Just reconstructed...Aug. 31st, 2009.
Every time I start an essay on this very provocative and controversial subject matter of 'Freud's and Masson's Seduction Theory Controversy', I keep looking for more and more interpretive and evaluative clarity, first in myself, and second in the way I convey my thinking to you -- I start in essentially the same place and end up up traveling to, and finishing up, somewhere completely, or at least partly different.
I'm not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. I think it is a good thing.
It brings us to this essential point:
Every thing is subject to change -- including human thinking, both 'inside and/or outside the box' which is our own particular representation and construction of the millions of different stimuli that life throws at us, both inside and outside our minds and bodies.
I keep going over this whole 'Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis vs. Masson and the 'Psychoanalytic Deconstructionists' relative to this now 113 year old Seduction Theory Controversy' which Masson re-opened very forcefully and dramatically in the early 1980s.
I pound my head with this issue, going back over the clinical facts and the editorial conclusions from both sides, trying to establish for myself where 'right' and 'wrong' is, 'good' and 'bad', 'guilty' and 'innocent'.
One time Freud is wrong but innocent of all moral-ethical charges against him. Another time -- he is not. There is still the 'Emma Ekstein scandal' and what would seem to be Freud's almost 20 year involvement with 'cocaine' (1894-1904) in which Freud was passing out cocaine like it was aspirin to his friends, probably his wife, his patients, probably Fliess and/or visa versa, a patient died to some combination of morphine and cocaine addiction under Freud's watch...even though no one knew at the beginning what the properties of cocaine were, how dangerous it was, how addictive it was, and other doctors were experimenting with it in similar ways, still Freud was involved in some highly risky and dangerous forms of 'medical and surgical treatment' that seemed to fly in the face of (without too much concern on Freud's part) the medical establishment's Hippocratic Oath: 'First, Do the patient no harm!'
But then again, there have always been risky and dangerous forms of 'therapy' in the evolution of medical treatment, and even today, one can quite legitimately ask the question: 'How closely do radiologists and chemo-therapists adhere to The Hippocratic Oath?'
Still, Freud's involvement with cocaine between approximately 1894 and 1904 is a bigger taboo topic than even his abandonment of The Seduction Theory between 1896 and 1899, and someone has to legitimately ask the question -- no different than an athlete who is known to be, or have been, on steroids -- 'To what extent did Freud's cocaine involvement during this time period (1894-1904) affect his theoretical as well as therapeutic work?'
And more specifically, did it have any affect on Freud's abandonment of The Seduction Theory and his evolution into 'Fantasy Theory'?
Doesn't it seem rather strange that no orthodox Psychoanalyst in approximately 110 years has ever professionally touched this question, let alone attempted to answer it, not even to my knowledge, Dr. Masson?
And then there is -- the 'bull in the china shop' -- Dr. Masson. Did Dr. Masson commit any epistemological and/or ethical errors or omissions in this 'Watergate' of a Psychoanalytic controversy/scandal? Such as accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' when none of us 80 to 100 years later can profess to know for sure what Freud's mindset was back between 1896 and 1900. Did Masson overstep his own ethical boundaries in this respect -- and kill his own career in Psychoanalysis in the process?
And then there is the question of whether Freud's 'Seduction Theory' -- meaning his 'Childhood Sexual Assault Theory' -- was ever fully justified by the clinical evidence in the first place? I have made this point this point before. Freud had a propensity for jumping to fast, provocative generalizations and theoretical conclusions (The Seduction Theory, The Oedipal Theory, The Childhood Sexuality and Sexual Fantasy Theory, The Death Instinct Theory...) that had a tendency of overstepping the boundaries of 'good epistemology' -- 'good rational-empiricism'. It almost seemed like Freud had a propensity throughout his life -- almost as if it was a 'transference repetition compulsion and/or serial behavior pattern' -- to 'shock people first', and then to 'justify' his provocative, controversial, shocking 'scientific conclusions' with 'rhetorical arguments' that were well put together and seemingly tightly argued -- almost like a prosecution or defense lawyer putting together a 'good case' -- even though, when you really delve into the case and get to the bottom of it, you find that the case, is at best, based on very 'flimsy' and 'far-stretched' clinical evidence that could just as well or better support 5 or 10 other completely different clinical theories.
Again and again, I need to impress upon you as a reader, that life offers each and every one of us a myriad of ever changing, connected and unconnected, stimuli that can be interpreted and evaluated in a multitude of different ways depending on our own personal background, our own experiences, our own narcissistic biases and interests...so to create a theory -- any theory -- is to start to 'think inside a box', 'a theoretical box of our own making' which in effect, 'leads the witness', leads the reader, in a particular direction, towards the conclusion and the theory of our own making -- which may be only one of many other possible conclusions and theories that another person could draw from the same 'myriad of connected and/or not connected stimuli'.
Furthermore, as soon as we start to abstract, as soon as we start to 'pick and choose' what evidence we will include and what evidence we will leave out we are once again, leading the witness, leading the reader, on a trip to either 'epistemological and/or ethical clarification' and/or on a trip to 'Never, Never Land' -- a 'boxed theory of our own making', good and/or bad, which for better or for worse, is a 'sound bite' or a 'visual bite' that leaves part of life out and this part of life that is left out may be either non-important to the discussion at hand or it could be critically important and, at the same time, neglected, suppressed, marginalized.
This problem of 'thinking inside a narcissistically biased theoretical box' is just as relevant to Masson and his re-supporting and re-trumpeting the Seduction Theory as it is relative to Freud basically abandoning the Seduction Theory and moving into his replacement theories: 1. 'The Oedipal Theory' and 2. 'Childhood/Adult Fantasy Theory'.
That is why I like, for the most part, to take a combined 'Spinozian-Hegelian' approach and go with the assumption that there is usually a 'combination of truth, distortion, and fantasy in any and every theory' -- not just The Seduction Theory, and not just the Oedipal Theory -- but both as they dialectically engage with each other and potentially come together in integrative theoretical union.
You see my own theory on this whole matter unites a whole host of different theories and theorists: 1. Traumacy Theory; 2. Narcissistic Fixation and Fantasy Theory; 3. Oedipal Theory; 4. 'Transference as an Obsessive-Compulsive Wish for Cathartic Healing and Closure' Theory; 5. Adlerian Early Recollection and Lifestyle Theory.
This idea of uniting seemingly dualistic and paradoxical theories is certainly not foreign to science. In the evolution of physics, 'particle' theory evolved into 'wave' theory which then evolved into a dialectically united 'particle-wave' theory which we now call 'quantum physics'.
I don't pretend to understand quantum physics but I certainly do understand the concept of 'dialectic union' which makes up half the essence and content of my own 'dialectic union and separation (or individuation)' theory of evolution.
Let us see what this particular website below has to say about the seemingly dualistic, paradoxical nature of matter and light.
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http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Particle-Wave-Duality-Paradox.htm
On Truth & Reality
The Spherical Standing Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) in Space
This website is primarily on the subjects of truth and reality. We get about 300,000 page views each week and are one of the top philosophy / physics sites on the Internet. The central thesis is best stated in three parts;
i) We must know the truth to act wisely, and truth comes from physical reality.
ii) Our present and past societies are not founded on truth and act unwisely (overpopulation, destruction of nature, pollution, climate change, religious and economic wars, etc.).
iii) We now know the correct language for describing physical reality (all matter interactions are wave interactions in space), and this knowledge is critical for our future survival, being the source of truth & wisdom.
So how do we prove that this is true? Everyone will agree that true knowledge of reality must explain and solve the fundamental problems of knowledge in physics, philosophy and metaphysics. This website does exactly that. The above subject pages provide short summaries / simple solutions to these central problems of knowledge. To begin it is useful to read the Introduction & Summary to this Physics Philosophy Metaphysics Website.
Short Summary of Quantum Physics
These Quantum Physics pages (on either side) show how this new understanding of physical reality (that all light and matter interactions are wave interactions in Space) explains and solves the central problems of Quantum Theory.
The mistake was to work from Newton's foundation of particles and instantly acting gravity forces in space and time (many things) and then have to add more things to explain light and electricity, i.e. charged particles, continuous electromagnetic fields and waves (Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz, Einstein's Special Relativity).
Thus by 1900 the central concepts of Physics were;
Matter as discrete particles with both gravitational mass and electrical charge properties (mass-charge duality).
Light as continuous electromagnetic waves (velocity of light c).
Continuous electromagnetic fields created by discrete charged particles (discrete particle-continuous field duality).
Local charge interactions limited by the velocity of electromagnetic waves (velocity of light c).
Over the next 30 years Quantum Theory destroyed these foundations by showing the exact opposite, that;
Matter has wave properties thus a particle-wave duality (de Broglie Waves, Schrodinger's wave equations).
Light has discrete particle properties thus a particle-wave duality (Light 'quanta', Max Planck, Albert Einstein)
Continuous deterministic fields are replaced by discrete statistical fields e.g. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation, Born's probability waves to predict the location of the particle.
Non-Local matter interactions (instant action-at-distance EPR Bell Aspect)
The solution to this confusion and contradiction is simple once known. Describe reality from One thing existing, Space (that we all commonly experience) and its Properties. i.e. Rather than adding matter particles to space as Newton did, we consider Space with properties of a continuous wave medium for a pure Wave Structure of Matter. This is the Most Simple Science Theory of Physical Reality (despite many claims to the contrary, science does actually work, we just needed the correct foundation of continuous Space rather than discrete matter).
Most importantly, this Dynamic Unity of Reality provides simple solutions to all the 'strangeness' of quantum physics that has resulted from this discrete / disconnected 'particle' conception of matter.
i.e.
Matter is a Wave Structure of Space - the Spherical Wave Center creates the 'particle' effect.
Light is a Wave Phenomena - however, spherical standing waves (matter) act as spherical resonators and only interact (resonantly couple) at discrete frequencies / energies which gives the effect of discrete light 'quanta'.
Reality is both Continuous (Space) and Discrete (Standing Wave Interactions).
Reality is both Local and Non-Local - matter is causally inter-connected in Space by its Spherical In and Out Waves (traveling at velocity c, i.e. Einstein's Locality).
However (and very importantly), with relative motion these matter wave interactions form de Broglie phase waves that travel at high velocities (c2/v), explaining EPR and apparent Non-Locality / Instant-Action-at-a-Distance.
Reality is Causally Connected but Non-Deterministic / Statistical. The waves in quantum theory are real waves (not abstract 'probability waves') but lack of knowledge of the interconnected whole (infinite Space) causes statistical behaviour of matter (as Einstein believed).
I realize this is a pretty abrupt / radical introduction to a new way of seeing things - that it will take some time to adjust. But the Wave Structure of Matter is simple sensible and obvious once known. Each Quantum Physics page has a short summary and important quotes, so it is easy to click around and confirm things for yourself. Enjoy! Think!
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. (Mohandas Gandhi)
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)
Hell is Truth Seen Too Late. (Thomas Hobbes)
A Simple Solution to the Wave Particle Duality of Light and Matter
Represents Spherical In-Wave (our future) flowing In to form the Wave-Center (our present) + Represents Spherical Out-Wave (our past) flowing Out of the Wave-Center (our present) = Combined In-Waves and Out-Waves form a Spherical Standing Wave about the Wave Center (our present). This explains the particle / wave duality of Matter. Matter is a Spherical Standing Wave - the Wave-Center causes the 'particle' effect of matter.
In-Wave + Out-Wave = Standing Wave
Introduction: The 'particle' conception of matter (from ancient Greeks) has caused many problems and paradoxes for modern Physics (as the quotes below make clear). Strangely, it is only in the past 20 years that a pure Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) has been properly examined. We then find (by replacing 'particles' with Spherical Standing Waves) that the natural laws originate from the behaviour of the waves and the properties of space.
It will also become clear that the classic point-particle model of charge and mass substance cannot satisfy either the logic of science or the many puzzles of physics.
The model is only an historical relic and its presence in the 'Standard Model' of physics is an obstacle to progress. This is evident in the quotes below which highlight the problems of modern physics when founded on the discrete and separate particle concept;
The idea that something can be both a wave and a particle defies imagination, but the existence of this wave-particle "duality" is not in doubt. ... It is impossible to visualise a wave-particle, so don't try. ... The notion of a particle being "everywhere at once" is impossible to imagine. (Davies, Superforce)
Wave Particle Duality: Heisenberg - Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. (Heisenberg)
Wave Particle Duality: Lee Smolin - It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it. (Smolin, 1997)It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it. (Smolin, 1997)
In the quantum world, subatomic particles lurch about, suddenly disappearing from their starting points and reappearing as if by magic somewhere else. ... In many cases you cannot watch a subatomic particle move from A to B; you can only observe it at point A, and, sometime later, observe it again at point B. Just how it got there is a mystery. In this realm particles sometimes act entirely like waves, and vice versa. This equivalence of particles and waves is related to the equivalence of matter and energy that Einstein discovered. ... How could nature be both things at once? How could both pictures be right? Yet how could either be wrong? (Margaret Wertheim)
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DGB...cont'd..
I am reminded of a movie I recently watched -- a 'crazy' movie that I liked -- called 'Choke'. It was about a sex addict whose mother was locked up in a psychiatric institute and who was looking for some sort of cathartic conflict resolution with his mother while at the same time going around seducing women, having emotionless sex with them.
At one scene in the movie, our main character has successfully managed to seduce a female doctor at the psychiatric institute (who unbeknownst to him is actually a patient disguised as a doctor). However, at the actual point of their sexual engagement, our main character can't get it going. The doctor/patient asks him: 'How is it that you can have sex with pretty well every other female patient and/or nurse in the institute but you can't have sex with me.' And he replies, 'Well, I think it is because I am beginning to like you.' And she replies: 'Well, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the two do not have to be mutually exclusive?'
Well, this is my point here -- and the point of each and every possible or actual dialectical theory: Seemingly opposing, paradoxical theories do not have to necessarily be mutually exclusive. Rather, they may easily -- or with some dialectical creativity -- dialectically merge into each other.
Freud's 'Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory' was too reductionistic -- quite simply, it may partly apply to a certain class of people are sexually assaulted as children but childhood sexual assault is not the root of all neurosis because not every person is sexually assaulted as a child. Thus, Freud's early (1893-1895) 'Traumacy-Cathartic Therapeutic Release' theory was a better theory because it applied to a much broader range of people -- probably us all.
However, Freud's opposing, seemingly paradoxical theory -- 'The Oedipal Theory' -- is potentially just as powerful, particularly if we don't take it literally but rather metaphorically/symbolically.
The most important part about the Oedipal Complex is not that we 'unconsciously' wanted to have sex with our mother when we were a child (and/or wanted her all to ourselves) -- or in the young girl's case, the father which was called 'The Electra Complex'.
Rather, the most important point here, is that we all have 'Mother Complexes' and we all have 'Father Complexes', and understanding the essential internal and external psychological and social dynamics of these Mother and Father Complexes makes up a huge part of understanding our psychological selves.
If I find a friend or a lover who is like my mom in some essential qualities, then we can say that I have an 'Active Mother Transference Complex' at work. Or alternatively, if I find a friend or a lover who is like my father, we can say that I have an 'Active Father Transference Complex' at work.
This obviously brings into our discussion here, and into over evolving 'multi-dialectic theory of health and neurosis', the factor of 'transference'.
So here is what we have established so far:
1. Everybody has some sort of 'traumacy' or another in their childhood background that has had a profound effect upon the development of their character and psychological makeup.
2. Everybody has an 'Oedipal Complex'-- meaning a 'Mother Complex' -- regardless of whether one's own particular mother was present or missing, loving or sadistic, accepting and/or rejecting of us as a child.
3. Everybody has similar and/or different, separate and/or united, types of 'Transference Complexes' at work in their personality that start from childhood and evolve in different ways in adulthood -- the connection being certain 'structural and/or process similarities' between a childhood relationship and an adult relationship, and/or the need to 'repeat and/or resolve a childhood scene' looking for some sort of 'narcissistic, emotional purging, often sexual release, and/or therapeutic catharsis'.
4. Everybody has 'narcissistic and/or sexual fixations'. These narcissistic-sexual
fixations may have much to do with something that we 'saw as children' and were 'narcissistically and/or erotically aroused by, either then and/or later (perhaps becoming more acute once puberty and hormonal sexual functioning sets in). And/or paradoxically, many narcissistic-sexual fixations arise out of childhood traumacies through a combination of psychological processes such as introjection, identification, and what I call 'positive and/or negative transference reversal'.
Here is where it starts to get a little complicated. My concept of 'negative transference-reversal' is an extension of Ferenczi's and Anna Freud's concept of 'identification with the aggressor'. Only I often re-label 'identification with the aggressor' as 'identification with the rejector and/or victimizer'.
What this means essentially is that we learn to reject people as adults in a 'signature transference style' that copies the way we remember ourselves being rejected by someone when we were a child. This 'signature negative transference reversal trademark' can become the 'rejecting and/or victimizing trademark' of any 'serial rejector and/or victimizer' -- at the most extreme end, the serial arsonist, the serial rapist, the serial child molester, the serial killer...
Now let us see if we can draw all of these different ideas and theories together into one 'DGB Multi-Dialectic Transference Theory of Narcissistic Neurosis'.
