Hegel's Hotel: DGB Multi-Bi-Polarity Philosophy-Psychology: Integrating Opposite Paradigms

1.14. Changes in Freud's Thinking Relative to 'Memories' Between 1896 and 1906

2012-01-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

In process, January 14th, 2012...

What Freud called 'screen memories' from 1899 (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899) onwards, Adler called 'lifestyle memories', and I call 'transference memories'. Each name and concept involves an assumptive or presumptive paradigm shift that opens up new conceptual and theoretical boundaries, and resulting territory.

1. A 'screen memory' suggests for us to 'look for another deeper, more etiologically (causally) significant memory...because this one you are looking at here is 'a screen memory that is both hiding and alluding to a deeper, repressed memory';

2. A 'lifestyle memory' says 'look right here -- don't go any further -- you have found the diagnostic gold right here' (with an underlying 'Adlerian unity -- as in no conflict -- in the personality' assumptive foundation);

3. A 'transference memory' says 'look here -- you've found the diagnostic gold and don't need to look any further' (but with an operative, Freudian assumptive foundation of 'conflict -- as opposed to unity -- in the personality, or even better, the dialectic idea of 'conflicted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality -- which integrates both Freudian and Adlerian assumptive foundations.

Thus, we arrive at the Quantum-Dialectic assumptive foundation of 'conficted unity' or 'unified conflict' in the personality, with different degrees of conflict and/or unity going on at different times in the personality, depending on the context of one's present and past life-situation interacting with each other at different moments in time.

Now, in 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through' (1914), Freud, although he was using the concept of 'screen memory' (as in 'dig deeper for a more important, 'repressed' memory) , he still stated quite assertively that that there was valuable diagnostic information to be obtained from a screen memory (so much so, in my editorial opinion that this type of memory rightly deserves to be called a 'transference memory' -- and a 'conscious early childhood transference memory' when the memory is from early childhood, partly arbitrarily chosen at 7 years old or younger -- I am following Adlerian Theory here with my own 'Bainian twist' regarding the 'conflicted unity' and 'transference memory' assumptive base):

To be continued...

1.13. Bridging The Gap Between Pre-Psychoanalytic 'Reality-Traumacy' Theory and Classical Psychoanalytic 'Fantasy-Impulse' Theory

2012-01-08T02:38:00.001-08:00

New essay....in process....January 14th/2012....

A distinction between three types of choices can be made:

1. An 'Aristotlean Either/Or Classification Choice';

Eg. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

2. A 'Kierkegaardian Either/Or Existential Choice';

Eg. Should I get married, or should I not?

3. A 'Hegelian Dialectic-Integrative Choice';

Eg. The Democrats and Republicans compromising on some legislative bill in order to get it passed into law....

A Hegelian choice involves synthesizing two or more seemingly opposing choices -- a 'compromise-solution' of sorts but ideally with the 'best of both worlds integrated into one 'dialectically interactive but cohesive unit or paradigm'....

Is integrating pre-1897 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory with post 1896 'Fantasy-Impulse Theory' going to give us a superior form of Psychoanalysis than either 'Pre-Classical' Psychoanalysis or 'Classical' Psychoanalysis' taken separately? That is the dialectically posed question here....

1.12. On The Similarity Between 'The Mind-Psyche-Self's' Immune System and The Mind-Body's Immune System

2012-01-08T02:36:00.000-08:00

The 'mind's defense system' and the 'body's defense system' work essentially the same way -- and for that matter, so does our 'computer's defense system'. And for that matter, so does our 'legal-civil defense system', and our 'military defense system'.

All of them can be said to use 'vaults' or 'prisons' to 'lock up the bad guys' -- or the 'viruses' and 'bacteria' -- or the 'dangerous thoughts, impulses, drives, obsessions, fantasies, and/or potential actions'....

In our 'psychic immune system', we all have ' superego and ego-defenders' who are like 'soldiers' or 'prison guards' who watch to make sure the 'prisoners don't escape' from 'The Shadow-Id Vault' -- the 'vault comprised of locked-up, misbehaving thoughts, impulses, drives, obsessions, fantasies, and/or potential actions'.

Now, introduce an 'existential or immediacy stressor' -- say, a loss of job, loss of income, loss of spouse, insufficient income to meet all our bills, and/or a huge bill unexpectedly landing on our desk -- say a lawyer's bill, a vet's bill, a dentist's bill, a doctor's bill, a tax bill... -- without the funds to take care of it...

Immediacy stressors can lead to 'upsets' or 'imbalances' in the mind-body's immune system, spawned by loss of hope, loss of spirit, loss of optimism, 'deflation of the ego'....Sometimes -- oftentimes -- this type of stess can spawn 'compensatory impulses' of either an angry, vengeful... and/or the sensual, pleasure-seeking variety...Indeed, often 'hard internal and/or external stressors' can trigger the onset of a whole host of possible 'addictions' -- food, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc...These are what I call 'oral obsessions' or 'oral addictions' -- they all involve the act of 'consuming' or 'receiving' pleasure -- or, at least, this is their intent.

So you wander down to your favorite 'watering hole' -- knock down a couple of 'quick cocktails', your 'ego defenders/prison guards' start to get a little 'tipsey' on the job while they are supposed to be 'working' -- and 'the inmates of your asylum, your Shadow-Id Vault' start to get a little excited that the guards 'are losing control of themselves and the 'door to the vault' -- and this is when you start to get 'The SIEVE Effect' -- Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy starting to 'escape' the vault and head upwards in the psyche, up towards the control system of 'The Central Ego'...Now, if your 'prsison guards' start to get really drunk, you could get a complete 'evacuation' of The Shadow-Id Vault -- and a 'flooding upwards' of the 'free inmates from your asylum', until you get, in effect, what might be metaphorically viewed as a 'Storming of The Bastille'...at which point you become a much more 'unpredictable patron of your local watering hole'...your behavior reflecting perhaps, more and more of the 'contents' of your 'Shadow-Id Vault and/or Ego', or worded otherwise, your 'Narcissistic-Dionysian Ego' as opposed to your 'Apollonian Ego' which used to be much more in control before you sucked down three cocktails...

If 'food' is your 'compensatory impulse of choice', then you are likely going to put on weight unless you exercise a lot, have a fast metabolism, and/or 'throw it back up again'...

If 'drug addiction' is your compensatory impulse of choice, then it will depend on whether you prefer the 'social and/or sexual type' or the 'anti-social, anal-schizoid, oral fantasy' type...The first type are usually done in couples or groups and/or parties; the latter type is more often done in metaphorical 'bat caves' where you disappear for 6 or 12 or 24 hours at a time before 're-surfacing again'..Alcohol can also serve this type of 'loner' addiction...

'Gambling' of course is likely only going to make your money problem worse...Then there are the people with lots of money -- who don't have a problem with money -- until gambling creates a money problem where there was none before...

This analysis is rather short, sharp, and pointed as well as all 'metaphorical' but I think the message is still important. The mind and body function similarly -- and dialectically -- not detached, different, and apart....

Enough said on this subject for now...This can be viewed, more or less, as an extension or extrapolation of 'Classic Freudian Theory'...

-- dgb, Jan. 8th, 2012...

-- David Gordon Bain

1.11. On The Seeming Absurdity of The Often Brutal Dialectic Interplay Between 'Being and Nothingness', and Within 'The Master-Slave Relationship'

2012-01-07T02:18:00.001-08:00

Finished...Jan. 7th, 2012

I go to bed most nights feeling more and more like Doestevsky, or at least some character in a Doestevsky novel -- like 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', or 'Notes From The Underground'. It is the first time in my life that I have seriously felt like this. Call it a product of 'The Trial' or 'The Stranger' -- getting older, feeling it, and not being where you want to be.

Or call it 'PMS-C Disorder' if you will -- 'Pessimism, Misery and Miserable Attitude, Skepticism -- Cynicism'.

Hegel's Hotel is built on a combination of love, reason, passion, idealism -- and the personal experience of elements of its opposite polarity -- moral, social and personal, democratic rage and outrage, as well as a sense of 'powerlessness', ineffectualness', self and social alienation, on top of a 'socio-economic meltdown' -- and behind all of this, a lack of sufficient and necessary 'will to self-empowerment'. Except what I can muster up in Hegel's Hotel here...

You don't usually write 5,000 or 10,000 pages of philosophy, psychology, economics, law, business, and/or politics without something seriously gnawing at you from 'The Shadow of Your Spirit and Soul...

Sometimes, what may 'sieve out' of your Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy' (SIEVE) through its 'transference-sublimation' into your work, at other times can rush or flood out, like The Mississippi or Red River during the springtime. You could call this a 'Shadow Rush' or a 'Shadow Flood' which may take many forms of 'High Psycho-Drama' -- a 'rage rush', a 'grief rush', a 'panic rush', a 'nervous breakdown', a 'psychotic meltdown'... We could be talking about anything from a Nietzsche 'love meltdown' -- at least that is how I heard it interpreted recently -- to a Ted Bundy murder spree....

.................................................................................................................

Lou Andreas-Salomé (born Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé, Russian: Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 – 5 January 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished western luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke.

.............................................................................................................................

When Nietzsche Wept
By: Justarius on Apr 17 2009
Category: Works

0 comments

I just finished watching the film When Nietzsche Wept (based on the book of the same title). It’s an interesting story that mixes some historical figures and events with Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychology. Although the movie has its flaws, it’s worth watching if you’re interested in any of these topics.
Revealing the story won’t ruin the experience, so here is a synopsis. Nietzsche suffers migraines and is depressed and suicidal due to a broken heart. The girl that broke his heart asks Dr. Josef Breuer (Freud’s mentor) to help him recover using both medicine and his new “talk therapy.” She has no romantic interest in Nietzsche, but she cares for him and believes that he will produce something great for mankind in the future.
The relationship between Breuer and Nietzsche proves mutually beneficial. Breuer helps Nietzsche recover, and Nietzsche helps Breuer overcome his own demons. They become friends in the end, and Nietzsche finally recognizes and confides his greatest fear to Breuer: he doesn’t want to die alone. And Nietzsche wept.
For all his complex ideas about ethics, social order, and the Ubermensch, at the most basic level, Nietzsche is simply a lonely guy. Of course, this is a gross oversimplification, but this idea is useful nonetheless. Philosophers come in all flavors, but they are plagued by the same occupational hazards, loneliness/alienation being the most common.
This got me thinking about the terrible toll loneliness takes on many visionary creators, whether they are thinkers, artists, or writers. They care about the world, yet they often express it in terms that people do not or cannot understand or appreciate. Their social ineptness or aloofness makes them difficult to love, and their insecurities make it difficult for them to accept love. Loneliness drives some to self-destruct, sometimes taking others with them, yet many simply vanish like shadows. Rare are those that weathered the storm and live long enough to receive acknowledgment within their lifetimes.
If only this were not true. Think of how many careers were cut short prematurely? How much richer would humanity be if these people had made their contributions, both great and small? Would a more stable Nietzsche be less brilliant, or would his thoughts be more balanced and accessible? Sadly, we will never know the answers to any of these questions.
Surely all creators want to live to see their work recognized; if only they would do more to help themselves. Or is this asking too much? Perhaps what drives creation invariably inhibits healthy social interaction as well; it is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t know. But I do know that everyone can use a friend at some point, even the father of the Ubermensch.

When Nietzsche Wept
<a href="http://www.philoscifi.com/scifi/works/when-nietzsche-wept">When Nietzsche Wept</a>
.....................................................................................................................................

Life is a strange integrative -- and non-integrative -- mix of co-operation and competition.

Narcissistic Capitalism often exasperates the 'competition' end of things -- as well as 'dissociating' the 'harmonious co-operation' end of things....

Power and money often distorts, perverts, poisons the truth -- and yet makes it real anyway -- creating a 'smoke and mirrors' show, an 'ideological and/or marketing fascade' where we really don't know who to trust, or what to trust, because the people we want to trust, want our money or our time and labour -- more than they want our friendship, our well-being, and our goodwill. Thus, narcissistic capitalism breeds a very lonely, alienated, 'Lord of The Flies', world....making it all the more important to hang on tight to our family, friends, and loved ones...Because once you lose your family, friends, loved ones -- what do you have left? -- a very, isolated, lonely, alienated existence -- and sometimes a 'moral rage and outrage' against the type of 'Narcissistic Corporate and Government Environment' that created such an isolated, lonely, alienated world we live in....with people not really caring about each other's problems -- we have enough of our own -- and going into the 'marketplace' each day to often 'rob and plunder' each other, to greater and lesser extents...

In this context, we try to find something meaningful in life....maybe we can find something meaningful in our work, and/or we 'cringe and defend ourselves' through each day, in order to get home to find something meaningful with our family, friends, loved ones, at night...And/or when that goes, what do you have left? A spiritless soul?

Or perhaps a 'spiritless soul' in a 'spiritless environment' -- still striving for a 'spiritual soul and a spiritual existence'....a dangerous, conflicted, ambivalent existence....and a dangerous 'abyss crossing' from a largely meaningless and spiritless existence to a more 'meaningful and spirited one' where we can perhaps feel more like a 'Superman' or 'Superwoman' with an effectual 'Will to Power and Self-Empowerment'...

And then maybe we have our Schopenhaurean, or Doestevskean, or Kierkegaardean'
moments when we shake our personal heads at the 'absurdity' of it all -- this often rather brutal dialectic interplay between 'Being and Nothingness'...

.......................................................................................

Last Thoughts on Woodie Guthrie

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

When your head gets twisted and your mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When you're laggin' behind and losin' your pace
In a slow motion crawl of life's busy race

No matter what you're doing, if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of your cup
If the winds got you sideways with, with one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slippin' and the feelin' is gone

And your train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the woods' easy findin' but you're lazy to fetch it
And your sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know it's wrong

And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from your pony are slippin'
And your rope is a slidin' 'cause your hands are a drippin'

And your sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And your sky cries water and your drain pipes a pourin'
And the lightnin's a flashin' and the thunders a crashin'

And the windows are rattlin' and breakin'
And the roof tops a shakin'
And your whole world's a slammin' and bangin'
And your minutes of sun turn to hours of storm

And to yourself, you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born?"

And you start gettin' chills and you're jumpin' from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And you're knee-deep in the dark water with your hands in the air
And the whole world's a watchin' with a window peek stare

And your good gal leaves and she's long gone a flyin'
And your heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And your jackhammer falls from your hand to your feet
And you need it badly but it lays on the street

And your bells bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think your ears might been hurt
Or your eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterday's rush
When you were faked out, an fooled white facin' a four flush

And all the time you were holdin' three queens
And it's makin' you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine

And there's somethin' on your mind you wanna be sayin'
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on your tongue and sealed in your head
And it bothers you badly when you're layin' in bed

And no matter how you try, you just can't say it
And you're scared to your soul, you just might forget it
And your eyes get swimmy from the tears in your head
And your pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead

And the lion's mouth opens and your starin' at his teeth
And his jaws start closin' with you underneath
And you're flat on your belly with your hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign

And you say to yourself, â€½Just what am I doin'?
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hangin', on this pathway I'm strollin'
In the space I'm takin', in this air I'm inhalin'"

Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard?
Why am I walkin', where am I runnin'?
What am I sayin', what am I knowin'
On this guitar I'm playin', on this banjo I'm frailin'?

On this mandolin I'm strummin'
In the song I'm singin', in the tune I'm hummin'
In the words I'm writin', in the words that I'm thinkin'
In this ocean of hours, I'm all the time drinkin'
Who am I helpin', what am I breakin'?
What am I givin', what am I takin'?

But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground or make your heart pound
But then again, you know why they're around
Just waitin' for a chance to slip and drop down

'Cause sometimes you hear 'em when the night times comes creepin'
And you fear that they might catch you a sleepin'
And you jump from your bed, from your last chapter of dreamin'
And you can't remember for the best of your thinkin'
If that was you in the dream that was screamin'

And you know that it's somethin' special you're needin'
And you know that there's no drug that'll do for the healin'
And no liquor in the land to stop your brain from bleedin'
And you need somethin' special
Yeah, you need somethin' special, all right

You need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That's been bangin' and boomin' and blowin' forever
That knows your troubles a hundred times over

You need a Greyhound bus that don't bar no race
That won't laugh at your looks, your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rollin' long after the bubblegum craze

You need somethin' to open up a new door
To show you somethin' you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more

You need somethin' to open your eyes
You need somethin' to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that you're standin', that space that you're sittin'

That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy, no matter how many times
You might get kicked

You need somethin' special all right
You need somethin' special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said or maybe you heard
On some windy corner, 'round a wide-angled curve

But that's what you need, man and you need it bad
And your trouble is you know it too good
'Cause you look and you start gettin' the chills
'Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill

And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ

And it ain't on that dim lit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Rantin' and ravin' and takin' your money
And you thinks it's funny

No, you can't find it in no night club or no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell, you're bound to tell
That no matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a gonna find it on your ticket stub

No and it ain't in the rumors people are tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in no cardboard box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course

And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes
And it ain't in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices

That come knockin' and tappin' in Christmas wrappin'
Sayin', â€½Ain't I pretty?â€ and â€½Ain't I cute?" and "Look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cryâ€
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows

No, you'll not, now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made out a paper mache
And inside it the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses

And it ain't in the fifty star generals and flipped out phonies
Who'd turn you in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind your back, my friend

The one's that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can't find it either in the no talent fools
That run around gallant and make all rules for the ones that got talent

And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent
But think they do and think they're foolin' you
The ones who jump on the wagon
Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of money and chicks

And you yell to yourself and you throw down your hat
Sayin', "Christ, do I gotta be like that?
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty, that stuff ain't real"

No, but that ain't your game, it ain't your race
You can't hear your name, you can't see your face
You gotta look some other place

And where do you look for this hope that you're seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a burnin'?
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'?
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'?

Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere?
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows

Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital

You'll find God in the church of your choice
You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion, I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both in Grand Canyon, sundown

-- Bob Dylan

.........................................................................................

I find my spirit in 'Hegel's Hotel'....

Freud found his spirit in 'Psychoanalysis'....

How did Freud 'lose his spirit' -- before he 're-found it' -- in Psychoanalysis?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this essay...soon to come...

-- dgb, Jan. 7th, 2012,

-- David Gordon Bain

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations....

-- Are Still in Process....

1.10. The Evolving DGB Multi-Dialectic Integrative Model of The Psyche -- As Compared and Contrasted With Freud's Classic Model

2012-01-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

Finished!...Jan. 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 2012...

A/ Introduction: A Contrast Between Fichte's Conceptualization of 'The Ego' and Freud's Conceptualization of The Ego and What The Difference Means Relative To Modifying and Extending Freud's Model of The Psyche

As far as my research goes back, and as I have indicated in other essays, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the first (German) philosopher who I know of to use the concept of 'ego' which effectively is a synonym for 'self' in the way that he used it. I am not sure whether or not Kant used the concept of 'ego' before Fichte. Regardless, other than Descartes and the other rational idealists (Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz) -- and even including the rational idealists, Fichte was the first philosopher to really focus in on 'the subjectivity of the human ego or self'. I don't know if Fichte has ever been called 'the father of phenomenology' but if he hasn't, perhaps he should.

If 'ego' in German -- up until Freud started to use it -- meant 'self' or 'psyche', then perhaps we should not get too 'freaked out' if we consider both 'the id' and 'the superego' to be separate 'conceptual and/or phenomenological divisions or compartments of the ego' -- or, in two or four words, separate 'ego states' with separate 'ego-functions' that conceptually divide each of these ego states from how ever many separate ego states we may conceptualize....

In this regard, perhaps Freud might have been better served by calling 'the id' -- 'The Narcissistic Ego' or 'The Dionysian Ego', or 'The Hedonistic (Pleasure-Seeking, Pain-Avoiding) Ego'....even though, with the last label, there are 'different types and levels of both pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding' -- some of which are deemed more 'morally and/or socially and/or legally acceptable' than others, meaning that some may be deemed more 'acceptable' to our internal Superego than others...

However, Freud chose to use the term 'id' which I believe has been translated into English as 'The It' which means that Freud considered the id to be a 'dissociated and/or repressed compart of The Self, The Psyche -- or The Ego....(in The Fichtean sense).

Worded otherwise, the id might be considered to be a 'primitive, uncivil, mainly dissociated compartment of the ego'... But of course, Freud didn't want this potential 'semantic confusion' between 'the id' and 'the ego'.....Regardless, this potential for confusion still stands -- because 'the id' is a particular set of 'ego functions' that are often 'dissociated' from the rest of the ego because they are deemed too 'primitive, too uncivil, too unsocial' to share with ourselves even, let alone anyone in our public world.

Thus, by this type of semantic analysis of the two concepts -- and particularly, the philosophical history of 'the ego' -- Freud was getting it 'backwards' when he stated that 'the ego was a more evolutionarily advanced derivative of the more primitive id'; rather, the id probably could have, and should have, been better conceptualized as the first primitive, evolutionary stage of the ego. In this regard, the id would also have been viewed as our first, most primitive and often uncivil 'ego state' with a particular set of 'self-contained biological and psychological ego functions built around our most demanding internal needs, impulses, drives...'

Now, to be clear, this wasn't Freud's perspective back in 1923 when he created these three concepts of 'id', 'ego', and 'superego'; rather, this is my perspective now looking back on these three concepts now from a different light -- the light that I am shining on them now.

So let me be absolutely clear in this regard: I view the 'id' as being an 'ego-state' involving a particular set of 'ego functions'. So much for 'Classical' Psychoanalysis....as I just turned it upside down like Freud did in 1896.

So with this in mind, and without further ado, let me quickly go over the newest version of my DGB model of the psyche....Let it be clear that this model didn't come out of the workwork or visit me during a dream -- it has been 40 years in the making starting with the first two 'psychology' books I read in 1972; Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics'; and Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought And Action'...

Along the way, this model has picked up influences from Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Fritz Perls, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Eric Berne, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Heinz Kohut, Jeffrey Masson, not to mention such noted Western (and one Eastern) philosophers as Anaximander, Lao Tse, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Spinoza, Sir Francis Bacon, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Doestevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida....This model has been a 'slow train coming'....

2/ The DGB Model Of The Psyche

Ba./ The More Conscious Elements of The Personality...

I have broken down Freud's 'superego' into three parts or three 'superego-states':

1. 'The Nurturing Superego' (Transactional Analysis would call this our 'Nurturing, Internalized Parent');
2. The 'Narcissistic Superego' (An internal 'superego-state' we like to go in order to mix 'power and pleasure' or, often more specifically, 'power and sex');
3. 'The Righteous Superego' (Transactional Analysis calls this 'superego state' our 'Critical Parent' -- looking to enforce 'ethical, legal, religious, theoretical, and/or practical rules' of subjectively construed 'good conduct' -- the problem is that 'ethical, legal, religious, theoretical, and/or practical righteousness' can be construed in a million different ways depending on the individual State, Institution, Corporation, Culture, Religion, or Individual...);

4. 'The Shadow-Id-Ego' (That part that burns inside us but we don't generally let loose..except sometimes consciously or subconsciously, in 'allusions to immediacy'...)
5. 'The Central Ego' (That mediates between all other element of the 'whole ego or self', and particularly here between The Shadow-Id Ego and The Personna Ego);
6. 'The Personna Ego'(which communicates with the outside world, usually holding 'Shadow-Id' elements back, or at least partly back for purposes of 'social diplomacy');

A new set of 'ego-states' -- or more precisely, 'underego states' -- has been developed based on 'object relations' studies to contrast against the 'superego states' listed above; and these are:

7. 'The Nurturing Underego' (appeases and pleases our superego states and/or our Central Ego);
8. 'The Narcissistic Underego' (aims to 'wrestle' power, egotism, pleaure, sex...away from the superego states); and
9. 'The Righteous Underego' (aims to wrestle power and righteousness away from the superego states);

Moving into the more subconscious elements of the personality, we have:

C/

10. 'The Dream Weaver' (DW...weaves our dreams, fantasies, artistic creations, and nightmares together while we are awake or sleeping);

11. 'The Transference-Lifestyle Template' (TLT)....our learnings from the past in order to deal better with the present and future than we have in the past...includes the Jungian concepts of 'Anima' and 'Animus' as well as 'Archetypes' in modified forms...as well as memories and learning of all types);

12. 'The Subconscious Shadow-Id Vault' (Bound Subconscious Shadow-Id Energy just forming and starting to consciously articulate itself...);

13. 'Our Terrifying Abyss of Perceived Existential Self-Failure and/or Loss of Self-Identity Combined With A Mixture of Such Emotios as: Panic, Anxiety, Existential Guilt, Moral Guilt, Depression, Grief, Anger, Rage, Hate, Aggression, Violence...';

14. Our Internal Place of Celebratory Self-Achievement and/or Spiritual Renewal based on 'peak moments';

15. Our Genetic, Potential Self or GPS (Our genetic skills, existential potentials, mythological symbols, and whatever else has been passed onto us by genetics/hereditary....in order to best 'actualize' or 'fulfill' our evolving existence...

