Re-Written....Sat. Feb. 2-3, 2013
Here is my newest GAP-DGB model of the human psyche which incorporates different elements of many of the other existing models in the field. Remember that conceptualized 'ego-states' or 'ego-compartments' or 'ego-structures' or 'ego-agents' are all 'fictional teaching conveniences' that turn verbs into nouns -- and the verbs are the related 'ego-processes' that we are also trying to track phenomenologically (subjectively) through the creation and implementation of our concepts and theories. Thus, we are assuming in a metaphysical sense that different 'ego-processes' are engineered by related 'ego-agents' or any of the other nouns I used above, and presumably, these different 'ego-agents' are different 'parts of The Holistic (Unified or Dis-unified) Self'.
For example, in The Classical Freudian model of the human psyche, 'the ego' and 'the superego' can be viewed as different 'ego-agents' in the personality, and 'the id' -- well, Freud should have made that an ego-agent as well, but got caught between describing it -- i.e., the id -- as a 'container holding all the life and death instincts', and writing about it as being totally separate and dissociated from the ego, and also totally unconscious, vs. writing about the id at times like it too was an 'agent' with a 'sub-personality' that was like a 'wild, uncivilized ego' -- a 'wild child' that the ego was partly trying to restrain, partly trying to let loose, and usually coming up with some kind of a 'compromise-(formation-solution) between completely restraining the id, and letting it completely run wild (like a parent trying how best to deal with a wild child). And just to add a little more restraining force to hold off an often overwhelmingly impulsive id, the ego sometimes needs to utilize the stronger and usually more conservative, internalized cultural force of the 'superego'.
There are 'life' complications and 'conceptual-theoretical' limitations to the Classical Freudian model of the personality, put together in 1923 (The Ego and The Id).
My 18 'ego-compartment' model of the personality is a huge extension of Freud's Classical '2 or 3 Story Victorian House' depending on whether you want to visualize the superego on the main or top floor (topographically speaking, the 'id' occupies the 'basement', the 'ego' occupies the main floor', and 'the superego' occupies either the main or top floor, depending on how you want to visualize it, with 'some metaphorical movement' going on through the 3 different floors by both the ego and the superego -- and/or its 'vicissitudes', but alas, the id is locked in the basement (i.e., the unconscious with only its 'watered-down' or 'sugar-coated' or 'allusionary' vicissitudes moving up through the other two floors, partly hiding, partly alluding to the deepest roots of its instinctual components in the unconscious id.
Freud had a creative conceptual and/or theoretical solution for every clinical complication. Or so it seemed. However, we all have our creative outbursts -- usually 'transference' and 'sublimation' related -- Adler this way, Jung that way, Rank this way, Ferenzci that way, Abraham this way, Klein that way, Wilhelm Reich this way, Klein that way, Sullivan this way, Erickson that way, Horney this way, Fairbairn that way, Winnicott this way, Guntrip that way, Fromm this way, Rogers that way, Perls this way, Berne that way, Bion this way, Lacan that way, Kohut this way...
I ran out of names...Janov that way...oh, right at the beginning a decade or so before Adler came along, Janet this way, Breuer that way, Krafft-Ebing this way...Looking the latter up right now, I find it highly ironic that the man who is perhaps most (in)famous for calling Freud's 'new sexual theory' a 'scientific fairy tale'....himself is most noted for his case studies on 'the deviation of sexual behavior'....Just a side note, there...
To sum up, to stereotype all psychoanalysts as 'rote learners' and/or as 'lemmings' ready to follow Freud and his theory of Classical Psychoanalysis off a metaphorical cliff would be a mistake...although I can certainly see why Masson basically thought so -- call it some brand of 'corporate compliant group thinking, i.e., a combination of corporate approval-seeking and disapproval-avoiding. However, as you can see above, there have been a lot of Freudian dissenters and rebellers along the psychoanalytic historical-evolutionary trail....As Perls used to say, for every 'pleaser' or 'approval-seeker', there is usually a 'spiteful brat' or at least a righteous rebeller (loud or silent) sitting right next door to the pleaser in the next 'ego-compartment' or 'ego-state' -- in the same person. And no one can hold down the creative human spirit for very long, no matter what the 'roadblocks' and 'obstacles' and 'punishments' are for this creativity...
The study of psychoanalysis -- with all due respect -- became a 'more free realm of study' when Freud died in 1940. And with all due respect again, it became an even more 'free realm of study' when Anna Freud died in 1982, and to a lesser extent perhaps, Kurt Eissler in 1999. With these three deaths, the last three major vestiges of strict Classical Freudian thought -- disappeared.
It would be interesting to take a poll today to see how many psychoanalysts still believe in Freud's concept of 'the id'. And 'the superego' for that matter.
