I want to bring together a number of different elements in this paper in a highly unusual, unorthodox, pre-Classical, Classical, and post-Classical integrative fashion.
To do this, I will write quickly, succinctly, and dogmatically -- like Freud in 1938 when he wrote 'An Outline of Psychoanalysis' -- emphasizing the similarities and differences between Freud's analytic findings, generalizations, concepts, theories, and paradigms -- and my own.
Freud wrote another essay in 1938, 'Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defense' which had the potential to become another revolutionary turning point in the evolution of psycho-analysis, indeed, still partly was, but his work was contaminated by what I believe to be a 'personal Freudian neurosis' -- Freud's fixation with the concept (and the underlying experience) of 'castration anxiety' -- which more or less nullified the potential monumental importance of this work.
I have a much better way of explaining the idea of 'The Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defense' that borrows partly on the work of Klein, Fairbairn, and Berne, as well as an extrapolation of what I just pulled out from Wikipedia here a moment ago to describe a certain general human phenomenon...
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Fight-or-flight response
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The fight-or-flight response (also called the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response, hyperarousal, or the acute stress response) was first described by Walter Bradford Cannon.[1][2][3][4][5]
His theory states that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system, priming the animal for fighting or fleeing. This response was later recognized as the first stage of a general adaptation syndrome that regulates stress responses among vertebrates and other organisms.
His theory states that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system, priming the animal for fighting or fleeing. This response was later recognized as the first stage of a general adaptation syndrome that regulates stress responses among vertebrates and other organisms.
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In order to understand the theory of 'the splitting of the ego in the process of defense' you need to understand and accept traumacy theory -- and its multitude of potential compensatory defensive human reactions that become essentially 'cemented' or 'templated' into the traumatized psyche.
Each potential compensatory reaction 'motivates', 'precipitates', and/or 'causes' a different 'split' in the ego as a means of a 'choice' of future potential compensatory defensive reactions in the face of what is perceived as a 'similar danger or threat to the ego and/or whole psyche' as just was experienced in the face of the traumatic event that just happened.
Now, the 'splitting of the ego' does not have to happen because of traumacy.
Let's now call 'traumacy' -- 'ego-traumacy'.
And now let's call 'ego-traumacy' a 'narcissistic injury'.
The splitting of the ego can be precipitated by either a 'narcissistic injury' and/or a 'narcissistic fixation'. A narcissistic fixation may be a narcissistic injury or it may be something else -- an 'object of heightened or strongly cathected narcissistic interest'. In effect, a narcssistic fixation is likely to become a 'fantasy object' which may or may not also mean that it is a 'fantasy sexual object'.
Now, here are the first two primary differences between 'GAP-DGB' or 'Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalysis (QDP)' and Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis.
The first primary difference is that I 're-engage' Freud's pre-1897 'traumacy theory' -- with a set of QDP differences, such as the ones mentioned above, some of which Freud touched upon in the period that he was working with Alfred Adler after he had more or less abandoned his traumacy theory but Adler was perhpas starting to 're-awaken' a different brand of traumacy theory as he began to talk about 'organ inferiorities' and 'super-cerebral-brain-activity' to (over)compensate. From 'organ inferiorities, Adler would move on to later talk about 'psychic inferiority perception and feelings' and 'superiority striving' aimed at '(over)compensating' for 'the perceived psychic inferiority issue or complex'. (See 'The Minutes of The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, November 7th, 1906.)
The second primary difference between Classic Freudian Psychoanalysis and QDP is that Freud spent his lifetime 'chasing repressed memories and/or fantasies' whereas I again show my Adlerian influence, preferring to chase and interpretively analyze 'conscious early childhood memories' that can tell us a lot about the makeup of our 'Memory-Learning-Transference Template' as well as our 'Compensating Impulsive and/or Defensive Transference Fantasies'.
I have a certain friend who years ago related to me a childhood memory where he remembers seeing the 'tops of his teacher's stockings'. I don't need Freud's theory of 'disavowal' or worse, his theory of 'castration anxiety and the castration complex' to explain to you where my friend's 'stocking fetish' came from -- I simply need to say to you that it became 'fixated' from an 'accidental childhood experience' that was accompanied by a feeling of 'childhood (pre-puberty) sexual excitement' which in turn was probably accompanied by a sense of the 'morally forbidden' -- and then 'locked in over time' in terms of his wanting to essentially 're-live the morally forbidden childhood experience over and over and over again, in similar and/or different contextual renditions'. This is what we might call a 'narcissistic transference fixation'.
The only difference between 1. a 'narcissistic (sexual) fixation and fantasy; and 2. a 'narcissistic injury (ego-traumacy) sexual fixation and fantasy is that in the latter type of 'transference fantasy' we are looking to essentially re-live the scene of one of our early childhood transference traumacies but with this essential difference: we wish to re-live the experience in a host of different possible ways that each show a unique 'compensatory defensive' purpose -- but in the end, there is one shared purpose amongst all these possible 'renditions of the traumacy-transference fantasy', and that is to 'nurture' and 'repair' our damaged childhood ego in a form of 'self-therapy' that when acted out satisfactorily -- may indeed partly repair our damaged psyche, but usually only temporarily, until the 'hole' or 'the gap' or 'the sick point' in our psyche motivates us, usually in combination with our sexual drive, to repeat our fantasy-action over again in some similar and/or different 'transference rendition'.
