Good day ladies and gentlemen,
I come here to honor Freud, to commend him, to critique him, to criticize him -- and more so, I intend to focus on his work -- some 46 years of published psychoanalytic writing (1893 to 1939), captured in Strachey's Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Psychological Works, all 24 volumes.
I will make some brief forays into Freud's earlier life, such as in 1859 with Freud's earliest conscious memory as a little toddler of about 3 years old, and such as the years 1880-1883 that Joseph Breuer -- Freud's writing partner between 1893 and 1895 -- worked with a young, female adult client labeled as 'hysterical', Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) who is generally considered the first client and clinical case of psychoanalysis.
Now, let me say a few words about reading Freud. For those of you who maybe haven't read Freud, or read his work seriously, I suggest that you read him with an open mind -- not to idealize and idolize him, and not to demonize him, and/or throw his work away like yesterday's news.
We all have character strengths and character weaknesses. Freud was no different. It is important that when you read Freud, you read him with benevolence, at least for the most part, and that you fairly critique him, after 'tasting' his ideas, 'chewing' them carefully, 'spitting out' those ideas that you do not like 'the smell' or 'taste' of, and 'swallowing' the rest.
This is the difference between 'assimilating' where you integrate the ideas of Freud that you like with your own experience and ideas, and/or the work of other theorists and writers, as opposed to 'phobically' staying away from Freud's work because you have heard that he is 'sexist' and 'patriarchal', or 'spitting Freud's ideas out' because at first taste, they seem too shocking, too ludicrous, too preposterous, or too much like 'yesterday's news', which some of them indeed may be.
Alternatively, don't just 'swallow' his ideas 'whole' with no 'careful chewing' because that may end up giving you 'stomach indigestion' -- or in this case 'mental indigestion' -- as the Freudian ideas that you are carrying around inside you now -- 'wolfed' down whole without any careful thinking -- don't blend well with some of your other ideas and some of your life experiences, and/or are not very functional, and/or carry with them 'toxins' and/or some of Freud's private 'character and/or thinking weaknesses' and/or his private 'traumacy' and/or 'transference neuroses'.
This is called 'introjecting' or 'identifying with' -- our earliest style of childhood learning -- what might be called 'monkey see, monkey do', or 'monkey hear, monkey believe'. If a small child could be warned beforehand, the double edged warning might be, 'don't copy everything you see, and don't believe everything you hear. That could get you into trouble later on, and perhaps through your whole life, unless or until a 'bad belief, value, and/or action' is modified or changed completely. Of course, a very small child has yet to grasp this principle, and this is very much what keeps psychotherapists in business. Children 'swallow' their parents' 'neuroses' -- or modifications and//or extensions or embellishments of them, and/or 'compensations' and/or 'defenses' from them. These 'neurotic' modifications, extensions, embellishments, compensations, and defenses are what also keep therapists in business. Tick, tick, tick, tick -- the therapist's 'cash meter' is running...
This applies particularly to 'digging'.
We are told right at the beginning of Freud's psychoanalytic writing (1893 to 1895) -- and this is paraphrased -- that memories that are neurotic... (I will use this word from now on without the quotation marks because it still seems as good as any other word for describing the different types of thoughts, emotions, impulses, restraints, and/or behaviors that most outside 'participant-observers' would describe as 'dysfunctional', 'self-destructive', and/or 'pathological'.
Now, to be sure, this type of outside judgment implies a certain amount or more of 'subjective, righteous, and/or narcissistic relativity' -- perhaps the judge/therapist or the school of psychology, or the culture as a whole is more neurotic than the client -- but you have to start somewhere, usually with the clients own complaints, and for the moment, we have to assume a 'normal judging context'. To be sure, this assumption is sometimes a big one -- and aimed in the wrong direction.
