I am about to embark on a critique of as many of Freud's most important and famous essays, ideas, theories, 'anti-theories', and their derrivatives as I can get to.
Now, I am in a bit of a quandry here. I need to do some explaining before I start this ambitious enterprise.
Firstly, I am not a psychoanalyst. I have never seen a psychoanalyst, and never stepped a foot inside a psychoanalytic training session.
Why? Probably money, period. Psychoanalysis has set itself up as an 'aristocratic psychology' -- a 'psychology for the rich' -- and/or that is the stereotype that it has created for itself. To me, this is unfortunate. This in itself restricts Psychoanalysis' potential growth -- theoretically, therapeutically, culturally, and class-wise.
Furthermore, what Freud started, and what The Psychoanalytic Establishment continues to support and maintain -- is a psychology of 'exclusionism'.
This is highly ironic and paradoxical because in my 35 years or so of studying psychology that runs through Humanistic Psychology (Rogers, Maslow, May, Fromm...), Cognitive Therapy (Maltz, Ellis, Beck, Frank, Kelly, Korzybski, Hayakawa, Branden, Rand, Meichenbaum...), Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, et al...), Adlerian Psychology (Adler, Dreikeurs, Mosak...) Transactional Analysis (Berne), and Psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, Masson...), if there is one thing I have learned, it is probably this: that most if not all varieties of human neurosis, psychosis, and psychopathology usually start with the individual's perception -- real and/or imagined -- of some form of 'social/family/school/cultural/racist/sexist/ exclusionism'.
Human neurosis can generally be summed up in the sentence: 'I am not wanted here, not invited, not liked, not accepted, not appreciated, not acknowleged, not relevant...
Transactional Analysis summed up the overarching idea above under two polar headings: 1. You're okay, I'm not okay'; 2. I'm okay, you're not okay'; or the two condensed together: 3. You're not okay, I'm not okay.
This applies to Freud himself just as much as it applies to anyone and everyone else...
Freud once said that you had/have to be a psychoanalyst in order to properly understand what comes out of 'the depths of the unconscious' and particularly the 'dynamics of repression'. I say, Well, repression is still a very controversial concept and subject matter that sometimes (often) defies what most would call 'good rational-empiricism'. It can easily become a 'circular concept' with no apparent foundational basis except in the eyes and ears of the theorist who 'believes in the existence of repression'.
A psychoanalyist says, 'You are repressed.' You reply, 'I am not repressed.' And the psychoanalyst then uses your 'resistance' as further evidence that 'you are repressed'.
How do you ever 'prove' the existence of a 'repression' except for the psychoanalyst's 'interpretation' as such, and how do you distinguish it from a much more common and more easily validated concept/phenomenon of 'suppression' or even 'dissociation'?
All of the concepts of 'suppression', 'subconscious', and 'dissociation' have much more 'tangible rational empiricism' attached to them than Freud's concept of 'repression' -- or even 'unconscious'.
I use the term 'unconscious' but often hesitatingly, and generally speaking, I am much more comfortable with the concept of 'subconscious'. I don't think I will ever use the concept of 'repression'. I believe in 'the psychology of defense' but, generally speaking, I do not support the 'psychology of repression'.
Does this take me out of the 'domain of Psychoanalysis'? The Psychoanalytic Establishment would obviously say 'yes' immediately, further supported by the fact that I have no formal training in Psychoanalysis. But The Psychoanalytic Establishment and Institute is partly like 'Hotel California' -- once you get in, you become 'locked into their particular paradigm' which includes Freud's own 'transference neurosis relative to his father'.
When Freud was alive, you had to be like Melanie Klein -- female and perceived as non-threatening -- in order to 'break through the wall of Freud's paradigm' -- and no man has 'broken through the neurotic paradigm of Freud's father-transference neurosis in Classical Psychoanalysis' unless he has either left Psychoanalysis completely (Adler, Jung, Reich, Rank, Ferenczi, Horney, Sullivan, Erickson, Fromm, Perls, Masson...and many more...) or followed 'Melanie Klein's skirt' into the paradigm of Object Relations and Self-Psychology. And most of Object Relations and all of Self-Psychology developed after Freud had died. But for a few years, it seems possible that there was perhaps a 'running positive dialectic' between Freud and Melanie Klein where Freud may have actually been partly influenced by Klein's work in a way that Pierre Janet never could. You see, 'Object Relations' -- a 'sub-school' of Psychoanalysis -- founded mainly by Melanie Klein, was an extension of Pierre Janet's ideas of 'the splitting of the ego', 'the alter-ego', and 'the dissociated personality' where 'ego' and 'alter-ego' are 'dissociated', 'alientated', 'disconnected' from each other. It is from Janet's ideas -- that Freud fought long and hard against (too bad Janet wasn't a woman) -- that the book and movie 'Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde' were born from.
With all due respect to Freud, the idea of 'the splitting of the ego' which Freud finally acknowledged and accepted towards the end of his career -- and stated that the idea seemed both strangely old and new at the same time (I wonder why) -- and the associated ideas of 'alter-ego' and 'dissociation between opposing ego-states' -- all of these ideas were much more 'theoretically and therapeutically useful' (at least in this author's strong editorial opinion) than Freud's 'hanging on concept' of 'repression'.
Perhaps even 'the Id' should be viewed as having an 'ego-state' extension that I would/do call 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic (selfish, egotistic, sensual, sexual) Ego' ('DNE' for short). The DNE can in turn be 'split' into 'The DNS' and 'The DNU' -- i.e., 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underdog or Underego', and 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Topdog or Superego'. Thus, you can have 'vertical splits' and 'horizontal splits' in the personality: 'superego' vs. 'underego' being an example of a 'vertical power split', and 'Approval-Seeking Underego' vs. 'Dionsysian-Narcissistic Underego' being an example of a 'horizontal power split'.
In my frame of thinking following this line of thinking, I differentiate between 'six auxilliary ego-states' and 'one Central (Mediating, Executive) Ego.
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The Gap-DGB Integrative (Psychoanalytic) Model of The Psyche
The six auxilliary ego-states are:
1. The Nurturing-Supportive Superego (NSS);
2. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Superego (DNS);
3. The Righteous-Rejecting Superego (RRS);
4. The Approval-Seeking Underego (ASU);
5. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underego (DNU);
6. The Righteous-Rejecting (Rebellious) Underego (RRU).
and the main decision-making ego-state is...
7. The Central (Mediating-Executive) Ego (CE)
Working downwards into the subconscious/unconscious, we have
8. The Dream Catcher/Weaver (DCW);
9. The Shadow-Id (Secret Interests) (SI)
10. The Personal Transference-Lifestyle Template (PTLT);
11. The Mythological-Symbolic Archetype Template (MSAT)
12. The Genetic Self Potential Template (GSPT);
13. The Multi-Bi-Polar Apeiron Template (MBPAT)
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The difference between 'repression' and 'suppression' is extremely important because it is easy to conflate, condense, and confuse the two together.
I 'suppress' what I am afraid to ask or tell you -- the concept of 'suppression' is easily validated by self-experience. But 'suppression' implies that I know very well what I want to ask or tell you. In the case of a 'suppressed memory' as opposed to a 'repressed memory', I remember the 'memory' all too clearly -- I am just embarrassed and/or otherwise reluctant to share it with you. A 'repressed memory' implies that I don't remember the memory at all -- which raises doubts about its very existence or is it a 'conceptual construction' created by Freud to explain a phenomena that he couldn't otherwise explain (such as hysteria, or anxiety neurosis, or obsessional neurosis...)?
For much of Freud's career, Freud viewed 'repression' as 'the defense' associated with ALL human neurosis, until he finally realized -- or admitted -- that were many other 'psychological defenses' at man's disposal such as: introjection, identification, projection, displacement, denial, transference, dissociation, retroflection (which is used a lot in Gestalt Therapy) and one that Adler added which is much more important to the etiology of neurosis, and more pervasive than Freud's concept of repression -- and that is the concept of 'compensation'. But even more important and pervasive to the etiology of all neurosis is the concept of 'transference'.
I see 'transference' as the over or under-riding 'defense mechanism' in all neuroses, and every other defense mechanism is a subset of transference.
I distinguish between: 'identification transferences', 'introjective transferences', 'projective transferences', 'compensatory transferences', 'positive transferences', 'negative transferences', 'oral transferences', 'anal transferences', 'genital transferences', 'distancing transferences', 'anal-schizoid transferences', 'anal-rejecting transferences', 'oral-nurturing transferences', 'narcissistic transferences', 'anti-narcissistic transferences', 'altruistic transferences', 'impulse-desire-fantasy transferences', 'impulse-restraint transferences' 'anxiety transferences', 'rebellious transferences', 'violent transferences'... and on and on we could go...
The concept of 'transference' is totally Psychoanalysis as are the concepts of 'narcissism', 'defense', 'projection', 'introjection', 'identification', and most of the other concepts listed above. So how can you call my work anything but 'psychoanalytic' other than perhaps the 'extensions' and 'disagreements' that I have with The Psychoanalytic Establishment...And oh yes, my 'lack of formal training' -- or shall we call that 'brain-washing'?
So call me an 'underground psychoanalytic theorist' if you will -- operating outside the walls of The Psychoanalytic Establishment, and even operating outside of 'The Academic Establishment'. I admire Spinoza's philosophical approach: Don't lock me into any kind of 'Establishment' that is going to try to 'muzzle my thinking' -- or at least the 'public demonstration of my thinking' .
As soon as you become affiliated with any kind of 'organization' or 'institution' or 'political party' or 'religious denomination' or 'corporation' or 'school of thought', you become subject -- and often a 'slave' -- to the organization's agenda and particular brand of 'group think'.
At times 'group think' can be 'enlivening' and 'multi-dialectically challenging and evolutionary'. But this is probably by far the exception rather than the rule. Much more often, 'group think' becomes synonomous with 'no think' or thinking inside a 'stagnant paradigm', or worse a 'dangerous or even evil paradigm'.
The worst cases of 'group think' that come quickly to mind are 'Nazi Germany', 'McCarthyism', 'Witch Hunting', 'The Reign of Terror', any form of 'racial cleansing', 'stereotyping', 'discrimination', 'reverse-discrimination', 'religious extremism', 'political extremism', 'righteous trash-talking', any form of 'supremacy thinking that is socially divisive and exclusionist, let alone violent', 'narcissistic collusions that are non-democratic and exclusionist', 'political and corporate conflict of interests', 'lobbyist special-interest groups that do not have to face up to their 'bi-polar, anti-special interest group' in an open, democratic forum. (All lobbyist groups should have to operate through public, open, democratic forums.)
Back to 'Psychoanalysis'...
In the case of a 'conscious' memory, a 'conscious memory' can also be called a 'subconscious memory' if it is 'psychodynamically alive' in our subconscious (or even in our unconscious) and yet, if someone asks us to recall this particular memory, we can usually recall it within a few minutes, given the right 'prompter' and/or 'association'.
So 'defining' Psychoanalysis can be -- indeed, usually is -- a very subjective, narcissistic-righteous matter.
Freud had a very 'anal-retentive' habit of defining it 'extremely tightly' according to his own parameters (which paradoxically sometimes changed 180 degrees like his still controversial switchover from 'The Traumacy-Seduction Theory' to 'The Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory'). If Freud had said 'the world was flat', I am sure that would have been included in 'The Freudian Bible of Classical Psychoanalysis'.
Freud did a brutal job of reconciling his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory with his post 1897 evolving Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Symbolic-Oedipal Theory. He just 'dumped' the first as if it never existed -- that it came from nowhere -- and then developed an 'opposite thesis'. I guess he could do that fairly easily because in 1897 he had no following -- just three volumes of work in The Standard 24 volume Edition to support his work during this time period, and Joseph Breuer 'one too many evenings and a thousand miles left behind'...
But that is why you have me here: to integrate what Freud did not know how to properly integrate. Dialectically integrate. That is why you have me 'trumpeting' the metaphorical structure of Hegel's Hotel as a larger and more useful 'multi-dialectic-humanistic-existential, philosophical and psychological paradigm' -- than 'Freud's Classical Hotel'.
If I am coming down hard on Freud here -- like thousands before me -- it is not because I do not respect Freud. Because I do. Indeed, I believe that he was one of the creatively most brilliant thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. But this still doesn't mean that he wasn't commonly -- wrong. And stuck inside a cultural Victorian paradigm, not to mention the theoretical paradigms of his own making.
In Victorian society, masturbation was commonly -- and/or at least publicly -- viewed as 'self-abuse'. So for Freud, stuck inside this Victorian paradigm, ending such 'neuroses' as 'neurasthenia' (chronic depleted energy) would logically involve 'stopping self abuse' -- i.e., stopping masturbation. (Maybe the opposite prescription might have been more appropriate.) In Victorian culture, 'castration anxiety' sounds like it was a very real -- and scary -- phenomenon, especially for a small boy growing up. 'If you keep wanking your thing there, little Siggy, daddy's going to cut it off!'
Personally, I think I partly understand Freud better than he understood himself -- and a thousand psychoanalysts after him have purported to understand him, such as the one and only Ernest Jones -- because such 'biographers' of Freud were all 'psychoanalyzing' Freud according to Freud's own theoretical parameters and assumptions. 'Towing the company' line if you will. 'Upholding the corporate image'. 'Giving Freud -- and all psychoanalysts -- what he and they wanted to hear.'
How can you possibly get any kind of significantly different understanding of Freud unless you have someone who is willing and/or able to see some of the 'deficiencies', 'liabilities', and 'limitations' of these same parameters and assumptions that Freud -- and all Classical Psychoanalysts -- have been locked inside for over 100 years?
I like 'Hegel's Hotel' better than 'Freud's Hotel' because Hegel's Hotel incorporates a better assortment of assumptions, parameters, paradigms, and 'glasses' than those that Freud was using at the time he was theorizing, and that essentially all, or most, Classical Psychoanalysts -- like 'good corporate employees' -- have been using since.
This is not to say that Classical Psychoanalysis has not evolved since Freud died -- it's just that some of the most important assumptions that Freud was using -- and that Classical Psychoanalysis continues to use with little to no modifications and/or updated extensions since Freud died -- are also some of his most flawed assumptions. Like 'Childhood Sexuality Theory' and 'Fantasy Theory' and 'Oedipal Theory'-- without their bipolar 'alter-ego' theory: 'Traumacy-Seduction-Assault Theory'.