Lately, I have become fascinated by the tv show 'Criminal Minds' -- a show that documents the activities of a group of 'serial profilers' who go hunting after serial criminals. (Privately, I am saying to myself, 'Hey, these guys -- a group of about 8 men and women -- are doing essentially what I do, and although they are more specialized in their particular brand of training, there may actually be some areas of their thinking that I can perhaps do a little better than them on, and take their thinking relative to 'crimes of transference' -- i.e., 'serial crimes' -- one step, or a few steps, further than it is already developed.
In the particular show I was partly watching last night, the profilers were hunting down a serial killer whose 'transference signature' was seducing and then torturing and drowning his female victims.
Later in the show, we find out that the killer's mother had died in a car accident when he was 10 years old. Still later in the show, we find out that the mother had actually drowned in the car accident in a small amount of water in the car (they must have driven into a lake), and that the son was also in the car at the time that she died, and that -- so concluded one of the profilers -- the only way that she could have drowned in the car in this small amount of water that was in the car, was if the son had actually held her head down under the water. So, further concluded the profiler, this was the killer's first -- and most emotionally cathartic -- 'signature drowning kill'.
Now, I don't know how closely this tv show actually follows the real facts of real killers in in real serial cases. But if we were to assume that this data that we have to work with is correct, then 'DGB Serial Transference Proliling' would have a couple of more things to add to the information above.
1. This act of extreme 'transference violence' -- i.e., drowning his mother -- may have been his first act of 'negative transference reversal' -- i.e., identification with the victimizer/rejector/aggressor. But it was not a memory that indicated the actual 'transference source of origin' of the killer's extreme 'transference rage and narcissistic impulse towards wanting to drown his mother'. We could say that perhaps the son had an extreme rage built up towards his mother -- and that the car accident and the water in the car became the opportunity by which he could finally vent his rage towards her. But this would not really explain 'water' and 'drowning' as 'signature, obsessive-compulsive, transference characteristics'.
2. For this, we would probably have to search further back into the killer's childhood relationship with his mother to find the actual 'memory-transference source of origin' of the killer's childhood rage towards his mother -- and to all women afterwords (who became transference-clones of his mother). Indeed, we would expect to find a memory, further back in the killer's childhood, where the mother almost drowned the child. This is the only type of transference memory that would suffice as a transference memory of origin' that would explain such an extremist reaction on the part of the child in terms of his rage towards his mother and his act of 'extreme negative transference reversal and violence towards her -- i.e., drowning her, which would then become the 'transference signature' of all later victims.
I am sorry that I had to use such a morbid example of negative transference reversal here but part of our purpose here is to better understand 'the darker side of human behavior'.
Let me close this paper with an example of a 'transference complex' at work in Freud's own life -- an example I used in an earlier paper I wrote called 'Truth, Narcissism, and Sophistry' (Sept. 2008).
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Freud's Earliest Transference-Traumacy Memory-Scene
Freud's earliest transference scene -- or at least one of them, and undoubtedly in my opinion his main one -- was a situation where he walked into his mom and dad's bedroom while they were having sex together -- one of the most classic, childhood transference scenes. In that instant, Freud took on a 'bi-polar split' between himself as the young child in the memory -- the curious, the investigator, the scientist, the person looking for 'epistemological clarity and truth' in what exactly was happening in this scene that he could not fathom while his dad was crouched over his mom, presumably in all his glory (his dad and his mom independently and integratively providing elements of what Fairbairn called 'The Exciting Object' for the young Sigmund Freud; also, his dad in the memory which would become Freud's 'introjected dad in his personality' -- the narcissist, the sophist, the illusionist, the mesmerizer -- trying to hide from his son 'the epistemological truth' of what exactly was going on in this most uncomfortable of situations relative to what actually was going on...
Twenty or thirty years later we start to see the beginning of 'Freud's repetition compulsion' -- or what I would call his 'transference re-creation compulsion' -- just like in Psycho, just like in Straight-Jacket, just like in 'The Dark Knight', just like what Freud would start to see in the behavior of his clients, starting with Breuer and 'The Anna O' case -- the first case history of Psychoanalysis. Repetition compulsions that started to follow the 'structural and psycho-dynamic format' of the client's -- in this case, Freud's -- earliest memory.
The Psychoanalytic Room starts to take its famous formation. The 'psychoanalytic couch' replaces 'the bed' in Freud's transference scene. The client replaces 'one bi-polar split' in Freud's 'introjected dad' in the form of 'resistance' and 'the defense mechanisms' -- the client doing everything in his or her power to 'hide the narcissistic truth' from 'Freud-the-grown-up-child's scientific-psychoanalytic investigation: The power of 'resistance, defense, narcissism, sophistry and illusion' over the 'power of epistemological truth'.
The client -- usually a woman -- also replaces his mom in his transference memory. And the 'real truths' -- both the clients' childhood (sexual) traumacies and their childhood and/or adult sexual fantasies -- start to 'rise to the top' and 'overflow into the psychoanalytic investigation', thus, giving Freud the type of 'transference cathartic release' (as well as the client) that satisfied Freud's own transference-traumacy reversal complex -- at least the one formulated from this memory.
Here is one of the strongest -- if not the strongest -- bi-polar splits in the human psyche. Freud found it in his parent's bedroom. And now he was going to bring it to the attention of the whole world in what would eventually become 'the id' vs. 'the ego' and/or 'superego'. Sexual and/or narcissisitic impulse -- hidden by 'human sophistry' vs. the 'ethical restraint' and/or 'the pursuit of epistemological truth'.
What kind of human drama and soap opera would we have without this core bi-polar split in the human psyche? Well, we could talk about the 'Liberal/Conservative' bi-polar split; or the 'Capitalist/Socialist' bi-polar split; or the 'Republican/Democrat' bi-polar split. But these discussions we will save for another day.
For now, this is where we will leave our hopefully provocative discussion on 'Truth, Narcissism, and Sophistry' on this fine, Friday morning, 10:11am.
-- dgb, September 5th, 2008.
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And this is where I will leave you on this fine Monday morning, almost a year later.
-- dgb, Aug. 31, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
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Sunday, August 16, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Always Remain -- 'Grounded'!! Don't Let Any Abstractionist Chase You Into Outer Space!! Don't Follow 'Smoke and Mirrors'!!
"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me."
-- G.W.F Hegel
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This sentence defies not only Aristolean logic but Hegel's own 'dialectic logic' as well!!!
If A is not B, then A cannot be B at the same time. This is Aristole's logic of 'non-identity'.
However, as stated above, the sentence defies Hegel's own dialectic logic as well.
The only way that A can both not be B and be B at the same time is if the two categories overlap such as in a sentence like this:
'Only one man understood me, and even he didn't completely understand me.
But this is not what Hegel said.
Thus, the only conclusion that I can come up with is this: Hegel did not wish to be understood; he was simply messing with our heads.
Sometimes -- oftentimes -- great philosophers can get away with this sort of 'cognitive convulutionism' or 'mental mysticism' because we have come to expect them to be brilliant and profound. We let them play the 'tantalizing topdog' while we play the 'underachieving underdog'.
We exercise to death and destroy thousands of brain cells trying to rack our brains, to turn our brains inside out, upside down, and side to side in order to figure out what a philosopher like Hegel here is saying. What on God's earth he meant by it. For the truly obsessed -- the Hegelian scholars -- it might become an all encompassing passion. Read his life history and you might finally understand what he meant here.
The truth is far more simple. The sentence means nothing.
If it had been said by anyone else but a great philosopher it would have been buried in the dust of time. Never to resurface again. But instead, the sentence keeps re-appearing over and over again, in philosophy classes, on the internet, on Flicker, like some ancient Chinese puzzle that only those with an IQ of over 150 can maybe -- with the greatest of efforts -- figure out.
'If only I can wrack my brain again just one more time, maybe I can finally understand what Hegel is saying here'. Meanwhile, Hegel is laughing in his grave, shaking his head from side to side, saying 'Gotcha! Gotcha all!!! Even from my grave, I am your master and you are my slave!'
Wittgenstein did the same thing with Bertrand Russell when he drove Russell 'over the deep end' by convincing him that there was a 'hippo in the room'. At this moment in time, Wittgenstein became Russell's 'master' and Russell became Wittgenstein's 'slave'.
Fritz Perls used to say in some instances it is important that we 'lose our minds and come to our senses'.
Or put another way -- in General Semantics terminology:
Come down the abstraction ladder young man or woman; don't go further up it!!! Let the philosopher or theorist come down to earth and come to you; don't try to chase him into philosophical outer space!! Or at least expect that he will 'dialectically meet you half way'. Don't turn him into your master, and you into his slave. This is my extension of one of Bacon's 'False Idols' -- 'Idols of Abstraction'.
Always remain -- grounded. Don't let Hegel or Kant or Wittgenstein or Freud chase you into outer space
This I learned from Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa. (Language in Thought and Action, 1949, 1972, 1991). Don't follow 'smoke and mirrors'!!
-- dgb, August 9th, 2009.
-- G.W.F Hegel
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This sentence defies not only Aristolean logic but Hegel's own 'dialectic logic' as well!!!
If A is not B, then A cannot be B at the same time. This is Aristole's logic of 'non-identity'.
However, as stated above, the sentence defies Hegel's own dialectic logic as well.
The only way that A can both not be B and be B at the same time is if the two categories overlap such as in a sentence like this:
'Only one man understood me, and even he didn't completely understand me.
But this is not what Hegel said.
Thus, the only conclusion that I can come up with is this: Hegel did not wish to be understood; he was simply messing with our heads.
Sometimes -- oftentimes -- great philosophers can get away with this sort of 'cognitive convulutionism' or 'mental mysticism' because we have come to expect them to be brilliant and profound. We let them play the 'tantalizing topdog' while we play the 'underachieving underdog'.
We exercise to death and destroy thousands of brain cells trying to rack our brains, to turn our brains inside out, upside down, and side to side in order to figure out what a philosopher like Hegel here is saying. What on God's earth he meant by it. For the truly obsessed -- the Hegelian scholars -- it might become an all encompassing passion. Read his life history and you might finally understand what he meant here.
The truth is far more simple. The sentence means nothing.
If it had been said by anyone else but a great philosopher it would have been buried in the dust of time. Never to resurface again. But instead, the sentence keeps re-appearing over and over again, in philosophy classes, on the internet, on Flicker, like some ancient Chinese puzzle that only those with an IQ of over 150 can maybe -- with the greatest of efforts -- figure out.
'If only I can wrack my brain again just one more time, maybe I can finally understand what Hegel is saying here'. Meanwhile, Hegel is laughing in his grave, shaking his head from side to side, saying 'Gotcha! Gotcha all!!! Even from my grave, I am your master and you are my slave!'
Wittgenstein did the same thing with Bertrand Russell when he drove Russell 'over the deep end' by convincing him that there was a 'hippo in the room'. At this moment in time, Wittgenstein became Russell's 'master' and Russell became Wittgenstein's 'slave'.
Fritz Perls used to say in some instances it is important that we 'lose our minds and come to our senses'.
Or put another way -- in General Semantics terminology:
Come down the abstraction ladder young man or woman; don't go further up it!!! Let the philosopher or theorist come down to earth and come to you; don't try to chase him into philosophical outer space!! Or at least expect that he will 'dialectically meet you half way'. Don't turn him into your master, and you into his slave. This is my extension of one of Bacon's 'False Idols' -- 'Idols of Abstraction'.
Always remain -- grounded. Don't let Hegel or Kant or Wittgenstein or Freud chase you into outer space
This I learned from Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa. (Language in Thought and Action, 1949, 1972, 1991). Don't follow 'smoke and mirrors'!!
-- dgb, August 9th, 2009.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
On The Academic and Experiential Origins and Evolution of DGBN Philosophy-Psychology
'Hegel's Hotel: GAP-DGB Philosophy-Psychology started out as my Honors Thesis in Psychology, called 'Evaluation and Health', written 30 years ago, in 1979.
'Evaluation and Health' became both the primary foundation and the primary stimulus for all my research and theorizing afterward -- what in effect has now become 'Hegel's Hotel' -- a network of some 30 to 50 evolving online blog sites which I began writing in 2006, and am still going.
In between now (2009) and then (1979), was an essay that I started writing in around 1981 which was called: 'Conflict in The Personality: A Critique of the Adlerian Assumption of Unity in the Personality'.
By 1981, after having graduated with my Honors degree in psychology from the University of Waterloo, I landed on the doorstep of both The Adlerian Institute of Ontario, which was run at the time through OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) and which was right across the street and partly connected to the University of Toronto (while at the same time also connected to The Adlerian Institute of Chicago. Also by 1981, I had become involved with The Gestalt Institute of Toronto which, when I first showed up there, was on Markham Street behind The Brunswick House in downtown Toronto, and which moved shortly thereafter down the street to a house on Cecil Street. (Currently, The Gestalt Institute of Toronto is on Carlton Street, on the east side of downtown Toronto.)
Being exposed to two different schools of psychology -- Adlerian Psychology and Gestalt Therapy, of which The Adlerian Institute was by far the more formal of the two, being taught in standard classrooms, while The Gestalt Institute was much less formal, seemingly almost a continuation of the 1960s and early 1970s -- a Fritz Perls, Esalon, Big Sur, California type environment with everyone sitting around on pillows waiting to do 'hot seat' work -- I couldn't help but start to become aware of the different content of psychological theory and the different style of psychotherapy.
Adlerian Psychology was a product mainly of 'cognitive-rational-emotive' philosophy of which Albert Ellis would be influenced by Adler and take this brand and branch of psychotherapy even further in a 'cognitive-rational-emotive' therapy, even calling his brand of psychotherapy 'Rational-Emotive Therapy' which harks back to an ancient Greek philosopher, Epictetus: 'Man is not disturbed by things but by the way he perceives them.'
In contrast, Gestalt Therapy was much more a product of 'romantic' and 'humanistic-existential' than Adlerian Philosophy which was much more a product of 'Enlightenment Philosophy' while both Adlerian Psychology (Adler) and Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls) were influenced by having first studied Freud and practised 'Psychoanalysis'. Then the two -- Adler and years later Perls -- both split from Psychoanalysis and created their own respective 'schools' of psychology and psychotherapy.
The difference between Adler and Perls was similar to the difference between Thales and Anaximander or the difference between Spinoza and Hegel.
Thales, the Ancient, and indeed, oldest Greek and Western Philosopher was a 'monist' (the idea of everything originating in one 'cause' and/or being 'united as one whole'). Thales believed that all life originated with 'water' whereas another monist, Anaximenes, believed that all life started with 'air'.
We have here in the controversy and opposition between the ideas and theories of two of the oldest Greek philosophers, the beginning of what would be articulated about 2300 years plus in the 'dialectic theory' of Hegel the idea of contrast, opposition and the eventual 'synthesis' or 'integration' of these 'oppositional playoffs' -- i.e., in this case, the oppositional theoretical playoff between 'water' and 'air' being the first 'life substance'.
However, between Thales and Anaximenes, you have two other Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers that show up on the scene and further 'muddy' the 'theory of the origin of life'.
Anaximander, the second oldest Greek philosopher, can be viewed as the oldest Greek and Western dialectic philosopher because Anaximander was the first Greek-Western philosopher to start philosophizing about the 'opposites in life'.
Indeed, Anaximander had a very intriguing -- primitive but sophisticated -- 'mythological philosophy' that still works (with some interpretive translation) to this day.
Anaximander had a very interesting theory of 'The Apeiron' which I will translate as either 'Chaos' or 'The Background' or 'The Shadows' or 'The Universe'.
This is a modern DGB-Jungian-Gestalt 2009 version of Anaximander's Apeiron Theory, the original of which is over 2500 years old.
Probably of most relevance here is 'Ego, Hunger, and Aggression' (Fritz Perls, 1947, 1969). Perls in turn was influenced by Salomo Friedlaender's book, and theory of, 'Creative Indifference' (and 'polar differentiation'), 1918.
Well, back between 550BC and 600BC, Anaxamander offered up the first theory of 'polar differentiation'. Paraphrasing and translating at least partly into modern day language, 'The Apeiron' might be viewed again as either 'Chaos', 'The Great Unknown', 'The Universe', 'The Shadows', or 'The Great Backdrop Preceding Polar Differentiation'.
Then things split into opposites and compete with each other, trying to 'dominate' and 'overpower' each other. One opposite comes out of this 'polar conflict' as the dominant polarity and takes the limelight in the process, while the other opposite polarity is marginalized, suppressed, oftentimes repressed and oppressed, and recedes back into the background -- The Apeiron -- to regroup. Here the marginalized opposite, re-energizes, gains power, compensates for previous mistakes and ineptitude, mutates...and comes back from The Shadows into The Limelight to fight another battle with its 'Opposite Polarity' -- its more 'Dominant Half'.
However, having regained power and energy from The Shadows (i.e., The Apeiron), having evolved, compensated, and mutated, the previously marginalized and defeated oppositional polarity comes back stronger than ever, perhaps surprising the dominant power with its new found strength and energy, and overpowers the dominant polarity which may have burnt itself out in the limelight, losing power in the process.
