Updated, April 3rd-4th, 2014....
We live in a competitive, 'either/or' world of choices -- which includes philosophical choices, psychological choices, business choices, financial choices, political choices, ethical choices, narcissistic choices, life-changing choices, simple choices, and the like....
We also live in a world of co-operative choices -- and probably even more common than this -- 'partly competitive-partly co-operative' choices where we aim to negotiate differences favorable towards what we want (or maybe we choose not to attempt to negotiate towards 'middle ground', if we are 'dug in by our heels' in terms of getting totally what we want) -- and what we want includes what we want both 'intra-psychically' and 'inter-personally' -- I.e., within ourselves first, and then within our encounters and/or relationships with other people second.
At this point, many factors can come into play such as: power, control, leverage...or the lack therof, narcissism, hedonism, less often altruism unless we really care about the other person and/or maintaining a long-term relationship with the person...
We can make a distinction between 'narcissistic negotiating' (where we are looking to get the best deal possible for ourselves) vs. 'egalitarian negotiating' where we are looking for a 'fair' or 'equal' deal where both ourselves and our fellow negotiator go home happy, and/or where our 'co-operator and/or competitor' in the negotiation deal want to continue to make further negotiated deals with us because they were happy with the results of the first deal.
In this latter regard, we can talk about 'mutual value-driven deals' -- deals that are negotiated towards a common ground of mutual engagement, interaction, co-operation as well as some greater or lesser level of competition, aimed at some degree of integration or synthesis where both parties involved in the 'conflict-negotiation' aim to reach some kind of 'mutually-driven, value-driven, two-way, compromise-formation' that ideally benefits both parties, maybe not to the utmost degree or to a 'perfect compromise', but certainly such that the two parties want to come back to the 'negotiating table' again in the future with each other in order to negotiate other 'mutual value-driven' deals.
When this fails to happen, we can either end up in a 'total impasse' in which both parties go their separate ways without getting what they want, or perhaps a negotiated deal is arrived at, but because one party has more leverage than the other, or is simply a better negotiator than the other, the result is that one party feels that he or she did not get the 'sufficient value' that they were looking for at the negotiating table, such that this person or group of person either vows not to return to 'do business' with this other party, and/or if there is an ongoing relationship between these two parties, such as in an employer/employee relationship, there may be negative spin-offs from the deal such that the party that did not feel he or she got 'sufficient value' from the deal, and thus feels like he or she is being exploited, will take out his or her animosity in some form of chronic and/or acute 'passive-aggression' (lateness, sickness, drop in spirit/morale, sabotage, less than stellar performance, eventually leaving from, or being fired by the company....)
Thus, negotiating compromises that have sufficient value for both parties in the arrived at compromise-formation such that both parties want to continue to develop their relationship with each other, is a vital life-skill for any person or group of persons in terms of meeting our personal, inter-personal, professional, business, financial, philosophical, psychological, political and/or any other type of perceived want or need that brings two or more parties to the negotiating table in the first place.
Negotiating is a hugely important individual life-skill and this does not necessarily mean narcissistically and/or manipulatively negotiating deals to the point where we get a 'total short-term win' to the point of losing a potential long-term negotiating partner. In this regard, a distinction can be made between 'short-term narcissistic negotiation victories' to the point of losing potential long-term friends, lovers, family members, business customers....vs. 'long-term, mutually value-laden, dialectically stabilizing, harmonizing, win-win, negotiation victories' where both parties go home happy to the point of wanting to return to the bargaining table with this particular negotiating partner...
A few of the top obstacles to this latter type of win-win negotiation style and victory are: individual and/or group narcissism, greed, hedonism, pride (just think of the 7 deadly 'sins' listed in the bible, any type of highly contentious speculation and/or interpretation, moral-ethical righteousness...grounded or ungrounded...
And it is here that we enter the highly contentious, highly righteous, highly interpretive, 'Seduction Theory Controversy' that blew Jeffrey Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment apart in the early 1980s, and goes back to a very early point in psychoanalytic history (1893-1899) where Freud suddenly 'reversed his theoretical tracks' -- 180 degrees -- and said that all his hard work over the first 3 to 4 years of his professional, psychoanalytic or pre-psychoanalytic life -- was basically a 'mistake'... He had gotten his client interpretations and generalizations about 'hysteria' and 'obsession' and 'neurosis', and his clients' early childhood memories, almost all wrong, or at least 180 degrees 'wrong'.