What percentage of psychoanalysts today are 'Object Relationists'? Lacanian Psychoanalysts? Bionian Psychoanalysts? Self Psychologists?
Fairbairn and Guntrip both rejected Freud's concept of the id. But Klein didn't. So what percentage of Object Relationists do or don't believe in the concept of the id?
Freud's mainly rejected Traumacy Theory is making a comeback. I would hope that most psychoanalysts today would not confuse an 'Oedipus complex' for a real childhood sexual assault memory...
Masson has at least partly been vindicated. He should be praised for standing up against the whole Psychoanalytic Establishment in the name of Traumacy Theory and Real Childhood Sexual Abuse rather than still being 'dissociated' for saying some things that simply needed to be bluntly stated. Not couched. Not white-washed. Not sugar-coated. But bluntly stated -- if overstated -- so that people didn't simply walk on by what was being stated.
I mean, to the extent, to the proportion, that there was any truth value whatsoever to Masson's claim that real childhood sexual assaults were being confused and/or re-interpreted by analysts as 'Oedipal sexual fantasies' on the part of the client reporting to have been seduced-manipulated-exploited-abused-and/or raped as a child -- can you think of any therapeutic error that would be worse than this one? The issue of the seduction theory vs. Oedipal theory and their radical different pictures of what was happening in the human psyche needed to be confronted once and for all. No abstract obscurities to hide away the issue.
Well, Masson did exactly that. What Masson went through in the 1980s and the early 1990s both professionally and personally, he did not deserve. But on the line was the history, the credibility of Psychoanalysis -- as well as Freud's character and integrity.
Portrayed as the ultimate 'ambitious, opportunist, narcissist' -- which obviously, he had some of that in him to climb as close to the top of The Freudian Empire as he did in such a short time, psychoanalytically and politically speaking -- as the very briefly anointed Projects Director of The Freud Archives -- what possibly could he have professionally and personally benefited from being the Ultimate Alter-Ego-and-in-the-end-Martyr of Psychoanalysis -- from having to walk The Psychoanalytic Plank (and/or choosing to walk it), metaphorically speaking, although many others had been there before him, some fighting, some not. Ferenzci still believed in Freud's traumacy-seduction theory and he was 'banished', 'dissociated' from the inner Freudian circle. Abraham still hung onto the traumacy-seduction theory significantly but in a way that did not lead to such a banishment-dissociation as what Ferenczi experienced. Rank was banished-dissociated from the inner circle but more for his controversial 'birth traumacy theory' -- and ironically, although Rank and Ferenzci were best friends, even Ferenczi, still in the psychoanalytic circle with Freud at the time, played a part in banishing-dissociating Rank.
One begins to think that someone certainly had a 'banishment-dissociation complex' that was spreading around the whole inner Freudian circle. Adler - gone. Jung -- gone. Rank -- gone. Ferenczi -- gone. One has got to go to the leader of the inner circle -- that would be Freud himself -- and ask oneself whether Freud himself did not have a serious 'banishment-dissociation transference complex'. It was like a contagious virus running rampant through the inner Freudian circle, even 'post-death' and 'inter-generationally' to his daughter Anna, to Kurt Eissler, and to any and every psychoanalyst who was around in the 1980s to witness, and play a part in, the 'banishment-dissociation' of Jeffrey Masson. Was Masson brashly arrogant and full of himself? Probably. Did Masson things that would practically guarantee his banishment-dissociation from Psychoanalysis? Probably.
Saying that Freud 'lost moral courage' went about 80 or 90 percent of the way to his psychoanalytic eviction order -- but that statement could still be true. No one will ever know for sure because, aside from Freud's unabridged letters to Fliess, which were in themselves very revealing and did not show Freud in his best light, still, no one could, or can, go back in psychoanalytic history to the extent of getting inside Freud's head, into his full-blooded, righteous and/or narcissistic, reasons for abandoning the traumacy-seduction theory the way that he so dramatically did. Maybe all these motivations were laid out in Freud's letters and/or in his public works. Or maybe they weren't. The 1895 botched Emma Ekstein nasal operation, which should have never been conducted in the first place, and the Vienna Psychiatric Meeting of April 21st, 1896, keep hanging around like a pair of dirty shirts. And/or maybe Freud caught one of his clients in a blatant lie and/or serious distortion of an 'alleged' childhood sexual seduction memory. Historically, I don't think we will ever get any closer to the 'truth' or at least the 'facts' at the time than we are right now. So it all comes down to your historical and motivational interpretation of what Freud said about his abandonment of the traumacy-seduction theory.