The two theories are still clamoring to be integrated. And without trying to be arrogant, I am probably the only theorist with enough of the right type of 'outside knowledge' and (read Adlerian Theory, Gestalt Theory, Transactional Analysis Theory...) -- and internal focus and creativity -- to properly do it.
If this makes me an 'egotist' and/or a 'narcissist', I can live with that. So was Freud. So was Masson. So are most professional athletes. You have to be an 'egotist' to get to the top -- of whatever 'mountain' you are trying to climb.
Like Ayn Rand would write, that simply means that /I/you/we believe in the strength and power of my/your/our skills and abilities....the skills and abilities that can make us all 'Supermen' and/or 'Superwomen' to the upper threshold of how high these skills and abilities can take us, just as long as we work hard enough, persevere enough, and meet the challenge of any and all obstacles in order to to get to where we want to go...our 'end visualization', our 'end fantasy', whatever that might be...
Not too many 'classical psychoanalysts' had'have the courage to 'think outside the classical box' -- at least publicly -- and if they did/do, then they were/are no longer likely considered to be 'Classical Psychoanalysts'. In Spinozian style, they were/are 'ex-communicated'. They were/are -- 'excluded'. Just look at Masson's rebellion against Freud in the 1980s. Masson stood up for what he believed was right -- and for that -- he is no longer a 'Psychoanalyst', let alone 'The Project Director of The Freud Archives'.
But alas things can change. Resentments can smooth over. 'Dissociations' can 'melt away', given the right circumstances, over time -- and 'bridges' and 'integrations' can start to take their place.
This is Hegel's World. This is Hegel's Hotel. 'Thesis'. 'Anti-thesis'. And finally -- 'synthesis'...'integration'...'either/or', 'right or wrong' melting away into a more harmonious, dialectic union...Perhaps with an 'agreement to disagree'. Or perhaps with a 'compromise towards the middle'. But most importantly, with more 'tolerance' and 'acceptance' for the right of any individual to 'disagree' with 'group think'. And not to be condemned for this...ex-communicated...excluded...
And Freud was The Great Excluder...
I told you he got this 'transference-characteristic' from his dad...
How come Freud couldn't see this clearly? Or could he? How come most Classical Psychoanalysts 'minimized' the 'negative transference' relationship between Freud and his dad? Or couldn't see it -- and worse, what the negative repercussions on Classical Psychoanalysis were.
Why? Because most Psychoanalysts -- read in particular Ernest Jones (his biography of Freud) -- did what Freud did. And Freud 'minimized' his dad. Sigmund 'excluded' his dad like his dad excluded -- and minimized -- little Siggy.
Most academics agree that the case of 'Anna O' is the first 'case' of Psychoanalyis. I agree -- in part.
But the 'template' case -- the case on which all of Psychoanalysis rests -- is little Sigmund's first, early childhood -- conscious -- memory.
And Freud -- and thousands of psychoanalysts -- continue to 'walk right around this first conscious memory of little Sigmund', like 'lemmings that follow their leader over a cliff'. I am partly sorry if I am coming across as being overly harsh here, or 'unfair to some more rebellious, individual thinking, psychoanalysts' but in the end we are all responsible and accountable for our own personal and collective 'transference neuroses' -- and doing something about them -- otherwise, why call 'Psychoanalysis' a 'first-rate form of psychotherapy'?
Psychoanalysts have to start thinking about 'conscious early memories' not as 'screen memories' that both hide and allude to other more important 'repressed memories and/or fantasies' but rather as important 'transference memories' in and by themselves. And for that, Psychoanalysts can thank Adler indirectly -- through me. Because what I am doing here is essentially turning 'Adlerian lifestyle and conscious early memory theory' back into an 'updated' form of 'Classical Transference Theory'. Which is so psychodynamically different than 'standard Freudian Classical Transference Theory' that many would ask, how can it possibly be called 'Classical' -- in which case I propose the alternative names of 'Quantum-Integrative Transference Theory' and 'Quantum-Integrative Psychoanalysis'.
'Screen Memories' (1899) is the worst paper that Freud ever wrote -- and Jones loved it....lap, lap, lap... while as Masson argued and I am paraphrasing, Freud was starting to 'conflate' and 'confuse' 'symbolic dream and fantasy material' with 'cold, hard, remembered reality'.
I am sure that Jones had his character strengths -- he did, I believe, support the growth and career of Fritz Perls when Freud wanted nothing to do with Perls because of the latter's 'rebellious' paper on 'Oral (as opposed to 'Anal') Resistances...
Freud excluded and excommunicated all significant 'male rebellers' just like his father 'excluded and excommunicated' little Sigmund...
Freud was a great rebel himself -- but once he achieved power -- he squashed all masculine rebellion in his ranks... This was a major part of his 'topdog/underdog transference bi-polarity and neurosis'... His 'excluding topdog' was his 'introjected dad'; and his 'rebellious underdog' was little Sigmund 'proving to his dad -- and to the world -- that he would find out all his dad's -- and his mom's -- private, most hidden sexual secrets -- with or without the help of his dad...and by transference extension -- with or without the help of his clients/patients, and the world at large.
Oh, yes. The memory. The conscious memory that has been so overlooked by so many psychoanalysts claiming to 'know all the hidden secrets of the mind'...And yet you all let Dr. Freud pull one over on you....as he pulled one over on himself...
Step out of Dr. Freud's 'false paradigm', gentlemen -- and gentlewomen.
Even Freud could -- and still continues to -- lead you down false corridors.
Even Freud could make serious 'false connections'.
Why would an 'archaeologist dig deep' if what he or she is looking for -- some 'supposedly hidden treasure' -- is sitting on the ground right in front of his or her eyes -- and nose?
Why would a psychoanalyst 'dig deep' into a client's unconscious if the answer to 'the riddle of the Sphynx' of the client's personality is lying right in front of the psychoanalyst's ears in an 'ignored', 'minimized', 'excluded' conscious early memory...
Note once again that I am partly Adlerian trained....and I would not have arrived at my own 'transference answer' to the riddle of the Sphynx of Freud's character if I had not been Adlerian trained. I superimposed 'Adlerian Lifestyle and Conscious Early Memory Theory' onto Classical Psychoanalysis.
Indeed, what I am doing here is superimposing the theoretical and therapeutic templates of all of Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, and Pre-Classical Freudian Theory -- right back where they belong on top of the template of Classical Psychoanalysis.
Because I am not -- at least in this venue -- an 'exclusionist'. Rather, I am an 'inclusionist'. I am a 'massive integrationist'. There is no one else in the world who is capable of doing what I am doing here for two reasons: 1. no one has exactly the same 'knowledge template' that I am carrying in my brain; and 2. just as importantly, no one is carrying exactly the same 'transference template' that I am carrying in my brain that demands that I push this story, that I push 'Hegel's Hotel', through to its definitive conclusion...
Regarding my own personal transference template (or 'complex' or 'neurosis'), perhaps the strongest reason that I can see Freud's 'transference neurosis' more clearly than most, is because it is all too similar to my own. Psychoanalysis was built unconsiously upon Freud's anger against his father and his father's 'authoritarianism', more specifically, his father's 'exclusionism' -- and like many sons -- I can identify with this type of anger.
The issue of 'authoritarianism' vs. 'democracy' is the underlying fuel behind many a son's -- or daughter's -- overt and/or covert rebellion against one or both of his or her parents, and by extension, a 'transference rebellion' against 'all associated adult transference surrogates'.
Freud copied (introjected, identified with) his dad's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego' around the issue of 'exclusionism'.
And in similar fashion, Classical Psychoanalysis copied (introjected, identified with) Sigmund Freud's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego around this same issue of 'exclusionism'. That makes Classical Psychoanalysis a product of Sigmund Freud's own 'exclusionism-abandonment transference neurosis'.
For those of you who are not familiar with little Sigmund's first conscious memory, he 'busted in on his parents in their bedroom while they were doing the nasty'....and little Sigmund's father screamed at him to get out...
A pretty understandable reaction by Sigmund's father...but that didn't help little Sigmund any...
Because he spent the rest of his life -- via his transference complex -- vicariously trying to understand perfectly what exactly had transpired in his parents' bedroom...and he was certainly no stranger to 'patient resistance to telling the truth'... Indeed, from a transference perspective, he entiredly expected it...
This is why this particular memory of little Sigmund is perhaps best declared...
The 'first true case of Psychoanalysis'...
-- dgb, Jan. 30th-31st, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Monday, January 31, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
DGB Transference and Personality Theory Integrates Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, Masson
Historically speaking, Freud was a Gestalt Therapist before he was a Psychoanalyst. Or put another way, Freud's first clinical ideas and practices were more in line with present-day Gestalt Therapy than they were with present-day Psychoanalysis.
All of Freud's early work with hysterical patients, using hypnosis (let us loosely say between 1886 and the early 1890s) was geared towards 'finishing the unfinished situation'. And at the same time, 'making the unconscious, conscious'. Or alternatively again, 'emotionally resolving unresolved emotional situations from many years gone by'.
In conceptuology and terminology that had not been close to fully developed yet, we might say that: Hysterical symptoms were 'compromise-formations' between deep, underlying impulses for self-expression and more surface-level, social resistances, restraints, and/or defenses against the underlying and 'rising' impulses for self-expression.
That 'rising impulse for honest self-expression' could be either a childhood or adolescent traumacy buried in the subconscious depths of the psyche by a restraining process of 'self-suppression' and/or 'repression'. Or it could be a 'secretive fantasy' from either years gone by, and/or still existing in the 'here-and-now'. Freud chose the first alternative before 1897. He chose the second alternative after 1896. He never tried to integrate both possibilities in the same theory at the same time.
That was arguably Freud's biggest error and/or Dr. Jeffrey Masson would come to say in the 1980s, 'ethical transgression' (for abandoning the traumacy-seduction theory after 1896) that Freud made in his career. Masson continues to believe that Freud should never have abandoned his traumacy-seduction theory in the first place. I believe that Freud should have integrated his traumacy-seduction theory with his later childhood sexuality, fantasy theory, and Oedipal Theory that he started to develop after 1896 in place of the traumacy-seduction theory.
Let's back up and do a quick history lesson before we go any further.
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
II. HISTORY
Suggestion x Free Association
Hysteria, Charcot, Breuer, Anna O.
Hysteria, now commonly referred to as a conversion disorder, displays physical symptoms (numbness/paralysis of a limb, loss of voice or blindness) that occur in a healthy body.
The French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, who was concerned with the treatment of hysteria, believed it to be a genuine ailment that afflicted men and women, and tried to free his patient's from their symptoms through hypnotic suggestion.
Joseph Breuer, a Vienese physician who also chose hypnosis as a clinical procedure, didn't intend just to suppress his patient's symptoms but rather searched for the deep causes of their suffering. He realized, during the treatment of his young patient "Anna O." (1880-82), that the results were far reaching if he let her talk about her feelings and thoughts. He named "spontaneous hypnosis" her trance-like states. Anna named 'talking cure' or 'chimney sweeping' the process that lead to the disappearance of her symptoms whenever she was able to recollect their root events.
Freud studied with Charcot in 1885-86. He collaborated with Joseph Breuer, while progressively formulating his theory on the mind, and considered hypnosis far more satisfactory than the electrotherapy he had tried until 1890.
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From the internet...
Hypnosis and Catharsis in Freud
David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University
Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralyses and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in nonhysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.
Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. In his work with Anna O, he found that by tracing her associations in an autohypnotic state, he could not only find an original repressed incident, but could actually cure her of her symptom. When she related an event to a symptom while in a hypnotic state, her symptom would become terribly powerful and dramatic, but would then be purged, never to trouble her again. This powerful and often traumatic transfer of an memory from the unconscious to the conscious is known as catharsis, an effective method which also seems to corroborate Freud's theories on the mind.
However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Now understand that I am a 'freelance and/or integrative theorist' who does not feel restricted by the boundaries of any one theorist's language, conceptuology, and/or theorizing. In fact, I can, and do, easily integrate them all -- particularily <em><strong>Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and Masson.</strong></em>
When it comes to pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian integrative theorizing about the nature, structure, and different process-dynamics in the personality -- in other words, in this instance, <em><strong>DGB Integrative Personality and Transference Theory </strong></em>-- I will call these 12 personality theorists who preceded me <em><strong>'The Imperative 12'. </strong></em>
More history...
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
Breuer and Freud published their findings and theories in Studies in Hysteria , in 1895. They assumed that hysterical symptoms occurred when a mental process highly charged with affect found its normal path blocked to consciousness and movement. This 'strangulated' affect diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (conversion).
Through hypnosis, the thoughts and memories connected with the symptoms would eventually reach consciousness. 'Catharsis' (cleansing in Greek) would come about bringing a normal discharge of affect; despite these facts, symptoms tended to reappear if the relation with the physician was disturbed in any way, signaling that an intense emotional tie with him played an important role in the cure.
The authors stated that these symptoms had sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts and were caused by unconscious wishes and forgotten memories (psychic traumas).Thus, hysterics suffered mainly from 'reminiscences' that had not been worked-through.
The cornerstone of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes that follow laws that do not apply to conscious thinking. Later, these processes were better understood and the mechanisms of psychological productions such as dreams could be grasped.
The Fundamental Technical Rule
Finding hypnosis inadequate, Freud refined Breuer's methods, based on his increasing clinical understanding of neuroses. He realized that success of the treatment depended upon the patient's relation to his physician whose task was to make the unconscious become conscious.
An entirely new relation between patient and physician developed out of a change in the technique and the surprising results thus obtained extended themselves to many other forms of neurotic disorders. Freud named this procedure Psychoanalysis - an art of interpretation, in 1896.
Freud thought that disturbing thoughts and conflicting urges were kept unconscious (repression) but, even so, they caused strong guilty feelings and great anxiety, interfering with conscious mental activity, as they consumed vital psychic energy in their struggle for release. As they were incompatible with the individual's normal standards, he would feel compelled to raise defenses against the intrusive ideas and the release of such urges, in order to maintain his inner equilibrium (defense mechanisms).
As Freud believed in the strict determination of mental events and assumed that all memories were interconnected, so that one recollection would lead to the next, he insisted that the patient should tell him everything that came to his mind, regardless of how irrelevant, senseless or disagreeable the idea might seem to him (free association). He found it possible for the patient to recover crucial memories while conscious.