Now, metaphorically speaking, we have a 'huge 15 room post-Freudian-Jungian-Adlerian-Gestalt... fully renovated mansion' to work inside of as opposed to a 'much smaller 3 room Classic, Victorian Freudian House -- unrenovated and very much in need of 21st century renovation...'.

For some -- or many -- of you, your immediate complaint may be that the model is too big, too cumersome, too convoluted, too complicated, too wordy awkward with the terminology...Yet what can be more awkward than Jung's use of the terms 'anima' and 'animus' -- I still have to look them up to re-establish which one is the 'Father Transference Figure' (FTF) and which one is the Mother Transference Figure (MTF)...I would prefer to use the shortforms 'FTF' and 'MTF' -- or lengthen them out -- and then there should be quicker clarity.

The model can be viewed as basically the same Freudian Classical Model -- surrounded by an Object Relations Model. With more of a 'basement foundation' in terms of our 'transference templates and the transference complexes within these templates' and how to become more aware of what they are.

We can go the 'mythological route' if we find that useful. The 'Nurturing Superego' could be construed as being 'built partly from the archetype images' of 'Gaia' (Mother of The Earth) and/or 'Hera' (Mother of Marriage and Family). In similar fashion, 'The Righteous Superego' could be construed as being built partly from the archetype image of 'Apollo' as our 'Shadow-Id-Ego' could be construed as being built partly from the archetype image of 'Dionysus'. Likewise our 'Narcissistic Ego' could obviously be construed as being built partly from the archetype mythological figure of 'Narcissus'. (Narcissus -- egotism, selfishness, self-centredness -- and Dionysus -- hedonism, pleasure-seeking, sensuality, sexuality, 'addictive bliss' -- generally have a close relationship connection between each other, although not necessarily).

There's also a 'Transactional Analysis' influence, and a 'Guntrip-Object Relations' influence, in terms of the idea of the 'schizoid personality' often erecting a sophisticated network of 'anal ego defenses' in order to fend off the potential 'panic reaction' to the overwhelming awareness of an underlying 'schizoid void or abyss of no self and no self-esteem'. This is based on the premise of 'extreme dissociation' between our 'Social Personna' and our 'Shadow-Id-Ego' (in my terminology) -- our Shadow-Id-Ego representing 'the heart and soul of our personality -- both creatively and destructively' in a way that either brings us into contact and congruence with our GPS -- in terms of a self-perception of our 'meaningful existential self-achievements' and resulting sense of 'self-fulfillment' or 'self-actualization' -- or not. (This Guntrip influence extends also into my Jungian and Frommian 'humanistic-existential' influence.

Anyway, for those of you who are quick to judge, I say....'Be patient.....let's see how the model works itself out....It can always be reduced if parts of it are not particularly useful in a particular case, as the model is full of multiple bi-polarities, and as a therapist, you will likely want to only work on one bi-polarity at a time....like a 'topdog-underdog' (superego-underego) polarity or a 'narcissistic-altruistic' polarity, or a 'personna-shadow' polarity', or a 'nurturing-righteous' polarity or a 'passive-aggressive' polarity, or a 'Dionysian-Apollonian' polarity, or an 'Enlightenment-Romantic' polarity...

Let's see how our new model works compared to the old one...

And then we can make further adjustments to the model as we go along, if need be...

And of course, the model will become easier to work with, the more you understand it, and become familiar with using it, assuming you are open-minded enough to want to give it a try...

We need some case examples and more definitive notes of descriptive clarification and extrapolation...

Coming soon...

-- dgb, January 4th, 5th, 2012,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- Dialectic Gap Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...

1.9. On The Connection Between Conscious Early Memories, Traumacy Neuroses, Identification Neuroses, Fantasy Neuroses, and Different Types of Obsessional Neuroses (Part 1)

2012-01-02T04:10:00.000-08:00

Finished..., January 2nd, 2012....

A pre-warning to my readers that some of the material in this essay may be disconcerting as we brush briefly on the topic of 'childhood sexual assaults' -- the focus of Freud's attention in 1896 -- before he changed the focus of his attention to the topic of 'childhood sexuality, sexual fantasy, and sexual fixation' shortly thereafter....The issue of 'childhood sexual assaults' is never easy to approach, but to a psychotherapist in particular, needs to be approached, in order to deal with it properly... I do not profess to be any kind of expert on any kind of sexual assault; however, as a theorist, I certainly do know something about 'biased theoretical and therapeutic results' based on 'biased, one-sided, discriminatory theories' -- and this will be the main focus of our discussion in this essay. -- dgb, Jan. 2nd, 2012.

...........................................................................................

There is only one way I know to effectively show the differences between: Pre-Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Humanistic-Existential Psychology... -- and DGB Quantum-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology which synthesizes elements of all of these different schools of philosophy-psychology into one, big, multi-cohesive package....Too big a package? Too impossible a task? Well, read up...and then judge for yourself...

We will go back to Freud's conscious early memories, and childhood relationships to collect the information that we need -- or at least a significant portion of it -- and then we will do an 'abbreviated transference analysis' of Freud's various 'obsessional neuroses', 'dissociation neuroses', 'traumacy neuroses', 'identification neuroses', 'fantasy neuroses'....based on the information that has been collected...

There will still be elements of information missing -- specific information about Freud's relationship with his mom, and particularly his dad....but we will go with what we have which is still significant enough to build a strong 'transference case of traumacy, fantasy, and obsessional neuroses' here...

The only difference between a 'complex' and a 'neurosis' in my work here is that a complex includes both 'positive' and 'negative' consequences attached to a particular 'transference neurosis', the latter of which accentuates the 'negative' aspect of a particular 'transference complex'...

Now, if you are a psychoanalyst reading this essay -- or any psychotherapist engaged in, and 'biased by', a particular 'brand' or 'school' or 'sub-school' of psychology -- then you are going to have to 'step outside of your own conceptual and theoretical box' here...or you might as well stop reading....A closed mind is not going to get you anywhere except the same place that you have already been...That may be good enough for you, or if you are open-minded enough, then you might find something here that you like better...or as an 'addition' to your current 'psychotherapeutic box of conceptual, theoretical, and practical tools'...

Next, regarding the concept of 'repression' -- I don't use it; in 37 years of studying various schools of psychology, and engaging in hundreds of hours of different forms of group personal growth and psychotherapy workshops...I have never come across what I would consider to be a case example of a 'repression'....Maybe some therapists have, maybe Freud did in his work with clients who were diagnosed as 'hysterics' or 'obsessional neurotics' or 'paranoid'...or maybe Freud was fooling himself as to just how 'buried' these so called 'critical' memories and/or fantasies were, and/or whether some weren't even a product of his own 'biased interpretive reconstructions'....

I don't know, and I am not going to debate the 'reality' or 'fantasy' of 'repression' -- not here, not probably anywhere -- 'repression' is simply a concept and a theory that I have not found meaningful, useful, practical in my work... Believe differently if you wish...but we are going down a different path here....

I have found Alfred Adler's concept and theory of the 'dianostic use' of 'conscious early memories' as 'lifestyle indicators' to be much more practical....except that I have taken Adler's work and brought it back into a 'psychoanalytic context'....to talk about 'transference memories' rather than 'lifestyle memories'....

What Freud called 'screen memories' that both 'hide' and 'allude' to other more etiologically (causally) significant 'repressed memories and/or fantasies', I call 'transference memories'...and I dig no deeper...

Here is an example of 'screen memory bias' in Ernest Jones' 'classic' biography of Freud (1953, 1981, 'The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, V. 1, p. 7), as Jones recites some of Freud's earliest conscious memories:

..........................................................................

'Among the (consciously) remembered ones are a few, banal enough in themselves, which are of interest only in standing out in a sea of amnesia. One was of penetrating into his parents' bedroom out of (sexual) curiosity and being ordered out by an irate father.'

...................................................................................................

Now you have to understand that psychoanalysts like Jones, Eissler, and Anna Freud were loyal to Sigmund Freud to a fault....each of them were important in their own right, but at the same time, each of them were like 'lemmings' following their 'over-idealized leader' over the cliff of his own private and public neuroses....and simply his unwillingness to be anywhere close to 'transparent' relative to his own private life, his own 'psycho-analyzed' life, and his own 'sexual interests/obsessions'.....Some of these he would 'allude to in the third person' and/or through 'fake clients' who were in fact himself as 'disguised' through his own 'transference projections' that can be found throughout his work.... I'm not intending to be too hard on Freud here because how many of us would want our 'private traumatic and fantasy worlds' exposed to the general public....

It is much easier to be a 'closet voyeur' relative to someone else's private sexual life -- and/or scandals -- than it is to be completely transparent relative to our own most private, narcissistic injuries, fantasies, and activities....and Freud was no different in this regard....

As much as Freud wanted to know every little tidbit of his clients' most private sexual lives, he certainly didn't want to expose his own inner, narcissistic world to nearly the same degree of scrutiny...Indeed, at times, he did everything possible to keep the public out of his own private life...he would put up 'smoke and mirrors shows'...or conversely, be oblivious to the psycho-dynamics and results of his own transference neuroses, which is unlikely....Or it might have been pieces of both...

To be sure, if Freud had had a chance, to be sure, he would have destroyed his letters to Fliess...but history was on our side in this regard...and plus...once we have a good handle on Freud's private transference material -- as interpreted by a more 'objective, open-minded source', i.e., 'me', then we can start to much more easily see his 'transference projections' scattered thoughout almost 50 years of his written work...

Let's start by analyzing one of Freud's earlier transference projections, to be found in 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896, in which Freud took a rather diametrically opposite point of view relative to the conscious early memory that Jones cited above....In between 1896 (The Aetiology of Hysteria) and 1953 (Jones' first publication of Freud's biography), was the little essay called 'Screen Memories' (1899), and the complete 'paradigm shift' that Freud was 'evolving through' (or 'de-evolving' through) in his partial to full abandonment of his 'repressed memory-traumacy-seduction theory' in favor of his later fancied and dominant 'fantasy-childood sexuality-Oedipal Theory'....

In 1896, however, Freud still believed in the 'traumatic-etiological effect' of memories on the later evolution of adult neuroses... And the passage below was in 'the heart of Freud's later abandoned 'repressed childhood seduction/sexual assault theory'...although his own personal transference-projection was not 'repressed' here; simply 'dissociated' and 'alluded to' in the third person...

But first, we need a little more 'warm-up' here to a better understanding of the psycho-dynamics going on in Freud's head as he wrote 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'...

The Aetiology of Hysteria is a complicated and perplexing essay -- perhaps not so easily stereotyped as Freud's most articulate, but most short-lived, essay on his infamous Seduction Theory... otherwise, worded as Freud's 'Repressed Early Childhood Memory of a Sexual Assault' Theory...

I suggest that this essay was actually 'The Bridge' to Freud's already evolving and soon to come 'Childhood Sexuality Theory'....

The line that gives Freud away, and the fact that he is already in conflict over a 'chldhood pain' vs. 'childhood pleasure' theory of hysteria....indeed, has been since December 1895, months before he wrote this essay...is this one:

...........................................................................................

'But have we not a right to assume that even the age of childhood is not wanting in slight sexual excitations, that later sexual development may perhaps be decisively influenced by childhood experiences?' (Freud, Sigmund, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', S.E. V. 111, p.202.)

.......................................................................................................................

There is a 'slow train coming' here....and the train of thought that is coming is 'childhood sexuality' in its own infancy in Freud's always freshly percolating brain...

In fact, the line above takes some steam out of Masson's theory of 'Freud losing moral courage around his theory of childhood sexual assault' -- although, to be sure, not entirely -- because it shows that Freud is stuck in a 'theoretical quandry' at this moment in psychoanalytic history, stuck between two opposing theories of hysteria that don't seem to support each other: 1. a 'pain' theory of hysteria, and from this, the idea of a 'repressed memory of a traumatic sexual assault encounter (or series of them) in early childhood'; and 2. a 'pleasure' theory of hysteria where 'the repressed memory is one of renounced or dissociated pleasure' -- that 'returns from the repressed' at a later time and place once 'puberty, sexual hormones, and an associated teenage or adult sexual encounter 're-stimulates the old, repressed memory' in the form of 'teenage or adult hysterical symptoms that are both hiding and alluding to the old, childhood repressed memory' -- or 'fantasy' once Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex Theory', starting in a letter to Fliess on October 15th, 1897, and later fully published in 'Three Essays on Sexuality' (1905).

We all tend to associate childhood -- or even teenage or adult -- sexual assaults, but especially early childhood sexual assaults, with 'physical and emotional pain' as well as 'righteous, moral disgust and horror' from an adult's perspective looking back at what happened, but what Freud seems to be intimating here -- even though he still talks about 'brutal childhood rapes' in the quotation I will cite below -- is the type of case of 'childhood manipulation and seduction' where a child may not necessarily understand things 'morally' yet, in fact, may even find some pleasure in the experiences of his or her own body in the participation of the childhoood sexual encounter. (Freud had already come to this conclusion in the case of boys being the 'active manipulators' as opposed to 'the more passive victims' that young girls were more likely to be, and he had classified the difference between 'hysteria' and 'obsession' as a 'passive' vs. 'active' ramification of the childhood encounter -- in the boy's case, developing an 'obsessional neurosis' years later involved an act of 'moral guilt' and 'self-reproachment' for the 'lustful underlying enactment of the sexual impulse...and, according to Freud, any awareness of this was 'repressed' as well...).

In the young girl's case, Freud was starting to believe -- even as he was deep into The Seduction Theory -- that the child who felt some element of 'pleasure' in the early encounter, starts to get a 'fuller sense of the moral implications' of what happened to her at a later date -- and then has to try to sort out the 'pleasurable' vs. the 'painful' elements of the 'psychic conflict', which then 'triggers' the 'repression' (or 'dissociation' in my words) -- a 'conflict avoidance', an 'attempted burial' or 'renouncement' of the psychic conflict -- which later becomes 're-awakened' by an 'associated' teenage sexual experience...and a 'return of the repressed' via the 'hysterical symtoms'....

This 'understanding' of hysteria would become very different to Freud's original understanding of the hysterical conflict as 'childhood sexual and emotional pain' conflicting with later 'normal teenage sexual impulses and/or encounters'...with 'repression' (or 'dissociation') once again 'pushing the conflict' back into the world of the 'repressed unconcious'....in effect, 'sweeping the conflict under the carpet' so as not to have to deal with it....until the 'hysterical symptoms' started showing up in place of the conflict...

So which was it? Childhood pain, or childhood pleasure? Mixing with moral and emotional pain later? Or mixing with normal teenage sexual impulses later? Freud was partly 'stuck' here between December of 1895 and May 1896.

Still, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' was dominantly a 'Childhood Sexual Assault/Seduction Theory' -- mainly by the father, or alternatively by someone in the family, or close to the family, or a stranger...perpretating the manipulation and/or the actual physcial assault on a pre-puberty girl...In the quote below, Freud talks about the 'traumas' of childhood sexual memories -- including, by 'transference projective interpretation', Freud's own earliest conscious memory....

.........................................................................................

In some cases, no doubt, we are concerned with experiences which must be regarded as severe traumas -- an attempted rape, perhaps, which reveals to the immature girl at a blow all the brutality of sexual desire, or the involuntary witnessing of sexual acts between parents, which at one and the same time uncovers unsuspected ugliness and wounds childish and moral sensibilities alike, and so on. But in other cases the experiences are astonishingly trivial. In one of my women patients it turned out that her neurosis was based on the experience of a boy of her acquaintance stroking her hand tenderly and, at another time, pressing his knee against her dress as they sat side by side at table, while his expression let her see that he was doing something forbidden. For another young lady, simply hearing a riddle which suggested an obscene answer had been enough to provoke her first anxiety attack and with it to start the illness. (p. 200-201)

..............................................................................................

What this quotation shows, I believe, is two things: 1. Freud wavering in and out of 'trauma theory' because 'traumacy' wasn't explaining the cases of 'forbidden sexual excitations'; and 2. still dominated -- or mainly dominated -- by his 'traumacy-seduction' theory, Freud still believed that these 'teenage memories' were 'associated' as what he would call 'screen memories' in 1899 with pre-puberty childhood sexual manipulation, exploitation, and/or more brutal rape -- but even here, Freud was also starting to think of 'early childhood sexual excitations' which would become the heart of his soon to come 'childhood sexuality theory'...

Now, stepping outside of the seduction theory, we also have a case of Freud -- by 'third person allusion' -- describing his own earliest childhood memory of seeing his parents engaging in a sexual act as being 'severely traumatic' as contrasted with Jones writing it off -- i.e., dismissing it -- some 57 years later (1953) as only a 'conscious' memory in a 'sea of amnesia' of other, presumably much more important, 'unconscious, repressed memories' that were much more worthy of our time and their 'psycho-dynamic impact' on Freud's evolving character structure...Oh, what a difference a major 'paradigm shift' makes...

Now before we come back to the memory, let's try to summarize what we can take out of what was going through Freud's head in the winter/spring of 1895-96....

Freud was caught up in a theoretical 'connundrum' between 'pleasure' and 'pain' -- and how to etiologically explain 'hysteria',

Specifically, Freud believed at this time that 'hysteria split the difference'; i.e., it involved a 'psychic conflict between pain and pleasure' (as for example, in the case of a brutal childhood rape conflicting years later with 'normal adolescent sexual desires'); or pleasure and pain' (as in 'childhood sexual excitations' being 'punished' and 'buried' by later teenage 'moral or superego-based guilt'). Freud was moving from a position of 'childhood sexual assault/manipulation/seduction usually with an adult or older sibling victimizer' in the case of hysteria, to a position of 'chilhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and activities' -- 'buried' my 'moral-superego guilt' -- with the 'compromise-formation' being 'teenage/adult hysterical symptoms' that both hide and allude to the underlying childhood sexual assaults in the about to be abandoned seduction theory, or the underlying childhood sexual fantasies, impulses, and/or activities in the soon-to-come theory of 'childhood sexuality'...

What Freud couldn't properly piece together -- or at least didn't so publicly -- is that this didn't need to be a 'mutually exclusive, Aristolean choice that was cemented into one over-riding; it could have been a 'Hegelian dialectic-integrative choice', and/or simply a situation where different clinical cases were yielding different clinical data whereby both sets of data needed to be accounted for by a 'bipolar-dialectic theory'....

The existence of childhood sexual assault does not rule out the existence of what might be called 'normal and/or abnormal childhood sexual activity' that may or may not include an 'assault'...Are you going to accuse a 7 year old boy of sexually assaulting a 5 year old girl? What parent hasn't seen his or her child 'playing with him or herself'?

Why did this ever have to be an 'either/or' battle in Freud's mind?

Because at this point in Freud's career, he was 'stuck inside an Aristotlean Paradigm, an Aristiolean, either/or mindset'? And Psychoanalysis paid the price as both Freud's Traumacy-Seduction Theory and his Childhood Sexuality and Fantasy-Impulse Theory where inherently self-destructive in their own 'limited unilateralness'; together they become a much better theory when they are treated as a 'Dialectic-Bipolar Theory -- in the same way as the bipolar 'Particle-Wave Theory' in physics is superior to either The Particle Theory or The Wave Theory -- taken separately and unilaterally....

Every clinical case needs to be treated differently before we start 'imposing our often righteous, narcissistic, unilateral theories' onto this clinical evidence....Otherwise, your theory will self-destruct just as soon as their is a clinical case of someone who does not fit inside your unilateral, limited conceptual theory and paradigm'...He or she simply has lived a life and experienced something that 'fits outside the boundary or boundaries of the theory you so dearly worship to the point of ignoring or manipulating or distorting your clinical evidence to mold the person's experiences to inappropriately fit into your model'.

And thqat is what Freud did...He wasn't perfect...and neither are any of us....Most important of all -- concepts and theories are never perfect because 'life will eventually crash and bury your beloved theory'....And mine too....(although my dialectic theory is superior to either side of Freud's 'mutually exclusive, either/or' theory here because it accounts for both potential sides of this same 'pleasure-pain-conflict' -- and even the two sides of the conflict 'conflated' together into 'one approach-avoidant, neurotic complex'...)
What we need to do is to 'see' the different types of psychic conflicts that Freud describes above as, for the most part, 'complex, paradoxical, integrative conflicts involving both traumatic and obsessional fantasy factors played off against each other -- thus, their 'paradoxical nature'.....attraction and repulsion blending together into one complex neurosis.....

And this is the type of neurosis that I will show you how to 'diagnose' and 'interpet' in Part 2 of this essay....with all these different factors coming together and playing off each other....conscious early memories, narcissistic injuries, compensations, and fixations, traumatic childhood memories, exciting childhood memories, identification neuroses, compensatory neuroses, compromise-formations, different types of obsessional neuroses and transference neuroses...you name it, and we will try to cover it, some in the next essay, and some beyond...

Happy New Year,

-- dgb, January 2nd, 2012,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiatons...

-- Are Still in Process....

...........................................................................................................

1.8. On The Dialectic Interplay Between Philosophy and Psychology...On The Distinction Between 'Mutually Inclusive' and 'Mutually Exclusive' Choices -- and A Tribute To Soren Kierkegaard...

2011-12-24T02:15:00.000-08:00

Dec. 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 2011..
I saw an assortment of new books in Chapters the other day that I hadn't seen before -- a product of my not having been in this store in about half a year or more....I could have easily walked out of there with $500 worth of books in my hands but a long lineup and bills that needed to be paid got the better of me -- and I walked out empty handed.

One new book that I saw -- I think it was published in 2010 -- offered a new, more 'dynamic, humanistic-existential' interpretation of Hegel's masterpiece, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit (TPS)' which was both exciting and frustrating at the same time since that is the same type of message that I have been offering here in Hegel's Hotel since I started writing it in 2006 -- i.e., a more 'psycho-dynamic, humanistic-existential' way of utilizing Hegel's dialectic logic and formula -- which is usually stated in what also might be classified as a 'triadic formula': 1. 'thesis'; 2. 'anti-thesis'; 3. 'synthesis' -- which Freud in 1923 'internalized into the psyche' in the form of: 1. 'id' (thesis); 2. 'superego'(anti-thesis); 3. 'ego' (synthesis). Immediately you can grasp the interconnection here between philosophy and psychology -- at least between Hegelian dialectic philosophy and Freudian dialectic psychology.

We can make 'either/or' choices in the spirit of Aristotle or Kierkegaard; or 'wedged into the middle of Aristotle and Kierkegaard, historically speaking, we can make 'Hegelian dialectically integrative choices' that 'conflate a part of each side of the "either" and the "or" -- into one integrative choice or package.

For example, we can mix 'black' and 'white' and get 'gray'...which comprises an element of 'black' and an element of 'white' to get the final mixture of 'gray' -- what we generally call a 'compromise solution', or in Freud's terminology, a 'compromise-formation'....which is basically a 'synergy' of the two opposing, conflicting polar characteristics, ideas, theories, paradigms, desires, values, beliefs, tensions...

From 'homeostatic or dialectic polar tension between two opposing side', we creatively arrive at some form of better working 'homeostatic or dialectic balance'...that is, assuming you are a Hegelian Dialectic Idealist -- or even a Hegelian Dialectic Pragmatic Semi-Idealist. Two opposing theorists working together (for example, Freud and Adler) -- if you are of a Hegelian Dialectic Idealistic Mindset -- is better for 'The Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy Paradigm as a Whole' than two opposing theorists working apart.

If both opposing theorists are dead, or unwilling and/or incapable of working with each other, then that is when you need a good 'Dialectic Integrative or Synergist Theorist' to come along and do for the two opposing theorists what they could not accomplish themselves.

How to synerguze opposing theories -- even multiple opposing theories -- is what I am trying to demonstrate here -- i.e., how to get from 'mutually exclusive either/or choices' to 'mutually inclusive dialectically integrative or synergetic choices' that bring together opposing people in opposing camps who were working against each other and now may enjoy the possibility of 'combining forces in the same, or a more similar, larger paradigm that does not arbitrarily shut people down because they have suddenly come to the end of a 'conceptual and/or theoretical boundary.

