Has been re-written....finished, October 29th....
October 28, 2012.
There are two ways we can look at the study of 'transference' -- one of, if not, Freud's most important concept(s) within the framework of psychoanalysis: 1. is a historical, evolutionary study of how transference developed as a concept over time in the history of psychoanalysis. In this regard, we need to distinguish the difference between the 'concept' of transference, meaning how Freud differently defined and described this concept over time vs. the 'phenomenon' itself as any clinical psychologist and/or therapist or husband or wife can experience it as their client or spouse is 'transferring' particular thoughts, feelings, impulses, and or defenses onto them from their childhood past; 2. is a more cognitive psychology approach to how the phenomenon of transference fits into the functioning -- and the dysfunctioning -- of the mind.
This essay became truncated after it was previously written -- chopped up into two or three essays. -- leaving behind it the one below which now has been re-written, hopefully in a more logically coherent manner. This essay is the first of a two to five essay series that will start with transference theory, then move on to character structure and personality theory, which should give us the type of multi-dialectic, multi-school template that we can then apply to the study of psychological health, the study of 'neurosis', mental illness, and psychopathology, and to the art and science of psychotherapy and clinical psychology as a whole. Here is essay number 1 below.
-- dgb, October 28, 2012....
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From a DGB cognitive theoretical perspective, we process our perceptions, interpretations, judgments, decisions in the confines of what we will label here as our 'Central, Executive and/or Mediating Ego'. Freud would have called this just 'the ego' but since I have followed the path of Object Relations and Transactional Analysis in the study of various 'subsidiary ego states' each with different 'ego functions', this necessitates a more specific labeling of each of these distinctively conceptualized ego-states with different sub-ego functions.
Call this the specialization of the ego as it goes about its daily functions, two of the most important being: 1. to compare; and 2. to contrast all the thousands of new things, new situations, new encounters, new relationships with similar and/or different experiences from our past.
This 'comparing' and 'contrasting' process is part of what underlies one of Freud's most important concepts -- transference. From the time we are newly born til the day we die, we are constantly 'processing' new experiences, learning from them, storing them in our memory banks, and then days or months or years later, bringing them back, as associatively connected to what is happening in our lives in the immediate present, in the form of what we might loosely call 'transferences' from our past that help us -- or hinder us -- in our new evaluations of these new situations, new things, new people, new encounters, new relationships that we are dealing with now.
This is our 'past' meeting our 'present', the bridge between our past and present, our 'dialectic connection' between our past and present. Our past judgments and generalizations are carried forward to help (or hinder) us in our present evaluations, and conversely, our present evaluations can also change the way that we construe our past, as well as providing 'fresh new transference generalizations' that may be used at some point in the evolving future.
Of particular importance, are the 'transference generalizations' that we learn in about the first 7 years of our life. These tend to be filled with emotional, impulsive, and defensive 'side kicks' that very much will determine the direction of our future destiny. We can classify them into 'life-directing' 'transference templates, complexes, and games' that create obsessive compulsions in our thoughts and behaviors, as well as 'serial behavior patterns'.
These serial behavior patterns can both be the driving force behind extremely creative and/or genius-like behavior on the one hand (such as can be seen through the biographies of all the great men and women in history), and/or alternatively, these same or different serial behavior patterns can also lead to extreme destruction and/or self-destruction on the other hand. Often our greatest character strength is also our greatest character weakness. And we know where 'serial behavior patterns' can take the extremely 'offside' psycho-or-sociopath.
Transference is only one of a large number of 'defense mechanisms' that have been classified by psychoanalysis.
From the learning functions of 'association', 'dissociation', and 'discrimination', come a whole host of seemingly 'hard-wired' or 'almost unavoidable' 'ego-learning and/or ego-defense mechanisms' that psychoanalysis, through its some 120 years of existence and evolution, has itemized and classified very well -- processes like 'repression', 'suppression', 'denial', 'resistance', 'disavowal', 'transference', 'compensation' (Adler's influence), 'introjection', 'identification', 'projection', 'sublimation', 'compromise-formation', 'allusion to immediacy', 'reaction-formation', 'displacement'....Many of them are inter-connected and/or subsidiaries of other defense mechanisms...
At this point, I need you to remember that I am a 'GAP' theorist -- as in a 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic' theorist -- who 'walks and explores the conceptual and theoretical boundary lines between Gestalt Theory, Adlerian Theory, and Psychoanalysis, among other schools of psychology. In football terminology, I look for 'the seams in the zone coverage' -- and that is where I do the essence of my theorizing, looking for 'Conceptual-Theoretical-Paradigm Bridges' between different schools of philosophy and/or psychology and/or simply paradigm perspective.
