Finished..., January 2nd, 2012....
A pre-warning to my readers that some of the material in this essay may be disconcerting as we brush briefly on the topic of 'childhood sexual assaults' -- the focus of Freud's attention in 1896 -- before he changed the focus of his attention to the topic of 'childhood sexuality, sexual fantasy, and sexual fixation' shortly thereafter....The issue of 'childhood sexual assaults' is never easy to approach, but to a psychotherapist in particular, needs to be approached, in order to deal with it properly... I do not profess to be any kind of expert on any kind of sexual assault; however, as a theorist, I certainly do know something about 'biased theoretical and therapeutic results' based on 'biased, one-sided, discriminatory theories' -- and this will be the main focus of our discussion in this essay. -- dgb, Jan. 2nd, 2012.
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There is only one way I know to effectively show the differences between: Pre-Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Humanistic-Existential Psychology... -- and DGB Quantum-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology which synthesizes elements of all of these different schools of philosophy-psychology into one, big, multi-cohesive package....Too big a package? Too impossible a task? Well, read up...and then judge for yourself...
We will go back to Freud's conscious early memories, and childhood relationships to collect the information that we need -- or at least a significant portion of it -- and then we will do an 'abbreviated transference analysis' of Freud's various 'obsessional neuroses', 'dissociation neuroses', 'traumacy neuroses', 'identification neuroses', 'fantasy neuroses'....based on the information that has been collected...
There will still be elements of information missing -- specific information about Freud's relationship with his mom, and particularly his dad....but we will go with what we have which is still significant enough to build a strong 'transference case of traumacy, fantasy, and obsessional neuroses' here...
The only difference between a 'complex' and a 'neurosis' in my work here is that a complex includes both 'positive' and 'negative' consequences attached to a particular 'transference neurosis', the latter of which accentuates the 'negative' aspect of a particular 'transference complex'...
Now, if you are a psychoanalyst reading this essay -- or any psychotherapist engaged in, and 'biased by', a particular 'brand' or 'school' or 'sub-school' of psychology -- then you are going to have to 'step outside of your own conceptual and theoretical box' here...or you might as well stop reading....A closed mind is not going to get you anywhere except the same place that you have already been...That may be good enough for you, or if you are open-minded enough, then you might find something here that you like better...or as an 'addition' to your current 'psychotherapeutic box of conceptual, theoretical, and practical tools'...
Next, regarding the concept of 'repression' -- I don't use it; in 37 years of studying various schools of psychology, and engaging in hundreds of hours of different forms of group personal growth and psychotherapy workshops...I have never come across what I would consider to be a case example of a 'repression'....Maybe some therapists have, maybe Freud did in his work with clients who were diagnosed as 'hysterics' or 'obsessional neurotics' or 'paranoid'...or maybe Freud was fooling himself as to just how 'buried' these so called 'critical' memories and/or fantasies were, and/or whether some weren't even a product of his own 'biased interpretive reconstructions'....
I don't know, and I am not going to debate the 'reality' or 'fantasy' of 'repression' -- not here, not probably anywhere -- 'repression' is simply a concept and a theory that I have not found meaningful, useful, practical in my work... Believe differently if you wish...but we are going down a different path here....
I have found Alfred Adler's concept and theory of the 'dianostic use' of 'conscious early memories' as 'lifestyle indicators' to be much more practical....except that I have taken Adler's work and brought it back into a 'psychoanalytic context'....to talk about 'transference memories' rather than 'lifestyle memories'....
What Freud called 'screen memories' that both 'hide' and 'allude' to other more etiologically (causally) significant 'repressed memories and/or fantasies', I call 'transference memories'...and I dig no deeper...
Here is an example of 'screen memory bias' in Ernest Jones' 'classic' biography of Freud (1953, 1981, 'The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, V. 1, p. 7), as Jones recites some of Freud's earliest conscious memories:
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'Among the (consciously) remembered ones are a few, banal enough in themselves, which are of interest only in standing out in a sea of amnesia. One was of penetrating into his parents' bedroom out of (sexual) curiosity and being ordered out by an irate father.'