Some boundaries may be there for a good reason; others simply restrict and constrict life -- and in this latter case -- we might be better off by 'taking a second serious look at the boundary we have been using' -- and see what we get in its place if 'we let it slide' and/or try out 'the paradigm on the opposite side of the boundary'...sometime a new paradigm...or a larger paradigm that does not restrict our field of vision and create internal screening bias....brings with it the opportunity for new experience, new clinical data....and new life...

Moving on....

Let's quickly examine the principle of 'homeostasis' and/or 'dialectically integrative' and/or 'homeostatically balanced' choices....and then we will finish off with a tribute to Soren Kierkegaard who I have mentioned a number of times now up above...

The mind and body were wonderfully created and constructed such that they give us a full range of choices from the most extremely radical to the most delicately balanced....

Walter B. Cannon called this the 'Wisdom of The Body' and its foundational principle -- no different than the 'mind-psyche-self' - is what he labelled as the principle of 'homeostasis' or in my words, homeostatic-dialectic dialectic balance', which is also often called 'equilibrium'....

What is truly amazing both philosophically and historically here, is that if you take two of our oldest Western 'pre-Socratic philosophers' -- Anaxamander and Heraclitus (Heraclitus being the Western rendition of Lao Tse in The East) -- and you combine Anaximander and Heraclitus with Plato and Aristotle -- you have the four main foundational piller stones of Western culture, evolution, philosophy, psychology, politics, and medicine....

The essence of Anaximander's philosophy is his belief that we were/are all born from 'Chaos' (The Apeiron), and like Freud would similarly say, 'to the Earth and to Chaos (Entropy, Death) shall we return...'

The wisdom of Anaximander is shocking as he basically states that history and evolution is both a 'power struggle', and, at the same time, like a game of 'tag', in that 'opposite polarities take turns dominating each other with the 'winner' basking in the temporary 'Sunshine of Existence', while 'the loser' retreats to 'The Shadows' (The Apeiron) to re-energize, re-think, compensate, build stronger offensive and defensive powers....and then one day return to the playing field, return to the 'power battle of existence' -- to re-battle their/our polar nemesis, and one day, if or when things go right, defeat their/our polar nemesis, such that we get time to 'bask in the sunshine of our glory and achievement' while our polar adversary gets a metaphorical or more substantial kick to the sidelines, i.e., thrown into The Shadows, The Darkness of Existence, to nurse his or her or our wounds, and do the same thing that they/we did while they/we were 're-arming and otherwise preparing' ourselves for the next 'dominance vs. submission' power battle....

Anaxamander's perspective on life was basically that life was/is a power battle in which we all take turns winning and losing...and winning and losing again...

Heraclitus, who was probably familiar with Anaximader's philosophy although they did not walk the earth (Ancient Greece) at the same time, had a different perspective on life: opposite polarites are attracted to each other and need each other in order to establish 'a harmonious, working homeostatic or dialectic balance or equilibrium' (he did not use these words; they didn't come along until much, much later, i.e., the 20th century and Cannon) -- the two opposing polar elements are attracted to, and need each other, because they, in effect, compensate for each other's weaknesses and vulnerabilities'....'Two opposite halves make a whole'...

But what is attracted to each other is also repelled by each other, setting up one of the ultimate paradoxes of man's existence: 'freedom and individuality' vs. 'committment to a bipolar and/or multi-polar union'....

Plato recounts a Greek myth of love which he delivers through the speech of Aristophanes in 'The Symposium'....

.........................................................................................

From Wikipedia...

Aristophanes

Before launching his speech, Aristophanes warns the group that his eulogy to love may be more absurd than funny. His speech is an explanation of why people in love say they feel "whole" when they have found their love partner. He begins by explaining that people must understand human nature before they can interpret the origins of love and how it affects the then present time. It is, he says, because in primal times people had doubled bodies, with faces and limbs turned away from one another. As somewhat spherical creatures who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels (190a), these original people were very powerful. There were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the "androgynous," who was half male, half female. The males were said to have descended from the sun, the females from the earth and the androgynous couples from the moon. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods (190b-c). Zeus thought about blasting them to death with thunderbolts, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half, in effect separating the two bodies.

Zeus then commanded Apollo to turn their faces around and pulled the skin tight and stitched it up to form the navel which he chose not to heal so Man would always be reminded of this event. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. The women who were separated from women run after their own kind, thus creating lesbians. The men split from other men also run after their own kind and love being embraced by other men (191e). He says some people think homosexuals are shameless, but he thinks they are the bravest, most manly of all (192a), and that many heterosexuals are adulterous men and unfaithful wives (191e). Aristophanes then claims that when two people who were separated from each other find each other, they never again want to be separated (192c). This feeling is like a riddle, and cannot be explained. Aristophanes ends on a cautionary note. He says that men should fear the gods, and not neglect to worship them, lest they wield the axe again and we have to go about with our noses split apart (193a). If man works with the god of Love, they will escape this fate and instead find wholeness.

.............................................................................................................................

That life -- and love -- should be so simple....

The lover we 'find' is not always -- indeed, not even often these days -- the lover who we 'keep' and/or 'stay with'...

No, I find that Life, Love, and even Creation and Destruction, are more like the types of 'biochemical reactions' that take place within 'stable' and 'unstable' atoms and molecules...

Sometimes atoms and/or molecules have too many 'electrons' (too much 'yin'), or too many 'protons' (too much 'yang') making for 'instability' within the atom and/or molecule....Sometimes you have 'free radicals' running around and 'blowing up' the stability of a particular atom and/or molecule....Life -- and love -- is often the 'dialectic tension' that is created by the inherent and continually changing nature of the paradox between the 'stability' and 'instability' of the atom/molecule/moment/encounter/relationship....

Plato also was a 'rational idealist' meaning that he believed that everything perfect could be found in our minds alone whereas everything in the 'outside sensory or phenomenal world' is an 'imperfect reflection' of what is 'perfect in our mind'.

In contrast, Aristotle was a 'rational-empiricist' believing that Plato had it 'backwards' -- that everything 'real' must be determined first and foremost through our 'senses', and then from our senses we can jump deeper into 'logical abstractions' as long as these logical abstractions are still connected to 'our real phenomenal world' as determined by a logical connection between our senses and our abstractions that gives us a good, working, functional representation or 'map' of our outside and inside world.

In other words, we need to use our 'senses' first according to Aritotle and then build our 'map of abstracted, conceptual representations' based on our sensory information; not the reverse as Plato idealistically and rationalistically theorized....

It was Aristotle who established 'the law of non-identity' which resulted in 'either/or' logic meaning that a 'thing' cannot be 'A' and 'not A' at the same time. Something cannot be 'white' and 'not white' at the same time, something cannot be an 'animal' and 'not an animal' at the same time, something cannot be a 'vegetable' and 'not a vegetable' at the same time...and so on...

To which both Hegel and later Alfred Korzybski (founder of General Semantics) objected...

In contradistinction to Aristotle, Hegel introduced or at least clearly articulated (as both Kant and Fichte started up this 'dialectic' path before him) the idea of 'dialectic logic' whereby 'A' mixes with 'B' and both 'A' and 'B' -- thus, 'integrated' or 'synthesized' -- take on the characteristics of 'AB'....This happens in genetics every day...

Dialectic logic is the foundation of biological evolution -- the idea that genes synthesize and mutate in order to biologically evolve and survive, both individually and as a species...

In a similar vein, dialectic logic is also the basis of 'conceptual evolution'.....and 'philosophical evolution'...and 'political evolution'....and 'legal evolution' and 'psychological evolution'....indeed, all different aspects of cultural evolution in the history and evolution of man...

It should be added that in genetic evolution, every time that 'A' and 'B' 'fertilize' and 'mix genes' -- resulting in a 'child' or 'offspring' of A and B that we are calling 'AB' -- everyone of these resulting 'AB's' (children, offspring) meaning 'AB1' and 'AB2' and 'AB3' and 'AB4' is going to be 'uniquely different' than all the other 'ABs' in their particular 'gene mix'....

Although each will still carry the similar characteristic of being an 'AB' mix, within that 'AB mix', the possible and actual gene permuations and combinations are biologically and biochemically endless....meaning that no two children will be exactly the same genetically except for identical twins who may start out as being 'genetically identical' but as soon as they both hit the doctor's or nurse's hands crying, they will still start to show their individual differences both 'intra-psychically' and 'socially'....

So too, it is with 'conceptual and theoretical evolution'....

Every time 'ideas metaphorically have sex with each other', the resulting 'conceptual and/or theoretical fertilization' is going to be 'uniquely different' than any prior or following conceptual/theoretical fertilizations/integrations/syntheses. (Sounds very Freudian, doesn't it? All I have to do is finish off with 'The Big Bang Theory' and everyone can go home happy...)

Let us see where this takes us. Let us imagine 1000 psychoanalysts out there. Everyone of them comes from a uniquely different 'conceptual-theoretical-practical' inter-psychoanalytic (and perhaps even 'neo-psychoanalytic' and/or 'non-psychoanalytic') gene pool. Each one of them today would probably have a working knowledge or at least a basic theoretical knowledge of 'Pre-Classical' (Traumacy Theory) Psychoanalysis, 'Classical' (Fantasy Theory) Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Self Psychology, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Bionian Psychoanalysis...and/or whatever else I might have missed...

However, all the individual 'conceptual-theoretical-therapeutic gene mixes' would/will be uniquely different in one respect or another -- and for a client, each experience with each individual psychoanalyst would/will be, at least partly uniquely different, with some general foundational similarities... We may have a 'conservative' Psychoanalyst or a 'wilder' one working within any of the paradigms and/or combinations of paradigms that I have mentioned above....and all will have their different 'personality traits' and their own unique 'transference and counter-transference complexes'...

This psychoanalyst might use 'The Oedipal Complex Theory' while this one might not...Within the underlying or over-riding 'general paradigm of Psychoanalysis', you are going to have a whole host of 'mini-paradigm shifts' if you were to move around from one psychoanalyst to another, and then on again to another...

Again, each psychoanalyst is going to be at least partly unique in his or her own particular 'brand' of Psychoanalysis, in terms of his or her unique influences, and in terms of his or her 'anal-rigid-conservative' or 'liberal-rebellious' attitude towards what he or she has been taught -- and either approach could be either publicly acknowledged or publicly denied.

This makes it virtually impossible for me to sit here and say that I have some sort of 'intimate pulse' on what is happening in Psychoanalysis today -- how many psychoanalysts are using some form of 'traumacy theory', how many are not, how many are using 'The Oedipal Theory', and how many are not, how big a deal the concept of 'repression' is in the different 'brands' of Psychoanalysis today, and/or to what extent it is not?

Every time we start talking about a different concept or theory, and how it is practically applied in therapy -- or not -- we are talking about some sort of major or minor 'paradigm shift'....which is going to affect the direction and outcome of therapy....I feel comfortable using the concept of 'The Oedipal Complex' in the way that I will demonstrate in my Freud example later... Why wouldn't the creator of 'The Oedipal Complex Theory' have an intimate example from his own network of 'childhood transference memories' upon which to base this theory?...)

I do not use the concept of 'repression' -- to me this was, and still is, a 'Big Paradigm Stopper' in Psychoanalysis...an example of why Hegel wrote that 'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.'... Freud simply 'overplayed' this theory -- hugely...probably because of his foundational work with Charcot, Breuer, hypnosis, and hysteria...We 'enlargen' the paradigm of Psychoanalysis significantly when we allow ourselves to use 'childhood conscious memories' as 'diagnostic tools' for 'transference complexes' rather than digging around enlessly looking for some 'repressed memory' that may or may not exist, and even if it does not exist, it may not be 'etiologically more significant' than what we can find right in front of our nose, simply by asking a client....'Think back to your earliest childhood memory....Can you share it with me? And perhaps two or three more memories that you remember before or up until the age of about 7 years old?

It has been my experience -- based on my training in Adlerian Psychology -- and extrapolating Adler's precious 'lifestyle diagnostic tool' back into the 'conflict and transference model' of Psychoanalysis -- that we can find a 'theoretical and therapeutic gold mine' here of 'transference complex material' that may only take 20 minutes to 'dig up' rather than 200 hour long sessions....(I may or may not be exaggerating here...)

Instead of 'repression', I use such concepts as 'suppression', 'oppression', 'alienation', 'isolation', 'dissociation', 'exclusion'...'relegated to The Shadows of conciousness or subconcsiciousness'...

I am comfortable using both 'traumacy theory' and 'fantasy theory' in a way that I have 'conceptually and theoretically synthesized' as opposed to 'dissociated' and 'alienated' from each other... Instead, I have brought my Adlerian knowledge back into a Freudian and post-Freudian paradigm where I feel totally comfortable talking about 'conflicts' and 'paradoxes' and 'inconsistencies' and 'object relations' and 'internal power struggles' in a way that Adlerian Psychology wouldn't -- and didn't -- teach me while I was learning there in 80-81.

Adler believed in the assumption of 'unity in the personality'; not 'conflict in the personality' and this was one of the main assumptive differences between Freud and Adler that I had to sort out for myself, with Perls and Gestalt Therapy offering more 'fuel' for this 'assumptive controversy'....Using the same idea that either Freud or Perls first articulated (I know Perls did; I am not sure about Freud), in the same way that 'every part of a dream can be considered to be a part of ourselves', so too it is with our conscious early childhood transference memories. Analysts who look at these memories as being simply 'screen memories', which started with Freud in 1899, are doing themselves a huge disfavour in terms of essentially 'dismissing' valuable theoretical and therapeutic material.

Even if they can be 'structurally associated' with other similar memories before and/or after them, harder or easier to 'dig up', this does not 'dismiss' their own theoretical and therapeutic value in themselves...

Remember, for those of you intimately familiar with Freud's early work, that Freud wrote that 'neurotic symptoms tend to be overdetermined' -- by perhaps a whole series of similarly structured memories, fantasies, and/or dreams/nightmares all 'converging' or 'conflating' on the same neurotic symptom and/or set of neurotic symptoms..everything 'transference related and interconnected'....

Regarding the 'conflict' vs. 'unity' in the personality controversy between Freud and Adler, this was one of my first major 'challenges' to my evolving brand of Hegelian dialectic thinking -- I had to turn what was deemed to be an 'Aristotlean "either/or" decision' -- into a 'synthesized Hegelian dialectic conflict resolution'...which I eventually did although it took me a number of years before I could clearly see my own answer to the controversy...it took even longer once I got into the middle of 'the seduction theory controversy'...

Today, I see all types of 'working and non-working or functional and dysfunctional differences' between some people who are 'more or less conflicted' than others, as well as the fact that we can all go through different periods of 'high', 'medium', and 'low' intra-psychic and/or social conflict, often the two types of conflict going hand and hand with each other...the intra-psychic type being 'projected outwards' into our social environment, and the 'social type' being 'introjected inwards' into the different psychic structures and/or dynamics of our personality....

Regarding Kierkegaard...

A distinction can be made betwen our Kierkgaardian 'either/or' choices and our Hegelian 'dialectically integrative' choices. In the first instance, I could either continue to write, or go back to bed, or go downstairs and make another coffee and/or some breakfast....All of these choices are more or less mutually exclusive relative to 'moment to moment choices'.....Our lives, from moment to moment, are built at least partly -- and significantly -- on these types of moment to moment Kierkgaardian choices...Do I write about Hegelian 'dialectically integrative choices, compromises, syntheses'? Or do I write about 'symptoms' and different types of 'obsessional neuroses'? Or do I use the one topic to 'dialectically bridge the gap between the two topics' -- and thus, demonstrate how seemingly 'mutually exclusive' topic choices can be 'cross-fertilized, integrated, synthesized' to form 'mutually inclusive' choices that are interconnected with each other?

In Kierkegaard's case, he perhaps made the 'ultimate Kierkgaardian either/or choice' in his lifetime: he chose to largerly isolate himself inside his particular brand of 'religious existential philosophy' rather than marry the woman he loved.....Ouch! that was a very harsh existential choice -- one that he probably/definitely spent a lot of time regretting afterwards, especially when he saw his 'ex-fiancee' get married to another man in the same town....

Now, at this point in time, I can only do a 'mini-analysis' of Kierkegaard's character based on Donald Palmer's work from 'Kierkegaard For Beginners' (1996). It seems, according to Palmer, that there were only three people of significant importance in Soren Kierkegaard's life -- his father (Michael Kierkegaard), his (ex)-fiancee (Regina Olsen), and the editor (Meier Goldschmidt) of the local (comical/satirical) newspaper (The Corsair). One wonders where Soren's mother and seven brothers (five of whom died prematurely) fit into this equation but...hey, let's go with what we have here...and perhaps a little more...Perusing very quickly through the beginning of Patrick Gardiner's book, 'Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction' (1988), I find a few more valuable tidbits about Kierkgaard's childhood -- enough to start to buiid a 'transference profile' of Kierkegaard's character....

What I don't have -- the most valuable information that a 'transference profiler' can have regarding the makeup of a particular person's character structure and psycho-dynamics, including their unique 'ego-defenses' and 'transference obsessional neuroses' -- is any of Kierkegaard's 'conscious childhood memories'.....

In Freud's case, Ernest Jones, through his famous or infamous biography of Freud, has given the world a series of Freud's earliest conscious childhood memories (even though he lightly dismisses them as quickly as he recites them due to the Freudian bias of 'repressed memories and fantasies' meaning much, much more than 'easily retrieved, conscious early childhood memories that became so important in Adler's work -- anyways, the Freud 'conscious early memories' are a 'God-Send' for me in putting together a much more reliable 'transference profile'; in this case here, with Kierkegaard, again, we have to work with what I have, and what I don't have, at least at this point in time, is any of his conscious, early memories...

Still, we have some significant childhood pieces to work with...

Here's an interesting piece of trivia....Did you know that Kierkegaard and Freud were born one day -- and 43 years -- apart? Kierkegaard died when he was 42 in 1855. He was born on May 5th, 1813; Freud was born on May 6th, 1856. Both liked to smoke cigars and both could be seen at the live theatre -- with their cigars.

Their respective temperments seem to have been quite a bit different, however. Freud was treated like a royal prince in his family -- particularly by his mom. A relatively secure child is going to, in all likelihood, become a relatively secure adult. If anything, Freud was pampered as a child -- and expected to be treated royally -- he was an 'Establishment Child' for the most part, and once Freud got through, for the most part, 'shocking the world' (let's say after 1905 and 'Three Essays on Sexuality'), Freud, more or less settled into an 'Establishment lifestyle', delivering one more major 'shocker essay' to us in 1920 with 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle'. His 1938 'Splitting of The Ego' was just a 'tease' as if he anticipated and was foreshadowing the way that Psychoanalysis was going to evolve in hands of Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Guntrip, and others...

Besides, Freud's wish to 'shock' or 'astonish' the world was from an entirely different place of psychic being -- like a 'magician shocking and astonishing an audience' -- than Kierkegaard who was usually writing from a place -- like Doestevsky -- of supreme pain and anguish, morbid guilt and grief, and wicked sarcasm stemming from underlying anger, bordering on barely contained, suppressed rage... Where did all this pent up morbid guilt and grief and rage come from? Kierkegaard was like a walking time bomb ready to explode....and he essentially 'creatively and emotionally exploded in the essays that he wrote'... In this regard, we can actually draw a line of 'emotional similarity' between Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Doestevsky, Nietzsche, and perhaps if we stretched it out far enough, Voltaire, Marx, Foucault, and Derrida...Freud -- although he could appreciate the anguish and the essence of this group (or at least the first four who lived predominantly before him), was probably more like Hegel, more at home in a middle to upper class environment, and more at home 'making the rules' once he had established his 'foothold of power' with people coming from around the world to meet him....No one came to meet Kierkegaard....He was a man who predominantly lived -- and died -- alone...at least once he turned his back on his fiancee....marriage and family.....Kierkegaard lived the life of a morbid man who believed that he was cursed -- and not capable of being 'normal'....As Palmer writes...'Kierkegaard was sacrificed -- or almost sacrificed -- on the alter of his dad's religiosity.' (p. 5).....Sounds like Nietzsche's childhood...

In Soren's case, Palmer writes that there is the hint of sexual impropriety regarding his dad and the family maid while his wife was on her death bed....That maid would become Michael Kierkegaard's second wife -- and Soren's mother.

It seems likely that Soren's father 'projected' the full rage of his own ethical and religious guilt on his son...Palmer writes that there is a passage in The Bible according to which...'The sins of the father will be visited upon by the sons.' (p. 8)

Well, something passed into little Soren's psyche -- and it wasn't healthy...From Palmer's book, we have a quote that seems to be from Soren: 'As a child I had already been made into an old man.' (p. 7)

Soren had another lifelong problem -- or let us say 'challenge'. A weak spine that he was ridiculed and bullied by other school kids because of his presumably 'hunched over' appearance...

Soren learned to fight back with words using his superior intellect and sarcasm...as he honed in on other people's vulnerabilities....an 'ego defense' that he used for his entire life....

It was a good way of keeping people at a distance...hurting them before they could hurt him....but it backfired with the editor of The Corsair -- because the editor, Meir Goldschmidt -- could play this 'game' as well, or better, than Soren, plus he had the advantage of a public newspaper to ridicule Soren over and over and over again until Soren was the laughing stock of Copenhagen....Almost sounds like 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'... only there was no woman to love him because he had rejected the only woman who did...

Ah, Soren.....you 'recreated your own misery in the template of your childhood -- and rejected the only two people who liked or love you -- your fiancee, and the editor of The Corsair who very much admired you until you belittled his newspaper and then he turned on you....Call that a 'self-fulfilling prophecy'...or Freud would call it your own private 'repetition compulsion'....your own private 'death instinct wish'...

But man, it took a while for people to recognize your philosophical greatness -- almost a hundred years before they learned the importance in academic circles of 'personal subjectivity' from you....and the importance of the 'living in the concrete moment'....

Soren Kierkegaard, you were the bridge between Hegel and Nietzsche, between Hegel and Existentialism -- in fact, you are usually referred to as 'the father of existentialism' -- with Fichte (The Subjectivity of The Ego), Schelling (Romantic Dialectic Unity), Schopenhauer (Cosmic Narcissism and Absurdity), and Doestevsky (Notes From The Underground) all contributing along the way...

Here is some of you at your best....courtesy of Brainy Quotes....

.........................................................................................................

Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

1 - 2 - 3

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Soren Kierkegaard

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Soren Kierkegaard

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
Soren Kierkegaard

Be that self which one truly is.
Soren Kierkegaard

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
Soren Kierkegaard

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
Soren Kierkegaard

Don't forget to love yourself.
Soren Kierkegaard

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
Soren Kierkegaard

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
Soren Kierkegaard

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Soren Kierkegaard

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
Soren Kierkegaard

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Soren Kierkegaard

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Soren Kierkegaard

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Soren Kierkegaard

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.
Soren Kierkegaard

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
Soren Kierkegaard

1 - 2 - 3

Biography

Type: Philosopher
Nationality: Danish
Born: May 5, 1813
Died: November 11, 1855

Links

Find on Amazon: Soren Kierkegaard

Related Authors

Friedrich Nietzsche
Socrates
Aristotle
Confucius
Sun Tzu
Plato
Lao Tzu
Albert Camus
Karl Marx
More Philosopher Quotes

Quote of the Day

Enjoy five great Quotes of the Day

Your Favorite Topics

Love Quotes
Life Quotes
Funny Quotes
Friendship Quotes
Wisdom Quotes
Motivational Quotes
Inspirational Quotes

Your Favorite Authors

Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein
Benjamin Franklin
Buddha
Dalai Lama
John F. Kennedy
Mark Twain
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Maya Angelou
Mohandas Gandhi
Mother Teresa
Muhammad Ali
Oscar Wilde
Ronald Reagan
Steve Jobs
Thomas Jefferson
William Shakespeare
Winston Churchill

BrainyQuote

Site

About Us

Our Story
Inquire
Advertise
Submit
Privacy
Terms

......................................................................................................................................

1.7. The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense as Captured By The QDP Model of The Psyche

2011-12-19T07:43:00.000-08:00

Finished revision!....Dec. 20th, 2011

Man's psychology of defense is very similar to his physiology/biology/bio-chemistry of defense....Same basic type of 'modus operandi' at work....

When we talk about 'the ego splitting in the process of defense'.....we are talking about the ego splitting for the perceived purpose of both 'functional adaptive advantage', and at the same time, for the purpose of internal and/or external defense...

