But before we meet Melanie Klein, we need to do some preliminary historical-psychoanalytic investigating in order to set the context for the arrival of Melanie Klein onto the Psychoanalytic scene.
Much of our life is centered around meeting people. Engagement and disengagement. Contact and withdrawal. Contact and avoiding contact. Avoiding contact to avoid the potential of rejection.
Let's start with some of the work of Alfred Adler in the context of his Freudian roots.
Conscious early memories can be divided into two types. Excuse my Aristotelean bi-polar logic here. I've been trying to steer you away from using it but sometimes it is useful as long as we remain aware of its potential limitations. And the main limitation of Aristotelean logic is the 'excluded, integrative middle category'. We will start by focusing on two different bi-polar categories. If your memory doesn't fit into either of these categories, then figure out what the 'new category' is that is missing or maybe your memory fits into the 'excluded middle category' that we are talking about.
The two types of childhood memories that I will talk about here are basically 'good' memories and 'bad' memories. Or put another way, memories of 'ego traumacy' on the one hand vs. memories of 'ego satisfaction' on the other hand. It basically takes us down the same path as the one Freud took before Adler (only he was working with repressed, unconscious memories and fantasies as opposed to conscious, remembered ones. I would say that the same principles apply for both types of memories and fantasies.
I am not one of these theorists -- like Freud -- who stated that a memory has to be unconscious and repressed in order to be 'etiologically (causally) important' relative to 'neurotic symptoms, disorders, and complexes'.
So another way that we can divide the memories (and/or fantasies) is into the categories of 'narcissistic (self-esteem) traumacies vs. 'narcissistic satisfactions and fixations -- or fetishes'. Oftentimes, narcissistic fixations and fetishes arise out of narcissistic (ego) traumacies. Here is where Aristotelean 'either/or' logic blends into Hegelian dialectic logic -- into the excluded integrative middle category.
Particularly important, are our earliest conscious/subconscious early rejections, failures, betrayals, abandonments, exclusions -- and I will emphasize 'conscious' or 'subconscious' here because that is what we are working with (unconscious, repressed memories are subject for another discussion).
These earliest rejections -- as often subjectively remembered and recorded in our earliest childhood conscious memories -- can sew the seeds, become the starting-point, and the central fixation point for our most important lifelong 'transference-lifestyle complexes'.
Now this concept -- 'transference-lifestyle-complex' (or 'TLC') is a multi-integrative concept because that is how Hegel's Hotel conducts its own particular brand of theorizing and therapizing.
'Transference' comes from Freud.
'Lifestyle' comes from Adler.
'Complex' comes from Jung and Adler.
'TLC' -- just remember 'Tender Loving Care'. Sometimes our earliest childhood memories reflect moments of tender, loving care. But probably more often than not, these memories reflect moments of 'un-tender, un-loving, un-care'. Consequently, they become the focal point of our deepest feelings of 'insecurity', 'inferiority', and/or lack of self-esteem.
Thus, the connection to the idea of 'narcissistic (ego, self-esteem) traumacy'.
And everyone one of our 'transference-lifestyle movements' after this early, traumatic event -- this 'crash in self-esteem' -- becomes a movement directed either 'upwards' ('superiority striving', 'mastery compulsion'), 'against' ('fight'), and/or 'away' ('flight') from the traumatic event. This is how Freud and Adler should have gotten their respective acts together. (And fleetingly, they were on the same page as Adler introduced his most important prospective contribution to Psychoanalysis at a meeting of The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on November 6th, 1906. Freud applauded Adler's work as Adler introduced the monumentally important ideas of 'organ inferiority' and 'compensation' or 'overcompensation' -- that would later be applied to the idea of 'psychic inferiority complexes' , 'psychic compensation and overcompensation', and 'superiority striving' which can be translated to the brief Freudian idea of 'the mastery compulsion'.)
My job is to get Freud and Adler back on the same page here as they 're-mull around with each other in Hegel's Hotel and mend old psychic wounds and disagreements'.
Or will I take this discussion back into the 1890s again -- back into the Seduction Theory Controversy for another attempt at an 'historical conflict resolution'.
Or both.
And that is before getting to the work of Melanie Klein and Eric Berne which we will examine in Part 2 of this essay.