'Polar power' ebbs and flows like the cyclical behavior of the tides, 'what goes up must come down', overthrown by a re-energizing force coming out of the Shadows, and taking over what once it lost and now has regained. Now the previously stronger polarity must retreat to the Shadows, the background, the Apeiron, to regain energy, regain power, compensate, mutate, and continue the 'polar swing of polar power' from strong to balanced to weak to balanced to strong again...and repeat -- in a nutshell, a combined interaction between an individual and group 'Will to Power' on the one hand, and a 'Will to Democratic-Dialectic, Homeostatic Balance and Egalitarianism' on the other hand.
That is my 'modernized' version of Anaxamander's more primitive but exceedingly wise and insightful theory of 'The Apeiron'. (Just watch the UFC for a while and tell me if you don't see this kind of thing happening. Same with the 'changing of the guards' relative to political parties coming in, and going out, of favor. And as Heraclitus would add later -- as well as one of the earliest Chinese philosophers (Lao tse?) -- opposites not only compete, they are also attracted to each other, need each other, and 'dialectically unite' in 'temporary harmonious, homeostatic balance'. Until something, or someone, upsets this homeostatic balance and then the whole process of 'competition' (the 'will to power and overpower') vs. 'attraction' (the 'will to dialectically and integratively and/or sexually unite' until 'individuation' pulls these attracting biological and psychological forces apart again and the whole process continues to evolve in a pattern of 'union', 'individuation', 'union', 'individuation'...always aiming to a different and/or better 'homeostatic, dialectic, power-based and/or democratic, balance'.
That which you just read above is DGB Philosophy-Psychology-Politics-Economics-Biology...summarizing 2600 years of Western Dialectic Philosophy, starting with Anaxamander and Heraclitus, most clearly stated by Hegel, and passing onward in different more healthy and/or pathological renditions through Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Nietzsche, Hitler, Freud, Jung, Adler, Foucault, Derrida, Perls...and now DGB Philosophy-Psychology...
Thus, GAP-DGB Philosophy -- the 'GAP' at one point standing for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic' and the 'DGB(N)' standing for 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging Negotiations' -- started out as a very 'Enlightenment-oriented, rational-empirical, humanistic' approach to life, philosophy, and psychology but something happened on the way to The Forum...DGB Philosophy met Gestalt Therapy, then Freud and Psychoanalysis, then Jungian Psychology, then Hegel, then Nietzsche, then Schopenhauer, then Anaxamander, Heraclitus, and Lao Tse, ....and now DGB Philosophy has a much more 'unpredictable edge' to it that encompasses much of what has happened in Western Philosophy after Enlightenment Philosophy gave way to Romantic Philosophy and then Humanistic-Existentialism, followed by the 'Power Deconstructionism' of Foucault and Derrida...
Today, DGB Philosophy-Psychology may be classified as a: 'Romantic-Enlightenment-Dialectic-Democratic-Humanistic-Existential-Homeostatic-Balance Philosophy-Psychology'. It recognizes an ongoing and evolving 'dualistic and dialectic struggle in man's nature and behavior' between 'unique individuation' and 'social union', and between 'power' and 'attraction'.
And somewhere in the midst of all of man's 'good and bad will', his and her 'unpredictability', and 'colossal stupidity and self-destructiveness, man searches for some unique and/or collective combination of: 1. 'personal excellence', 'personal meaning', 'congruence', and 'good faith' (Nietzsche, Sartre, Frankl); 2. the 'release of biological and psychological impulses and drives (Freud); 3. ethical restraint and balance (Kant, Freud); 4. a 'will to power and/or individual superiority' (Nietzsche, Adler); 5. a 'will to narcissism, greed, egotism, hedonism (Hobbes, Machiavelli, Schopenhauer, Freud...); 6. a 'will to rootedness, stability, safety, and security (Erich Fromm); 7. a will to 'excitement', 'growth', 'change', and 'new stimuli' (Nietzsche); 8. a 'will to creativity' and 'artistic self-revelation' (Erich Fromm); 9. a 'will to reason' (The Enlightenment); 10. a will to passion, love, nature and romance, the 'here and now' (Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Perls...); 11. a 'will to transcendence' in trying to make sense of all this, sometimes with the addition of a 'higher power' (God); and 12. 'a will to homeostatic balance' between all these different dialectic biological, psychological, philosophical, religious, political, economic, and legal struggles (Lao Tse, Heraclitus, Friedlaender, Cannon, Perls).
Did I miss anything?
-- dgb, August 7th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
--
That is where DGB Philosophy stands
'Evaluation and Health' became both the primary foundation and the primary stimulus for all my research and theorizing afterward -- what in effect has now become 'Hegel's Hotel' -- a network of some 30 to 50 evolving online blog sites which I began writing in 2006, and am still going.
In between now (2009) and then (1979), was an essay that I started writing in around 1981 which was called: 'Conflict in The Personality: A Critique of the Adlerian Assumption of Unity in the Personality'.
By 1981, after having graduated with my Honors degree in psychology from the University of Waterloo, I landed on the doorstep of both The Adlerian Institute of Ontario, which was run at the time through OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) and which was right across the street and partly connected to the University of Toronto (while at the same time also connected to The Adlerian Institute of Chicago. Also by 1981, I had become involved with The Gestalt Institute of Toronto which, when I first showed up there, was on Markham Street behind The Brunswick House in downtown Toronto, and which moved shortly thereafter down the street to a house on Cecil Street. (Currently, The Gestalt Institute of Toronto is on Carlton Street, on the east side of downtown Toronto.)
Being exposed to two different schools of psychology -- Adlerian Psychology and Gestalt Therapy, of which The Adlerian Institute was by far the more formal of the two, being taught in standard classrooms, while The Gestalt Institute was much less formal, seemingly almost a continuation of the 1960s and early 1970s -- a Fritz Perls, Esalon, Big Sur, California type environment with everyone sitting around on pillows waiting to do 'hot seat' work -- I couldn't help but start to become aware of the different content of psychological theory and the different style of psychotherapy.
Adlerian Psychology was a product mainly of 'cognitive-rational-emotive' philosophy of which Albert Ellis would be influenced by Adler and take this brand and branch of psychotherapy even further in a 'cognitive-rational-emotive' therapy, even calling his brand of psychotherapy 'Rational-Emotive Therapy' which harks back to an ancient Greek philosopher, Epictetus: 'Man is not disturbed by things but by the way he perceives them.'
In contrast, Gestalt Therapy was much more a product of 'romantic' and 'humanistic-existential' than Adlerian Philosophy which was much more a product of 'Enlightenment Philosophy' while both Adlerian Psychology (Adler) and Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls) were influenced by having first studied Freud and practised 'Psychoanalysis'. Then the two -- Adler and years later Perls -- both split from Psychoanalysis and created their own respective 'schools' of psychology and psychotherapy.
The difference between Adler and Perls was similar to the difference between Thales and Anaximander or the difference between Spinoza and Hegel.
Thales, the Ancient, and indeed, oldest Greek and Western Philosopher was a 'monist' (the idea of everything originating in one 'cause' and/or being 'united as one whole'). Thales believed that all life originated with 'water' whereas another monist, Anaximenes, believed that all life started with 'air'.
We have here in the controversy and opposition between the ideas and theories of two of the oldest Greek philosophers, the beginning of what would be articulated about 2300 years plus in the 'dialectic theory' of Hegel the idea of contrast, opposition and the eventual 'synthesis' or 'integration' of these 'oppositional playoffs' -- i.e., in this case, the oppositional theoretical playoff between 'water' and 'air' being the first 'life substance'.
However, between Thales and Anaximenes, you have two other Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers that show up on the scene and further 'muddy' the 'theory of the origin of life'.
Anaximander, the second oldest Greek philosopher, can be viewed as the oldest Greek and Western dialectic philosopher because Anaximander was the first Greek-Western philosopher to start philosophizing about the 'opposites in life'.
Indeed, Anaximander had a very intriguing -- primitive but sophisticated -- 'mythological philosophy' that still works (with some interpretive translation) to this day.
Anaximander had a very interesting theory of 'The Apeiron' which I will translate as either 'Chaos' or 'The Background' or 'The Shadows' or 'The Universe'.
This is a modern DGB-Jungian-Gestalt 2009 version of Anaximander's Apeiron Theory, the original of which is over 2500 years old.
Probably of most relevance here is 'Ego, Hunger, and Aggression' (Fritz Perls, 1947, 1969). Perls in turn was influenced by Salomo Friedlaender's book, and theory of, 'Creative Indifference' (and 'polar differentiation'), 1918.
Well, back between 550BC and 600BC, Anaxamander offered up the first theory of 'polar differentiation'. Paraphrasing and translating at least partly into modern day language, 'The Apeiron' might be viewed again as either 'Chaos', 'The Great Unknown', 'The Universe', 'The Shadows', or 'The Great Backdrop Preceding Polar Differentiation'.
Then things split into opposites and compete with each other, trying to 'dominate' and 'overpower' each other. One opposite comes out of this 'polar conflict' as the dominant polarity and takes the limelight in the process, while the other opposite polarity is marginalized, suppressed, oftentimes repressed and oppressed, and recedes back into the background -- The Apeiron -- to regroup. Here the marginalized opposite, re-energizes, gains power, compensates for previous mistakes and ineptitude, mutates...and comes back from The Shadows into The Limelight to fight another battle with its 'Opposite Polarity' -- its more 'Dominant Half'.
However, having regained power and energy from The Shadows (i.e., The Apeiron), having evolved, compensated, and mutated, the previously marginalized and defeated oppositional polarity comes back stronger than ever, perhaps surprising the dominant power with its new found strength and energy, and overpowers the dominant polarity which may have burnt itself out in the limelight, losing power in the process.
'Polar power' ebbs and flows like the cyclical behavior of the tides, 'what goes up must come down', overthrown by a re-energizing force coming out of the Shadows, and taking over what once it lost and now has regained. Now the previously stronger polarity must retreat to the Shadows, the background, the Apeiron, to regain energy, regain power, compensate, mutate, and continue the 'polar swing of polar power' from strong to balanced to weak to balanced to strong again...and repeat -- in a nutshell, a combined interaction between an individual and group 'Will to Power' on the one hand, and a 'Will to Democratic-Dialectic, Homeostatic Balance and Egalitarianism' on the other hand.
That is my 'modernized' version of Anaxamander's more primitive but exceedingly wise and insightful theory of 'The Apeiron'. (Just watch the UFC for a while and tell me if you don't see this kind of thing happening. Same with the 'changing of the guards' relative to political parties coming in, and going out, of favor. And as Heraclitus would add later -- as well as one of the earliest Chinese philosophers (Lao tse?) -- opposites not only compete, they are also attracted to each other, need each other, and 'dialectically unite' in 'temporary harmonious, homeostatic balance'. Until something, or someone, upsets this homeostatic balance and then the whole process of 'competition' (the 'will to power and overpower') vs. 'attraction' (the 'will to dialectically and integratively and/or sexually unite' until 'individuation' pulls these attracting biological and psychological forces apart again and the whole process continues to evolve in a pattern of 'union', 'individuation', 'union', 'individuation'...always aiming to a different and/or better 'homeostatic, dialectic, power-based and/or democratic, balance'.
That which you just read above is DGB Philosophy-Psychology-Politics-Economics-Biology...summarizing 2600 years of Western Dialectic Philosophy, starting with Anaxamander and Heraclitus, most clearly stated by Hegel, and passing onward in different more healthy and/or pathological renditions through Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Nietzsche, Hitler, Freud, Jung, Adler, Foucault, Derrida, Perls...and now DGB Philosophy-Psychology...
Thus, GAP-DGB Philosophy -- the 'GAP' at one point standing for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic' and the 'DGB(N)' standing for 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging Negotiations' -- started out as a very 'Enlightenment-oriented, rational-empirical, humanistic' approach to life, philosophy, and psychology but something happened on the way to The Forum...DGB Philosophy met Gestalt Therapy, then Freud and Psychoanalysis, then Jungian Psychology, then Hegel, then Nietzsche, then Schopenhauer, then Anaxamander, Heraclitus, and Lao Tse, ....and now DGB Philosophy has a much more 'unpredictable edge' to it that encompasses much of what has happened in Western Philosophy after Enlightenment Philosophy gave way to Romantic Philosophy and then Humanistic-Existentialism, followed by the 'Power Deconstructionism' of Foucault and Derrida...
Today, DGB Philosophy-Psychology may be classified as a: 'Romantic-Enlightenment-Dialectic-Democratic-Humanistic-Existential-Homeostatic-Balance Philosophy-Psychology'. It recognizes an ongoing and evolving 'dualistic and dialectic struggle in man's nature and behavior' between 'unique individuation' and 'social union', and between 'power' and 'attraction'.
And somewhere in the midst of all of man's 'good and bad will', his and her 'unpredictability', and 'colossal stupidity and self-destructiveness, man searches for some unique and/or collective combination of: 1. 'personal excellence', 'personal meaning', 'congruence', and 'good faith' (Nietzsche, Sartre, Frankl); 2. the 'release of biological and psychological impulses and drives (Freud); 3. ethical restraint and balance (Kant, Freud); 4. a 'will to power and/or individual superiority' (Nietzsche, Adler); 5. a 'will to narcissism, greed, egotism, hedonism (Hobbes, Machiavelli, Schopenhauer, Freud...); 6. a 'will to rootedness, stability, safety, and security (Erich Fromm); 7. a will to 'excitement', 'growth', 'change', and 'new stimuli' (Nietzsche); 8. a 'will to creativity' and 'artistic self-revelation' (Erich Fromm); 9. a 'will to reason' (The Enlightenment); 10. a will to passion, love, nature and romance, the 'here and now' (Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Perls...); 11. a 'will to transcendence' in trying to make sense of all this, sometimes with the addition of a 'higher power' (God); and 12. 'a will to homeostatic balance' between all these different dialectic biological, psychological, philosophical, religious, political, economic, and legal struggles (Lao Tse, Heraclitus, Friedlaender, Cannon, Perls).
Did I miss anything?
-- dgb, August 7th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
--
That is where DGB Philosophy stands
Monday, August 3, 2009
Does The Concept of 'Split Personality' Still Have Relevance?
The Classical Psychoanalytic Model of the human psyche is a '3-Compartment' model. Different theorists may disagree on many of the particulars of the model and the theory which for example emphasized post 1900 'Oedipal Theory' and 'Childhood-Adult Sexual Fantasy Theory' as opposed to Freud's earlier 1895 'Traumacy Theory' (with Joseph Breuer) and his one year later 'Seduction Theory' that emphasized the idea of the relationship between 'childhood sexual abuse and hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and in effect, neurosis in general'.
Running through all four of these different and/or intertwined theories was Freud's idea of 'the unconscious' and 'repression': more particularly, Freud's belief that without repression (the 'blocking of a childhood memory and/or fantasy from consciousness), you can't have 'pathological neurosis'.
I for one disagree with Freud's theory of repression, believing instead that 'subjectively perceived traumacy and/or narcissistic fixation' is a necessary precursor of neurosis but the intervening variable does not have to be 'repression' -- the 'locking out of consciousness of a dissociated or unwanted memory'. Memories can be 'dissociated' without necessarily being 'repressed', the latter of which in my opinion is more the exception than the rule. For me, 'dissociation' is a better choice of words than 'repression' because it is more all inclusive. And memories themselves don't have to necessarily be 'dissociated' to be 'neurotically operative' -- they may be easily recalled as in conscious childhood recollections but the memory may function as a 'symbolic metaphor of something that is very important in a person's life and/or character -- but the different parts of the memory may be dissociated from each other in terms of 'internal object relations' and 'ego-splits' -- and this may be the 'neurotically operative' (and 'transfrence-lifestyle') element of the memory. This conclusion, I have arrived at using a combination of different theories from different schools of psychology including: Classical Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, Adlerian Psychology, and Gestalt Therapy.
In this regard, there is much to be said for the relatively unheralded work of one of Freud's earliest 'French competitors' -- Pierre Janet and his concept of 'dissociation' and the 'splitting of the personality' into 'ego' and 'alter-ego' -- a kind of 'Dr. Jeckyl and Mr.(Mrs.)Hyde' phenomenon which more or less got picked up by Carl Jung and his concepts of 'persona' vs. 'shadow'.
'Alienation' is another name for dissociation.
We can be consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously alienated from ourselves, others, and/or society in general. Alienation, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, indicates that there is 'bad faith' going on, 'lack of congruence and integrity', between either a person and him or herself -- and/or between a person and some element of his or her natural and/or social environment (friends, family, work, spouse, government, natural environment, etc.)
In Jungian terminology, in a 'properly integrated personality', we should have internal 'awareness' of what is going on in both our 'Persona' (that part of our Ego that we easily present to the world outside of us) and our 'Shadow' (that part of our Ego that we largely 'hide' from the world outside of us).
Some similarity can be drawn between Freud's concept of 'Id' and Jung's concept of Shadow in that it is usually our Shadow that contains our innermost narcissistic desires, fantasies, and/or traumacies; likewise, with our Id. But there is a significant difference between the two concepts in that our Shadow might be hiding -- for example -- our 'Romantic Ego'. (my DGB terminology). If we have been hurt badly and/or recently in 'love', it is not at all unusual for a person to hide this 'loving, vulnerable, romantic' component of his or her ego/personality.