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Now you have to understand that psychoanalysts like Jones, Eissler, and Anna Freud were loyal to Sigmund Freud to a fault....each of them were important in their own right, but at the same time, each of them were like 'lemmings' following their 'over-idealized leader' over the cliff of his own private and public neuroses....and simply his unwillingness to be anywhere close to 'transparent' relative to his own private life, his own 'psycho-analyzed' life, and his own 'sexual interests/obsessions'.....Some of these he would 'allude to in the third person' and/or through 'fake clients' who were in fact himself as 'disguised' through his own 'transference projections' that can be found throughout his work.... I'm not intending to be too hard on Freud here because how many of us would want our 'private traumatic and fantasy worlds' exposed to the general public....
It is much easier to be a 'closet voyeur' relative to someone else's private sexual life -- and/or scandals -- than it is to be completely transparent relative to our own most private, narcissistic injuries, fantasies, and activities....and Freud was no different in this regard....
As much as Freud wanted to know every little tidbit of his clients' most private sexual lives, he certainly didn't want to expose his own inner, narcissistic world to nearly the same degree of scrutiny...Indeed, at times, he did everything possible to keep the public out of his own private life...he would put up 'smoke and mirrors shows'...or conversely, be oblivious to the psycho-dynamics and results of his own transference neuroses, which is unlikely....Or it might have been pieces of both...
To be sure, if Freud had had a chance, to be sure, he would have destroyed his letters to Fliess...but history was on our side in this regard...and plus...once we have a good handle on Freud's private transference material -- as interpreted by a more 'objective, open-minded source', i.e., 'me', then we can start to much more easily see his 'transference projections' scattered thoughout almost 50 years of his written work...
Let's start by analyzing one of Freud's earlier transference projections, to be found in 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896, in which Freud took a rather diametrically opposite point of view relative to the conscious early memory that Jones cited above....In between 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria) and 1953 (Jones' first publication of Freud's biography), was the little essay called 'Screen Memories' (1899), and the complete 'paradigm shift' that Freud was 'evolving through' (or 'de-evolving' through) in his partial to full abandonment of his 'repressed memory-traumacy-seduction theory' in favor of his later fancied and dominant 'fantasy-childood sexuality-Oedipal Theory'....
In 1896, however, Freud still believed in the 'traumatic-etiological effect' of memories on the later evolution of adult neuroses... And the passage below was in 'the heart of Freud's later abandoned 'repressed childhood seduction/sexual assault theory'...although his own personal transference-projection was not 'repressed' here; simply 'dissociated' and 'alluded to' in the third person...
But first, we need a little more 'warm-up' here to a better understanding of the psycho-dynamics going on in Freud's head as he wrote 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'...
The Aetiology of Hysteria is a complicated and perplexing essay -- perhaps not so easily stereotyped as Freud's most articulate, but most short-lived, essay on his infamous Seduction Theory... otherwise, worded as Freud's 'Repressed Early Childhood Memory of a Sexual Assault' Theory...
I suggest that this essay was actually 'The Bridge' to Freud's already evolving and soon to come 'Childhood Sexuality Theory'....
The line that gives Freud away, and the fact that he is already in conflict over a 'chldhood pain' vs. 'childhood pleasure' theory of hysteria....indeed, has been since December 1895, months before he wrote this essay...is this one:
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'But have we not a right to assume that even the age of childhood is not wanting in slight sexual excitations, that later sexual development may perhaps be decisively influenced by childhood experiences?' (Freud, Sigmund, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', S.E. V. 111, p.202.)
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There is a 'slow train coming' here....and the train of thought that is coming is 'childhood sexuality' in its own infancy in Freud's always freshly percolating brain...
In fact, the line above takes some steam out of Masson's theory of 'Freud losing moral courage around his theory of childhood sexual assault' -- although, to be sure, not entirely -- because it shows that Freud is stuck in a 'theoretical quandry' at this moment in psychoanalytic history, stuck between two opposing theories of hysteria that don't seem to support each other: 1. a 'pain' theory of hysteria, and from this, the idea of a 'repressed memory of a traumatic sexual assault encounter (or series of them) in early childhood'; and 2. a 'pleasure' theory of hysteria where 'the repressed memory is one of renounced or dissociated pleasure' -- that 'returns from the repressed' at a later time and place once 'puberty, sexual hormones, and an associated teenage or adult sexual encounter 're-stimulates the old, repressed memory' in the form of 'teenage or adult hysterical symptoms that are both hiding and alluding to the old, childhood repressed memory' -- or 'fantasy' once Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex Theory', starting in a letter to Fliess on October 15th, 1897, and later fully published in 'Three Essays on Sexuality' (1905).
