Newly Updated Nov. 7th, 2009.
A/ Introduction
Man's mind, brain, and body -- taken together, and/or taken apart for teaching and learning purposes -- consists of a myriad of different types of opposite desires and restraints that can be differentiated, classified, grouped into what can be called 'multiple bi-polarities' where choices need to be made -- choices of extremism or choices of greater or lesser moderate balance.
Pathology for the most part tends to be associated with extremism. Extreme righteousness. Extreme narcissism. Extreme self-denial and/or self-control.
In this regard, pathology on the psychological level shouldn't be viewed too much differently than pathology on the biochemical level where pathology tends to be associated with such things as: high blood-sugar levels (diabetes), low blood-sugar levels (hypoglycemia), too acidic, too alkaline, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, too much fat, not enough fat, too much protein, not enough protein, too many carbohydrates, not enough carbohydrates, too much potassium, not enough potassium, too much iron, not enough iron...and on and on we could go...
For the most part, health tends to follow the moderate, middle path, 'The Golden Mean' (Aristotle).
Not always. There is a 'Nietzschean existential factor' that we need to take fully into account. Call this the 'will to self-empowerment' or the 'will to excellence'. Often times, we need to spend literally hundreds or thousands of hours obsessively practising what we want to be very good at so that we can show ourselves and/or the world just how good we can be.
This type of 'job, career, sport or hobby extremism' is at least partly healthy as we are 'striving towards excellence'. It only becomes 'borderline or partly pathological' when we become 'workaholics' to the extent that we lose our mate, our family, our friends, our 'psychological and emotional balance' in the process. Partly, we need to do what we do either simply to 'economically survive' and/or to be the best we possibly can be at whatever we have decided to 'specialize' in. But not at the expense of destroying everything and everyone else who are critically important to us in our lives. We all need some 'downtime' and we all need some 'compensatory' time to do other things in our lives besides our area of 'acute specialization'.
Thus, a certain element of 'healthy extremism' is involved in 'the will to excel'. However, even here one needs to watch that one's wish and will to excel does not so consume our life that we end up losing our spouse, our family, our friends in the process. Again, even in the will to excel, at some point we need to consider the issue of 'balance' and ask ourselves, for example, what is the cost I am paying for my righteous extremism, and/or my 'workaholism' which may be connected to my 'will to excel' (and/or to likewise put extremely high demands on those around me who are most important to me who may either crash or rebel under our imposed stress and pressure on them).
Thus, life becomes a game, an art, and/or a science of balancing different priorities and bi-polarities in our personality and in our life like balancing and juggling different plates in the air while making sure thant none of these plates come crashing down, sometimes first one, and then sometimes more and more til they have all crashed to the floor...We crashed under the stress of our continual juggling act. Maybe next time, we need to juggle with less plates in the air.
The goal of most dialectic bi-polar psychotherapies -- Psychoanalysis, Jungian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Transactional Analysis -- including this DGB approach here, is to help bring about more 'wholistic multi-dialectic, multi-bi-polar, integration' both inside and outside of the personality.
Evolution -- as asserted and theorized here -- is 'multiple-bi-polar-dialectic-evolution'. Everything comes about either from 'power over' or from 'integrative union'. Where destruction or anhiliation is not the goal, the second type of evolution among men -- integrative union -- usually works much better with far less human tragedy, traumacy, 'insurgency', and casualties. The more oppressive the leadership is, the more likely there will be a myriad of signs and symptoms of rising 'covert' and/or 'overt' rebellion, mutiny, anarchy. The less people feel they have to lose -- the more they feel their lives are being terrorized -- the more likely they are to eventually take up arms. War is never a good thing. But the more government leaders 'squeeze' their citizens, the more likely that the citizens will eventually 'burst' -- either internally and/or externally. This applies to taxes, it applies to 'overbearing' family support payments to separated fathers who after half their income is deducted from their cheque, are making significantly less than social assistence recipients. It applies to suppressed rights regardless of the person's race, colour, sex, or religion. And it is not always the 'usually perceived' categories of people who are necessarily being discriminated against. 'Preferentialism' of all types exists for numerous different categories and classes of people. And the problem of 'reverse discrimination' continues to ominously exist in bids to 'overcompensate' for previously discriminated groups of people who are now being treated preferentially.