Every theorist of the mind takes a partly similar, partly different, snap shot of how they picture the process and structure of the mind -- including myself -- although my particular 'snapshot' is basically a collage of the snapshots taken before me, integrated together, and both modified and expanded in a way that makes sense to me. And I will be the first to admit that my own 'transference templates and complexes' play a significant determining factor in my particular 'range and focus of snapshots' as I present them to you. No different than Freud, Adler, Jung, or Perls before me....We have, or have had, 'unfinished business' or 'unfinished situations' that have provided each of us with the 'motivating drive' behind whatever theory we have ended up presenting. It is up to others to 'sift out' the 'narcissistic biases' that may lean a theory one way or another in such a fashion that it may not be helpful to a certain class of people with other different life experiences and/or different narcissistic biases...For example, the Seduction Theory might be useful for one class of therapeutic clients, while not being useful to another...And a good psychoanalyst will not use Freud's 'Oedipal Complex Theory' in a way that prevents the therapist from seeing the possibility of real clients that were really sexually seduced, manipulated, exploited, assaulted...as children...or later on...
So, right now I am walking the 'unfinished situation-lifestyle-transference' boundary between Gestalt Therapy, Adlerian Psychology, and Psychoanalysis with the goal of explaining Freud's concept of 'transference' and Adler's concept of 'lifestyle' in an integrative Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic fashion that probably Perls was the closest to 'nailing on the head with a hammer'....But I bring more psychoanalytic detail back into the human phenomenon that Freud called transference -- and that includes all of a 'pre-1897, post-1896, Classical, and Object Relations 'smorgasbord' to mix with Adler's theory of 'conscious early memories', 'lifestyle memories, inferiority feelings, compensation, superiority striving, lifestyle goals and orientations', and Perls' important contribution of 'the unfinished situation'.
One Freudian-Jungian theorist who I read had a good handle on what I am about to present here, when he called it our 'handicap challenge' -- our 'childhood ego traumacy memory' that becomes 'worked over a thousand or a hundred thousand times in our mind during the course of our life' -- and 'symbolically or metaphorically re-created, re-enacted, repeated in a way that is ideally aimed at compensation, defense, wish-fulfillment, ego-satisfaction, superiority-striving -- that crashes through the wall of our childhood ego traumacy, dis-satisfaction, and/or frustration that we have gone on to set up as a transference-lifestyle-unfinished situation GAME with the intended goal of patching the hole in our childhood-self-esteem -- and thus, essentially trying to make our self-esteem and self-image feel whole again'...
This is the 'whole part' of transference that Freud never got in its entirety -- rather, he gave us 'two partial solutions' that he never integrated: Part 1. 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory'; and Part 2. 'Fantasy-Wish Fulfillment-Oedipal Theory'.
This is also where my work connects with both Eric Berne's 'Games People Play', and Janov's 'The Primal Scream'. Because underneath each and every unique and customized 'Primal Transference-Lifestyle Game/Complex' that each and everyone of us is walking around and symbolically re-enacting in our lives with the goal of 'gaining or winning our supreme form of transference-lifestyle ego-satisfaction' -- underneath all of this -- is a childhood memory, and an ego-traumacy that, when traced back to its original source, is capable of eliciting a 'Primal Transference Scream' -- of anguish, pain, rejection, abandonment, exclusion, guilt, anxiety, panic, and/or rage....This is the essential transference connection between Freud's Traumacy Theory and his later Fantasy Theory which Adler re-developed in terms of the latter's 'Inferiority Feeling' and 'Superiority Striving (Ego-Compensation) Theory...
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Freud's real 'caput Nili' that he never totally found. He thought he had found it until he renounced that he had found it (i.e., The Traumacy-Seduction Theory). Then, he thought he had found it again with his creation of 'The Oedipal Complex' -- the counter-thesis to Freud's previous Traumacy-Seduction Theory.
But Freud couldn't, or wouldn't, in this particular context and controversy -- think dialectically and integratively as opposed to unilaterally. Thus, the 'caput Nili' (source of the Nile), for Freud, remained undiscovered. He found the two main 'branches' leading in and out of 'The Source' -- but he never found the source. The 'Source' as I am trumpeting it here is a dialectic integration between Freud's early Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his later Fantasy-Impulse Theory. The two are intimately interwoven. I just better need to show you how.
What remains is for the integration of the ideas of Freud, Adler, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Berne, Janov, Perls...
All woven together...in intricate fashion...
To be neatly demonstrated in a few crystal clear case examples of how this multi-dialectic theory all comes together...
In the life force, the death force -- the paradoxical love-hate, approach-avoidance, power-submission dynamics -- of the individual 'transference complexes' and the 'transference games that people play'....often without even knowing, or at least fully understanding, the underlying psycho-dynamics that are at work in their own minds...
And this is where I will leave you today, in this, the 100th anniversary of one of Freud's most important papers: 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912).
To help unfold this whole mystery -- and its solution or resolution -- in the form of more concrete details in concrete cases...And also, a synopsis of the evolution of the concept of transference in the history of psychoanalysis and how DGB Transference Theory is similar but also significantly -- different.
Until then....
Have a great day!
-- dgb, Oct 16, 17, 2012
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic-Gap-Bridging Creations....
-- Are Still in Process...
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