Before we go on to talk about any others, let us list eight primary 'ego-functions' of perceived adaptive advantage and/or internal and/or external defense:

1. flight;
2. fight;
3. submission and/or co-operation;
4. let's call 'narcissistic-hedonistic activities and/or escapism';
5. let's call for now 'covert operations';
6. let's call 'righteous ethical-moral restraint';
7. let's call 'nurturing encouragement';
8. let's call 'integrative, final, executive decisons'

Now, from years of research in clinical psychology, particularly what in psychoanalysis is called 'object relations', we learn that people 'introject' or 'internalize' their most important childhood relationships, particularly with their parents, their siblings, their closest friends, their closest relatives, and/or their other role models....relationships that may be 'authoritarian', 'co-operative', 'competitive', 'antagonistic', and so on.....

From all of this work, I get the first part of my QDP 'model of the psyche' that now looks like this:

1. The Nurturing Superego;
2. The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Superego;
3. The Distancing Superego;
4. The Righteous-Rejecting Superego;
5. The Co-operative (Approval-Seeking) Underego;
6. The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Underego;
7. The Distancing Underego;
8. The Righteous-Rejecting Underego;
9. The Central (Mediating, Executive) Ego.

From these different types of 'ego-functions' and 'ego-defenses' that come about through 'the splitting of the ego in the process of defense', we can have a relatively 'functional, harmonious ego' if all 'ego-states' are basically 'getting along with each other' and moving together in a relatively 'healthy, constructive direction; alternatively, if different ego states are at war with each other, the results can be more dysfunctional and destructive....

The inside of the personality, for the most part, is going to look like a snap shot of the childhood 'transference' factors that make up the person's 'Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT)' Template which are then 'projected upwards' into the different more 'conscious ego states' in the personality, as listed above..

The Central Executive Ego can be divided into two parts, in integrative Freudian-Jungian terminology: 1. the outward bound, socially directed 'Personna'; and 2. the 'covert, internal operations' going on within 'The (Conscious) Shadow-Id Vault'.

Sometimes above consciousness, sometimes below consciousness, we have:

10. 'The Symbolic Image Maker and Dream/Nightmare Weaver';
11. 'The Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT) Template';
12. 'The Shadow-Id' and 'The (Subconscious) Shadow-Id Vault' ('unrestrained' vs. 'restrained' Shadow-Id formations and activities);
13. The Internal Abyss of Perceived Existential Self-Defeat (guilt, anxiety, panic, anger, rage, depression, grief, mortification, distancing...unworked through...)
14. The Internal 'Mountain' of Perceived Existential Self-Contact, Self-Congruence, Self-Actualization and Self-Achievement;
15. The Genetic, Potential, Existential Self

As a humanistic-existentialist in the mold of Erich Fromm, I personally view the 'purpose' of life as the existential self-contact, self-congruence, self-actualization, and self-achievement of our Central Ego in the service of our Genetic, Potential Existential Self as well as the encouragement and support of others in the pursuit of their particular individual goals, hopefully towards both self and social interest as well, without anyone having to use or exploit another person as a means of achieving their own personal goals....Fairness to self, fairness to others....a code of ethics that seems to be largely lost within a paradigm of largely unbounded Corporate, Gorvernment, and Cultural Narcissism.

You can be a 'religious' humanistic-existentialist, an 'agnostic' humanistic-existentialist, an 'atheist' humanistic-existentialist, a 'pantheist' humanistic-existentialist', a 'deist' humanistic-existentialist -- it's all the same to me...

Just two main 'ethical points of reference' that are important in my books: a workable balance between 1. compassion; and 2. accountablity -- both to ourselves and to others; in Adler's terminology, a balance between 'self and social interest'....

Merry Christmas everyone !

-- dgb, Dec. 20th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process....

1.6. Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis (QDP): Traumacy, Fantasy, and Transference Theory United Through The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense

2011-12-13T04:51:00.000-08:00

New direction...just finished...Dec. 19th, 2011....

I want to bring together a number of different elements in this paper in a highly unusual, unorthodox, pre-Classical, Classical, and post-Classical integrative fashion.

To do this, I will write quickly, succinctly, and dogmatically -- like Freud in 1938 when he wrote 'An Outline of Psychoanalysis' -- emphasizing the similarities and differences between Freud's analytic findings, generalizations, concepts, theories, and paradigms -- and my own.

Freud wrote another essay in 1938, 'Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defense' which had the potential to become another revolutionary turning point in the evolution of psycho-analysis, indeed, still partly was, but his work was contaminated by what I believe to be a 'personal Freudian neurosis' -- Freud's fixation with the concept (and the underlying experience) of 'castration anxiety' -- which more or less nullified the potential monumental importance of this work.

I have a much better way of explaining the idea of 'The Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defense' that borrows partly on the work of Klein, Fairbairn, and Berne, as well as an extrapolation of what I just pulled out from Wikipedia here a moment ago to describe a certain general human phenomenon...

......................................................................................................

Fight-or-flight response

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

The fight-or-flight response (also called the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response, hyperarousal, or the acute stress response) was first described by Walter Bradford Cannon.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]
His theory states that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system, priming the animal for fighting or fleeing. This response was later recognized as the first stage of a general adaptation syndrome that regulates stress responses among vertebrates and other organisms.

...........................................................................................................

In order to understand the theory of 'the splitting of the ego in the process of defense' you need to understand and accept traumacy theory -- and its multitude of potential compensatory defensive human reactions that become essentially 'cemented' or 'templated' into the traumatized psyche.

Each potential compensatory reaction 'motivates', 'precipitates', and/or 'causes' a different 'split' in the ego as a means of a 'choice' of future potential compensatory defensive reactions in the face of what is perceived as a 'similar danger or threat to the ego and/or whole psyche' as just was experienced in the face of the traumatic event that just happened.

Now, the 'splitting of the ego' does not have to happen because of traumacy.

Let's now call 'traumacy' -- 'ego-traumacy'.

And now let's call 'ego-traumacy' a 'narcissistic injury'.

The splitting of the ego can be precipitated by either a 'narcissistic injury' and/or a 'narcissistic fixation'. A narcissistic fixation may be a narcissistic injury or it may be something else -- an 'object of heightened or strongly cathected narcissistic interest'. In effect, a narcssistic fixation is likely to become a 'fantasy object' which may or may not also mean that it is a 'fantasy sexual object'.

Now, here are the first two primary differences between 'GAP-DGB' or 'Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalysis (QDP)' and Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis.

The first primary difference is that I 're-engage' Freud's pre-1897 'traumacy theory' -- with a set of QDP differences, such as the ones mentioned above, some of which Freud touched upon in the period that he was working with Alfred Adler after he had more or less abandoned his traumacy theory but Adler was perhpas starting to 're-awaken' a different brand of traumacy theory as he began to talk about 'organ inferiorities' and 'super-cerebral-brain-activity' to (over)compensate. From 'organ inferiorities, Adler would move on to later talk about 'psychic inferiority perception and feelings' and 'superiority striving' aimed at '(over)compensating' for 'the perceived psychic inferiority issue or complex'. (See 'The Minutes of The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, November 7th, 1906.)

The second primary difference between Classic Freudian Psychoanalysis and QDP is that Freud spent his lifetime 'chasing repressed memories and/or fantasies' whereas I again show my Adlerian influence, preferring to chase and interpretively analyze 'conscious early childhood memories' that can tell us a lot about the makeup of our 'Memory-Learning-Transference Template' as well as our 'Compensating Impulsive and/or Defensive Transference Fantasies'.

I have a certain friend who years ago related to me a childhood memory where he remembers seeing the 'tops of his teacher's stockings'. I don't need Freud's theory of 'disavowal' or worse, his theory of 'castration anxiety and the castration complex' to explain to you where my friend's 'stocking fetish' came from -- I simply need to say to you that it became 'fixated' from an 'accidental childhood experience' that was accompanied by a feeling of 'childhood (pre-puberty) sexual excitement' which in turn was probably accompanied by a sense of the 'morally forbidden' -- and then 'locked in over time' in terms of his wanting to essentially 're-live the morally forbidden childhood experience over and over and over again, in similar and/or different contextual renditions'. This is what we might call a 'narcissistic transference fixation'.

The only difference between 1. a 'narcissistic (sexual) fixation and fantasy; and 2. a 'narcissistic injury (ego-traumacy) sexual fixation and fantasy is that in the latter type of 'transference fantasy' we are looking to essentially re-live the scene of one of our early childhood transference traumacies but with this essential difference: we wish to re-live the experience in a host of different possible ways that each show a unique 'compensatory defensive' purpose -- but in the end, there is one shared purpose amongst all these possible 'renditions of the traumacy-transference fantasy', and that is to 'nurture' and 'repair' our damaged childhood ego in a form of 'self-therapy' that when acted out satisfactorily -- may indeed partly repair our damaged psyche, but usually only temporarily, until the 'hole' or 'the gap' or 'the sick point' in our psyche motivates us, usually in combination with our sexual drive, to repeat our fantasy-action over again in some similar and/or different 'transference rendition'.

There -- in that small nutshell above -- I probably just delivered to you the best work on 'transference' since Freud's 'The Dynamics of Transference' (1912) -- like I said I would. In fact, I am the same age as Freud was when he wrote The Dynamics of Transference -- 56 -- which is why I wanted to finish this essay before the new year -- and ideally before Christmas. Having said this, I was writing about my particular unique 'Dynamics of Transference' back in the 1980s, before I knew who either Heinz Kohut or Jeffrey Masson were......I just didn't have any 'blogspot' on the internet to write my stuff on, I had barely even started studying Psychoanalysis seriously, and my ideas were just in their infancy. I trumpet the influence of Jeffrey Masson and his introducing me to Freud's 'Seduction Theory' as being the key turning point in helping me to bring these ideas all home in the fashion that you are now reading them.

I hope you understand the full significance of what I have written above. Because, you see, in this little nutshell of an essay here, I have also tied Freud's Memory, Traumacy, Fantasy, and Transference Theories all together and put them in a nice little Christmas box, complete with a nice red bow, as a present to you.

The only thing I need to do now is to extrapolate in greater detail on what has been said here, to articulate in greater depth the process of 'The Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defense', its connection to our 'oral' and 'anal' characteristics, and its birthplace in traumatic and/or exciting narcissistic early childhood memories turned into repetitive and/or compensatory ego-satisfying, usually but not always, erotic transference fantasies.

This is both so Freudian and so anti-Freudian at the same time that I don't have a clue how orthodox Freudians or Object Relationists or Adlerians or any other academic and/or professional will react to it from the confines of their own conceptual box, theory, paradigm...whether that 'conceptual box' be 'analy tight' or conversely 'fluidly liberal and dynamic'.

My argument against Dr. Masson, to the limits of the degree that he gingerly steps back into the Psychoanalytic Colliseum, is that his thought too has become 'stuck inside a one-sided paradigm that confines the potential growth and evolution of Psychoanalytic Theory as a cohesive, integrative theory'.

I couldn't have arrived where I am today -- I couldn't have created QDP the way I have today -- without the huge academic influence of Dr. Jeffrey Masson...

But we have to get beyond Dr. Masson's arguments -- and for the longest while I was stuck on those same controversies and arguments too. Did Freud 'morally fail' Psychoanalysis? And if so, how badly? Or is there an alternative explanation -- one part of the 'mystery of the human psyche' that Freud couldn't fully and properly put together; one part of the 'human jig-saw puzzle' that Freud couldn't entirely comprehend?

Was perhaps, Freud too caught up inside an Aristotlean 'either/or' paradigm in which he thought he had to choose between 'memories' and 'fantasies' -- and didn't properly see how the two were so intermeshed together and pushed forward in 'the seemingly paradoxical dynamics of the transference complex'?

Or did Freud simply make a bad theoretical, therapeutic, and ethical mistake at the same time -- and that mistake was 'The Oedipal Complex'.

Did Freud fundamentally and ethically fail women?

In this way, did Freud essentially 'identify with his aggressors' and like all the other essentially paternalistic, chauvanistic, Victorian doctors in The Psychiatry and Neurology Society -- in harmony with their leader, Krafft-Ebing -- believe that when Freud wrote his stunning essay on Childhood Sexual Abuse -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) -- in which Freud connected childhood sexual abuse with hysteria and other 'neurotic' conditions, that this, according to Krafft-Ebing, was essentially a 'scientific fairy tale'.

Did Freud end up actually believing this himself? Or did he 'alter his theoretical direction' as a 'defense mechanism' in order to safeguard his job and his profession as a doctor, substituting his Oedipal Complex Theory (false sexual assault memory syndrome, from 1897 onwards...) for his earlier Seduction Theory (before 1897, where Freud believed that these childhood sexual assaults actually happened)?

One way or the other -- or both -- Classical Psychoanalysis ended up with a 'sick point' between 1896 and 1897, and that 'sick point' was the dissociation between Freud's 'Reality Theory' and his 'Fantasy Theory'....

Like a 'religious person' stuck inside a 'religious paradigm' or an 'atheist person' stuck inside an 'atheist paradigm', before 1897, Freud couldn't see outside of his 'reality memory-traumacy-seduction-transference box'; and after 1897, Freud couldn't see outside of his 'fantasy-Oedipal box'.

Just like Quantum Physics needed to put together a 'particle-wavelength dialectic theory of matter and energy', so too did Freud and Psychoanalysis.

But in 1896, Freud dropped the ball. He missed the key shot.

And Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanalysis have had to live with this 'Splitting of The Psychoanalytic Ego in The Process of Defense'....

Regardless of whether it was with good or bad 'moral-ethical intentions'...

One way or the other, Freud still morally failed women....

And so too, did his daughter, Anna Freud...

Because a female client's childhood memories -- if the classical psychoanalyst even gets so much as a sniff of 'childhood sexual abuse' in one of these memories between a father and her daughter (the client) -- would immediately -- without any hesitation, if he or she is following the stereotype of the Oedipal Complex Theory, as strigently taught by father Freud, would move to 're-classify' this alleged memory as a 'repressed sexual fantasy of the daughter's'....thus, 'disavowing' the memory as being potentially 'real'...

And that is not right....

If stringent, anal-retentive, Classical Psychoanalysis....

Self-destructs...which it probably already mainly has...

It will be under the tombstone...

Of Freud's worst theoretical mistake...

The Oedipal Complex...

In this small essay here,

I have shown a new, evolving direction...

An integrative direction...

In one small swoop here, I have shown the essence of the necessary integration between Freudian 'Pre-Psychoanalytic Reality, Memory, Traumacy, and Transference Theory' with 'Classical' Freudian Fantasy and Oedipal Theory -- as well as the main essence of Adlerian 'Inferiority and Superiority and Lifestyle Theory', and the essence of Object Relations and The Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense...

The rest can be extrapolated on...

-- dgb, December 19th, 2011...

-- David Gordon Bain

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still Pressing On...

1.5. Maps and Territories -- and Their Integration With Hegelian Dialectic Logic

2011-12-09T05:12:00.000-08:00

In process.....Dec. 12th, 2011

I am just coming off a six day work week and seem to have lost some of the momentum that I had when I started to write this essay at the beginning of last week....

We will find out very shortly whether I can pick up my 'lost momentum' relative to the direction that this essay was heading last week -- or conversely, and based on today's 'immediacy' -- steer the essay in a somewhat or entirely different direction. I have two days off to write this essay, and hopefully, I can write one or two others as well which are clamoring to get out of my head. -- dgb, dec. 12th, 2011..

1. In and Out of The 'Name Box'

Regarding the name -- 'Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis' -- think of this statement:

'If you dialectically engage both the people in your lives, and the ideas in your head, as well as your thoughts, feelings, and actions, in a respectful, egalitarian manner that invites both experiential and conceptual learning -- in other words, passionately integrates your mind, body, heart and soul, and also allows you to think and feel both inside and outside the 'conceptual box, the theoretical box, the paradigm box' -- you will, generally speaking, make 'quantum leaps' in the overall quality, immediacy, and direction of your life. -- dgb

Regarding past names that I still partly hold onto, use, and/or integrate...

GAP or GAAP Psychology -- recognizes the four main psychological cornerstones of what I teach: 1. Gestalt Therapy; 2. Adlerian Psychology; 3. Analytic (Jungian) Psychology; 4. Psychoanalysis. Two other honorable mentions not included in the name above are: 5. Transactional Analysis; and 6. General Semantics and Cognitive Therapy.

Furthermore, we all have different types of 'GAPS' in our thinking, feeling, doing that can be addressed both theoretically and therapeutically with the goal of improving the quality of our lives...

And also, there are 'gaps in theory and therapy' that exist between all the different schools of psychology (and philosophy), including the six different schools of psychology above: these 'gaps' can be 'bridged' and the different schools of psychologiy 'integrated' or 'synthesized'....which leads to this last name and acronym on my own personal name...

DGB(AIN) Psychology as in 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging-And-Integrative-Negotiations....
are still in process...(with every essay that I write...until I die...there is no timeline or deadline on 'personal evolution' except within the 'finite timeline and deadline' of our own lives...)

Or to synthesize two of the names above, we arrive at: 'GAP-DGB' Philosophy-Psychology...

......................................................................................

2. Maps and Territories

I have been in the transportation business almost all my adult life -- so talking about 'maps' and 'territories' comes easily to me, as a driver, as a scheduler, as a dispatcher -- and stepping outside the realm of transportation and 'geography' -- we can move internally into man's psyche and talk about the 'geography of the psyche' and how this subject matter too is very intimately connected to the the metaphor of -- 'maps' and 'territories' -- with the ideal goal being 'better and better structural and associative similarity between the 'map' or 'model' and the 'territory' this map or model is supposed to represent.

Recall that Kant was the first to distinguish between 1. the 'noumenal/objective world' of 'things' that exist above and beyond the finite capabilities of 2. 'the subjective/phenomenal world' of our 'senses' -- i.e., 'our sensory-experiential world' -- that, in turn, leads us deeper and deeper into our 3. 'increasingly abstractive, interpretive world of 'logic', 'associations', 'generalizations' and 'causes' that exist entirely beyond our senses (but should have logical connections to them), and finally, these interpretive generalizations lead us even deeper into 4. our personal 'value generalizations and judgments' and, from these, our 'contextual evaluations' that we attach to our abstractive interpretations and generalizations in order to classify and label particular things and/or processes as being 'good' or 'bad', 'right' or 'wrong' -- which in turn, lead us, based partly also on particular 5. 'perceived survival needs, self-demands, wishes, and/or wants' to 6. stimulate and motivate the creation of different possible/plausable 'response-choices' and imagined 'action scenarios' that we might play out, which, in turn, we judge based on what we imagine to be each of their likely or possible consequences to our lives -- good, bad, ugly, or ineffectual -- , following which we make, 7. 'executive decisions' -- either radical or mediating and compromising -- on how best to act, or not act, given the certain set of external and/or internal stimuli that are impinging on us and demanding that we act -- or not act -- as best we conclude and see fit based on our imagination and judgment of each of their likely or possible consequences, and the element of risk involved for each.

'No adventure, no gain....' or 'No adventure no loss...' -- either of these axioms could be our more general rule of thumb. Which one we use more often could be partly or mainly a product of our 'abstracted' and/or 'concretized' past experience, and/or it could be a product of our general character makeup -- which again, could be based mainly on our past experience of relative success or failure in our 'risk-taking behaviors'..., culminating in whether we are more likely to view ourselves in a particular risk-taking situation as a 'risk-taker' or conversely, as a 'non-risk-taker' which, translated, usually means a 'comfort, safety, and security-seeker'...

3. Abstraction, Evaluation and Health

This evaluation process or evaluation cycle is what I focused on in my 1979 Honours Thesis, essay, Evaluation and Health -- and this evaluation is primarily the domain of what today I would call our 'Central (Executive and Mediating) Ego' -- which in turn is surrounded by a whole 'network of ego-states' and 'facilitatory ego functions and divisions' -- all of which can be viewed as being like 'special interest lobbyist groups' within the confines of the human psyche and mediated by -- our internal leader which is our 'Central Ego' .

Sound familiar regarding the 'special interest lobbyst groups? That's because both our government and our private corporations can be viewed as 'external reflections or projections' of the structural and dynamic makeup of our internal psyche -- which entails all of the good, bad, and/or ugly' of what we call 'human nature' and/or 'human behavior'.

4. The Ego, The I, and The Self

If we go back to the period of 'German Philosophical Idealism', we will find that the philosopher Johann Fichte used the term 'ego' (I'm not sure whether or not Kant used it) which translates from German to English as basically the word 'I', although in English, we have also become very comfortable using the word 'ego' as well.

This raises the whole 'subject-object' conundrum and controversy which goes back at least to Kant and his 'Kant Know' thesis. According to Kant, we 'cant know' what is in our completely 'objective (noumenal) world' because this world of 'things' and 'processes' is outside of, and beyond, the realm of our imperfect 'sensory and rational-empirical (phenomenal) world'... Thus, our objective-noumenal world -- being above and beyond the capabilities of our phenomenal-subjective world -- can also be viewed and labelled as our 'metaphysical world' -- a world that we cannot know (or as I would say, cannot know completely and perfectly).

Stuck inside this 'subjective-objective Kantian Split' is our 'I' (subject) and 'ego' (object). Our 'subjective I' is capable of perceving, interpreting, analzying, and judging our 'objective ego'....within the realm of its capability as an 'imperfectly perceiving, interpreting, analyzing, and judging mind-brain system'...

Of which, for the purpose of our 'map' and 'territory' metaphor or analogy, and the goal of 'teaching' and 'learning' purposes, we can 'sub-divide' or 'sub-classify' the objective ego into 'sub-compartments' or 'ego-states' -- Freud was heading in this direction (at least partly) at the very end of his career and life in 1938 when he wrote his small but evolutionary essay on 'ego-splitting'. Melanie Klein was heading in this same direction -- perhaps she even influenced Freud, or he, her -- when she created the first 'alternative' school of Psychoanalysis which is now referred to as 'Object Relations' (which Eric Berne turned into 'Transactional Analysis').

From an integration of all the different schools of psychology listed above -- I have created 'Quantum-Dialectic Pscyhoanalysis' or 'GAP-DGB Philosophy-Psychology'.

My '14 Compartment Model' of the Ego, the Self, the I....'splits' the ego into these sub-compartments:

1. The Nurturing Superego;
2. The Narcissistic Superego;
3. The Righteous-Rejecting Superego;
4. The Approval-Seeking (Compliant, Co-operative) Underego;
5. The Narcissistic Underego;
6. The Righteous-Rebellious Underego;
7. The Central Ego which can be sub-divided, Jungian style, into:
7a. The Personna; and 7b. The Shadow;
8. The Dream and Fantasy Weaver;
9. The Superego-Id-Defensive (SID) Vault;
10. The Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT) Template;
11. The Nietzschean 'Superman or Superwoman' of Existential Self-Actualization and Self-Achievement;
12. The Nietzschean Abyss of Self-Defeat (Guilt, Anxiety, Panic, Depression, Grief, Hopelessness, Anger, Rage, Hate, Self-Hate...);
13. Biological/Hormonal Influences on The Id-Ego-Superego-Self;
14. The Genetic Potenetial Self (GPS).

This model may or may not seem relatively simple or complex -- depending on your perspective -- but, one way or the other, it has taken me almost 40 years to build (1972-2011). It is an extension of my 1979 model of what I now call 'The Central Ego'.

Maps, models, concepts, theories, and paradigms -- are only as good as their relative functional usefulness, and as the cognitive theorist, George Kelly (1955, the year I was born) once wrote -- and I am paraphasing from my distant memory going back to my work in the 70s -- all concepts, theories (or 'constructs' in Kelly's terminology) have both a focus and range of usefulness -- meaning that once we extend these contructs 'outside of, or beyond, their range of usefulness, they start to lose their functionality, and instead become -- 'dysfunctional'.

Now, at this point Kelly's thinking starts to merge with Hegel's dialectic thinking (although I am sure that Kelly didn't see the association) -- and, in fact, it is only now, at this exact moment in time, that I see the associative linke between Hegel's dialectic thinking and Kelly's cognitive theorizing.

Specifically, one-sided, unilateral theories and/or constructs are going to run out of 'real estate' or 'territory' faster than than 'dialectic or bipolar or multi-bipolar or multi-paradigm theories' which can cover significantly more 'territory'...

Thus, a 'trauma-fantasy' dialectic, bipolar theory has the capability of being functionally superior to either a unilateral 'trauma' theory or a unilateral 'fantasy' theory, both of which are going to run out of 'functional usefulness' faster than a well-defined and articulated trauma-fantasy bipolar theory that can cover twice as much 'human phenomenology'.

Thus, when Hegel asserted that 'every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction'...this has dialectic evolutionary implications, specifically...

That a one-sided, unilateral theory is going to deconstruct or self-destruct faster than a well articulated dialectic, bipolar theory such as in physics a 'particle-wavelength' theory which is superior to both a 'particle' theory and a 'wavelength' theory in and by themselves...With the evolution of the bipolar particle-wavelength theory, physics took a 'quantum leap' into the realm of 'Quantum Physics'...

