Under construction...
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The Classical Freudian Psychoanalytic model is pretty simple and straightforward -- but missing some contemporary elements of Psychoanalytic and non-Psychoanlytic theory and therapy.
'The Superego' is our family and culturally and sometimes religiously influenced 'ethical/moral/restraining conscience';
'The Id' is our 'pressing biological (life and death) instincts' that are demanding 'here and now satisfaction and/or relief';
'The Ego' is our 'central mediator, problem-solver, and conflict-resolver' that seeks to 'bridge or close the gap' (another 'fitting game', this time) between our Superego and our Id.
Now both man's thinking -- individually and collectively -- and 'models' of how he thinks are going evolve and change over time.
There are many things you can say about Freud's 'Classical Psychoanalytic' model of the personality or psyche.
You could say that it is 'simple and elegant'.
You could say that it is 'simple but incomplete'....
You could say that it is 'simple but misleading in its over-reductionistic simplicity'.
Now there are two things that you can say have evolved -- and/or are still evolving over time:
1. man's mind-brain, psyche, personality...itself;
2. our assortment of different 'evolutionary spinoffs' of the Freudian model that are aimed at either a) capturing this continued evolutionary process of man's mind-brain-pscyhe-self; and/or b) capturing what Freud missed or didn't pay sufficient attention to.
I have no problem starting with the Classic Freudian model of the personality.
However, in constructing my own model, I have engaged in a threefold process:
1. 'The splitting and extending of the id';
2. 'The splitting and extending of the superego';
3. 'The splitting and extending of the ego'.
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1a. The Splitting and Extending of The Id -- Part 1: The Shadow-Id
Freud viewed 'the id' as being basically a bundle of dynamic, volatile, largely unconscious instinctive energy in the personality that may be 'erotically charged with energy (libido)', 'more conservtively charged with self-preservative energy' and/or 'destructively and/or self-destructively charged with death energy' (thanatos).
Freud -- by 1923 when he created the concept of the id -- left out an old part of his 'repressive equation': specifically traumacy and particularly sexual traumacy and/or what I would call 'narcissistic (self-esteem) injury or traumacy'. In Gestalt language, Freud left out what might be called 'traumatic and/or any other form of unfinished business'...that is dysfunctionally using up stress energy in the un/subconscious.
As Freud used to say before 1896, this 'repressed (or suppressed or otherwise disowned, dissociated, disavowed, estranged, projected...) energy needs to be 'therapeutically abreacted' and the more potentially 'dangerous' this repressed or suppressed energy is (meaning full of potential destructive and/or self-destructive energy), the more important that this energy is 'abreacted' in the safe confines of a professional therapist's office who knows what he or she is doing....
It is in this regard, that I have integrated one of Freud's main concepts -- 'the Id' -- with one of Jung's main concept -- 'the Shadow'. Integrated together, I get the concept that I like -- 'The Shadow-Id'.
The Shadow can be 'Id-like'. And/or the Shadow can be 'traumatically dysfunctional'. And/or the Shadow can be a subconsciously operating 'existential potential'.
Together, the Shadow and the Id -- or the 'Shadow-Id' -- operate primarily in the 'subconcsious shadows' of the personality with 'rising' conscious manifestations, viscisitudes, compromise-formations, sublimations, repetition complusions, obsessive compulsions, projections, fixations, fetishes, addictions, compensatory defensive behaviors such as avoidances, phobia, anal-schizoid (distancing) behavior, aggressions, paranoia, manic-depression, other forms of 'bi-polar dysfunction syndrome', psychotic disorders, and/or other forms of 'existential-transference formations'....
Did you catch and understand all that?
For those of you not very familiar with Psychoanalytic and modern day psychiatric jargon, I will walk through all these concepts at a slower, individual, defining, pace...on another day....
For tonight,
I am calling it a night....
To be continued tomorrow morning...
-- dgb, Aug 8th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
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