -- we all know, that it is bad enough that our privacy is being invaded each and every day as we sit on our computer or cell phone and type away...
We are going to assume, for the time being and probably for the duration of this set of essays, that this type of 'transference profiling' is meant for the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client -- anything else, will need to be discussed and debated at a future time...
And this is only one area of psychoanalysis and/or neo-psychoanalysis that still can be significantly developed...
This is all part of my 40 plus educational development -- combined with my unique transference profile -- that has led me to this point in my personal evolutionary path, right here and now.
My coincidentally and/or non-coincidentally bumping into Masson's psychoanalytic work in the early to mid 1990s ('Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst', 1992; and 'The Assault on Truth': Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory') -- two highly controversial -- to the point of 'scandalous' -- books based on Masson's editorial opinions of being involved with Psychoanalysis at the highest level in the early 1980s, and more specifically, having read Freud's most intimate and personal, 'out of the public's eye', correspondence (mainly personal letters from Freud to Fliess in the period of time that Psychoanalysis' was first being developed during the 1990s) -- well, this new 'historical knowledge and/or editorialized back into history knowledge' coming into my mind-brain, partly changed the 'trajectory' of my 'transference profile and motivation', as I suddenly became obsessed with the history and evolution of the early part of psychoanalysis that Masson was writing and protesting against --i.e., Freud's alleged partial or full abandonment of his early (pre-1897) 'Pre-Psychoanalytic, trauma and seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theories' in favor of his newly evolving (1895? 1896?, and definitely,1897, onwards...) 'Classical' -- 'drive, fantasy, childhood sexuality, Oedipus and Dream theories...'
And here we are today...
By the time I had started delving more seriously into the history and evolution of psychoanalysis in the mid 1990s, I had already partly dipped into Jungian Psychology which, along with Gestalt Therapy, led me into the dialectic philosophy of Hegel -- one of the main bridges between Western/Eastern philosophy and Western psychology -- and from the dialectic logic and process of Hegelian philosophy (stated most simply as a triadic process: 1. thesis; 2. anti-thesis; and 3. synthesis which today has become popularized as 'synergy' and 'the synergetic win-win process'), I had a 'method', a 'process' by which to think both 'inside the box and outside the box at the same time' which can also be viewed as an extension of the Gestalt 'hot seat and empty chair method' into the philosophy and psychology of ideas, concepts, theories, paradigms -- and their dialectic integration.
Thus, I arrived at the metaphor that I have been using for about eight years now to label my type of philosophical and psychological thinking -- 'Hegel's Hotel'.
Actually my choice of name and title for my philosophical and psychological work goes back to that same period in the early to mid 1990s, but my writing online started, if I remember correctly, back in 2006.
When I did my online interview with Jeffrey Masson back in 2010 (google... Hegel's Hotel, The Jeffrey Masson Interview), this was the one main area of divergence in our respective paradigms of thinking: Dr. Masson was arguing for basically a return to Freud's pre-1897 'reality-trauma-seduction theory'; whereas I was arguing for a synthesis of Freud's respective Reality or RTS theory and his post-1895 evolving 'Impulsive Drive-Fantasy-Oedipus-Childhood Sexuality' Set of Theories. It is this 'evolving synthesis' between the pre-1897 Freud and the post-1896 Freud that will be the main subject of the essays that follow.
Chief among my new 'synthesis' and the resulting 'renovations' to what I will call 'Greater Classical Psychoanalysis (1893-1939) or 'GCP' will be my re-working of Freud's 'id theory' and what I will call the 'vicissitudes of the id' which include such new concepts as: 1. 'the id-ego'; 2. 'the id vault'; 3. 'id-ego compromise formations'; 4. 'allusions to id fantasies'; 5. 'the idian topdog' as distinguishable from 'the idian underdog'....
In fact, if you are a Freudian loyalist or scholar, or simply 'sufficiently educated student of Freud', do you really think that you can make any distinction between what I am calling here 'The Idian-Ego' and what could also be called 'The Narcissistic Ego'....Freud, himself, in around 1914, 1915, made the distinction between what he called 'The Pleasure Ego' and 'The Reality Ego' -- a foreshadowing of his later (1923) distinction between 'The Ego' and 'The Id'.
It is time 'we' -- I will loosely call myself a 'student of Freud' -- get back to the German idea, as defined in Freud's earliest work, that 'ego' means 'self' and, as such, 'the id' -- being a significant part of 'the self' -- is also a significant part of the ego -- and/or an 'ego-state', or an 'ego-compartment' -- defined, at least partly, like the id currently is, as a 'primal, uncivilized, narcissistic ego-state' within the confines of 'the wholistic ego' or 'Self' (here I am integrating Greater Classical Psychoanalysis with Object Relations and Self Psychology, as well).
I will leave things at that for today....I am trying to keep my essays shorter and simpler for blog-reading...but this should give you an idea of where I am going with my project here...
I will also be inter-mixing brief editorial essays on Freud's work from start to finish, essay by essay, as organized in James Strachey's Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Works. I may not get to all of them but I will certainly get to the essays that have made the most significant impact on me.
As mentioned above, Freud called his 1895 aborted project which still turned out to foreshadow most of his later work, 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'.
I will call my project here: 'Project for a Greater, Multi-Integrative, Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis and Neo-Psychoanalysis'.
Let's get going!
-- dgb, March 31st, April 4th, 2014,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Essays...
-- Are Now in Process...
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:
......................................................................................
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
..............................................................
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).
..............................................................................................................................................
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)
.......................................................................................................................
-- 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.'
......................................................................................
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
..............................................................
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...
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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)
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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...
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'In some cases, no doubt, we are concerned with experiences which must be regarded as severe traumas -- an attempted rape, perhaps, which reveals to the immature girl at a blow all the brutality of sexual desire, or 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!
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'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)
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-- 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....
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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...
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