And we can do the same in both psychology and, more specifically, Psychoanalysis...

Thus, the latest name for my 'Underground School of Psychoanalysis' -- 'Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis...

Keep reading me and you will see some 'quantum leaps' in the evolution of Psychoanalytic Theory...

-- dgb, Dec. 12th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging-And-Integrative-Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...
.............................................................................................................................
If you are interested in checking out further references to the work of George Kelly and some of the early cognitve theorists, which evolved in one direction into 'cognitve-behavior theory and therapy' of which I wrote my honours thesis for one of the pioneers and best recognized theorists and therapists in this area -- Dr. Donald Meichenbaum, 1979, at The University of Waterloo, you can find the essay below on the internet...as I just did...

.................................................................................................................

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Basic Principles and Applications

Robert L. Leahy

American Institute for Cognitive Therapy, NYC

and Weill-Cornell University Medical College

Reprinted with permission of Jason Aronson Publishers. © 1996

Jason Aronson.

This book may be purchased at www.Aronson.com

CHAPTER 2

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

OF COGNITIVE THERAPY
...............................................................................................................

Newly Updated Quantum-Dialectic Model of The Human Psyche

2011-12-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

A/ Our Mainly Conscious Ego-States

01. Our Nurturing Superego;
02. Our Narcissistic Superego;
03. Our Righteous Superego;
04. Our Central (Executive, Mediating) Ego which has two parts;
4a. Our 'Personna'; and
4b. Our 'Conscious Shadow Vault' (CSV);
05. Our Co-operative (Compliant, Approval-Seeking) Underego;
06. Our Narcissistic (Hedonistic-Egotistic) Underego;
07. Our Righteous/Rebellious Underego;

B/ Our Mainly Subconscious Facilitary Ego-Functions/Divsions

08. Our Dream (and Nightmare) Weaver;
09. Our 'Subconscious Shadow Vault' (SSV);
10. Our Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT) Template;
11. Our 'Mountain Foot Hill' of Who We Are And Who We are Capable of Becoming;
12. Our 'Mountain Peak' of Celebratory, Existential Self-Actualization and Self-Achievement;
13. Our 'Dark Abyss' of Lost Hope, Anger, Rage, Hate, Self-Hate, Guilt, Anxiety, Depression, Grief, and/or Despair';
14. Our Biological/Hormonal 'Id Influences'
15. Our Genetic Potential Self (GPS)

-- dgb, December 5th, 8th, 12th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- (DGBAIN) Dialectic Gap-Bridging And Integrative Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...

Newly Updated, General Table of Contents

2011-12-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Hegel's Hotel: A Phenomenology of Mind, Body, and Spirit For The 21st Century

Newly Updated, General Table of Contents

Part 1: Introductory Essays on Hegel, Dialectic Logic, and The Dialectic Methodology;

Part 2: Quantum-Dialectic Philosophy: On The History, Evolution, And Integration of Western Philosophy;

Part 3: Quantum-Dialectic Psychology: On The History, Evolution, and Integration of Psychoanalysis and Other Schools of Psychology;

Part 4: Quantum-Dialectic Politics;

Part 5: Quantum-Dialectic Law and Civil Rights;

Part 6: Quantum-Dialectic Business and Economics;

Part 7: A Tribute To My Father's 21st Century Canadian, Romantic Poetry;

Part 8: Quantum-Dialectic Logic and Methodology: Closing Essays

-- dgb, December 5th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...

-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism...

Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis: 1.4. The Integration of Classical Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory into DGB, Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalytic Theory

2011-12-03T05:51:00.000-08:00

Final modifications and finished! Dec. 5th, 2011...

The Integration of Classical Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory into DGB Quantum Dialectic Psychoanalytic Theory

In 1920, Freud postulated that man has both a 'life' and 'death' instinct. He probably 'over-used' his death theory to explain things that he better explained between 1893 and 1896 using his more powerful 'reality-traumacy' theory which he basically threw in the garbage pail, starting around 1897.

I do not completely discard Freud's death instinct (or in my vocabulary, 'death energy') theory; in fact, I will use it partly in adherence to the way that Freud used it, and partly in other, hopefully, creative, meaningful ways. Our life can be viewed as following an 'arc', and once we get to the top of our 'life arc', there follows an either slow or fast 'regression' or 'dominance of the death instinct or our death energy', not completely inescapable, because there are things that we can do to improve the situation, but ultimately, inevitable as to its final destination and outcome -- death.

Still, the traumacy theory and narcissistic theory both 'explain' aggressive, destructive, and/or self-destructive impulses better than Freud's explanation of the death instinct, so in this type of matter, we will return to, and expand on, Freud's 1893-1896 Reality-Traumacy-Seduction (RTS) theory.

Freud's post-1896 'abandonment' of his RTS theory was one of Freud's two worst theoretical mistakes. For those of my readers who may not have a general or sufficient understanding of what Freud's 'RTS(PCR)' Theory is -- or was -- let me try to briefly summarize it. The 'PCR' part of this theory includes: 1. 'The Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle' which dominated Freud's thinking until 1920 ('Beyond The Pleasure Principle); 2. 'The Constancy or Equilibrium Theory' (which Freud never abandoned and which basically states that both the mind and the body try to 'maintain a comfortable level of stability, consistancy, or constancy' or 'equilibrium' or 'balance'); and 3. 'The Repression Theory' (which Freud never abandoned and its 'over-use' or 'inappropriate use', I cite as Freud's second biggest theoretical mistake).

'Reality Theory' means that before 1897, Freud thought that he was dealing with 'real experiences', 'real encounters', 'real memories of encounters', 'real relationships'. After 1896, these ideas started to 'slip away' -- not totally, but in large part -- to make way for his 'inbound, sexual fantasy theory', whereby his 1897 created 'Oedipal Complex Theory' (OPT) to all extents and purposes, replaced his 1896 'Seduction Theory' which was basically the theory that all hysteria -- as well as some other major 'neurotic disorders' such as 'obsessional neurosis' -- were, for the most part, 'caused' by 'childhood sexual assault' that included both 'childhood sexual manipulations' and the more forceful, at times brutal, phenomena of childhood rapes. This became labelled as Freud's 'Seduction Theory' which lasted only part of one year -- 1896 -- and one major paper, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896), which some academics (for example, Masson and myself) believe was one of Freud's finest -- and certainly most compassionate towards his female clients -- papers.

In contrast, and here is where some academics (Masson and myself included), believe that Freud -- 'for politically and/or professlonally expedient motives, or whatever' -- pulled a 'Judas' and abandoned the sanctity and integrity of his female clients' 'real memories' in favor of a radically different 'psychoanalytic interpretation' -- that these 'so-called memories' were not memories at all, but rather his (mainly female) clients' own 'repressed sexual fantasies towards their own father' (which became known as 'The Oedipal or Electra Complex').

That was the Freudian 'Copernican Revolution' in 1896 -- and here's saying that this 'new interpretation' by Freud starting on October 15th, 1897, was at least partly a huge, theoretical blunder -- as well as a public relations disaster -- as it began 'the alienation of many women' (particularly in this century) from Classical Psychoanalysis.

The second theoretical error committed by Freud involved 'over-using' -- or 'inappropriately using' -- his 'repression' theory. Most people don't usually 'forget' their worst life traumacies; they usually acutely remember them. As Freud himself stated: 'Hysterics suffer mainly from 'reminiscences' (1895, Freud and Breuer, Studies in Hysteria). (And not 'always' -- indeed, perhaps not even 'often' -- 'repress' these memories, a 'mindset', theory in itself, and 'paradigm' that dominated Freud's thinking for most, if not all, of his life, and thus too, later, after Freud's death, the mindset and paradigm of Psychoanalysis as a whole. Big mistake as what Freud called 'repression' certainly should not be viewed as any 'foundational theory and/or assumption' of psychoanalysis. Perhaps this theory was 'pre-conditioned' by Freud's start with the therapeutic tool of 'hypnosis'. My addition in the last set of italics here.)

Regarding 'The Oedipal Complex'....

We all have 'Oedipal Complexes' -- meaning more than one in my opinion which ooperates by a more 'extended, metaphorical model' of the Oedipal Complex as opposed to Freud's much more restrictive and literal sense and usage of The Oedipal Complex -- Oedipal Complexes of a sort towards both our mom and our dad, and also, other significant figures in our early childhood lives...Sometimes, a little girl's -- and later, adult woman's -- 'father Oedipal Complex' is referred to as 'The Electra Complex' in which case the usage of 'The Oedipal Complex' is restricted to a little boy's -- and later, man's -- 'repressed sexual fantasies towards his mother'.

As Freud would say (with Fliess' influence), we are all 'psychologically -- (as well as biochemically and hormonally) bi-sexual' in the sense that both sexes contain mixtures in different degrees of both testosterone and estrogen, as well as both 'love' and 'hate' feelings leftover from our childhood psychological development towards both our mom and dad -- and other significant childhood transference figures.

These 'transference encounters, memories of encounters, and memories of relationships -- both good and bad' -- 'merge' together to form both healthy and/or neurotic 'complexes', which merge again, into what I will call from now on, our 'Memory-Learning-Transference (MLT)Template'.

Wthiin this MLT template then, at any moment of our waking or sleeping day, different Transference Complexes' (TCs) are either overtly and/or covertly 'active' in our subconcious, either 'bound up and restrained' in our 'Shadow-Id Vault' (or partly so), and/or they may be 'unbound' and 'free-floating' through both the subconscious and the conscious aspects of our personality, including any or all of the different 'ego-states' that our ego 'splits' into for either 'healthy, functional' and/or 'unhealthy, dysfunctional' purposes that relate to their 'there and then', 'traumatic' and/or 'narcissistic' beginnings.

What we have above is a 'model' and a 'structural-dynamic foundation' that reflects a a significant component of 'Classical' Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory (CFPT) integrated into DGB Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalytic Theory (QDPT), which, in turn, integrates ALL 50 years of Freud's work, including both before and after 1896 in a much more harmonious, peaceful -- as opposed to 'alienating', 'estranged', 'suppressive' and 'oppressive', i.e., 'neurotic' -- fashion. Put another way, we have the structural foundation of a 'bridge' over 'Freud's Troubled Psychoanalytic Waters' in 1896, whatever those 'troubled waters' stemmed from (and both Masson and myself have historically interpreted what they were in partly similar, partly different, fashions).

Masson may or may not want to be associated with my work. We both agree that I am a more 'integrative' theorist, for better or for worse, In my short email interview with Masson back in 2010, Masson was skeptical that I could 'harmonize' pre-1897 Freudian theory with post-1896 Freudian theory, although he applauded me at the time for trying.

My interpretation of Masson's thinking is that if a female client asserts a 'childhood sexual assault memory' to a classical psychoanalyst in the therapy room, that the analyst should take this memory seriously as being 'real' (unless or until -- or at least this is my take on the situation -- there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary that shows up later in the analytic process -- and/or outside the anaytic process, like might show up in a courtroom of law that may be viewing a 'larger body of evidence').

The analyst, in Masson's mind -- and my own -- shouldn't be automatically re-interpreting the 'allegedly real memory' as a Freudian stereotype of a 'repressed Oedipal sexual fantasy' from the female client's own mind that has no bearing on any 'real memory' from her childhood past that actually happened....

Ouch! This was, is -- and still remains -- a wicked blow to the heart of any woman who has actually been sexually abused in childhood -- and indeed, only too acutely, still remembers this memory, or any number of other, similar types of associated memories; indeed, it is blow to the 'phenomenological and epistemological credibility and integrity' of all women as Freud started the changeover in 1897 from being at 'the forefront and a Masculine Defender of the Women's Rights Movement' to being a 'Victorian, Patriarchal, Establishment Oppressor' of 'The same Evolving Women's Movement'...which he may have helped to set back about 20 or 30 or 40 years, with no help from his daughter or Kurt Eissler in correcting this rather tragic situation...

In the end, Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler chose to protect the legacy and credibility and integrity of Freud over the legacy and credibility and integrity of Psychoanalysis....And that too was -- and continues to be -- a tragic, institutional error and 'cover up' of scandulous proportions on the same scale as 'The Penn State Scandal' which, probably because of the more 'abstract nature' of the Psychoanalytic Seduction Theory Controversy, and the fact that the lay public doesn't fully understand its full implications and applications, never amounted to the type of 'public Psychoanalytic rebellion' that Masson anticipated in the 1980s....

That, and perhaps, the fact that the weight of The Psychoanalytic Establishment carried more credibility with the media and the general public than Masson's own personal rebellion against it.....And, of course, Janet Malcolm -- with her 'real' or 'fabricated' or partly both quotes allegedly coming from Masson's own mouth -- did no public or academic favors to Masson's cause for the rights of women -- and particularly, 'to the rights of sexually assaulted women' undergoing Classical Psychoanalytic 'Therapy' that wasn't even going to 'honour' their memories as being 'real'...

This is my last 'kick' at Freud's abandonment of the 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory....Up to this point, I have supported Masson's cause -- a cause that I am sure that he will go to his grave defending, and rigthfully so....

But now, I move on, and I move on past Masson's important historical and evolutionary contribution to Psychoanalysis, and do something that I believe Masson still believes is unobtainable -- a 'working, harmonious, synthesis' between Freud's pre-1897 and post-1896 psychoanalytic theory.

In Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis, this 'theoretical estrangement' is overcome...A 'metaphorical bridge' is built over 1895, 1896, and 1897 -- Freud's three most 'neurotic professional years' -- where up until now there has been a 'Nietzschean Chasm, an Abysss'...and no 'bridge'...

I call this 'The Bridge Over Troubled Psychoanalytic Waters'....And even though I am 'only' an 'underground, anti-establishment, outside-psychoanalytic theorist', still I have the working knowledge, the intellectual creativity, and the power of words to accomplish my goal -- the building of this 'metaphorical peace bridge'....

Call me an 'intellectual egotist with an inferiority complex' if you wish...

Laugh at me if you wish as I state that I am metaphorically 'riding a white or black stallion with a one man army' to the forefront of another potential psychoanaytic revolution for the 21st century...

But there is one thing that I can do that neither Freud nor Masson was able to do -- and that is to unite pre-1897 and post-1896 Psychoanalytic Theory.

And I can successfully unite Freud and Adler. And Freud and Jung. And Freud and Melanie Klein. And Freud and Fairbairn. And Freud and Kohut. And Freud and Berne. And Freud and Perls...And Freud and Masson...

Freud was guilty of 'over-generalizing' -- many times. Freud overgeneralized on The Seduction Theory. He overgeneralized on his theory of 'repression'. He overgeneralized on his 'Oedipal Complex Theory'. He overgeneralized on his 'Death Instinct Theory'...

But so too did Masson. I fully admire Masson for standing up to The Psychoanalytic Establishment -- and losing one of the most prestigious jobs at the top of The Psychoanalytic hierarchy in the process -- all in the supreme personal effort to reclaim a lost Psychoanalytic moral principle -- i.e., for the analyst to believe in the legitmacy and the reality of a client's asserted 'personal memory' -- at least unless, or until, there is substantial clinical and/or outside evidence to the contrary of the 'reality' of this memory. And this evidence has got to be more than Freud's rigid, reductionistic -- 'stereotyped' -- belief in his post-1896 Oedipal and Fantasy Theory.

Masson has proven one thing over his lifetime -- that he is very good at 'deconstructing false idols'....

But -- and this I issue to Dr. Masson as a challenge -- has Masson ever built a 'Phenomenology of Mind, Body, and Spirit for the 20th and/or 21st Century'?

No, Masson -- to the limits of my interpretive analysis of his work -- has for the most part remained a skeptic, a pessimist, a cynic, a deconstructionist, and a disillusionist...What remaining 'ideals' and 'idols' do you have left, Dr. Masson? Or do you have any? Are you against 'fantasy' Psychoanalysis? Are you against Psychiatry? And/or are you against all forms of therapy -- which in my opinion seems like a classic 'overgeneralization' in Freudian style of your ongoing, and usually non-admitted 'love-hate relationship' with Psychoanalysis? Underneath your 'anal schizoid demeanor' -- 'I am against all forms of therapy...' Is that all forms of therapy? Or just all forms of 'psychotherapy', or just 'Psychiatry and the administration of drugs?... -- I know there still exists a very passionate. Dr. Masson, you remind me in some ways of R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness), and what they were 'deconstructing' in the 60s and 70s...

I too, can be all of those...

But after all your hard research and work -- and 'deconstructing', Dr. Masson...

I am left with the following questions:

Do you have anything left to creatively construct for us?

Do you have any new ideals -- besides relative ot animal psychology and veganism (and I respect your work in both these areas, I am not trying to make light of them....)-- that you can build for us?

It seems to me like a kind of 'I'm taking my net and going home' attitude towards not getting your own way...Like Freud, in more ways than you would like to imagine perhaps, you are a 'control freak' -- as well as an 'I will not be controlled freak' -- who is like the guy who goes down the beach 'wiping out other people's sandcastles' -- while not having the courage and/or the ability to 'build your own sandcastle that we can freely evaluate' as being better or worse than the one you just destroyed...or in Derrida's language -- 'deconstructed'...

Where is your own idealistic philosophical and/or psychological 'Grand Narrative'?

Or are you getting too old to create one now?

Hegel's Hotel is my 'Grand Narrative' -- and I am not ashamed to admit it. Hopefully, one day it will be my 'legacy' that I can be proud of at having worked so hard to build it...

Dr. Masson, you are like 'The Demolition Expert'...and then theorists like me have to come up behind you, look to see what you have demolished, and see if there is anything left over from your 'Demolition Derby' to create an exciting, new 'Architectural and Engineering Wonder Building' from your ashes...

For every Demolition Expert...there needs to be a 'Howard Rourke' to come up behind and create a new 'creative masterpiece'...

One of the limiting qualities of all 'post-modernist philosophers' of the 20th and 21st centuries (Derrida, Foucault...) is that they have forgotten how to do this? And/or they will not allow themselves to do this-- to create their own Grand Narrative -- like the Great German Idealists -- Kant, Schelling, I hesitate to say Fichte, and of course, the Master Grand Narrativist...perhaps of all time...G.W. Hegel...Maybe Ayn Rand was the greatest Grand Narrativist -- and one of the few -- of the 20th century. Rand gave us 'Howard Rourke'...

Well, personally, even beneath my own, at times, very 'heavy deconstructionism', I remain a 'Romantic-Enlightenment, Humanistic-Existential Idealist'...

I believe in the Scottish Enlightenment. I believe in The French Enlightement -- until it became pathologically 'The Reign of Terror'. I believe in the work of The German Romanticists and Idealists -- and even their critics, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard....and Nietzsche...the latter of whom gave us 'The Superman' and 'The Will to Power' (or probably better stated, as 'The Will to Self-Empowerment and Self-Actualization').

And I believe in the creative brilliance of Sigmund Freud -- at least until he at least partly 'neurotically deconstructed' in the years, 1895, 96, and 97.

I believe in the real and potential creative brilliance of Freud's 'ultimate sublimation' -- his own Grand Narrative -- Classical Psychoanalysis -- at least on both sides of Freud's most 'neurotic years' mentioned above -- the effect that those years had on the 'evolution' and/or 'de-evolution' of Psychoanalysis -- and the fact that Freud could never really step outside 'the paradigm' of his own 'reductionistic, anal-retentive, sublimated creation', as brilliant as it was, and as brilliant as he was.

The same goes for Masson. Masson is too locked into 'one paradigm' -- or perhaps a 'collection of quasi-paradigms'. Is he a pre-1897 psychoanalytic theorist? Or is he more than this? It is difficult to pinpoint his exact thoughts and feelings on this subject matter these days.

In 2010, Masson edited what, at my first perusal through it, looks like a beautiful and engaging new hardcover edition of Freud's 1900 classic -- 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (ID).

But 'ID' was the heart and soul of the beginning of Freud's 'Fantasy' Theory -- which when combined with Freud 'Chilhood Sexuality Theory' and 'Oedipal Theory', took Freud away from the clinical phenomena of 'real memories' and 'real traumas' and 'real childhood sexual assaults'. So in this respect, ID was both a blessing and a curse to the evolution of Classical Psychoanalysis -- from a Massonian vantage point (and I am interpreting Masson's perspective here) -- in that it both opened up the huge domain of 'fantasy theory' while at the same time effectively 'closing down' or 'covering up' the equally huge domain of what has previously been 'Freudian Reality Theory (before 1897).

This shouldn't have been an 'either/or' choice for Freud. And neither should it have been an 'either/or' choice for Masson. These are not mutuallly exclusive clinical territories. Reality and fantasy sometimes merge into each other but certainly not in the way that Freud would have us believe relative to the implications and applications of his 'Oedipal Complex Theory' (OCT) -- which as Masson has stated to us over and over again -- took Freud away, and us away, as readers and students of Freud, from Freud's 1893-1896 'Reality Theory'.

This should never have happened. But it did. And once Masson got into Freud's most intimate letters and found out much more concretely what types of things were happening to Freud between 1895 and 1897 -- Masson, being the type of 'no bullcrap' guy that he was -- flipped out on Freud for creating a 'clinical myth' in his strict sexual interpretatiion of the OCT, flipped out on The Psychoanalytic Establishment for perpetuating this myth, and took his argument to the general public believing that they would see the grave 'immoral implications and applications' of Freud's OCT, and what Classical Psychoanalysts were still doing in the clinical setting under 'the myth of Freud's neurotic and pathological OCT' .

Or so Masson believed, and still believes. And there others out there, including myself, who believe in the strength of Masson's argument. But not enough of the general public tuned into Masson's argument, or understood it, or cared about it.....leaving Masson to walk off into the sunset....and take the next flight to New Zealand.

I admire the courage of what Masson did in the 1980s -- I couldn't have done what he did, at least in the way that he did it. But now Masson is still 'dabbing' in Psychoanalysis from the 'outside' and 'far away from the madding crowd'....Does he still care about Psychoanalysis, or does he not? Does Masson effectively reject all of Freud's work after 1897, or does he not? It is hard to believe that he does when he just spent so much time releasing his new 2010 edition of Freud's ID.

I communicated to Masson in my interview with him in 2010 that I was/am going to integrate all 50 years of Freud's work, including the 'supposed abyss-like gap' between his 'Pre-1897 and post-1896 work.

Masson replied that he didn't/doesn't believe it can be done -- but then I ask him here and now: What are you going to do with all of Freud's post-1896 work -- throw it into the garbage can -- including all of his usually considered best works: ID (1900), Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), The Dynamics of Transference (1912), On Narcissism (1914), Beyond the Pleausre Principle (1920), and The Ego and The Id (1923)? You throw out these papers and you are throwing about 90 percent (my estimate) -- or 21 of 24 volumes of Freud's work. In effect, you know longer have 'Classical' Psychoanalysis, which at times, seems to be what Masson is saying should be done...but I don't believe that....and his freshly edited version of ID would suggest I am right. At other times, Masson will say that he is both against 'The Dark Science' (presumably 'psychiatry', visions of 'One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest', and 'The Myth of Mental Illness'...); at other times, Masson will claim that he is 'Against Therapy' altogether....at which point I partly throw up my arms in exasperation and say: 'Dr. Masson, we have heard a lot about what you don't like, what you don't want, and what you don't stand for, but my question to you now is: What do you stand for and what do you want -- other than 'not killing and abusing animals'; and supporting 'veganism'? Do you have any human ideals left and if you are really against 'All Therapy' -- then, why are you still dabbing in Psychoalanalysis? Do you want to see Psychoanalysis improved? Or do you want to see Psychoanalysis disappear off the face of the earth?'

What I am getting from your somewhat puzzling behavior, Dr. Masson, is effectively that you still have an on again, off again, 'love-hate relationship' with Freud and Psychoanalysis...

This I can understand...If I am right in interpreting your partly paradoxical behavior and seeming motivations in this regard, Dr. Masson, then I share these feelings with you - but overtly and unabashedly so -- rather than in 'hit and run style' -- and I do not hesitate in stating that I want to 'make Psychoanalysis better', not keep dragging it in the mud, which I too, have probably been more than a little 'obsessive' about....

But all of this is changing as of now....because I am moving forward, Dr. Massson, into new 'creatively fertile' -- not 'sterile' -- theoretical territory, and I will leave you, Dr. Masson, to keep insisting that you were 'right', when you first stated that Freud 'lost moral courage'....I agree with you, I think he did too, but end of argument -- I am coming back here no more; I am pushing forward into new theoretical territory. I am tired of sounding like a broken record, and if I don't push forward, my work will never get done...