There -- in that small nutshell above -- I probably just delivered to you the best work on 'transference' since Freud's 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912) -- like I said I would. In fact, I am the same age as Freud was when he wrote The Dynamics of Transference -- 56 -- which is why I wanted to finish this essay before the new year -- and ideally before Christmas. Having said this, I was writing about my particular unique 'Dynamics of Transference' back in the 1980s, before I knew who either Heinz Kohut or Jeffrey Masson were......I just didn't have any 'blogspot' on the internet to write my stuff on, I had barely even started studying Psychoanalysis seriously, and my ideas were just in their infancy. I trumpet the influence of Jeffrey Masson and his introducing me to Freud's 'Seduction Theory' as being the key turning point in helping me to bring these ideas all home in the fashion that you are now reading them.
I hope you understand the full significance of what I have written above. Because, you see, in this little nutshell of an essay here, I have also tied Freud's Memory, Traumacy, Fantasy, and Transference Theories all together and put them in a nice little Christmas box, complete with a nice red bow, as a present to you.
The only thing I need to do now is to extrapolate in greater detail on what has been said here, to articulate in greater depth the process of 'The Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defense', its connection to our 'oral' and 'anal' characteristics, and its birthplace in traumatic and/or exciting narcissistic early childhood memories turned into repetitive and/or compensatory ego-satisfying, usually but not always, erotic transference fantasies.
This is both so Freudian and so anti-Freudian at the same time that I don't have a clue how orthodox Freudians or Object Relationists or Adlerians or any other academic and/or professional will react to it from the confines of their own conceptual box, theory, paradigm...whether that 'conceptual box' be 'analy tight' or conversely 'fluidly liberal and dynamic'.
My argument against Dr. Masson, to the limits of the degree that he gingerly steps back into the Psychoanalytic Colliseum, is that his thought too has become 'stuck inside a one-sided paradigm that confines the potential growth and evolution of Psychoanalytic Theory as a cohesive, integrative theory'.
I couldn't have arrived where I am today -- I couldn't have created QDP the way I have today -- without the huge academic influence of Dr. Jeffrey Masson...
But we have to get beyond Dr. Masson's arguments -- and for the longest while I was stuck on those same controversies and arguments too. Did Freud 'morally fail' Psychoanalysis? And if so, how badly? Or is there an alternative explanation -- one part of the 'mystery of the human psyche' that Freud couldn't fully and properly put together; one part of the 'human jig-saw puzzle' that Freud couldn't entirely comprehend?
Was perhaps, Freud too caught up inside an Aristotlean 'either/or' paradigm in which he thought he had to choose between 'memories' and 'fantasies' -- and didn't properly see how the two were so intermeshed together and pushed forward in 'the seemingly paradoxical dynamics of the transference complex'?
Or did Freud simply make a bad theoretical, therapeutic, and ethical mistake at the same time -- and that mistake was 'The Oedipal Complex'.
Did Freud fundamentally and ethically fail women?
In this way, did Freud essentially 'identify with his aggressors' and like all the other essentially paternalistic, chauvanistic, Victorian doctors in The Psychiatry and Neurology Society -- in harmony with their leader, Krafft-Ebing -- believe that when Freud wrote his stunning essay on Childhood Sexual Abuse -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) -- in which Freud connected childhood sexual abuse with hysteria and other 'neurotic' conditions, that this, according to Krafft-Ebing, was essentially a 'scientific fairy tale'.
Did Freud end up actually believing this himself? Or did he 'alter his theoretical direction' as a 'defense mechanism' in order to safeguard his job and his profession as a doctor, substituting his Oedipal Complex Theory (false sexual assault memory syndrome, from 1897 onwards...) for his earlier Seduction Theory (before 1897, where Freud believed that these childhood sexual assaults actually happened)?
One way or the other -- or both -- Classical Psychoanalysis ended up with a 'sick point' between 1896 and 1897, and that 'sick point' was the dissociation between Freud's 'Reality Theory' and his 'Fantasy Theory'....
Like a 'religious person' stuck inside a 'religious paradigm' or an 'atheist person' stuck inside an 'atheist paradigm', before 1897, Freud couldn't see outside of his 'reality memory-traumacy-seduction-transference box'; and after 1897, Freud couldn't see outside of his 'fantasy-Oedipal box'.
Just like Quantum Physics needed to put together a 'particle-wavelength dialectic theory of matter and energy', so too did Freud and Psychoanalysis.
But in 1896, Freud dropped the ball. He missed the key shot.
And Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanalysis have had to live with this 'Splitting of The Psychoanalytic Ego in The Process of Defense'....
Regardless of whether it was with good or bad 'moral-ethical intentions'...
One way or the other, Freud still morally failed women....
And so too, did his daughter, Anna Freud...
Because a female client's childhood memories -- if the classical psychoanalyst even gets so much as a sniff of 'childhood sexual abuse' in one of these memories between a father and her daughter (the client) -- would immediately -- without any hesitation, if he or she is following the stereotype of the Oedipal Complex Theory, as strigently taught by father Freud, would move to 're-classify' this alleged memory as a 'repressed sexual fantasy of the daughter's'....thus, 'disavowing' the memory as being potentially 'real'...
And that is not right....
If stringent, anal-retentive, Classical Psychoanalysis....
Self-destructs...which it probably already mainly has...
It will be under the tombstone...
Of Freud's worst theoretical mistake...
The Oedipal Complex...
In this small essay here,
I have shown a new, evolving direction...
An integrative direction...
In one small swoop here, I have shown the essence of the necessary integration between Freudian 'Pre-Psychoanalytic Reality, Memory, Traumacy, and Transference Theory' with 'Classical' Freudian Fantasy and Oedipal Theory -- as well as the main essence of Adlerian 'Inferiority and Superiority and Lifestyle Theory', and the essence of Object Relations and The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense...
The rest can be extrapolated on...
-- dgb, December 19th, 2011...
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still Pressing On...
