We are trying to break old assumptions, paradigms, conceptual barriers, and in the process, bring in new assumptions, new paradigms, new integrative conceptual barriers -- and see where these take us.
Ultimately, we are trying to solve both conceptual and pragmatic, day to day problems.
We are trying to find new ways of resolving old, unresolved, and seemingly unresolvable, conflicts.
And we are trying to build new 'conceptual and pragmatic bridges' aimed at 'closing conceptual and pragmatic gaps in thinking, feeling, and behaving between people who support different assumptions, different paradigms, different conceptual barriers'.
We are trying to build new 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging' Assumptions, Paradigms with Flexible, Integrative, Potentially Moving, Conceptual Barriers.
Theoretically, I am a constructionist, a deconstructionist, and a reconstructionist -- all tied into one.
In Hegel's Hotel, there is room for almost every theorist and every theory, because almost every theory contains its own particular element of 'truth' -- as well as its own distortions and limitations, and its own focus and range of theoretical and pragmatic functionality. If the creator and owner of a particular theory puts up a 'conceptual boundary', and protects this boundary with 'conceptual and pragmatic narcissism' -- like a guard dog protects its owner's property -- reason, logic, deconstruction, reconstruction, and proper integrative evolution can fly out the window, or simply be locked out of existence, locked out of any normal rational discussion and debate' pertaining to the value and/or dis-value/pathology of this particular conceptual-theoretical boundary.
In the words of Fritz Perls, I call this a 'hanging-on bite'. A 'pitbull bite'. A 'lock-jaw' bite.
Now a hanging-on bite can have value -- 'humanistic-existential-egalitarian-democratic-romantic-enlightenment-ethical value.
Case in point -- Karl Marx. Karl Marx had a hanging-on bite. And yet -- specifically, in Marx's earliest writing, Marx was a verifiable humanist. Some of his searing criticisms of Capitalism are just as fresh and relevant today, perhaps more so, than they were when he initially wrote these criticisms in the 19th century. Marx was one of the best 'philosophical deconstructionists' in Western history. Which is not to say that Marx didn't have some weaknesses and limitations in his own philosophical thinking, and that there are not just as many problems -- or more -- where Marx's economic thinking led him into Socialism and Communism. I don't think that Marx would have been happy with where Lenin, Stalin, and and Mao Tse Tung took his particular brand of philosophical and economic thinking -- people had less freedom and democracy in Russia and China than they did in Western Capitalist countries -- but alas, that is a discussion, an argument, a debate if there is one, for another day.
Marin Luther King had a hanging-on bite and yet he is viewed as one of the greatest 'Equal Rights Social Activists' in the history of mankind. We look back at him with the greatest of honor, dignity, and respect. Why? Because what Martin Luther King was 'hanging on to' -- despite monumental and life-threatening dangers -- was critically important to the present and future well-being and harmony of mankind.
However, people with hanging on bites can have extremely pathological and dangerous beliefs and values as well. And these people -- as well as the beliefs and/or values that they hold -- can be very dangerous to society, to the harmony and well-being of mankind.
And in between, there can people -- probably most of us -- who hang on to a mixture of good and bad beliefs and values and provide a 'mixed picture' of what we are talking about here.
Life -- and natural, evolving, changing, mutating structures and processes -- always manage to find a way to 'squeeze into the gaps' that are left behind by all of us who are not trained to think differently than in the mold of the old 'either/or, right or wrong, good or bad, us or them, Aristotelean system of logic -- and classifying plants, animals, vegetables, minerals, and things according to a system of A or not A, B or not B, A cannot be B, and B cannot be A'.
This Aristotelean system of logic which is a system of logic that we all grew up learning, is a system of thinking and a system of logic and a system of 'classifying things' that simply does not mimic life. It is not a system of logic that -- in the words of Korzybski -- is 'structurally similar' to endless mutations and integrations of life. Aristotelean logic may be useful to a point but beyond this point -- the point at which multi-dialectic-mutation and evolution starts to set in -- it becomes a bad system of logic in that 'oversimplifies the infinitely expanding diversity and complexities of life'.