'Outsiders' can become 'insiders' again, or for the first time -- at least often times -- by creating and demonstrating 'better' problem solutions and conflict resolutions to the insiders' own inside (in this case, institutional, theoretical and therapeutic) problems and conflicts. And perhaps some day, some 'Psyhchoanalytic Insider(s)' with enough astuteness, liberalness in thinking, power and clout to make it happen...will indeed, see -- in Classic Hegelian dialectic and paradoxical style -- that there is an opportunity here, not to be missed, for a 'great new richness in evolutionary Psychoanalytic thinking and development'...I am not counting on it...but it could happen....There are some Psychoanalytic seminars open to the public in Toronto -- I get the advertisements for them -- and one day, probably soon, I will walk into one of these seminars...Nothing definitive yet...but I can see it happening...I would like to get a better idea of what is happening in Psychoanalysis -- now -- not 30 years ago when, presumably things were different...

Maybe, maybe not....

As they taught me in Gestalt Therapy...

'Everything is subject to change'...

And great bridges can be built over even the deepest...

And darkest of abysses...

Sometimes, you just have to get away from 'the hard feelings'...

And rigid, inflexible, anal-retentive thinking patterns....

When it comes to better understanding human behavior....

Conceptual and theoretical boundaries were meant to be broken....

And 'flexible, shifting paradigms'...

Are a 'good thing', not a 'bad thing'....

'Conceptual and theoretical narcissism'...

Stagnates flexible thinking patterns...

And makes concepts, theories, and paradigms...

'Sterile'....

This point applies to both Freud -- and Masson.

Masson said in the early 1990s...

That he just wanted to find an 'objective critic'...

He found one...

Does he have the open-mindedness to 'hear' the criticism?

And The Psychoanalytic Establishment too...

Or will this remain a case....

That goes down in history...

As 'The Righteous, Raging Bull' and/or 'The Man With The Hanging-On-Pit Bull
Bite'...

Versus 'The Inpenetratable Ivory Tower, Fortress Wall'

Time will tell...
Who has fell...
And who's been left behind...
When you go your way, and I go mine...

-- Bob Dylan, Most Likely You Go Your Way, And I'll Go Mine'

-- dgb, December 4th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain,

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...

Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis: 1.3. The Integration of General Semantics (Maps, Territories, and Rational-Empiricism) with DGB, Post-Hegelian, Quantum-Dialectic Theory

2011-11-22T18:17:00.000-08:00

1.3.1. Maps and Territories: Narcissistic Influences and Ethical Idealism

In 1979, before I even knew who Schopenhauer was, I had just finished my Honours Thesis in psychology, an essay called 'Evaluation and Health' that was mainly about 'Maps and Territories' -- focusing on a General Semantic model of the way the world works, and the way man's mind-brain-nervous system works, as created by Aflred Korzysbski, the founder of General Semantics, in his classic (albeit none too 'crystal clear' in itself) philosophical treatise, 'Science and Sanity' (1933).

Korzybski and Wittgenstein were operating in the same time period -- Korzsbski's first book (Manhood of Humanity, 1921) was published the same year as Wittgenstein published his famous 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'.

Until this morning, I was not clear about who influenced who because their ideas about 'reality, language, and epistemology' at the 'bottom level of abstraction' were too similar 'in structure' not for at least one to have influenced the other.

It turns out that Koyrzybski in 'Manhood' quoted Wittgenstein from 'Tractatus' as I found out in the discussion 'Institute of General Semantics' (IGS) discussion forum below (See Wittgenstein and Korzybski on the internet as the relevant material didn't completely present itself below.):

.......................................................................................

IGS Discussion Forums: Learning GS Topics: Wittgenstein and Korzybski

Author: Steve (stevierayd) Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 10:34 pm
I find John Searle, professor of Philosophy, to be a very good communicator. See a lecture series that feature him on "Philosophy of Mind". I found this old video in which he discusses Wittgenstein's writings. It provides a very clear, well articulated summary of his philosophy. http://methodsofprojection.blogspot.com/2008/03/ bryan-magee-interviews-john-searle-on.html A couple of notions discussed reminded me of general semantics: In Wittgenstein's early writings he was very interested in differentiating talk that made sense from talk that didn't make sense. His ideas included the notion of language as having a structural similarity with the world they were about. Later, his philosophy evolved the notion of language as a tool, that we should look at how the language is being used to understand the meaning. Please contribute any known connections between Wittgenstein and Korzybski
Author: David Linwood (dlinwood) Thursday, April 17, 2008 - 07:36 pm
Steve: Korzybski refers to Wittgenstein in "Manhood.." and in Science and Sanity. I have uploaded attachments which pinpoint most of these references. "What can be shown cannot be said." There is a discussion using Theory of Types between Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in S&S. David Linwood There is another small internet piece that introduces Korzybski's ideas in very simple fashion. You can find it here: Science and Sanity by Flemming Funch, 30 Dec 94. ................................................................................................................ In a nutshell, Korzybski got around -- at least significantly -- the whole 'Kantian Split' problem between our 'noumenal-objective world' (outside our senses) and our 'phenomenal-subjective world' (inside our senses, perceptions, interpretations, evaluations, and choices...) in a way that none of the other German Idealists (partiicularly Fichte and Hegel) did. Fichte was too 'subjectively obsessed' -- he basically got rid of the notion of a 'noumenal-objective world' altogether; and Hegel got caught up -- and lost up -- in his ideal notion of 'The Absolute', the idea that man would eventually 'transcend' his 'finite imperfections' through the process of 'historical- dialectic evolution'. (In my opinion, Hegel didn't sufficiently take into account man's 'narcissistic- egotistic-greed-and-survival-oriented nature', a 'flaw' in Hegel's work that Schopenhauer would more than compensate for. Now, Schopenhauer's philosophical compensation for Hegel's 'over-idealism' could be used in a backhanded way to support the very theory that Hegel was promoting: again, 'historical-dialectic-evolution' with Schopenhauer compensating for Hegel's 'narcissistic oversight', Kierkegaard compensating for another 'Hegelian oversight' -- his 'global and historical abstractionism' -- and the world marching on to the beat of *'The Hegelian Historical-Dialectic-Evolutionary-* *Deterministic Drum'.* *Still, one wonders why -- some 200 plus years later --* *we don't seem to be any closer to Hegel's idealistic vision* *of 'The Absolute' -- at least in an 'ethical', 'behavioral'* *and 'humanistic-existential' sense, and partly in an* *'epistemological' sense, than we were in Hegel's time....* *Indeed, we seem closer to Schopenhauer's much* *more pessimistic, narcissistic, Hobbesean, 'Lord of The* *Flies'* *world, than anything resembling Hegel's idealistic* *vision* *of 'The Absolute'...* *unless we are talking about 'Absolute Narcissism'...* *But that is a subject for another debate....and relative* *to the subject of epistmology, the only thing that we* *need to -- strongly -- concern ourselves with in this* *regard is the distortion of any 'objective' sense of* *the words* *'knowledge' and 'epistemology',* *being 'subjectively manipuated' by narcissistic,* *human interests -- and the power and money* *to go with it...* *Indeed, just as Nietzsche proclaimed that 'God is dead!',* *so too...(and Nietzsche basically took us here as well,* *as did Marx and Engels, and Foucault and Derrida,* *and Erich Fromm...): 'Science is dead!', and* *'Politics is dead!...and 'Any and every body of human* *knowledge and ethics is dead! -- just so long as these* *different areas of human culture are manipulated by* *money, power, survival, greed -- or in two words,* *'Narcissistic Capitalism'.* *As long as we have politicians being 'bought off' by* *lobbyists of all types but particularly lobbyists for* *large corporatations -- democracy, whether it be* *'representative democracy' and/or 'participative* *democracy -- remains impossible. The only ones* *being 'represented' are the 'corporations with* *the money'...at least until we get some form of* *'democratic, metaphorical' -- 'Storming of The Bastilles'* *by private citizens -- united together -- who are sick* *and tired of being ruled by politiicans who have* *been 'bought' by corporate, and/or other lobbyist* *interests.* *I have gotten way ahead of myself here. Before we get* *back to the subject of 'ideal, ethical epistemology', let* *me just say that I am not necessarily a proponent of* *'Socialism' -- particularly as it was practised in both* *(Mao Tse Tung) China and (Lenin, Stalin) Russia --* *but rather what I am looking for here on a* *'socio-economic-legal-political level' is some type* *of better 'dialectic engagement' between the* *philosophies of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand on the* *'Capitalist' side of things, vs. the philosophies of* *Marx, Engels, and Erich Fromm on the 'Socialist'* *side of things, with the dialectic philosophies of* *Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Foucualt,* *Derrida, and Presidents like Jefferson and* *Eisenhauer...* *warning us of the dangers of* *narcissistic interests at the top end* *of the 'corporate food chain',* *and the destructive forces,* *that their 'collusion' with politicians,* *can have on so-called 'democracy',* *on civil, Western society...* *and on The Pursuit of* *The American Dream...* *for The Working Class Heroes...* *Of both sexes and all races,* *Not just a few members of* *The Corporate Elite...* *In essence, I am ideally looking for a more* *'ethically and epistemologically transparent'* *form of 'Multi-Dialectic-Integrative-Humanistic-* *Existential-Ethical Socialist-Capitalism' --* *a world where neither 'Corporate Owners'* *nor 'Big Unions' dominate, manipulate, and* *exploit; a world where politicians aren't 'bought off* *by lobbyists'; a world where all classes, races,* *religions, and both sexes of people can share* *in 'The Democratic, North American Dream'...* *No one is fed 'advertising lies' or 'fraudulent claims',* *and no one is 'pushed downwards' into 'the* *gutter of silent, economic desperation'* *so that others can 'push upwards' into their* *'ivory, economic towers' that, in the most narcissistic* *cases, are basically built up from 'blood-money'...* *such as middle class people being forced out* *of their houses so that others* *can live in bigger mansions...* *The point I am making here is that you cannot have* *'Objective Epistimology' in any idealistic Ayn Rand* *'Atlas Shrugged' or 'The Fountainhead' sense* *of her Capitalist Ethics,* *in a world of manipulative, narcissistic,* *fraudulent Capitalism* *that defies* *any sense of an idealized* *'Howard Roark'.* *You can't have any idealized vision of* *Capitalism when...* *All ethical behaviors are dead!* *And reversing this trend* *Starts with Senators and other Politicians* *Being equally vulnerable to the laws of the land* *And being charged, convicted, and sentenced...* *For taking bribes...* *From corporate lobbysts...* *The word 'lobbyst' comes from the fact* *that this breed of people 'worked the parliament lobbies'* *In England...* *We need to take lobbysts out of the lobbies* *Where politicians work...* *And if they want something...* *They will have to step into...* *A public forum...* *And speak 'transparently' in this forum...* *With cameras, microphones,* *Politicians, media, and the genral public...* *Watching and listening to their every word...* *No more 'collusions' in 'back rooms' and* *'lobbyists'....* *We need to take away the 'lobbies' from lobbysts..* *Those of us who retain some semblance of 'ethical,* *political,* *and ecomomic idealism', need to come out* *of our hiding places* *And help us move 'upwards',* *Towards,* *A better form of...* *'Ethical, Humanistic-Existential,* *Win-Win, Capitalism'....* *as opposed to any brand or version of* *'Exploitive, I win, you lose, Capitalism'...* *The type we are living under now...* *What I have stated above is a big part of my own* *idealistic* *dream and vision of what 'Hegel's Hotel' is...* *An 'ethical idealistic vision'* *where all people --* *preferrably open-minded,* *democratic-minded, people* *Of both sexes, every race and nationality,* *Religious and non-religious people,* *Conservative and liberal people,* *Republicans and Democrats,* *Can gather together and* *Hopefully, both assertively speak,* *And compassionately listen...* *To all the diverging and converging...* *Ideologies...* *Like life itself...* *Dialectics engaging, unionizing...* *And then splitting apart...* *When they no longer work...* *To be replaced by other evolving,* *Newly engaging dialectics...* *Coming from every direction...* *The more different converging* *And diverging paradigms...* *We can learn to comprehend...* *And functionally use,* *The better equipped we are to meet...* *A multi-dialectic, pluralistic,* *Constangly changing, constantly evolving,* *World...* *Let's move out of the world of 'socio-economics, law and politics',* *And on to my main 'epistemological piece' here...* *(before I get waylaid by other 'contextual variables'...) -- dgb, Nov.29th, updated, Dec. 3rd, 2011..* *-- David Gordon Bain*

Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis: 1.2 Foundational Assumptions: Concepts, Theories, Doctrines, and Paradigms

2011-11-20T03:16:00.000-08:00

1.2 Foundational Assumptions: Concepts, Theories, Doctrines, and Paradigms

..............................................................................................

A Quote From Plato

I think a man's duty is one of two things: either to be taught or to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life and take the risk; unless he could have a more seaworthy vessel to carry him more safely and with less danger, some divine doctrine to bring him through. -- Simmias, from The Phaedo, The Death of Socrates, Great Dialogues of Plato

..............................................................................................................................

Let me take a page or two out of my memory of my General Semantic (Korzybski, Hayakawa) lessons from the 1970s....and then expand from this into my basic theory of theories on both epistemology and evaluation -- or in Schopenhauer's words -- 'representation' and 'will'.

Let's quickly start with 'The Kantian Split'. Immanuel Kant -- the first of the great German Idealists -- conceptually divided the world into two parts: 1. The 'Noumenal' (Objective) World; and 2. The 'Phenomenal' (Subjective) World. For simplicty's sake, and hopefully to avoid confusion, I will turn Kant's technical terms from 300 years ago -- 'noumenal' and 'phenomenal' -- into terminology that is, as I say, hopefully easier to work with today: 'objective' (noumenal) and 'subjective' (phenomenal).

Now Kant's key premise was that we 'Kant Know' our objective world because it is beyond the scope of our senses. In fact, anything belowing to the subject of 'metaphysics' -- i.e., 'above physics' (like 'the existence or non-existence of God') -- is beyond the scope of our senses, and therefore, essentially 'unknowable'....(unless you want to enter into the 'slippery slope' of 'faith' -- as in I believe that my husband or wife will be 'faithful' -- which, has little or no value in the realm of 'rational-empiricism', which, ideally speaking, is based on a combination of 'sensory experience' and 'rational logic').

In fact, when you come right down to it -- even my desk, which is staring me right in the face, is, in Kant's view, as 'the thing in itself', essentially 'unknowable' in the strictly 'objective' sense because, our objective world, strictly speaking, is the part of our world that is beyond the scope of our senses.

However, this is point at which all three of Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer -- as well as my at least partly idealized Hegel -- made crucial epistemological errors.

Firstly, what Kant should have said rather than 'We Kant Know our objective world.', is 'We Kant Know everything about our objective world.' The latter statement is much more logical, accurate, and functional in terms of its 'practical believabilty' factor and 'where we can go with it, and what we can do with it'. In contrast, Kant's radical assertion and premise 'drove almost all of the academics and philosophers of the time to do 'crazy things'.....like real estate investors would do in the case of a 'collapse of the real estate market', or 'stock market investors would do in the case of a 'collapse of the stock market'....For, with Kant's new at the time 'Kantian Split', it certainly seemed to all academics and philosophers that 'the epistemological world had come to an end'.....As Nietzsche would eventually say that 'God is dead!', so too was Kant, years before Nietzsche, essentially saying -- or at least seeming to say (there's that 'subject/object' differentation again...) -- that 'Epistemology is dead!

From there, Fichte 'flew into a world of subjectivity and said essentially that there is no noumenal-objective world -- or at least that it doesn't matter!'); whereas Schopenhauer laughed at, and ridiculed Fichte for being so stupid as to believe that there is no 'real, noumenal, objective' world....but then, seemingly paradoxically, Schopenhauer went off to create his own 'cosmic thing in itself' in the form of a 'Cosmic Will to Live/Survive' -- a Copernican switch from the 'cosmic world of objects' to a 'cosmic wold of impulsive desires'. (Can you hear Nietzsche and Freud coming?)

Everyone in this time period seemed to be obsessed with creating some form of 'collective or cosmic idealism' -- or in Schopenhauer's case -- an 'anti-thesis' in the form of a 'cosmic, collective, and individual narcissistic pessimism'.

Ironically or paradoxically again, Schopenhauer who hated Hegel with a passion and called him a 'clumsy charlatan' (See a summary of Schopenhauer's life on Wikipedia.); indeed, Schopenhauer disagreed with all 'the German Idealists' in his 'anti-idealistic' stance pertaining to man's individual and collective 'will to survive' and 'will to fulfill his innermost narcissistic desires'. (My use of the term 'narcissistic' here does not come from his use of it, but rather mine, in that the term hadn't been created yet while Schopenhauer was alive (except as the ancient Greek myth), and wouldn't be created until the arrival of Havelock Ellis and then Sigmund Freud at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.

It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer's ideas about a 'will to live or survive' pre-date the work of Darwin, although there was a point where they were both alive together -- Darwin more likely to be influenced by the older Schopenhauer than the other way around. Schopenhauer died (1860) a year after Darwin published 'Origins of The Species (1859). Schopenhauer finished his most important work, 'The World as Will and Representation' in 1818 when Darwin was 9 years old, and published it a year later in 1819. Schopenhauer was born in 1788, Darwin in 1809.

There are parts of Schopenhauer's work that I find very attractive. You can see the Thomas Hobbes influence in his work, as he describes what I will call the 'Narcissistic Shadow' in human behavior that generally seems to find its way to the top of the human personality from the bottom... Nietzsche and Freud jumped all over this aspect of Schopenhauer's work -- Nietzsche intentionally, Freud vicariously, and/or more directly later in his life. According to Freud, Freud didn't read Schopenhauer until later in his life and I believe there is a Freudian quote out there somewhere that says something to the effect of, 'I fear my work is starting to look more and more like Schopenhauer's (presumably Schopenhauer's pessimistic view of human nature).

Schopenhauer's critique of Fichte's work is compelling, basically accusing Fichte of 'losing touch with reality' when he got rid of Kant's 'noumenal world' (Google, Fichte, Wikipedia). Paradoxically however, Schopenhauer's work has a partly similar feel to it as Fichte's work in its 'cosmic narcissistic determinism' (Schopenhauer) as opposed to Fichte's 'cosmic idealistic determinism'.

I love the title of Schopenhauer's main work: 'The World as Will and Representation', and if I was critiquing his work and re-writing it, I would call my own work, partly in tribute to Schopenhauer: 'The Mind as Representation and Will: A Study of Epistemology, Narcissism, Ethics, Conflict and Choice in Man's Evaluation and Health Cycle.' This would be my final extension and conclusion to what I started in 1972 and 'left unfinished' in my 1979 Honours Thesis, entitled more simply: 'Evaluation and Health'.

There were a lot of 'Grand Narratives' being written in the 'German Idealism' and 'Post-Idealism' period: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer...Nietzsche and the rest of the 'Post-Modernists' and 'Deconstructionists' basically ridiculed 'Grand Narratives'....and I say, "Hold on, wait a minute -- without 'Grand Theorists, Grand Constructionists', we have nothing, we have no architecture, we have no culture, we have no political or economic or legal idealism, we have no 'philosophical idealism', we have no 'schools of psychology'..."

We have no 'TOEs' -- 'Theory Of Everythings'....

Being the 'Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential, Deconstructionist-Reconstructionist' that I am, 'I dance between different dualisms, bi-polarities, and dialectics....I engage them and challenge them to interact with each other in a creative, constructive manner...that brings something new and exciting to the table...'

'Synergy -- and The Creative, Innovative Synthesis'...

I have a TOE -- a Theory of Everything -- and I am proud of it...

It might read something like this:

'The world -- being a subset of the cosmic universe -- is comprised of the endless dialectic collisions and engagements -- both positive and negative, co-operative and aggressive, creative and destructive -- between life and death, health and sickness, opposite personalities, opposite sexes, testosterone and estrogen, yin and yang, good and bad will, narcissistic and altruistic, concreteness and abstraction, theories and counter-theories -- and probably a million or billion bi-polarities like this....some dominating, some retreating into 'The Shadows' -- or 'The Apeiron' -- in the words of one of the oldest and wisest philosopher in Western History -- Anaxamander. With due respect to Hegel, this 'Grand Narrative' that I am writing here is built first and foremost on the words of Anaxamander; not Kant or Fichte or Hegel...In this regard, I have thought numerous times of re-naming this philosophical treatise of mine -- 'Anaxamander's Hotel' or perhaps 'Anaxamander's Axiom' -- as opposed to 'Hegel's Hotel'....but so far I have refrained, perhaps largely because 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' remains my favorite philosophical work, even if I have only read small pieces of it, and interpretations of it....Still it remains the 'idealistic centrepiece' of my work surrounded by as many of my favorite works, philosophers, and psychologists as I can 'synthesize' into one creative whole: Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Plato integrated with Aristotle, Alexander the Great integrated with Diogenes, Epictetus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith integrated with Karl Marx, Diderot, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Montasquieu, Jefferson, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Russell, Wittgenstein, Korzybski, Hayakawa, Rand, and the psychologists....Freud, Jung, Adler, Fromm, Perls, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Guntrip, Ellis, Rogers, Beck, Branden, Strachey, Bird, Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler, and Masson....

Oh yes, back to Korzybski and Hayakawa....Here is a theoretical problem that I have mulled over in my head for a while....How do you combine the rather straight-forward epistemological work of Korzybski and Hayakawa with the dialectic theory of Hegel?

I am starting to find ways on how to do this...

We will make that the object of our sole attention in the next essay....

-- dgb, Nov. 22nd, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain...

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...

Quantum-Dialectic Psychoanalysis: 1.1. My Academic, History, Beginning Concepts, Theories, and Paradigms -- and The Birth of 'Hegel's Hotel'

2011-11-19T05:03:00.000-08:00

Re-worked...re-written....November 26th, 2011...

1.1: My Academic History, Beginning Concepts, Theories, and Paradigms -- and The Birth of 'Hegel's Hotel'

Good day!

My name is David Bain and most of the material written in my network of blogsites here has been written by me, with the exception of a blogsite that pays tribute to my dad's 21st century Canadian Romantic Poetry, which is well worth taking a look at. My father has published a book of poems through the 'normal, formal' publishing channels, Many of these poems add a very nice 'romantic' section to my work here, almost like they had been written during The German Romantic period.

I started writing 'Hegel's Hotel' in July, 2006, which amounts to about 5 and half years now. I am sure I have over a thousand essays on line now although I haven't counted. Of course, that means nothing if the quality isn't there to meet the quantity. Hegel's Hotel is a much broader extension of my Honours Thesis in Psychology, written way back in 1979. At that point, I was heavily into a combination of rational empiricism, Cognitive Therapy, Enlightenment and Romantic Philosophy, and Humanistic-Existentialism.

The work was rather 'dry', 'cognitive', and 'mechanical' -- even though it aimed to support a philosophy of man's individual freedom and 'striving for meaning and relevance' within this 'paragdigm of freedom' (or at least partial freedom). Still, this first model was 'stiff and cybernetic-machine-like' -- kind of like me as I was rather 'anal-schizoid' and 'distancing' at this point in my life, as I had just left home at this point in my life and was trying to both 'escape' and 'deal with the internal psycho-dynamics of my dad's rather volatile temper and authoritarianism' contrasted against his 'visionary self, political, and social activist, liberal, democratic spirit',

My dad was active everywhere in the community, helping political leaders, negotiating with political leaders for better sports facilities in the community, organizing leagues, running leagues...and so on....

By the time I reached university, I was 'running away from all these different types of social activism and my dad's righteous authoritarianism, preferring instead to engage in 'my own narcissistic fantasy world' -- which had been an 'escape mechanism' all my life up to this point when I needed it, which was becoming more and more predominant in my late teems -- and now, here I was at The University of Waterlook, studying psychology, which culminated in my Honours Thesis, 'Evaluation and Health', finished in 1979.

Having finished my first 'model of the human psyche', I knew I had to probe much deeper into the underlying dimensions of the human psyche -- into what I would now call 'the subconscious', as opposed to Freud's use of the term 'unconscious' which I find much more semantically confusing and problematic.

That was over 30 years ago.

My present use of the term 'subconscious' means basically 'out of awareness' -- and what is out of awareness can re-emerge back into awareness at any given point in time and place -- usually, if not always, through the process of 'association'.

Association, in this regard, can be divided into two types: 1. 'structured and directed'; and 2. 'unstructured and undirected'.

