Taking Stock on The Driving Force Behind 'Hegel's Hotel' -- The Synergy of Opposing Ideas and The Phenomenology of The Multi-Dialectic Spirit (Part 1): Hegel Meets Nietzsche Meets Freud

Hegel's Hotel -- as a metaphor for the history, evolution, and integration of Western Philosophy-Psychology -- can be internalized into our individual and/or collective minds, our personalities, in larger or smaller fashion, depending on how many times you or I want to slice 'the classification pie', so to speak; or to continue with my main Hegel's Hotel metaphor, how many 'rooms' I want to include in the 'psychology wing of Hegel's Hotel' --  for example, whether I want to include 'philosophy' and/or 'mythological' rooms in this wing of my hotel, or  create different wings of the hotel for these two related but different subject areas. 

For the purpose of this essay, and probably eventually this whole section, I have chosen to put these two subject areas -- philosophy and mythology -- into separate wings of Hegel's Hotel, and focus on '20 particular psychology rooms' I am interested in at this particular moment in time Actually, one of my 20 rooms -- my 'Phenomenology of Spirit Room' -- can be viewed as a room that encompasses both the positives and the negatives of our 'whole existential and emotional spirit' -- good, great, so-so, bad, ugly, or horrific... 

Even within the psychology wing of the hotel, we could make up a different number of rooms, depending on how you or I want to 'organize the psychology wing of the hotel', whether you or I want to do a summary of the major ideas of each major psychologist who means something to you or I in the history of clinical psychology -- I say 'you or I' because what I am trying to say is that 'Hegel's Hotel' can be an individual, customized project, for anyone who wants to try to build their own modified derivative of Hegel's Hotel -- although this Hegel's Hotel that you are reading is definitely my custom made 'hotel' which is not to say that I might not invite other writers to contribute at a later date....

Since the ultimate goal of my project is 'massive, evolving DGB integration', at some point, I need to draw a line, a cut off point, and devote a certain number of 'rooms' to this evolving end product of massive philosophy-psychology...integration. 

Of course, again, all is very subjective and personal -- in this case, organized and classified by yours truly (although much, much more classifying and organizing still needs to be done). 

At some point, I would like to have all the different 'wings' of the hotel labelled, all the 'floors' numbered, and all the 'individual rooms' numbered. 

Whether this all comes together before I die or not remains to be seen. Sorry to sound morbid here but that is just the reality of the situation. Freud said that the 'id' -- the bottom, most primitive, uncivil portion of the mind -- is divided into the 'life' and 'death' instincts. I do not mind starting with this bipolarity in the personality, although I prefer to use the concepts of 'life force' and 'death force'... At some point in one's life -- whether chronically and/or acutely -- one is going to start to feel our death force overcrowd our life force as nature starts to drag us back towards entropy. Morbid -- but real.    

Now, everything is subject to change, and at the present time I am battling a bout on pneumonia, so obviously I am negatively biased, and the optimist in me says that things will get better (the pessimist is not so sure...)

Life is fleeting -- and precious -- the older we get, the more we begin to appreciate this, or should begin to appreciate this, unless, in the case of sudden death, we never come to fully appreciate this...

Looking at two great philosophers in history, Kierkegaard died at 42 and accomplished a lot of writing in that time -- he died in 1855, a hundred years before I was born (maybe that is why I am so pessimistic); Nietzsche died at 56 (of which the last 10 years he spent 'insane', from 1889 to 1997 in the care of his mother until she died, and the last three years in the care of his sister until Nietzsche himself died in 1900).  

In my 'historical perspectivism', I look at some of the age and accomplishment milestones of some of the great philosophers and psychologists. Even though I have written over a thousand essays on the internet now -- I have no idea of the exact number of completed pieces -- at the moment, all these essays lie in my archives in organizational disarray, and until they are actually cohesively organized into one major integrative piece of work, I don't think I've accomplished anything yet. 

Man is caught between a number of different philosophical ideals in terms of how to live 'the good life'. 

One, that we are all familiar with is 'the pursuit of happiness'; that comes from 'The Enlightenment' period and is written into a number of different national constitutions. 

Another, is the goal of 'equilibrium' or '(homeostatic, dialectic) balance'. 

A third is Nietzschean in nature -- in 1872, in 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT), Nietzsche was looking for an almost unattainable balance between an 'Apollonian' and a 'Dionysian' lifestyle, thus, the 'birth of tragedy'; but by the time he started writing 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (TSZ), between 1883 and 1885, Nietzsche had abandoned poor Apollo, and was riding full steam ahead on his 'Dionysian Horse'....this was living life to the fullest, passionately, 'Beyond Good and Evil', in the spirit of 'The Anti-Christ', not the 'Crucified'....the life of a 'Superman' with a 'Will to Self-Empowerment', flying high above the  'mediocre, crucified, herd'....You would have to say that this involved living life with a far greater sense of 'imbalance' than what Nietzsche was looking for in 1872 (under Hegel's influence) in a 'tug-of-war conflict' between an Apollonian (cerebral, organized, cohesive) and a Dionysian (sensory, passionate, impulsive, emotional...) lifestyle. BT gave us a mythological analysis of what was to come, say, 51 years later in 'The Ego and The Id' (Freud, 1923), and more generally in The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.