And thus, if we 'narcissistically keep hanging onto' some sort of an assumption or paradigm or barrier or belief or value that doesn't work, or no longer works, because it no longer follows the evolutionary and phenomenological path of life, for whatever reason we may do this -- and there are many such as pride, ego, authority, blind righteousness, money, territory...and on and on we could go -- in the end, we may be doing a huge disservice to both ourselves, and to the rest of mankind.
Now we come back to this hugely difficult and controversial Freudian changeover in theoretical assumptions that Freud engineered between 1896 and 1899: the basic abandonment of his previous 'Traumacy' (1895) and then 'Seduction' (1896) Theory... The 'Seduction' Theory was a rather 'white-washed' name, not applied at this time but later, that stood for something much more ominous: childhood sexual abuse and incest between father and daughter.
The critical paper in which Freud introduced The Seduction Theory was a little paper that I consider to be one of Freud's best: The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896). In this essay, Freud showed a mixture of compassion and empathy towards women sexually assaulted as children on the one hand, and a clinical and theoretical astuteness relative to connecting these early childhood traumatic sexual scenes with his patients' later 'recurring neurotic symptoms'. The idea back then was that if you 'unlocked the patient's unconscious/repressed sexual traumacy memory', then you would at the same time unlock the mystery of understanding a woman's so-called 'hysterical -- and/or other neurotic symptoms'. And get rid of these symptoms in the process -- the formula basically being: 'awareness plus emotional catharsis equals emotional and behavioral therapy and change towards the better'.
Many psychotherapists still use this early Freudian formula today -- or perhaps partly different renditions or modifications of it -- with, for example, the issue of 'sexuality' being involved in some of these early childhood 'ego-traumacies', while not being involved in others. Thus, for many different brands and schools of psychotherapy today, Freud's early (1893-1895) traumacy theory is still effectively practiced today in partly similar and partly different forms.
It is not a theory that Freud should have totally -- or even significantly -- abandoned. Not his Traumacy Theory. And not the 'sexual component' of his Traumacy Theory which he no doubt overgeneralized when he said that (and I am paraphrasing) 'Childhood sexual assault played a part in every case of hysteria that he had treated'. Probably a significant portion but if you look back into his case files -- back even to the case of Anna O, the first case in the history of Psychoanalysis -- I do not think you will find any example of 'childhood sexual assault' playing a role in this woman's 'neurotic and psychotic troubles'.
But Freud did abandon it -- in fact he abandoned both theories, both his Traumacy and his Seduction Theory -- in favor of The 'Fantasy, False and Screen Memory, Dream, Childhood Sexuality, and Oedipal/Electra Complex Theories' that were coming down the line in his creative theorizing between about 1897 and let us say 1905.
And Psychoanalysis -- for better or worse -- has not turned back since. It has looked back. But it has not turned back.
Freud had a strong hanging-on bite.
Right or wrong, good or bad, Freud -- once he locked into a particular theoretical belief and/or value -- he would not let go. He hung onto this conceptual belief and/or value like the proverbial Doberman or Pit Bull guarding his piece of meat.
Now this point should be modified because before Freud 'locked into' a particular theoretical position, he could show almost infinite flexibility and creativity in terms of 'breaking his own conceptual barriers'.
Freud revolutionized Psychoanalysis -- and cause significant theoretical controversy -- at least four, five, or even more times:
1. his Traumacy-Seduction Theory (1895, 96);
2. his 'Screen Memory' Theory (1899); leading to 'The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Fantasy Theory, Childhood Sexuality, The Sexual Stages of Childhood Development, The Oedipal and Electra Complex...(up to 1905)
3. his evolving 'Transference Theory' such as The Dynamics of The Transference (1912);
4. his 'Narcissistic Theory' (1914);
5. his Death Instinct Theory (1920);
6. his 'Ego, Id, and Superego Theory' (1923);
7. his movement towards a more 'Object Relations' approach in 'Outline of Psychoanalysis' and 'Splitting of The Ego' (1940).