A theorist and/or therapist should always have both his ears and eyes 'wide open' to any 'subjective, phenomenological client-based possibility' -- not walk into the therapeutic encounter with any pre-canned, pre-stereotyped, discriminating theoretical and therapeutic bias that could pathologically lead the client away from his or her own phenomenological and existential truth.
A client is in psychotherapy not to confirm any narcissistic, righteous bias on the part of the therapist who may have consciously or unconsciously set up a type of 'hyper-vigilence' towards confirming his or her theory and 'finding' exactly what he or she is looking for (the 'self-fulfilling prophecy') -- this is bogus, pathological psychotherapy; rather, a client is in psychotherapy either for some specific purpose (hopefully coming from his or her own motivation) or perhaps more generically to 'fill in, and/or integrate the different gaps in his or her personality' -- to move towards more 'personal congruency and integrity' -- such as integrating the various potential 'gaps' between his or her 'Superego' and 'Id' or between his or her 'Persona' and 'Shadow', or between his or her 'Apollonian Ego' and 'Dionysian Ego'. And that is without necessarily 'dumping a ton of technical terminology' on the client; 'Okham's Razor' (the simplest possible interpretations, explanations, and/or terminology) is probably usually the best policy. The client is not there to get a 'PHD' in psychology -- and if he or she seems like he or she is, then there is probably a process of 'rationalization' and/or 'intellectualization' that is going on that is hiding more intimate, emotional underlying processes.
Sometimes the most intelligent people in the world can have the deepest 'personality splits' based on deep, 'core-nuclear conflicts' from early childhood. Intellect has nothing to do with an 'integrated' and/or 'split personality'.
You see -- and/or hear about -- a man with a very active, intelligent mind, who can carry on a very intelligent, interesting conversation, who has a lot of money in the bank from past successful business transactions, and what used to be a very beautiful townhouse, and you know from you own dealings with this man, or from the words of family, that the man is inside his townhouse most of the day, 'retired' at 50, drinking himself to a slow or one day suddenly quick death, littering alcoholic bottles everywhere in his once beautiful townhouse, and you ask yourself, 'What demons are going on in this man's mind? Where is the 'hole' in his psyche, his heart, his spirit, his soul? The 'gap', 'the psychic void' -- the 'lost internal object' -- is it his wife that left him a number of years ago, or is it his 'internal dad' who was a hard-line 'house alcoholic' in his own right who treated the above-mentioned son abysmally growing up. Is it his lost executive job and career? And/or all told, is it just too much time alone in his townhouse being overpowered by his own 'self-destructive thought process'?
Anyway you want to look at it, there is just no amount of alcohol that is going to fill the void in this man's soul. His townhouse has become his own personal 'death-trap' unless and/or until he becomes willing to choose another 'life path' -- a path that will get him outside of his townhouse and willing to seek out 'new external objects' (meaning people) and/or interests -- work and/or hobbies.
Nobody can choose this path for him. It has got to start with the words 'I can choose differently' and/or 'I need some help and/or support here.' I need to come to a better resolution and integration with all my 'internal demons' and/or my 'past lost and/or terrorizing internal objects'.
In Gestalt Therapy, they say, no amount of 'internal chastising' is going to change things unless and/or until we can first accept where we are, and who we are -- right now.
This is called the 'paradoxical theory of change'. No movement forward is going to happen -- indeed, we will resist all our internal 'topdogging' and all the world's external preaching -- until we can first accept who and where we are in this moment, here and now. And that might not be a pretty thing. We might have to accept all or our internal 'ugliness' -- our internal flaws, make fun of them, laugh at them, our own tragic absurdity -- before we can again start to feel and be 'pretty' again.
-- dgb, Aug. 3rd, 2009, updated and modified, Sept. 9th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
.........................................................................
Running through all four of these different and/or intertwined theories was Freud's idea of 'the unconscious' and 'repression': more particularly, Freud's belief that without repression (the 'blocking of a childhood memory and/or fantasy from consciousness), you can't have 'pathological neurosis'.
I for one disagree with Freud's theory of repression, believing instead that 'subjectively perceived traumacy and/or narcissistic fixation' is a necessary precursor of neurosis but the intervening variable does not have to be 'repression' -- the 'locking out of consciousness of a dissociated or unwanted memory'. Memories can be 'dissociated' without necessarily being 'repressed', the latter of which in my opinion is more the exception than the rule. For me, 'dissociation' is a better choice of words than 'repression' because it is more all inclusive. And memories themselves don't have to necessarily be 'dissociated' to be 'neurotically operative' -- they may be easily recalled as in conscious childhood recollections but the memory may function as a 'symbolic metaphor of something that is very important in a person's life and/or character -- but the different parts of the memory may be dissociated from each other in terms of 'internal object relations' and 'ego-splits' -- and this may be the 'neurotically operative' (and 'transfrence-lifestyle') element of the memory. This conclusion, I have arrived at using a combination of different theories from different schools of psychology including: Classical Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, Adlerian Psychology, and Gestalt Therapy.
In this regard, there is much to be said for the relatively unheralded work of one of Freud's earliest 'French competitors' -- Pierre Janet and his concept of 'dissociation' and the 'splitting of the personality' into 'ego' and 'alter-ego' -- a kind of 'Dr. Jeckyl and Mr.(Mrs.)Hyde' phenomenon which more or less got picked up by Carl Jung and his concepts of 'persona' vs. 'shadow'.
'Alienation' is another name for dissociation.
We can be consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously alienated from ourselves, others, and/or society in general. Alienation, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, indicates that there is 'bad faith' going on, 'lack of congruence and integrity', between either a person and him or herself -- and/or between a person and some element of his or her natural and/or social environment (friends, family, work, spouse, government, natural environment, etc.)
In Jungian terminology, in a 'properly integrated personality', we should have internal 'awareness' of what is going on in both our 'Persona' (that part of our Ego that we easily present to the world outside of us) and our 'Shadow' (that part of our Ego that we largely 'hide' from the world outside of us).
Some similarity can be drawn between Freud's concept of 'Id' and Jung's concept of Shadow in that it is usually our Shadow that contains our innermost narcissistic desires, fantasies, and/or traumacies; likewise, with our Id. But there is a significant difference between the two concepts in that our Shadow might be hiding -- for example -- our 'Romantic Ego'. (my DGB terminology). If we have been hurt badly and/or recently in 'love', it is not at all unusual for a person to hide this 'loving, vulnerable, romantic' component of his or her ego/personality.
A theorist and/or therapist should always have both his ears and eyes 'wide open' to any 'subjective, phenomenological client-based possibility' -- not walk into the therapeutic encounter with any pre-canned, pre-stereotyped, discriminating theoretical and therapeutic bias that could pathologically lead the client away from his or her own phenomenological and existential truth.
A client is in psychotherapy not to confirm any narcissistic, righteous bias on the part of the therapist who may have consciously or unconsciously set up a type of 'hyper-vigilence' towards confirming his or her theory and 'finding' exactly what he or she is looking for (the 'self-fulfilling prophecy') -- this is bogus, pathological psychotherapy; rather, a client is in psychotherapy either for some specific purpose (hopefully coming from his or her own motivation) or perhaps more generically to 'fill in, and/or integrate the different gaps in his or her personality' -- to move towards more 'personal congruency and integrity' -- such as integrating the various potential 'gaps' between his or her 'Superego' and 'Id' or between his or her 'Persona' and 'Shadow', or between his or her 'Apollonian Ego' and 'Dionysian Ego'. And that is without necessarily 'dumping a ton of technical terminology' on the client; 'Okham's Razor' (the simplest possible interpretations, explanations, and/or terminology) is probably usually the best policy. The client is not there to get a 'PHD' in psychology -- and if he or she seems like he or she is, then there is probably a process of 'rationalization' and/or 'intellectualization' that is going on that is hiding more intimate, emotional underlying processes.
Sometimes the most intelligent people in the world can have the deepest 'personality splits' based on deep, 'core-nuclear conflicts' from early childhood. Intellect has nothing to do with an 'integrated' and/or 'split personality'.
You see -- and/or hear about -- a man with a very active, intelligent mind, who can carry on a very intelligent, interesting conversation, who has a lot of money in the bank from past successful business transactions, and what used to be a very beautiful townhouse, and you know from you own dealings with this man, or from the words of family, that the man is inside his townhouse most of the day, 'retired' at 50, drinking himself to a slow or one day suddenly quick death, littering alcoholic bottles everywhere in his once beautiful townhouse, and you ask yourself, 'What demons are going on in this man's mind? Where is the 'hole' in his psyche, his heart, his spirit, his soul? The 'gap', 'the psychic void' -- the 'lost internal object' -- is it his wife that left him a number of years ago, or is it his 'internal dad' who was a hard-line 'house alcoholic' in his own right who treated the above-mentioned son abysmally growing up. Is it his lost executive job and career? And/or all told, is it just too much time alone in his townhouse being overpowered by his own 'self-destructive thought process'?
Anyway you want to look at it, there is just no amount of alcohol that is going to fill the void in this man's soul. His townhouse has become his own personal 'death-trap' unless and/or until he becomes willing to choose another 'life path' -- a path that will get him outside of his townhouse and willing to seek out 'new external objects' (meaning people) and/or interests -- work and/or hobbies.
Nobody can choose this path for him. It has got to start with the words 'I can choose differently' and/or 'I need some help and/or support here.' I need to come to a better resolution and integration with all my 'internal demons' and/or my 'past lost and/or terrorizing internal objects'.
In Gestalt Therapy, they say, no amount of 'internal chastising' is going to change things unless and/or until we can first accept where we are, and who we are -- right now.
This is called the 'paradoxical theory of change'. No movement forward is going to happen -- indeed, we will resist all our internal 'topdogging' and all the world's external preaching -- until we can first accept who and where we are in this moment, here and now. And that might not be a pretty thing. We might have to accept all or our internal 'ugliness' -- our internal flaws, make fun of them, laugh at them, our own tragic absurdity -- before we can again start to feel and be 'pretty' again.
-- dgb, Aug. 3rd, 2009, updated and modified, Sept. 9th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
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Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Freud and The Continuing Evolution of Psychoanalysis: The Seduction Theory Controversy, Masson, Malcolm, Object Relations, Janet, Klein, Fairbairn...
I said that I would re-read Janet Malcolm's book, 'In The Freud Archives' (1984) and I am in the process of doing that. It was about 15 years ago the last time I read it. The book is a composite of two articles Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker in 1983.
Malcolm's book, similarly to Masson's own book with different editorial opinions, 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst', 1990, documents Masson's 'fall out of grace' with the Psychoanalytic World after he had risen almost right to the top of the Psychoanalytic hierarchy as Executive Director of The Freud Archives -- behind only Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler in perceived power and status.
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Sigmund Freud Archives
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The Sigmund Freud Archives mainly consist of a trove of documents housed at the US Library of Congress [1] and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens in northwest London. They were at the center of a complicated scandal which is described in Janet Malcolm's book In the Freud Archives. Jeffrey Masson writes about it in Chapter Nine Disillusions of his book Final Analysis.
After World War II Dr. Kurt Eissler (1909-1999) and a small group of psychoanalysts who knew Sigmund Freud personally, including Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Bertram Lewin and Herman Nunberg, decided to preserve Freud's letters and papers in a single archive. The Library of Congress, Dr. Eissler wrote, agreed in a legal "instrument" to accept as a donation all documents collected by the Archives, and to make them accessible to scholars. By the 1980s Dr. Eissler, with the help of Anna Freud, had collected thousands of tapes, letters and papers for that archive. (An exhibition of parts of the collection was held at the Library of Congress last year and will be at the Jewish Museum this year.) [2]
The Archives were founded in 1951 by Dr. Eissler and directed by him for decades. Dr. Eissler prevented many well-meaning scholars from seeing many Freud doucments claiming confidentiality, even when their donors had not requested nor demanded that confidentiality, nor was anyone a potential victim of the revelation of those documents. In 1974 the 65-year-old Dr. Eissler met Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born 1941), a 33-year-old Sanskrit scholar and psychoanalyst, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Eissler took a liking to Masson, appointed him his secretary, and meant to make him his successor at the Archives. Being an officer of the Sigmund Freud Archives Masson had 'administrative access' to all documents in the Archives, he was allowed to see anything he wanted breaking the seal whenever necessary. In 1981 Dr. Masson, who was then the Projects Director of the Archives, delivered a paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Masson said that Freud had abandoned his seduction theory -- the idea that adult neurosis is caused by childhood sexual abuse -- for personal rather than scientific reasons. By dropping the seduction theory, Dr. Masson concluded, "Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, has come to a dead halt in the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis throughout the world." Dr. Eissler was deeply shocked ("Just today Masud Khan called me from London and asked me to dismiss you from the Archives. The board members, all of them, or at least most of them, are asking for the same.") [3] and sought to dismiss Dr. Masson from his job at the Archives, which led to bilateral legal action and a well-publicized scandal.
Masson was subsequently dismissed from his position as project director of the Freud Archives after a vote by the 13-member board of the Freud Archives - a nonprofit foundation controlling the vast public and private papers of Freud - not to renew Dr. Masson's contract as projects director for a second year starting in January. [4]
The current director of the Archives is Dr. Harold P. Blum, a well-known psychoanalyst and scholar [5]. Dr. Harold P. Blum succeeded Dr. Masson and Dr. Eissler as Executive Director of The Sigmund Freud Archives. The other current officers of The Sigmund Freud Archives are: Drs. Alexander Grinstein, President; Bernard L. Pacella, Secretary/Treasurer; and Sidney S. Furst.
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Janet Malcolm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, and In the Freud Archives.
Malcolm is best known for the 1991 lawsuit triggered by In the Freud Archives, when psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued Malcolm and The New Yorker for $10 million, after claiming that Malcolm had fabricated explosive quotations attributed to him. After several years of proceedings, the court found against Masson.
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles."[1] The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Background and personal
* 2 Masson case
* 3 The Journalist and the Murderer
* 4 Works
* 5 References
* 6 Sources
* 7 External links
[edit] Background and personal
Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters--the other is author Marie Winn-- of a psychiatrist father. She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan and lives in New York City. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960's. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.
Early Malcolm book jackets report her "living in New York with her husband and daughter." Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.
[edit] Masson case
Publication of the book In The Freud Archives triggered a $10 million legal challenge by Jeffrey Masson, former project director for the Freud Archives, who claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.
In the disputed quotations, Masson called himself an "intellectual gigolo", who had slept with over 1000 women; said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women and fun"; and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court[3], and after years of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. (See the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
In August, 1995, Malcolm discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes. As reported in The New York Times[4] the author "declared in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."
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DGB
What I wish to do in this essay is to give my own editorial comments on some of the various 'ethical transgressions' committed by the various 'players' in this Psychoanalytic scandal -- Freud, Fliess, Masson, The Psychoanalytic World, and Janet Malcolm -- no one comes off 'ethically scot-free' in this huge Psychoanalytic scandal: neither Freud nor Fliess in the mid 1890s, nor Masson, Malcolm, nor the Psychoanalytic World in the mid 1990s.
Indeed, it is partly ironical or maybe a sense of 'poetic justice' that this Psychoanalytic scandal that hit its peak in 1983-1984 was just short of a 'hundred year anniversary transference-repetition-compulsion' of the original Freudian ordeal (1896-1897) and '180 degree change in Psychoanalytic Theory' from 'real traumacy and sexual abuse to sexual fantasy' that provided the backdrop to the 1993-94 Masson vs. Malcolm and The Psychoanalytic Institute scandal.
In this regard, it was almost like Masson was playing the role of Freud's 'suppressed righteous-ethical conscience' -- in technical language, his 'rejecting object or Superego' for inventing a theory that engaged in 'the alleged role of childhood sexual fantasy' in Psychoanalytic cases where there may have been real, live patients who had 'suffered from the very real traumacy of childhood sexual abuse'.
In a Masson quoted comparison from 'In The Freud Archives', pg. 55, that I will extrapolate on here, that is like trying to pretend that 'Aushwitz' never happened -- that it was one big 'sexual fantasy', or alternatively, that there is essentially no reason for a therapist trying to deal with any 'real or imagined gap' between a patient's 'subjective, psychic reality' of how he or she 'experienced Aushwitz' and the 'objective reality' of what really happened to that patient at Aushwitz.
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Auschwitz concentration camp
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(Redirected from Auschwitz)
"Auschwitz" redirects here. For the town, see Oświęcim. Distinguish from Austerlitz.
This article is semi-protected.
Coordinates: [show location on an interactive map] 50°02′09″N 19°10′42″E / 50.03583°N 19.17833°E / 50.03583; 19.17833
Auschwitz-Birkenau
German Nazi Concentration and
Extermination Camp (1940-1945)*
UNESCO World Heritage Site
The main gate of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 2006
Type Cultural
Criteria vi
Reference 31
Region** Europe and North America
Inscription history
Inscription 1979 (3rd Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List.
