The New, Introductory Essays to DGB Neo-Psychoanalysis: Essay 2: Should Psychoanalysis Keep Freud's Concept of 'The Id'?

My goal here is to integrate Freud's 'Early' Psychoanalysis (1893-1896), his 'Classical' Psychoanalysis (1897-1939), Object Relations, and Self Psychology. I will even invent a new label here -- 'Greater Classical' Psychoanalysis which will include both Freud's Early Psychoanalysis and his later Classical Psychoanalysis.

Our starting point for this integration will be Freud's concept of 'the id'. How do we integrate Freud's 'bio-psychoanalysis' with Melanie Klein's and Ronald Fairbairn's respective brands of Object Relations. Melanie Klein already gave us her conceptualization of this integration which included Freud's concept of the id and the 'life' and 'death instincts'.

In contrast, Fairbairn more or less turned away from Freud's bio-psychoanalysis to focus on the 'object attachment seeking goals' of people as opposed to their 'pleasure-seeking (or 'beyond pleasure-seeking') biological drives' (primarily in Freud's view, sex and aggression). Nobody says that this distinction between biological drives (Freud's life and death instincts) and Fairbairn's 'object-attachment seeking wishes, impulses, and/or goals' has to be an 'either/or' proposition. Klein certainly tried to integrate the two sets of motivations, which some psychoanalysts liked and others didn't. In the resulting 'battle' between 'The Anna Freudians' (who didn't like Klein's re-working of Freud's Classical Psychoanalysis) and 'The Kleinians' (who did), Fairbairn positioned his 'school' (which he didn't even like viewing as a school) as 'The Middle School' (which stayed out of the Anna Freud vs. Melanie Klein theoretical feud).

Well, I like Fairbairn's work a lot. However, I am going to try to re-integrate Fairbairn's work with both Melanie Klein's work and Freud's Greater Classical Psychoanalysis (as well as -- later -- to both Adler's work on lifestyle and conscious early memories, and inferiority feelings and superiority striving' as well as to Kohut's work on self-psychology, narcissism, and 'narcissistic transferences').

We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we are just beginning.

Let us start with Freud's concept of 'the id'.


In the divergence of Object Relations (OR) from Classical Psychoanalysis, some OR theorists have hung onto Freud's concept of the id (Melanie Klein and her followers, Hartman, Erickson,  Winnicott) while other have not (Sullivan, Fairbairn, Guntrip) (Guntrip, 1971,1973, Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and The Self.) My thoughts that are unfolding below are based very much on this editorial summation on Guntrip's part of the evolution of OR thinking from the dualism of Freud's combined 'psycho-biology' and 'preliminary OR thinking').

In the OR group mentioned in the last paragraph, I probably have been influenced mostly by Fairbairn and Klein, partly by Guntrip in his conceptualization of the 'schizoid personality' often underlying more 'normal' and/or 'normal-neurotic' behavior.

However, I fall into line with the first group of OR thinkers who hung onto Freud's conceptualization of the id, as opposed to Guntrip who believed that psychodynamic thinking -- or at least OR psychodynamic thinking -- was being chained down by Freud's psycho-biological (id) conceptualizations. I disagree with that belief on Guntrip's part but will make my own effort below to more harmoniously integrate Freudian, Kleinian, and Fairbairnian thinking.

If you are a beginning Freud student, you can look up Freud's conceptualization of the id just by googling 'the id' for starters. That is our starting point. My conceptualization of the id can be either viewed as very similar to Freud's -- or very different -- depending on your perspective. Mine is a more OR conceptualization of the id which perhaps may bring the id more in line with Object Relations thinking -- not only of the Kleinian type but also of the Fairbairnian type (which doesn't include the concept of the id).

Basically, the first thing I am trying to do is to turn the id into a functional part of the ego, and visa versa. Freud's conceptualization of the id as being like a 'cauldron' or a 'reservoir' containing 'the life and death instincts' is rather mechanistic and inorganic -- a 'thing', a 'container' -- compared to the idea of the id as a thinking, feeling, driving, wanting, lusting part of the personality. I would conceptualize the id by connecting it to another name -- 'the narcissistic id-ego'. (There is some Kohutian-type thinking entering the picture here).

However, I will distinguish between two parts of the id -- the part mainly defined by Freud as being unconscious (subconscious, below our consciousness) -- as opposed to the part of the id -- our subjective id -- that either 'sneaks' its way up into our conscious personality -- or 'drives' and 'over powers' the defenses of our more 'socialized, morality-reality-based ego' on its way up there, and sometimes into blunt, direct action. 