But once Freud held onto to an idea, he held on tight -- and he did not like 'group dissension' and 'individual differentiation' within the ranks. I would call Freud a rather strong 'Conceptual Narcissist'. Exit either before or after Freud died: Adler, Jung, Reich, Rank, Ferenzci, Horney, other 'neo-Freudians', Perls, Berne, and many others....right up to the dramatic departure of Dr. Jeffrey Masson in the 1980s...
The only psychoanalyst who seemed to get away with 'significant theoretical deviation' before Freud died was Melanie Klein. She opened the door for a whole host of 'Object Relationists' (Fairbairn, Winnicott, Jacobson, Guntrip...) and 'Self Psychoanalysts' (Kohut). But Freud opened this theoretical door himself (or maybe he himself was influenced by Melanie Klein) when Freud wrote a very significant paper -- foreshadowing another change in theoretical direction right at the end of his career without being able to follow up on it -- in 'Splitting of The Ego' (1940).
Now the last two major custodians of the Freudian Classical Psychoanalytic Empire -- Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler -- are both dead. This, I say, with all due respect to both of them, and I do respect both of them (Anna Freud's 'The Ego and The Mechanisms of Defense' has some very important concepts in it that are critical to my present line of thinking). Anna Freud, died in 1982. Kurt Eissler, died in 1999.
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Anna Freud
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Anna Freud | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 3 December 1895 Vienna |
| Died | 9 October 1982 (aged 86) |
| Fields | psychoanalysis |
| Known for | Work on the nature of Ego |
| Influences | Sigmund Freud |
| Part of a series of articles on |
| Psychoanalysis |
 |
| Psychology portal |
Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field ofpsychoanalysis. With Melanie Klein, she is the cofounder of psychoanalytic child psychology.[1] Compared to her father, her work emphasized the importance of the ego and its ability to be trained socially.
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Kurt Eissler, 90, Director Of Sigmund Freud Archives
By SARAH BOXER
Published: Saturday, February 20, 1999
Kurt Robert Eissler, the New York psychoanalyst who founded, directed and defended the Sigmund Freud Archives and then handpicked a successor who ended up plunging the archive into a sea of trouble, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
Until the 1980's Dr. Eissler was little known outside psychoanalytic circles. As Janet Malcolm described him in 1983 in The New Yorker, ''he was tall, gaunt, and unmistakably European,'' he was ''an extraordinary clinician,'' and he was the author of many ''quirky papers.'' His work included papers on the treatment of schizophrenics and delinquents and a paper on the debate about vaginal orgasm.
He wrote ''The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient,'' (1955) ''Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on the Enigma'' (1961) and a two-volume work, ''Goethe: A Psychoanalytic Study'' (1963). He also wrote a number of books on Freudian history, including ''Talent and Genius,'' about Viktor Tausk, Freud's troubled student (1971). In that book, Ms. Malcolm wrote, he defended Freud against ''the insinuation that Freud was to blame'' for his patient's death. ''Eissler's devotion to Freud,'' she added, was ''considered a kind of lovable nuttiness.''
After World War II Dr. Eissler and a small group of psychoanalysts, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Krus, 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 ''to accept as a donation all documents collected by the Archives, and to make them accessible to scholars.'' By the 1980's 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.)
But his role in psychoanalytic history took a turn (though he did not know it then) when he met Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a Sanskrit scholar and psychoanalyst, at an annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Society.
This is how Dr. Masson remembered him when they met in 1974: Dr. Eissler, the Secretary of the Archives, was ''called the pope of orthodox analysis,'' Dr. Masson wrote in his book ''Final Analysis.'' He had ''hundreds of hours of tape recordings of conversations with many of Freud's patients,'' and he was a confidante of Anna Freud. Dr. Masson continued, ''If anyone represented the link with Freud and Freud's Vienna, it was the formidable Kurt Eissler.''