** Region as classified by UNESCO.
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Konzentrationslager_Auschwitz.ogg Konzentrationslager Auschwitz (help·info)) was the largest of Nazi Germany's concentration camps and extermination camps, established in Nazi German occupied Poland. The camp took its German name from the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby which later was mostly destroyed by the Germans.
Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Oświęcim was annexed by Nazi Germany and renamed Auschwitz, the town's German name.[1]
The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to 3 million people had died at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised this figure to 1.1 million,[2][3] about 90% of whom were Jews from almost every country in Europe.[4] Most victims were killed in Auschwitz II's gas chambers using Zyklon B; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".
In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the first two camps. By 1994, some 22 million visitors - 700,000 annually - had passed through the iron gate crowned with the motto "Arbeit macht frei (Work brings freedom)". The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945 is celebrated on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom, and other similar memorial days in various countries.
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DGB
As basically black and white, life and death, as Aushwitz obviously was -- and similarly in clear-cut cases of childhood sexual abuse where there is much witness testimony and/or supporting empirical evidence -- in many, many cases, particularly as the therapist is still getting to know the client and what he or she is all about -- there is nothing nearly so 'objectively and epistemologically clear' in the therapist's office between therapist and client. The therapist may not know to what extent he or she can trust the client's 'subjective revelations'.
Any psychotherapist -- as well as any of us in our day-to-day living -- is often caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to determining 'objective, epistemological reality' relative to the memories, reports, and experiences that are coming out of the mouths of people who are talking about situations where we were not there at the time of these 'alleged events'.
The dreaded distinction between 'subjective' and 'objective' reality raises its 'clouded' face again.
Kant's 'subjective-objective-metaphysical split'.
The idea that we can never know for 100 percent sure what is happening in our own 'objective (noumenal) world' was one of the main theses of Kant's classic philosophical treatise: 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Kant's extremely skeptical, pessimistic epistemological conclusions in this regard were greatly disturbing to those who believed (like Hegel after him) that we could -- through human evolution -- get closer and closer to 'epistemological truth'. In some areas of science, yes. In many areas of day to day living -- and even in many 'court epistemological conclusions and decisions' -- not necessarily. 'Truth' in many life circumstances will always remain 'fleeting' and 'cloudy' -- even 'impossible to unequivocally determine'.
Did Freud 'lose moral courage and integrity'? Was Freud a fraud? How can any of us living today know for sure what was going on inside Freud's head back in 1896-97 in this regard when any and all conclusions are based on entirely, speculative, associative, circumstantial evidence?
Did Freud make a bad ethical if not legal mistake when he entrusted his patient, Emma Ekstein, to his closest friend, Dr. Fliess, who in turn conducted a totally unnecessary nasal surgery on her that almost killed her when he left -- and forgot -- a 'long string of gauze' in her nose that another doctor found days later when she was not healing properly, pulled on and pulled out -- and she almost bled to death from the nasal hemorrhaging? Yes. But is this the reason, or one of the reasons, that Freud changed his thinking from 'The Seduction Theory' to 'The Oedipal Theory'? None of us can know this. Including Dr. Masson. The theory that 'Freud lost moral courage and integrity' -- and that The Oedipal Theory, in effect, was a 'fraudulent cover-up theory with a hidden agenda behind it' -- to escape the 'political incorrectness' of child sexual abuse amongst his medical peers and superiors, and/or to 'save his own medical career' and/or to save both himself and his best friend, Fliess, from a 'huge medical guilt trip' -- all of these individual pieces of evidence do not in anyway conclusively prove Masson's 'theory into Freud's subjective mindset' -- this theory remains only that -- a theory -- just like Freud's 'Seduction Theory' and just like Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' -- impossible to prove conclusively one way or the other.
Actually, The Seduction Theory -- in its totally generality and reductionism -- is the easiest theory to logically disprove.
Not all people who are 'neurotic' are sexually assaulted as children.
I for one, can attest to that. I have a whole network of 'transference neuroses' in my personality, and I know for a fact that I didn't get sexually assaulted as a child. (Unless I was asleep or unconscious when it happened. Nope. Didn't happen. Indeed, I fully agree with Masson on this part -- if I was sexually assaulted as a child, I would know about it. I would remember it. Here Masson and I totally agree.
Personally, I don't think that 'repression' (unremembered memories) has much to do with human neurosis at all except perhaps in some very extreme and unusual case examples.
Here I part company from Psychoanalysis altogether both before and after 1896. I much prefer the ideas of 'dissociation' and 'splitting of the ego' (Charcot, Janet, Freud) into 'Persona' and 'Shadow' (Jung); or 'Ego' and 'Alter-ego' (Janet?); or Dionysian Ego and Apollonian Ego (my extension of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy'; or 'Superego', 'Ego' and 'Id' (Classic Freudian Psychoanalysis).
There is nothing in my thinking that says that the 'sexual and/or violent' content in a person's 'Id' or 'Dionysian Ego' has to be 'unconscious' or 'repressed'. Often it may 'dissociated' or 'denied' or even 'suppressed' but not at all 'unconscious' or 'repressed'.
Thus, when I start to talk about 'Transference Complexes, Scripts, and Neuroses', I turn instead to Adler's very fertile idea of interpreting conscious early memories.
For me, conscious early childhood memories can be viewed as 'transference memories'.
In my opinion, if I am a therapist and some client tells me that he or she was sexually assaulted as a child, I am going to do two things: 1. tentatively accept the client's 'subjective, psychic reality'; and 2. retain a certain element of 'agnosticism' or 'objective skepticism' realizing that what the client is telling me has not been 'empirically verified or confirmed' in any way by any outside witnesses and/or supporting evidence.
The therapist is being hired as a therapist -- which means mostly the role of 'Nurturing Superego' as well as 'Insight Giver' -- not as 'judge' and 'jury' either for or against the client, or for or against any of the client's living 'family members' who may or may not have been guilty of some moral and/or legal transgression against the client when the client was a much younger age. That is for the police and/or courts to decide -- if the client wants to proceed that far -- not for the therapist to play the role of police, judge, or jury -- or even to 'push' the client in that direction. As a therapist, we can 'surmise and infer or interpret' all we want -- and even this can be extremely dangerous when it gets to the point of 'interpreting or reconstructing a sexual assault memory' that is coming out of your mouth, not the client's. I would not try to touch such an interpretation with a ten foot pole -- it might make you a legitimate, and deserved, candidate for a client or family lawsuit.
One only has to review the case of Dr. Charles Smith to see 'how far the seduction theory can potentially get out of control if it is not kept within reasonable boundaries'. Dr. Smith was a 'child forensic pathologist' who rose to the top of his field before he was 'disgraced' by the 'over exuberance' with which he seemed to be looking for 'child murderers'. Furthermore, a good psychoanalyst can see the 'transference connection' between what Dr. Smith was doing in his forensic office and in the court room -- and his own 'abandonment by his mother both as a child and again when he contacted her as an adult'.
'Transference reversal and/or revenge' for a person who has a lot of power in a field where he or she can 'act out' with relative impunity his or her particular brand of 'underlying psycho and socio-pathology' in the guise of 'technical expertise' is a very dangerous social phenomenon. We need to know more about it.
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Dr. Charles Smith: The man behind the public inquiry
Last Updated Oct. 1, 2008
CBC News
On a typical case, he might have to decide whether a child had been shaken to death or accidentally fallen from a highchair.
Dr. Charles Smith was once considered top-notch in his field of forensic child pathology. In 1999, a Fifth Estate documentary singled him out as one of four Canadians with this rare expertise.
Dr. Charles Smith was long regarded as one of Canada's best in forensic child pathology. A public inquiry was called after an Ontario coroner's inquiry questioned Smith's conclusions in 20 of 45 child autopsies. (CBC)
For 24 years, Smith worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. In the hospital's pediatric forensic pathology unit, he conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies.
But Smith no longer practises pathology. An Ontario coroner's inquiry reviewed 45 child autopsies in which Smith had concluded the cause of death was either homicide or criminally suspicious.
The coroner's review found that Smith made questionable conclusions of foul play in 20 of the cases — 13 of which had resulted in criminal convictions. After the review's findings were made public in April 2007, Ontario's government ordered a public inquiry into the doctor's practices.
That inquiry, led by Justice Stephen Goudge and concluding in October 2008, found that Smith "actively misled" his superiors, "made false and misleading statements" in court and exaggerated his expertise in trials.
Far from an expert in forensic child pathology, "Smith lacked basic knowledge about forensic pathology," wrote Goudge in the inquiry report.
"Smith was adamant that his failings were never intentional," Goudge wrote. "I simply cannot accept such a sweeping attempt to escape moral responsibility."
Acted more like a prosecutor
Some have accused Smith of taking on a role larger than pathologist. The lawyer for Brenda Waudby said he was on a crusade and acted more like a prosecutor. Waudby was convicted in the murder of her daughter after Smith analyzed the case.
A pubic-like hair found on her daughter went missing during Smith's investigation. It was discovered he had kept the hair in his office before police found it five years later. In the end, Waudby's charges were dropped and the child's babysitter was convicted.
Smith said he had a passion for uncovering the truth in child deaths. The Ontario pathologist told media lampooning him he had "a thing against people who hurt children." He welled up when speaking about a mother looking for the cause of her baby's death.
Smith had been in search of his own personal truths. He was born in a Toronto Salvation Army hospital where he was put up for adoption three months later. After years of looking for his biological mother, he called her on her 65th birthday. But she refused to take his call.
Smith's adoptive family moved often. His father's job in the Canadian Forces took them throughout Canada and to Germany. He attended high school in Ottawa, and graduated from medical school at the University of Saskatchewan in 1975.
Sick Kids tenure
Hired by Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children in 1979, Smith worked in surgery for a year and then moved on to pathology training. A pathologist studies diseases and illnesses by assessing matter such as cells, tissues, organs and fluids. Pathologists also examine biopsy material, and give a subsequent diagnosis.
When it comes to autopsy reports, the field of pathology can be a subjective one. It's based on research and opinion, and it's especially controversial in Canada, where there is no formal training or certification process. Only a handful of practitioners in Ontario are entrusted with the job — and they've learned by doing.
With child victims, forensic analysis is rarely cut and dried. It can take an infant up to 24 hours to die of a shaking incident, which is a crime that doesn't leave evidence the way a regular killing might.
After his initial training at Sick Kids, as the Toronto hospital is known, Smith began conducting child autopsies in 1981. He started with children who had died of accidental and natural causes. By the late '90s, Smith saw more forensic child cases than any other pathologist across the country.
Smith's unit used arrest warrants to reinvestigate cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). He oversaw the autopsies of exhumed babies that led to new murder charges.
In one such case, Smith appeared before a court in the death of six-month-old Sara Podniewicz. He concluded she had been dead for up to 15 hours before her parents reported the death. The parents had told a 911 operator the girl had died just moments before. Smith's analysis led to second-degree murder charges.
First doubts
In 1991, a family in Timmins, Ont., was the first to raise questions about Smith's work. He had concluded their one-year-old baby had died from being shaken. The child had been under the care of a babysitter who said the baby had fallen down stairs.
In court, experts challenged Smith's opinion, which had resulted in the babysitter's charge of manslaughter. The judge in the case stated Smith should have taken other causes into consideration.
Once the most prolific pathologist, Smith began getting a reputation for late cases, and his disorderly desk produced samples that had gone missing.
In 2002, he received a caution from the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college said he was being "overly dogmatic" and had a "tendency towards overstatement."
In June 2005, Dr. Barry McLellan, Ontario's chief coroner, started the review of 45 child autopsies conducted by Smith between 1991 and 2002. The review, released in April 2007, found that Smith had made mistakes in 20 cases involving the deaths of children. The review cast doubt on criminal convictions in 13 of the cases.
"I am very surprised with the overall results of the review, and concerned," McLellan said. "In a number of cases, the reviewers felt that Dr. Smith had provided an opinion regarding the cause of death that was not reasonably supported by the materials available for review."
The chief coroner said the results of the review were being shared with defence and Crown attorneys involved in all of the relevant criminal cases.
After resigning from Sick Kids in 2005, Smith accepted a pathology position in Saskatoon. He was fired after three months. A tribunal later reinstated him, but without a licence, Smith was unable to practise.
Smith told media his marriage ended in light of stress from the highly publicized events. He had lived with his wife and two children on a farm north of Newmarket, Ont.
As a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Smith says he has been fuelled by his life's purpose — finding out the truth for parents who have lost babies.
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DGB
With all due respect to Masson because I greatly respect his work and his willingness to stand up to his conclusions, some of which I support and others which I don't, memories are like all human experiences -- they are subjectively biased, and can be distorted, even intentionally or unintentionally totally fabricated.
This certainly does not mean that they are always, or even usually, fabricated in the cases of memories of sexual assault. Indeed, I agree with Masson's conclusion that if a person has been sexually assaulted, they are usually going to clearly remember it; there certainly does not have to be any 'repression' involved, nor does there need to be any repression involved to 'cause' neurosis.
First of all, let me give you two examples of 'fabricated memories' from my own life. In the first case, my dad was going through one of the most stressful times of his life. His company was collapsing, the work that he had done his entire life was collapsing, he wasn't making enough revenue anymore to pay for all his bills, and his bills -- including company creditors -- were soaring higher and higher. My dad seemed bordering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Neither his thoughts nor his memories were 'logically connecting' in a way that people around him would normally expect from him in any normal conversation.
My family and I years previous to this happening, had gone on a trip to the Bahamas. My brother and I had recounted a memory several or numerous times in the intervening years where we had gone for a walk along the beach first thing in the morning. On our way back to the hotel we got 'trapped' by one of the many canals in Freeport, Bahamamas that wound its way inland for seemingly miles from the ocean beach.
My brother and I were looking at the 100 feet or so that it would take to 'swim' across the channel, and we were also looking at the 'seemingly miles that we would need to walk inland to walk around the canal. Swimming, and getting soaked in the process -- we were wearing summer clothes at the time, not bathing suits -- was becoming more and more attractive to the point where we were going to do it when a large stingray meandered past our very eyes in the light blue-green water that we were looking down at. We quickly changed our minds -- and walked around the canal.
Years later, during this period of heavy stress for my dad, a group of us were in my parents' living room when my dad recounted the story as if he had been there! My brother and I looked at each other -- and said nothing. But quietly we were both shaking our heads because we knew he had not been with us that morning, he was either back at the hotel or out somewhere doing his own business that morning. It had just been my brother and I who had been there.
Just to show that this type of thing can happen to all of us -- and me too -- I remember my dad recounting a memory where at the age of of about 5, I had stood up in front of a whole church congregation and named off every country on a globe that presumably my dad pointed to in front of me. I succeeded, obviously with a lot of private practice before I got to that moment and event in the church. The thing is, I never 'remembered' the incident until my dad shared it with me numerous times in my later life. Then I started to 'remember' what only can be construed as a 'false memory'. This can happen to all of us.
Similarly, the particular detail events in memories over time -- especially as we get older and our memory is not as good as it used to be -- can be 'added' to and/or 'subtracted' from the memory, different or similar events from different memories in different times and/or places can be 'conflated' together. All of this is to say that 'subjective, narcissistically biased memories' -- unless otherwise supported and confirmed by other witnesses and/or credible evidence -- should not be construed as being the same as 'objective facts'.
Having said this, not many people are going to 'forget' a memory with the magnitude of 'subjective importance' of a sexual assault -- or anything close to it. I can remember twice in my younger life -- between 20 and 35 -- where I was verbally propositioned by homosexual men. At least once when I was driving cab in my 30s, a second time too, I believe, that I cannot remember the details, and once in my teens or early 20s where I was propositioned in the man's apartment after he had just locked the door. I politely told the man, 'sorry, but I didn't lean that way' -- and promptly undid the lock and left. Another time -- stupid on my part -- I was hitchhiking back to university late at night and got into a car with a homosexual man. The man towards the end of the trip made a 'physical pass' at me, putting his hand on my knee and running it up my leg -- this was probably one of the most stupid situations that I ever got myself into but fortunately we were in Waterloo by this time and I was out of the car in a flash without anything further developing.
That last memory I have only shared with one or two people in my life -- I was embarrassed, humiliated might be a better word, for getting myself into the situation in the first place where it happened. Memories like this, we don't 'forget'. Maybe we 'suppress' them -- don't share them with others -- but that doesn't mean that we either 'forget' or 'repress' them. We remember them clearly.
Or speaking from my own experience, this is what I believe.
So Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' clearly did a 'disservice' to mankind, and particularly to any Psychoanalytic clients who may have been sexually assaulted as children because the Oedipal Theory basically 'denied the existence' of such 'traumatic experiences and the memories of such experiences' having re-theorized and classified these experiences and memories of experiences into 'normal childhood -- and/or later teenage -- sexual fantasies unconsciously re-worked, masked, distorted, and/or fabricated as 'actually happened events' that in post 1900 Psychoanalytic theory -- didn't happen. For a client who may have been actually horrifically sexually assaulted, this would be like the equivalent of telling a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust that 'the Holocaust never happened'. Thus, in this regard, The Oedipal Theory can only be construed as a 'brutal pathology of normalcy' within Psychoanalytic Theory itself -- and something that to this day, still needs to be changed amongst all Classically trained Psychoanalysts who are still adhering to this 'distorted' theory.