Back to 'digging'. I got seriously waylaid there. Back to my Freudian paraphrasing. We are told by Freud in different words between 1893 and 1895 that memories that are conscious cannot be 'neurotically operative' or 'cathected' (the latter is a Freudian term). Memories that are neurotically operative and cathected have to be unconscious -- indeed, they have to be 'purposely repressed' (deliberately held unconscious, at least until a psychoanalyst can get a hold of you) -- that is the whole idea of neurosis, according to Freud, the bottom-line assumptive foundation of both neurosis and psychoanalysis -- the idea of 'repression' and later modified to include all the different types of 'unconscious, psycho-dynamic defense'. The first Freudian, psychoanalytic idea was that an 'unbearable memory and/or idea' was being purposely held back from consciousness because of the pain, the anxiety, the guilt, the rage, the sexual element that gave the memory its 'unbearable nature'. Thus, it was purposely blocked from consciousness. This was Freud's signature and foundational concept of 'repression' -- not to be confused with 'suppression' which is a conscious process of keeping something secret or private. Suppression involves conscious intent. Repression can only involve the seemingly paradoxical intent of keeping something private and secret from ourselves.
Sounds good -- Freud said that anyone who did not believe in the idea of repression could not be viewed as a psychoanalyst or even a psychoanalytic thinker. Ouch! That hurts. I guess I better go into a different line of thinking. Or we can turn the blaming finger around and say, 'This is an example of perhaps Freud's number 1 weakness as a theorist: i.e., 1. he over-generalized a lot; and 2, he then 'reified' and/or 'structuralized' his over-generalization until it was 'cemented in concrete'.
Freud created psychoanalysis -- with honorary mention to Breuer who worked on the Anna O. case some 13 years before Freud 'entered' or 'more formally created psychoanalysis' and particularly 'the psychology of repression and other psycho-dynamic forms of defense'. But Freud is dead now, and psychoanalysis is still alive and evolving -- and Freud is no longer a part of this evolution. And if there is something fundamentally wrong with Freud's foundational assumption of 'repression' and his definition of psychoanalysis -- which is a continually evolving art, quasi-science, and system -- then that should be duly and ethically noted because even if Freud is half legend, half man, if you have any passion, vision, and sense of duty for psychoanalysis, you don't want psychoanalysis built upon a 'faulty premise' or 'cracked foundation' -- regardless of whether Freud was the primary or only creator. Otherwise, Freud's 'hotel' or 'Victorian house' will still eventually collapse, if it hasn't already, under the effect of 'pressures' and 'stresses' being applied to 'the foundational crack'.
Would you invest millions of dollars of your own money 'renovating an old Freudian hotel' if the hotel had a serious crack in its very foundation? Would this make you a smart thinker? Would this make you a 'deep thinker'? Or would it make you a 'rather stupid business man or woman' before you even started the project?
Let's talk about the unconscious here for a moment. And maybe use a different set of analogies. How unconscious is unconscious? If something that I could easily associate to and remember is out of my conscious for the moment, is this unconscious? Freud would say no to this, and in fact, he coined the term 'pre-conscious' to specifically cover such a thought or memory or fantasy. It was not considered 'unconscious'. So how long does a thought or memory or fantasy have to be in 'the unconscious' before it is considered 'unconscious'? A day? A week? A month? A year? Until you get to psychoanalysis? What if it is not even down there? Do you see one of the inherent problems of using the term 'unconscious?
Jeffrey Masson remarks in the introduction to his beautifully illustrated edition (2010) of Freud's classic work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). (Incidentally, forgive me but I have to share this with you. I was musing the other day that if you initialize the primary letters of The Interpretation of Dreams, you have 'The ID'):
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Many people have noted that Freud's edifice -- that is, the theory of psychoanalysis -- is in general, a rigged system. Whatever the evidence, it is possible for Freud (or any other analyst) to claim that the interpretation in question, or the analytic endeavor in itself, is validated. For the patient to disagree with an interpretation is seen, or can be seen, as resistance. Freud could always respond with, as he often did, "of course, you do not know it, or cannot acknowledge it, it is unconscious."