Dr. Eissler, whose wife, Ruth, died in 1988, was a formal and secretive man. But he befriended Dr. Masson because of their mutually intense interest in Freud. Dr. Eissler let Dr. Masson listen to his tapes of the so-called Wolf Man, Freud's patient, and borrow valuable Freud documents. Finally, in 1980 Dr. Eissler decided that Dr. Masson would be his successor at the archives. He asked Anna Freud to release the letters between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess that had not yet been published so that Dr. Masson could translate and edit them. The fatefulness of that decision became clear to Dr. Eissler in 1981, when Dr. Masson, who was projects director of the archives, delivered a shocking paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, in New Haven. Dr. Masson said 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.''
The fallout followed quickly. Dr. Eissler led the 13-member board of the Freud Archives into a vote to remove Dr. Masson from his position as projects director of the archives. In explanation of his action, Dr. Eissler said: ''Would you make director of the archives someone who writes plain nonsense?'' Then the legal tango began. Dr. Masson sued the Freud Archives for $13 million. Dr. Eissler sued Dr. Masson to get back his audio tapes and Freud's letters. And after Ms. Malcolm wrote an article on the affair, she too was sued by Dr. Masson. One matter at the heart of Malcolm trial involved a quotation in which Dr. Masson describes Dr. Eissler begging him not to tell Anna Freud about the scandal. Dr. Eissler attended that trial. ''There was about him,'' Gwen Davis wrote in The Nation, ''the poignance of old Geppetto, who had carved himself a son, only to discover, to his profound chagrin, that Pinocchio was a naughty boy.''
George Gross, a psychoanalyst and friend of Dr. Eissler, saw Dr. Eissler's emotions in a slightly different light. Dr. Eissler, he said ''was disappointed that he had not found a person who understood Freud the way he did.'' In that, he was a little like Freud. Mr. Gross said, ''Freud was constantly disappointed.''
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dgb, cont'd...
Now, Dr. Kurt Eissler can -- or could -- say what he wanted relative to the value of Freud's vs. Masson's particular logic and paradigm of thinking. It is a free world for all of us who live in a democratic country to voice our particular opinions.
But Eissler saying that Masson's opinion was just 'plain nonsense' -- does not make it so. We need more 'empirical, common sense, and logical evidence' than just Eissler's status and credibility as 'the guardian of the Classical Freudian Castle'.
And quite frankly, Eissler's assertion that Masson's assertion that 'childhood sexual assault and incestuous sexual relations between some fathers and some daughters really exists' is plain nonsense is well -- it's disgusting -- and its a source of continuing public embarrassment to Classical Psychoanalysis. Ask any woman, any feminist, any therapist who has ever actually experienced and/or dealt with a case of childhood sexual abuse on this issue -- and, well, I am sure that you will get more 'enlightened people' who don't want to bury their collective heads in the 'sands of denial' -- that side with Masson on this matter rather than Eissler.
Who amongst us is willing to assert that 'childhood sexual abuse does not happen'? Even Freud didn't go this far.
Who amongst us is willing to assert that 'childhood sexual relations between some fathers and some daughters never happens'? Here, Freud hangs on to his rigid (post-Seduction Theory) Electra Complex Theory which asserts that the daughter is imagining the alleged 'seduction' based on a repressed desire to 'romantically and sexually possess the father' -- and then passing it off on the father.
That would be very much akin to those people who still try to assert that 'The Holocaust never happened'.
And yet this is essentially the paradigm of thinking that Classical Psychoanalysis is still holding onto, and still trying to defend, even after the feminist movement, in 2009!
Unbelievable!