In my opinion, The Oedipal Theory should be defined and described differently: it is our tendency to be romantically and/or sexually attracted to a person who reminds us in some way, consciously or subconsciously, of one or both of our parents.
This does not need to imply that we were all sexually attracted to our parent of the opposite sex growing up -- or that we wanted to 'conquer and destroy' the parent of the same sex in order to get to the parent of the opposite sex, although in many families growing up, it might indeed, actually seem like this type of psychological process was going on. But this theory is better taken 'metaphorically, symbolically, and/or mythologically' in my opinion, than to be taken literally like a Classically trained Psychoanalyst is taught to do.
Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex' from the ancient Greek Sophocles Trilogy.
..............................................................................
Oedipus Trilogy
The Oedipus Trilogy was originally written by Sophocles and is meant to be told in a story-telling fashion.
SOPHOCLES
OEDIPUS THE KING
Translation by F. Storr, BA
Formerly Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge
From the Loeb Library Edition
Originally published by
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
and
William Heinemann Ltd, London
First published in 1912
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ARGUMENT
To Laius, King of Thebes, an oracle foretold that the child born
to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother.
So when in time a son was born the infant's feet were riveted together
and he was left to die on Mount Cithaeron. But a shepherd found the
babe and tended him, and delivered him to another shepherd who took
him to his master, the King or Corinth. Polybus being childless
adopted the boy, who grew up believing that he was indeed the King's
son. Afterwards doubting his parentage he inquired of the Delphic god
and heard himself the weird declared before to Laius. Wherefore he
fled from what he deemed his father's house and in his flight he
encountered and unwillingly slew his father Laius. Arriving at Thebes
he answered the riddle of the Sphinx and the grateful Thebans made
their deliverer king. So he reigned in the room of Laius, and
espoused the widowed queen. Children were born to them and Thebes
prospered under his rule, but again a grievous plague fell upon the
city. Again the oracle was consulted and it bade them purge
themselves of blood-guiltiness. Oedipus denounces the crime of which
he is unaware, and undertakes to track out the criminal. Step by
step it is brought home to him that he is the man. The closing scene
reveals Jocasta slain by her own hand and Oedipus blinded by his own
act and praying for death or exile.
.............................................................................
But in my opinion again, 'The Oedipal Myth' is best left interpreted as a myth -- and not something normally to be taken literally, although again, in some particular circumstances, it almost looks like it should be taken literally.
And often, it is quite possible to get some extremely 'mixed up' and/or 'conflated' variables.
For example, we could divide the Oedipal Complex in half and talk about the 'Antigone Complex' where a child metaphorically and/or literally wants to 'conquer and/or destroy' his or her parent of the same sex.
And we can also talk about the 'Polar Oedipal Complex' where we are attracted to a person who has the opposite characteristic(s) of one or both parents.
Indeed, it is not at all unusual for elements of Freud's 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory, Oedipal Theory, Transference Theory and and Narcissistic Compensation/Overcompensation/Mastery Compulsion Theory (Adler's influence)' -- all to be conflated together in particular case examples giving an extremely muddled clinical picture unless a therapist is actually taught (and/or learns him or herself) to expect this type of clinical picture to happen. Because I think it is more the norm than the exception.
Personally, I believe that the strongest Freudian Theory exists when all of Freud's various theories are merged together -- even the ones he personally 'disowned' -- and treated as supporting each other, not as being mutually exclusive.
This is where we all have a tendency of getting caught up -- and 'tricked' -- by Aristolean or Kierkgaardian 'black or white, either/or logic' when oftentimes we are better utilizing Hegelian or post-Hegelian 'dialectically-integrative logic'.
One of the best ideas of 'wisdom' that I can come up with is the distinction of 'properly knowing when we are best utilizing Aristolean-Kierkegaardian either/or logic vs. when we are best utilizing Hegelian or Post-Hegelian dialectically-integrative logic'. Often, we get 'stuck' and 'locked' inside an Aristolean-Kierkegaardian model of viewing the world and our own particular choices when we would be better utilizing a Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential, Dialectically Integrative Model.
To give you another example, in physics, to the best of memory, there used to be a 'particle' theory or matter. Then there was a 'wave theory' of matter. However, the best model of all came when -- using Hegelian dialectic logic -- a 'wave-particle duality' theory was created which became a central quantum mechanics.
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Wave–particle duality
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In physics and chemistry, wave–particle duality is the concept that all matter and energy exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, duality addresses the inadequacy of classical concepts like "particle" and "wave" in fully describing the behaviour of small-scale objects. Various interpretations of quantum mechanics attempt to explain this ostensible paradox.
Wave–particle duality should be distinguished from wave-particle complementarity, the latter implying that matter can demonstrate both particle and wave characteristics, but not both at the same time (that is, not within one and the same experimental arrangement).
The idea of duality is rooted in a debate over the nature of light and matter dating back to the 1600s, when competing theories of light were proposed by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton). Through the work of Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa).[1] The only distinction in this regard is that in different contexts, because of mass or energy or frequency, some matter seems more particle-like than wave-like; in other contexts, or with reduced values of energy etc., the same matter will more obviously show wave-like qualities than particle-like.
This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also for compound particles like atoms and even molecules. In fact, according to traditional formulations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, wave–particle duality applies to all objects, even macroscopic ones; because of their small wave lengths, the wave properties of macroscopic objects cannot be detected.[2]
...........................................................................
The same type of 'dialectically integrative' or 'duality theory' should be applied to Psychoanalysis as has been done in physics.
Everyone of Freud's many 'sub-theories' should be equally respected and/or modified and then merged together to create what I think is potentially the best Psychoanalytic theory of all -- a 'multi-dialectic-integrative-and-wholistic one'; not a 'reductionistically torn apart and dissociated one' where all the individual pieces and sub-theories need to be put back together again like 'Humpty Dumpty'.
Even Freud's last theory that was only just being started to be developed on 'dissociation' and the splitting of the ego' would become an incredibly valuable addition to 'Object Relations' Psychoanalysis as clinicians and theorists like Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Harold Guntrip, Heinz Kohut, and Eric Berne would take this 'theoretical ball and run with it'.
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Melanie Klein
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Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had a significant impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life
* 2 Thought
* 3 Literature
* 4 In popular culture
* 5 External links
* 6 Notes
[edit] Life
Born in Vienna of Jewish parentage[1], Klein first sought psychoanalysis for herself with Sandor Ferenczi when he was living in Budapest during World War I. There she became a psychoanalyst and began analysing children in 1919. In 1921 she moved to Berlin where she studied with and was analysed by Karl Abraham. Although Abraham supported her pioneering work with children, neither Klein nor her ideas received much support in Berlin. However, impressed by her innovative work, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones invited Klein to come to London in 1926, where she worked until her death in 1960.
Klein had a major influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain. As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications consisted of a teaching degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians.
After the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalyst daughter, Anna, in London in 1938, Klein’s ideas came into conflict with those of Continental analysts who were immigrating to Britain. Following protracted debates between the followers of Klein and the followers of Anna Freud during the 1940s, the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Anna Freudian, and (3) independent. This division remains to the current time.
Apart from her professional successes, Klein’s life was full of tragic events. Allegedly the product of an unwanted birth, her parents showed her little affection. Her much loved elder sister died when Klein was four, and she was made to feel responsible for her brother’s death. Her academic studies were interrupted by marriage and children. Her marriage failed and her son died, while her daughter, the well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly in the British Psychoanalytic Society. Mother and daughter were not reconciled before Klein's death, and Schmideberg did not attend Klein's funeral.
[edit] Thought
Although she questioned some of the fundamental assumptions of Sigmund Freud, Klein always considered herself a faithful adherent to Freud's ideas. Klein was the first person to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques[2] (such as working with children using toys) and her theories in infant development. Strongly opinionated, and demanding loyalty from her followers, Klein established a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis. She is considered one of the co-founders of object relations theory.
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a speculative hypothesis eventually accepted by Freud, which stated that life may be a fragile occurrence, that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains a drive towards death. In psychological terms Eros (properly, the life instinct), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly seeks to terminate and disintegrate life.Both Freud and Klein regarded these biomental forces as the foundations of the psyche. These were human instincts ("Triebe") unrelated to the animal instincts of ethology.These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the "id," sparked the ego--the experiencing self--into activity. Id, ego, and superego--to be sure--were merely shorthand terms (like the "instincts")referring to highly complex, mostly uncharted, psychodynamic operations. Freud and Klein never abandoned the terms or the conceptualizations despite protests and controversies by many of their adherents, especially now.
While Freud’s ideas concerning children mostly came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working directly with children, often as young as two years old. Klein saw children’s play as their primary mode of emotional communication. After observing troubled children play with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine, pencil and paper, Klein attempted to interpret the specific meaning of play. She realised that parental figures played a significant role in the child’s phantasy life, and considered that the chronology of Freud’s Oedipus complex was imprecise. Contradicting Freud, she concluded that the superego was present long before the Oedipal phase.
After exploring ultra-aggressive phantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young, very ill children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore. She named the state of the psyche, when the sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position. The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid-schizoid position.[3]
Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analysing children brought her into conflict with Freud's own daughter, Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists working in England at that time. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial/scientific discussions.
Today, Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the major schools within psychoanalysis. Kleinian psychoanalysts are members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the predominant school of psychoanalysis within Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exception of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. Within the United States of America, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the major training center that follows the work of Melanie Klein. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults is characterized by a very traditional technique using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on interpreting very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies.
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DGB
In the 'Splitting of the Ego in The Process of Defense' essay (1938), written a year before he died in London, England, Freud's opening paragraph is extremely significant.
'I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter.' (The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 23, p. 275).
There are numerous ways in which this 'old-new' line of thinking on Freud's part should both be linked to his past work -- and to the work of Pierre Janet -- as well as pointing a 'new' path for Psychoanalysis in the future.
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Pierre Janet
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Pierre Janet
Born May 30, 1859(1859-05-30)
Died February 24, 1947 (aged 87)
Nationality French
Fields psychology, philosophy, psychiatry
Doctoral students William James
Known for dissociation
Pierre Marie Félix Janet (May 30, 1859 - February 24, 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
He was one of the first people to draw a connection between events in the subject's past life and his or her present day trauma, and coined the words ‘dissociation’ and ‘subconscious’. He studied under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Psychological Laboratory in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, in Paris. In several ways, he preceded Sigmund Freud. Many consider Janet, rather than Freud, the true 'founder' of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
He first published the results of his research in his philosophy thesis in 1889 and in his medical thesis, L'état mental des hystériques, in 1892. He earned a degree in medicine the following year in 1893.
In 1898, Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1902 he attained the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France, a position he held until 1936. He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913.
In 1923, he wrote a definitive text, La médecine psychologique, on suggestion and in 1928-32, he published several definitive papers on memory.
Whilst he did not publish much in English, the fifteen lectures he gave to the Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906 were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria and he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.
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DGB
Personally, the one theory of Freud's that I more or less completely 'dissociate' myself from is his theory of 'repression' and 'the unconscious'. I much prefer Janet's concepts of 'dissociation' and 'subconscious'. And the concept that Freud is just starting to develop here -- specifically, the 'splitting of the ego in the process of defense' although here we need to either make critical distinctions and/or 'equal associative linguistic and semantic connections' between the 'splitting of the ego', 'the splitting of the psyche', and the 'splitting of the Whole Self'. I am inclined to lump all three of these ideas together to mean exactly the same thing.
Many psychoanalysts, I believe, would not want to do this. Freud, as I recall -- I will have to check this -- believed that the newborn baby was basically a 'bundle of biological, biochemical, sexual, and psychic energy' -- which he called the 'Id' -- to be differentiated later from the biological, social, evolutionary survival function and development of 'the ego' as it 'split off from the id' in order to protect the self from 'internal and/or external dangers'. 'The Superego' -- i.e., the 'internalized (or introjected) righteous, ethical, social conscience of society and/or the parents -- would be viewed by Freud as a later 'splitting off of The Ego' into the third part of the human psyche which Freud gave the name 'Superego' to.
Now Freud's 'classic 3 part model of the human psyche' as discussed above is either a little bit or quite a bit different than any kind of 'Object Relations' model depending on who is doing the interpreting and what kind of Object Relations model we are talking about.
Freud was the first psychoanalyst to use the term 'object' (1915?) -- starting from his 'drive theory' (sexual and aggressive) and then differentiating between the 'source', 'the aim', and the 'object' of the particular drive. In 1917 ('Mourning and Melancholia), Freud started to talk about 'external objects' and 'lost objects' relative to depression which eventually paved the way for Melanie Klein to start to talk about 'relational psychoanalysis' with 'internal' and 'external' objects as well as 'drive Psychoanalysis' (a derivative of Freud's sexual and aggressive instincts) and Fairbairn to take this one step further and drop 'drive Psychoanalysis altogether.
The two types of models can actually be integrated and incorporated into the same model as Klein more or less tried to do (but with some further distinctions).
My intent is similar but in a way that is much broader (and less convoluted) than Klein as I aim to integrate all elements of Psychoanalytic Theory (as well as some aspects of 'Non-Analytic' theory: Adler, Jung, Perls, Berne, Masson).
This includes: Traumacy-Seduction Theory, my modified version of Oedipal Theory, 'Unorthodox Transference' Theory, the Adlerian interpretation of conscious early childhood memories as 'conflicted transference memories', Narcissistic Id Theory, 'Mastery Compulsion, Compensation, and Transference-Reversal Theory', and Object Relations Theory...with the outside contributions of the aforementioned Adler, Jung, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Perls, Berne, and others...
What this requires is essentially a further 'splitting off' of both The Ego and The Superego as well as perhaps even the Id and/or other 'Subterranean' elements of the Personality into further 'components', 'compartments' or 'divisions' of the psyche.
This idea we will develop more specifically in the next essay.
Enough for now.
-- dgb, August 1st, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Malcolm's book, similarly to Masson's own book with different editorial opinions, 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst', 1990, documents Masson's 'fall out of grace' with the Psychoanalytic World after he had risen almost right to the top of the Psychoanalytic hierarchy as Executive Director of The Freud Archives -- behind only Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler in perceived power and status.
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Sigmund Freud Archives
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The Sigmund Freud Archives mainly consist of a trove of documents housed at the US Library of Congress [1] and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens in northwest London. They were at the center of a complicated scandal which is described in Janet Malcolm's book In the Freud Archives. Jeffrey Masson writes about it in Chapter Nine Disillusions of his book Final Analysis.
After World War II Dr. Kurt Eissler (1909-1999) and a small group of psychoanalysts who knew Sigmund Freud personally, including Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Bertram Lewin and Herman Nunberg, decided to preserve Freud's letters and papers in a single archive. The Library of Congress, Dr. Eissler wrote, agreed in a legal "instrument" to accept as a donation all documents collected by the Archives, and to make them accessible to scholars. By the 1980s Dr. Eissler, with the help of Anna Freud, had collected thousands of tapes, letters and papers for that archive. (An exhibition of parts of the collection was held at the Library of Congress last year and will be at the Jewish Museum this year.) [2]
The Archives were founded in 1951 by Dr. Eissler and directed by him for decades. Dr. Eissler prevented many well-meaning scholars from seeing many Freud doucments claiming confidentiality, even when their donors had not requested nor demanded that confidentiality, nor was anyone a potential victim of the revelation of those documents. In 1974 the 65-year-old Dr. Eissler met Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born 1941), a 33-year-old Sanskrit scholar and psychoanalyst, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Eissler took a liking to Masson, appointed him his secretary, and meant to make him his successor at the Archives. Being an officer of the Sigmund Freud Archives Masson had 'administrative access' to all documents in the Archives, he was allowed to see anything he wanted breaking the seal whenever necessary. In 1981 Dr. Masson, who was then the Projects Director of the Archives, delivered a paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Masson said that Freud had abandoned his seduction theory -- the idea that adult neurosis is caused by childhood sexual abuse -- for personal rather than scientific reasons. By dropping the seduction theory, Dr. Masson concluded, "Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, has come to a dead halt in the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis throughout the world." Dr. Eissler was deeply shocked ("Just today Masud Khan called me from London and asked me to dismiss you from the Archives. The board members, all of them, or at least most of them, are asking for the same.") [3] and sought to dismiss Dr. Masson from his job at the Archives, which led to bilateral legal action and a well-publicized scandal.
Masson was subsequently dismissed from his position as project director of the Freud Archives after a vote by the 13-member board of the Freud Archives - a nonprofit foundation controlling the vast public and private papers of Freud - not to renew Dr. Masson's contract as projects director for a second year starting in January. [4]
The current director of the Archives is Dr. Harold P. Blum, a well-known psychoanalyst and scholar [5]. Dr. Harold P. Blum succeeded Dr. Masson and Dr. Eissler as Executive Director of The Sigmund Freud Archives. The other current officers of The Sigmund Freud Archives are: Drs. Alexander Grinstein, President; Bernard L. Pacella, Secretary/Treasurer; and Sidney S. Furst.
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Janet Malcolm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, and In the Freud Archives.