Now, to be sure, many of Freud's earliest ideas were carried forward into his later work, but there remained the highly provocative and controversial issue -- regarding that sometimes 'very gray' area of human existence -- specifically concerning the hugely important issue of 'knowledge' and 'epistemology' and 'what was knowledge' and what was 'pseudo-or-false knowledge', what was 'real' and what was 'distortion', what was 'real' and what was 'fiction', what was 'real' and what was 'fantasy', and to what extent, in personal experiences and memories or non-memories of experiences, did the two 'polar entities' -- 'reality' and 'fantasy', 'truth' and 'fiction', 'the objective' and 'the subjective' -- 'conflate' and/or 'collude' with each other in what a psychoanalyst or any other therapist, for that matter, was 'hearing' from his client in the therapy room...was he or she hearing 'reality' or 'fantasy', 'truth' or 'fiction', or somewhere in between? And to what extent, in between? And how much might this vary from client to client? Or could 'solid, righteous, iron-clad generalizations' be put into place? At bottom line, was the issue of 'childhood sexual abuse' -- an uncomfortable subject to talk about, hugely so back in Victorian Vienna, and to be quite frank, not that much better today... Not only the actual phenomenon is a huge 'human taboo', and today, punishable by long potential jail sentences, but even talking about the subject is not something that most of us would 'like' to do if we don't have to....And 'cover ups' or 'attempted cover-ups' are likely to be almost everywhere that the 'real phenomenon exists' -- just think of Penn State University. And now think of Vienna, Austria, 1896.
It is here that Jeffrey Masson's explosive protest against The Psychoanalytic Establishment and what he called 'Freud's Suppression of His Infamous Seduction Theory' (meaning Freud's real or alleged 'cover-up' of real or imagined childhood sexual abuse in Vienna families) that created the 'clinical evidence' for his professionally read 'Seduction (Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory' before the Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society on the evening of April 21st, 1896 -- it is here that 'The Unstoppable Force' (Jeffrey Masson) collided with 'The Inpenetratable Wall' (The Psychoanalytic Establishment), with most notably, Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, at the top of the International Psychoanalytic hierarchy.
The highly respected Freud-loyalist, Kurt Eissler, a close friend of Masson's before this controversy broke out into the public eye, was in the second position of the hierarchy, and Jeffrey Masson had just been promoted to the third highest position in the hierarchy as 'The Projects Director of The Freud Archives' -- which is how he was granted full access to Freud's most private, and non-public, letters, particularly to Wilhelm Fliess, which involved intimate details surrounding Freud's 'abandonment' of his pre-1897 'reality-trauma-seduction' network of inter-connected theories at the expense of his newly evolving, post-1896, 'instinctual drive, fantasy, wish, 'screen memories', childhood sexuality, The Psycho-Sexual Stages of Development, Oedipus Complex...' network of inter-connected theories...
The 1980s 'moral conflict and resulting impasse' between Masson and The Psychoanalytic Establishment, surrounding Freud's 'motivation' in the 1896-1899 time period' -- i.e., Masson accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' -- still exists today, some 30 plus years after this highly contentious and provocative issue was first made public in a series of newspaper interviews, and Janet Malcolm's highly entertaining but editorially controversial book (In The Freud Archives, 1983, 1985) on this subject matter.
I, haphazardly, on one of my many visits to a downtown Toronto bookstore, picked up two of Masson's books, not knowing who the author was (but seemingly rebellious against an 'anal-retentive psychoanalytic orthodoxy' -- my first interpretation and judgment of the polar conflict between the two competing factions, which made the unknown author appealing to me, consequently, my purchase of his two books that I was looking at: 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (1990, 1991); and 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984, 1985, 1992).
For me, Jeffrey Masson's exodus out of psychoanalysis was ironically my ticket into psychoanalysis, at least in terms of igniting my passion for studying psychoanalysis, and examining it, editorializing on it, renovating and integrating it -- particularly relative to the controversial years of between 1895 and 1899 -- and from the outside looking in as opposed to the inside looking out.