And all the newspapers and all of our 'so-called enlightened' newspaper journalists, editors, and owners, still, for the most part, seem to go along with 'The Classical Psychoanalysis argument', still support the Freudian status-quo, while the one man out there who was actually brave enough to confront this 'atrocity of 100 years of Psychoanalytic theory and practice' was fired, blackballed, and driven out of Psychoanalysis, driven out of America, to New Zealand where I assume but don't actually know that he is living a much more peaceful and harmonious life today studying and writing about 'animal psychology and animal emotions'.
I shake my head.
Just in case there are any doubters out there who do not believe that Freud was as rigid in his 'Oedipal thinking' as is being stated, I draw your attention to this quote that lays Freud's thoughts on the line pretty specifically:
The passage I have in mind comes from the 1916 Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (S.E. 16, p. 370), where Freud writes: "Phantasies of being
seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies
but real memories. Fortunately, however, they are nevertheless not real as
often as seemed at first to be shown by the findings of analysis. Seduction
by an older child or by one of the same age is even more frequent than by an
adult; and if in the case of girls who produce such an event in the story of
their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there
can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or the
motive that has led to it." (1916, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. V. 16, p. 370, emphasis mine.)
Just to be clear on where I stand on The Oedipal/Electra Complex, I believe that the concept has some significant theoretical and therapeutic value if taken 'metaphorically' or 'symbolically'.
Let me give you an example from my own life. My mom has some wonderful marriage, family, and community values that I have the greatest of respect for -- even though I have a tendency to often take these values, and my mom in general, for granted, as if the situation could never be any different. I have a tendency to do the same thing with my girlfriend of 10 plus years who exemplifies the same beliefs and values. However, I have experienced enough of the opposite with my first common law relationship to know what can happen if or when the bottom falls out of your marriage, your family, your friends, and your community. At this point, if not before, you much more fully start to wake up, realize and appreciate just how important these values are, and what life can be like if or when they are gone.
My relationship with my girlfriend rightly deserves to be called a 'mother-transference' relationship, or even an Oedipal relationship in the metaphorical/symbolic sense.
However, it does absolutely no-one any good -- not the theoretician, not the therapist, and certainly not the client -- to go one dramatic step further and to suggest that 'in early childhood, I had an unconscious/repressed romantic/sexual fantasy towards my mother'. How do you prove or unprove this -- and who really cares. It doesn't take us anywhere theoretically and/or therapeutically. Nor would it alternatively take us anywhere if I were to choose a girlfriend who was more like my father and therefore it was suggested that I had an early childhood romantic/sexual infatuation with my father. And what if I was to choose a girlfriend who was like neither my mom or my dad, but say, more 'rebelliously like' me. Then what? -- We would have to say something like, I had a 'narcissistic romantic/sexual relationship with myself' as a child (perhaps this is the most likely to be true -- certainly in my teenage years...) that I then projected onto someone in my teenage or adult years who I viewed as being rebelliously like myself...
What I am trying to say here is that there is some interpretive value in following the metaphorical/symbolic logic of the Oedipal/Electra Complex. And if you really want to choose to take it to the ultimate 'sexual' interpretation that Freud did, by all means, go ahead. Not that it takes you anywhere differently. Unless.....
A therapist chooses to use this theory to dismiss, marginalize, suppress, and/or deny the possibility of real live childhood sexual assault.
And if a therapist does this -- Psychoanalyst or not -- then he or she should not be a psychotherapist.
And as for Psychoanalysis, each and every working Psychoanalyst today should be morally ashamed of the fact that they are working for a supposedly 'therapeutic organization' that still supports and adheres to this last aspect of the Oedipal/Electra principle.
And as regards to the article above on Eissler that says in 1981:
Dr. Masson, who was projects director of the archives, delivered a shocking paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, in New Haven. Dr. Masson said 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.''