By surrendering to his own unconscious mental activity (a state of evenly-suspended attention), Freud would follow the unconscious flow of his patient's mental productions, in order to trace the connections between the chain of allusive associations and the forgotten memories.
Occasionally, the patient might omit some material and this very gap in the communication would reveal that the association was avoided (resistance) due to its potential evocative power to bring the underlying forgotten memories to the surface of consciousness, along with the emergence of its previously inaccessible meaning.
Freud noticed that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual ideas. In 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, they were the residues of infantile impulses and desires (fantasies). Thus he assumed that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed libido, which found expression in various symptoms.
By being in touch with his inner experiences in a state of regression, in which long-forgotten 'events' would be remembered, the analysand would relate to the analyst as if the latter were a figure from his past (transference).
Freud would communicate the connection between the patient's fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences (interpretation).
This powerful re-experience of original conflicts caused great distress to the patient, but the working-through of the emotional pain (insight) rendered the treatment efficient, due to a new balance and distribution of psychic energy, promoting a reorganization of the psychological structures into healthier mental configurations.
..........................................................................
DGB Editorial Comments
Integrative theorizing is not a completely 'random' and/or 'democratic' process. As an integrative theorist, there are times when I have make 'either/or' judgments and decisions. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Adler's ideas. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Adler's ideas. Or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Freud's 'Traumacy and Seduction Theories' or I support his Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theories. Sometimes -- indeed, oftentimes -- <em><strong>compromise-formations </strong></em>can be arrived at between the different theories. But not always. Like every theorist before me, my brain becomes a <em><strong>'filter and editorial screening process' </strong></em>for those ideas that I let into my brain to become a vital part of DGB Personality and Transference Theory -- and those ideas that I don't let through this editorial screening process.
Example 1:
I think Freud invested way too much Psychoanalytic time and energy locked up in the concepts of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These ideas play no part in DGB Personality and Transference Theory. To put it bluntly, they get tossed away.
Between 1974 and 1979, while I was at The University of Waterloo working through my Honours B.A. in psychology, I was involved in numerous 'group psychotherapy' processes. Never once, did I witness -- either in myself or someone else -- an 'unconscious memory becoming conscious'. Never once did I witness the so-called phenomenon of 'repression'. I don't believe in concepts that I can't -- or don't -- experience. In this regard, I am an John Locke rational-empiricist, through and through. Don't give me any 'no-sense' concepts that do not have a 'sensory-experiential' ('phenomenological-existential') foundation. If you do -- then at least properly label these concepts as 'metaphysical' and/or 'mythological'. DGB Philosophy-Psychology uses metaphysical-mythological concepts but they are labelled as such. Metaphysical and/or mythological concepts are not to be confused with 'down-to-earth' concepts that have 'physical referents' that can be seen, heard, and/or touched. Our loved ones, we can see, touch, experience. I've never seen an 'unconscous memory' or a 'repression' seen, touched, experienced. My roughly 12 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute (1979-1991) in Toronto only further reinforced what I am saying here.
I've never seen a 'memory therapeutically worked with' that couldn't be brought to the client's awareness usually in pretty easy and timely fashion. 'Resistance' and 'suppression' are verifiable concepts.
With some degree of apprehension, I will use the concepts of 'suppressed memories' and 'subconscious memories' -- meaning 'out-of-awareness' memories that can usually be quickly brought into awareness with the right associations and/or the right degree of focus of attention -- but these are not to be confused with the ideas of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These latter two concepts give a psychotherapist far too much liberty and license to 'project his or her own theoretical and/or experiential material' onto the client. Psychotherapeutically and legally there is the potential for much abuse and damage here -- in essence, creating or interpreting or reconstructing or analysing 'unconscious or repressed memories that don't exist, and that never existed' in a client's life history. Perhaps Freud, as an Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theorist was the worst violator of supposedly unconscious or repressed memories -- see 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' -- but the potential for this type of violation exists just as strongly, maybe even more so, at the hands of present-day Traumacy-Seduction Theory Psychotherapists. I cringe at the very real event of some father being dragged into court -- and his life ruined -- because some Traumacy-Seduction-Repressed Memory Therapist has 'interpreted or analyzed or reconstructed' a supposedly repressed memory from a client who doesn't even remember this memory. At least until the therapist convinces him or her elsewise. In most courts, that is called 'leading the witness'. All such cases should be thrown out of court. If a person can't remember something -- it's not a memory. Period.
Don't let some psychotherapist's or even some school of psychotherapy's theorizing --whether from one polar extreme, such as 'Classical Psychoanlytic-Oedipal-Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy' Theorizing; or from another polar extreme, such as Childhood-Traumacy-Seduction-Sexual-Assault' Theorizing -- destroy a person's life and/or a family's life because he/she/they 'projected his/her/their own theory onto a client whose case material didn't support this theory but rather was 'forced' into this theory like trying to put a circular piece into a rectangular box. We are talking about any situation where the therapist is playing the 'fitting game' with the client -- and the client's life experiences don't neatly 'fit into the therapist's theory, diagnosis, and therapeutic gameplan'. Any use of 'unconscious' or 'repressed' memories gives a therapist far too much liberty, license -- and potential for abuse -- of what a client does and doesn't remember.
How many men or women who as children or as adults were sexually assaulted -- don't remember the assault? They may not want to talk about it. But that is a different thing entirely from 'not remembering' it.
I don't support everything that Jeffrey Masson has written about Freud's Controversial Abandonment of his Traumacy-Seduction Theory but I support Masson's editorial opinion on this account (The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory) -- people can almost always remember if they have been sexually assaulted, and the particular details around this event. Sexual assault memories are likely very conscious in a person's psyche.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Moussaieff_Masson
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'Hysteria' and 'Neurotic Symptoms' as 'Compromise-Formations' and 'Allusions to Immediacy'
We have to be very careful that we not abuse the label of 'hysteria' and that it represents a legitimate diagnostic phenomenon, and not some 'medically unknown and/or undiagnosed phenomenon' either in present day or in Freud's time such as perhaps 'epilepsy' or a 'brain tumor' or 'schizophrenia' or 'hypochondria'.
Having said this, Freud, in his earliest psychotherapy sessions, worked in much more 'immediacy-oriented, Gestalt-fashion' than he did in his later more interpretive and analytical Psychoanalytical sessions.
I believe that Freud might have taken some serious steps backwards in this regard.
It is important that any form of psychotherapy be well-grounded in immediacy, contact, and the client's experience.
The higher a therapist climbs into his or her own abstractions, interpretations, and analysis, more often than not, the less meaningful and therapeutically important this 'flight into therapist interpretation and abstraction' is going to be for the client. Did 'Dora' get anything out of Freud's rather 'wild transference interpretation' of Dora's symptoms? Or did she cut off Freud's treatment of her believing that perhaps she had met a therapist who was crazier than she was? (See Freud's 'Dora case' for your own interpretation and judgment here.)
In contrast, you look back at the way Breuer handled the 'Anna O' case and you have the classic essence of any form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a 'talking cure' -- meaning the client is doing most of the talking, not the therapist. The 'talking cure' leads to 'chimney sweeping' and 'emotional catharsis' -- turning an 'unfinished emotional event' into a 'finished' one.
This is the Gestalt theory of 'paradoxical change'. By accepting first who we are, and who we have been, and by 'closing unclosed emotional events' or by 'finishing unfinished emotional events', we then give ourselves the opportunity to move beyond who we are and/or who we have been, to who we now can be. <em><strong>'The truth shall set you free.'</strong></em>
The further Freud moved away from Breuer's more 'client-centred approach' (which Breuer basically 'fluked' upon) where 'Anna O' basically led the way and 'closed some of her own emotional issues and neurotic symtoms', and the further Freud moved into his own more 'therapist-directed, interpretive and analytic directed, and Oedipal-sexual fantasy directed' form of psychotherapy -- i.e., Classic Psychoanalysis -- the more it is quite possible if not probable that Freud was leaving patients behind in his own 'unilateral dust'. 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' being two cases in point.
................................................................................
From the internet...
Freud:
A Very Short
Introduction
Anthony Storr
Neville Jason, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
Civilization and Its Discontents, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Anna (and Anna O!), penis envy, the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, cigars, Charcot, Fleiss, hysteria, infantile sexuality, jokes, the unconscious, neuroses, slips of the tongue, the oral, the anal, and death. It is astonishing what the man accomplished in his almost eight decades on earth.
At one point, Storr wonders out loud why Freud was so influential. He cites his marvelous writing style (and it is wondrous, even in translation --- Norman Mailer said Freud was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century). But we suspect it is more simple than that.
Most of us want to know what makes us tick, and most of us run into people and events that affect us strangely, that make no sense. We wonder where they come from, what it all means, how could we --- for example --- fall into a trap, any trap, that trap again.
Positing id, ego, and the hidden unconscious gave us a chance to explain these oddities. For those lucky enough, or rich enough, psychoanalysis offered the chance to peer into one's own mind with the assistance of a nonjudging, tolerant, and infinitely patient helper.
Storr was a practicing psychoanalyst, which would mean that he should also be patient, observant, non-judgmental. In writing about Freud, he is patient and observant but very judgmental. He wants to make sure that we know that when Freud defined the obsessional character ("order, cleanliness, control") the master was talking about himself: a man of detail, one who was detached, one who did not brook rebellion in the ranks.
Storr suggests that although Freud repeatedly called his handiwork a science --- not a philosophy, not a religion --- those who deviated from the dogma (Fleiss, Jung, Rank) were cut off, even labeled by the other followers as "Neurotic" or "Psychotic."
There are some surprises here. Freud was called "my golden Ziggy" by his mother. He took a dim view of humanity, called it "trash." He was generous. One of his long-term patients he christened The Wolf Man because of a dream he related to Freud --- a dream, perhaps, next to the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the most famous in existence:
I dreamed that it was night and I was lying in my bed. Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
Wolf Man lived into the 1970s, was often interviewed on the master's technique. He tells us that Freud chatted with him about his own life, talking of his children, daily events; he even loaned him money, arranged for loans from others when he was broke. The only thing Freud did not do, Storr tells us, was to cure him. Even in later life Wolf Man suffered from depression, from the frightening thoughts that first brought him to treatment when he was a young man.
Freud's books, and monographs as published constitute some twenty-four volumes, but Storr informs us that he did not even begin writing until he was thirty-nine years old.
Storr doesn't think much of most of Freud's writings outside of his theories (although he does make an exception for his paper on Michelangelo's Moses). Moreover, he suggests that Freud was not all that great an analyst. He offers up the idea that he saw patients mainly to create or shore up his own theories of the mind.
Storr also gives short shrift to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. He points out that modern psychoanalysts do not see dreams as hiding repressed sexual fantasies or memories. He merely credits Freud for rescuing dreams from the realm of mystics and witches, and he ignores Freud's insight that dreams represent one of the richest treasure-chests of insight to those who bother to record them.
Many of us who bother to interpret our own dreams learn quickly that they are as Freud saw them --- puns and games, a superb internal movie going on nightly, with hints and clues that can tell us more than we ever dreamed possible what the hell is going on there in our psyches, creating its own subtle symbolic system, the system that possibly rules us, possibly can free us.
Freud preferred his patients --- they weren't called "clients" in those pre-Carl Rogers' days --- to be well educated. He also was not interested in treating the overtly mad, nor those over the age of fifty. (In 1900 the life expectancy was such that to analyze an older person, he suggested, would be a waste). Freud also chose the couch for his analysands because he didn't like "being stared at for eight hours a day."
From his time with Charcot, Freud learned that the traumas could be retrieved and defused through hypnosis. This led to one of his major theories, that of trauma and repression. From his own experience, he learned of the significant phenomena of transference and counter-transference --- a subtle but powerful tool that brought the reality of a patient's passions and needs right into the consulting room where they could be examined by doctor and patient to understood where he or she came from, where he or she was going.
Patients were thus given permission to fall in love with the analyst without fear or shame. And an artful analyst could help one define fears and hopes from childhood, artfully transferred to the consulting room.
He cites Freud's showing the profound importance of how children are raised, and how they are hurt. The child, he proved, is indeed "father of the man." You and I as we exist now were formed by those who created us, nurtured us --- or in some cases, maltreated us.
The major gift of the master, in Storr's view, is that individuals were offered the opportunity to have an uncritical, sympathetic listener, one who would devote extensive time to those who may have needed it the most. It was the chance to be in the presence of one who would listen, would not judge nor criticize, and at appropriate times, could guide one into soul-changing insight.
These three discs run for four hours. Nevill Jason is a fine and precise (and dare we say , a compulsive) reader ... in the dry, BBC sense. Storr's judgmental view of his subject would be more befitting a parent rather than a historical figure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Storr emphasizes Wolf Man's oft repeated sentiment that Freud was "like a father" to him.
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DGB Editorial Comments
The only point on which I take issue with the writer above is on just how 'non-interpretive and non-judgmental a listener' Freud really was -- particularly the older Freud got and the more 'entrenched' his own theories became in his own mind.
I think that there may have been a point at which Freud's theoretical conclusions and the clinical applications of these theories may have come to supersede and dominate any client's feeling of being 'freely and non-judgmentally listened to'.
That point may have come in 1896 when Freud abandoned his previous Traumacy-Seduction Theory which took the patient's psycho-history more at face value, based on the patients' own self-assertions and testimony. Something around this time period seems to have jarred Freud's 'face-value trust' of his patients' clinical self-history -- perhaps one or more patients who lied to Freud about his/her/their childhood history, and/or Freud's evolving ideas on 'childhood sexuality, fantasy theory, and dream theory'.
That was perhaps the turning point at which Freud ceased to be a Gestalt Therapist -- and started to become a 'Psycho-analyst'.
-- dgb, Feb. 18th, 2009, updated Jan. 29th, 2011.
-- David Gordon Bain
All of Freud's early work with hysterical patients, using hypnosis (let us loosely say between 1886 and the early 1890s) was geared towards 'finishing the unfinished situation'. And at the same time, 'making the unconscious, conscious'. Or alternatively again, 'emotionally resolving unresolved emotional situations from many years gone by'.