Malcolm is best known for the 1991 lawsuit triggered by In the Freud Archives, when psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued Malcolm and The New Yorker for $10 million, after claiming that Malcolm had fabricated explosive quotations attributed to him. After several years of proceedings, the court found against Masson.
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles."[1] The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Background and personal
* 2 Masson case
* 3 The Journalist and the Murderer
* 4 Works
* 5 References
* 6 Sources
* 7 External links
[edit] Background and personal
Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters--the other is author Marie Winn-- of a psychiatrist father. She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan and lives in New York City. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960's. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.
Early Malcolm book jackets report her "living in New York with her husband and daughter." Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.
[edit] Masson case
Publication of the book In The Freud Archives triggered a $10 million legal challenge by Jeffrey Masson, former project director for the Freud Archives, who claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.
In the disputed quotations, Masson called himself an "intellectual gigolo", who had slept with over 1000 women; said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women and fun"; and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court[3], and after years of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. (See the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
In August, 1995, Malcolm discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes. As reported in The New York Times[4] the author "declared in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."
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DGB
What I wish to do in this essay is to give my own editorial comments on some of the various 'ethical transgressions' committed by the various 'players' in this Psychoanalytic scandal -- Freud, Fliess, Masson, The Psychoanalytic World, and Janet Malcolm -- no one comes off 'ethically scot-free' in this huge Psychoanalytic scandal: neither Freud nor Fliess in the mid 1890s, nor Masson, Malcolm, nor the Psychoanalytic World in the mid 1990s.
Indeed, it is partly ironical or maybe a sense of 'poetic justice' that this Psychoanalytic scandal that hit its peak in 1983-1984 was just short of a 'hundred year anniversary transference-repetition-compulsion' of the original Freudian ordeal (1896-1897) and '180 degree change in Psychoanalytic Theory' from 'real traumacy and sexual abuse to sexual fantasy' that provided the backdrop to the 1993-94 Masson vs. Malcolm and The Psychoanalytic Institute scandal.
In this regard, it was almost like Masson was playing the role of Freud's 'suppressed righteous-ethical conscience' -- in technical language, his 'rejecting object or Superego' for inventing a theory that engaged in 'the alleged role of childhood sexual fantasy' in Psychoanalytic cases where there may have been real, live patients who had 'suffered from the very real traumacy of childhood sexual abuse'.
In a Masson quoted comparison from 'In The Freud Archives', pg. 55, that I will extrapolate on here, that is like trying to pretend that 'Aushwitz' never happened -- that it was one big 'sexual fantasy', or alternatively, that there is essentially no reason for a therapist trying to deal with any 'real or imagined gap' between a patient's 'subjective, psychic reality' of how he or she 'experienced Aushwitz' and the 'objective reality' of what really happened to that patient at Aushwitz.
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Auschwitz concentration camp
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(Redirected from Auschwitz)
"Auschwitz" redirects here. For the town, see Oświęcim. Distinguish from Austerlitz.
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Coordinates: [show location on an interactive map] 50°02′09″N 19°10′42″E / 50.03583°N 19.17833°E / 50.03583; 19.17833
Auschwitz-Birkenau
German Nazi Concentration and
Extermination Camp (1940-1945)*
UNESCO World Heritage Site
The main gate of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 2006
Type Cultural
Criteria vi
Reference 31
Region** Europe and North America
Inscription history
Inscription 1979 (3rd Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List.
** Region as classified by UNESCO.
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Konzentrationslager_Auschwitz.ogg Konzentrationslager Auschwitz (help·info)) was the largest of Nazi Germany's concentration camps and extermination camps, established in Nazi German occupied Poland. The camp took its German name from the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby which later was mostly destroyed by the Germans.
Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Oświęcim was annexed by Nazi Germany and renamed Auschwitz, the town's German name.[1]
The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to 3 million people had died at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised this figure to 1.1 million,[2][3] about 90% of whom were Jews from almost every country in Europe.[4] Most victims were killed in Auschwitz II's gas chambers using Zyklon B; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".
In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the first two camps. By 1994, some 22 million visitors - 700,000 annually - had passed through the iron gate crowned with the motto "Arbeit macht frei (Work brings freedom)". The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945 is celebrated on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom, and other similar memorial days in various countries.
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DGB
As basically black and white, life and death, as Aushwitz obviously was -- and similarly in clear-cut cases of childhood sexual abuse where there is much witness testimony and/or supporting empirical evidence -- in many, many cases, particularly as the therapist is still getting to know the client and what he or she is all about -- there is nothing nearly so 'objectively and epistemologically clear' in the therapist's office between therapist and client. The therapist may not know to what extent he or she can trust the client's 'subjective revelations'.
Any psychotherapist -- as well as any of us in our day-to-day living -- is often caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to determining 'objective, epistemological reality' relative to the memories, reports, and experiences that are coming out of the mouths of people who are talking about situations where we were not there at the time of these 'alleged events'.
The dreaded distinction between 'subjective' and 'objective' reality raises its 'clouded' face again.
Kant's 'subjective-objective-metaphysical split'.
The idea that we can never know for 100 percent sure what is happening in our own 'objective (noumenal) world' was one of the main theses of Kant's classic philosophical treatise: 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Kant's extremely skeptical, pessimistic epistemological conclusions in this regard were greatly disturbing to those who believed (like Hegel after him) that we could -- through human evolution -- get closer and closer to 'epistemological truth'. In some areas of science, yes. In many areas of day to day living -- and even in many 'court epistemological conclusions and decisions' -- not necessarily. 'Truth' in many life circumstances will always remain 'fleeting' and 'cloudy' -- even 'impossible to unequivocally determine'.
Did Freud 'lose moral courage and integrity'? Was Freud a fraud? How can any of us living today know for sure what was going on inside Freud's head back in 1896-97 in this regard when any and all conclusions are based on entirely, speculative, associative, circumstantial evidence?
Did Freud make a bad ethical if not legal mistake when he entrusted his patient, Emma Ekstein, to his closest friend, Dr. Fliess, who in turn conducted a totally unnecessary nasal surgery on her that almost killed her when he left -- and forgot -- a 'long string of gauze' in her nose that another doctor found days later when she was not healing properly, pulled on and pulled out -- and she almost bled to death from the nasal hemorrhaging? Yes. But is this the reason, or one of the reasons, that Freud changed his thinking from 'The Seduction Theory' to 'The Oedipal Theory'? None of us can know this. Including Dr. Masson. The theory that 'Freud lost moral courage and integrity' -- and that The Oedipal Theory, in effect, was a 'fraudulent cover-up theory with a hidden agenda behind it' -- to escape the 'political incorrectness' of child sexual abuse amongst his medical peers and superiors, and/or to 'save his own medical career' and/or to save both himself and his best friend, Fliess, from a 'huge medical guilt trip' -- all of these individual pieces of evidence do not in anyway conclusively prove Masson's 'theory into Freud's subjective mindset' -- this theory remains only that -- a theory -- just like Freud's 'Seduction Theory' and just like Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' -- impossible to prove conclusively one way or the other.
Actually, The Seduction Theory -- in its totally generality and reductionism -- is the easiest theory to logically disprove.
Not all people who are 'neurotic' are sexually assaulted as children.
I for one, can attest to that. I have a whole network of 'transference neuroses' in my personality, and I know for a fact that I didn't get sexually assaulted as a child. (Unless I was asleep or unconscious when it happened. Nope. Didn't happen. Indeed, I fully agree with Masson on this part -- if I was sexually assaulted as a child, I would know about it. I would remember it. Here Masson and I totally agree.
Personally, I don't think that 'repression' (unremembered memories) has much to do with human neurosis at all except perhaps in some very extreme and unusual case examples.
Here I part company from Psychoanalysis altogether both before and after 1896. I much prefer the ideas of 'dissociation' and 'splitting of the ego' (Charcot, Janet, Freud) into 'Persona' and 'Shadow' (Jung); or 'Ego' and 'Alter-ego' (Janet?); or Dionysian Ego and Apollonian Ego (my extension of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy'; or 'Superego', 'Ego' and 'Id' (Classic Freudian Psychoanalysis).
There is nothing in my thinking that says that the 'sexual and/or violent' content in a person's 'Id' or 'Dionysian Ego' has to be 'unconscious' or 'repressed'. Often it may 'dissociated' or 'denied' or even 'suppressed' but not at all 'unconscious' or 'repressed'.
Thus, when I start to talk about 'Transference Complexes, Scripts, and Neuroses', I turn instead to Adler's very fertile idea of interpreting conscious early memories.
For me, conscious early childhood memories can be viewed as 'transference memories'.
In my opinion, if I am a therapist and some client tells me that he or she was sexually assaulted as a child, I am going to do two things: 1. tentatively accept the client's 'subjective, psychic reality'; and 2. retain a certain element of 'agnosticism' or 'objective skepticism' realizing that what the client is telling me has not been 'empirically verified or confirmed' in any way by any outside witnesses and/or supporting evidence.
The therapist is being hired as a therapist -- which means mostly the role of 'Nurturing Superego' as well as 'Insight Giver' -- not as 'judge' and 'jury' either for or against the client, or for or against any of the client's living 'family members' who may or may not have been guilty of some moral and/or legal transgression against the client when the client was a much younger age. That is for the police and/or courts to decide -- if the client wants to proceed that far -- not for the therapist to play the role of police, judge, or jury -- or even to 'push' the client in that direction. As a therapist, we can 'surmise and infer or interpret' all we want -- and even this can be extremely dangerous when it gets to the point of 'interpreting or reconstructing a sexual assault memory' that is coming out of your mouth, not the client's. I would not try to touch such an interpretation with a ten foot pole -- it might make you a legitimate, and deserved, candidate for a client or family lawsuit.
One only has to review the case of Dr. Charles Smith to see 'how far the seduction theory can potentially get out of control if it is not kept within reasonable boundaries'. Dr. Smith was a 'child forensic pathologist' who rose to the top of his field before he was 'disgraced' by the 'over exuberance' with which he seemed to be looking for 'child murderers'. Furthermore, a good psychoanalyst can see the 'transference connection' between what Dr. Smith was doing in his forensic office and in the court room -- and his own 'abandonment by his mother both as a child and again when he contacted her as an adult'.
'Transference reversal and/or revenge' for a person who has a lot of power in a field where he or she can 'act out' with relative impunity his or her particular brand of 'underlying psycho and socio-pathology' in the guise of 'technical expertise' is a very dangerous social phenomenon. We need to know more about it.
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Dr. Charles Smith: The man behind the public inquiry
Last Updated Oct. 1, 2008
CBC News
On a typical case, he might have to decide whether a child had been shaken to death or accidentally fallen from a highchair.
Dr. Charles Smith was once considered top-notch in his field of forensic child pathology. In 1999, a Fifth Estate documentary singled him out as one of four Canadians with this rare expertise.
Dr. Charles Smith was long regarded as one of Canada's best in forensic child pathology. A public inquiry was called after an Ontario coroner's inquiry questioned Smith's conclusions in 20 of 45 child autopsies. (CBC)
For 24 years, Smith worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. In the hospital's pediatric forensic pathology unit, he conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies.
But Smith no longer practises pathology. An Ontario coroner's inquiry reviewed 45 child autopsies in which Smith had concluded the cause of death was either homicide or criminally suspicious.
The coroner's review found that Smith made questionable conclusions of foul play in 20 of the cases — 13 of which had resulted in criminal convictions. After the review's findings were made public in April 2007, Ontario's government ordered a public inquiry into the doctor's practices.
That inquiry, led by Justice Stephen Goudge and concluding in October 2008, found that Smith "actively misled" his superiors, "made false and misleading statements" in court and exaggerated his expertise in trials.
Far from an expert in forensic child pathology, "Smith lacked basic knowledge about forensic pathology," wrote Goudge in the inquiry report.
"Smith was adamant that his failings were never intentional," Goudge wrote. "I simply cannot accept such a sweeping attempt to escape moral responsibility."
Acted more like a prosecutor
Some have accused Smith of taking on a role larger than pathologist. The lawyer for Brenda Waudby said he was on a crusade and acted more like a prosecutor. Waudby was convicted in the murder of her daughter after Smith analyzed the case.
A pubic-like hair found on her daughter went missing during Smith's investigation. It was discovered he had kept the hair in his office before police found it five years later. In the end, Waudby's charges were dropped and the child's babysitter was convicted.
Smith said he had a passion for uncovering the truth in child deaths. The Ontario pathologist told media lampooning him he had "a thing against people who hurt children." He welled up when speaking about a mother looking for the cause of her baby's death.
Smith had been in search of his own personal truths. He was born in a Toronto Salvation Army hospital where he was put up for adoption three months later. After years of looking for his biological mother, he called her on her 65th birthday. But she refused to take his call.
Smith's adoptive family moved often. His father's job in the Canadian Forces took them throughout Canada and to Germany. He attended high school in Ottawa, and graduated from medical school at the University of Saskatchewan in 1975.
Sick Kids tenure
Hired by Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children in 1979, Smith worked in surgery for a year and then moved on to pathology training. A pathologist studies diseases and illnesses by assessing matter such as cells, tissues, organs and fluids. Pathologists also examine biopsy material, and give a subsequent diagnosis.
When it comes to autopsy reports, the field of pathology can be a subjective one. It's based on research and opinion, and it's especially controversial in Canada, where there is no formal training or certification process. Only a handful of practitioners in Ontario are entrusted with the job — and they've learned by doing.
With child victims, forensic analysis is rarely cut and dried. It can take an infant up to 24 hours to die of a shaking incident, which is a crime that doesn't leave evidence the way a regular killing might.
After his initial training at Sick Kids, as the Toronto hospital is known, Smith began conducting child autopsies in 1981. He started with children who had died of accidental and natural causes. By the late '90s, Smith saw more forensic child cases than any other pathologist across the country.
Smith's unit used arrest warrants to reinvestigate cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). He oversaw the autopsies of exhumed babies that led to new murder charges.
In one such case, Smith appeared before a court in the death of six-month-old Sara Podniewicz. He concluded she had been dead for up to 15 hours before her parents reported the death. The parents had told a 911 operator the girl had died just moments before. Smith's analysis led to second-degree murder charges.
First doubts
In 1991, a family in Timmins, Ont., was the first to raise questions about Smith's work. He had concluded their one-year-old baby had died from being shaken. The child had been under the care of a babysitter who said the baby had fallen down stairs.
In court, experts challenged Smith's opinion, which had resulted in the babysitter's charge of manslaughter. The judge in the case stated Smith should have taken other causes into consideration.
Once the most prolific pathologist, Smith began getting a reputation for late cases, and his disorderly desk produced samples that had gone missing.
In 2002, he received a caution from the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college said he was being "overly dogmatic" and had a "tendency towards overstatement."
In June 2005, Dr. Barry McLellan, Ontario's chief coroner, started the review of 45 child autopsies conducted by Smith between 1991 and 2002. The review, released in April 2007, found that Smith had made mistakes in 20 cases involving the deaths of children. The review cast doubt on criminal convictions in 13 of the cases.
"I am very surprised with the overall results of the review, and concerned," McLellan said. "In a number of cases, the reviewers felt that Dr. Smith had provided an opinion regarding the cause of death that was not reasonably supported by the materials available for review."
The chief coroner said the results of the review were being shared with defence and Crown attorneys involved in all of the relevant criminal cases.
After resigning from Sick Kids in 2005, Smith accepted a pathology position in Saskatoon. He was fired after three months. A tribunal later reinstated him, but without a licence, Smith was unable to practise.
Smith told media his marriage ended in light of stress from the highly publicized events. He had lived with his wife and two children on a farm north of Newmarket, Ont.
As a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Smith says he has been fuelled by his life's purpose — finding out the truth for parents who have lost babies.
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DGB
With all due respect to Masson because I greatly respect his work and his willingness to stand up to his conclusions, some of which I support and others which I don't, memories are like all human experiences -- they are subjectively biased, and can be distorted, even intentionally or unintentionally totally fabricated.
This certainly does not mean that they are always, or even usually, fabricated in the cases of memories of sexual assault. Indeed, I agree with Masson's conclusion that if a person has been sexually assaulted, they are usually going to clearly remember it; there certainly does not have to be any 'repression' involved, nor does there need to be any repression involved to 'cause' neurosis.
First of all, let me give you two examples of 'fabricated memories' from my own life. In the first case, my dad was going through one of the most stressful times of his life. His company was collapsing, the work that he had done his entire life was collapsing, he wasn't making enough revenue anymore to pay for all his bills, and his bills -- including company creditors -- were soaring higher and higher. My dad seemed bordering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Neither his thoughts nor his memories were 'logically connecting' in a way that people around him would normally expect from him in any normal conversation.
My family and I years previous to this happening, had gone on a trip to the Bahamas. My brother and I had recounted a memory several or numerous times in the intervening years where we had gone for a walk along the beach first thing in the morning. On our way back to the hotel we got 'trapped' by one of the many canals in Freeport, Bahamamas that wound its way inland for seemingly miles from the ocean beach.
My brother and I were looking at the 100 feet or so that it would take to 'swim' across the channel, and we were also looking at the 'seemingly miles that we would need to walk inland to walk around the canal. Swimming, and getting soaked in the process -- we were wearing summer clothes at the time, not bathing suits -- was becoming more and more attractive to the point where we were going to do it when a large stingray meandered past our very eyes in the light blue-green water that we were looking down at. We quickly changed our minds -- and walked around the canal.