I say, 'Bravo!' Even if Masson did come across like a 'raging Anti-Freudian bull in a Psychoanalytic China Shop', he was saying something that needed to be said, and probably that hundreds of Psychoanalysts before him had thought to themselves, maybe even quietly rebelled against in their own therapeutic sessions, but not had the courage to stand up to The Freudian Establishment and actually say what Masson was saying.
Ferenczi was one of the few Psychoanalysts to stand up to Freud in his classic Psychoanalytic paper on childhood sexual abuse called 'Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and The Child (1932)', which eventually led to his 'Psychoanalytic ex-communication in a 'Spinozian mold' which had become as regular within The Freudian Establishment as it was hundreds of years earlier in Churches that did the same thing (if not worse).
And as far as Masson saying or not saying some of the things that Janet Malcolm quoted him as saying (I can't believe it turned into a 10 year law suit) about opening up the windows in Freud's house to get some air in the house and getting some women in there, and even throwing some parties -- I say, well, maybe Malcolm was taking too many 'creative liberties' with what and when Masson said whatever he said to her in order to 'spice up her book a bit', and/or maybe Masson was over-stating some of his comments to make the point that he was trying to make: specifically, that Classical Psychoanalysis needed to be 'cleansed' of all its anachronistic 'sterility' and 'deadness' -- specifically, the ideas that they are still holding onto from a 'very patriarchal, prim and proper Victorian era' that are badly -- so badly outdated -- that I can't believe that they are still holding onto them with a straight and unflinching 'anal-retentive' face...
And in this latter regard, relative to Masson's misquoted or partly misquoted comments, I once again say, 'Bravo!'. Because, aside from the deviations off into 'Object Relations' and 'Self-Psychology', Classical Psychoanalysis hasn't had a serious 'detoxification-and-anal-cleansing' in over 100 years (other than what Freud has done himself -- the rest of the past and present Classical Psychoanalysts are/were too scared stiff to try to touch the Oedipal/Electra Complex in any way that might tumble The Freudian Grand Narrative in any way -- and suggest that Masson was like the little boy who said the King was naked! Dah! How many women, and women therapists, and feminists does it take to get through to the thickest of Classical Psychoanalysts heads that forced and/or manipulated sexual incest between a daughter and her father does happen!
Talk about a 'hanging on bite'! Shake those cobwebs out of your grossly overgeneralized Oedipal/Electra Complex, all ye 'over-educated' Classical Psychoanalysts. You've been sleeping for over a hundred years! Get out of your coma! Join the 21st century!
And that is what I am here for through my medium of Hegel's Hotel.
...........................................................................................................................
dgb, cont'd...
Now, Dr. Kurt Eissler can -- or could -- say what he wanted relative to the value of Freud's vs. Masson's particular logic and paradigm of thinking. It is a free world for all of us who live in a democratic country to voice our particular opinions.
But Eissler saying that Masson's opinion was just 'plain nonsense' -- does not make it so. We need more 'empirical, common sense, and logical evidence' than just Eissler's status and credibility as 'the guardian of the Classical Freudian Castle'.
And quite frankly, Eissler's assertion that Masson's assertion that 'childhood sexual assault and incestuous sexual relations between some fathers and some daughters really exists' is plain nonsense is well -- it's disgusting -- and its a source of continuing public embarrassment to Classical Psychoanalysis. Ask any woman, any feminist, any therapist who has ever actually experienced and/or dealt with a case of childhood sexual abuse on this issue -- and, well, I am sure that you will get more 'enlightened people' who don't want to bury their collective heads in the 'sands of denial' -- that side with Masson on this matter rather than Eissler.
Who amongst us is willing to assert that 'childhood sexual abuse does not happen'? Even Freud didn't go this far.
Who amongst us is willing to assert that 'childhood sexual relations between some fathers and some daughters never happens'? Here, Freud hangs on to his rigid (post-Seduction Theory) Electra Complex Theory which asserts that the daughter is imagining the alleged 'seduction' based on a repressed desire to 'romantically and sexually possess the father' -- and then passing it off on the father.