In conceptuology and terminology that had not been close to fully developed yet, we might say that: Hysterical symptoms were 'compromise-formations' between deep, underlying impulses for self-expression and more surface-level, social resistances, restraints, and/or defenses against the underlying and 'rising' impulses for self-expression.
That 'rising impulse for honest self-expression' could be either a childhood or adolescent traumacy buried in the subconscious depths of the psyche by a restraining process of 'self-suppression' and/or 'repression'. Or it could be a 'secretive fantasy' from either years gone by, and/or still existing in the 'here-and-now'. Freud chose the first alternative before 1897. He chose the second alternative after 1896. He never tried to integrate both possibilities in the same theory at the same time.
That was arguably Freud's biggest error and/or Dr. Jeffrey Masson would come to say in the 1980s, 'ethical transgression' (for abandoning the traumacy-seduction theory after 1896) that Freud made in his career. Masson continues to believe that Freud should never have abandoned his traumacy-seduction theory in the first place. I believe that Freud should have integrated his traumacy-seduction theory with his later childhood sexuality, fantasy theory, and Oedipal Theory that he started to develop after 1896 in place of the traumacy-seduction theory.
Let's back up and do a quick history lesson before we go any further.
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
II. HISTORY
Suggestion x Free Association
Hysteria, Charcot, Breuer, Anna O.
Hysteria, now commonly referred to as a conversion disorder, displays physical symptoms (numbness/paralysis of a limb, loss of voice or blindness) that occur in a healthy body.
The French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, who was concerned with the treatment of hysteria, believed it to be a genuine ailment that afflicted men and women, and tried to free his patient's from their symptoms through hypnotic suggestion.
Joseph Breuer, a Vienese physician who also chose hypnosis as a clinical procedure, didn't intend just to suppress his patient's symptoms but rather searched for the deep causes of their suffering. He realized, during the treatment of his young patient "Anna O." (1880-82), that the results were far reaching if he let her talk about her feelings and thoughts. He named "spontaneous hypnosis" her trance-like states. Anna named 'talking cure' or 'chimney sweeping' the process that lead to the disappearance of her symptoms whenever she was able to recollect their root events.
Freud studied with Charcot in 1885-86. He collaborated with Joseph Breuer, while progressively formulating his theory on the mind, and considered hypnosis far more satisfactory than the electrotherapy he had tried until 1890.
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From the internet...
Hypnosis and Catharsis in Freud
David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University
Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralyses and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in nonhysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.
Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. In his work with Anna O, he found that by tracing her associations in an autohypnotic state, he could not only find an original repressed incident, but could actually cure her of her symptom. When she related an event to a symptom while in a hypnotic state, her symptom would become terribly powerful and dramatic, but would then be purged, never to trouble her again. This powerful and often traumatic transfer of an memory from the unconscious to the conscious is known as catharsis, an effective method which also seems to corroborate Freud's theories on the mind.
However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Now understand that I am a 'freelance and/or integrative theorist' who does not feel restricted by the boundaries of any one theorist's language, conceptuology, and/or theorizing. In fact, I can, and do, easily integrate them all -- particularily <em><strong>Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and Masson.</strong></em>
When it comes to pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian integrative theorizing about the nature, structure, and different process-dynamics in the personality -- in other words, in this instance, <em><strong>DGB Integrative Personality and Transference Theory </strong></em>-- I will call these 12 personality theorists who preceded me <em><strong>'The Imperative 12'. </strong></em>
More history...
......................................................................
From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
Breuer and Freud published their findings and theories in Studies in Hysteria , in 1895. They assumed that hysterical symptoms occurred when a mental process highly charged with affect found its normal path blocked to consciousness and movement. This 'strangulated' affect diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (conversion).
Through hypnosis, the thoughts and memories connected with the symptoms would eventually reach consciousness. 'Catharsis' (cleansing in Greek) would come about bringing a normal discharge of affect; despite these facts, symptoms tended to reappear if the relation with the physician was disturbed in any way, signaling that an intense emotional tie with him played an important role in the cure.
The authors stated that these symptoms had sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts and were caused by unconscious wishes and forgotten memories (psychic traumas).Thus, hysterics suffered mainly from 'reminiscences' that had not been worked-through.
The cornerstone of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes that follow laws that do not apply to conscious thinking. Later, these processes were better understood and the mechanisms of psychological productions such as dreams could be grasped.
The Fundamental Technical Rule
Finding hypnosis inadequate, Freud refined Breuer's methods, based on his increasing clinical understanding of neuroses. He realized that success of the treatment depended upon the patient's relation to his physician whose task was to make the unconscious become conscious.
An entirely new relation between patient and physician developed out of a change in the technique and the surprising results thus obtained extended themselves to many other forms of neurotic disorders. Freud named this procedure Psychoanalysis - an art of interpretation, in 1896.
Freud thought that disturbing thoughts and conflicting urges were kept unconscious (repression) but, even so, they caused strong guilty feelings and great anxiety, interfering with conscious mental activity, as they consumed vital psychic energy in their struggle for release. As they were incompatible with the individual's normal standards, he would feel compelled to raise defenses against the intrusive ideas and the release of such urges, in order to maintain his inner equilibrium (defense mechanisms).
As Freud believed in the strict determination of mental events and assumed that all memories were interconnected, so that one recollection would lead to the next, he insisted that the patient should tell him everything that came to his mind, regardless of how irrelevant, senseless or disagreeable the idea might seem to him (free association). He found it possible for the patient to recover crucial memories while conscious.
By surrendering to his own unconscious mental activity (a state of evenly-suspended attention), Freud would follow the unconscious flow of his patient's mental productions, in order to trace the connections between the chain of allusive associations and the forgotten memories.
Occasionally, the patient might omit some material and this very gap in the communication would reveal that the association was avoided (resistance) due to its potential evocative power to bring the underlying forgotten memories to the surface of consciousness, along with the emergence of its previously inaccessible meaning.
Freud noticed that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual ideas. In 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, they were the residues of infantile impulses and desires (fantasies). Thus he assumed that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed libido, which found expression in various symptoms.
By being in touch with his inner experiences in a state of regression, in which long-forgotten 'events' would be remembered, the analysand would relate to the analyst as if the latter were a figure from his past (transference).
Freud would communicate the connection between the patient's fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences (interpretation).
This powerful re-experience of original conflicts caused great distress to the patient, but the working-through of the emotional pain (insight) rendered the treatment efficient, due to a new balance and distribution of psychic energy, promoting a reorganization of the psychological structures into healthier mental configurations.
..........................................................................
DGB Editorial Comments
Integrative theorizing is not a completely 'random' and/or 'democratic' process. As an integrative theorist, there are times when I have make 'either/or' judgments and decisions. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Adler's ideas. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Adler's ideas. Or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Freud's 'Traumacy and Seduction Theories' or I support his Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theories. Sometimes -- indeed, oftentimes -- <em><strong>compromise-formations </strong></em>can be arrived at between the different theories. But not always. Like every theorist before me, my brain becomes a <em><strong>'filter and editorial screening process' </strong></em>for those ideas that I let into my brain to become a vital part of DGB Personality and Transference Theory -- and those ideas that I don't let through this editorial screening process.
Example 1:
I think Freud invested way too much Psychoanalytic time and energy locked up in the concepts of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These ideas play no part in DGB Personality and Transference Theory. To put it bluntly, they get tossed away.
Between 1974 and 1979, while I was at The University of Waterloo working through my Honours B.A. in psychology, I was involved in numerous 'group psychotherapy' processes. Never once, did I witness -- either in myself or someone else -- an 'unconscious memory becoming conscious'. Never once did I witness the so-called phenomenon of 'repression'. I don't believe in concepts that I can't -- or don't -- experience. In this regard, I am an John Locke rational-empiricist, through and through. Don't give me any 'no-sense' concepts that do not have a 'sensory-experiential' ('phenomenological-existential') foundation. If you do -- then at least properly label these concepts as 'metaphysical' and/or 'mythological'. DGB Philosophy-Psychology uses metaphysical-mythological concepts but they are labelled as such. Metaphysical and/or mythological concepts are not to be confused with 'down-to-earth' concepts that have 'physical referents' that can be seen, heard, and/or touched. Our loved ones, we can see, touch, experience. I've never seen an 'unconscous memory' or a 'repression' seen, touched, experienced. My roughly 12 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute (1979-1991) in Toronto only further reinforced what I am saying here.
I've never seen a 'memory therapeutically worked with' that couldn't be brought to the client's awareness usually in pretty easy and timely fashion. 'Resistance' and 'suppression' are verifiable concepts.
With some degree of apprehension, I will use the concepts of 'suppressed memories' and 'subconscious memories' -- meaning 'out-of-awareness' memories that can usually be quickly brought into awareness with the right associations and/or the right degree of focus of attention -- but these are not to be confused with the ideas of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These latter two concepts give a psychotherapist far too much liberty and license to 'project his or her own theoretical and/or experiential material' onto the client. Psychotherapeutically and legally there is the potential for much abuse and damage here -- in essence, creating or interpreting or reconstructing or analysing 'unconscious or repressed memories that don't exist, and that never existed' in a client's life history. Perhaps Freud, as an Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theorist was the worst violator of supposedly unconscious or repressed memories -- see 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' -- but the potential for this type of violation exists just as strongly, maybe even more so, at the hands of present-day Traumacy-Seduction Theory Psychotherapists. I cringe at the very real event of some father being dragged into court -- and his life ruined -- because some Traumacy-Seduction-Repressed Memory Therapist has 'interpreted or analyzed or reconstructed' a supposedly repressed memory from a client who doesn't even remember this memory. At least until the therapist convinces him or her elsewise. In most courts, that is called 'leading the witness'. All such cases should be thrown out of court. If a person can't remember something -- it's not a memory. Period.
Don't let some psychotherapist's or even some school of psychotherapy's theorizing --whether from one polar extreme, such as 'Classical Psychoanlytic-Oedipal-Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy' Theorizing; or from another polar extreme, such as Childhood-Traumacy-Seduction-Sexual-Assault' Theorizing -- destroy a person's life and/or a family's life because he/she/they 'projected his/her/their own theory onto a client whose case material didn't support this theory but rather was 'forced' into this theory like trying to put a circular piece into a rectangular box. We are talking about any situation where the therapist is playing the 'fitting game' with the client -- and the client's life experiences don't neatly 'fit into the therapist's theory, diagnosis, and therapeutic gameplan'. Any use of 'unconscious' or 'repressed' memories gives a therapist far too much liberty, license -- and potential for abuse -- of what a client does and doesn't remember.
How many men or women who as children or as adults were sexually assaulted -- don't remember the assault? They may not want to talk about it. But that is a different thing entirely from 'not remembering' it.
I don't support everything that Jeffrey Masson has written about Freud's Controversial Abandonment of his Traumacy-Seduction Theory but I support Masson's editorial opinion on this account (The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory) -- people can almost always remember if they have been sexually assaulted, and the particular details around this event. Sexual assault memories are likely very conscious in a person's psyche.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Moussaieff_Masson
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'Hysteria' and 'Neurotic Symptoms' as 'Compromise-Formations' and 'Allusions to Immediacy'
We have to be very careful that we not abuse the label of 'hysteria' and that it represents a legitimate diagnostic phenomenon, and not some 'medically unknown and/or undiagnosed phenomenon' either in present day or in Freud's time such as perhaps 'epilepsy' or a 'brain tumor' or 'schizophrenia' or 'hypochondria'.
Having said this, Freud, in his earliest psychotherapy sessions, worked in much more 'immediacy-oriented, Gestalt-fashion' than he did in his later more interpretive and analytical Psychoanalytical sessions.
I believe that Freud might have taken some serious steps backwards in this regard.
It is important that any form of psychotherapy be well-grounded in immediacy, contact, and the client's experience.
The higher a therapist climbs into his or her own abstractions, interpretations, and analysis, more often than not, the less meaningful and therapeutically important this 'flight into therapist interpretation and abstraction' is going to be for the client. Did 'Dora' get anything out of Freud's rather 'wild transference interpretation' of Dora's symptoms? Or did she cut off Freud's treatment of her believing that perhaps she had met a therapist who was crazier than she was? (See Freud's 'Dora case' for your own interpretation and judgment here.)
In contrast, you look back at the way Breuer handled the 'Anna O' case and you have the classic essence of any form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a 'talking cure' -- meaning the client is doing most of the talking, not the therapist. The 'talking cure' leads to 'chimney sweeping' and 'emotional catharsis' -- turning an 'unfinished emotional event' into a 'finished' one.
This is the Gestalt theory of 'paradoxical change'. By accepting first who we are, and who we have been, and by 'closing unclosed emotional events' or by 'finishing unfinished emotional events', we then give ourselves the opportunity to move beyond who we are and/or who we have been, to who we now can be. <em><strong>'The truth shall set you free.'</strong></em>
The further Freud moved away from Breuer's more 'client-centred approach' (which Breuer basically 'fluked' upon) where 'Anna O' basically led the way and 'closed some of her own emotional issues and neurotic symtoms', and the further Freud moved into his own more 'therapist-directed, interpretive and analytic directed, and Oedipal-sexual fantasy directed' form of psychotherapy -- i.e., Classic Psychoanalysis -- the more it is quite possible if not probable that Freud was leaving patients behind in his own 'unilateral dust'. 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' being two cases in point.
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From the internet...
Freud:
A Very Short
Introduction
Anthony Storr
Neville Jason, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
Civilization and Its Discontents, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Anna (and Anna O!), penis envy, the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, cigars, Charcot, Fleiss, hysteria, infantile sexuality, jokes, the unconscious, neuroses, slips of the tongue, the oral, the anal, and death. It is astonishing what the man accomplished in his almost eight decades on earth.
At one point, Storr wonders out loud why Freud was so influential. He cites his marvelous writing style (and it is wondrous, even in translation --- Norman Mailer said Freud was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century). But we suspect it is more simple than that.
Most of us want to know what makes us tick, and most of us run into people and events that affect us strangely, that make no sense. We wonder where they come from, what it all means, how could we --- for example --- fall into a trap, any trap, that trap again.
Positing id, ego, and the hidden unconscious gave us a chance to explain these oddities. For those lucky enough, or rich enough, psychoanalysis offered the chance to peer into one's own mind with the assistance of a nonjudging, tolerant, and infinitely patient helper.
