Thursday, November 29, 2012
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..
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Gods, Archetypes, Myths, Christianity, Humanistic-Existential Religion, and Personality Theory -- Part 1: Underlying Philosophical and Spiritual-Religious Foundations
I am picking up a theme here that I started to develop in January, 2011. How do the essays that I wrote back in that time period on 'God, Archetypes, Myths, Philosophers, and Psychologists' relate to my most recent work on personality theory?
Well, I am a man of 'Grand Unorthodox Inspirations, Interactions, and Integrations'....or at least that is what I would like to be viewed as....Put that on my tombstone when I am dead and gone...and I will rest with some peace....More peace if I can actually found and start a Massive Mult-Dialectic-Integrative Educational-Philosophy-Psychology...Institute that bears Hegel's name.....
Hegel's Hotel ....As a philosophical-psychological-political-spiritual treatise, it will never be finished because it is always evolving....It is my version of the continuation of Hegel's masterpiece, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807)
Fresh thinkers say, 'Think outside the box.' Well, the wonderful thing about Hegelian Philosophy, Hegelian (Multi-) Dialectic Logic, and my extended, projected manifestation of Hegel's brilliant work, is that once you develop a Hegelian (Multi-) Dialectic Philosophical Mindset -- you can never 'not think outside the box'. Indeed, you are always thinking outside the box....because you are always integrating different boxes, different concepts from different boxes, different theories from different theorists, different paradigms....Structures and processes -- whether metaphysically conceptualized or physically real -- become interwoven together to form creative new conceptual structures, processes, theories, and paradigms...(See Otto Rank and his viewpoint on creativity...)
Questions like this -- whether consciously or subconsciously formulated -- make up the foundation of my 'Phenomenology of Spirit': How can I integrate Christianity with Nietzsche's (so called 'Anti-Christian') brand of Humanistic-Existentialism? And where did Nietzsche go wrong? Nietzsche went wrong -- or at least partly wrong -- after his first creatively brilliant book (The Birth of Tragedy, or BT for short, 1872) where Nietzsche integrated Hegelian philosophy with a 'balanced view' of his (at that time) humanistic-existentialism which can be referred to as either 'Apollonian-Dionysianism' or 'Dionysian-Apollonianism'. This remarkable little book represented what might be called 'The Hegelian-Nietzschean Phenomenology of Spirit of 1872'.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche abandoned 'his Hegelian Bi-Polar (Dialectically Integrative) Horse of BT' after 1872, never to return to it in this first conceptualized format. A pity, I say, because BT is, in my opinion, Nietzsche's 'healthiest' book, perhaps his best book -- the bridge between Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' and Freud's Psychoanalysis.
Nietzsche himself looked at 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' as his masterpiece but the closer I get to this book, the more I fail to see this. It is full of 'Nietzschean hypocrisies', and quite frankly, having lost his 'Apollonian-Dionysian (and Enlightenment-Romantic) Balance', I believe that Nietzsche had become so 'full of himself' that he had become both 'narcissistically and righteously offside'. 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' would need to be ethically and morally 'sanitized' before it could be considered a 'balanced' piece of work -- and, of course, that will never happen except in the editorial reviews of authors like me.
Nietzsche, in Zarathustra, calls all idealists 'cowards' and yet what is Zarathustra other than Nietzsche's ultimate 'idealistic' work. Similarly, Nietzsche confuses 'truth' with 'value' arguing that 'truthfulness is the highest virtue' (and yet what is virtue other than an 'ideal moral or ethical value'?) while at the same time Nietzsche dismisses and demeans all 'morality' -- this was allegedly Zarathustra's most 'calamitous error; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it'...Nietzsche builds an idealistic model of how man should live his life -- through the life of 'The Superman or Overman', through 'The Will to Power', through the process of 'overcoming', through the process of 'truthfulness', through the process of....
... a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch (Superman/Overman).
These values above are all well and good, one could say an anti-Christian Bible of existential values -- unsanitized, or immoralized, in its lack of humanistic (Christian) values of such things as compassion, caring, altruism, love, generosity, empathy, social interest.....the types of values that a 'pathological narcissistic thinker' would not have much, if any, use for...as Nietzsche was, by this time, flying towards his own Abyss -- and perhaps an abysmal 'eternal recurrence'. Which brings us to another Nietzschean hypocrisy -- Nietzsche dismisses and demeans the Christian view of 'The Afterlife' while at the same time 'idealizing' his own mythological creation of 'The Eternal Recurrence'. Similarly....Part of Nietzsche's reactionary thought is also that the creature he most sincerely loathes is the spirit of revolution, and his hatred for the anarchist and rebel.[8]..(Wikipedia, Zarathustra).
while at the same time it is not hard at all to view Nietzsche as one of the ultimate 'rebel, anarchist philosophers' in all of Western history....Did Nietzsche really know himself as much as many scholars seem to think he did? To what extent did Nietzsche find 'truth within himself'? There seems to me to be a lot of polar parts of Nietzsche's character that Nietzsche was trying to bury in his own private closet -- and yet which were being projected into his work (sublimation) in an unrecognized way. His writing hypocrisies are many -- he fails to see his own idealism, his own 'ethical or moral virtues',his own view of the 'afterlife', the highly rebellious nature of his philosophy, he trumpets the sensory virtues of Dionysus, suppresses the righteous, truth-seeking virtues of Apollo -- and yet it is easy to see Nietzsche as much more of a 'righteous-narcissistic Apollonian philosopher' than a 'Dionysian one'. What is 'Dionysianism' other than man's 'uncultivated animality'....and yet Nietzsche sees... a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch.. .
This, to me, sounds like a movement away from Dionysianism and towards an Apollonian Superman (and wasn't this, in effect, what Nietzsche was doing -- while at the same time trumpeting Dionysianism and suppressing/repressing his own Apollonianism? An Apollonianism based on existential virtues -- but lacking in humanistic compassion -- and we know where this ultimately led Germany to.....and I am generalizing to one point in time.....a crystallized cultural 'herd-crowd' of 'righteous-narcissistic-arrogant Nazi national supremists lacking in human compassion, empathy, and decency....until everything came crashing down....like Nietzsche's life....You can say what you want to about Nietzsche condemning German 'herd thinking' but the essence of the 'herd-thinking' was based on the type of 'Social Darwinian Extremism' that Nietzsche trumpeted through all of his later philosophy....We need someone to synthesize and synergize Nietzsche's radical brand of extremist existentialism with the Christian virtues of humanism meaning: compassion, empathy, caring, generosity, altruism...all of which was radically missing in Nietzsche's later philosophy. That is one of the things that I am trying to accomplish here in Hegel's Hotel...And that is why I view 'BT as a 'healthier' book than Zarathustra....Zarathustra, in effect, lacks Christian -- and any humanistic religious -- BALANCE....Combine Nietzsche's Self-Assertion with Christian Caring About Others...and you have Adler's idea of a balance between 'self and social interest'. Self-assertion is the 'yang' of life; while 'compassion and caring about others' is the 'yin' of life....
.Here below is Nietzsche expressing his animosity towards all 'morality' except his own one-sided brand of 'Existentialism Without Compassionate Humanism'...
..............................................................................................................................................
The ultimate of ironies was Nietzsche's most 'Christian' act -- or at least so the story goes -- just before he went insane -- when he saw a horse rider about to whip his horse and Nietzsche ran across the street to shield the horse from the impending whip....There in that one special moment -- just before he went insane -- Nietzsche integrated his brand of 'Existentialism Without Huamism' with his own very 'Christian-Humanistic Deed'.
For the most part, I believe in the idea of 'Cosmic Balance and Justice' -- which is not to say that we don't need 'civil laws and applied justice'....
But read Anaximander's and Heraclitus' philosophy in quick succession, and you will find the foundation of Western Dialectic Philosophy....before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle....which coincidentally or non-coincidentally merges very well with the Ancient beginnings of Chinese and Eastern Philosophy....with their polar concepts of 'yin' and 'yang'...and also similar mythological philosophical implications involving 'air/wind', 'water', 'earth', and 'fire'...
'Humanistic-Existential Balance' is 'The Path'....as I move to converge elements of Ancient Western and Eastern Dialectic Philosophy, Christianity, Daoism, Heraclitus-Spinozian Pantheism, Enlightenment Deism, Agnosticism, Atheism...
They all can be connected if they share the underlying foundation of Humanistic-Existentialism, Self Assertion, Healthy Narcissism, Self-Overcoming, and Self-Actualization with Social Empathy, Caring, and Altruism...
This is the philosophical foundation of Hegel's Hotel....
It underpins all my theoretical ideas on the concept of 'Multi-Dialectic-Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis'.
Let us move in the next part of this paper into the manifestations of these ideas in the form of DGB Personality and Transference Theory...
-- dgb, Nov. 17th, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap Inspirations, Creations, Interactions, Negotiations, and Integrations...
-- Are Still in Process...
Well, I am a man of 'Grand Unorthodox Inspirations, Interactions, and Integrations'....or at least that is what I would like to be viewed as....Put that on my tombstone when I am dead and gone...and I will rest with some peace....More peace if I can actually found and start a Massive Mult-Dialectic-Integrative Educational-Philosophy-Psychology...Institute that bears Hegel's name.....
Hegel's Hotel ....As a philosophical-psychological-political-spiritual treatise, it will never be finished because it is always evolving....It is my version of the continuation of Hegel's masterpiece, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807)
Fresh thinkers say, 'Think outside the box.' Well, the wonderful thing about Hegelian Philosophy, Hegelian (Multi-) Dialectic Logic, and my extended, projected manifestation of Hegel's brilliant work, is that once you develop a Hegelian (Multi-) Dialectic Philosophical Mindset -- you can never 'not think outside the box'. Indeed, you are always thinking outside the box....because you are always integrating different boxes, different concepts from different boxes, different theories from different theorists, different paradigms....Structures and processes -- whether metaphysically conceptualized or physically real -- become interwoven together to form creative new conceptual structures, processes, theories, and paradigms...(See Otto Rank and his viewpoint on creativity...)
Questions like this -- whether consciously or subconsciously formulated -- make up the foundation of my 'Phenomenology of Spirit': How can I integrate Christianity with Nietzsche's (so called 'Anti-Christian') brand of Humanistic-Existentialism? And where did Nietzsche go wrong? Nietzsche went wrong -- or at least partly wrong -- after his first creatively brilliant book (The Birth of Tragedy, or BT for short, 1872) where Nietzsche integrated Hegelian philosophy with a 'balanced view' of his (at that time) humanistic-existentialism which can be referred to as either 'Apollonian-Dionysianism' or 'Dionysian-Apollonianism'. This remarkable little book represented what might be called 'The Hegelian-Nietzschean Phenomenology of Spirit of 1872'.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche abandoned 'his Hegelian Bi-Polar (Dialectically Integrative) Horse of BT' after 1872, never to return to it in this first conceptualized format. A pity, I say, because BT is, in my opinion, Nietzsche's 'healthiest' book, perhaps his best book -- the bridge between Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' and Freud's Psychoanalysis.
Nietzsche himself looked at 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' as his masterpiece but the closer I get to this book, the more I fail to see this. It is full of 'Nietzschean hypocrisies', and quite frankly, having lost his 'Apollonian-Dionysian (and Enlightenment-Romantic) Balance', I believe that Nietzsche had become so 'full of himself' that he had become both 'narcissistically and righteously offside'. 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' would need to be ethically and morally 'sanitized' before it could be considered a 'balanced' piece of work -- and, of course, that will never happen except in the editorial reviews of authors like me.
Nietzsche, in Zarathustra, calls all idealists 'cowards' and yet what is Zarathustra other than Nietzsche's ultimate 'idealistic' work. Similarly, Nietzsche confuses 'truth' with 'value' arguing that 'truthfulness is the highest virtue' (and yet what is virtue other than an 'ideal moral or ethical value'?) while at the same time Nietzsche dismisses and demeans all 'morality' -- this was allegedly Zarathustra's most 'calamitous error; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it'...Nietzsche builds an idealistic model of how man should live his life -- through the life of 'The Superman or Overman', through 'The Will to Power', through the process of 'overcoming', through the process of 'truthfulness', through the process of....
... a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch (Superman/Overman).