That would be very much akin to those people who still try to assert that 'The Holocaust never happened'.
And yet this is essentially the paradigm of thinking that Classical Psychoanalysis is still holding onto, and still trying to defend, even after the feminist movement, in 2009!
Unbelievable!
And all the newspapers and all of our 'so-called enlightened' newspaper journalists, editors, and owners, still, for the most part, seem to go along with 'The Classical Psychoanalysis argument', still support the Freudian status-quo, while the one man out there who was actually brave enough to confront this 'atrocity of 100 years of Psychoanalytic theory and practice' was fired, blackballed, and driven out of Psychoanalysis, driven out of America, to New Zealand where I assume but don't actually know that he is living a much more peaceful and harmonious life today studying and writing about 'animal psychology and animal emotions'.
I shake my head.
Just in case there are any doubters out there who do not believe that Freud was as rigid in his 'Oedipal thinking' as is being stated, I draw your attention to this quote that lays Freud's thoughts on the line pretty specifically:
The passage I have in mind comes from the 1916 Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (S.E. 16, p. 370), where Freud writes: "Phantasies of being
seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies
but real memories. Fortunately, however, they are nevertheless not real as
often as seemed at first to be shown by the findings of analysis. Seduction
by an older child or by one of the same age is even more frequent than by an
adult; and if in the case of girls who produce such an event in the story of
their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there
can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or the
motive that has led to it." (1916, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. V. 16, p. 370, emphasis mine.)
Just to be clear on where I stand on The Oedipal/Electra Complex, I believe that the concept has some significant theoretical and therapeutic value if taken 'metaphorically' or 'symbolically'.
Let me give you an example from my own life. My mom has some wonderful marriage, family, and community values that I have the greatest of respect for -- even though I have a tendency to often take these values, and my mom in general, for granted, as if the situation could never be any different. I have a tendency to do the same thing with my girlfriend of 10 plus years who exemplifies the same beliefs and values. However, I have experienced enough of the opposite with my first common law relationship to know what can happen if or when the bottom falls out of your marriage, your family, your friends, and your community. At this point, if not before, you much more fully start to wake up, realize and appreciate just how important these values are, and what life can be like if or when they are gone.
My relationship with my girlfriend rightly deserves to be called a 'mother-transference' relationship, or even an Oedipal relationship in the metaphorical/symbolic sense.
However, it does absolutely no-one any good -- not the theoretician, not the therapist, and certainly not the client -- to go one dramatic step further and to suggest that 'in early childhood, I had an unconscious/repressed romantic/sexual fantasy towards my mother'. How do you prove or unprove this -- and who really cares. It doesn't take us anywhere theoretically and/or therapeutically. Nor would it alternatively take us anywhere if I were to choose a girlfriend who was more like my father and therefore it was suggested that I had an early childhood romantic/sexual infatuation with my father. And what if I was to choose a girlfriend who was like neither my mom or my dad, but say, more 'rebelliously like' me. Then what? -- We would have to say something like, I had a 'narcissistic romantic/sexual relationship with myself' as a child (perhaps this is the most likely to be true -- certainly in my teenage years...) that I then projected onto someone in my teenage or adult years who I viewed as being rebelliously like myself...
What I am trying to say here is that there is some interpretive value in following the metaphorical/symbolic logic of the Oedipal/Electra Complex. And if you really want to choose to take it to the ultimate 'sexual' interpretation that Freud did, by all means, go ahead. Not that it takes you anywhere differently. Unless.....
A therapist chooses to use this theory to dismiss, marginalize, suppress, and/or deny the possibility of real live childhood sexual assault.
And if a therapist does this -- Psychoanalyst or not -- then he or she should not be a psychotherapist.
And as for Psychoanalysis, each and every working Psychoanalyst today should be morally ashamed of the fact that they are working for a supposedly 'therapeutic organization' that still supports and adheres to this last aspect of the Oedipal/Electra principle.
