In process, January 15th, 2012...Finished January 21st, 2012....
1. Introduction
What Freud called 'screen memories' from 1899 onwards (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899), Adler, in the 1920s, called 'lifestyle memories', and I, in 2012 (going back to the mid 1980s), call 'transference memories'.
Each name-concept mentioned above involves an assumptive paradigm shift that changes conceptual and theoretical boundaries, and opens up new conceptual and theoretical territory. If the paradigm shift turns out to be theoretically and therapeutically/pragmatically useful, then I say 'go with the paradigm shift' and/or at least open up your mind to the idea of 'bouncing back and forth' between different paradigm assumptions. That's called being open-minded. And/or 'thinking both inside and outside the box.' And/or 'not letting traditional, status-quo, Establishment ideas define and limit you to the prospect and potential for an 'evolutionary advancement in new and better labels, ideas, theories, classification systems, paradigms...'.
In particular, when you open yourself up to the use of 'bi-polarity theories' that reflect a similar 'bi-polarity in life', you advance yourself past the point of being caught up in an Aristolean 'either/or' classification system and/or a Kierkegaardian choice between Theory A vs. Theory B, or political party A vs. B...each focusing on the particular advantages of their end of the bi-polar idea spectrum while downplaying, minimizing, degrading the polar theory of their opposite competitor. Until, one day, someone has the bright idea of integrating the two opposite polar paradigm theories, and very neatly incorporates the best advantages of each, while covering up for the weaknesses of each...
This is what Hegel meant when he said -- and I am paraphrasing -- that 'every (one-sided) idea or theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.
In physics, the key to overcoming the deficiences of both the 'particle theory' and the 'wave theory' of matter and energy lay in 'dialectically integrating' the two theories together, and such is what needs to be done with Freud's pre-1897 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory vs. his post 1896 'fantasy-instinct-impulse' theory, or worded differently, his 'childhood sexual abuse' theory vs. his 'childhood sexual instinct, impulse and fantasy' theory....
Life is continually busting down man-made conceptual and theoretical boundaries...
We either adjust, accept, appreciate, and respect this fact -- or we don't.
Those who persist on righteously and narcissistically holding on -- with a pit bull's bite -- to one-sided, anal-retentive theories that defy and distort life, are holding us all back from 'evolving' to a more Hegelian multi-dialectic-dynamic approach and paradigm of: philosophy, history, psychology, law, politics, economics, biology, physics, chemistry, business, economics, art, music, religion, mythology, spirituality...
Nietzsche's 'healthiest' philosophy book was his first one: 'The Birth of Tragedy' which subscribed to a 'bi-polar' theory that involved integrating his classification system of an 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' lifestyle.
However, after that book, Nietzsche shunned Apollo to 'The Dissociation Pit' -- and even though Nietzsche continued to write an ongoing assortment of brilliant essays/books afterwards, still, they were partly 'de-evolving' into an increasingly one-sided 'Dionysian approach' to life which, in my editorial opinion, will usually end in 'Dionysian-Id self-destruction' if not properly 'balanced' by 'Apollonian, Enlightenment-Ego-and-Superego' characteristics....as trumpeted in Nietzsche's first book....
Whether coincidence or not, the last ten years of Nietzsche's life ended in his own 'existential self-destruction' -- perhaps from falling 'too deeply in love' one too many times (i.e., in the last case, to Lou Andreas Salome) without having the internal 'Apollonian resources' to pull him out of his own self-created 'Romantic Abyss'...Was 'romance' a part of Nietzsche's 'Dionysian Classification System' -- or was Dionysus more fixated on alcohol, seduction, sex, music, and sensual hedonism...
Perhaps Nietzsche forgot about 'Eros' or 'Cupid', as I have too, for the most part, in my larger 'mythological' personality classification system. Regardless, it's good to be 'romantic'...but not to the point of 'romantic self-destruction'....and maybe Nietzsche fell just a little too hard on his last attempt at romance in his life....
2. Screen Memories, Lifestyle Memories, and Transference Memories
a. A 'screen memory' suggests for us to 'look for another deeper, more etiologically (causally) significant memory...because this one you are looking at here is 'a screen memory that is both hiding and alluding to a deeper, repressed memory';
b. A 'lifestyle memory' says 'look right here -- don't go any further -- you have found the diagnostic gold right here' (with an underlying 'Adlerian unity -- as in no conflict -- in the personality' assumptive foundation);
c. A 'transference memory' says 'look here -- you've found the diagnostic gold and don't need to look any further' (but with an operative, Freudian assumptive foundation of 'conflict -- as opposed to unity -- in the personality, or even better, the dialectic idea of 'conflicted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality -- which integrates both Freudian and Adlerian assumptive foundations.
Thus, we arrive at the DGB Multi-Bi-Polarity or Quantum-Dialectic assumptive foundation of 'conficted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality, with different degrees of conflict and/or unity going on at different times in the personality, depending on the context of one's present and past life-situation interacting with each other at different moments in time.
Now, in 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through' (1914), Freud, although he was using the concept of 'screen memory' (as in 'dig deeper for a more important, 'repressed' memory), still stated quite assertively that that there was essential, diagnostic information to be obtained from a screen memory (so much so, in my editorial opinion that this type of memory rightly deserves to be called a 'transference memory' rather than, or in addition to, being called a Freudian 'screen memory'.