The symbol of the Übermensch also alludes to Nietzsche's notions of "self-mastery", "self-cultivation", "self-direction", and "self-overcoming". (from Wikipedia, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
.................................................................................................................................These values above are all well and good, one could say an anti-Christian Bible of existential values -- unsanitized, or immoralized, in its lack of humanistic (Christian) values of such things as compassion, caring, altruism, love, generosity, empathy, social interest.....the types of values that a 'pathological narcissistic thinker' would not have much, if any, use for...as Nietzsche was, by this time, flying towards his own Abyss -- and perhaps an abysmal 'eternal recurrence'. Which brings us to another Nietzschean hypocrisy -- Nietzsche dismisses and demeans the Christian view of 'The Afterlife' while at the same time 'idealizing' his own mythological creation of 'The Eternal Recurrence'. Similarly....Part of Nietzsche's reactionary thought is also that the creature he most sincerely loathes is the spirit of revolution, and his hatred for the anarchist and rebel.[8]..(Wikipedia, Zarathustra).
while at the same time it is not hard at all to view Nietzsche as one of the ultimate 'rebel, anarchist philosophers' in all of Western history....Did Nietzsche really know himself as much as many scholars seem to think he did? To what extent did Nietzsche find 'truth within himself'? There seems to me to be a lot of polar parts of Nietzsche's character that Nietzsche was trying to bury in his own private closet -- and yet which were being projected into his work (sublimation) in an unrecognized way. His writing hypocrisies are many -- he fails to see his own idealism, his own 'ethical or moral virtues',his own view of the 'afterlife', the highly rebellious nature of his philosophy, he trumpets the sensory virtues of Dionysus, suppresses the righteous, truth-seeking virtues of Apollo -- and yet it is easy to see Nietzsche as much more of a 'righteous-narcissistic Apollonian philosopher' than a 'Dionysian one'. What is 'Dionysianism' other than man's 'uncultivated animality'....and yet Nietzsche sees... a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch.. .
This, to me, sounds like a movement away from Dionysianism and towards an Apollonian Superman (and wasn't this, in effect, what Nietzsche was doing -- while at the same time trumpeting Dionysianism and suppressing/repressing his own Apollonianism? An Apollonianism based on existential virtues -- but lacking in humanistic compassion -- and we know where this ultimately led Germany to.....and I am generalizing to one point in time.....a crystallized cultural 'herd-crowd' of 'righteous-narcissistic-arrogant Nazi national supremists lacking in human compassion, empathy, and decency....until everything came crashing down....like Nietzsche's life....You can say what you want to about Nietzsche condemning German 'herd thinking' but the essence of the 'herd-thinking' was based on the type of 'Social Darwinian Extremism' that Nietzsche trumpeted through all of his later philosophy....We need someone to synthesize and synergize Nietzsche's radical brand of extremist existentialism with the Christian virtues of humanism meaning: compassion, empathy, caring, generosity, altruism...all of which was radically missing in Nietzsche's later philosophy. That is one of the things that I am trying to accomplish here in Hegel's Hotel...And that is why I view 'BT as a 'healthier' book than Zarathustra....Zarathustra, in effect, lacks Christian -- and any humanistic religious -- BALANCE....Combine Nietzsche's Self-Assertion with Christian Caring About Others...and you have Adler's idea of a balance between 'self and social interest'. Self-assertion is the 'yang' of life; while 'compassion and caring about others' is the 'yin' of life....
.Here below is Nietzsche expressing his animosity towards all 'morality' except his own one-sided brand of 'Existentialism Without Compassionate Humanism'...
[F]or what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. [...] His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist” who flees from reality [...]—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.
— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny", §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann
..............................................................................................................................................
The ultimate of ironies was Nietzsche's most 'Christian' act -- or at least so the story goes -- just before he went insane -- when he saw a horse rider about to whip his horse and Nietzsche ran across the street to shield the horse from the impending whip....There in that one special moment -- just before he went insane -- Nietzsche integrated his brand of 'Existentialism Without Huamism' with his own very 'Christian-Humanistic Deed'.
For the most part, I believe in the idea of 'Cosmic Balance and Justice' -- which is not to say that we don't need 'civil laws and applied justice'....
But read Anaximander's and Heraclitus' philosophy in quick succession, and you will find the foundation of Western Dialectic Philosophy....before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle....which coincidentally or non-coincidentally merges very well with the Ancient beginnings of Chinese and Eastern Philosophy....with their polar concepts of 'yin' and 'yang'...and also similar mythological philosophical implications involving 'air/wind', 'water', 'earth', and 'fire'...
'Humanistic-Existential Balance' is 'The Path'....as I move to converge elements of Ancient Western and Eastern Dialectic Philosophy, Christianity, Daoism, Heraclitus-Spinozian Pantheism, Enlightenment Deism, Agnosticism, Atheism...
They all can be connected if they share the underlying foundation of Humanistic-Existentialism, Self Assertion, Healthy Narcissism, Self-Overcoming, and Self-Actualization with Social Empathy, Caring, and Altruism...
This is the philosophical foundation of Hegel's Hotel....
It underpins all my theoretical ideas on the concept of 'Multi-Dialectic-Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis'.
Let us move in the next part of this paper into the manifestations of these ideas in the form of DGB Personality and Transference Theory...
-- dgb, Nov. 17th, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap Inspirations, Creations, Interactions, Negotiations, and Integrations...
-- Are Still in Process...
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
On Transference (Part 1)
November 12, 2012
When defining a concept, the concept is attached to one or more certain contextual parameters or variables which provide the boundaries of the concept, and based on these conceptual boundaries which in turn are based on the particular variable-parameters specified, gives the concept its definition.
Freud (1895, Studies in Hysteria) originally defined 'transference' as a 'false connection' (where a person confuses or distorts the characteristics of a person in the here-and-now that he or she is relating to -- usually the therapist/analyst within the context of the therapeutic relationship -- with a person from the past -- usually one of the client's parents. Thus, the idea of 'false connection' became the original defining variable/parameter of the concept of transference.)
A new concept, transference, was born in psychoanalysis -- and a very important one -- indeed, from my perspective, a concept that was to become more important than Freud's earlier concept of 'repression'.
My work on transference is a mixture of the orthodox and the unorthodox. Some of it is supported by the work of Freud -- and the likes of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Ronald Fairbairn, Eric Berne, Arthur Janov, Brian Bird...
For other parts of it, I have stepped outside of the realm of psychoanalysis and entered into the realm of Adlerian Psychology (Alfred Adler), Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls), Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne), Primal Therapy (Arthur Janov) to find parts of the answers I have been looking for to certain otherwise unanswered questions. For example, Is transference a form of intended self-psychotherapy? Or is it a manifestation of the destructive-death instinct at work? Or are there elements of both tendencies at work in the same 'obsessive-compulsive' process?
Paradoxically, transference can be both therapeutic and/or pathological at the same or different times. It all depends on how it is being acted out, and what exactly is coming out of our 'transference complexes'.
Are we getting on the same roller coaster ride over and over again without even being consciously aware of what we are doing, and how we are doing it? And will there ever come a time where we say to ourselves: I don't want to get on this roller coaster ride anymore. It hurts too much when the roller coaster ride goes awry and I am left with 'emotional parts' strewn all over the 'bottom of the roller coaster'.
There is also the question of how, exactly, transference theory relates to the broader parameter of personality theory. And more questions: How does transference theory relate to traumacy theory and fantasy theory? And how does transference theory relate to Object Relations and Self Psychology as well as Classical Theory? And can we draw a connection between transference theory and elements of Bionian Traumacy Theory? These questions, we will come back and answer shortly.
...................................................................................................................................
Added Nov. 17th, 2012...below....and a happy birthday to my sister, Trish Bain...
.............................................................................................................................................
But first, I have another essay I wish to write that takes me back to a number of essays and a line of thinking that I began to develop a couple of years ago.
I found one of these essays in my archives, dated June 17th, 2011,
There are one or two more out there from the same time period that explore this same theme...I just added the word 'transference' to the first title listed above...
I will be back shortly to pick up the trail that I am leaving you in 'the midst of the woods' here...
To be continued...
-- dgb, November 17th, 2012
-- David Gordon Bain,
When defining a concept, the concept is attached to one or more certain contextual parameters or variables which provide the boundaries of the concept, and based on these conceptual boundaries which in turn are based on the particular variable-parameters specified, gives the concept its definition.
Freud (1895, Studies in Hysteria) originally defined 'transference' as a 'false connection' (where a person confuses or distorts the characteristics of a person in the here-and-now that he or she is relating to -- usually the therapist/analyst within the context of the therapeutic relationship -- with a person from the past -- usually one of the client's parents. Thus, the idea of 'false connection' became the original defining variable/parameter of the concept of transference.)
A new concept, transference, was born in psychoanalysis -- and a very important one -- indeed, from my perspective, a concept that was to become more important than Freud's earlier concept of 'repression'.
My work on transference is a mixture of the orthodox and the unorthodox. Some of it is supported by the work of Freud -- and the likes of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Ronald Fairbairn, Eric Berne, Arthur Janov, Brian Bird...
For other parts of it, I have stepped outside of the realm of psychoanalysis and entered into the realm of Adlerian Psychology (Alfred Adler), Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls), Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne), Primal Therapy (Arthur Janov) to find parts of the answers I have been looking for to certain otherwise unanswered questions. For example, Is transference a form of intended self-psychotherapy? Or is it a manifestation of the destructive-death instinct at work? Or are there elements of both tendencies at work in the same 'obsessive-compulsive' process?
Paradoxically, transference can be both therapeutic and/or pathological at the same or different times. It all depends on how it is being acted out, and what exactly is coming out of our 'transference complexes'.
Are we getting on the same roller coaster ride over and over again without even being consciously aware of what we are doing, and how we are doing it? And will there ever come a time where we say to ourselves: I don't want to get on this roller coaster ride anymore. It hurts too much when the roller coaster ride goes awry and I am left with 'emotional parts' strewn all over the 'bottom of the roller coaster'.
There is also the question of how, exactly, transference theory relates to the broader parameter of personality theory. And more questions: How does transference theory relate to traumacy theory and fantasy theory? And how does transference theory relate to Object Relations and Self Psychology as well as Classical Theory? And can we draw a connection between transference theory and elements of Bionian Traumacy Theory? These questions, we will come back and answer shortly.
...................................................................................................................................
Added Nov. 17th, 2012...below....and a happy birthday to my sister, Trish Bain...
.............................................................................................................................................
But first, I have another essay I wish to write that takes me back to a number of essays and a line of thinking that I began to develop a couple of years ago.
I found one of these essays in my archives, dated June 17th, 2011,
On Dialectic (Transference) Complexes, Gods and Archetypes, Mythologies, The Id, The Instincts/Impulses, and Their Many Viscisitudes (Mutations, Defenses, and Compromise-Formations)...
Here is another one, dated January 15th, 2011...
Floor 2: Gods, Myths, Archetypes, Philosophers, and Psychologists: Room 201: What Are Gods?
There are one or two more out there from the same time period that explore this same theme...I just added the word 'transference' to the first title listed above...
I will be back shortly to pick up the trail that I am leaving you in 'the midst of the woods' here...
To be continued...
-- dgb, November 17th, 2012
-- David Gordon Bain,
Sunday, November 4, 2012
What Is 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'? And What Is Its Opposite? How Is The Phenomenology of Spirit 'Derailed' By 'The Depressive-Addiction Cycle'
'The Phenomenology of Spirit' -- taken from the title of Hegel's 1807 masterpiece -- is the 'humanistic-existential energy' of the human soul, the human spirit. Or at least it is by my interpretation of what Hegel meant by it.
You can tell when you have it because you feel energized and 'full of life' -- you want to embrace people and embrace life; contradistinctively, you can tell when you don't have it because -- at its worst -- you feel a 'dark, depressive or death spirit emulating from your heart and your whole mind and body'. This is 'the abyss', 'the pit', or 'the garbage pail' of human existence. In between, we all have good and bad days but the mark of the completely depressive personality is that there are no good days -- they are all bad, or so we 'conceptually and emotionally construct' them.