Storr was a practicing psychoanalyst, which would mean that he should also be patient, observant, non-judgmental. In writing about Freud, he is patient and observant but very judgmental. He wants to make sure that we know that when Freud defined the obsessional character ("order, cleanliness, control") the master was talking about himself: a man of detail, one who was detached, one who did not brook rebellion in the ranks.
Storr suggests that although Freud repeatedly called his handiwork a science --- not a philosophy, not a religion --- those who deviated from the dogma (Fleiss, Jung, Rank) were cut off, even labeled by the other followers as "Neurotic" or "Psychotic."
There are some surprises here. Freud was called "my golden Ziggy" by his mother. He took a dim view of humanity, called it "trash." He was generous. One of his long-term patients he christened The Wolf Man because of a dream he related to Freud --- a dream, perhaps, next to the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the most famous in existence:
I dreamed that it was night and I was lying in my bed. Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
Wolf Man lived into the 1970s, was often interviewed on the master's technique. He tells us that Freud chatted with him about his own life, talking of his children, daily events; he even loaned him money, arranged for loans from others when he was broke. The only thing Freud did not do, Storr tells us, was to cure him. Even in later life Wolf Man suffered from depression, from the frightening thoughts that first brought him to treatment when he was a young man.
Freud's books, and monographs as published constitute some twenty-four volumes, but Storr informs us that he did not even begin writing until he was thirty-nine years old.
Storr doesn't think much of most of Freud's writings outside of his theories (although he does make an exception for his paper on Michelangelo's Moses). Moreover, he suggests that Freud was not all that great an analyst. He offers up the idea that he saw patients mainly to create or shore up his own theories of the mind.
Storr also gives short shrift to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. He points out that modern psychoanalysts do not see dreams as hiding repressed sexual fantasies or memories. He merely credits Freud for rescuing dreams from the realm of mystics and witches, and he ignores Freud's insight that dreams represent one of the richest treasure-chests of insight to those who bother to record them.
Many of us who bother to interpret our own dreams learn quickly that they are as Freud saw them --- puns and games, a superb internal movie going on nightly, with hints and clues that can tell us more than we ever dreamed possible what the hell is going on there in our psyches, creating its own subtle symbolic system, the system that possibly rules us, possibly can free us.
Freud preferred his patients --- they weren't called "clients" in those pre-Carl Rogers' days --- to be well educated. He also was not interested in treating the overtly mad, nor those over the age of fifty. (In 1900 the life expectancy was such that to analyze an older person, he suggested, would be a waste). Freud also chose the couch for his analysands because he didn't like "being stared at for eight hours a day."
From his time with Charcot, Freud learned that the traumas could be retrieved and defused through hypnosis. This led to one of his major theories, that of trauma and repression. From his own experience, he learned of the significant phenomena of transference and counter-transference --- a subtle but powerful tool that brought the reality of a patient's passions and needs right into the consulting room where they could be examined by doctor and patient to understood where he or she came from, where he or she was going.
Patients were thus given permission to fall in love with the analyst without fear or shame. And an artful analyst could help one define fears and hopes from childhood, artfully transferred to the consulting room.
He cites Freud's showing the profound importance of how children are raised, and how they are hurt. The child, he proved, is indeed "father of the man." You and I as we exist now were formed by those who created us, nurtured us --- or in some cases, maltreated us.
The major gift of the master, in Storr's view, is that individuals were offered the opportunity to have an uncritical, sympathetic listener, one who would devote extensive time to those who may have needed it the most. It was the chance to be in the presence of one who would listen, would not judge nor criticize, and at appropriate times, could guide one into soul-changing insight.
These three discs run for four hours. Nevill Jason is a fine and precise (and dare we say , a compulsive) reader ... in the dry, BBC sense. Storr's judgmental view of his subject would be more befitting a parent rather than a historical figure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Storr emphasizes Wolf Man's oft repeated sentiment that Freud was "like a father" to him.
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DGB Editorial Comments
The only point on which I take issue with the writer above is on just how 'non-interpretive and non-judgmental a listener' Freud really was -- particularly the older Freud got and the more 'entrenched' his own theories became in his own mind.
I think that there may have been a point at which Freud's theoretical conclusions and the clinical applications of these theories may have come to supersede and dominate any client's feeling of being 'freely and non-judgmentally listened to'.
That point may have come in 1896 when Freud abandoned his previous Traumacy-Seduction Theory which took the patient's psycho-history more at face value, based on the patients' own self-assertions and testimony. Something around this time period seems to have jarred Freud's 'face-value trust' of his patients' clinical self-history -- perhaps one or more patients who lied to Freud about his/her/their childhood history, and/or Freud's evolving ideas on 'childhood sexuality, fantasy theory, and dream theory'.
That was perhaps the turning point at which Freud ceased to be a Gestalt Therapist -- and started to become a 'Psycho-analyst'.
-- dgb, Feb. 18th, 2009, updated Jan. 29th, 2011.
-- David Gordon Bain
On The Interaction and Entanglement of Transference and Immediacy
1. Transference is very obsessive-compulsive and a life-long process, often going through different evolutions with different relationships. Most of this is on a subconscious level. We never know where the next transference evolution is going to take us in whatever new relationship we happen into. But the subconscious usually takes us to where it/we feel the greatest need. Awareness does not always make a difference because there is such a perceived need to go where we are going anyway -- despite any conscious 'Apollonian' objections.
2. Immediacy and contact still play a big part in any relationship, probably the most important part. You get into too much 'transference analysis' and you can paralyze the relationship you are in. Paralysis by analysis.
3. Similarily with such relationship factors as trust, respect, caring, empathy, assertiveness, excitement....these too remain essential to any long-lasting, successful relationship.
4. But intertwined into the immediacy and the contact of any relationship is the hugely important transference complex and whatever it may be with each person in the same relationship, and each person in each different relationship....
5. And here 'the rejecting person' is often the 'exciting person'....perhaps re-awakening negative childhood memories that we subconsciously and symbolically want to 'fix'...and this can take us back to issues of perceived abandonment, betrayal, being controlled, distancing, bad tempers, alcholism, drugs, and/or whatever the perceived imperfections of our childhood may have been -- 'Father-Complexes', 'Mother-Complexes', 'Sibling-Complexes', 'Stranger-Complexes', 'Relationship-Complexes', 'One Time Memory-Encounter Complexes'....
6. Transferences tend to revolve around 'core nuclear childhood conflicts' and our adult relationships tend to 're-awaken' these conflicts to either 'repeat them' or 'work through' them. Our adult relationships hinge on the success or failure of this enterprise.
-- dgb, Feb. 16th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
2. Immediacy and contact still play a big part in any relationship, probably the most important part. You get into too much 'transference analysis' and you can paralyze the relationship you are in. Paralysis by analysis.
3. Similarily with such relationship factors as trust, respect, caring, empathy, assertiveness, excitement....these too remain essential to any long-lasting, successful relationship.
4. But intertwined into the immediacy and the contact of any relationship is the hugely important transference complex and whatever it may be with each person in the same relationship, and each person in each different relationship....
5. And here 'the rejecting person' is often the 'exciting person'....perhaps re-awakening negative childhood memories that we subconsciously and symbolically want to 'fix'...and this can take us back to issues of perceived abandonment, betrayal, being controlled, distancing, bad tempers, alcholism, drugs, and/or whatever the perceived imperfections of our childhood may have been -- 'Father-Complexes', 'Mother-Complexes', 'Sibling-Complexes', 'Stranger-Complexes', 'Relationship-Complexes', 'One Time Memory-Encounter Complexes'....
6. Transferences tend to revolve around 'core nuclear childhood conflicts' and our adult relationships tend to 're-awaken' these conflicts to either 'repeat them' or 'work through' them. Our adult relationships hinge on the success or failure of this enterprise.
-- dgb, Feb. 16th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
DGB Psychology: More On Transference
Transference is like the dialectic itself -- in fact, it is the re-creation or reincarnation of an old, emotional dialectic. It can be good and/or bad depending on which way it turns. It can be used creatively and/or destructively. In the sphere of love and sex, it is very obsessive-compulsive, very addictive -- the essence of the psychology and biochemistry all rolled into one -- and thus, very hard to avoid.
Some transferences are much more dangerous than others -- transferences connected to alcoholic, drug-using, and/or abusive fathers and/or moms, transferences connected to abandoning fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to violent fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to distancing fathers or mothers, transferences connected to over-controlling fathers or moms, transferences connected to sado-masochist fathers or moms...
<em><strong>When transference is involved in self-growth, it involves a 'healing' and 'patching' of the self-esteem -- it involves an evolutionary progression from environmental support to self-support (in Gestalt terminology). It involves a 'creative dialectic negotiation and integration' in the personality that is usually highly connected to the creative dialectic negotiation and integration that is happening in the transference relationship at the same time.
This adult transference relationship is both similar and/or different than the old transference relationship(s). It is like the Myth of The Phoenix where out of the old, we rise and fly into the new...and are reborn in the process...From a 'caterpillar', we become a 'butterfly'. </strong></em>
When transference is self-destructive and pathological, it involves not only a re-creation of the past, but also a repetition of the past. It involves a regression into 'earlier states of being' that are not self-supportive. Rather than healing and/or patching the 'gap' or 'void' in self-esteem, instead through a recurrence or repetition of adult events similar to childhood events, that gap or void is reinforced and widened until once again it becomes a 'chasm' or an 'abyss' or an 'absess' in the the self-esteem and personality.
Transference repeated in this most negative sense involves the re-creation of a 'huge gaping pit in the stomach' or wherever one chooses to 'lock up' one's 'transferred dialectic rage, anxiety, and/or grief'.
-- dgbn, Feb. 1st, 2009.
-- david gordon bain
Some transferences are much more dangerous than others -- transferences connected to alcoholic, drug-using, and/or abusive fathers and/or moms, transferences connected to abandoning fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to violent fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to distancing fathers or mothers, transferences connected to over-controlling fathers or moms, transferences connected to sado-masochist fathers or moms...
<em><strong>When transference is involved in self-growth, it involves a 'healing' and 'patching' of the self-esteem -- it involves an evolutionary progression from environmental support to self-support (in Gestalt terminology). It involves a 'creative dialectic negotiation and integration' in the personality that is usually highly connected to the creative dialectic negotiation and integration that is happening in the transference relationship at the same time.
This adult transference relationship is both similar and/or different than the old transference relationship(s). It is like the Myth of The Phoenix where out of the old, we rise and fly into the new...and are reborn in the process...From a 'caterpillar', we become a 'butterfly'. </strong></em>
When transference is self-destructive and pathological, it involves not only a re-creation of the past, but also a repetition of the past. It involves a regression into 'earlier states of being' that are not self-supportive. Rather than healing and/or patching the 'gap' or 'void' in self-esteem, instead through a recurrence or repetition of adult events similar to childhood events, that gap or void is reinforced and widened until once again it becomes a 'chasm' or an 'abyss' or an 'absess' in the the self-esteem and personality.
Transference repeated in this most negative sense involves the re-creation of a 'huge gaping pit in the stomach' or wherever one chooses to 'lock up' one's 'transferred dialectic rage, anxiety, and/or grief'.
-- dgbn, Feb. 1st, 2009.
-- david gordon bain
DGB Philosophy-Psychology vs. Freud and Psychoanalysis: On Transference (Revised Edition, Jan. 30th, 2009)
Freud's most brilliant discovery and conceptual creation -- was 'transference'.
It is in the sphere of the transference - and, more particularly, in the sphere of 'transference complexes' (a combination of Freudian and Jungian terminology) -- that we move into the deepest -- and darkest -- closets of the personality, with sometimes brilliantly creative behavioral consequences; at other times, horribly self-destructive behavioral consequences -- and oftentimes, both.
Interwoven into the sphere of the transference is a number of other Psychoanalytic and post-Psychoanalytic concepts such as:
1. Introjection: metaphorically, 'swallowing whole' a thought, idea, belief, value...like a child often introjects the beliefs and values of his or her parents;
2. Identification: involves 'behavioral copying' like a small child often watches and copies the behavior his mother and/or father;
3. Projection: 'seeing some element of the outside world' in the same way that we consciously and/or subconsciously 'see ourselves', like watching a movie of ourselves that we 'project' out into the outer world -- but most of the time, we don't even recognize that we are watching and projecting onto a friend or a lover or an enemy or an animal or an object or a creative story or essay a characteristic, a thought, a feeling, a flaw, an impulse, a strength...that fully or partly, distinctly or subtley, consciously or subconsciously belongs to us...We tend to be alienated from our own projections unless and/or until we train ourselves to fully recognize and accept the fact that it/they belong to us;
4. Compensation: Adjusting and/or modifying our thoughts, feelings, impulses, and/or behavior to fit with new information and/or experiences that are constantly coming into our ego, thought, and feeling process. Call this also, 'mutation' and/or 'compensatory evolution'.
5. Displacement/Distortion: Most different types of transference have a greater or lesser amount of 'displacement' and/or 'distortion' in them. Displacement implies the element of 'cognitive-emotional-behavioral inappropriateness' based on the idea that the transference complex and/or element which originated in Situation A -- let us say usually up to or before the age of 7 or 8 years old in childhood -- is then functionally -- and/or dysfunctionally (usually dysfunctionally) 'transferred' to Situation B which may be 10, 20, or 30 years later in some similar - but significantly different -- adult encounter, and/or relationship. To the extent that this is true, we can say that the transference is displaced and/or distorted onto an inappropriate adult person and/or into an inappropriate social setting many, many years after the origin of the childhood transference complex.
6. Contactful Transference: However, in some and/or even many adult transference relationships, we will find that a person's particular 'transference projections and reactions' are quite relevant and appropriate to the present person and relationship at hand. Indeed, this is usually the most outstanding feature of the whole 'transference comlex' -- searching in the present for someone who reminds us of some element of our 'unfinished emotional and self-esteem business' of the past.
What has happened is that 'the transferring person or subject' has subconsciously sought out and found a person in his or her adult life ('the transference object') who appropriately and/or inappropriately reminds the transferring person of his or her original childhood transference figure/object. This starts to get complicated so let me try to utilize some metaphors and examples to illustrate what is going on here.
We move through life and we find a girlfriend or boyfriend, husband or wife -- or 'other friend and/or lover' - who reminds us of an important childhood transference figure in our 'template' of subconscious, unfinished, emotional complexes in our personaliy.