While Masson was deconstructing -- or at least trying to -- Classical Psychoanalysis throughout the early 1980s and early 1990s, I was learning, or at least partly learning, Gestalt Therapy at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto (off and on, from 1979 to 1991), and Adlerian Psychology at The Adlerian Institute of Ontario for two years (1980-81).
Everyone has at least a partly unique and idiosyncratic view of the world -- formed mainly from our early childhood experiences and how we react to them, generalize about them, are motivated by them; but also partly based on our later levels and types of experiences, educational training, and again, how we react to these experiences and this training, generalize about them, and are motivated by them, as we continue to evolve and move along our adult path.
By this point in time, speaking from the vantage point of a psychoanalytic and/or neo-psychoanalytic point of view, and also from someone educationally trained to understand 'transferences' but as much as from the outside looking into psychoanalysis as from the inside looking out from psychoanalysis -- i.e., with educational training in Language (General Semantics) and Cognitive Therapy, Humanistic-Existentialism, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, and some elements of Jungian Psychology -- we can say two things: one, that by adulthood and particularly after the main bulk of a person's educational training, the person -- meaning any person -- including Freud -- including you, the reader -- and including myself -- are already well along our 'transference path of destiny' which is very resistant to change, for better or for worse; and two, for a psychological theorist -- albeit constructionist and/or deconstructionist -- like Freud, like Adler, like Jung, like Perls, like Masson, and like a relative unknown such as myself, these 'transference idiosyncrasies' are going to show up in the individual theorist's work under what I call, using a 'conflation' or 'confluence' of two psychoanalytic terms -- 'transference sublimation'.
Our transference sublimation is what gives our 'professional career, or work, or non-work path in life' its individual uniqueness or 'profile', and its distinctiveness or set of 'signature transference distinctions' from all others who walk on this planet. First, we had fingerprint signatures; then we had DNA signatures; and now, not totally new, but certainly still in its earlier stages of evolutionary development, we have our 'transference signatures' -- indeed, an 'internal template of unique transference signature distinctions' that make up our 'transference profile' -- laid out originally in Freud's classic essay, 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912), and similar, but different (because of a difference in underlying philosophical and psychological assumptions), to what Adler conceptualized as our 'lifestyle' and to what Brian Bird, in the 1970s, called 'the universal phenomenon of transference'.
Now, hopefully, if everything goes as expected, I will be using my own broad, integrative knowledge stemming from a combination of my imagination and my willingness to 'transgress any and all conceptual and theoretical boundaries' (one might say a part of my own transference signature), I will be able in a portion of the essays to follow to convey this knowledge of 'how to better understand an individual person's -- or read, 'client's' -- unique 'set of transference distinctions and overall transference profile'...
For anyone who has watch the television program 'Criminal Minds', this is the type of analysis that the 'criminal profilers' do on the show, but within the specialized arena of 'catching serial -- read 'transference -- criminals'; whereas, I come from a different experiential and educational background, am looking to expand this type of knowledge -- as 'customized' by yours truly -- to apply to a variety of different 'specialized and/or more general arenas and settings' -- for hopefully 'the right ethical reasons' because there is an issue of 'ethics' here that needs to be seriously contemplated and discussed/debated relative to issues of 'personal privacy' and the like -- we all know, that it is bad enough that our privacy is being invaded each and every day as we sit on our computer or cell phone and type away...
We are going to assume, for the time being and probably for the duration of this set of essays, that this type of 'transference profiling' is meant for the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client -- anything else, will need to be discussed and debated at a future time...
And this is only one area of psychoanalysis and/or neo-psychoanalysis that still can be significantly developed...
This is all part of my 40 plus educational development -- combined with my unique transference profile -- that has led me to this point in my personal evolutionary path, right here and now.
My coincidentally and/or non-coincidentally bumping into Masson's psychoanalytic work in the early to mid 1990s ('Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst', 1992; and 'The Assault on Truth': Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory') -- two highly controversial -- to the point of 'scandalous' -- books based on Masson's editorial opinions of being involved with Psychoanalysis at the highest level in the early 1980s, and more specifically, having read Freud's most intimate and personal, 'out of the public's eye', correspondence (mainly personal letters from Freud to Fliess in the period of time that Psychoanalysis' was first being developed during the 1990s) -- well, this new 'historical knowledge and/or editorialized back into history knowledge' coming into my mind-brain, partly changed the 'trajectory' of my 'transference profile and motivation', as I suddenly became obsessed with the history and evolution of the early part of psychoanalysis that Masson was writing and protesting against --i.e., Freud's alleged partial or full abandonment of his early (pre-1897) 'Pre-Psychoanalytic, trauma and seduction (childhood sexual abuse) theories' in favor of his newly evolving (1895? 1896?, and definitely,1897, onwards...) 'Classical' -- 'drive, fantasy, childhood sexuality, Oedipus and Dream theories...'