There is a 'Spinozian-Hegelian' spirit going on here in Hegel's Hotel in the sense that 'everything is connected, everything is linked'. We just have to find the right connections, the right linkages. That is what we might call the 'reincarnation of the combined 'Spinozian-Hegelian Multi-Dialectic-Wholistic Spirit' here in Hegel's Hotel.
Let us start with Adler's ideas of 'organ inferiority' and 'compensation'.
These two ideas are totally relevant to my current medical situation. And they can be applied to psychological situations -- or 'symptoms' -- as well.
In my own case, as I have said in earlier essays, I have cirrhosis in the right lobe of my liver. However, my body has 'compensated' for the 'organ inferiority' of the right lobe of my liver by 'building a larger left lobe to take on some or all of the functions that are not being carried out properly any longer by my right lobe'. Obviously, my life prognosis will depend very much on how well my left lobe continues to carry out these functions. If my left lobe turns cirrhotic (as opposed to 'neurotic') as well as my right lobe, then it's basically 'lights out and kiss the world goodbye'...or as a last stop measure, a liver transplant. Here's to hoping -- and trying as best as possible to ingest the right things into my body as opposed to the wrong things -- that my left lobe stays healthy so that I can stay healthy for as long as possible.
In winter, we 'compensate' for the 'colder weather' by putting on 'additional warmer clothes' to 'defend ourselves' against the colder outside temperatures.
Taken from the minutes of the Nov. 7th, 1906 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Adler speaking),
'There seems to be a direct relationship between the increased activity of the central nervous system in childhood and the childhood defects (both physical and psychological, my addition). In neurotics, childhood defects seem to be the rule, and the efforts to compensate for these childhood defects -- (real and/or imagined -- my addition again) -- marks the entire life of the individuals concerned (what I referred to above as 'transference-lifestyle complexes and neuroses' -- my dgb addition again).' (1962, Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, Library of Congress, Minutes of The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, p. 40).
And on pages 52-54 of the Minutes, Nov. 21, 1964, Adler again present, a presentation is made 'On The Megalomania of The Normal Person' by Philipp Frey,
Frey emphasizes first that there are people who appear quite normal in the social sense but who cannot be considered entirely normal from the psychological point of view. (Can any of us? My addition). Their souls bear 'ugly' marks, we might say....This sort of purely psychic (not sociologic) abnormality in relation to self-assertion is present in many people. In many cases, the tendency to megalomania (conceit) turns out to be a compensation for the feeling of one's own inferiority.
p. 54...Kahane notes that Frey has entirely omitted to mention the megalomania (and exaggerated narcissism, my addition) of poets, actors, and artists (athletes, politicians, bankers, CEOs...my addition). He calls attention also to the megalomania of nations (Nazi Germany, my addition), chauvanism. He mentions also the 'chosen people' driven to this compensatory glorification by continuous, fierce outside pressure... In his opinion, megalomania is most likely to develop in people who are faced with the real (or imagined, my addition) danger of being undervalued...
Now let us work our way back historically to 1894 and Freud's essay, 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence'.
The subject is the etiology (cause) of hysteria.
Writes Freud,
'According to the theory of Janet (1892-4, and 1893), the splitting of consciousness is a primary feature of the mental change in hysteria. It is based on an innate weakness of the capacity for psychical synthesis, on the narrowness of the 'field of consciousness (champ de la conscience)' which, in the form of a psychical stigma, is evidence of the degeneracy of hysterical individuals.' (Standard Edition. Volume 3, 1894, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, p. 46).
Let us continue to follow Freud in his evolving argument which is very much indicative of Psychoanalysis in the process of being born. Particularly important here -- and partly a logical counter-argument to the main thrust of Masson's 'loss of moral courage' argument as to why Freud later abandoned his later Seduction Theory -- is the fact that Freud was playing around with elements of his later 'fantasy theory' here as well as his 'traumacy theory'. Indeed, the two theories were in fact already at least partly 'dialectically synthesized with each other' without Freud seemingly being aware of this fact because he never developed the full implications of a 'dialectic integration' argument that I will develop here for him.
It should be noted that Freud was defining 'hysteria' very broadly at this point in time -- almost to the point where it was virtually synonymous with the later idea of 'neurosis'.