Imagine a 'roulette wheel' in the subconscious memory- fantasy template of our personality. Every number on this 'psychological roulette wheel' represents an assortment of different possible 'memory-fantasy' transference complexes -- 'metaphorical planets or moons' if you will that are spinning around the main planet or sun of our 'Central Ego'. You can even look at them as being like 'astrological signs or planets' that create for us a myriad of potential 'biochemical-psychological-philosophical' relationship possibilities...spinning around in our head looking for a particular type of 'match' or 'fit' in the real world. This is the world of 'transference complexes'.
And then in the real world, we hit a 'fit'. Now I don't give complete credibility to 'astrological signs and readings and predictions...' But I don't completely discredit them either. I look at 'coincidences' and 'accidents' in life and I don't always completely discard them as coincidences and accidents. I look at potential 'emotional fits' between coincidences and accidents on the one hand -- and the internal workings of 'subconscious emotional transference complexes' on the other hand.
Here are some of the different types of 'mystical coincidences' (the head of The Toronto Gestalt Institute (George Rosner at the time I was learning there -- off and on between 1979 and 1991 -- used to call them 'wu wu connections') that I do not automatically dismiss and view as possible 'mystical transference fits': 1. My dad's birthday is April 2nd. So too is my girlfriend's birthday who I have been with for almost 10 years. My son's birthday is October 15th. That just happens to be Nietzsche's birthday. Freud and Jung met for the first time on March 3rd (1907). That's my birthday -- 48 years later. Alexander Bain is, I believe, usually viewed as being the 'first academic or technical psychologist' -- the first philosopher to specifically move from the study of philosophy into the more particular study of psychology. I did a bit of a 'geneology check' on my family's roots and couldn't find a connection with this man's lineage...and yet I look at this man's biography and his work -- in philosophy, psychology, English (spelling, grammar)....and I see his academic interests written all through my own personality...Also, Alexander Bain taught at The University of Aberdeen, Scotland, which is the city where my ancestors came from...I feel some serious <em><strong>'Karma'</strong></em> with this man...even if there are no (at least known) genetic roots.
My work may or may not come anywhere close to Alexander Bain's level of academic significance but once again I fin it 'mystcally coincidental' that ...if I had one choice of what I would like to do with the rest of my life, I would like to create 'The DGB PEPP (Philosophy-English-Psychology-Politics)...Club' focusing on the study and dialectic evolution of Philosophy, English, Psychology ..the same three areas of study that Alexander Bain specialized in...
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Karma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Kamma (disambiguation).
Spirituality portal
Karma (Sanskrit: कर्म kárma (help·info), kárman- "act, action, performance"[1]; Pali: kamma) is the concept of "action" or "deed" in Indian religions understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect (i.e., the cycle called saṃsāra) originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist philosophies.
The philosophical explanation of karma can differ slightly between traditions, but the general concept is basically the same. Through the law of karma, the effects of all deeds actively create past, present, and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life, and the pain and joy it brings to him/her and others. The results or 'fruits' of actions are called karma-phala. In religions that incorporate reincarnation, karma extends through one's present life and all past and future lives as well.
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Alexander Bain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bain
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dgb, continued...
One way or the other -- whether I am 'reaching too far' on these 'coincidental connections' or not -- it is no accident that we all narcissistically and symbolically return to the scene of our 'childhood transference memories and figures' to 're-create' the 'old scene' again, to re-live it again -- and to try to narcissistically 'finish' or 'complete' that which was left 'unfinished' and/or 'unresolved' the first time.
This phenomenon gave rise to Freud's concepts of the 'repetition compulsion' and the 'death instinct' which do not do sufficient justice to what is happening here. The essence of the childhood transference scene -- and the memory -- is that it is narcissisically unfinished, and incomplete because either there has been a 'life-changing, self-esteem injury' here, and/or the opposite -- a narcissistic triumph or pleasure -- and a 'fixation' with this triumph and/or pleasure.
In the case, of a life-changing self-esteem tragedy, traumacy, and/or injury, the one thing that Freud could not get his head around -- and perhaps his main reason for abandoning his Childhood Traumacy/Seduction/Sexual Assault Theory -- is that Freud couldn't understand why a person, usually a 'hysterical' woman in his early clinical practise, but equally applicable to both sexes, would want to return, over and over again -- obsessive-compulsively -- metaphorically in clinical practise and in adult relationships to the scene of his or her greatest childhood and lifetime traumacies/tragedies. This clinical fact violated and flat-out contradicted his 'unpleasure theory' which stated that people would go out of their way to avoid pain -- and/or its re-creation. And yet, here in the 'deterministic' throes of an obsessive-compulsive-addictive transference complex' people were coming back over and over again metaphorically, symbolically to the childhood scenes of their greatest traumacies -- and self-esteem traumacies.
Why in God's name, would they/we want to do this -- and often in the process, re-create, re-live the old childhood pain all over again, often to the tune of brand new -- but old self-destruction all over again -- unless they derived some sort of contorted, twisted, masochistic pleasure from this experience? Which seems to be more or less what Freud concluded -- and also that there was some sort of twisted narcissistic pleasure in the old traumatic childhood scene -- which led Freud up the road, up the path -- a partly wrong one, I believe -- to 'distorted, screen memories' and then to 'dreams' and 'unconscious childhood fantasies' and 'The Oedipal Complex' and later to 'the repetition compulsion' and the 'death instinct'.
DGB Philosophy-Psychology doesn't go to any of these later Freudian places in the exact same way that Freud did -- except from a different post-Freudian, integrative perspective -- specifically, a combined Psychoanalytic, Adlerian, Jungian, Transactional Analysis, and Gestalt perspective that focuses on the idea of of 'transference incompletion' and 'unfinished childhood business' -- the compensating wish and fantasy to complete or finish this unfinished childhood business, the childhood self-esteem traumacy -- in a more <em><strong>self-empowering </strong></em>fashion.
This is how in Ronald Fairbairn's terminology and conceptuology -- our 'childhood rejecting transference object' becomes also at the same time our 'childhood exciting transference object' as we view this and only this person as holding the key to 're-completing the wholeness' of the 'void' or 'abyss' or 'tumor' in our own fractured self-esteem growth. This combination of rejecting and exciting transference object is then transferred into our adult transference complexes and relationships.
In other words, contrary to Freud's logical analysis of this situation, there is no violation of the 'pleasure' and/or 'unpleasure' principle here but rather the pleasure principle is still very much in tact and at work. Specifically, man's -- and woman's -- greatest narcissistic triumph involves his or her own transference complex(es) whereby our greatest childhood narcissistic/self-esteem failures, rejections, abandonments, and traumacies are 'magically undone' and/or 'reversed' if only for a short period of time through the supreme triumph of our adult transference successes and accomplishments that -- if only for a brief time -- make our self-esteem 'whole' again where in the original transference scene (and/or series of scenes/memories), there may have been the creation of a huge, gaping 'self-esteem void or hole' through tragedy, traumacy, rejection, assault, abuse, betrayal, and/or the like.
In the 1980s, I called this whole transference complex -- and its underlying goal of 'compensation superiority striving, success and triumph' (Adler) -- <em><strong>transference-reversal</strong></em>. It totally follows the dictates of the pleasure and unpleasure principle -- although in an often seemingly contorted and masochistic way, for if we are 'symbolically and existentially going to play with fire again', it is more or less inevitable that we are going to get 'burnt again', as we go down some of the old childhood paths again, leading back to a newer version of one of our most feared and revered old childhood protagonists/rejectors/excitors -- and a 'symbolic repetition' of the same or similar traumacy, tragedy, and self-destruction -- all over again, relived dramatically, in all of its old and new, most exciting and most painful passon and suffering combined together to the max. This is the essence of the transference complex and at its worst, one can easily see how Freud connected it to his idea of the repetition compulsion and death instinct.
That is a DGB short version of the whole idea of 'transference' -- built from the earliest and latest work of Freud, and many of the greatest psychologists -- pro, con, and modified, integrative Psychoanalysts -- who came after him.
7. Narcissism: Another one of Freud's most important conceptual and theoretical additions to Psychoanalysis was/is the concept and phenomenon of 'narcissism'.
Narcissism is a very abstract term/concept with a broad range and focus of different nuances of meaning depending on the context it is being used in. It can be used to describe any of the following inter-related ideas, feelings, experiences: ego, pride, self-esteem, self-worth, self-absorption, self-arrogancy, selfishness, self-assertion, greed, self-pleasure, connected with traumacy and/or tragedy, we can talk about 'narcissistic traumacy', 'narcissistic anxiety', 'narcissistic excitement', 'narcissistic fixation', 'narcissistic compensation', 'narcissistic projection', 'narcissistic introjection and/or identification', 'narcissistic transference', 'narcissistic rage'...
It was the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut who was most influential in developing the last line of thought relative to transference...Freud thought that people who are extremely narcissistic cannot 'transfer' thoughts and/or feelings and/or impulses because they are too locked up, too self-absorbed, in themselves. However, Kohut correctly assessed (in my opinion) that it was/is this characteristic of 'self-absorption' in the context of a social relationship that is the essence of a 'narcissistic transference' -- i.e., the inability and/or unwillingness to see another except in the light of one's own thoughts, feelings, impulses, and projections...In other words, the extemely narcissistic person is unwilling and/or incapable of feeling empathy and/or social sensitivity towards another person. Thus, extreme narcissism is often connected to the ideas of 'psychopathic' and/or 'sociopathic', particularly when it is connected with such auxiliary thoughts, feeling, emotions -- and/or the lack of them -- as extreme possessiveness, jealousy, anger, rage, hate, violence...
Narcissism is both an normal and an abnormal, a healthy and an unhealthy process depending on its childhood course of development and evolution. And depending on the element of 'balance' vs. 'extremism' that is attached to this childhood and adult evolutionary delopmental process.
The opposite of narcissism is 'altruism' although both can and do have the same roots in caring and love -- and/or its absence.
Narcissism -- particularly pathological narcissism -- can and does have its roots in childhood neglect, abuse, betrayal, abandonment...Thus, we can speak of 'narcissistic traumacy' and/or 'narcissistic tragedy'...a traumatic/tragic loss of an important childhood figure (like mom and/or dad) and often combined with this a tragic/traumatic loss of self-esteem, self-worth, self-love...
However, narcissism can and is often connected with what would seem to be the opposite -- pampering, spoiling, treating a child as if he or she can do no wrong, as if there are no social laws, rules, regulations, and values to be learned in life -- especially the values of empathy, social sensitivity, ethics, fairness -- and reciprocity.
Thus, we can distinguish between the 'narcissism of neglect' -- i.e., 'compensatory narcissism' -- vs. the 'narcissism of being spoiled/pampered' (which involves the 'neglect of being taught and learning social reciprocity'. It is from these childhood lessons and learning processes -- and/or the lack of them -- that we, meaning DGBN Philosophy-Psychology arrive at the same concept Kohut did -- this being the concept of 'narcissistic transferences'.
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Heinz Kohut
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Kohut
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We will pick this line of thinking up in later essays.
-- DGBN Philosophy-Psychology, January 23rd, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic-Gap Bridging Negotiations...are still in process...
It is in the sphere of the transference - and, more particularly, in the sphere of 'transference complexes' (a combination of Freudian and Jungian terminology) -- that we move into the deepest -- and darkest -- closets of the personality, with sometimes brilliantly creative behavioral consequences; at other times, horribly self-destructive behavioral consequences -- and oftentimes, both.
Interwoven into the sphere of the transference is a number of other Psychoanalytic and post-Psychoanalytic concepts such as:
1. Introjection: metaphorically, 'swallowing whole' a thought, idea, belief, value...like a child often introjects the beliefs and values of his or her parents;
2. Identification: involves 'behavioral copying' like a small child often watches and copies the behavior his mother and/or father;
3. Projection: 'seeing some element of the outside world' in the same way that we consciously and/or subconsciously 'see ourselves', like watching a movie of ourselves that we 'project' out into the outer world -- but most of the time, we don't even recognize that we are watching and projecting onto a friend or a lover or an enemy or an animal or an object or a creative story or essay a characteristic, a thought, a feeling, a flaw, an impulse, a strength...that fully or partly, distinctly or subtley, consciously or subconsciously belongs to us...We tend to be alienated from our own projections unless and/or until we train ourselves to fully recognize and accept the fact that it/they belong to us;
4. Compensation: Adjusting and/or modifying our thoughts, feelings, impulses, and/or behavior to fit with new information and/or experiences that are constantly coming into our ego, thought, and feeling process. Call this also, 'mutation' and/or 'compensatory evolution'.
5. Displacement/Distortion: Most different types of transference have a greater or lesser amount of 'displacement' and/or 'distortion' in them. Displacement implies the element of 'cognitive-emotional-behavioral inappropriateness' based on the idea that the transference complex and/or element which originated in Situation A -- let us say usually up to or before the age of 7 or 8 years old in childhood -- is then functionally -- and/or dysfunctionally (usually dysfunctionally) 'transferred' to Situation B which may be 10, 20, or 30 years later in some similar - but significantly different -- adult encounter, and/or relationship. To the extent that this is true, we can say that the transference is displaced and/or distorted onto an inappropriate adult person and/or into an inappropriate social setting many, many years after the origin of the childhood transference complex.
6. Contactful Transference: However, in some and/or even many adult transference relationships, we will find that a person's particular 'transference projections and reactions' are quite relevant and appropriate to the present person and relationship at hand. Indeed, this is usually the most outstanding feature of the whole 'transference comlex' -- searching in the present for someone who reminds us of some element of our 'unfinished emotional and self-esteem business' of the past.
What has happened is that 'the transferring person or subject' has subconsciously sought out and found a person in his or her adult life ('the transference object') who appropriately and/or inappropriately reminds the transferring person of his or her original childhood transference figure/object. This starts to get complicated so let me try to utilize some metaphors and examples to illustrate what is going on here.
We move through life and we find a girlfriend or boyfriend, husband or wife -- or 'other friend and/or lover' - who reminds us of an important childhood transference figure in our 'template' of subconscious, unfinished, emotional complexes in our personaliy.