We all tend to associate childhood -- or even teenage or adult -- sexual assaults, but especially early childhood sexual assaults, with 'physical and emotional pain' as well as 'righteous, moral disgust and horror' from an adult's perspective looking back at what happened, but what Freud seems to be intimating here -- even though he still talks about 'brutal childhood rapes' in the quotation I will cite below -- is the type of case of 'childhood manipulation and seduction' where a child may not necessarily understand things 'morally' yet, in fact, may even find some pleasure in the experiences of his or her own body in the participation of the childhoood sexual encounter. (Freud had already come to this conclusion in the case of boys being the 'active manipulators' as opposed to 'the more passive victims' that young girls were more likely to be, and he had classified the difference between 'hysteria' and 'obsession' as a 'passive' vs. 'active' ramification of the childhood encounter -- in the boy's case, developing an 'obsessional neurosis' years later involved an act of 'moral guilt' and 'self-reproachment' for the 'lustful underlying enactment of the sexual impulse...and, according to Freud, any awareness of this was 'repressed' as well...).
In the young girl's case, Freud was starting to believe -- even as he was deep into The Seduction Theory -- that the child who felt some element of 'pleasure' in the early encounter, starts to get a 'fuller sense of the moral implications' of what happened to her at a later date -- and then has to try to sort out the 'pleasurable' vs. the 'painful' elements of the 'psychic conflict', which then 'triggers' the 'repression' (or 'dissociation' in my words) -- a 'conflict avoidance', an 'attempted burial' or 'renouncement' of the psychic conflict -- which later becomes 're-awakened' by an 'associated' teenage sexual experience...and a 'return of the repressed' via the 'hysterical symtoms'....
This 'understanding' of hysteria would become very different to Freud's original understanding of the hysterical conflict as 'childhood sexual and emotional pain' conflicting with later 'normal teenage sexual impulses and/or encounters'...with 'repression' (or 'dissociation') once again 'pushing the conflict' back into the world of the 'repressed unconcious'....in effect, 'sweeping the conflict under the carpet' so as not to have to deal with it....until the 'hysterical symptoms' started showing up in place of the conflict...
So which was it? Childhood pain, or childhood pleasure? Mixing with moral and emotional pain later? Or mixing with normal teenage sexual impulses later? Freud was partly 'stuck' here between December of 1895 and May 1896.
Still, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' was dominantly a 'Childhood Sexual Assault/Seduction Theory' -- mainly by the father, or alternatively by someone in the family, or close to the family, or a stranger...perpretating the manipulation and/or the actual physcial assault on a pre-puberty girl...In the quote below, Freud talks about the 'traumas' of childhood sexual memories -- including, by 'transference projective interpretation', Freud's own earliest conscious memory....
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In some cases, no doubt, we are concerned with experiences which must be regarded as severe traumas -- an attempted rape, perhaps, which reveals to the immature girl at a blow all the brutality of sexual desire, or the involuntary witnessing of sexual acts between parents, which at one and the same time uncovers unsuspected ugliness and wounds childish and moral sensibilities alike, and so on. But in other cases the experiences are astonishingly trivial. In one of my women patients it turned out that her neurosis was based on the experience of a boy of her acquaintance stroking her hand tenderly and, at another time, pressing his knee against her dress as they sat side by side at table, while his expression let her see that he was doing something forbidden. For another young lady, simply hearing a riddle which suggested an obscene answer had been enough to provoke her first anxiety attack and with it to start the illness. (p. 200-201)
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What this quotation shows, I believe, is two things: 1. Freud wavering in and out of 'trauma theory' because 'traumacy' wasn't explaining the cases of 'forbidden sexual excitations'; and 2. still dominated -- or mainly dominated -- by his 'traumacy-seduction' theory, Freud still believed that these 'teenage memories' were 'associated' as what he would call 'screen memories' in 1899 with pre-puberty childhood sexual manipulation, exploitation, and/or more brutal rape -- but even here, Freud was also starting to think of 'early childhood sexual excitations' which would become the heart of his soon to come 'childhood sexuality theory'...
Now, stepping outside of the seduction theory, we also have a case of Freud -- by 'third person allusion' -- describing his own earliest childhood memory of seeing his parents engaging in a sexual act as being 'severely traumatic' as contrasted with Jones writing it off -- i.e., dismissing it -- some 57 years later (1953) as only a 'conscious' memory in a 'sea of amnesia' of other, presumably much more important, 'unconscious, repressed memories' that were much more worthy of our time and their 'psycho-dynamic impact' on Freud's evolving character structure...Oh, what a difference a major 'paradigm shift' makes...