I have seen this type of situation happen right here in Canada where 'separated fathers' are squeezed so tightly by the Canadian government on the responsibility of 'family support' that they cannot any longer support themselves with any kind of reasonable dignity and self-respect -- and start to panic and internally or externally 'burst'. A man should at least have the right to keep enough of his net income to decently support himself with integrity -- and not have to go down to his knees begging anyone, least of all the government, if he is putting in a full week of work -- even more -- and they are still deducting half his cheque. Unbelievably, I have heard of a case where a 60 plus year old man is being deducted half his pension money to go towards supporting a couple of 20-25 year old children who are still in college or university. No 'married man' would be forced to do this. I view this law that forces separated fathers to continue to pay child suppor to 'adult children' (19 or over) who are still in school as completely discriminatory and disgusting.
There is no topic of philosophy that gets my blood boiling faster than the topic of 'equal rights'. That is why I keep avoiding it -- and avoiding the deepest, darkest area of my righteous anger, even rage, until I have laid down almost every other part of the complete foundation of Hegel's Hotel. The last thing that I want is for Hegel's Hotel to be viewed as 'extremist' without knowing the full extent towards which I trumpet and support all Enlightenment-Egalitarian values and right for both sexes and all races, religions, ethnic groups, colours, and classes of people...But we will come back to this on another day...
Physical and psycho-pathology are differentiated -- but similar -- in that they both need to be located on a continuum of a multitude of swinging pendulums of health, balance ('The Golden Mean', 'The Middle Path' -- Aristotle) vs. extremism, extreme swings of the pendulum -- and the resulting physical and/or psycho-pathology that comes with extremism over the edge and, at its worst, into the darkest abyss of humanity, non-humanity, and/or ultimately self-destruction and death.
B/ Other Psychological Models of The Personality and Their Influence
Let us try this again for the upteenth time -- as I once again battle the dichotomoy of simplicity vs. complexity -- and aim to get the DGB model of the personality down to something of reasonable size, clarity, and understandability. Okham's Razor. (All else being equal, the simplest theory is usually the best one.) KISS: KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID.
Having said this, I am trying to integrate a lot of different psychological models here that all have significant value -- to integrate 'the best of the best' if you will.
Synonyms for 'Personality' or 'Personality Structure' in this Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy-Psychology domain will be: 'Ego', 'Psyche', 'Self', and 'Character Structure'.
View the personality as being like a 'government' or a 'corporation' (preferably egalitarian, democratic, multi-dialectic, and balanced) with numerous different 'departments' (or 'compartments') that have separate functions that are all designed to come together to fulfill the overall function of the government/corporation/personality. In this respect, the personality -- with its different 'ego-states' that I will name and describe, can also be metaphorically compared to the different 'organs' of the body, each having its own separate functions, but each 'working towards the combined good and health of the whole personality/body'.
Some of the other personality models that are out there and which I will simply skim over quickly without giving full justice to, are:
1. The Gestalt Model (Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman) uses the terms 'topog' and 'underdog', a 'two-compartment' model;
2. The Adlerian Model (Alfred Adler) emphasizes the ideas of 'inferiority feeling' and 'superiority striving', with a person's movement in behavior being from a perceived 'minus' situation to a perceived 'plus' situation and a person's 'lifestyle' -- or I would say 'lifestyle-transference-complex' -- providing the person's 'signature movement' through life towards his or her ultimate lifestyle (transference) goal. The idea of transference comes from Freud, not Adler, but I see a 'lifestyle-transference' connection in that both are aimed at that 'fictional final goal' (Adler).