For example, Freud was calling 'phobias' and 'obsessions' -- 'defence hysterias' -- which is not a type of classification that held up over time, at least relative to phobias and obsessions, even as Freud's idea of 'defence' in general was just starting to heat up.
Continues Freud,
'I am now in a position to bring forward evidence of two other extreme forms of hysteria in which it is impossible to regard the splitting of consciousness as primary in Janet's sense. In the first of these two (two further) forms I was repeatedly able to show that the splitting of the content of consciousness is the result of an act of will on the part of the patient; that is to say, it is initiated by an effort of will whose motive can be specified. By this, I do not, of course, mean that the patient intends to bring about a splitting of the consciousness. His intention is a different one; but, instead of attaining its aim, it produces a splitting of consciousness.' (1894, v. 3, p. 46-47).
In the third form of hysteria, which we have demonstrated by means of psychical analysis of intelligent patients, the splitting of consciousness plays an insignificant part, or perhaps none at all. They are those cases in which what has happened is only that the reaction to traumatic stimuli has failed to occur, and which can also, accordingly, be resolved and cured by 'abreaction' (emotional catharsis). These are pure 'retention hysterias'. (IBID, p. 47)
As regards the connection with phobias and obsessions, I am only concerned with the second form of hysteria. For reasons which will soon be evident, I shall call this form 'defence hysteria', using the name to distinguish it from hypnoid hysteria and retention hysteria. I may also provisionally present my cases of defence hysteria as 'acquired' hysteria, since in them there was no question either of a grave hereditary taint or of an individual degenerative atrophy. (IBID, p. 47)
dgb comments...At this point in time, Freud was supporting Breuer's idea of 'hynoid hysterias' -- the idea that hysteria formed during periods of 'psychic disorientation' (my words) or 'dream-like states' (Freud's and Breuer's words). This idea and this classification category basically died over time although it is quite likely that a person might become very disoriented (and in a dreamlike state) in a moment or extended moment of sudden traumacy.
Back to Freud,
For these patients whom I analyzed had enjoyed good mental health up to the moment at which an occurence of incompatibility took place in their ideational life -- that is to say, until their ego was faced with an experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a distressing affect that the subject decided to forget about it because he had no confidence in his power to resolve the contradiction between the incompatible idea and his ego by means of thought-activity. (p. 47).
In females incompatible ideas of this sort arise chiefly on the soil of sexual experience and sensation; and the patients can recollect as precisely as could be desired their efforts at defence, their intention of 'pushing the thing away', of not thinking of it, of suppressing it. I will give some examples, which I could easily multiply, from my own observation: the case of a girl, who blamed herself because, while she was nursing her sick father, she had thought about a young man who had made a slightly erotic impression on her; the case of a governess who had fallen in love with her employer and had resolved to drive this inclination out of her mind because it seemed to her incompatible with her pride; and so on. (p. 47-48)
.....................................................................................................................
dgb...
These last two paragraphs may be critically important in resolving The Seduction Theory Controversy in a manner different than both Freud and Masson.
Specifically, we can see in the above two paragraphs Freud's 'traumacy theory' and his 'fantasy theory' developing side by side -- in fact, intertwined with each other -- two years before Freud wrote 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) in which he advanced his Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory for the first time.
What does this mean? It means that Freud's 'sexual fantasy' theory was at least percolating in his mind two years before he was ridiculed by his medical peers and superiors when he read his 'Aetiology of Hysteria' essay to them in Vienna on April 11th, 1896 at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology.
In fact, the clinical evidence in Freud's and Breuer's collective case histories was at least as supportive of a 'fantasy theory' as it was of a 'traumacy theory' and furthermore, the clinical evidence was more supportive of a combined 'traumacy-fantasy' theory than it was of his later Seduction-Childhood Sexual Assault Theory in which Freud claimed that everyone hysterical woman that he had treated was a victim of a childhood seduction and/or more forceful sexual assault -- which is basically 'balderdash' if you follow Freud's and Breuer's collective case histories -- either that, or Freud and Breuer were 'suppressing clinical information' in these earlier case histories.
If Freud was guilty of anything, he was probably most guilty of creating a 'radical, controversial, provocative theory' -- and then 'overgeneralizing' on the clinical evidence that he had to support this new, radical theory.