Some depressions can be improved just by 're-framing' or 're-constructing' the way we think. There are other types of depressions that demand that we take radical action to change our whole life around -- and make it significantly better. In between are those of us who simply have good and bad days where a full night sleep will often do wonders relative to the preceding bad day.
Let's just say that I am having a very bad day where a decent night's sleep did not wipe away my preceding bad day. If I were on The Toronto Raptors basketball team, I would say that I am 'sliding on a two game losing streak'. Could be worse. Could be better.
Depression is often tied to addiction. Here is where you get the 'manic-depressive' or 'bipolarity' tag (the first tag is more descriptively concrete and includes the bipolarity issue). And here is what I would call 'The Depression-Addiction Cycle'. 1. You are working through the days problems and not coming up with the solutions you want. The problems are significant to your sense of existence. 2. You feel a loss of 'self-empowerment' or 'self-control'. The world is controlling you; you are not controlling it. 3. You plunge into 'the abyss of depression' which is basically 'uncontacted grief, anxiety, resentment, anger, rage, or the like. A Gestalt Hot Seat is in order. But you don't have a Gestalt Therapist in your back pocket. So you do the next best thing -- or so you think. 4. You 'contact your addiction' to try to make yourself feel better. That could be food, sweets, spending and buying, alcohol, gambling, drugs, sex....anything that 'kicks your pleasure principle into gear'...Worry about 'the reality principle later. 5. Depending partly on how bad your addiction is, and what your attitude is about it, you either: a) ignore help and keep on doing it; b) you wrestle though it yourself and get your Central Ego back in gear again so that it is working in a more 'Apollonian' as opposed to 'Dionysian' direction, and go back to trying to solve the same problems you couldn't solve the first time around. You either succeed -- or you don't -- or somewhere in between.
That is about the extent of my capabilities for this evening.
-- dgb
You can tell when you have it because you feel energized and 'full of life' -- you want to embrace people and embrace life; contradistinctively, you can tell when you don't have it because -- at its worst -- you feel a 'dark, depressive or death spirit emulating from your heart and your whole mind and body'. This is 'the abyss', 'the pit', or 'the garbage pail' of human existence. In between, we all have good and bad days but the mark of the completely depressive personality is that there are no good days -- they are all bad, or so we 'conceptually and emotionally construct' them.
Some depressions can be improved just by 're-framing' or 're-constructing' the way we think. There are other types of depressions that demand that we take radical action to change our whole life around -- and make it significantly better. In between are those of us who simply have good and bad days where a full night sleep will often do wonders relative to the preceding bad day.
Let's just say that I am having a very bad day where a decent night's sleep did not wipe away my preceding bad day. If I were on The Toronto Raptors basketball team, I would say that I am 'sliding on a two game losing streak'. Could be worse. Could be better.
Depression is often tied to addiction. Here is where you get the 'manic-depressive' or 'bipolarity' tag (the first tag is more descriptively concrete and includes the bipolarity issue). And here is what I would call 'The Depression-Addiction Cycle'. 1. You are working through the days problems and not coming up with the solutions you want. The problems are significant to your sense of existence. 2. You feel a loss of 'self-empowerment' or 'self-control'. The world is controlling you; you are not controlling it. 3. You plunge into 'the abyss of depression' which is basically 'uncontacted grief, anxiety, resentment, anger, rage, or the like. A Gestalt Hot Seat is in order. But you don't have a Gestalt Therapist in your back pocket. So you do the next best thing -- or so you think. 4. You 'contact your addiction' to try to make yourself feel better. That could be food, sweets, spending and buying, alcohol, gambling, drugs, sex....anything that 'kicks your pleasure principle into gear'...Worry about 'the reality principle later. 5. Depending partly on how bad your addiction is, and what your attitude is about it, you either: a) ignore help and keep on doing it; b) you wrestle though it yourself and get your Central Ego back in gear again so that it is working in a more 'Apollonian' as opposed to 'Dionysian' direction, and go back to trying to solve the same problems you couldn't solve the first time around. You either succeed -- or you don't -- or somewhere in between.
That is about the extent of my capabilities for this evening.
-- dgb
Monday, October 29, 2012
The Newest DGB Model of Character Structure and Personality Dynamics
Oct 29, 31, Nov. 1, 2012....still in process....
Good morning!
I have two essay 'coming down the pipe here' -- one on transference theory and the other on character structure and personality theory. The two are intimately interconnected: transference theory contains the core and the essence of character structure and personality theory, whereas character structure and personality theory provides the broader context by which we can 'zero in on' the study of transference theory.
I am going to write the essay on personality theory first because, it is by far the easiest one to write as it has been evolving in my mind both recently in its latest rendition, and for over 30 years, going back to my university days in 1978-79, my last two major papers in university, including my Honours Thesis (which focused mainly on the activities of what I would now call 'The Central Ego'), providing the initial humanistic-existential and cognitive-problem-solving foundation for what is to follow -- without the Gestalt, Adlerian, and Psychoanalytic influences (the first two taking shape in the 1980s, and the Psychoanalytic influence being built up primarily over the last two or three years but stretching back into the 1980s as well when I started to study Object Relations, Narcissism, and Transference Theory.)
I am happy with my latest model of character structure and personality theory to the extent that I do not believe I will change this model, from hereon in. (However, I have said that before and made further changes.)
The model uses 20 different 'compartments' -- an inordinately large number by most standards considering Gestalt Therapy uses 2 compartmets (topdog and underdog), and Classical Psychoanalysis uses 3 compartments (ego, id, superego).
As large and cumbersome as my model may seem to many people, it is like many models in that it simply needs to be understood better to be used easier. There are basically three parts to the model: 1. is a 'Dialectic-Classical' model that integrates traumacy-seduction theory with drive-fantasy-wish theory -- in other words, all of Freud's work in Strachey's 24 Volume Complete Standard Edition of Freud's work; not just the work he did after 1897; 2. is an Object Relations-Transactional Analysis model that looks at 'ego-states' and 'specific ego-function' (and/or dysfunction) within or between each ego-state; 3. is a humanistic-existential model that aims at 'trumpeting and recovering' a 'humanistic-existential phenomenology of spirit' for the 21st century. This is largely a spirit of self-assertiveness and self-directedness, a spirit of self and social caring, a spirit of conscious, cognitive enlightenment and romantic-emotional-balance, a spirit of creative drive and in the process allowing ourselves to be spiritually created....
I look at the 'ego' as representing the 'whole self', 'the whole psyche'....with all the different 'ego-states' or 'ego-compartments' representing more 'specialized functions' of the work of the overall ego.
If we equate the ego with 'the whole self' -- which is the way that it was originally defined by German philosophers like Fichte, and one way that Freud defined it before 1923, but not after he wrote 'The Ego and The Id' in 1923 -- then an 'ego compartment' -- or 'ego state' -- can be defined as a particular 'part of the whole ego, or the whole self'.
Freud ran himself into a philosophical and psychological conundrum after he wrote The Ego and The Id in 1923. If 'the ego' by previous standards referred to 'the whole self', then what is 'the id'? -- a 'compartment' or 'department' in the self representing the 'non-self'? The 'it'? This reflects a 'dissociation' in the self, in the whole personality, allegedly even among healthy people. It is like we all allegedly have an 'alien' inside ourselves, even as we start life, and our 'alien' is allegedly our own 'life' and 'death' instincts.
Thus, we start out as 'man against himself' -- a man, or woman, whose own instincts are 'alien' to him or her. Even the so-called 'life' which includes the 'self-preserving' as well as the 'sexual' instincts are allegedly 'alien' to us because they are part of our 'id' which is our 'it' which is an allegedly 'foreign being' inside us that also creates our 'ego instincts' which means that even they must be 'foreign' to us -- allegedly speaking by Freud's 1923 philosophical and psychological perspective. It is like we are 'self-destructing' even as we begin life as a newborn baby -- before any 'trauma' even enters the situation (other than perhaps 'birth trauma').
How does Freud reconcile that, logically (or illogically) speaking, according to this perspective, we start life as an 'it', and then our 'it' turns into our 'I', while at the same time maintaining our 'it/id' status through the remainder of our life? And that our 'it' continues to 'psychologically feed' our 'I'? Freud has told us that our 'id' is full of internal contradictions.
Allegedly, one of these contradictions could be the contradiction between our 'it' and our 'I', but the fact that our 'it' allegedly contains all our 'life instincts' including our self-preservation, sexual, and ego instincts blurs the boundary line so much between our 'id' and our 'ego', that one wonders why even have a 'boundary line' at all? Why not just say that the 'id' is the precursor to the 'ego' and that both contain 'life' and 'death' instincts in similar and/or different formats? Or that 'the id' is a 'compartment' of 'the whole ego, the whole self'? Thus, the 'id' and 'the superego' become different 'specialized compartments' of the whole ego. Thus, we could talk about the 'Idian Ego', which upon consciousness, might become either 'The Hedonistic, Pleasure Ego' or 'The Narcissistic Ego'. Or -- since the 'id' contains all the life and death instincts, presumably this would mean that 'the id' -- being the 'energy system' of the personality -- feeds all the different 'ego-compartments' that we may want to talk about, including all aspects of 'the superego'.
Anyway you want to cut it, by Freud's own inherently contradictory definition, the so-called 'line of distinction' between 'the ego' and 'the id' becomes so blurred by this definition that it only makes sense that at some point we have to start to talk about the 'evolution of the id into the ego' -- and at this point, as contradictory as this may sound -- the concept of 'the ego-id', or 'the idian ego' makes complete sense. The ego essentially becomes the ultimate 'vicissitude' of the id.
Either that -- or as some, indeed many, psychoanalysts have already done -- you scrap the concept of 'the id' altogether.
We must keep in mind that such 'compartments' -- whether we are talking about 'the id' or 'the ego' or 'the superego' -- are essentially 'conceptual conveniences' -- they are essentially 'make-believe sub-realms of life' -- turned into ideas with boundaries inside our head that may or may not have any bearing on any type of 'empirical boundary' that we may, or may not, be able to physically see. Many concepts have 'metaphysical boundaries' -- like 'the id' and 'the ego' and 'the superego' -- which means that these are concepts that have boundaries that we have likely made up inside our own mind. Or at least someone did -- like Freud -- and we have chosen to follow suit -- or not.
These types of concepts with 'metaphysical boundaries' might also be referred to as 'functional fictions'. We draw boundaries where life doesn't -- mainly to help us make life easier to understand. Sometimes our 'conceptual and/or theoretical reductionism' is useful to us; and sometimes it is not.
In Freudian post-1920 terminology, ideas are essentially no different than people. They both carry 'death instincts' inside them which at a certain point, especially if we are not aware of them, 'cause' us to 'self-destruct'. Connect this to what Hegel wrote -- that 'every idea, every theory, carries the seeds of its own self-destruction'. The only way to avoid this is to carry multi-dialectic concepts and theories inside us that allow us to 'continue to evolve outwards' at the point where one theory loses its 'functional edge and importance', and another, usually bipolar concept and/or theory and/or paradigm picks up where the previous one left off. Then -- with our freshly evolving, multi-dialectic concept-theory-paradigm pulsating in our brain, we rise up -- like the Phoenix -- we don't self-destruct with the outdated or overmatched or one-sided 'Concept-Theory-Paradigm (CTP)' that we left behind because we were smart enough to see that it had lost its 'theoretical and practical importance' when it 'overstepped a boundary of life' -- the range and focus of its functionality.
Failing to see this, the results in practical, real life are evident every day....life 'zigs', we stay still, or 'zag'....and are left holding a bagful of conceptual and theoretical 'nothings'....Our theory doesn't match with real life processes, and thus, it breaks down because of its 'unpredictability' and 'dysfunctionality'....We need to move on and change generalizations, change theories, or at least modify them so that they can stand up under the test of life 'changing directions'....That's the biggest problem with one-sided, anal retentive theories: life moves on and our theories stay the same...
...................................................................................
We say -- 'Pay attention to this particular part of the ego because certain ego-functions are carried on here that significantly affect the working of the whole personality. These 'compartments' can also be viewed as 'departments' like the type of departments we might find in a large store or other type of commercial business or government institution.