Do you entirely believe him, or do you not? I certainly do not rule out the very real possibilities that The Vienna Psychiatric Society applied political, professional, and economic leverage against Freud's 'unwanted theory of childhood sexual abuse'. (That would lead The Society down a path of 'paternal molesters' and The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society was full of fathers, some who might have been implicated, and had their careers irreparably damaged. Better to apply the threat, the leverage, of career damage to the creator of the theory itself -- that would be Freud -- call it 'hush leverage' -- in a way that Masson would not be hushed 85 years later. But again, this is 'historical theory' that could be right or could be wrong. Similarly, with the Emma Ekstein and how her 'blood bath' of botched nasal surgery somehow got 'turned around' a year later into the 'psychoanalytic interpretation' of 'Emma longing for Freud so much that she would bleed for him in order to get his attention and his presence at her side'. The word 'longing' sounds from a particular letter of this time period (May, 1896) like it was suggested to Freud by Fliess -- Freud of whom ran with it 'creatively' and 'theoretically' like an unbridled race horse.
This was the beginning of Freud's 'fantasy theory' in the winter of 1895 and spring of 1896, and if the Emma Ekstein ordeal was the 'original, stimulating' clinical case that prompted the beginning of fantasy theory, well, this would be like the use of steroids in baseball, or Pete Rose gambling on baseball -- it would certainly be a very 'tainted' beginning to fantasy theory, one skewed in the direction of 'psychoanalytic interpretive pathology'. And the Oedipus complex -- at least in its capability of 'steering psychoanalysts' in the direction of 'childhood sexual fantasy' rather than 'childhood sexual abuse' in a biased and overly one-sided manner -- well, this can easily be construed, like Masson did -- of even deeper, more generalized 'psychoanalytic interpretive pathology'.
Paraphrasing from my memory a line that Masson was quoted by Janet Malcolm as saying from her book, 'In The Freud Archives' (I'm sure that Masson would verify this quote as actually have been accurate), Masson argued that because of the shaky assumptive grounds of The Oedipus complex, Classical Psychoanalysis would have to 'recall' as many or more clients as Ford had to recall Pintos -- to make sure that these were not 'actual cases of childhood sexual abuse'.
Masson stood up for sexually traumatized women mainly -- in particular, women sexually abused as children, just as Freud himself did up to the spring of 1896, and the rights of these women to tell their respective stories of abuse in Psychoanalysis freely without having a Psychoanalyst automatically 'reinterpreting this story-memory as the result of 'The Oedipal Complex' -- and, in this regard, as their own sexual fantasies'. This was the worst and most one-sided, patriarchal mistake that Freud made in the history of Psychoanalysis. If Freud hadn't been so caught up in the need for an 'either/or' theory and perhaps the need to be 'politically correct' and/or 'abstractly elusive' and/or put up a 'false persona' in his own profession in order to keep his career and his job, well perhaps he could have eventually found his way to a 'bipolar theory of 'traumacy-fantasy' that covered both the 'traumatized' and the 'fantasized' aspects of human nature and human behavior -- a 'love-hate transference theory' very much like what Fairbarn came up with around 1930...and like the one that I adhere to today...
Masson, on the other hand didn't and doesn't believe in the 'dialectic advantage' of bipolar, integrative theories either -- he still stands, on my last contact with him, on the 'righteousness of the traumacy theory' -- presumably, no 'fantasy-impulse theory' mixed in with it whatsoever. That, in my mind, is just as one-sided a theory as Freud's instinct-fantasy theory was, and doesn't allow for the reality of clients -- and therapists -- own narcissistic biases, interpretive distortions, possible memory distortions, fantasies, judgments, feelings, impulses, and the like. What most people cannot understand -- except a knowledgeable and experienced psychoanalyst and/or non-psychoanalytic therapist who believes in bipolar paradoxes, conflicts, dichotomies in the human psyche -- is that a traumatic early childhood memory can still very much be the springboard for an obsessive-compulsive, repetitive compulsive, serial behavior pattern, set of 'impulse-fantasies', often 'spreading outward' in different angles and directions like 'spokes from the hub of a wheel'. This is what I call a 'transference memory complex'.
Freud partly arrived at the idea above in 1917 in his Introductory Lectures (Lecture 23) going back and forth again between 'real traumacy' and 'not real fantasy' like a ping pong match, going faster and faster, until the lines between reality and fantasy become increasingly blurred and even erased -- memories containing fantasies, and fantasies containing memories -- until the reader -- or at least this one -- is left wondering if he or she even knows the difference any more between reality and fantasy.
My different brand of 'reality-fantasy theory' leaves no such blurred and/or erased lines. Borrowing from Adlerian Theory, and introjecting Adlerian Conscious Memory-Lifestyle Theory into the middle of my brand of Transference Paradoxical Conflict Theory.