Imagine a 'roulette wheel' in the subconscious memory- fantasy template of our personality. Every number on this 'psychological roulette wheel' represents an assortment of different possible 'memory-fantasy' transference complexes -- 'metaphorical planets or moons' if you will that are spinning around the main planet or sun of our 'Central Ego'. You can even look at them as being like 'astrological signs or planets' that create for us a myriad of potential 'biochemical-psychological-philosophical' relationship possibilities...spinning around in our head looking for a particular type of 'match' or 'fit' in the real world. This is the world of 'transference complexes'.
And then in the real world, we hit a 'fit'. Now I don't give complete credibility to 'astrological signs and readings and predictions...' But I don't completely discredit them either. I look at 'coincidences' and 'accidents' in life and I don't always completely discard them as coincidences and accidents. I look at potential 'emotional fits' between coincidences and accidents on the one hand -- and the internal workings of 'subconscious emotional transference complexes' on the other hand.
Here are some of the different types of 'mystical coincidences' (the head of The Toronto Gestalt Institute (George Rosner at the time I was learning there -- off and on between 1979 and 1991 -- used to call them 'wu wu connections') that I do not automatically dismiss and view as possible 'mystical transference fits': 1. My dad's birthday is April 2nd. So too is my girlfriend's birthday who I have been with for almost 10 years. My son's birthday is October 15th. That just happens to be Nietzsche's birthday. Freud and Jung met for the first time on March 3rd (1907). That's my birthday -- 48 years later. Alexander Bain is, I believe, usually viewed as being the 'first academic or technical psychologist' -- the first philosopher to specifically move from the study of philosophy into the more particular study of psychology. I did a bit of a 'geneology check' on my family's roots and couldn't find a connection with this man's lineage...and yet I look at this man's biography and his work -- in philosophy, psychology, English (spelling, grammar)....and I see his academic interests written all through my own personality...Also, Alexander Bain taught at The University of Aberdeen, Scotland, which is the city where my ancestors came from...I feel some serious <em><strong>'Karma'</strong></em> with this man...even if there are no (at least known) genetic roots.
My work may or may not come anywhere close to Alexander Bain's level of academic significance but once again I fin it 'mystcally coincidental' that ...if I had one choice of what I would like to do with the rest of my life, I would like to create 'The DGB PEPP (Philosophy-English-Psychology-Politics)...Club' focusing on the study and dialectic evolution of Philosophy, English, Psychology ..the same three areas of study that Alexander Bain specialized in...
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Karma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Kamma (disambiguation).
Spirituality portal
Karma (Sanskrit: कर्म kárma (help·info), kárman- "act, action, performance"[1]; Pali: kamma) is the concept of "action" or "deed" in Indian religions understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect (i.e., the cycle called saṃsāra) originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist philosophies.
The philosophical explanation of karma can differ slightly between traditions, but the general concept is basically the same. Through the law of karma, the effects of all deeds actively create past, present, and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life, and the pain and joy it brings to him/her and others. The results or 'fruits' of actions are called karma-phala. In religions that incorporate reincarnation, karma extends through one's present life and all past and future lives as well.
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Alexander Bain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bain
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dgb, continued...
One way or the other -- whether I am 'reaching too far' on these 'coincidental connections' or not -- it is no accident that we all narcissistically and symbolically return to the scene of our 'childhood transference memories and figures' to 're-create' the 'old scene' again, to re-live it again -- and to try to narcissistically 'finish' or 'complete' that which was left 'unfinished' and/or 'unresolved' the first time.
This phenomenon gave rise to Freud's concepts of the 'repetition compulsion' and the 'death instinct' which do not do sufficient justice to what is happening here. The essence of the childhood transference scene -- and the memory -- is that it is narcissisically unfinished, and incomplete because either there has been a 'life-changing, self-esteem injury' here, and/or the opposite -- a narcissistic triumph or pleasure -- and a 'fixation' with this triumph and/or pleasure.
In the case, of a life-changing self-esteem tragedy, traumacy, and/or injury, the one thing that Freud could not get his head around -- and perhaps his main reason for abandoning his Childhood Traumacy/Seduction/Sexual Assault Theory -- is that Freud couldn't understand why a person, usually a 'hysterical' woman in his early clinical practise, but equally applicable to both sexes, would want to return, over and over again -- obsessive-compulsively -- metaphorically in clinical practise and in adult relationships to the scene of his or her greatest childhood and lifetime traumacies/tragedies. This clinical fact violated and flat-out contradicted his 'unpleasure theory' which stated that people would go out of their way to avoid pain -- and/or its re-creation. And yet, here in the 'deterministic' throes of an obsessive-compulsive-addictive transference complex' people were coming back over and over again metaphorically, symbolically to the childhood scenes of their greatest traumacies -- and self-esteem traumacies.
Why in God's name, would they/we want to do this -- and often in the process, re-create, re-live the old childhood pain all over again, often to the tune of brand new -- but old self-destruction all over again -- unless they derived some sort of contorted, twisted, masochistic pleasure from this experience? Which seems to be more or less what Freud concluded -- and also that there was some sort of twisted narcissistic pleasure in the old traumatic childhood scene -- which led Freud up the road, up the path -- a partly wrong one, I believe -- to 'distorted, screen memories' and then to 'dreams' and 'unconscious childhood fantasies' and 'The Oedipal Complex' and later to 'the repetition compulsion' and the 'death instinct'.
DGB Philosophy-Psychology doesn't go to any of these later Freudian places in the exact same way that Freud did -- except from a different post-Freudian, integrative perspective -- specifically, a combined Psychoanalytic, Adlerian, Jungian, Transactional Analysis, and Gestalt perspective that focuses on the idea of of 'transference incompletion' and 'unfinished childhood business' -- the compensating wish and fantasy to complete or finish this unfinished childhood business, the childhood self-esteem traumacy -- in a more <em><strong>self-empowering </strong></em>fashion.
This is how in Ronald Fairbairn's terminology and conceptuology -- our 'childhood rejecting transference object' becomes also at the same time our 'childhood exciting transference object' as we view this and only this person as holding the key to 're-completing the wholeness' of the 'void' or 'abyss' or 'tumor' in our own fractured self-esteem growth. This combination of rejecting and exciting transference object is then transferred into our adult transference complexes and relationships.
In other words, contrary to Freud's logical analysis of this situation, there is no violation of the 'pleasure' and/or 'unpleasure' principle here but rather the pleasure principle is still very much in tact and at work. Specifically, man's -- and woman's -- greatest narcissistic triumph involves his or her own transference complex(es) whereby our greatest childhood narcissistic/self-esteem failures, rejections, abandonments, and traumacies are 'magically undone' and/or 'reversed' if only for a short period of time through the supreme triumph of our adult transference successes and accomplishments that -- if only for a brief time -- make our self-esteem 'whole' again where in the original transference scene (and/or series of scenes/memories), there may have been the creation of a huge, gaping 'self-esteem void or hole' through tragedy, traumacy, rejection, assault, abuse, betrayal, and/or the like.
In the 1980s, I called this whole transference complex -- and its underlying goal of 'compensation superiority striving, success and triumph' (Adler) -- <em><strong>transference-reversal</strong></em>. It totally follows the dictates of the pleasure and unpleasure principle -- although in an often seemingly contorted and masochistic way, for if we are 'symbolically and existentially going to play with fire again', it is more or less inevitable that we are going to get 'burnt again', as we go down some of the old childhood paths again, leading back to a newer version of one of our most feared and revered old childhood protagonists/rejectors/excitors -- and a 'symbolic repetition' of the same or similar traumacy, tragedy, and self-destruction -- all over again, relived dramatically, in all of its old and new, most exciting and most painful passon and suffering combined together to the max. This is the essence of the transference complex and at its worst, one can easily see how Freud connected it to his idea of the repetition compulsion and death instinct.
That is a DGB short version of the whole idea of 'transference' -- built from the earliest and latest work of Freud, and many of the greatest psychologists -- pro, con, and modified, integrative Psychoanalysts -- who came after him.
7. Narcissism: Another one of Freud's most important conceptual and theoretical additions to Psychoanalysis was/is the concept and phenomenon of 'narcissism'.
Narcissism is a very abstract term/concept with a broad range and focus of different nuances of meaning depending on the context it is being used in. It can be used to describe any of the following inter-related ideas, feelings, experiences: ego, pride, self-esteem, self-worth, self-absorption, self-arrogancy, selfishness, self-assertion, greed, self-pleasure, connected with traumacy and/or tragedy, we can talk about 'narcissistic traumacy', 'narcissistic anxiety', 'narcissistic excitement', 'narcissistic fixation', 'narcissistic compensation', 'narcissistic projection', 'narcissistic introjection and/or identification', 'narcissistic transference', 'narcissistic rage'...
It was the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut who was most influential in developing the last line of thought relative to transference...Freud thought that people who are extremely narcissistic cannot 'transfer' thoughts and/or feelings and/or impulses because they are too locked up, too self-absorbed, in themselves. However, Kohut correctly assessed (in my opinion) that it was/is this characteristic of 'self-absorption' in the context of a social relationship that is the essence of a 'narcissistic transference' -- i.e., the inability and/or unwillingness to see another except in the light of one's own thoughts, feelings, impulses, and projections...In other words, the extemely narcissistic person is unwilling and/or incapable of feeling empathy and/or social sensitivity towards another person. Thus, extreme narcissism is often connected to the ideas of 'psychopathic' and/or 'sociopathic', particularly when it is connected with such auxiliary thoughts, feeling, emotions -- and/or the lack of them -- as extreme possessiveness, jealousy, anger, rage, hate, violence...
Narcissism is both an normal and an abnormal, a healthy and an unhealthy process depending on its childhood course of development and evolution. And depending on the element of 'balance' vs. 'extremism' that is attached to this childhood and adult evolutionary delopmental process.
The opposite of narcissism is 'altruism' although both can and do have the same roots in caring and love -- and/or its absence.
Narcissism -- particularly pathological narcissism -- can and does have its roots in childhood neglect, abuse, betrayal, abandonment...Thus, we can speak of 'narcissistic traumacy' and/or 'narcissistic tragedy'...a traumatic/tragic loss of an important childhood figure (like mom and/or dad) and often combined with this a tragic/traumatic loss of self-esteem, self-worth, self-love...
However, narcissism can and is often connected with what would seem to be the opposite -- pampering, spoiling, treating a child as if he or she can do no wrong, as if there are no social laws, rules, regulations, and values to be learned in life -- especially the values of empathy, social sensitivity, ethics, fairness -- and reciprocity.
Thus, we can distinguish between the 'narcissism of neglect' -- i.e., 'compensatory narcissism' -- vs. the 'narcissism of being spoiled/pampered' (which involves the 'neglect of being taught and learning social reciprocity'. It is from these childhood lessons and learning processes -- and/or the lack of them -- that we, meaning DGBN Philosophy-Psychology arrive at the same concept Kohut did -- this being the concept of 'narcissistic transferences'.
...........................................................................
Heinz Kohut
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Kohut
......................................................................
We will pick this line of thinking up in later essays.
-- DGBN Philosophy-Psychology, January 23rd, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic-Gap Bridging Negotiations...are still in process...
Transference as A Narcissistic Self-Esteem Injury -- and The Compensatory Wish to 'Undo' or 'Repair' This Injury as An Adult
Transference involves a symbolic re-creation or reincarnation of an old, emotional dialectic. It can be good and/or bad depending on which way it turns. It can be used creatively and/or destructively. In the sphere of love and sex, it is very obsessive-compulsive, very addictive -- the essence of erotic psychology and biochemistry all rolled into one -- and thus, very hard to avoid.
Some transferences are much more dangerous than others -- transferences connected to alcoholic, drug-using, and/or abusive fathers and/or moms, transferences connected to abandoning fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to violent fathers and/or mothers.
Every child eventually has to run into the phenomenon of 'rejection' in some form or another at an early age, some worse than others, some construed worse than others, and these early rejections often 'trigger' the onset of life-lasting transference neurosis or transference complex.
The difference between a 'transference neurosis' and a 'traumacy neurosis' from a DGB perspective is the difference between obsessively wanting to symbolically return to the 'scene of the childhood traumacy/rejection' -- and not.
In a traumacy neurosis, there is usually simply 'avoidance behavior' -- a fear of repeating some traumatic scene all over again, and thus, taking precautionary steps aimed at preventing this type of traumacy from happening again. There is no element of 'attraction', 'excitement' 'romantic infatuation' and/or 'sexuality'.
However, in a transference neurosis -- at least the type of transference encounter and/or relationship that we are talking about here -- we have the paradoxical addition of 'attraction', 'excitement', and 'self-esteem celebration' as well as underlying opposing feelings of fear or anxiety, grief -- and resentment, anger, hate, even to the point of unleashed narcissistic-transference rage (overt or covert) over issues such as perceived abandonment, betrayal, etc.
So a transference love neurosis or complex -- and the type of relationship that it feeds off of -- entails a huge, and very intense, bag of emotions that swing back and forth in bi-polar fashion from anxiety to excitement and back to anxiety, and from love to hate and back to love again, with romantic infatuation and strong sexual feelings also often mixed up in the middle of this smorgasboard of emotions and sensations.
Underlying this paradoxical mixture of emotions, there is usually but not always the subconscious wish to 'undo or repair a childhood rejection' by 'wishing to play out the childhood scene differently in adulthood' -- with a more satisfying 'self-esteem result. But this does not always work; indeed, oftentimes it backfires, as once again, our 'transference protagonist' gets the best of us, and/or alternatively, sometimes also, we can 'lose interest' in our transference protagonist if he or she becomes 'too accepting' of us -- which 'diminishes the original transference excitement around the similarity to the childhood rejector' and then we start subconsciously looking for a newer and more 'challenging' transference figure/protagonist to start the process all over again.
Alternatively again, sometimes we might spend five or ten years 'playing out a particular type of transference drama with a particular type of transference figure/protagonist' until we get to a point where we reject this person, reject this style of relationship -- the person and the process -- and then go bouncing like a pinball machine into the opposite type of transference relationship with an opposite type of 'transference-lover'.