Thus, 'The Nurturing Ego' carries out nurturing functions, 'The Dionysian-(hedonistic-pleasure) Ego' carries out functions aimed at sensual/sexual pleasure, 'the Righteous Ego' carries out righteous functions, 'the Distancing Ego' carries out distancing functions', 'the Narcissistic Ego' carries out narcissistic functions....and so on....And each of these conceptualized domains can 'split' into 'topdog/superego compartments' and 'underdog/underego states' based on contextual self-image perceptions. That is 5 different ego-states -- or 10 if you count the bipolar splits within each of these 5 ego states around the issue of 'power' and 'self-image'.
So really all I am doing here is expanding the Gestalt model and/or The Classical Freudian model, depending on which paradigm you may be more comfortable working inside of.
But again, we are talking about 'abstract, metaphysical concepts and boundaries' here; not empirically and physically based concepts like 'the brain' or 'the heart' or 'the liver'. You can't see a 'Narcissistic Ego' -- but you can metaphysically and abstractly 'classify' its presence from the type of behavior you witness in a person. If you see a 'lot of narcissistic behavior' at work in a particular person's personality, then you/I/we can 'infer' a 'dominant Narcissistic Ego' at work in this person's personality. Have we explained anything? Not really -- we have simply generalized our observations into a particular part of the personality that we have given a name to, in order to identify it, and help make people more aware of its 'metaphysical presence' and 'inferred resulting behavioral activity'. We can then go further in our 'psycho-analysis' by looking for what might be inferred as the 'etiological roots or causes' of this 'dominant narcissistic ego-activity' (either a narcissistic role model, or a 'pampered childhood', or perhaps a 'compensatory defensive line of activity' aimed at 'covering up' a weak underlying self-esteem' And alternatively, we can look at 'the teleological purpose' of the behavior -- i.e., what type of results is this type of behavioral activity aimed at achieving? Freud called this 'the whence' and 'the whither'.
Without counting all the 'Object Relations Splits', the first 11 compartments listed below are both realistic and idealistic. In other words, we can see how they work each and every day, in our small and large 'problem-solving' and 'conflict-resolving' endeavors, and also, we can see our 'arrival' at the 'idealistic humanistic-existential ego states' when our problem-solving and/or conflict-resolving endeavors reward us with 'the fruit of our labour' -- in the form of the celebration of positive, rewarding, self-fulfilling, self-nurturing, experience. This is what I call 'Nietzsche's Mountain'.
In contrast, the collapse of our self-confidence and problem-solving/conflict-resolving capabilities into a state of 'cognitive-emotional-humanistic-existential depression' -- is what I refer to as 'Nietzsche's Abyss'.
The last 11 ego-states or ego-compartments -- the 'top of the iceberg' if you will -- can be classified as follows:
20. Nietzsche's Mountain;
19. The Central-Executive Ego (Nietzsche's 'Tightrope' to Self-Empowerment, Being and Becoming');
18. The Public Persona Ego;
17. The Private-Shadow Ego;
16. The Romantic-Spiritual Ego;
15. The Anal-Schizoid-(Angry-Distancing or Abandoning) Ego;
14. The Oral-Phobic, Anxious Ego;
13. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Ego;
All of the ego-compartments listed above (except for Nietzsche's Mountain) can be 'split' in the process of ego development into 'topdog and/or underdog' or alternatively, 'superego and/or underego' states and functions depending on the degree of 'inferiority feeling' or 'superiority and/or confident feeling' attached to the particular ego compartment or state. Nietzsche's Mountain pre-supposes a feeling of euphoric, superiority, and/or confident, celebratory feeling, meaning that there is no 'underdog or underego' component that is attached to it except as Nietzsche's Mountain may have become a place of 'defensive, megalomaniac behavior' in the form of narcissistic compensation for underlying feelings of insecurity and/or inferiority.
Below these ego states or compartments listed above, we can find another set of evolving 'id-ego' states or compartments that can be viewed as 'precursors' to the ones listed above. These are:
9. The Dream and Fantasy Weaver;
8. Escaped or Released Vicissitudes of The Evolving Subconscious Id-Ego;
7. The Detaining Subconscious-Id-Ego Vault;
6. The Post-Transference, Subconscious-Id-Ego;
5. The Transference-Lifestyle Memory-Learning Templates;
4. The Pre-Transference, Evolving Subconscious-Id-Ego;
3. Nietzsche's Abyss;
2. The Evolving Subconscious-Id-Ego in The Womb;
1. The Genetic Potential (Humanistic-Existential) Self (or Id-Ego).
One of the most important distinctions between Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis and what has evolved here -- informally stated -- as, in effect, DGB Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic (GAP) Theory, is that Freud defined and described his concept of 'the Id' in two different and largely mutually exclusive, incompatible ways: 1. as the 'reservoir' of our deepest, darkest instinctual drives, most notably, sex, and then, later aggression and destruction; and 2. as a further evolution of the previous theory -- the 'reservoir' of all 'life' and 'death' instincts, which more or less takes away the significance of Freud's previous dualism (before 1920) between the 'sexual (id) instincts' and the 'self-preservation (ego) instincts'. Now, since the concept of 'the id' didn't formally come into existence until 1923 (The Ego and The Id), Freud, more or less, conflated the two different ideas of the id into one definition and description, but not without newly created problems for his overall theory. With his definition of the id as the reservoir of all life and death instincts, Freud basically 'blurred the vision of the psycho-dynamic relationship between the id and the ego. Firstly, the ego is viewed as the largely 'conscious part of our self or Self' -- an 'organic, thinking, feeling entity' -- whereas the id is simply viewed as a more or less 'inorganic reservoir' -- which, I am sure, that is not how Freud wanted us to view it. The 'organic, psycho-dynamic component of the id, as technically described by Freud would seem to be 'the instincts' contained within the id; not the id itself. And/or 'the vicissitudes of the id'.
But when Freud started to include the 'ego-self-preservative-and-defensive-instincts' with the 'sexual' (Eros) and 'death-destructive' (Thantos) instincts, Freud had reached a state of conceptual and theoretical abstraction where more or less 'everything' had 'conflated' into the 'reservoir of the id', to the point where one had/has to say that the dualistic distinction between the id and the ego had/has essentially become non-existent or increasingly blurred.
The only fruitful way out of this Freudian conundrum, as I see it, is to say that 'the id is the precursor of the ego and indeed, the superego too', and that the id essentially evolves and mutates into all the various ego and superego splits, functions, states, compartments that I have conceptualized above -- and that we are perhaps better talking about 'ego-ego conflicts between the different ego-states', as well as perhaps 'id-id conflicts' between the evolving and contradicting parts of the id that later evolve and mutate into the different parts of the ego.
This is my justification for the use of the term 'the evolving id-ego' -- or 'The Subconscious-Id-Ego' within the confines of the subconscious personality; and the id-ego, or simply the ego, within the confines of the more conscious, self-aware, personality.
In my opinion, we are better viewing the ID as 'The Paradoxical, Impulsive-Defensive Ego' like the newborn baby that cries out of impulse and need -- or the frustration of such -- and 'spits out food' as a sure sign that the baby's 'Defensive-Detoxification System' is just as in place when it is born as its 'Impulse-Need-System' is. Both systems are vital to the newborn baby's -- and the adult ego's -- survival. If we are going to use the concept of 'the id' at all, then it should be viewed as a 'wholistic precursor of the ego'; not an 'It' that is buried in the unconscious like some form of 'alien being'...
Alienation, detachment, repression, dissociation...and all the rest of the defense mechanisms -- used outside of awareness -- are usually signs of 'neurosis' and/or 'psychopathology'; not 'psychological health'. 'Congruent wholism/holism' is usually a better sign of psychological health. And a newborn baby, and even a young todddler is generally born and functions in a 'congruently wholistic' style -- until either the forces of 'socialization' and/or 'narcissistic trauma' -- and the 'fixation' and 'defensive compensations' to this narcissistic trauma -- start to set in. Then you begin to see the evolution of what might be better called 'The Divided Self'.
When we move to Part 2 of my first part 'transference essay', we will be referring to what happens within #5. The Transference-Lifestyle Memory-Learning Templates. And this includes the impact of 'trauma fixation' and 'narcissistic-compensatory-defensive serial behavior patterns' to this trauma fixation.
It is to this essay, that we will next turn.
-- dgb, October 29, 2012.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Creations and Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
Good morning!
I have two essay 'coming down the pipe here' -- one on transference theory and the other on character structure and personality theory. The two are intimately interconnected: transference theory contains the core and the essence of character structure and personality theory, whereas character structure and personality theory provides the broader context by which we can 'zero in on' the study of transference theory.
I am going to write the essay on personality theory first because, it is by far the easiest one to write as it has been evolving in my mind both recently in its latest rendition, and for over 30 years, going back to my university days in 1978-79, my last two major papers in university, including my Honours Thesis (which focused mainly on the activities of what I would now call 'The Central Ego'), providing the initial humanistic-existential and cognitive-problem-solving foundation for what is to follow -- without the Gestalt, Adlerian, and Psychoanalytic influences (the first two taking shape in the 1980s, and the Psychoanalytic influence being built up primarily over the last two or three years but stretching back into the 1980s as well when I started to study Object Relations, Narcissism, and Transference Theory.)
I am happy with my latest model of character structure and personality theory to the extent that I do not believe I will change this model, from hereon in. (However, I have said that before and made further changes.)
The model uses 20 different 'compartments' -- an inordinately large number by most standards considering Gestalt Therapy uses 2 compartmets (topdog and underdog), and Classical Psychoanalysis uses 3 compartments (ego, id, superego).
As large and cumbersome as my model may seem to many people, it is like many models in that it simply needs to be understood better to be used easier. There are basically three parts to the model: 1. is a 'Dialectic-Classical' model that integrates traumacy-seduction theory with drive-fantasy-wish theory -- in other words, all of Freud's work in Strachey's 24 Volume Complete Standard Edition of Freud's work; not just the work he did after 1897; 2. is an Object Relations-Transactional Analysis model that looks at 'ego-states' and 'specific ego-function' (and/or dysfunction) within or between each ego-state; 3. is a humanistic-existential model that aims at 'trumpeting and recovering' a 'humanistic-existential phenomenology of spirit' for the 21st century. This is largely a spirit of self-assertiveness and self-directedness, a spirit of self and social caring, a spirit of conscious, cognitive enlightenment and romantic-emotional-balance, a spirit of creative drive and in the process allowing ourselves to be spiritually created....
I look at the 'ego' as representing the 'whole self', 'the whole psyche'....with all the different 'ego-states' or 'ego-compartments' representing more 'specialized functions' of the work of the overall ego.
If we equate the ego with 'the whole self' -- which is the way that it was originally defined by German philosophers like Fichte, and one way that Freud defined it before 1923, but not after he wrote 'The Ego and The Id' in 1923 -- then an 'ego compartment' -- or 'ego state' -- can be defined as a particular 'part of the whole ego, or the whole self'.
Freud ran himself into a philosophical and psychological conundrum after he wrote The Ego and The Id in 1923. If 'the ego' by previous standards referred to 'the whole self', then what is 'the id'? -- a 'compartment' or 'department' in the self representing the 'non-self'? The 'it'? This reflects a 'dissociation' in the self, in the whole personality, allegedly even among healthy people. It is like we all allegedly have an 'alien' inside ourselves, even as we start life, and our 'alien' is allegedly our own 'life' and 'death' instincts.
Thus, we start out as 'man against himself' -- a man, or woman, whose own instincts are 'alien' to him or her. Even the so-called 'life' which includes the 'self-preserving' as well as the 'sexual' instincts are allegedly 'alien' to us because they are part of our 'id' which is our 'it' which is an allegedly 'foreign being' inside us that also creates our 'ego instincts' which means that even they must be 'foreign' to us -- allegedly speaking by Freud's 1923 philosophical and psychological perspective. It is like we are 'self-destructing' even as we begin life as a newborn baby -- before any 'trauma' even enters the situation (other than perhaps 'birth trauma').
How does Freud reconcile that, logically (or illogically) speaking, according to this perspective, we start life as an 'it', and then our 'it' turns into our 'I', while at the same time maintaining our 'it/id' status through the remainder of our life? And that our 'it' continues to 'psychologically feed' our 'I'? Freud has told us that our 'id' is full of internal contradictions.