I believe that real memories -- even traumatic ones -- can and do sew the seeds for adult fantasies, and often 'erotic' and/or 'power' fantasies in particular. No blurred lines here. The childhood memories, for the most part, are real, even if subjectively biased, and the adult sexual fantasies that spin off of these childhood memories are real too -- but they are fantasies, not memories, even if they are rooted in childhood memories, traumacies, and/or other form of of 'narcissistic fixation'.
The result is what might be referred to as basically 'Lifelong Narcissistic Fixations', some based in traumatic memory, some not, spinning off into adult fantasies of one type and/or another -- usually involving 'power reversal' and/or 'sexual satisfaction' and a basic 'overcoming' of the original 'narcissistic ego-traumacy memory'.
This idea combines Freudian, Adlerian, and Gestalt Theory, as well as Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Jungian Psychology, Transactional Analysis, Primal Theory, Cognitive-Behavior Theory, Rogerian Theory, Horney's Neurotic Conflict Theory, Frommian Theory, and other brands of Humanistic-Existentialism, most of which have been added more recently than original integration of Freudian, Adlerian, and Gestalt Theory that I was working on in the 1980s.
So let us now 'reduce the 18 compartment model' into smaller, hopefully more digestible, pieces. The idea here is that the personality is born 'whole' and begins to 'split into smaller ego processes and/or structures' in order to function more efficiently relative to the demands of its own needs, wants, and interests, and the demands of reality -- much like a corporation or government would/will 'split' into more and more 'specialized departments', the bigger it got/gets. Now, this 'splitting process' -- as long as there is good communication and bi-lateral or multi-lateral tolerance between the different 'ego-departments' -- is likely to create more organizational efficiency within the whole spectrum of the personality. But if there is 'acute and/or chronic conflict and/or dissension and a lack of respect, trust, and tolerance' among the different ego-departments, well, then we have the makings of a 'pathological government or corporate leadership' within the confines of the whole self, the whole personality.
Here are some reducible 'part-wholes' within the confines of the personality, as laid out in the GAP-DGB model. Some of the terms or names of the different ego-departments, ego-structures, and/or ego-agents within the personality can be transcribed back into your psychology school of choice -- eg. Psychoanalysis, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Jungian Psychology, Transactional Analysis....
Topographically from top to bottom...visualize a large Victorian house -- or 'Hegel's Hotel'...with an assortment of different parlors and/or rooms...
Sub-Part 1 of The GAP-DGB Model (Influences: Klein, Fairbairn, Object Relations, Horney, Berne, Transactional Analysis)
1. The Nurturing Superego;
2. The Narcissistic-Hedonistic (Dionysian, Pleasure-Seeking Superego;
3. The Organizational, Ethical, Righteous-Rejecting (Apollonian) Superego;
4. The Co-operative-Approval-Seeking Underego;
5. The Narcissistic-Hedonistic (Dionysian, Pleasure-Seeking Underego;
6. The Rebellious-Exciting (Deconstructive) Underego;
Sub-Part 2 of The GAP-DGB Model (Influences: Jung, Nietzsche, Hegel)
7. The Public (Persona), Conscious Ego;
8. The Private (Shadow), Conscious Ego;
9. The Central, Mediating Ego;
10. The Phenomenology of (Cognitive-Emotional-Behavioral) Spirit;
a) Nietzsche's (Zarathustra's, Dionysus') Existential/Celebratory Mountain Peak;
b) Nietzsche's Existential Abyss (Black Hole, Depression Pit);
c) The (Cognitive-Emotional-Behavioral) Comfort Zone (Entropy, Home Base, Addiction Pit);
Sub-Part 3 of The GAP-DGB Model (Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm, Perls, Janov, Cognitive Psychology, Robbins...)
11. The Dream-Weaver (Censor, Watchman)
12. Escaped or Released 'Shadow-Id-Ego' Complexes;
13. The 'Shadow-Id-Ego Vault';
14. Rising Transference Shadow-Id-Ego Complexes;
15. The Memory-Learning-Transference Templates (Generalizations, Associations, Distinctions, Causal Interpretations, Fixations, Complexes);
16. The (Post-Birth) Shadow-Id-Ego;
17. The (Pre-Birth) 'Womb-Room';
18. The (Pre-and-Post-Birth) Genetic Self and Potential Self.
a) Constitutional Pre-Dispositions, Skills, Talents...
b) Capabilities for Learning and/or Creating Visual (Mythological) and Language Symbols
I will leave all further explanatory comments for later papers...
This at least lays out the model as I currently visualize it, for work still to come...
Good night,
-- dgb, Sun. Feb. 3rd, 2013,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- GAP stands for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic', as well as the 'gaps' in our personality that often spell 'neurosis' and the 'gaps' in professional theory (often found around its conceptual and theoretical boundaries) that often limit the functionality and range of focus of the theory...
-- DGB stands for 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging' Negotiations and Creative Integrations...