3. The Classic Freudian Model (Sigmund Freud): a '3 compartment model': 'The Id' (containing all our biological drives), 'The Superego' (containing our ethical/moral and legal conscience 'The Ego' (the mediating agent between our id and superego);
4. The Jungian Model (Carl Jung): arguably a '6 compartment model': includes a) 'The Persona' ('The Social Ego' -- 'The Face We Show Society'), b) 'The Shadow' ('The Dark Side of the Personality, , 'Darth Vader' 'The Alter-Ego', 'Mr. or Ms. Hyde), c) 'The Personal Unconscious', d)'The Collective Unconscious', e) 'The (Potential) Self...and a more or less 'assumed' f) 'Central, Integrative Ego' (when everything is working right);
5. The Object Relations Model(s) (Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip...)
Melanie Klein really got the ball rolling in Object Relations adding such concepts to Psychoanalysis as: 'External Objects', 'Internal Objects', 'The Depressive Position', 'The Paranoid-Schizoid Position...
Ronald Fairbairn also had a model that was quite interesting which included: a) 'the exciting object'; b) 'the rejecting object'; c) 'the morally idealized and anti-libidinal parent'; d) 'the infantile, libidinal ego'; e) 'the infantile, anti-libidinal ego'; and f) 'the central ego' identifying with the morally idealized parents. Fairbairn's model is a '6 department or compartment model' of the personality. (Harry Guntrip, Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and The Self, 1971,73, p. 98)
6. The Transactional Analysis Model (Eric Berne): Built mainly from an 'Object Relations' perspective of the personality -- and simplified for the 'lay public' -- Berne created a model that looks something like this: a) 'The Nurturing (Encouraging-positive, spoiling-negative) Parent(-Ego); b) 'The Critical, Controlling (Structuring-positive, oppressive-negative) Parent(-Ego)'; c) 'The Adult-(Ego); d) 'The Adapted (Co-operative, Compliant) Child; e) 'The Free (Spontaneous-positive, Immature-negative) Child. That would make this a '5 department or compartment model'.
From these 6 'classic personality theories and models' (and there are many others I have not used here), I have derived and created the following reduced DGB '7 Ego-States model' (with 4 'Subconscious or Unconscious Pre-Ego-States').
This can also be viewed as a psychological -- and abbreviated -- version of Hegel's Hotel -- internalizd.
................................................................................
C/ A DGB Multiple-Bi-Polar Model of The Personality (Psyche)
01. The Nurturing Topdog
02. The Narcissistic-Dionysian (Pleasure-Seeking) Topdog
03. The Righteous (Orthodox-Establishment)-Apollonian Topdog
04. The Central (Mediating, Executive) Ego
05. The Approval-Seeking (Co-operative, Submissive) Underdog
06. The Narcissistic-Dionysian (Pleasure-Seeking) Underdog
07. The Righteous-Rebellious (Deconstructionist, Anti-Thesis) Underdog
08. The Dynamic, Creative (Dream-Making) Unconscious
09. The Structural, Learned Unconscious and Transference-Memory Template
10. The Structural, Genetic Unconscious and Mythological Archetype Template
11. The Unconsious Blueprint-Template of The Self (Our Potential Essence, Spirit or Soul)
That was simple.
Now all I have to do is extrapolate on the model and dig into the different nuances and 'intra-psychic dynamics' of the model in more detail.
We will discuss some of these more concrete details and the different applications of this model as we continue to move along.
That is not too far away. I will probably start with a full rendition of 'The Functioning and Dysfunctioning of The Central Ego'. My goal is to start that rather large paper -- that I will divide into many parts for easier blog-reading -- sometime around the middle of Nov. 2009, and hopefully finish by year end. That essay will be a long overdue version of my 1979 Honours Thesis in Psychology, 'Evaluation and Health' which will now include all of my 'post-1979 dialectic and non-dialectic influences' from Hegel to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Freud to Jung to Perls...and many, many others.
This new rendition of my 1979 essay will be called: 'Language, Epistemology, Evaluation and Action: The Functioning and Dysfunctioning of The Central Ego'.
-- dgb, Aug. 5th, 2009, updated Sept. 27th, 29th, Nov. 7th-8th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism
-- Dialectic, Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process
..................................................................................