In contrast, TSZ was a horse of a different colour -- a Dionysian Horse -- which was more of a philosophy of  'Let our Id be free!'....a rather dangerous and unstable, unpredictable ethical recipe....this was the philosophy of 'The Anti-Christ'.....as opposed to the Christian philosophy which was more of a 'submission to God's demands and wishes' (as interpreted by whoever... presumably, in most cases, with an aim of a philosophy and a lifestyle involving more altruism and self-denial...as opposed to narcissistic self-interest).

At this point, we can choose the path of 'the unilateral, either/or philosopher' or the path of the more 'bipolarity negotiating, multi-integrative-dialectical, homeostatic balance oriented, compromising' philosopher' who wishes to 'find the middle path between opposite poles of conflicting thought, spirit, and action'... 

This is what I label down below as the domain of 'The Central Ego' as well as our  'Phenomenology of Spirit Room' which is our 'emotional and spiritual thermostat' to let us know how we are doing in our very fine and precarious balancing act of different philosophies,  problem-solving strategies, conflict-mediation, and resulting behavior patterns and styles of life...

It is interesting to note that in The United States of America, things aren't so united, as there exists a philosophical and political gridlock in Congress and in The White House between 'the unilateralists' and 'the more compromising integrationists'... Dependiing on whether this gridlock is unlocked or not, at the end of this month, lies what is being called the financial cliff of which the future of America is hanging on the edge...Let the better mediating and conflict-solving politicians win a negotiated settlement that will at least partly head America in the right  direction...

Below, I have created part of the 'psychological wing' of Hegel's Hotel -- the part that summarizes my work as a 'multi-integrative-dialectic philosopher and psycho-theorist'. It integrates the work of say, some 50 psychologists starting with Freud, of which about 10 or 15 of these psychologists are more important. 

Abstracting still further from here, we come to what, for me, might be called 'The Big Three Psychologists' -- Freud, Adler and Perls -- Jung, the fourth, Berne, the fifth, and then we can start to get into all the other early psychoanalysts: Rank, Abraham, Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich... 'The Objective Relationists'  -- Karl Abraham,  Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Harold Guntrip, and 'Self-Psychologists -- Heinz Kohut, and 'The Neo-Freudians and Humanistic-Existentialists -- Karen Horney, Eric Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow; 'The Cognitive-Emotional-Behaviorists' -- Alfred Korzybski, S.I. Hayakawa, Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, Maxwell Maltz, Nathaniel Branden, Donald Meichenbaum... 

For me, three big philosophers lie in the 'shadow-background' of all these great psychologists -- Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche -- and beyond that Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao tse, Epictetus, Epicurus, Diogenes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Foucault, Derrida, and back to psychology, Jeffrey Masson and somehow we should be able to find a way to fit Bion and Lacan into the psychoanalytic list.... 

The result is 'Hegel's Hotel: The GAP-DGB Psychology Wing' of which all of what I have listed above has been, in one way or another, highly compacted into the model below...

 We can use this model to help us understand better how our mind works in different contexts -- structurally, organizationally, and psycho-dynamically. 

It can be viewed as a larger, '20 room extension' of Freud's classic 'ego', 'id' and superego' model, or Perls' 'topdog', 'underdog' model, or Bernes' transactional analysis model, or Jung's 'personna', 'shadow' model... 

This newest rendition of Hegel's Hotel -- the internalized psychological model -- we can choose to visit consciously, or -- 'out of awareness' -- visit subconsciously. All of the different rooms have both 'healthy' and 'pathological' components attached to them, contextually, to different degrees, in different persons. 

The model I present to you can be used 'mythologically and/or spiritually' as well as 'rationally-empirically' without any talk of 'mythological figures' or 'Gods'... Your choice -- this is the flexibility of the model. 

'GAP' incidentally, if you do not already know, stands for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic' and it also stands for all the 'gaps' in our personality, and in our existence...

'DGB' stands for 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging' ....

And together, 'GAP-DGB' stand for the gap, the Nietzschean Abyss, in each of our lives, and the 'rope' or 'bridge' or 'cape' that we all have to create and use to climb or fly from 'The Precipice of Personal and/or Genetic History (Etiology) to 'The Precipice of Being (Ontology)' and then again to 'The Precipice of Becoming (Teleology)...and it also signifies climbing back and forth from 'The Precipice of Dionysus' to 'The Precipice of Apollo'......

This is living the life of 'The Multi-Integrative Dialectic Superman or Superwoman'....It is 'The GAP-DGB rendition of 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'....and in Heraclitus-Lao-tse-Spinozian-Schellingian-Hegelian fashion...it is 'The Multi-Integrative-Dialectic-Holistic Path to Personal Spiritual Salvation'....ideally speaking...

That is the essence of the driving force behind Hegel's Hotel...

At this point, we are talking about 'hotel rooms' metaphorically representing 'ego-states' or 'ego-positions' and various different types of 'id-ego impulses' and 'defense mechanism'  -- some against our own id-ego impulses, others toward the perceived dangers in our outer world. 

We need to better understand -- or at least have a workable theory -- that will help us better understand how we got to these different ego-states or positions, id-ego impulses, and defense mechanisms against 'over-impulsiveness' on our own accord, and the perceived dangers that we interpret in our outer world. 

Let us develop such a theory --  that integrates maybe about 30 to 40 psychologists, probably about 10 important ones that I will list in approximate order of importance here: Freud, Adler, Perls, Jung, Berne, Rank, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip, Horney, Fromm, Berne, Janov.... backed up by these important philosophers listed chronilogically: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Epicurus, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida. 

This will be the subject of my next essay.  


-- dgb, Dec. 8th, 2012, 

Dialectic Gap-Bridging Creations...

Are Still in Process..