Allegedly, one of these contradictions could be the contradiction between our 'it' and our 'I', but the fact that our 'it' allegedly contains all our 'life instincts' including our self-preservation, sexual, and ego instincts blurs the boundary line so much between our 'id' and our 'ego', that one wonders why even have a 'boundary line' at all? Why not just say that the 'id' is the precursor to the 'ego' and that both contain 'life' and 'death' instincts in similar and/or different formats? Or that 'the id' is a 'compartment' of 'the whole ego, the whole self'? Thus, the 'id' and 'the superego' become different 'specialized compartments' of the whole ego. Thus, we could talk about the 'Idian Ego', which upon consciousness, might become either 'The Hedonistic, Pleasure Ego' or 'The Narcissistic Ego'. Or -- since the 'id' contains all the life and death instincts, presumably this would mean that 'the id' -- being the 'energy system' of the personality -- feeds all the different 'ego-compartments' that we may want to talk about, including all aspects of 'the superego'.
Anyway you want to cut it, by Freud's own inherently contradictory definition, the so-called 'line of distinction' between 'the ego' and 'the id' becomes so blurred by this definition that it only makes sense that at some point we have to start to talk about the 'evolution of the id into the ego' -- and at this point, as contradictory as this may sound -- the concept of 'the ego-id', or 'the idian ego' makes complete sense. The ego essentially becomes the ultimate 'vicissitude' of the id.
Either that -- or as some, indeed many, psychoanalysts have already done -- you scrap the concept of 'the id' altogether.
We must keep in mind that such 'compartments' -- whether we are talking about 'the id' or 'the ego' or 'the superego' -- are essentially 'conceptual conveniences' -- they are essentially 'make-believe sub-realms of life' -- turned into ideas with boundaries inside our head that may or may not have any bearing on any type of 'empirical boundary' that we may, or may not, be able to physically see. Many concepts have 'metaphysical boundaries' -- like 'the id' and 'the ego' and 'the superego' -- which means that these are concepts that have boundaries that we have likely made up inside our own mind. Or at least someone did -- like Freud -- and we have chosen to follow suit -- or not.
These types of concepts with 'metaphysical boundaries' might also be referred to as 'functional fictions'. We draw boundaries where life doesn't -- mainly to help us make life easier to understand. Sometimes our 'conceptual and/or theoretical reductionism' is useful to us; and sometimes it is not.
In Freudian post-1920 terminology, ideas are essentially no different than people. They both carry 'death instincts' inside them which at a certain point, especially if we are not aware of them, 'cause' us to 'self-destruct'. Connect this to what Hegel wrote -- that 'every idea, every theory, carries the seeds of its own self-destruction'. The only way to avoid this is to carry multi-dialectic concepts and theories inside us that allow us to 'continue to evolve outwards' at the point where one theory loses its 'functional edge and importance', and another, usually bipolar concept and/or theory and/or paradigm picks up where the previous one left off. Then -- with our freshly evolving, multi-dialectic concept-theory-paradigm pulsating in our brain, we rise up -- like the Phoenix -- we don't self-destruct with the outdated or overmatched or one-sided 'Concept-Theory-Paradigm (CTP)' that we left behind because we were smart enough to see that it had lost its 'theoretical and practical importance' when it 'overstepped a boundary of life' -- the range and focus of its functionality.
Failing to see this, the results in practical, real life are evident every day....life 'zigs', we stay still, or 'zag'....and are left holding a bagful of conceptual and theoretical 'nothings'....Our theory doesn't match with real life processes, and thus, it breaks down because of its 'unpredictability' and 'dysfunctionality'....We need to move on and change generalizations, change theories, or at least modify them so that they can stand up under the test of life 'changing directions'....That's the biggest problem with one-sided, anal retentive theories: life moves on and our theories stay the same...
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We say -- 'Pay attention to this particular part of the ego because certain ego-functions are carried on here that significantly affect the working of the whole personality. These 'compartments' can also be viewed as 'departments' like the type of departments we might find in a large store or other type of commercial business or government institution.
Thus, 'The Nurturing Ego' carries out nurturing functions, 'The Dionysian-(hedonistic-pleasure) Ego' carries out functions aimed at sensual/sexual pleasure, 'the Righteous Ego' carries out righteous functions, 'the Distancing Ego' carries out distancing functions', 'the Narcissistic Ego' carries out narcissistic functions....and so on....And each of these conceptualized domains can 'split' into 'topdog/superego compartments' and 'underdog/underego states' based on contextual self-image perceptions. That is 5 different ego-states -- or 10 if you count the bipolar splits within each of these 5 ego states around the issue of 'power' and 'self-image'.
So really all I am doing here is expanding the Gestalt model and/or The Classical Freudian model, depending on which paradigm you may be more comfortable working inside of.
But again, we are talking about 'abstract, metaphysical concepts and boundaries' here; not empirically and physically based concepts like 'the brain' or 'the heart' or 'the liver'. You can't see a 'Narcissistic Ego' -- but you can metaphysically and abstractly 'classify' its presence from the type of behavior you witness in a person. If you see a 'lot of narcissistic behavior' at work in a particular person's personality, then you/I/we can 'infer' a 'dominant Narcissistic Ego' at work in this person's personality. Have we explained anything? Not really -- we have simply generalized our observations into a particular part of the personality that we have given a name to, in order to identify it, and help make people more aware of its 'metaphysical presence' and 'inferred resulting behavioral activity'. We can then go further in our 'psycho-analysis' by looking for what might be inferred as the 'etiological roots or causes' of this 'dominant narcissistic ego-activity' (either a narcissistic role model, or a 'pampered childhood', or perhaps a 'compensatory defensive line of activity' aimed at 'covering up' a weak underlying self-esteem' And alternatively, we can look at 'the teleological purpose' of the behavior -- i.e., what type of results is this type of behavioral activity aimed at achieving? Freud called this 'the whence' and 'the whither'.
Without counting all the 'Object Relations Splits', the first 11 compartments listed below are both realistic and idealistic. In other words, we can see how they work each and every day, in our small and large 'problem-solving' and 'conflict-resolving' endeavors, and also, we can see our 'arrival' at the 'idealistic humanistic-existential ego states' when our problem-solving and/or conflict-resolving endeavors reward us with 'the fruit of our labour' -- in the form of the celebration of positive, rewarding, self-fulfilling, self-nurturing, experience. This is what I call 'Nietzsche's Mountain'.
In contrast, the collapse of our self-confidence and problem-solving/conflict-resolving capabilities into a state of 'cognitive-emotional-humanistic-existential depression' -- is what I refer to as 'Nietzsche's Abyss'.
The last 11 ego-states or ego-compartments -- the 'top of the iceberg' if you will -- can be classified as follows:
20. Nietzsche's Mountain;
19. The Central-Executive Ego (Nietzsche's 'Tightrope' to Self-Empowerment, Being and Becoming');
18. The Public Persona Ego;
17. The Private-Shadow Ego;
16. The Romantic-Spiritual Ego;
15. The Anal-Schizoid-(Angry-Distancing or Abandoning) Ego;
14. The Oral-Phobic, Anxious Ego;
13. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Ego;
12. The Narcissistic Ego;
11. The Righteous-Apollonian (Constructive, Deconstructive, or Destructive) Ego;
10. The Oral-Receptive-(Nurturing-Altruistic) Ego;
Below these ego states or compartments listed above, we can find another set of evolving 'id-ego' states or compartments that can be viewed as 'precursors' to the ones listed above. These are:
9. The Dream and Fantasy Weaver;
8. Escaped or Released Vicissitudes of The Evolving Subconscious Id-Ego;
7. The Detaining Subconscious-Id-Ego Vault;
6. The Post-Transference, Subconscious-Id-Ego;
5. The Transference-Lifestyle Memory-Learning Templates;
4. The Pre-Transference, Evolving Subconscious-Id-Ego;
3. Nietzsche's Abyss;
2. The Evolving Subconscious-Id-Ego in The Womb;
1. The Genetic Potential (Humanistic-Existential) Self (or Id-Ego).
One of the most important distinctions between Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis and what has evolved here -- informally stated -- as, in effect, DGB Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic (GAP) Theory, is that Freud defined and described his concept of 'the Id' in two different and largely mutually exclusive, incompatible ways: 1. as the 'reservoir' of our deepest, darkest instinctual drives, most notably, sex, and then, later aggression and destruction; and 2. as a further evolution of the previous theory -- the 'reservoir' of all 'life' and 'death' instincts, which more or less takes away the significance of Freud's previous dualism (before 1920) between the 'sexual (id) instincts' and the 'self-preservation (ego) instincts'. Now, since the concept of 'the id' didn't formally come into existence until 1923 (The Ego and The Id), Freud, more or less, conflated the two different ideas of the id into one definition and description, but not without newly created problems for his overall theory. With his definition of the id as the reservoir of all life and death instincts, Freud basically 'blurred the vision of the psycho-dynamic relationship between the id and the ego. Firstly, the ego is viewed as the largely 'conscious part of our self or Self' -- an 'organic, thinking, feeling entity' -- whereas the id is simply viewed as a more or less 'inorganic reservoir' -- which, I am sure, that is not how Freud wanted us to view it. The 'organic, psycho-dynamic component of the id, as technically described by Freud would seem to be 'the instincts' contained within the id; not the id itself. And/or 'the vicissitudes of the id'.
But when Freud started to include the 'ego-self-preservative-and-defensive-instincts' with the 'sexual' (Eros) and 'death-destructive' (Thantos) instincts, Freud had reached a state of conceptual and theoretical abstraction where more or less 'everything' had 'conflated' into the 'reservoir of the id', to the point where one had/has to say that the dualistic distinction between the id and the ego had/has essentially become non-existent or increasingly blurred.
The only fruitful way out of this Freudian conundrum, as I see it, is to say that 'the id is the precursor of the ego and indeed, the superego too', and that the id essentially evolves and mutates into all the various ego and superego splits, functions, states, compartments that I have conceptualized above -- and that we are perhaps better talking about 'ego-ego conflicts between the different ego-states', as well as perhaps 'id-id conflicts' between the evolving and contradicting parts of the id that later evolve and mutate into the different parts of the ego.
This is my justification for the use of the term 'the evolving id-ego' -- or 'The Subconscious-Id-Ego' within the confines of the subconscious personality; and the id-ego, or simply the ego, within the confines of the more conscious, self-aware, personality.
In my opinion, we are better viewing the ID as 'The Paradoxical, Impulsive-Defensive Ego' like the newborn baby that cries out of impulse and need -- or the frustration of such -- and 'spits out food' as a sure sign that the baby's 'Defensive-Detoxification System' is just as in place when it is born as its 'Impulse-Need-System' is. Both systems are vital to the newborn baby's -- and the adult ego's -- survival. If we are going to use the concept of 'the id' at all, then it should be viewed as a 'wholistic precursor of the ego'; not an 'It' that is buried in the unconscious like some form of 'alien being'...
Alienation, detachment, repression, dissociation...and all the rest of the defense mechanisms -- used outside of awareness -- are usually signs of 'neurosis' and/or 'psychopathology'; not 'psychological health'. 'Congruent wholism/holism' is usually a better sign of psychological health. And a newborn baby, and even a young todddler is generally born and functions in a 'congruently wholistic' style -- until either the forces of 'socialization' and/or 'narcissistic trauma' -- and the 'fixation' and 'defensive compensations' to this narcissistic trauma -- start to set in. Then you begin to see the evolution of what might be better called 'The Divided Self'.
When we move to Part 2 of my first part 'transference essay', we will be referring to what happens within #5. The Transference-Lifestyle Memory-Learning Templates. And this includes the impact of 'trauma fixation' and 'narcissistic-compensatory-defensive serial behavior patterns' to this trauma fixation.
It is to this essay, that we will next turn.
-- dgb, October 29, 2012.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Creations and Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Transference Re-Visited: A Tribute to The 100th Anniversary of Freud's Ground-Breaking 1912 Essay: 'The Dynamics of Transference'... (Part 1)
Has been re-written....finished, October 29th....
October 28, 2012.