And as regards to the article above on Eissler that says in 1981:
Dr. Masson, who was projects director of the archives, delivered a shocking paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, in New Haven. Dr. Masson said 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.''
I say, 'Bravo!' Even if Masson did come across like a 'raging Anti-Freudian bull in a Psychoanalytic China Shop', he was saying something that needed to be said, and probably that hundreds of Psychoanalysts before him had thought to themselves, maybe even quietly rebelled against in their own therapeutic sessions, but not had the courage to stand up to The Freudian Establishment and actually say what Masson was saying.
Ferenczi was one of the few Psychoanalysts to stand up to Freud in his classic Psychoanalytic paper on childhood sexual abuse called 'Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and The Child (1932)', which eventually led to his 'Psychoanalytic ex-communication in a 'Spinozian mold' which had become as regular within The Freudian Establishment as it was hundreds of years earlier in Churches that did the same thing (if not worse).
And as far as Masson saying or not saying some of the things that Janet Malcolm quoted him as saying (I can't believe it turned into a 10 year law suit) about opening up the windows in Freud's house to get some air in the house and getting some women in there, and even throwing some parties -- I say, well, maybe Malcolm was taking too many 'creative liberties' with what and when Masson said whatever he said to her in order to 'spice up her book a bit', and/or maybe Masson was over-stating some of his comments to make the point that he was trying to make: specifically, that Classical Psychoanalysis needed to be 'cleansed' of all its anachronistic 'sterility' and 'deadness' -- specifically, the ideas that they are still holding onto from a 'very patriarchal, prim and proper Victorian era' that are badly -- so badly outdated -- that I can't believe that they are still holding onto them with a straight and unflinching 'anal-retentive' face...
And in this latter regard, relative to Masson's misquoted or partly misquoted comments, I once again say, 'Bravo!'. Because, aside from the deviations off into 'Object Relations' and 'Self-Psychology', Classical Psychoanalysis hasn't had a serious 'detoxification-and-anal-cleansing' in over 100 years (other than what Freud has done himself -- the rest of the past and present Classical Psychoanalysts are/were too scared stiff to try to touch the Oedipal/Electra Complex in any way that might tumble The Freudian Grand Narrative in any way -- and suggest that Masson was like the little boy who said the King was naked! Dah! How many women, and women therapists, and feminists does it take to get through to the thickest of Classical Psychoanalysts heads that forced and/or manipulated sexual incest between a daughter and her father does happen!
Talk about a 'hanging on bite'! Shake those cobwebs out of your grossly overgeneralized Oedipal/Electra Complex, all ye 'over-educated' Classical Psychoanalysts. You've been sleeping for over a hundred years! Get out of your coma! Join the 21st century!
And that is what I am here for through my medium of Hegel's Hotel.
I think I might have suggested that I was going to play the 'mediator' and 'diplomat' between Classical Psychoanalysis and 'The Massonian Bull in The Psychoanalyst China Shop'.
But you can't reconstruct until you first deconstruct.
And guess what? It looks like I just played the part of the second bull in The Classical Freudian China Shop.
Gee, maybe they should perhaps think of looking and/or buying into 'stronger china'.
Then there China Shop might not be so vulnerable to 'serial breakage'.
Again that is why I am here -- in this, and in other, associated essays:
1. To give Classical Psychoanalysis a badly needed 'detoxification-and-anal-cleansing'.
2. And to 'dialectically bridge the gap' between Freud and Masson. Or stated differently between pre-1897 Freud and post-1897 Freud.
3. To give Masson the respect he deserves for standing up against The Freudian Establishment when no one else in The Freudian Establishment would.
4. Loyalty to Freud only deserves to go so far. And not to the point of distorting, abandoning, or suppressing the therapeutic truth.
5. Because then it is Classical Psychoanalysis that is in 'denial'; not the client!
Stay tuned...more to come...
-- dgb, Dec. 7th, 2009, modified Jan. 6th, 2010.
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process....