The latter type of 'unstructured, undirected type of association was pointed out in the 'melancholic reminiscences and/or cognitive-emotional meanderings' -- both 'reality' and/or 'fantasy' based -- in 'the first recognized client of Psychoanalysis' -- referred to in the literature as 'Anna O.' -- and her 'doctor/therapist' between 1880 and 1882 was Joseph Breuer -- who would later hook up with, and recite this case, to the one and only Sigmund Freud. This latter type of unstructured, undirected form of association became known in Psychoanalysis and labelled by Freud as 'free association' as opposed to the other type of more 'directed association'.

That was over 30 years ago....and my life didn't go quite as planned...

In a paraphrasing of a popular aphorism.....

'Life, for many of us, is what happens to us -- and what we do -- while we are busy making other plans.

That frist model I made of the human psyche -- very rational-empirical and Enlightenment oriented in its paradigm -- I now view as largely a model of 'Central Ego Functioning and Dysfunctioning'. At some point down the road here, I will 're-work and dialectically update' that 1979 model.

In 1980-81, I became involved in The Adlerian Institute of Ontario -- though 'OISE' (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) and The Adlerian Institute in Chicago -- and started a part-time Masters Degree Program there.

However, after two years, I ran out of money and motivation -- I had already engaged and disengaged the 'freedoms' and 'unfreedoms' of 4 years of university life. I was partly 'motivationally burnt out' with 'academic studies. And The Gestalt Institute of Toronto on Cecil Street was capturing much more of my attention and energy down a few block from OISE at St. George and Bloor Street. At the Adlerian Institute, we sat at desks like in University; at The Gestalt Institute, we sat on cushions on the floor -- more like out of the Yorkville 60s, and like my 'more cozy group therapy workshops' at The University of Waterloo.

Adlerian Psychology fed well into my 'Cogntive Therapy' approach to psychotherapy that I had advanced through most my University Studies and Honours Thesis. But it also fed well into my 'intellectual defense mechanisms and emotional avoidances' which I partly wanted to get away from, and thus, my attraction to Gestalt Therapy which 'heightened my anxieity levels' but also my 'excitement levels' as I engaged in all types of different Gestalt Workshops, off and on, through the 1980s. Within these different Gestalt Workshop settings, I was constantly 'in contact with', and/or 'avoiding' my 'approach-avoidance conflict with 'emotional and behavioral risk-taking'. Probably, I did more avoiding...as I was still very 'anal-schizoid', 'socially phobic', and 'distancing'... I was a scared client....

Influenced by both The Adlerian Institute and by The Gestalt Institute -- the first, working inside a conceptual and theoretical paradigm of 'unity in the personality'; while the second operating on the basis of a more Freudian based 'conflict in the personality' model -- I was captured by the intellectual challenge of trying to sort out the reasons for the seemingly paradoxical different models of the psyche, and more importantly, how to integrarte them into one model, which was further complicated when I first started seriously studying Psychoanalysis, mainly of the 'Object Relations' variety at this point in time during the early and mid 1980s. The net result of all my integrative thinking, I called 'GAP' Psychology -- as in 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic' Psychology. Furthermore, I was investigating 'the gaps' between the different theories, and 'the gaps' in all of our 'existential lives'....

I had moved one step closer to the birth of 'Hegel's Hotel', and somewhere in that time period, I started to read a little Carl Jung as well...another 'dialectic psychologist' using a 'conflict model' of the personality in a similar vein as Freud, Perls, and all the 'Object Relationists'....as well as Eric Berne and his 'Transactional Analysis'...

Gestalt Therapy didn't finish up the way I wanted it to....

I had started the 3 year professional program around 1990...I finished year one, and they weren't happy with the degree of my 'evolution' into 'emotional and behavioral risk-taking' -- this seemed to be becoming a lifetime problem unless I was in a bar with a few 'Black Russian cocktails under my belt'... They didn't doubt my intellectual capabilities but they wanted me to repeat Year 1. I didn't feel I had the monetary resources to do this, not to mention the emotional resources, and in this regard, psychologically...I 'was already gone'....

I had to take a few rather huge emotional steps backwards...and gather my thoughts on where I was going, intellectually and emotionally, after this rather devastating emotional blow...Professionally and economically, I was doing fairly well -- from about 1984 to 1996, I was locked into a pretty comfortable, middle class government job in the public transportation business...that was doing me fine...

Around about this time period -- say, about 1992 -- two things happened: 1. I started to get involved more in the history and evolution of Western Philosophy, working backwards from Perls to Jung, to G.W. Hegel who seemed to be the 'mastermind' philospher between himself, German Idealism, and all of these different 'dialectic psychologists' who I had studied, and/or was still in the process of studying....including the mastermind of Psychoanalysis -- Sigmund Freud.

Also around this time (1992), I walked into a downtown Toronto bookstore on Queen Street -- and as fate would have it -- pulled a book off the shelf that seemed intriguing, by an author who I didn't know....The book was called 'Final Analysis' -- and the author was the one and only Dr. Jeffrey Masson, former Projects Director of The Freud Archives. I picked up another book right beside it by the same author -- 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory'.

Those two books -- and their follow-up research with my own interpretive analysis -- would keep me busy for the next 20 years, off and on, until now, and the various essays that I have written on this subject matter in 'Hegel's Hotel' over the last few years...

This includes a short email interview a couple of years ago with the same Dr. Jeffrey Masson, who has been living since the early to mid 1990s in New Zealand, studying animal psychology, emotions in animals, veganism, and assorted other subject matter, writing books on all these subject matters, including a brief return or two to the subject of Freud's 'loss of moral courage' in his abandonment of the seduction theory and the connected subject matter of childhood sexual abuse, and how The Psychoanalytic Establishment -- and most of the academic and general public at large -- still won't recognize and/or acknowledge that Freud made a rather 'huge, epistemological and ethical mistake' -- suggesting it was 'manipulatively on purpose' between about 1895 and 1903 regarding his 'switchover' from 'Reality-Traumacy-Seduction' Theory to 'Instinct-Fantasy-Oedipal' Theory and what is now known as the difference between 'Classical' (1897 onwards) Psychoanalysis as opposed to 'Pre-Classical' (before 1897) Psychoanalysis.

I have addressed this crucial turning point in Psychoanalytic history in numerous previous essays, and will probably address it one more time (hopefully, the last) in one of the next few essays to come, but right now let's pass over it, and finish up what I would like to accomplish for today.

More and more by 2006, my ultimate goal -- or 'endgame' -- had become a massive philosophical and psychological undertaking: to integrate all of Western philosophy and all of Western Clinical Psychology -- or at least significant elements of each -- into on 'Grand Narrative', one doctrine, one treatise, the likes of which we have not seen since 'the last of the Grand Narratives' which could be Hegel's classic 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' or Schopenhauer's 'counter-classic' 'The World as Will and Representation'....To these, we could add Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations', Marx's 'On Capital', Kant's 'The Critique of Pure Reason', Schelling's various integrations between Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel..., Nietzsche's 'Philosophy of The Superman, The Abyss, The Tight Rope, and The Will to Power (or 'Self-Empowerment') -- if you are a 'Superman', then you can 'fly' over the Abyss, if you are like me, then you climb and/or crawl 'the tightrope' (and don't look down) over the Abyss of 'failure, depression, paralyzing anxiety, and/or existential death' on your way from 'being' to 'becoming'... Strachey's Standard Edition of the 24 Volumes of Freud's Complete Works....Korzybski's 'Science and Sanity', Cannon's 'The Wisdom of The Body', Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought and Action'....Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged', 'The Fountainhead', and 'Objectivism', Erich Fromm's 'Man for Himself', 'The Sane Society' and 'The Art of Loving', Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics', Branden's 'The Psychology of Self-Esteem'...and maybe some day...if I live long enough...

'Hegel's Hotel'...

That, of course, is what I am working on here, and have been since 2006.

In Hegel's Hotel, everyone is welcome -- regardless of race, culture, poltical or religious denomination, philosopher, psychologists, poet...-- as long as you have a 'democratic, open-minded, spirit', you want to learn, you want to integrate, and you don't mind hearing other theorists trumpet theories and ideas that may be completely or partly different than your own...

Hegel's Hotel was created in the spirit of 'the Gestalt hotseat and empty chair bi-polar' form of the psychotherapy...and thus, in this regard, every essay in Hegel's Hotel is meant to metaphorically and symbolically be a form of 'academic hot seat and empty chair therapy' where the 'finished product' at the end of the essay is designed to be a 'creatively negotiated integration' of one or more numerous bi-polar conceptual and theoretical encounters and interactions during the course of the essay...

The 'ideal' is that I am successful in this capacity in every essay, although to be sure, there are going to be some essays where I am more successful than others, and indeed, there may be some where I fail in what I have attempted to do....But I do not want to get caught up, and/or bogged down, in essay to essay technicalities and gliches -- if I can't write the essay better in short order, then I would sooner move on to the next essay, particularly if I have lost my motivation in writing the previous one, perhap even leaving it unfinished....and hanging at the brink of 'nothingness' -- a 'chasm' or 'abyss'...that maybe in a later essay I will better be able to 'bridge'...

I love Nietzsche -- and his 'narcissisitic triumphs'....that I may one day experience the ultimate high of 'The Superman' which from time to time I have experienced in 'small individual segments'...As one of the latest television commercials highlights, to the extent that I can remember it,

'Everyone aspires to be the best at whqt they most want to do; no one aspires to be 'second best'...

And so it is with me as I do 'intellectual battle' with some of the greatest minds in the history of Western Philosophy and Psychology...

And my favorite theorist to do 'intellectual battle' with -- as well as be both 'amazed' and 'disappointed by' in different contexts....is none other than -- Sigmund Freud.

Freud, in my opinion, is the greatest of the great theorists, and love him or hate him -- or both -- he is still the best; clinical psychology and psychotherapy (although many or most may now claim that Freud is seriously 'outdated' and 'not relevant'), in my opinion, still starts and ends with Freud. Freud has 'rejected' more ideas about the internal workings of the human psyche than most theorists have 'created'....

The same goes for the controversy surrounding Masson's belief that Freud 'lost moral courage'....I have spent many, many hours in the emotional throes of this claim, probably spent too much time on it as I have 'gotten bogged down' on it and stopped moving on with my 'end game'....

Masson is one of my favorite, more direct and immediate, mentors -- I believe that he should be honoured by The Psychoanalytic Institute for his courage and bravery in re-opening up the controversy surrounding Freud's abandonment of his 'Reality-Traumacy-Seduction' Theory, and re-opening the usually 'politically incorrect' topic of 'childhood sexual abuse'... He fights on with his case, in his own way, while I aim to 'fix' the problem by coming up with an 'integration' between Pre-Classical Psychoanalysis and Classical Psychoanlaysis in a way that makes 'good, old, rational-empirical, common sense' -- or at least partly. There remains a part of the makeup of man's psyche -- and his overall existence -- that defies good, old, rational-empirical, common sense, and in this regard, we need to turn to a more 'paradoxical, romantic, multi-dualistic, and dialectic' model of the human psyche that encompasses much of 'The German Idealistic and Romantic Period' (and some of its paradoxes and inconsisitencies).

We all have an 'ego' and an 'id' -- or what I would prefer to call a 'divided ego' that constantly needs to be 're-synthesized', as well as what I would call a 'Shadow-Id' (synthesizing Freud and Jung) or 'Sid' for short. Sid is our 'alter-ego' that can be both our best friend and worst enemy....Sid's 'life and death energy' can be 'bound up' in our subconscious in a structure that I have come to call our 'Shadow-Id Vault', or 'Sid Vault', or 'SIV' -- or Sid's life and death energy can 'break free' of our SIV (if our SIV is not 'properly defended' by 'ego defenders'...and thus broken free or 'unbound' from our SIV, Sid can travel north (topologically and metaphorically speaking), up into our 'conscious personality' and either 'disturb' or 'enliven' any one of our various 'working ego states'.....or in more extreme contexts...effectively 'storm and overwhelm our Central Ego' like 'The Storming of The Bastille'... Our 'inside' and 'outside' worlds, taken together, are generally comprised of a a collection of interwoven 'introjections' and 'projections' with 'transference/sublimation elements' connected to both such that the one is more or less a 'mirror reflection of the other' --either 'overtly' or 'covertly' so... in the latter case, through 'symptoms' and 'signs' and 'compromise-formations' and 'art' and 'work' and 'hobbies' and 'architecture', and 'politics' and 'economics' and 'philosophy' and what can be overall summarized as -- 'culture'...

None of this is terribly different than what Freud had to say -- from about 1920 onwards -- with my simply adding a couple of more 'simple concepts' to help distinguish what Freud left a little confusing before he died...

None of this takes into account the controversial period in Psychoanalytic history between 1895 and say, 1905, The Seduction Theory Controversy, The Oedipal Theory Controversy, the 'gap' or 'abyss' between 'reality-traumacy-seduction' theory and 'instinct-fantasy-impulse' theory...all of which I am looking to 'build a bridge' over top of....as well as the 'gaps' between Freud and Adler, Freud and Jung, Freud and Perls, Freud and Object Relations, Freud and Transactional Analysis, and so on...

This is the 'substance' and 'essence' of this aspect of Hegel's Hotel which I have called: Quantum Psychoanalysis (Bridges Over, and Through, Psychoanalysis): A Phenomenology of Mind, Body, and Spirit For The 21st Century'...

Freud was 56 years old the year he wrote 'The Dynamics of Transference'...

Maybe, if you are lucky enough, and if I am good enough, you will find another creative offshoot of 'The Dynamics of Transference' in the midst of this collection of essays...

I am confident that I am smart enough, creative enough, and have all of the necessary knowledge in my head to write some of the best essays in the history and evolution of Psychoanalysis -- even if these are not from 'The Ivory Tower of Academia' but rather 'Notes From The Underground'. Hey, what is beyond my control, is beyond my control...

For those of you 'non-believers' or readers who think I have a bad case of 'megalomania' or 'narcissistic over-self-aggrandization'... (Remember, we all aspire to be 'the best'...)...and regardless,

I will re-cycle the classic Trudeau line -- 'Watch me!'....

And put up the ultimate 'chef's test' -- 'The proof is in the pudding.'

Now, for the rest of my readers who have already sampled past essays, and who are simply interested -- indeed, hopefully, excited -- about the direction and content of my integrative work here, I say:

Welcome aboard, or I am glad you are still on board, I wish you the most pleasant and meaningful voyage...have a safe trip....there will be some 'ups' and 'downs', and let us both creatively grow together through our shared or indivdual 'good and bad weather'...

In the words -- or at least main words (I changed and added a couple) of Johann Fichte...I wish to write....

A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest (Multi-Dialectic-Integrative (MDI) -- or Dialectic-Gap-Bridging (DGB) -- or 'Quantum') Psychoanalytic Theory: An Attempt to Grab, Excite, Motivate the Reader to Understand...

That's enough for today...

-- dgb, November 19th, updated November 26th, 2011...

-- David Gordon Bain

-- Dialectic Gap Bridging Negotiations...

-- Are Still in Process...

Bi-Polarities and Paradoxes, 'The Sick Point' and 'The Health Point', In The Human Psyche

2011-11-01T02:08:00.000-07:00

To be re-packaged.......Started Nov. 9th, modfied and updated Nov. 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 2011...dgb

..................................................................................................

Introduction

I hate to label and stereotype myself according to a 'word' or a 'group of words strung together' because this word or these words can become 'self-limiting', and evolution is basically built on the principle of 'breaking self-limits'...The cosmos and the human mind are outer and inner reflections of each other...and both work on the principle of 'bi-polarity' and 'paradox', as well as 'separation' and 'union'...'Evolution' is not a straight-forward event, but rather a process of 'trial' and 'error', 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', and 'growing and decaying and growing again synthesis'....

The minute we start to 'self-stereotype' ourselves, and put ourselves in a 'self-imposed prison'.... there is usually a 'devil's advocate' -- our 'Rebel With or Without a Cause' -- at work within us (our opposite bi-polarity) who/that starts to develop 'the opposite thesis'.... Call this 'devil's advocate' our 'Id', our 'Shadow', our 'Alter-ego'....any of these labels work, or sometimes one label may work better than the others, to describe the often 'hidden' or 'partly hidden' 'opposite tendency' in the human psyche...

We can be judgmental one moment, compassionate the next, we are constantly regulating betwen 'impulse' and 'restraint'....between 'primal' and/or 'primary' (id, shadow, alter-ego) wishes and 'secondary, moral-ethical shoulds and should nots' -- overseen and usually mediated by what I call our 'Central Mediating or Executive Ego' which generally 'negotiates compromises' between 'our wants' and 'our shoulds' -- assuming that one of the two sides isn't much stronger than the other -- and 'dominating the scene of the negotiation'.....

I don't mind using the Classical Freudian distinction between the 'oral' and the 'anal' personality, partly modified and extended by myself -- as 'metaphorical structures and processes' -- although we all have different degrees of both 'types of characteristics' running through our personality at all times...
The 'oral personality' -- or 'character type' -- is focused on the 'bi-polar spectrum of either 'giving' and/or 'receiving', 'altruism' and/or 'narcissism', sensusal, hedonistic pleasure of a giving and/or getting nature, as well as 'emotional nurturing', again of an either giving or getting nature...

There is room for 'sub-character types' within the larger spectrum of the 'oral personality' as, for example, 'the oral-narcissistic person' is usually quite different than 'the oral-giving person', at least in terms of 'dominat mode of interaction', although to repeat, wherever there is 'one strong polarity' in a person, you will usually find the opposite polarity more buried and hidden, but usually, still very covertly active...Usually, it is not very hard to find 'the covert rebel' working behind the scenes in the personality of a very 'oral-giving, co-operative, pleasing, approval-seeking' type personalty...'Anal-righteousness' is much more often 'buried' than 'smiling agreement'...
which brings us to 'the anal personality or character type'...

The 'anal polarity spectrum' actually includes a number of 'sub-anal-polarity spectrums'with assorted different and sometimes opposite characteristics such as: order vs. chaos, organization vs. disorganization, neatness vs. messiness, hygiene vs. uncleanliness, collecting (meticulously neat and organized) vs. hoarding (horribly messy and usually unhygenic), disciplined vs. non-disciplined, punctual vs. non-punctual, parsimonious vs. non-parsimonious, working vs. not working, righteousness vs. rebelliousness, toxifying vs. detoxifying, power and revenge, domination and submission, anal-retentiveness and/or anal-explosiveness, anal sadism and/or anal masochism, anal-confrontational and/or anal-paranoid-schizoid (distrustful and distancing)...

The 'active, oral hedonistic and/or narcissistic' person is more likely to be 'crudish, lewdish, rudeish' whereas the 'anal-retentive person' is more likely to be 'prudish'....

Those are some the main 'oral' vs. 'anal' bi-polar' distinctions that I use...

Amongst many Eastern philosophers the distinction between 'yin' (female characteristics usally associated with 'peace', 'tranquility', and 'more passiveness') and 'yang' (male characteristics usually associated with 'more active assertion and/or aggression) has been used for thousands of years, perhaps starting with the ancient Eastern philosopher, Lao Tse...(or some unknown person who taught Lao Tse).....Now, in the Western world, this stereotypical and sexual description of 'yin' and 'yang' may make some feminists uncomfortable....but let us not forget that we are all at least 'partly bi-sexual' in at least two or three different ways: 1. we all have differing levels of 'testosterone' and 'estrogen' in our bodies; 2. testosterone increases sexual drive in both men and women; and 3. most of us have pretty clear 'internalized templates' of 'mom' and 'dad', and both of these templates affect our day to day behavior, as well as what types of people we are attrracted to and/or repelled by...

Crucial to all of these potential and actual millions of 'bi-polarities' -- including the one that Freud got stuck on -- 'reality' vs. 'fantasy' -- is the principle of 'homestatic' and/or 'dialectic balance'....

In general, 'out of balance' creates 'sickness', and 'in balance' creates 'health'....

In this regard, what a 'therapist' -- or ourselves as 'self-therapist' -- is looking for is a 'sick point' (I think this idea can be traced to Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy) which is a point at which there is an 'empathetic break in self and/or other-compassion'. (I think this idea can be traced to Heinz Kohut.)

The sick point occurs at the point where there is an 'negotiation and integration breakdown' between either two bipolarities in the personality, and/or between our selves and some other or others outside in the world. This 'sick point impasse and/or breakdown' is often the resulting of 'righteousely opposing ideologies'...

Paradoxically, this 'sick point' is also the potential 'health point' if and/or when both parties in the impasse want to try to honestly face each other and work through their conflictual differences.

Employer/employee breakdowns are most likely to break off when either or both have lost compassion and empathy for the other's point of view....and cannot see the world through the eyes of their 'bi-polar opposite'...

'Bi-polarity Disorder' is an acute and/or chronic situation where opposing factions or polarities in the personality' take turn 'running amok'...

In all of the respects above, I don't mind calling myself a 'Neo-Hegelian-Dialectic or Bi-Polar Theorist'. I am constantly in search of 'dialectic, bi-polar truths' as opposed to 'one-sided, partial truths' that leave us in a 'conceptual blackout' on the bipolar side that has not been adequately accounted for -- i.e., it has been suppressed, minimized, denied, etc...I can also be viewed as a 'Neo-Derridian Dialectic or Bipolar Philosopher' in this same regard -- Derrida obviously having been significantly influenced by Hegel, directly or indirectly...Similarily, when talking about Freud or Jung's respective personality theories, wherever there is an 'ego' or a 'superego', there is also an 'id' usually hidden behind the scene, or wherever there is a 'personna', there is also a 'shadow' again hidden usually behind the scene ...The object of any bipolar, dialectic theory and therapy is to find a 'good, working balance' between 'two, partial bipolar truths' that need to be integrated together; not dissociated from each other like Freud sadly did between his 'reality-traumacy-seduction theory' and his bipolar 'childhood sexuality-impulse-drive-Oedipal theory'...The two polar theories simply need to be properly integrated to get to a better, working balance that 'Classical' Psychoanalysis is still sadly and unbelievably missing...In short, Freud 'missed a golden opportunity to arrive at a dialectic, bipolar truth' in 1896 when he instead bounced from one opposing theory to its opposite like a ball in a pinball machine...In the words of John Lennon, Freud's two opposing theories needed both then, and still now, to -- 'Come Together'... That is what I am writing this essay -- and a host of ones previous to it -- for....in two more words -- 'conflict resolution'.... dgb, Nov. 13th, 15th, 2011

.....................................................................................

To be further edited, Nov. 15th, 2011...
The blindspot of any theory is its opposing theory. If a theory doesn't ideally have an 'opposing theory or theories' that it can be 'dialectically integrated and balanced with', then it is either not a 'complete' theory -- and/or it is a 'truth' or a 'fact'. Why? Because the world is essentially constructed in a mold of billions of 'bipolarities' and/or 'multi-bi-polarities', all searching for a working balance with each other....some more successful at finding each other...than others... -- dgb, Nov. 13th, 2011...

...........................................................................................

As theorists -- and we are all 'theorists' in multiple matters each and every day we are alive -- the biggest mistake we can make is to confuse our 'theories' with 'truths' and 'facts'. That is what we call being 'close-minded'...

To become more 'open-minded' we need to be able to look at, and respect, the possible 'truth-value' in theories that oppose our own'...In fact, in some contexts, indeed, many contexts, there is greater 'truth-value' in 'integrative, multiple co-factor or dialectic (two-way) truth' then there is in the more simple, easier to comprehend 'Aristolean type of proclaimed truth' that we have been brought up and taught to look for -- i.e., 'either/or, black and white truth' like '2 plus 2 equals 4' or she is either 'pregnant or not pregnant -- she can't be both'....

Many 'truths' in the world simply do not fit into an either/or, black or white mold'....They may involve an 'integrative gray'....and indeed, a possible hundred or thousand 'shades of gray'...Such is the case in genetics and mutations....and such is the case in people interacting with, and influencing, each other...

Indeed, a theory and its opposite (or its numerous opposites), when integrated together, should provide a better theory, a more powerful theory, than either of, or any of, the different theories dissociated and alienated from each other. Dissociation and alienation can occur on either/or both a 'phenomenological-existential' level and a 'conceptual-theoretical' level...

Thus, we have Freud's clients being dissociated/alienated from either and/or both their memories and/or their desires -- or at least particular, uncomfortable ones... It is impossible to say that we 'know' a person well without knowing a combination of their memories and their desires...and the interaction between them....

Thus, 'memory-reality-traumacy' phenomenological events and 'compensation-defense-fantasy-desire' events become dialectially intertwined and inclusive in all of us; not 'dissociated, alienated, and mutually exclusive' from each other.