And here we are today...
By the time I had started delving more seriously into the history and evolution of psychoanalysis in the mid 1990s, I had already partly dipped into Jungian Psychology which, along with Gestalt Therapy, led me into the dialectic philosophy of Hegel -- one of the main bridges between Western/Eastern philosophy and Western psychology -- and from the dialectic logic and process of Hegelian philosophy (stated most simply as a triadic process: 1. thesis; 2. anti-thesis; and 3. synthesis which today has become popularized as 'synergy' and 'the synergetic win-win process'), I had a 'method', a 'process' by which to think both 'inside the box and outside the box at the same time' which can also be viewed as an extension of the Gestalt 'hot seat and empty chair method' into the philosophy and psychology of ideas, concepts, theories, paradigms -- and their dialectic integration.
Thus, I arrived at the metaphor that I have been using for about eight years now to label my type of philosophical and psychological thinking -- 'Hegel's Hotel'.
Actually my choice of name and title for my philosophical and psychological work goes back to that same period in the early to mid 1990s, but my writing online started, if I remember correctly, back in 2006.
When I did my online interview with Jeffrey Masson back in 2010 (google... Hegel's Hotel, The Jeffrey Masson Interview), this was the one main area of divergence in our respective paradigms of thinking: Dr. Masson was arguing for basically a return to Freud's pre-1897 'reality-trauma-seduction theory'; whereas I was arguing for a synthesis of Freud's respective Reality or RTS theory and his post-1895 evolving 'Impulsive Drive-Fantasy-Oedipus-Childhood Sexuality' Set of Theories. It is this 'evolving synthesis' between the pre-1897 Freud and the post-1896 Freud that will be the main subject of the essays that follow.
Chief among my new 'synthesis' and the resulting 'renovations' to what I will call 'Greater Classical Psychoanalysis (1893-1939) or 'GCP' will be my re-working of Freud's 'id theory' and what I will call the 'vicissitudes of the id' which include such new concepts as: 1. 'the id-ego'; 2. 'the id vault'; 3. 'id-ego compromise formations'; 4. 'allusions to id fantasies'; 5. 'the idian topdog' as distinguishable from 'the idian underdog'....
In fact, if you are a Freudian loyalist or scholar, or simply 'sufficiently educated student of Freud', do you really think that you can make any distinction between what I am calling here 'The Idian-Ego' and what could also be called 'The Narcissistic Ego'....Freud, himself, in around 1914, 1915, made the distinction between what he called 'The Pleasure Ego' and 'The Reality Ego' -- a foreshadowing of his later (1923) distinction between 'The Ego' and 'The Id'.
It is time 'we' -- I will loosely call myself a 'student of Freud' -- get back to the German idea, as defined in Freud's earliest work, that 'ego' means 'self' and, as such, 'the id' -- being a significant part of 'the self' -- is also a significant part of the ego -- and/or an 'ego-state', or an 'ego-compartment' -- defined, at least partly, like the id currently is, as a 'primal, uncivilized, narcissistic ego-state' within the confines of 'the wholistic ego' or 'Self' (here I am integrating Greater Classical Psychoanalysis with Object Relations and Self Psychology, as well).
I will leave things at that for today....I am trying to keep my essays shorter and simpler for blog-reading...but this should give you an idea of where I am going with my project here...
I will also be inter-mixing brief editorial essays on Freud's work from start to finish, essay by essay, as organized in James Strachey's Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Works. I may not get to all of them but I will certainly get to the essays that have made the most significant impact on me.
As mentioned above, Freud called his 1895 aborted project which still turned out to foreshadow most of his later work, 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'.
I will call my project here: 'Project for a Greater, Multi-Integrative, Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis and Neo-Psychoanalysis'.
Let's get going!
-- dgb, March 31st, April 4th, 2014,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Essays...
-- Are Now in Process...