Years later, during this period of heavy stress for my dad, a group of us were in my parents' living room when my dad recounted the story as if he had been there! My brother and I looked at each other -- and said nothing. But quietly we were both shaking our heads because we knew he had not been with us that morning, he was either back at the hotel or out somewhere doing his own business that morning. It had just been my brother and I who had been there.
Just to show that this type of thing can happen to all of us -- and me too -- I remember my dad recounting a memory where at the age of of about 5, I had stood up in front of a whole church congregation and named off every country on a globe that presumably my dad pointed to in front of me. I succeeded, obviously with a lot of private practice before I got to that moment and event in the church. The thing is, I never 'remembered' the incident until my dad shared it with me numerous times in my later life. Then I started to 'remember' what only can be construed as a 'false memory'. This can happen to all of us.
Similarly, the particular detail events in memories over time -- especially as we get older and our memory is not as good as it used to be -- can be 'added' to and/or 'subtracted' from the memory, different or similar events from different memories in different times and/or places can be 'conflated' together. All of this is to say that 'subjective, narcissistically biased memories' -- unless otherwise supported and confirmed by other witnesses and/or credible evidence -- should not be construed as being the same as 'objective facts'.
Having said this, not many people are going to 'forget' a memory with the magnitude of 'subjective importance' of a sexual assault -- or anything close to it. I can remember twice in my younger life -- between 20 and 35 -- where I was verbally propositioned by homosexual men. At least once when I was driving cab in my 30s, a second time too, I believe, that I cannot remember the details, and once in my teens or early 20s where I was propositioned in the man's apartment after he had just locked the door. I politely told the man, 'sorry, but I didn't lean that way' -- and promptly undid the lock and left. Another time -- stupid on my part -- I was hitchhiking back to university late at night and got into a car with a homosexual man. The man towards the end of the trip made a 'physical pass' at me, putting his hand on my knee and running it up my leg -- this was probably one of the most stupid situations that I ever got myself into but fortunately we were in Waterloo by this time and I was out of the car in a flash without anything further developing.
That last memory I have only shared with one or two people in my life -- I was embarrassed, humiliated might be a better word, for getting myself into the situation in the first place where it happened. Memories like this, we don't 'forget'. Maybe we 'suppress' them -- don't share them with others -- but that doesn't mean that we either 'forget' or 'repress' them. We remember them clearly.
Or speaking from my own experience, this is what I believe.
So Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' clearly did a 'disservice' to mankind, and particularly to any Psychoanalytic clients who may have been sexually assaulted as children because the Oedipal Theory basically 'denied the existence' of such 'traumatic experiences and the memories of such experiences' having re-theorized and classified these experiences and memories of experiences into 'normal childhood -- and/or later teenage -- sexual fantasies unconsciously re-worked, masked, distorted, and/or fabricated as 'actually happened events' that in post 1900 Psychoanalytic theory -- didn't happen. For a client who may have been actually horrifically sexually assaulted, this would be like the equivalent of telling a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust that 'the Holocaust never happened'. Thus, in this regard, The Oedipal Theory can only be construed as a 'brutal pathology of normalcy' within Psychoanalytic Theory itself -- and something that to this day, still needs to be changed amongst all Classically trained Psychoanalysts who are still adhering to this 'distorted' theory.
In my opinion, The Oedipal Theory should be defined and described differently: it is our tendency to be romantically and/or sexually attracted to a person who reminds us in some way, consciously or subconsciously, of one or both of our parents.
This does not need to imply that we were all sexually attracted to our parent of the opposite sex growing up -- or that we wanted to 'conquer and destroy' the parent of the same sex in order to get to the parent of the opposite sex, although in many families growing up, it might indeed, actually seem like this type of psychological process was going on. But this theory is better taken 'metaphorically, symbolically, and/or mythologically' in my opinion, than to be taken literally like a Classically trained Psychoanalyst is taught to do.
Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex' from the ancient Greek Sophocles Trilogy.
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Oedipus Trilogy
The Oedipus Trilogy was originally written by Sophocles and is meant to be told in a story-telling fashion.
SOPHOCLES
OEDIPUS THE KING
Translation by F. Storr, BA
Formerly Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge
From the Loeb Library Edition
Originally published by
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
and
William Heinemann Ltd, London
First published in 1912
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ARGUMENT
To Laius, King of Thebes, an oracle foretold that the child born
to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother.
So when in time a son was born the infant's feet were riveted together
and he was left to die on Mount Cithaeron. But a shepherd found the
babe and tended him, and delivered him to another shepherd who took
him to his master, the King or Corinth. Polybus being childless
adopted the boy, who grew up believing that he was indeed the King's
son. Afterwards doubting his parentage he inquired of the Delphic god
and heard himself the weird declared before to Laius. Wherefore he
fled from what he deemed his father's house and in his flight he
encountered and unwillingly slew his father Laius. Arriving at Thebes
he answered the riddle of the Sphinx and the grateful Thebans made
their deliverer king. So he reigned in the room of Laius, and
espoused the widowed queen. Children were born to them and Thebes
prospered under his rule, but again a grievous plague fell upon the
city. Again the oracle was consulted and it bade them purge
themselves of blood-guiltiness. Oedipus denounces the crime of which
he is unaware, and undertakes to track out the criminal. Step by
step it is brought home to him that he is the man. The closing scene
reveals Jocasta slain by her own hand and Oedipus blinded by his own
act and praying for death or exile.
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But in my opinion again, 'The Oedipal Myth' is best left interpreted as a myth -- and not something normally to be taken literally, although again, in some particular circumstances, it almost looks like it should be taken literally.
And often, it is quite possible to get some extremely 'mixed up' and/or 'conflated' variables.
For example, we could divide the Oedipal Complex in half and talk about the 'Antigone Complex' where a child metaphorically and/or literally wants to 'conquer and/or destroy' his or her parent of the same sex.
And we can also talk about the 'Polar Oedipal Complex' where we are attracted to a person who has the opposite characteristic(s) of one or both parents.
Indeed, it is not at all unusual for elements of Freud's 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory, Oedipal Theory, Transference Theory and and Narcissistic Compensation/Overcompensation/Mastery Compulsion Theory (Adler's influence)' -- all to be conflated together in particular case examples giving an extremely muddled clinical picture unless a therapist is actually taught (and/or learns him or herself) to expect this type of clinical picture to happen. Because I think it is more the norm than the exception.
Personally, I believe that the strongest Freudian Theory exists when all of Freud's various theories are merged together -- even the ones he personally 'disowned' -- and treated as supporting each other, not as being mutually exclusive.
This is where we all have a tendency of getting caught up -- and 'tricked' -- by Aristolean or Kierkgaardian 'black or white, either/or logic' when oftentimes we are better utilizing Hegelian or post-Hegelian 'dialectically-integrative logic'.
One of the best ideas of 'wisdom' that I can come up with is the distinction of 'properly knowing when we are best utilizing Aristolean-Kierkegaardian either/or logic vs. when we are best utilizing Hegelian or Post-Hegelian dialectically-integrative logic'. Often, we get 'stuck' and 'locked' inside an Aristolean-Kierkegaardian model of viewing the world and our own particular choices when we would be better utilizing a Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential, Dialectically Integrative Model.
To give you another example, in physics, to the best of memory, there used to be a 'particle' theory or matter. Then there was a 'wave theory' of matter. However, the best model of all came when -- using Hegelian dialectic logic -- a 'wave-particle duality' theory was created which became a central quantum mechanics.
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Wave–particle duality
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In physics and chemistry, wave–particle duality is the concept that all matter and energy exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, duality addresses the inadequacy of classical concepts like "particle" and "wave" in fully describing the behaviour of small-scale objects. Various interpretations of quantum mechanics attempt to explain this ostensible paradox.
Wave–particle duality should be distinguished from wave-particle complementarity, the latter implying that matter can demonstrate both particle and wave characteristics, but not both at the same time (that is, not within one and the same experimental arrangement).
The idea of duality is rooted in a debate over the nature of light and matter dating back to the 1600s, when competing theories of light were proposed by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton). Through the work of Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa).[1] The only distinction in this regard is that in different contexts, because of mass or energy or frequency, some matter seems more particle-like than wave-like; in other contexts, or with reduced values of energy etc., the same matter will more obviously show wave-like qualities than particle-like.
This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also for compound particles like atoms and even molecules. In fact, according to traditional formulations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, wave–particle duality applies to all objects, even macroscopic ones; because of their small wave lengths, the wave properties of macroscopic objects cannot be detected.[2]
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The same type of 'dialectically integrative' or 'duality theory' should be applied to Psychoanalysis as has been done in physics.
Everyone of Freud's many 'sub-theories' should be equally respected and/or modified and then merged together to create what I think is potentially the best Psychoanalytic theory of all -- a 'multi-dialectic-integrative-and-wholistic one'; not a 'reductionistically torn apart and dissociated one' where all the individual pieces and sub-theories need to be put back together again like 'Humpty Dumpty'.
Even Freud's last theory that was only just being started to be developed on 'dissociation' and the splitting of the ego' would become an incredibly valuable addition to 'Object Relations' Psychoanalysis as clinicians and theorists like Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Harold Guntrip, Heinz Kohut, and Eric Berne would take this 'theoretical ball and run with it'.
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Melanie Klein
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Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had a significant impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life
* 2 Thought
* 3 Literature
* 4 In popular culture
* 5 External links
* 6 Notes
[edit] Life
Born in Vienna of Jewish parentage[1], Klein first sought psychoanalysis for herself with Sandor Ferenczi when he was living in Budapest during World War I. There she became a psychoanalyst and began analysing children in 1919. In 1921 she moved to Berlin where she studied with and was analysed by Karl Abraham. Although Abraham supported her pioneering work with children, neither Klein nor her ideas received much support in Berlin. However, impressed by her innovative work, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones invited Klein to come to London in 1926, where she worked until her death in 1960.
Klein had a major influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain. As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications consisted of a teaching degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians.
After the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalyst daughter, Anna, in London in 1938, Klein’s ideas came into conflict with those of Continental analysts who were immigrating to Britain. Following protracted debates between the followers of Klein and the followers of Anna Freud during the 1940s, the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Anna Freudian, and (3) independent. This division remains to the current time.
Apart from her professional successes, Klein’s life was full of tragic events. Allegedly the product of an unwanted birth, her parents showed her little affection. Her much loved elder sister died when Klein was four, and she was made to feel responsible for her brother’s death. Her academic studies were interrupted by marriage and children. Her marriage failed and her son died, while her daughter, the well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly in the British Psychoanalytic Society. Mother and daughter were not reconciled before Klein's death, and Schmideberg did not attend Klein's funeral.
[edit] Thought
Although she questioned some of the fundamental assumptions of Sigmund Freud, Klein always considered herself a faithful adherent to Freud's ideas. Klein was the first person to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques[2] (such as working with children using toys) and her theories in infant development. Strongly opinionated, and demanding loyalty from her followers, Klein established a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis. She is considered one of the co-founders of object relations theory.
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a speculative hypothesis eventually accepted by Freud, which stated that life may be a fragile occurrence, that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains a drive towards death. In psychological terms Eros (properly, the life instinct), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly seeks to terminate and disintegrate life.Both Freud and Klein regarded these biomental forces as the foundations of the psyche. These were human instincts ("Triebe") unrelated to the animal instincts of ethology.These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the "id," sparked the ego--the experiencing self--into activity. Id, ego, and superego--to be sure--were merely shorthand terms (like the "instincts")referring to highly complex, mostly uncharted, psychodynamic operations. Freud and Klein never abandoned the terms or the conceptualizations despite protests and controversies by many of their adherents, especially now.
While Freud’s ideas concerning children mostly came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working directly with children, often as young as two years old. Klein saw children’s play as their primary mode of emotional communication. After observing troubled children play with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine, pencil and paper, Klein attempted to interpret the specific meaning of play. She realised that parental figures played a significant role in the child’s phantasy life, and considered that the chronology of Freud’s Oedipus complex was imprecise. Contradicting Freud, she concluded that the superego was present long before the Oedipal phase.
After exploring ultra-aggressive phantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young, very ill children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore. She named the state of the psyche, when the sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position. The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid-schizoid position.[3]
Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analysing children brought her into conflict with Freud's own daughter, Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists working in England at that time. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial/scientific discussions.
Today, Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the major schools within psychoanalysis. Kleinian psychoanalysts are members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the predominant school of psychoanalysis within Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exception of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. Within the United States of America, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the major training center that follows the work of Melanie Klein. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults is characterized by a very traditional technique using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on interpreting very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies.
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DGB
In the 'Splitting of the Ego in The Process of Defense' essay (1938), written a year before he died in London, England, Freud's opening paragraph is extremely significant.
'I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter.' (The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 23, p. 275).
There are numerous ways in which this 'old-new' line of thinking on Freud's part should both be linked to his past work -- and to the work of Pierre Janet -- as well as pointing a 'new' path for Psychoanalysis in the future.
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Pierre Janet
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Pierre Janet
Born May 30, 1859(1859-05-30)
Died February 24, 1947 (aged 87)
Nationality French
Fields psychology, philosophy, psychiatry
Doctoral students William James
Known for dissociation
Pierre Marie Félix Janet (May 30, 1859 - February 24, 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
He was one of the first people to draw a connection between events in the subject's past life and his or her present day trauma, and coined the words ‘dissociation’ and ‘subconscious’. He studied under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Psychological Laboratory in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, in Paris. In several ways, he preceded Sigmund Freud. Many consider Janet, rather than Freud, the true 'founder' of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
He first published the results of his research in his philosophy thesis in 1889 and in his medical thesis, L'état mental des hystériques, in 1892. He earned a degree in medicine the following year in 1893.
In 1898, Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1902 he attained the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France, a position he held until 1936. He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913.
In 1923, he wrote a definitive text, La médecine psychologique, on suggestion and in 1928-32, he published several definitive papers on memory.
Whilst he did not publish much in English, the fifteen lectures he gave to the Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906 were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria and he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.
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DGB
Personally, the one theory of Freud's that I more or less completely 'dissociate' myself from is his theory of 'repression' and 'the unconscious'. I much prefer Janet's concepts of 'dissociation' and 'subconscious'. And the concept that Freud is just starting to develop here -- specifically, the 'splitting of the ego in the process of defense' although here we need to either make critical distinctions and/or 'equal associative linguistic and semantic connections' between the 'splitting of the ego', 'the splitting of the psyche', and the 'splitting of the Whole Self'. I am inclined to lump all three of these ideas together to mean exactly the same thing.
Many psychoanalysts, I believe, would not want to do this. Freud, as I recall -- I will have to check this -- believed that the newborn baby was basically a 'bundle of biological, biochemical, sexual, and psychic energy' -- which he called the 'Id' -- to be differentiated later from the biological, social, evolutionary survival function and development of 'the ego' as it 'split off from the id' in order to protect the self from 'internal and/or external dangers'. 'The Superego' -- i.e., the 'internalized (or introjected) righteous, ethical, social conscience of society and/or the parents -- would be viewed by Freud as a later 'splitting off of The Ego' into the third part of the human psyche which Freud gave the name 'Superego' to.
Now Freud's 'classic 3 part model of the human psyche' as discussed above is either a little bit or quite a bit different than any kind of 'Object Relations' model depending on who is doing the interpreting and what kind of Object Relations model we are talking about.
Freud was the first psychoanalyst to use the term 'object' (1915?) -- starting from his 'drive theory' (sexual and aggressive) and then differentiating between the 'source', 'the aim', and the 'object' of the particular drive. In 1917 ('Mourning and Melancholia), Freud started to talk about 'external objects' and 'lost objects' relative to depression which eventually paved the way for Melanie Klein to start to talk about 'relational psychoanalysis' with 'internal' and 'external' objects as well as 'drive Psychoanalysis' (a derivative of Freud's sexual and aggressive instincts) and Fairbairn to take this one step further and drop 'drive Psychoanalysis altogether.
The two types of models can actually be integrated and incorporated into the same model as Klein more or less tried to do (but with some further distinctions).
My intent is similar but in a way that is much broader (and less convoluted) than Klein as I aim to integrate all elements of Psychoanalytic Theory (as well as some aspects of 'Non-Analytic' theory: Adler, Jung, Perls, Berne, Masson).
This includes: Traumacy-Seduction Theory, my modified version of Oedipal Theory, 'Unorthodox Transference' Theory, the Adlerian interpretation of conscious early childhood memories as 'conflicted transference memories', Narcissistic Id Theory, 'Mastery Compulsion, Compensation, and Transference-Reversal Theory', and Object Relations Theory...with the outside contributions of the aforementioned Adler, Jung, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Perls, Berne, and others...
What this requires is essentially a further 'splitting off' of both The Ego and The Superego as well as perhaps even the Id and/or other 'Subterranean' elements of the Personality into further 'components', 'compartments' or 'divisions' of the psyche.
This idea we will develop more specifically in the next essay.
Enough for now.
-- dgb, August 1st, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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