There are two ways we can look at the study of 'transference' -- one of, if not, Freud's most important concept(s) within the framework of psychoanalysis: 1. is a historical, evolutionary study of how transference developed as a concept over time in the history of psychoanalysis. In this regard, we need to distinguish the difference between the 'concept' of transference, meaning how Freud differently defined and described this concept over time vs. the 'phenomenon' itself as any clinical psychologist and/or therapist or husband or wife can experience it as their client or spouse is 'transferring' particular thoughts, feelings, impulses, and or defenses onto them from their childhood past; 2. is a more cognitive psychology approach to how the phenomenon of transference fits into the functioning -- and the dysfunctioning -- of the mind.
This essay became truncated after it was previously written -- chopped up into two or three essays. -- leaving behind it the one below which now has been re-written, hopefully in a more logically coherent manner. This essay is the first of a two to five essay series that will start with transference theory, then move on to character structure and personality theory, which should give us the type of multi-dialectic, multi-school template that we can then apply to the study of psychological health, the study of 'neurosis', mental illness, and psychopathology, and to the art and science of psychotherapy and clinical psychology as a whole. Here is essay number 1 below.
-- dgb, October 28, 2012....
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From a DGB cognitive theoretical perspective, we process our perceptions, interpretations, judgments, decisions in the confines of what we will label here as our 'Central, Executive and/or Mediating Ego'. Freud would have called this just 'the ego' but since I have followed the path of Object Relations and Transactional Analysis in the study of various 'subsidiary ego states' each with different 'ego functions', this necessitates a more specific labeling of each of these distinctively conceptualized ego-states with different sub-ego functions.
Call this the specialization of the ego as it goes about its daily functions, two of the most important being: 1. to compare; and 2. to contrast all the thousands of new things, new situations, new encounters, new relationships with similar and/or different experiences from our past.
This 'comparing' and 'contrasting' process is part of what underlies one of Freud's most important concepts -- transference. From the time we are newly born til the day we die, we are constantly 'processing' new experiences, learning from them, storing them in our memory banks, and then days or months or years later, bringing them back, as associatively connected to what is happening in our lives in the immediate present, in the form of what we might loosely call 'transferences' from our past that help us -- or hinder us -- in our new evaluations of these new situations, new things, new people, new encounters, new relationships that we are dealing with now.
This is our 'past' meeting our 'present', the bridge between our past and present, our 'dialectic connection' between our past and present. Our past judgments and generalizations are carried forward to help (or hinder) us in our present evaluations, and conversely, our present evaluations can also change the way that we construe our past, as well as providing 'fresh new transference generalizations' that may be used at some point in the evolving future.
Of particular importance, are the 'transference generalizations' that we learn in about the first 7 years of our life. These tend to be filled with emotional, impulsive, and defensive 'side kicks' that very much will determine the direction of our future destiny. We can classify them into 'life-directing' 'transference templates, complexes, and games' that create obsessive compulsions in our thoughts and behaviors, as well as 'serial behavior patterns'.
These serial behavior patterns can both be the driving force behind extremely creative and/or genius-like behavior on the one hand (such as can be seen through the biographies of all the great men and women in history), and/or alternatively, these same or different serial behavior patterns can also lead to extreme destruction and/or self-destruction on the other hand. Often our greatest character strength is also our greatest character weakness. And we know where 'serial behavior patterns' can take the extremely 'offside' psycho-or-sociopath.
Transference is only one of a large number of 'defense mechanisms' that have been classified by psychoanalysis.
From the learning functions of 'association', 'dissociation', and 'discrimination', come a whole host of seemingly 'hard-wired' or 'almost unavoidable' 'ego-learning and/or ego-defense mechanisms' that psychoanalysis, through its some 120 years of existence and evolution, has itemized and classified very well -- processes like 'repression', 'suppression', 'denial', 'resistance', 'disavowal', 'transference', 'compensation' (Adler's influence), 'introjection', 'identification', 'projection', 'sublimation', 'compromise-formation', 'allusion to immediacy', 'reaction-formation', 'displacement'....Many of them are inter-connected and/or subsidiaries of other defense mechanisms...
At this point, I need you to remember that I am a 'GAP' theorist -- as in a 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic' theorist -- who 'walks and explores the conceptual and theoretical boundary lines between Gestalt Theory, Adlerian Theory, and Psychoanalysis, among other schools of psychology. In football terminology, I look for 'the seams in the zone coverage' -- and that is where I do the essence of my theorizing, looking for 'Conceptual-Theoretical-Paradigm Bridges' between different schools of philosophy and/or psychology and/or simply paradigm perspective.
Every theorist of the mind takes a partly similar, partly different, snap shot of how they picture the process and structure of the mind -- including myself -- although my particular 'snapshot' is basically a collage of the snapshots taken before me, integrated together, and both modified and expanded in a way that makes sense to me. And I will be the first to admit that my own 'transference templates and complexes' play a significant determining factor in my particular 'range and focus of snapshots' as I present them to you. No different than Freud, Adler, Jung, or Perls before me....We have, or have had, 'unfinished business' or 'unfinished situations' that have provided each of us with the 'motivating drive' behind whatever theory we have ended up presenting. It is up to others to 'sift out' the 'narcissistic biases' that may lean a theory one way or another in such a fashion that it may not be helpful to a certain class of people with other different life experiences and/or different narcissistic biases...For example, the Seduction Theory might be useful for one class of therapeutic clients, while not being useful to another...And a good psychoanalyst will not use Freud's 'Oedipal Complex Theory' in a way that prevents the therapist from seeing the possibility of real clients that were really sexually seduced, manipulated, exploited, assaulted...as children...or later on...
So, right now I am walking the 'unfinished situation-lifestyle-transference' boundary between Gestalt Therapy, Adlerian Psychology, and Psychoanalysis with the goal of explaining Freud's concept of 'transference' and Adler's concept of 'lifestyle' in an integrative Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic fashion that probably Perls was the closest to 'nailing on the head with a hammer'....But I bring more psychoanalytic detail back into the human phenomenon that Freud called transference -- and that includes all of a 'pre-1897, post-1896, Classical, and Object Relations 'smorgasbord' to mix with Adler's theory of 'conscious early memories', 'lifestyle memories, inferiority feelings, compensation, superiority striving, lifestyle goals and orientations', and Perls' important contribution of 'the unfinished situation'.
One Freudian-Jungian theorist who I read had a good handle on what I am about to present here, when he called it our 'handicap challenge' -- our 'childhood ego traumacy memory' that becomes 'worked over a thousand or a hundred thousand times in our mind during the course of our life' -- and 'symbolically or metaphorically re-created, re-enacted, repeated in a way that is ideally aimed at compensation, defense, wish-fulfillment, ego-satisfaction, superiority-striving -- that crashes through the wall of our childhood ego traumacy, dis-satisfaction, and/or frustration that we have gone on to set up as a transference-lifestyle-unfinished situation GAME with the intended goal of patching the hole in our childhood-self-esteem -- and thus, essentially trying to make our self-esteem and self-image feel whole again'...
This is the 'whole part' of transference that Freud never got in its entirety -- rather, he gave us 'two partial solutions' that he never integrated: Part 1. 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory'; and Part 2. 'Fantasy-Wish Fulfillment-Oedipal Theory'.
This is also where my work connects with both Eric Berne's 'Games People Play', and Janov's 'The Primal Scream'. Because underneath each and every unique and customized 'Primal Transference-Lifestyle Game/Complex' that each and everyone of us is walking around and symbolically re-enacting in our lives with the goal of 'gaining or winning our supreme form of transference-lifestyle ego-satisfaction' -- underneath all of this -- is a childhood memory, and an ego-traumacy that, when traced back to its original source, is capable of eliciting a 'Primal Transference Scream' -- of anguish, pain, rejection, abandonment, exclusion, guilt, anxiety, panic, and/or rage....This is the essential transference connection between Freud's Traumacy Theory and his later Fantasy Theory which Adler re-developed in terms of the latter's 'Inferiority Feeling' and 'Superiority Striving (Ego-Compensation) Theory...
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Freud's real 'caput Nili' that he never totally found. He thought he had found it until he renounced that he had found it (i.e., The Traumacy-Seduction Theory). Then, he thought he had found it again with his creation of 'The Oedipal Complex' -- the counter-thesis to Freud's previous Traumacy-Seduction Theory.
But Freud couldn't, or wouldn't, in this particular context and controversy -- think dialectically and integratively as opposed to unilaterally. Thus, the 'caput Nili' (source of the Nile), for Freud, remained undiscovered. He found the two main 'branches' leading in and out of 'The Source' -- but he never found the source. The 'Source' as I am trumpeting it here is a dialectic integration between Freud's early Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his later Fantasy-Impulse Theory. The two are intimately interwoven. I just better need to show you how.
What remains is for the integration of the ideas of Freud, Adler, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Berne, Janov, Perls...
All woven together...in intricate fashion...
To be neatly demonstrated in a few crystal clear case examples of how this multi-dialectic theory all comes together...
In the life force, the death force -- the paradoxical love-hate, approach-avoidance, power-submission dynamics -- of the individual 'transference complexes' and the 'transference games that people play'....often without even knowing, or at least fully understanding, the underlying psycho-dynamics that are at work in their own minds...
And this is where I will leave you today, in this, the 100th anniversary of one of Freud's most important papers: 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912).
To help unfold this whole mystery -- and its solution or resolution -- in the form of more concrete details in concrete cases...And also, a synopsis of the evolution of the concept of transference in the history of psychoanalysis and how DGB Transference Theory is similar but also significantly -- different.
Until then....
Have a great day!
-- dgb, Oct 16, 17, 2012
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic-Gap-Bridging Creations....
-- Are Still in Process...
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Sunday, October 14, 2012
New Thoughts on 'The Id' (A DGB 'Re-Framing' of The Id)
Finished, Oct. 21, 2012...
Good evening,
There are two areas of study that I would like to focus on over the next little while -- and the two are intimately inter-connected. One, is the study of 'transference' (on this the 100th anniversary of one of Freud's most important papers: 'The Dynamics of Transference', 1912).
The second is the study of 'The ID' -- which I purposely spelled in capital letters for purposes of a 'double acronym' and for purposes of moving the study of The Id in a partly different direction than Freud.
Understand, before we get going that: 1. I am certainly not any kind of 'orthodox Classical Psychoanalytic theorist'; 2. I am not the type of Psychoanalytic theorist who wants to 'jump off the Freudian Ship' and jump onto 'The Object Relations Ship', or 'The Bionian Ship', or 'The Lacanian Ship'...If anything, what I want to do is to 'integrate the design of the Freudian Ship with The (Abraham-Klein-Fairbairn-Winnicott-Guntrip-Horney-Federn-Berne) Object Relations Ship....Except we are not going to talk Object Relations theory right now; rather Classical Id Theory going down a slightly different path....
Are you with me?
Let us start with Classical Id theory -- and I will differentiate it as we progress here from my currently evolving DGB ID theory.
In 1920, in 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle', Freud postulated a 'life instinct' and a 'death instinct' -- and he 'deposited' both these paradoxical, warring instincts in 'the id' (which was not to have a name for another 3 years in 1923, in 'The Ego and The Id'). We are told by James Strachey, co-editor of Freud's Complete Works, The Standard Edition, that 'the id' in German means 'the it', as in something quite different -- and 'dissociated/disavowed/detached' -- from (and/or by 'the ego').
Furthermore, the id is completely unconscious, and is like a container or reservoir that containing the completely volatile and unpredictable 'life' and 'death/or destructive') instincts. If you follow Freud by 'the letter of the law', this would seem to indicate that 'the instincts are volatile and unpredictable'; whereas as 'the id' -- being only the 'container' for the instincts, is not. The instincts or impulses or desires or drives or wishes are 'full of life and/or death processes' -- like the 'wish/desire' I had for the coffee I am drinking right now, whereas 'the id' is more like the coffee mug I am drinking the coffee out of -- structural, boring, not particularly interesting to a psychologist anymore than 'the prostate' would be of particular interest to a person studying genetics, sperm, and/or semen...