Now before we come back to the memory, let's try to summarize what we can take out of what was going through Freud's head in the winter/spring of 1895-96....
Freud was caught up in a theoretical 'connundrum' between 'pleasure' and 'pain' -- and how to etiologically explain 'hysteria',
Specifically, Freud believed at this time that 'hysteria split the difference'; i.e., it involved a 'psychic conflict between pain and pleasure' (as for example, in the case of a brutal childhood rape conflicting years later with 'normal adolescent sexual desires'); or pleasure and pain' (as in 'childhood sexual excitations' being 'punished' and 'buried' by later teenage 'moral or superego-based guilt'). Freud was moving from a position of 'childhood sexual assault/manipulation/seduction usually with an adult or older sibling victimizer' in the case of hysteria, to a position of 'chilhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and activities' -- 'buried' my 'moral-superego guilt' -- with the 'compromise-formation' being 'teenage/adult hysterical symptoms' that both hide and allude to the underlying childhood sexual assaults in the about to be abandoned seduction theory, or the underlying childhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and/or activities in the soon-to-come theory of 'childhood sexuality'...
What Freud couldn't properly piece together -- or at least didn't so publicly -- is that this didn't need to be a 'mutually exclusive, Aristolean choice that was cemented into one over-riding; it could have been a 'Hegelian dialectic-integrative choice', and/or simply a situation where different clinical cases were yielding different clinical data whereby both sets of data needed to be accounted for by a 'bipolar-dialectic theory'....
The existence of childhood sexual assault does not rule out the existence of what might be called 'normal and/or abnormal childhood sexual activity' that may or may not include an 'assault'...Are you going to accuse a 7 year old boy of sexually assaulting a 5 year old girl? What parent hasn't seen his or her child 'playing with him or herself'?
Why did this ever have to be an 'either/or' battle in Freud's mind?
Because at this point in Freud's career, he was 'stuck inside an Aristotlean Paradigm, an Aristiolean, either/or mindset'? And Psychoanalysis paid the price as both Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his Childhood Sexuality and Fantasy-Impulse Theory where inherently self-destructive in their own 'limited unilateralness'; together they become a much better theory when they are treated as a 'Dialectic-Bipolar Theory -- in the same way as the bipolar 'Particle-Wave Theory' in physics is superior to either The Particle Theory or The Wave Theory -- taken separately and unilaterally....
Every clinical case needs to be treated differently before we start 'imposing our often righteous, narcissistic, unilateral theories' onto this clinical evidence....Otherwise, your theory will self-destruct just as soon as their is a clinical case of someone who does not fit inside your unilateral, limited conceptual theory and paradigm'...He or she simply has lived a life and experienced something that 'fits outside the boundary or boundaries of the theory you so dearly worship to the point of ignoring or manipulating or distorting your clinical evidence to mold the person's experiences to inappropriately fit into your model'.
And thqat is what Freud did...He wasn't perfect...and neither are any of us....Most important of all -- concepts and theories are never perfect because 'life will eventually crash and bury your beloved theory'....And mine too....(although my dialectic theory is superior to either side of Freud's 'mutually exclusive, either/or' theory here because it accounts for both potential sides of this same 'pleasure-pain-conflict' -- and even the two sides of the conflict 'conflated' together into 'one approach-avoidant, neurotic complex'...)
What we need to do is to 'see' the different types of psychic conflicts that Freud describes above as, for the most part, 'complex, paradoxical, integrative conflicts involving both traumatic and obsessional fantasy factors played off against each other -- thus, their 'paradoxical nature'.....attraction and repulsion blending together into one complex neurosis.....
And this is the type of neurosis that I will show you how to 'diagnose' and 'interpet' in Part 2 of this essay....with all these different factors coming together and playing off each other....conscious early memories, narcissistic injuries, compensations, and fixations, traumatic childhood memories, exciting childhood memories, identification neuroses, compensatory neuroses, compromise-formations, different types of obsessional neuroses and transference neuroses...you name it, and we will try to cover it, some in the next essay, and some beyond...
Happy New Year,
-- dgb, January 2nd, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiatons...
-- Are Still in Process....
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