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In the words of Freud:
In some cases, I have had an impression that the familiar childhood amnesia, which is theoretically so important to us, is completely counterbalanced by screen memories. Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories. It is simply a question of knowing how to extract it out of them by analysis. They represent the forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of a dream represents the dream-thoughts. (Freud, Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through', Edited by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, S.E. Vol. Xll, p. 148.)
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Freud, as early as 1895, claimed that 'hysterical (read also: neurotic) symptoms were overdetermined' (Freud, Studies on Hysteria, V. 2, p. 263 and 290, and in 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria), Freud asserted that memories are like a 'geneological tree' (1896, p. 198), that they are 'associatively connected' to each other (1896, p. 198), 'co-operated' with each other (1896, p. 202), and, in this regard, were structurally and psycho-dynamically similar to each other...Freud said that both the memories and the symptoms could be put together like a 'child's picture puzzle' (1896, p. 205), and that, 'the contents of the infantile scenes (the 'lowest common denominator' of all the 'memory links and associations' of which at this point in Freud's theorizing were considered both 'real' and 'unconscious/repressed' -- soon to change after 1896, in fact, maybe even partly changing in the midst of this essay, my editorial addition) turn out to be indispensible supplements to the associative and logical framework of the neurosis, whose insertion makes its course of development for the first time evident, or even, as we might often say, self-evident' (1896, p. 205).
You can see this 'co-operation of memories' illustrated in some of Freud's collection of conscious early memories between the ages of 3 and 7, the general time period that I am talking about when I use the term 'conscious early memories', and which Freud includes under the category of 'screen memories'.
Adler didn't follow Freud into his 'repression' or 'childhood amnesia' assumption, and instead, used 'conscious early memories' which he also called 'lifestyle memories' as one of his main diagnostic, psychological interpretive tools. I have followed Adler's lead in this regard -- Adler learned from Freud, and I learned indirectly from Adler (i.e., through 'The Adler Institute of Ontario' back in the early 1980s) , but neither Adler nor I were/are impressed with Freud's general theory of 'repression/childhood amnesia', and have, more or less, eliminated this type of thinking from our respective theoretical perspectives. In my case, not entirely as illustrated by my own two case examples of the 'reports' cited below which can be viewed as belonging to my own childhood 'sea of amnesia'.
There are however, what Adler called 'reports' (of events as recited usually by family members) that may or may not be personally remembered. And these can cause some 'mental confusion' as we may become confused as to whether we actually remember these (usually early childhood) events, or whether we don't. I have two reports of this type in my life: 1. an event where I stood up in a Church Congregation at about 4 or 5 years old and naming all the countries in the world that my dad pointed to on a globe (I couldn't come close to that now.) 2. an event where my dad said I reported another child stealing from a storeowner, and the storeowner thanking my dad for raising such an 'honest' child. (That was in my 'naive, innocent, unjaded early days before I learned how the Narcissistic Capitalist world works. Now I focus on politicians 'stealing' from taxpayers, and corporate owners 'stealing' from their employees...perhaps as partly 'learned' in that first store experience that I don't remember....)
'Reports' are kind of 'nebulous, skaky transference diagnostic tools' -- not entirely meaningless, but not as trusted as a 'vivid conscious childhood memory' which is likely to have much stronger diagnostic, 'transference structural and psycho-dynamic memory, fantasy, and obsessive impulse and repetition associations' attached to it.
Freud had more than a handful of conscious early transference memories which he did and he didn't put much stock into. If you keep hammering the importance of 'repressed early childhood memories', how many theorists/therapists trained in your school of psychology and psychotherapy are going to take a serious look at the 'lifesyle or transference significance' of conscious early memories. Adler did -- and he called them 'lifestyle memories'. I do, and I bring these 'lifestyle memories' back into a Freudian and post-Freudian 'conflict model/paradigm' of the personality, and interpret/analyze them from my own post-Freudian, post-Adlerian 'paradoxical, dialectic, multi-bi-polar, perspective.
Two of the more important conscious early transference memories in Freud's life were: 1. his 'primal master bedroom scene' memory relative to his busting in on his parents when he was 3 or 4 years old while they were having sex, and being yelled at by his father to get out of the room immediately (I have interpreted this memory in a number of other different essays such as 'The First True Case of Psychoanalysis'); and 2. his 'magician memory' where his mom told little Siggy that we all are born from the earth and will return to the earth, and to demonstrate this, she rubbed her hands and produced some dark specimens of epidermis to a first skeptical, then astonished, but believing, little Siggy. Sounds like Freud's early childhood assumptive basis for what would much later in his life become 'the principle of constancy', 'the conservation of energy', 'the law of entropy', and from 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' -- 'the nirvana' and 'death instinct' principle. Not to mention Freud's 'narcissistic, transference fixation' with always looking for a 'magician' in his life (Breuer, Charcot, Bernheim, Fliess, Jung...) as well as 'astonishing' the world by metaphorically being one himself.
We will leave this subject of 'childhood transference memory interpreting' for now, as I want to go back over my still evolving DGB model of the Psyche/Personality. There are a few modifications and changes that I would like to add. We will do this in my next essay. And my model of the psyche needs to be connected to my theory of 'transference memories' and their psycholoigical interpretation....
Join me there!
-- dgb, January 21st, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