Life is full of the paradoxical interaction -- including the construction and destruction -- of 'structure' and 'process'...but Freud did call one of his papers, 'The Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' (1915), and by this he presumably meant that neither 'the id' nor even 'the primary instincts' travel to 'the consciousness of the ego' (except allusively and/or symbolically through a dream, a joke, a Freudian slip, a projection, a sublimation, a compromise-formation, a reaction-formation, a displacement, a transference relationship, a 'neurotic symptom and/or complex'...), all of which might be called 'vicissitudes' of the original primal instinct born in the confines of the id...which does start to make the id sound a little more exciting than a 'coffee mug'....and to be sure a 'prostate' has more life in it than a coffee mug -- indeed, it is essential to the birth of new life....Certainly, the prostate -- like any organ -- is 'organic', where a coffee mug is 'inorganic' (except to the extent that the coffee mug is made up of 'organic' ingredients). Anyway, let us not overly confuse the situation.
Perhaps, in this regard, we might want to call the id our 'instinct maker or creator', in which case, from a spiritual standpoint, some might even wish to view the id as both our 'Internal God' and our 'Unadulterated Creator of Spirit'...that is...before our 'defense mechanisms' get to it...and 'sugar coat' it, 'white wash' it, 'derail' it...'modify' it, 'compromise' it...make these desires more 'civil'....).
This is where 'the id' gets a bad name. It has been stereotyped as being inherently 'unconscious' and 'uncivil'. Not fit for civilization. And this brings us to the conflict between 'the ego and the id' (with the 'superego' being an extra 'ethical mutation' of 'the ego' involving the addition of more 'socially introjected', or 'self-introjected', guilt...)....
But did Freud get this all right? Or perhaps stated better, did Freud 'frame' his conceptualized theory of the psycho-dynamics of the ego and the id -- or the 'working psyche' -- in a manner that best described what was 'phenomenologically really happening'? Or are there better models out there of the human psyche that work better -- especially with, say, a hundred years (give or take 10 years) of evolution behind us to study this whole matter.
For Fichte -- and even for Freud at times in his earlier years -- the 'ego' meant the 'self' or 'Self'. (For Hume, even the 'self/Self' was a human invention -- and a conceptual fiction.)
So how could he turn around and argue that the ego was 'born' from the id, and that a newborn baby is 'full of id' with no ego present.
Balderdash! The ego is there. The self is there. The id is there -- as part of the ego/self. The first time it cries, we know it wants something that it doesn't have (it's 'oral' or 'impulsive desire' ego is in place); the first time it 'spits out food' or takes a dump, we know its 'anal-rejecting' ego is in place as well -- this classification system is not perfect -- no classification system is -- but it is very useful up to the point where the boundaries start to blend together. Just think 'nutritious' and 'good for me' for the 'oral desire' or 'oral ego'; and 'toxic' or 'poisonous' or 'not good for me' for the 'anal ego'. Of course, things can always get twisted around -- and turned inside out -- which is the essence of 'neurosis' and 'psychopathology', and much of the point of everything we are distinguishing here.
Remember Freud's primal distinction in his earliest days of theorizing but perhaps not fully articulated until between 1911 and 1915. The 'primary principle' (pleasure) vs. 'the reality principle' (safety) which by 1915 had been worked into 'the pleasure ego' vs. 'the reality ego'....No 'id' needed for this distinction....rather, just a 'splitting of the ego' which would come back to partly haunt or excite Freud (or both) in his last paper, 'Splitting of The Ego in The Mechanism of Defense' (1939)....Oh, oh, here comes Object Relations -- gyrating through Freud's mind -- to put another 'crowbar' in the 'assembly line' of Classical Psychoanalysis....
Do you think 'the id' -- meaning the 'house of the pleasure-pain principle' -- is 'unconscious' in a newborn baby? Do you think it is always even unconscious or subconscious or preconscious in a fully grown -- and 'mainly civilized' -- adult? We have our ego and superego to help protect us from the dangers of our 'unadulterated id'....even at a conscious level. So what is Freud's preoccupation with 'the unconscious' all about? Was that a part of his 'Secret Society Complex'? (I will explain that later via Freud's main 'Transference Complex'. Call it 'Transference Complex #1).
What I am getting at is this: We are all born with an 'ego' or an 'Ego-ID' that is already partly 'split' from the first breath of air and the first gulp of milk that, as a newborn baby, we take.
Yes, the ego is 'holistic' and working toward a common goal -- life and self-survival -- unless, or until, that gets 'pathologized' towards a 'wish of death'.
But lets take this example. I watch the activity of a small bird that drops down on my bird feeder, looking for food to eat. Self-survival again, is the name of the game.
But the small bird also has an 'ego' that is essentially divided into two part-functions: 1. 'Impulsive Drive'; and 2. 'Immunity or Internal Defense'. Both are crucial to self-survival. One moment it grabs a seed or two; the next moment, it's head is up, looking around, and the next moment it is in flight again...Harder to nab a moving target than a sitting one...
Thus, Freud's career long distinction between 'the primary (pleasure-unpleasure) principle' and 'the secondary principle' is at least partly a misnomer. Later on, this was framed as 'the pleasure principle' vs. 'the reality principle', and then 'the pleasure ego' vs. 'the reality ego'.
But if you think about it long enough, the 'reality principle' is essentially the 'unpleasure or pain principle' -- meaning the second half of the 'pleasure-unpleasure principle' -- meaning that they are one and the same with two part functions: one, 'pleasure' meaning 'food', 'shelter', 'sex', etc. and two, 'avoidance of pain or unpleasure' which essentially comes down to 'avoidance of possible predators, dangers, risks, frights, traumacies, longer term bad consequences, etc.', which is essentially what Freud meant by 'the reality principle' or 'the secondary principle'.
All of this is to say,
That we are all born with an 'ID-Ego' which can be divided into two parts and/or two part-functions:
1. The 'ID1-Ego' -- meaning 'The Impulsive-Desire (or Oral-Proactive/Receptive) Ego'; and,
2. The 'ID2-Ego' -- meaning 'The Immunity-Defense (or Anal-Righteous/Schizoid) Ego';
Which comes down to...
3. 'Perceived Need and Wish Satisfaction (Pleasure)' vs. 'Safety, Ethics-Politics-Law, and Detoxification (Avoidance of Pain)';
The 'Oral-Proactive/Receptive' Ego uses, for the most part the law of 'association' -- as in, 'I associate -- and want to bring you closer -- to me'....
Whereas 'The Anal Righteous, Rejecting, and/or Schizoid' Ego uses, for the most part, the law of 'dissociation' -- as in, 'I dissociate myself -- and want to push you further away from -- me'....
A distinction can also be made here between the 'oral addictions' and 'the anal defenses' against the 'oral addictions'. or even the 'anal obsessive-compulsions and/or defenses' (transference, projection, introjection, identification, displacement, denial, sublimation...) which may (or may not) be covering up for a 'submerged, underlying, suppressed, repressed, subconscious') 'oral addiction' or 'oral fixation'....(food, sex, seduction, power, money, alcohol, drugs, clothes, shopping, spending...) or the two sets of symptoms, together might make up a 'compromise-formation' between the impulsive desire and the defense against the desire...
For example, in 'manic-depression', we might say that the 'manic' phase satisfies 'the oral addictions part' and the 'depressive' phase satisfies 'the anal righteousness and self-rejection part'....Rather than a 'better working compromise between the two polar sides of the personality', we get a radically extreme polarity between opposite sides of 'The Id-Ego' being acted out sequentially, with each part (ID-Ego1 and ID-Ego2) -- the 'oral' and the 'anal' side -- taking its respective turn at 'controlling' the 'steering wheel' of 'The Central Executive Ego'...
Coming from a Gestalt background, a 'good hot seat and empty chair therapy session' might help a person with over-extreme polarities warring with each other to gain more 'conscious awareness' of the whole set of dynamics, and ideally, help move the person towards a more integrative, healthy balance...
This is one example of how Psychoanalysis and Gestalt Therapy might be integrated to complement each other....Therapeutically, I like the hot seat and empty seat technique but theoretically, I prefer where I am right now in terms of my development of 'psycho-dynamic structure and process' using Psychoanalysis as my 'base camp', than the simple 'two compartment-topdog-underdog' model that Perls left us with in Gestalt Theory. It's simple and effective -- I just like more to work with, such as 'the transference templates' and 'the pleasure ego' vs. 'the safety ego' or the 'oral ego' vs. 'the anal ego', 'inferiority complexes juxtaposed against superiority complexes', 'Gods' and 'Archetypes', 'Nietzsche's/Zarathustra's Mountain', and 'Nietzsche's Abyss', and 'the tight rope of life between them'...all the 'Object Relations Ego States' (The Nurturing Superego and Underego or Topdog and Underdog, The Hedonistic-Dionysian-Pleasure Topdog and Underdog, The Anal-Schizoid and/or Oral-Phobic Topdog and Underdog, The Apollonian, Anal-Righteous-Rejecting Topdog and Underdog, The Private Shadow Ego, The Public Persona Ego, The Central Executive Ego, The Unconscious, Pre-Conscious, or Conscious, Uncivilized, or Unrefined Id-Ego (Before Splitting), The Dream-Weaver, The Id-Ego Vault, The Oral Addiction (Obsessive-Compulsion) Centre (which is inside The Dionsysian Pleasure Ego), The Anal Addiction (Obsessive-Compulsion) Centre which can be found inside The Apollonian Anal-Righteous Ego...
Topographically, the model now looks like this:
1. The Nurturing Ego which splits into our Nurturing Topdog and Underdog (or Nurturing Superego and Underego);
2. Our Dionysian-Pleasure Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
3. Our Anal-Schizoid (Angry, Distancing) Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
4. Our Oral-Phobic (Scared, anxious, distancing) Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
5. Our Anal-Righteous-Rejecting (Confrontational) Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
6. Our Private Shadow Ego;
7. Our Public Persona Ego;
8. Our Central Decision-Making Ego;
9. Our Dream-Maker;
10. Our 'Escaped' Id-Ego Complexes and Their Greater or Lesser, Partly Healthy, Partly Toxic Vicissitudes;
11. Our Id-Ego Vault;
12. Our 'Post-Transference' Id-Ego Complexes and Their Partly Toxic Vicissitudes;
13. Our Transference Traumacy and Narcissistic Fixation Templates;
14. Our Version of Nietzsche's Mountain;
15. Our Version of 'Nietzsche's Tightrope Walk of Life' (Our Will Towards Greater and Greater Self-Empowerment, Being, and Becoming);
16. Our 'Symbolic, Existential Replacement Womb' (Or our 'Safety Room' -- or initially and ideally, 'Our Nurturing Mom');
17. Our Newborn, Evolving Id-Ego, Our Impulsive Drives, and Our Beginning Anal Defenses, 'Functional and Dysfunctional Splits in The Personality/Ego/Self;
18. Our Existential Abyss (Nietzsche's Abyss, Anaximander's Apeiron, Freud's Partial Version of The Id as 'Chaotic', 'Unorganized', and Paradoxical, Self-Contradictory, Pre-Polarization)
19. Our Real Pre-Birth Womb;
20. Our Genetic Potential Self
Maybe understandable at this point, maybe not...or probably partly both...
Until the next time...we can spend together....
dgb, Oct. 21, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
Good evening,
There are two areas of study that I would like to focus on over the next little while -- and the two are intimately inter-connected. One, is the study of 'transference' (on this the 100th anniversary of one of Freud's most important papers: 'The Dynamics of Transference', 1912).
The second is the study of 'The ID' -- which I purposely spelled in capital letters for purposes of a 'double acronym' and for purposes of moving the study of The Id in a partly different direction than Freud.
Understand, before we get going that: 1. I am certainly not any kind of 'orthodox Classical Psychoanalytic theorist'; 2. I am not the type of Psychoanalytic theorist who wants to 'jump off the Freudian Ship' and jump onto 'The Object Relations Ship', or 'The Bionian Ship', or 'The Lacanian Ship'...If anything, what I want to do is to 'integrate the design of the Freudian Ship with The (Abraham-Klein-Fairbairn-Winnicott-Guntrip-Horney-Federn-Berne) Object Relations Ship....Except we are not going to talk Object Relations theory right now; rather Classical Id Theory going down a slightly different path....
Are you with me?
Let us start with Classical Id theory -- and I will differentiate it as we progress here from my currently evolving DGB ID theory.
In 1920, in 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle', Freud postulated a 'life instinct' and a 'death instinct' -- and he 'deposited' both these paradoxical, warring instincts in 'the id' (which was not to have a name for another 3 years in 1923, in 'The Ego and The Id'). We are told by James Strachey, co-editor of Freud's Complete Works, The Standard Edition, that 'the id' in German means 'the it', as in something quite different -- and 'dissociated/disavowed/detached' -- from (and/or by 'the ego').