(The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, 1900, Masson's illustrated hardcover edition, 2010, introduction, p. xi)
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Personally, like Janet, I prefer the term 'subconscious' to 'unconscious'-- any thought, idea, memory, feeling, impulse, fantasy, that is out of sight, out of mind -- but which can appear back in consciousness at a moment's notice, with the slightest association, or alternatively, with a much greater deal of work and greater association, this is what I call 'subconscious'. And we move into progressively more and more epistemologically greater danger, the more a theorist and/or therapist starts to project his or her 'reconstructions' and/or 'psycho-dynamic interpretations' on what a client is telling him or her, or even beyond that, something beyond the clinical context. We are entering into what Kant would have called 'metaphysical space' here and the more 'objection' and 'resistance' you get from someone reacting to the interpretation, and/or tied into the interpretation, well, the more you try to 'push' or 'force' your interpretation as 'truth' onto the person, well, that is epistemologically troubling, and I say, you are better to simply let the person know that you could be wrong, but that was/is your interpretive perspective on the matter, and he or she can run with it for a while if he or she wants, or 'spit it out' if they don't.
Back to digging deeper. Digging deeper is not always better. If two sets of 'gold diggers' arrive at essentially the same scene, one set of diggers sets up as its 'visionary project' and 'premise foundation' the task of 'digging deeply into the earth' to see if they can 'hit a significant core of gold' while the other set of diggers sets up its 'visionary project' and 'premise foundation' the task of 'panhandling for gold' at 'the riverbank surface' and by the end of the day, or the week, or the month, or the year, it comes about that the 'riverbank panhandlers' have found more gold than the 'deep diggers' who have found nothing, who started with the better foundational premise? Were the deeper diggers, the better thinkers?
Or if I spend an hour trashing my house or my bedroom looking for car keys which I eventually find in my front coat pocket, how smart have I been for not looking in my front coat pocket first?
Simply put, sometimes in psychoanalysis -- in fact, I will suggest oftentimes, indeed, usually -- it is better to 'surface dig' before you start 'deep digging'. Unless you are more interested in the client's tick, tick, ticking, of his or her psychoanalytic 'cash meter'. That, in my opinion, is very much akin to the taxi driver who takes you around the city -- without you knowing it -- before he finally takes you to your desired destination in a foreign city.
That's what I think about digging -- and digging deeply -- or 'deep thinking'. As a psychoanalyst -- or at least an ethical one -- you think as deep as you need to, and you dig as deep as you need to, in order to find 'the gold' or the 'key' you are looking for. The 'key' to unlocking the clients repetitive symptoms. Anything superfluous to this is likely a waste of the client's money, does not show your capabilities as a psychoanalyst and/or a psychotherapist in a good light, skill-wise, or ethically-wise, and is not the type of practice that I would suggest for anyone trying to establish a therapeutic profession, and a good name for him or herself within it.
We will move on to my suggested premise foundations for the future vision, or at least this brand or school's vision, of psychoanalysis in Lecture 2.
Just one more point.
To my knowledge, Freud never clearly distinguished the difference between an 'unconscious memory' and/or 'unconscious fantasy' on the one hand, and a series of 'unconscious, psycho-dynamic processes' on the other hand. This, I believe is an important distinction.
For example, I can ask you for one of your conscious (or pre-conscious) early childhood memories, and you can probably give me one -- I would probably ask you for your first one, first -- and you could probably give me this memory in a matter of seconds or minutes -- thus, it's not unconscious.
However, if I work with you for a session like a psychoanalyst might work with the 'manifest content' of a dream you have given him and would like interpreted, and we work together to find 'the latent, psycho-dynamic transference content and meaning' of the conscious early memory -- like an Adlerian psychologist would but without the psycho-dynamic 'conflictual rendition' of the 'lifestyle'/(transference) material he or she interprets from the memory, then this is an example of a conscious early childhood memory yielding important 'subconscious transference process material'....in my opinion, the biggest 'missed gold' mistake in Freud's career.
More on this in a later essay soon to come...It is a serious hint towards the most important focus of this brand/school of integrative psychoanalysis that uses my Adlerian knowledge of interpreting conscious early memories and places it in a 'psycho-dynamic, bi-polar, conflictual context'...
Any questions on this presentation?
-- dgb, Feb. 10, 2013,
-- David Gordon Bain,
Dialectic-Gap-Bridging Negotiated-Creative-Integrations...
Are still in process...