This is entirely different than Freud's insistence that we can only interpret the full desires of the id (which, according to Freud, is totally operating below consciousness), symbolically and symptomatically through 'the vicissitudes of the id' (does this semantic distinction really have any viable, functional meaning?) i.e., through phenomena like dreams, neurotic symptoms, jokes, projections, creations, sublimations, and the like. One way or the other, the subjective desires of our id -- or our 'id-ego' or our 'narcissistic ego' -- whether operating consciously or subconsciously -- are fully active in our personality at all times. Our 'id' is not like an 'alien' inside of ourselves (although sometimes it may feel like it) -- it is ourselves. It is that part of our personality that exists before and after socialization and morality are burned into our ego and superego. Our id and id-ego or narcissistic ego reflect what we want 'selfishly' before empathy and altruism and morality and ethics enter the picture.

So, in effect, our ego is part of our id, and our id is part of our ego. However, there is a part of our ego that identifies with our id, versus another part of our ego that both identifies with our superego (as well as external socialization, morality, ethics, law...) and in this identification defends against our 'idian desires'.

Thus, we can say that our ego is 'split within itself' (actually many ways if we want to classify our 'metaphysical ego-functions and ego-states or ego-compartments' in this manner.)

Or if you go back to Freud's conceptualization, we would have to say that our first 'split' is a 'splitting of the id into the id and the ego' -- or a splitting of our primary, primal, uncivil id-ego into a more civil, socialized, evolving id-ego

Either way, we have to say that our basic, primal-primary id or id-ego either expands or splits in a manner that our more conscious id-ego or ego is caught between a rock and a hard place, or 'internally split in two' -- identifying with either and/or both the narcissistic desires of the id or id-ego as well as the more socialized, civil restraints of that part of the id-ego or ego that identifies with our internalized superego and the external forces of both reality and moral-legal civilization.   

Now, let us say for argument sake, that the id splits first into the ego. Before that, at birth, and for the first little while (a highly debatable time period) -- or metaphysically, maybe we are just 'imagining' this 'split' but need to classify it as happening 'conceptually-theoretically' -- the id and ego can be viewed as 'undifferentiated' and even Freud in one of his two last papers, 'The Origin of Psychoanalysis' (1938/39), used the term 'ego-id' right at the beginning of the paper.

So, at this point, we can either go Melanie Klein's route and say that the id and ego start to split at birth, during the relationship between the newborn infant and the mother (or mother's breast); or conversely, we can wait a little bit longer in the toddler's development, and say that the splitting of the id and ego -- or both, or both together -- starts to take place around 3 or 4 years old, 'the Oedipus period of development' -- and can start to be traced by more 'conscious memories of early childhood experiences'.


For purposes of my conceptualization here, I am going to say that the splitting of the id and the ego -- though certainly hugely influenced by the earliest child-mother relationship -- from a more 'subjectively empirical psychoanalytic perspective', can start to be traced with the client's/person's first conscious childhood memory. (Here, I am influenced by Adler).

This will be our working hypothesis as I 'introject' (or project) a hugely important element of Adlerian theory (from about the 1920s) into early Freudian Psychoanalysis (1893-1896).

At this point, I am going to say that 'creativity' starts significantly from our 'id' or 'id-ego' because the id, according to Freud, and supported by me, operates by 'no boundaries' and/or 'the seemingly paradoxical collision' of opposing (bipolar) ideas that can be 'integrated dialectically' as I am about to do.

So without trying to explain why, let me do something highly unorthodox and unique here -- and that is, pull an important part of Adlerian theory (lifestyle theory and the interpretation of conscious early memories) into early Freudian trauma theory.

Next, I will say that important 'lifelong, lifestyle-transference scripts' can be viewed as starting to form -- or at least become visible to a theorist-therapist who knows how to interpret them -- in the person's/client's first conscious memory -- and particularly, usually, the person's/client's first conscious traumatic memory (even if by 'traumatic' here, we mean what might be viewed as 'subjectively traumatic in the eyes and experience of a 3 or 4 year old toddler'.  Early childhood rejections, exclusions, and/or perceived failures are very likely to stand out in this regard.

From these experiences -- and their opposites (triumphs, accomplishments, encouragements, and 'narcissistic fixations' of a positive as opposed to a negative, traumatic, sort), can be interpreted in partly psychoanalytic, partly Adlerian fashion, in a way that we (meaning the theorist and/or therapist) can start to 'profile' a person's most important 'transference scripts' (an Eric Berne influence here). These transference scripts can be interpreted from conscious early memories of scenes that we will call 'transference memories' of 'transference scenes'.


And that is where we will stop today.


-- dgb, Monday, July 27th, 2014,

-- David Gordon Bain




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