Furthermore, the id is completely unconscious, and is like a container or reservoir that containing the completely volatile and unpredictable 'life' and 'death/or destructive') instincts. If you follow Freud by 'the letter of the law', this would seem to indicate that 'the instincts are volatile and unpredictable'; whereas as 'the id' -- being only the 'container' for the instincts, is not. The instincts or impulses or desires or drives or wishes are 'full of life and/or death processes' -- like the 'wish/desire' I had for the coffee I am drinking right now, whereas 'the id' is more like the coffee mug I am drinking the coffee out of -- structural, boring, not particularly interesting to a psychologist anymore than 'the prostate' would be of particular interest to a person studying genetics, sperm, and/or semen...
Life is full of the paradoxical interaction -- including the construction and destruction -- of 'structure' and 'process'...but Freud did call one of his papers, 'The Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' (1915), and by this he presumably meant that neither 'the id' nor even 'the primary instincts' travel to 'the consciousness of the ego' (except allusively and/or symbolically through a dream, a joke, a Freudian slip, a projection, a sublimation, a compromise-formation, a reaction-formation, a displacement, a transference relationship, a 'neurotic symptom and/or complex'...), all of which might be called 'vicissitudes' of the original primal instinct born in the confines of the id...which does start to make the id sound a little more exciting than a 'coffee mug'....and to be sure a 'prostate' has more life in it than a coffee mug -- indeed, it is essential to the birth of new life....Certainly, the prostate -- like any organ -- is 'organic', where a coffee mug is 'inorganic' (except to the extent that the coffee mug is made up of 'organic' ingredients). Anyway, let us not overly confuse the situation.
Perhaps, in this regard, we might want to call the id our 'instinct maker or creator', in which case, from a spiritual standpoint, some might even wish to view the id as both our 'Internal God' and our 'Unadulterated Creator of Spirit'...that is...before our 'defense mechanisms' get to it...and 'sugar coat' it, 'white wash' it, 'derail' it...'modify' it, 'compromise' it...make these desires more 'civil'....).
This is where 'the id' gets a bad name. It has been stereotyped as being inherently 'unconscious' and 'uncivil'. Not fit for civilization. And this brings us to the conflict between 'the ego and the id' (with the 'superego' being an extra 'ethical mutation' of 'the ego' involving the addition of more 'socially introjected', or 'self-introjected', guilt...)....
But did Freud get this all right? Or perhaps stated better, did Freud 'frame' his conceptualized theory of the psycho-dynamics of the ego and the id -- or the 'working psyche' -- in a manner that best described what was 'phenomenologically really happening'? Or are there better models out there of the human psyche that work better -- especially with, say, a hundred years (give or take 10 years) of evolution behind us to study this whole matter.
For Fichte -- and even for Freud at times in his earlier years -- the 'ego' meant the 'self' or 'Self'. (For Hume, even the 'self/Self' was a human invention -- and a conceptual fiction.)
So how could he turn around and argue that the ego was 'born' from the id, and that a newborn baby is 'full of id' with no ego present.
Balderdash! The ego is there. The self is there. The id is there -- as part of the ego/self. The first time it cries, we know it wants something that it doesn't have (it's 'oral' or 'impulsive desire' ego is in place); the first time it 'spits out food' or takes a dump, we know its 'anal-rejecting' ego is in place as well -- this classification system is not perfect -- no classification system is -- but it is very useful up to the point where the boundaries start to blend together. Just think 'nutritious' and 'good for me' for the 'oral desire' or 'oral ego'; and 'toxic' or 'poisonous' or 'not good for me' for the 'anal ego'. Of course, things can always get twisted around -- and turned inside out -- which is the essence of 'neurosis' and 'psychopathology', and much of the point of everything we are distinguishing here.
Remember Freud's primal distinction in his earliest days of theorizing but perhaps not fully articulated until between 1911 and 1915. The 'primary principle' (pleasure) vs. 'the reality principle' (safety) which by 1915 had been worked into 'the pleasure ego' vs. 'the reality ego'....No 'id' needed for this distinction....rather, just a 'splitting of the ego' which would come back to partly haunt or excite Freud (or both) in his last paper, 'Splitting of The Ego in The Mechanism of Defense' (1939)....Oh, oh, here comes Object Relations -- gyrating through Freud's mind -- to put another 'crowbar' in the 'assembly line' of Classical Psychoanalysis....
Do you think 'the id' -- meaning the 'house of the pleasure-pain principle' -- is 'unconscious' in a newborn baby? Do you think it is always even unconscious or subconscious or preconscious in a fully grown -- and 'mainly civilized' -- adult? We have our ego and superego to help protect us from the dangers of our 'unadulterated id'....even at a conscious level. So what is Freud's preoccupation with 'the unconscious' all about? Was that a part of his 'Secret Society Complex'? (I will explain that later via Freud's main 'Transference Complex'. Call it 'Transference Complex #1).
What I am getting at is this: We are all born with an 'ego' or an 'Ego-ID' that is already partly 'split' from the first breath of air and the first gulp of milk that, as a newborn baby, we take.
Yes, the ego is 'holistic' and working toward a common goal -- life and self-survival -- unless, or until, that gets 'pathologized' towards a 'wish of death'.
But lets take this example. I watch the activity of a small bird that drops down on my bird feeder, looking for food to eat. Self-survival again, is the name of the game.
But the small bird also has an 'ego' that is essentially divided into two part-functions: 1. 'Impulsive Drive'; and 2. 'Immunity or Internal Defense'. Both are crucial to self-survival. One moment it grabs a seed or two; the next moment, it's head is up, looking around, and the next moment it is in flight again...Harder to nab a moving target than a sitting one...
Thus, Freud's career long distinction between 'the primary (pleasure-unpleasure) principle' and 'the secondary principle' is at least partly a misnomer. Later on, this was framed as 'the pleasure principle' vs. 'the reality principle', and then 'the pleasure ego' vs. 'the reality ego'.
But if you think about it long enough, the 'reality principle' is essentially the 'unpleasure or pain principle' -- meaning the second half of the 'pleasure-unpleasure principle' -- meaning that they are one and the same with two part functions: one, 'pleasure' meaning 'food', 'shelter', 'sex', etc. and two, 'avoidance of pain or unpleasure' which essentially comes down to 'avoidance of possible predators, dangers, risks, frights, traumacies, longer term bad consequences, etc.', which is essentially what Freud meant by 'the reality principle' or 'the secondary principle'.
All of this is to say,
That we are all born with an 'ID-Ego' which can be divided into two parts and/or two part-functions:
1. The 'ID1-Ego' -- meaning 'The Impulsive-Desire (or Oral-Proactive/Receptive) Ego'; and,
2. The 'ID2-Ego' -- meaning 'The Immunity-Defense (or Anal-Righteous/Schizoid) Ego';
Which comes down to...
3. 'Perceived Need and Wish Satisfaction (Pleasure)' vs. 'Safety, Ethics-Politics-Law, and Detoxification (Avoidance of Pain)';
The 'Oral-Proactive/Receptive' Ego uses, for the most part the law of 'association' -- as in, 'I associate -- and want to bring you closer -- to me'....
Whereas 'The Anal Righteous, Rejecting, and/or Schizoid' Ego uses, for the most part, the law of 'dissociation' -- as in, 'I dissociate myself -- and want to push you further away from -- me'....
A distinction can also be made here between the 'oral addictions' and 'the anal defenses' against the 'oral addictions'. or even the 'anal obsessive-compulsions and/or defenses' (transference, projection, introjection, identification, displacement, denial, sublimation...) which may (or may not) be covering up for a 'submerged, underlying, suppressed, repressed, subconscious') 'oral addiction' or 'oral fixation'....(food, sex, seduction, power, money, alcohol, drugs, clothes, shopping, spending...) or the two sets of symptoms, together might make up a 'compromise-formation' between the impulsive desire and the defense against the desire...
For example, in 'manic-depression', we might say that the 'manic' phase satisfies 'the oral addictions part' and the 'depressive' phase satisfies 'the anal righteousness and self-rejection part'....Rather than a 'better working compromise between the two polar sides of the personality', we get a radically extreme polarity between opposite sides of 'The Id-Ego' being acted out sequentially, with each part (ID-Ego1 and ID-Ego2) -- the 'oral' and the 'anal' side -- taking its respective turn at 'controlling' the 'steering wheel' of 'The Central Executive Ego'...
Coming from a Gestalt background, a 'good hot seat and empty chair therapy session' might help a person with over-extreme polarities warring with each other to gain more 'conscious awareness' of the whole set of dynamics, and ideally, help move the person towards a more integrative, healthy balance...
This is one example of how Psychoanalysis and Gestalt Therapy might be integrated to complement each other....Therapeutically, I like the hot seat and empty seat technique but theoretically, I prefer where I am right now in terms of my development of 'psycho-dynamic structure and process' using Psychoanalysis as my 'base camp', than the simple 'two compartment-topdog-underdog' model that Perls left us with in Gestalt Theory. It's simple and effective -- I just like more to work with, such as 'the transference templates' and 'the pleasure ego' vs. 'the safety ego' or the 'oral ego' vs. 'the anal ego', 'inferiority complexes juxtaposed against superiority complexes', 'Gods' and 'Archetypes', 'Nietzsche's/Zarathustra's Mountain', and 'Nietzsche's Abyss', and 'the tight rope of life between them'...all the 'Object Relations Ego States' (The Nurturing Superego and Underego or Topdog and Underdog, The Hedonistic-Dionysian-Pleasure Topdog and Underdog, The Anal-Schizoid and/or Oral-Phobic Topdog and Underdog, The Apollonian, Anal-Righteous-Rejecting Topdog and Underdog, The Private Shadow Ego, The Public Persona Ego, The Central Executive Ego, The Unconscious, Pre-Conscious, or Conscious, Uncivilized, or Unrefined Id-Ego (Before Splitting), The Dream-Weaver, The Id-Ego Vault, The Oral Addiction (Obsessive-Compulsion) Centre (which is inside The Dionsysian Pleasure Ego), The Anal Addiction (Obsessive-Compulsion) Centre which can be found inside The Apollonian Anal-Righteous Ego...
Topographically, the model now looks like this:
1. The Nurturing Ego which splits into our Nurturing Topdog and Underdog (or Nurturing Superego and Underego);
2. Our Dionysian-Pleasure Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
3. Our Anal-Schizoid (Angry, Distancing) Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
4. Our Oral-Phobic (Scared, anxious, distancing) Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
5. Our Anal-Righteous-Rejecting (Confrontational) Ego which can split into topdog and underdog polarities;
6. Our Private Shadow Ego;
7. Our Public Persona Ego;
8. Our Central Decision-Making Ego;
9. Our Dream-Maker;
10. Our 'Escaped' Id-Ego Complexes and Their Greater or Lesser, Partly Healthy, Partly Toxic Vicissitudes;
11. Our Id-Ego Vault;
12. Our 'Post-Transference' Id-Ego Complexes and Their Partly Toxic Vicissitudes;
13. Our Transference Traumacy and Narcissistic Fixation Templates;
14. Our Version of Nietzsche's Mountain;
15. Our Version of 'Nietzsche's Tightrope Walk of Life' (Our Will Towards Greater and Greater Self-Empowerment, Being, and Becoming);
16. Our 'Symbolic, Existential Replacement Womb' (Or our 'Safety Room' -- or initially and ideally, 'Our Nurturing Mom');
17. Our Newborn, Evolving Id-Ego, Our Impulsive Drives, and Our Beginning Anal Defenses, 'Functional and Dysfunctional Splits in The Personality/Ego/Self;
18. Our Existential Abyss (Nietzsche's Abyss, Anaximander's Apeiron, Freud's Partial Version of The Id as 'Chaotic', 'Unorganized', and Paradoxical, Self-Contradictory, Pre-Polarization)
19. Our Real Pre-Birth Womb;
20. Our Genetic Potential Self
Maybe understandable at this point, maybe not...or probably partly both...
Until the next time...we can spend together....
dgb, Oct. 21, 2012,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
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