That's a clinical, a scientific, a logical, and a theoretical 'no-no'.
In the first case of Psychoanalysis -- the 'Anna O' case -- Anna O was either in love with, and or sexually fantasizing about her therapist -- Joseph Breuer -- to the point where Breuer himself got scared, didn't know how to handle the situation, perhaps it was causing some significant problems for himself and/or his relationship with his wife at home (dare I say like Tiger Woods although there is no evidence to suggest that Breuer 'morally transgressed'), and Breuer finally 'ran' from his therapeutic relationship with Anna O. to avoid any further potential 'complications'.
Now let us be clear on one thing here. Anna O's 'fantasy' was not some kind of 'incestuous fantasy' or even a 'father transference fantasy' to our knowledge unless Breuer's presence and/or character 'triggered certain father-transference excitations' that no one today is aware of from the written transcripts of this case.
In other words, I would call Anna O's 'fantasy' a perfectly normal adult woman's 'immediacy fantasy' relative to a man who she was emotionally and intimately involved with. To be sure, there were probably some transference -- or 'reverse-transference' -- factors involved here but nothing here that would indicate the presence of 1. a past childhood sexual assault. I would suggest that there was probably a 'reverse father transference complex' being played out here in that instead of her 'nursing' her father 90 percent of the time, she fell in love with a man who was 'nursing her'. Then she could 'use her sickness (hysteria, neurosis...) to control her therapist (Breuer) just like her father used his sickness to control her!
But still, regardless of any Psychoanalytic interpretation presented here, the bottom line is that Anna O. was either romantically and/or sexually infatuated with Breuer (and in the boredom of her mundane existence where she was basically a 'slave' to her sick father, how can we call her romantic and/or sexual infatuation and fantasy 'abnormal'?)
In the two passages cited above, we see some of the same type of 'immediacy fantasies' at work: 1. a woman 'fantasizing about a young man while she is nursing her sick father'; and 2. a governess falling in love with her employer.
The only 'traumatic' factor involved in the two cases cited here is that the women in therapy couldn't 'accept their sexual and/or romantic fantasies -- and so 'denied' them by 'pushing them down and out of consciousness, and/or to a 'suppressed, marginalized ego state' ('alter-ego', 'The Id', 'The Shadow', 'The Rebellious-Dionysian Ego').
Amazingly, Freud basically abandoned this avenue of thought in 1894 for 44 years and 20 volumes of Strachey's Standard Edition, although Strachey suggests that Freud was moving back towards this idea since 1923. (S.E., v., 23, p. 273.) (Perhaps the idea of 'splitting of consciousness' in 1894 was too close to Janet's thinking just like perhaps Freud's 1920 idea of the 'mastery compulsion' was too close to Adler's ideas of 'superiority striving' and 'compensation'. Or perhaps, clinically and theoretically, Freud simply needed to travel on a different path until he started to come back to this path he started in 1894.
Perhaps also, it was either in the process of influencing and/or being influenced by Melanie Klein after 1925, that Freud came back to this basic idea in his unfinished 'Object Relations' paper, 'Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defence' (1937/1938/1940, S.E. V. 23, p. 271.)
Strachey states that this essay as reported by Ernest Jones had been 'written at Christmas, 1937', dated January 2nd, 1938, and published posthumously. The essay can be connected to both Freud's 1894 paper cited above as well as three papers pointed out by Strachey between 1923 and 1927: 1. 'Disavowal' (1923); 2. 'Neurosis and Psychosis' (1924); and 3. 'Fetishism' (1927) (Strachey, V. 23, p. 273).
Klein was becoming very active and influential with her ideas after 1925.
In 'Splitting of the Ego in The Process of Defence', Freud opened this essay with the following comment:
'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.'
final dgb comments...
I think the former. Try familiar with him since 1894 and Janet's idea of 'the splitting of consciousness' which was at least partly supported by Freud in his essay, 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (which perhaps should have been titled 'The Psycho-Neuroses of Defence').
Yes, it was a slow train coming.
But 'what goes around comes around'.
Freud had traveled a long way between 1894 and 1937 to come back to essentially the same place he started.
And his 'Traumacy Theory' should have been called his 'Traumacy-Fantasy Theory'.
-- dgb, Dec. 12th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