<em><strong>When transference is involved in self-growth, it involves a 'healing' and 'patching' of the self-esteem -- it involves an evolutionary progression from environmental support to self-support (in Gestalt terminology). It involves a 'creative dialectic negotiation and integration' in the personality that is usually highly connected to the creative dialectic negotiation and integration that is happening in the transference relationship at the same time. This adult transference relationship is both similar and/or different than the old transference relationship(s). It is like the Myth of The Phoenix where out of the old, we rise and fly into the new...and are reborn in the process...From a 'caterpillar', we become a 'butterfly'. </strong></em>
When transference is self-destructive and pathological, it involves not only a re-creation of the past, but also a repetition of the past. It involves a regression into 'earlier states of being' that are not self-supportive. Rather than healing and/or patching the 'gap' or 'void' in self-esteem, instead through a recurrence or repetition of adult events similar to childhood events, that gap or void is reinforced and widened until once again it becomes a 'chasm' or an 'abyss' or an 'absess' in the the self-esteem and personality.
If or when this latter negative situation happens, we have a number of choices facing us:
1. Do nothing about it;
2. Learn to understand our transference complexes/neuroses better, so that we can particularly understand the 'why' and the 'how' of its 'brutal, potential downside', and what we can do in terms of 'not going on this roller coaster ride that is going to throw us off the roller coaster at the top and/or the bottom of the ride';
3. Learn both the positive and the negative dynamics of your 'transference ride', and if you choose to play your own particular transference game because of the potential 'thrill' it gives you, do so consciously, in awareness, and don't engage in the negative type of self-talk that generally tends to happen when 'the most exciting part of your transference game' suddenly turns sour, and starts to spin negatively, downwards, out of control.
-- dgbn, Feb. 1st, 2009, updated and modified Feb. 13th, 2009, Jan. 29th, 2011.
-- david gordon bain
Some transferences are much more dangerous than others -- transferences connected to alcoholic, drug-using, and/or abusive fathers and/or moms, transferences connected to abandoning fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to violent fathers and/or mothers.
Every child eventually has to run into the phenomenon of 'rejection' in some form or another at an early age, some worse than others, some construed worse than others, and these early rejections often 'trigger' the onset of life-lasting transference neurosis or transference complex.
The difference between a 'transference neurosis' and a 'traumacy neurosis' from a DGB perspective is the difference between obsessively wanting to symbolically return to the 'scene of the childhood traumacy/rejection' -- and not.
In a traumacy neurosis, there is usually simply 'avoidance behavior' -- a fear of repeating some traumatic scene all over again, and thus, taking precautionary steps aimed at preventing this type of traumacy from happening again. There is no element of 'attraction', 'excitement' 'romantic infatuation' and/or 'sexuality'.
However, in a transference neurosis -- at least the type of transference encounter and/or relationship that we are talking about here -- we have the paradoxical addition of 'attraction', 'excitement', and 'self-esteem celebration' as well as underlying opposing feelings of fear or anxiety, grief -- and resentment, anger, hate, even to the point of unleashed narcissistic-transference rage (overt or covert) over issues such as perceived abandonment, betrayal, etc.
So a transference love neurosis or complex -- and the type of relationship that it feeds off of -- entails a huge, and very intense, bag of emotions that swing back and forth in bi-polar fashion from anxiety to excitement and back to anxiety, and from love to hate and back to love again, with romantic infatuation and strong sexual feelings also often mixed up in the middle of this smorgasboard of emotions and sensations.
Underlying this paradoxical mixture of emotions, there is usually but not always the subconscious wish to 'undo or repair a childhood rejection' by 'wishing to play out the childhood scene differently in adulthood' -- with a more satisfying 'self-esteem result. But this does not always work; indeed, oftentimes it backfires, as once again, our 'transference protagonist' gets the best of us, and/or alternatively, sometimes also, we can 'lose interest' in our transference protagonist if he or she becomes 'too accepting' of us -- which 'diminishes the original transference excitement around the similarity to the childhood rejector' and then we start subconsciously looking for a newer and more 'challenging' transference figure/protagonist to start the process all over again.
Alternatively again, sometimes we might spend five or ten years 'playing out a particular type of transference drama with a particular type of transference figure/protagonist' until we get to a point where we reject this person, reject this style of relationship -- the person and the process -- and then go bouncing like a pinball machine into the opposite type of transference relationship with an opposite type of 'transference-lover'.
<em><strong>When transference is involved in self-growth, it involves a 'healing' and 'patching' of the self-esteem -- it involves an evolutionary progression from environmental support to self-support (in Gestalt terminology). It involves a 'creative dialectic negotiation and integration' in the personality that is usually highly connected to the creative dialectic negotiation and integration that is happening in the transference relationship at the same time. This adult transference relationship is both similar and/or different than the old transference relationship(s). It is like the Myth of The Phoenix where out of the old, we rise and fly into the new...and are reborn in the process...From a 'caterpillar', we become a 'butterfly'. </strong></em>
When transference is self-destructive and pathological, it involves not only a re-creation of the past, but also a repetition of the past. It involves a regression into 'earlier states of being' that are not self-supportive. Rather than healing and/or patching the 'gap' or 'void' in self-esteem, instead through a recurrence or repetition of adult events similar to childhood events, that gap or void is reinforced and widened until once again it becomes a 'chasm' or an 'abyss' or an 'absess' in the the self-esteem and personality.
If or when this latter negative situation happens, we have a number of choices facing us:
1. Do nothing about it;
2. Learn to understand our transference complexes/neuroses better, so that we can particularly understand the 'why' and the 'how' of its 'brutal, potential downside', and what we can do in terms of 'not going on this roller coaster ride that is going to throw us off the roller coaster at the top and/or the bottom of the ride';
3. Learn both the positive and the negative dynamics of your 'transference ride', and if you choose to play your own particular transference game because of the potential 'thrill' it gives you, do so consciously, in awareness, and don't engage in the negative type of self-talk that generally tends to happen when 'the most exciting part of your transference game' suddenly turns sour, and starts to spin negatively, downwards, out of control.
-- dgbn, Feb. 1st, 2009, updated and modified Feb. 13th, 2009, Jan. 29th, 2011.
-- david gordon bain
Thursday, January 27, 2011
An Introduction -- and Overview -- To Gap-DGB Personality Theory (Part 3)
Life is a journey from chaos to organization and back to chaos again.
The personality evolves from chaos -- a newborn baby entering a world that he or she has no experience dealing with...
Impulses -- indeed instincts for food, warmth, touch, nurturing, comfort, safety... -- propel the baby forward with the only tool that baby has at his or her disposal upon entering this frightening new world: his or her vocal chords.
Movement -- first, disorganized movement, and then more organized, co-ordinated movement with a purpose -- start to develop shortly thereafter, and baby, barring any health and/or adaptive complications, is on his or her way towards developing a greater and greater cognitive-emotional-physical skillset for dealing with the world and fulfilling his or her needs in conjunction with the world...
Cognitvely speaking, there are three main skillsets that baby needs to develop in the process of what is happening above: 1. association (recognizing similarities and regularities); 2. distinction (recognizing differences); and 3. memory that can be divided into two types: 'associative memory' and 'distinctive memory' (as well as the more usually distinguished short and long-term memory).
Long term 'associative and distinctive memories' that are carried over from childhood to adulthood we will refer to here as 'transferences'. From the word and concept of transference, we get such derrivative words and concepts as: 'transference complexes', 'transference neuroses', 'transference fixations', transference obsessions', 'transference avoidances', 'distancing transferences', 'rebellious transferences', 'approval-seeking transferences', 'schizoid transferences', 'violent transferences', 'oral transferences', 'anal transferences', 'oral-nurturing transferences', 'oral-obsessive transferences', 'anal-schizoid transferences', 'anal-rejecting transferences', 'anal-distancing transferences', 'impulsive transferences', 'defensive transferences', 'compensatory transferences', 'approach-avoidance transferences', 'transference memories', 'transference encounters', 'transference relationships'...and on and on we could/can go...
The road between newborn baby and adult personality theory travels through transference theory.
Alfred Adler had some very important things to say about transference theory but unfortunately (or fortunately) by the time he got around to saying these things, he had long since stepped outside of, and away from, the Classic Freudian Paradigm, and thus, he needed to invent a new terminology which we will call here 'lifestyle theory' complete with a whole host of different, competing assumptions and associated theories that 'hid' the associative (or potential associative) connection between Freudian Transference Theory and Adlerian Lifestyle Theory. That is where I will come in to 'bridge the dialectic gap'.
Furthermore, the direction that Freud had started to go relative to 'Pre-Classical Traumacy and Transference Theory' was suddenly aborted shortly after 1896, a whole new set of associative assumptions and theories were built up after 1896 to replace the associative assumptions and theories that Freud had built up until 1896, and thus, a distinction that we can make here and now between 'transference-traumacy theory' and 'transference-fantasy and impulse theory', most Classical Freudians cannot even contemplate because they have been taught 'transference theory' entirely within the 'Classical Freudian Paradigm' or perhaps, a competing post-Classical paradigm' such as 'Object Relations Theory' and/or 'Self Psychology' which has developed different assumptions and theories about transference...
However, no-one within Freudian circles, to my knowledge, has asked the question: How would Freudian Transference Theory been different if he had never abandoned his 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory' after 1896?
That is where I come in again and provide a 'Quantum-Integrative-Traumacy-Fantasy-Defense' Theory of Transference that combines elements of: 1. what Freud wrote before 1896; 2. What Freud wrote after 1896; and 3. what Adler wrote long after he had left Freud and Psychoanalysis. Thus, in essence, I am addressing and aiming to bridge two gaps here: 1. 'the pre-1896-post-1896 Freudian gap'; and 2. 'The Freudian-Adlerian gap'. You can add one more 'gap' to these two gaps, and that is the 'Freudian-Jungian gap'.
If this sounds complicated and confusing now, particulary if you are a reader less familiar with all the different stages (and seeming contradictions) of Freudian Theory, hopefully, it will become less so as we move along here.
Regarding Jung, there is some important Jungian Theory -- and 'DGB-Jungian Quantum-Integrative Theory' -- that we need to discuss before we move on to a more complete discussion of 'DGB Quantum-Integative Transference Theory'.
The Jungian and DGB-Jungian Theory that I am talking about we will encapsule under the concept and theory of 'The Mythological-Symbolic Genetic Self'. This more or less falls under the domain of what Jung called the 'Collective Unconscious'.
It is to this subject matter that we will turn to...probably tomorrow.
-- dgb, Jan. 26th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
The personality evolves from chaos -- a newborn baby entering a world that he or she has no experience dealing with...
Impulses -- indeed instincts for food, warmth, touch, nurturing, comfort, safety... -- propel the baby forward with the only tool that baby has at his or her disposal upon entering this frightening new world: his or her vocal chords.
Movement -- first, disorganized movement, and then more organized, co-ordinated movement with a purpose -- start to develop shortly thereafter, and baby, barring any health and/or adaptive complications, is on his or her way towards developing a greater and greater cognitive-emotional-physical skillset for dealing with the world and fulfilling his or her needs in conjunction with the world...
Cognitvely speaking, there are three main skillsets that baby needs to develop in the process of what is happening above: 1. association (recognizing similarities and regularities); 2. distinction (recognizing differences); and 3. memory that can be divided into two types: 'associative memory' and 'distinctive memory' (as well as the more usually distinguished short and long-term memory).
Long term 'associative and distinctive memories' that are carried over from childhood to adulthood we will refer to here as 'transferences'. From the word and concept of transference, we get such derrivative words and concepts as: 'transference complexes', 'transference neuroses', 'transference fixations', transference obsessions', 'transference avoidances', 'distancing transferences', 'rebellious transferences', 'approval-seeking transferences', 'schizoid transferences', 'violent transferences', 'oral transferences', 'anal transferences', 'oral-nurturing transferences', 'oral-obsessive transferences', 'anal-schizoid transferences', 'anal-rejecting transferences', 'anal-distancing transferences', 'impulsive transferences', 'defensive transferences', 'compensatory transferences', 'approach-avoidance transferences', 'transference memories', 'transference encounters', 'transference relationships'...and on and on we could/can go...
The road between newborn baby and adult personality theory travels through transference theory.
Alfred Adler had some very important things to say about transference theory but unfortunately (or fortunately) by the time he got around to saying these things, he had long since stepped outside of, and away from, the Classic Freudian Paradigm, and thus, he needed to invent a new terminology which we will call here 'lifestyle theory' complete with a whole host of different, competing assumptions and associated theories that 'hid' the associative (or potential associative) connection between Freudian Transference Theory and Adlerian Lifestyle Theory. That is where I will come in to 'bridge the dialectic gap'.
Furthermore, the direction that Freud had started to go relative to 'Pre-Classical Traumacy and Transference Theory' was suddenly aborted shortly after 1896, a whole new set of associative assumptions and theories were built up after 1896 to replace the associative assumptions and theories that Freud had built up until 1896, and thus, a distinction that we can make here and now between 'transference-traumacy theory' and 'transference-fantasy and impulse theory', most Classical Freudians cannot even contemplate because they have been taught 'transference theory' entirely within the 'Classical Freudian Paradigm' or perhaps, a competing post-Classical paradigm' such as 'Object Relations Theory' and/or 'Self Psychology' which has developed different assumptions and theories about transference...
However, no-one within Freudian circles, to my knowledge, has asked the question: How would Freudian Transference Theory been different if he had never abandoned his 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory' after 1896?
That is where I come in again and provide a 'Quantum-Integrative-Traumacy-Fantasy-Defense' Theory of Transference that combines elements of: 1. what Freud wrote before 1896; 2. What Freud wrote after 1896; and 3. what Adler wrote long after he had left Freud and Psychoanalysis. Thus, in essence, I am addressing and aiming to bridge two gaps here: 1. 'the pre-1896-post-1896 Freudian gap'; and 2. 'The Freudian-Adlerian gap'. You can add one more 'gap' to these two gaps, and that is the 'Freudian-Jungian gap'.
If this sounds complicated and confusing now, particulary if you are a reader less familiar with all the different stages (and seeming contradictions) of Freudian Theory, hopefully, it will become less so as we move along here.
Regarding Jung, there is some important Jungian Theory -- and 'DGB-Jungian Quantum-Integrative Theory' -- that we need to discuss before we move on to a more complete discussion of 'DGB Quantum-Integative Transference Theory'.
The Jungian and DGB-Jungian Theory that I am talking about we will encapsule under the concept and theory of 'The Mythological-Symbolic Genetic Self'. This more or less falls under the domain of what Jung called the 'Collective Unconscious'.
It is to this subject matter that we will turn to...probably tomorrow.
-- dgb, Jan. 26th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
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