For Freud to try to 'separate' and 'dissociate' the two from each other -- conceptually and theoretically, saying, in essence, after 1896, that his 'memory-reality-traumacy' theory was 'wrong' and his 'fantasy-impulse' theory was 'right', was a most unfortunate example of Freud falling into 'The Aristotlean Black or White, Either/Or Trap'...

Freud chose to discriminately favour 'fantasy-desire-impulse' theory over 'memory-reality-traumacy' theory in a 180 degree turnaround of what, up to 1896 had been a 'reality-memory-bound' theory of what today is called 'Pre-Psychoanalysis', and after 1896, for reasons that are still controversially debated today, instead developed an 'instinct-fantasy-desire' bound theory of what today is called 'Classical' Psychoanalysis...

This is a strong example of a situation where I favor 'integrative-multiple-co-factor (dialectic-two or more ways) truth' over Freud's choice of basically discarding one form of 'truth' in favor of another. In essence, the 'more exciting and fashionable truth' became the focus of Freud's mindset over the 'old, established, stable, and less exciting truth'. It was like Freud 'falling out of love with his wife' and 'falling into love with his wife's sister'...It was a 'win-lose situation' both for his wife (if that is indeed what happened) -- and for Psychoanalysis...which did indeed happen...

The focus on one theory -- just as in one phenomenological desire and interest -- often dissociates and alienates another theory/desire/interest to the point where the 'excluded theory/desires/interest' recedes into The Shadow of our Psyche -- still a significant 'player' in the game of either 'psychic and/or cosmic truth' -- but no longer recognized or respected as such...(see the philosophy of Derrida's 'Deconstruction')....

I would posit a theory -- building on both what I have learned and what I have experienced -- that states that most, if not all, of human 'psychological neurosis, pathology, emotional suffering' comes from the perception of feeling socially excluded, rejected, and/or failing in some horrific moment, of feeling in some way 'less' than those around us, of becoming mad at both the world and at ourselves for this perceived self and social breakdown, of reaching a point of not feeling comfortable in our own skin, even of loathing ourselves for what we believe we failed to do, and punishing ourselves, terrorizing ourselves, internally -- sometimes nonstop and escalating -- for any of these, and/or all of these, perceived self and/or social failures...in effect, we are at war within ourselves...and at the same time, we are at war with the world...or some perceived portion of it...

Significant Freudian, Adlerian, and Jungian influence here...as well a Cognitive Theory...all screened through my own mind and personal experience...

Now, regarding 'integrative conceptual and/or theoretical truth-value'...

Two opposing theories -- integrated together -- can, and should, be better than either opposing theory trying to stand alone on what amounts to 'only one theoretical leg'... This is the essence of Hegelian Dialectic Theory....Partly paraphrasing Hegel (I don't have the exact quote here)...'Every theory carries within itself the seeds of its own self-destruction'...The area that the theory is most likely to 'self-destruct' in, is the area of its 'polar blind spot' -- i.e., 'the area better covered by one of its opposing theories'...

The particle theory and wave theory of matter and energy both have blindspots when taken apart from each other that seriously limit the value of each respective theory. However, when the two theories are integrated -- as they were in the early 20th century -- the resulting, integrative theory becomes much more powerful than either of the two theories taken apart from each other. In effect, they became 'good marriage partners'.

Adler's 'theory of inferiority feelings' would not have been as powerful a theory if it had not been integrated with his theory of 'compensation' and 'superiority striving' which, for each individual, according to Adler, culminates in his or her unique, particular 'lifestyle plan'. Now, I have integrated Adler's thinking here back into my version of what might be called 'DGB Neo-Classical 'GAP' (Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic) Theory with some Jungian 'Analytic' Theory, Transactional Analysis, Frommian Theory, and General Semantic-Cognitive Theory in there as well...too many influences to get them all in the name...

Ideally speaking, every theory -- at least every 'relevant theory' that has been around for a good number of years -- when integrated together, helps to 'minimize the blind spots' left behind by other theorists and their particular 'spectacles' for looking at the world and themselves the way they do, their 'pardigms', their 'philosophies', their 'theories', 'sub-theories', and 'concepts'...

What you need to put all these different 'world and self views' into a less restrictive and larger, more comprehensive, overall 'world view' is a superb, synthesizing theorist who is familiar with all these different theories, and has the creative and logical abilities to 'blend them all together into one, cohesive package'...

That's me!

Now, if I could go back in time to May, 1896, and visit Dr. Freud at his home in Vienna, and get in to see him for an hour or so, I would tell him to 'give his head a shake, that he was letting his personal and professional biases and traumacies -- the Emma Ekstein episode, the April 21st professional meeting with The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society, lack of clients and money that was threatening his career -- influence a 'paradigm-changing' decision that he was about to make that would, in essence traumatize Psychoanalysis and dissociate Psychoanalysis from its reality and traumacy underpinnings.' To use Freud's own terminology, Freud was about to 'repress' -- or at least 'suppress' -- the philosophical and psychological foundation of Psychoanalysis that he had spent over six years building (let's say, 1890 to 1896).

All the justifications and rationalizations in the world could not 'wipe out' the number of 'sexual assault victims' that walked through Freud's door between 1890 and 1896. By the spring of 1896 -- for whatever the combination of 'real reasons' that led to Freud's momentous decision to scrap the 'traumacy and seduction theories' -- Freud was simply developing an entirely different 'mindset' or 'paradigm'; in essence, he wanted to 'chase down' his clients' 'sexual fantasies'; not their 'sexual traumacies'.

His colossal mistake was his decision to 'turn his internal personal and professional conflict -- his theoretical and therapeutic impasse' into an 'either/or, mutually exclusive' decision...that would make his soon-to-be 'fantasy-instinct' theory dominant, and his abandoned 'reality-traumacy' theory dissociated, repressed, suppressed, disavowed, submissive, relegated to The Shadow, The ID Vault, The Dissociation Chamber...-- whatever word or collection of words you wish to use here, unless of course you believe that Freud 'did the right thing' in basically abandoning his 'Reality-Memory-Traumacy' Theory after 1896...

My advice to beginning psychology students who are just starting to study Freud....or conversely turn away from him because of what they have heard and/or read in small smatterings....

'Do not tarnish -- and dismiss -- Freud with one paintbrush...The man still remains the most brilliant psychologist of the mind who ever lived, in my opinion...He was human, like all of us are human, and subject to both personal and professional traumacies and fears on the one hand, as well as conceptual and theoretical overgeneralizations and reductionisms on the other hand....The best way to read Freud in my opinion, is to pretend that he never rejected his work before 1897, pretend that he never rejected his Reality, Memory, Traumacy, and Seduction Theories which were all built during this time period....Instead, read all of Freud's 50 years of theorizing as if it is 'wholistically connected' -- not 'dialectically divided and dissociated' by the years 1896 and 1897....What Freud wrote up to 1896 is just as important to the history and evolution of Psychoanalysis -- and 'Classical' Psychoanalysis (Unsuppressed) -- as anything he wrote after 1896. Where there seem to be 'theoretical collisions and contradictions', that is only because Freud was dealing with abstractions and generalizations that he 'compartmentalized and classified' in one direction, while ignoring clinical evidence -- real human, phenomenoligical events, moments, memories, relationships... -- that supported the theory or theories Freud was in the process of rejecting...

To support the theory of human sexuality and sexual fantasy does not wipe out the very real existence of human sexual traumacy and assault...

To support the theory of 'The Oedipal Complex' does not wipe out the very real existence of childhood sexual assault...adults assaulting children and older children assaulting younger children...

Freud's 1896 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' is one of the vest essays he ever wrote -- it certainly shows Freud at his concrete, compassionate, compelling best in terms of describing some of the horrific things that adults can do to children which were ending up in his therapy office many years later as real, live people -- usually women -- diagnosed as 'hysteric' because no one could make any kind of rational sense out of their bodily, emotional, and/or psychological symptoms -- the leftover 'damage' that had been incurred from their early (or later) traumacies -- which therapists like Breuer, Janet, and Freud were just starting to make sense out of in a way that was 'shocking' the professional medical world.

The knee-jerk reaction of the professional world was to 'reject and ridicule' these ideas -- to call them a 'scientific fairy tale' -- and, in my opinion, it is a historical shame that Freud took this professional rejection and ridicule too closely too heart....(probably it was the 'intimidation' in the form of 'professional blackballing' and 'lack of referral of clients' that brought Freud more to his knees than it was their rejection and ridicule (because to Fliess in his letters, Freud just ridiculed them back. Still, Freud was relatively young in his profession and was essentially at the 'economic' mercy of the medical community if they turned on him and stopped sending him patients which Freud said to Fliess, through his letter of May 4th, 1896 that that was exactly what they were doing to him after his scientfic meeting with them of April 21st, 1896.)

Through all his 'brave talk' to Fliess through this time period, it certainly looks to me like -- under professional and economic duress -- Freud, in the words of Masson, eventually 'lost moral couage' becuase, to my knowledge, Freud never wrote anything significant on childhood sexual abuse -- particularly as pertaining to a father against his own daughter -- again.

Blame the Psychiatry and Neurology Society of Vienna partly for this outcome -- for 'medically blackballing' Freud and 'taking away his income' -- I'm not sure how differently most of us would react under the very real threat, and indeed temporary actuality, of losing his income, and perhaps even eventually his profession...

Still, the matter of just exactly was 'going on inside Freud's head, from top to bottom' (we know partly from Freud's very intimate letters to Fliess), remains a contentious issues.

In between the Freudian idealists, ideologists, mythologists, and protectors (Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler mainly back in the early 1980s when the whole Masson scandal broke out...) on the one hand, and the Freudian 'conspiracy theorists' on the other hand, is probably the 'reality' of why Freud did what he did -- i.e., turn psychoanalysis on its head and start creating a new 'brand' of Psychoanalysis based on human 'fantasy' and 'instinct' theory and later 'narcissistic' theory, as opposed to 'reality' and 'traumatic memory' theory...

Freud's 'dream theory was coming hard by the beginning of 1896, and with it his 'sexual instinct' and 'sexual fantasy' and 'childhood sexuality' theories...But it remains very hard to believe that Freud -- who wrote one of the most compelling essays in his career on childhood sexual abuse in early 1896, would drop 'this line of thinking' almost seemingly in a 'Vienna Moment' without someone practically 'scaring the death' out of him...And that someone could very well have been the collective 'Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society'....Perhaps partly mixed in with the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco of February 1895 because in the same letter of May 4th, 1896, Freud was also going engaging in some 'historical and interpretive revisionism' regarding what 'caused' poor Emma Ekstein's 'post-nasal surgery hemmoraging traumacies'....

From the obvious 'cause' of medical incompetence and/or neglegence on Fliess' part, specifically, for 1. conducting the totally unorthodox, unsanctioned surgery in the first place; to 2. leaving a long piece of gauze up Emma's nose, and not telling Freud, while Fliess left Vienna and travelled back to his home in Berlin -- to any rational-empirical outsider, either there and then, or here and now, Fliess and Freud come across as 'backroom butchers'...And yet here was Freud in his letter of May 4th, 1896, writing to Fliess and still trying to 'console both of their guilt and moral consciences'...saying that Emma was hemmoraging because she was 'hysterical' and was a 'hysterical bleeder' and bled because she longed to see her two 'backroom butchers' again, and unconsciously, thought that 'bleeding' would bring one or both of them back to her 'bedside'....

I shake my head...

..........................................................................................

Now, I am going to turn this essay in a direction that many of you may not like...

Let me preface this by saying that I like it when my essays are well-received, I like it when psychologists and particularly psychoanalysts, feel comfortable enough with my work that they want to advertise on this site...

However, sometimes, as in this case, I simply cannot dissociate myself from what I truly believe, and I charge ahead, knowing in the back of my mind that it is a good philosopher's duty to sometimes write what is 'politically incorrect' and/or what many people may just not want to read...

In this case, I am not like Freud in wanting, or feeling the need, to be like a 'magician' and shock and amaze people... but rather, I feel the need to make a strong point that seems to continue to elude the significance of the lay public, academics, and professionals alike...

And/or people simply do not want to believe, what first, Jeffrey Masson, the former Projects Director of The Freud Archives, had to say about Freud, particularly in the years 1895 and 1896, and now, I am saying in partly similar, partly different words, as Masson, but with a different 'end game' in mind -- i.e., specifically 'massive theoretical integration' rather than 'massive rejection' of Freud's post-1896 work (which is not entirely true with Masson, at least these days, because I have a beautiful, new, hardcover edtion of Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams', edited by Masson, in 2010. I give Masson credit for not 'painting all of Freud's post-1896 work with the same black brush or poison dart'....To be sure, Masson still makes his own editorial comments that are still consistent with his 1980s perspective; he simply makes these comments without disturbing the flow of what many consider to be Freud's greatest work...).

Still, the big Freudian-Psychoanalytic scandal of the 1980s was Masson, as Projects Director of The Freud Archives, saying (and I am paraphrasing) that Freud 'lost moral courage' when he 'suppressed' the Seduction Theory after April 21st, 1896 because of 'professional and economic pressure' being applied to him by The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society after the fateful April 21st, meeting...(I have more or less repeated the same argument above, and also addressed the Emma Ekstein medical disaster, which Masson did too back in his 1984, 1985, 1992 book, 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory'...

Masson's argument continued that Freud basically 'covered up' childhood sexual assault by inventing his concept of 'The Oedipal Complex' (real sexual assault memories by female clients being 're-interpreted' by Freud as 'distorted, unconscious, romantic-sexual fantasies that the client had towards her father as a child and perhaps 'embellished' and 'repressed' later as a teenager (as most female children have these types of 'fantasies' towards their respective dads, and alternatively, most male children have towards their respective mothers... According to Freud, this is 'normal psycho-sexual childhood development' with some 'different, individual variations' on the Oedipal theme...I would editorialize and say that most of us partly identify with both our mother and our father, assuming we were raised by both, while at the same time being partly 'attracted' and partly 'repelled' by 'adult surrogates' of both parents, either 'swinging back and forth between transference relationships with surrogates of either or both parents (and/or 'narcissistic images' of ourselves, or the opposite, and/or looking for a 'balance' between the key characteristics of both parents...and/or a balance between ourselves and our opposite...).

Masson argued (and again I am paraprhasing -- I think you can find this argument in 'In The Freud Archives' by Janet Malcolm although Masson later accused Malcolm of seriously misquoting him on many things she supposedly quoted him on....but I don't believe this argument...I will look for the reference and cite it here later) -- the argument was that Classical Psychoanalysis would have to 'recall all their patients -- like The Pinto' -- from about 1900 onwards to try to determine how many 'real sexual assault memories' might have been 'falsely diagnosed as the Oedipal Complex fantasies'...

Now, one of the two Senior Saints of Freudian Psychoanalysis back in 1982 -- Kurt Eissler (Anna Freud being the other) -- argued in this fashion: How could The Psychoanalytic Establishment continue to employ a man as 'Projects Director of The Freud Archives' who had openly in public stated that 'Freud lacked moral courage and integrity'?

The answer, determined by The Psychoanalytic Board of Directors -- which included Anna Freud and Eissler -- was simple: They couldn't. Masson had 'publicly denounced and defamed' Freud; therefore, Masson had to be fired from his job as Projects Director of The Freud Archives. Which he was...And Masson left Psychoanalysis altogether...

As outrageous as most people today (no different than the non-psychoanalysts around him when he was alive) -- and I include academics, professionals, and the general public -- may believe, and have believed, that Freud's ideas, and particularly his post-1900 pysychoanalytic interpretations -- were outrageously radical and convoluted, still, until Masson came along in the 1980s, no one really questioned Freud's 'moral and ethical integrity'... There were a few -- Max Schur, Freud's personal doctor, started to ask some 'tough questions' that Masson grabbed a hold of, tightly, like a Pit Bull, and wouldn't let go of...

So my question is this: What if Masson was essentially right: that Freud was metaphorically speaking, in a high stakes game of poker with his medical peers and superiors, in April and May, 1896, where they held all 'the high cards', the 'professional, political, and economic leverage', and Freud, starting to feel the pressure in terms of 'unreferred and lost patients'....essentially 'folded his cards'....drew a new set of cards....and started playing a 'different game of Psychoanalysis' with a 'different set of cards' -- i.e., 'Fantasy Theory' rather than 'Reality Theory'?

And what if Freud essentially 'hid' the phenomenon of 'childhood sexual abuse' -- particularily 'incest' -- behind his new 'trump card' -- his new 'source of the Nile' -- i.e., 'The Oedipal Complex'?

And what if 'Classical' Psychoanalysts today, are still playing with 'the Oedipal Card', and in so doing, are doing what Freud started doing after 1900, and up until the end of his career -- i.e., 're-interpreting 'reality theory' (incest) as 'fantasy theory' ('repressed' childhood and teenage sexual fantasies hidden behind 'false childhood memories')...

So, now we are faced with the dilemma and question:

Which is it?: Are childhood or teenage sexual assault memories hidden behind analyst-interpreted 'repressed childhood or teenage sexual fantasies'? Or are 'false' childhood or teenage sexual assault memories hidden behind 'repressed' childhood or teenage sexual fantasies?

Or either/or both depending on the context of the situation?

Or how about this which perhaps makes the most 'rational-empirical sense': Most of us can tell the difference between a 'memory' and a 'fantasy' and although there may be some lesser or greater degree of distortion and/or 'one-sidedness' of the memory based on things like 'time', 'interest and attention', and 'narcissistic bias', still, unless we are deliberately trying to deceive, and/or there is something 'seriously psychotic' at work within our personality, we can usually tell the difference between what 'experientially happened to us' and what 'we would like to happen to us'...again, assuming no serious, epistemological dissociation at work within us....We must remember that there is no 'ideal objective epistemology' except in the form of some credible, reliable 'subjective-objective-integrative epistemology'...And this process of 'determining reality' has never been perfect -- not even in a court of law....

It is not a cut and dry, black and white problem, except that in individual cases it is going to be one or the other, with the therapist not having been back in the client's childhood to be able to witness which was which?

And conveniently, by Freud 'drawing a hand of new cards' back after a very disappointing April 21st, 1896 meeting, 'his new cards' -- even though they seemed almost as 'crazy' as his 'first set of cards' -- did not draw attention to 'sexually abusive fathers' -- which could have made all the difference in the world to the 'male doctors' in The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society'...

One way, some of them may have been what we could call today 'sexual predators'; the other way they were 'normal' fathers...

Was this a 'Freudian manipulation'?

Or simply a 'coincidence' -- with Freud opting for what he believed was a 'better theory'?

One way, Freud's 'ethical integrity' remains in tact....

The other way -- like Joe Paterno this past week --

Freud's 'ethical integrity' takes a huge negative hit...

And nothing is written in stone...

Because it is all 'conjecture', 'historical speculation'....

As to just exactly what was going on inside of Freud's mind...

In 1895 and 1896,

Particularly, when Freud had already taken one 'ethical hit' in 1895,

With the botched Emma Ekstein 'nasal-sexual surgery'....

This whole controversy also reflects very much on Jeffery Masson's psychoanalytic career...

One way he is perceived as a 'narcissistic radical'...

And the other way he is perceieved as trying to...

Rescue 'the moral integrity' of The Psychoanalytic Establishment...

Which is more important: the moral and ethical integrity of Penn State?

Or the 'moral-ethical legacy' of Joe Paterno?

Similarily, which is more important: the moral and ethical integrity of The Psychoanalytic Establishment?

Or the 'moral-ethical legacy' of Sigmund Freud?

Is this a case of very few people seeing, or wanting to see, that 'The Emperor, in 1896, had no clothes on'....

Or did Sigmund Freud do the 'right' thing...

And this is all a 'smoke and mirrors' ethical controversy?

With Max Schur, then Jeffery Masson, and now me....amongst a host of other more diplomatic, and carefully treading, theorists and therapists...

Wasting our collective intellects, writing time, and energies...

Trying to diplomaticly and/or brashly and bluntly assert that something 'rotten happened in Vienna' after the spring of 1896: in a nutshell, Freud lost much of his 'empathetic compassion' for his patients, and partiularly his sexually abused patients, in the process of 'trying to safeguard his own profession and source of income'...and also in the process of developing his 'sexual fantasy model of the human psyche'...

I will let you mull on this for as long as you wish -- or don't wish -- to...

In the days that come, I will list off some of the most revelevant quotes that I think mark a radical change in Freud's personality after 1896 -- i.e., he became less empathetic, less compassionate -- and more narcissistic....
Have a great day!

-- dgb, Nov. 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain

More Thoughts on 'The Abyss' and 'The Monster' (Id, Shadow...)

2011-10-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

Further revisions and extensions, October 25th, 26th, 2011...

..............................................................................................

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. -- Albert Camus

A Happy Death (written 1938), first published as La mort heureuse (1971), as translated by Richard Howard (1972)

......................................................................................................

All things truly wicked start from an innocence. -- Ernest Hemingway

.....................................................................................................

When I start using Nietzsche's concepts of 'The Abyss' and 'The Monster', I have this visual picture in my head....It's a bit morbid -- existential too, Freudian too -- sometimes the imagery comes to me such as now in a more 'academic' moment; other times, if I am feeling deathly sick, the imagery and whole experience becomes much more real...

Here I am, David Bain, looking over the precipace of 'life' and 'death', metaphorically if not literally a few times in my life....I'm staring into a deep, deep abyss, and I start to see two 'eyes' staring back at me....Am I hallucinating or is this real? Am I staring down into the eyes of a 'Shadow Life Monster' or a 'Shadow Death Monster'? Or is it both?

If I keep staring long enough into the Abyss, is it possible that I could be 'dragged down into the Abyss'? Or even jump? Or give the 'Monster' enough time, space, freedom, and energy to 'jump out of the abyss of my psyche' and into my 'Conscious Personality'?

Academically speaking, can I make a distinction between my 'Id Monster' and my 'Superego Monster'?

My Superego Monster seems to be ranging around in my conscious personality all the time, and when I get sick, or when I start thinking about what I wanted to achieve, and haven't achieved up to this point in my life, my Superego Monster can start going 'ballistic' on me -- 'bathing and toxifying me in self-loathing' like a character in a Doestevsky novel.

My 'Shadow-Id Monster' is of a different sort....He seems to dwell in the depths of my personality a la Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung. Usually, he stays down there -- indeed, I usually have lots of 'ego-defenders' to keep him 'chained up down there'....Still, he has enough power to 'send partly restrained amounts of either life and/or death energy up to any 'ego-state' in my conscious personality -- 'sexual energy' up to my 'hedonistic ego', 'creative-passionate energy' up to my 'creative-romantic ego', 'righteous energy' up to my 'righteous ego' (which can turn into my 'Superego Monster'), 'approval-seeking and/or co-operative energy' up to my 'approval-seeking, co-operative ego'...(which is the more 'wimpy', non-confrontational, non-assertive side of my character)....

Some of these different types of energies can collide with, oppose and contradict each other...especially as they fully manifest themselves in their respective ego-states. And all of these different 'ego-states' can themselves split into either a 'superior (topdog) ego position' or an 'inferior (underdog) ego position.

We have to recall that before 1920, Freud visualized the dialectic opposition between 'the sexual instincts' (with a 'sexual object' and 'sexual aim' in mind) and the 'self-preservative (ego) instincts' which were designed to 'keep our sexual instincts under normal, safe, civil, self-control', and not have them endanger or destroy us -- what can turn out to be a 'lose-lose situation' or even a 'win-lose situation' where the loss significantly over magnifies any 'win' before it...(like having an affair, getting caught, and losing your wife/husband and family because of it).

However, in 1914, Freud introduced the concept of 'narcissism' and this concept became front and centre in all further, evolving Freudian theory. It more or less, took the place of Freud's '(sexual) libido' theory because 'narcissism' became a new form of 'energy' theory containing both 'sexual instincts' and 'ego instincts' which blew away the line between 'sexual instincts' and 'self-preservative instincts' -- they both merged together under the concept of 'narcissism' which reflected 'the self-interests of the organism' whether that 'self-interest' was of a 'sexual' nature, an 'egotistic' nature, and/or a 'self-preservative' nature.

In this regard, you could start to see 'conflicts' developing within the concept of 'narcissism' itself -- such as 'approach-avoidance conflicts' between being boldly assertive vs. being more 'cautiously conservative and self-restrained'....
And our aforementioned conflict between 'the sexual (id) instincts' and 'the self-preservative (ego) instincts' still remained -- it was just that, again, the line between what we would normally call 'the ego' (defense) and 'the id' (sexual libido) had both been subsumed under the concept of 'narcissism', and thus, Freud had no conceptual 'dualism' left, heading into 1920.

You could probably say that there was a new 'dualism' between 'narcissism' and 'altruism' but Freud never, to my knowledge, seemed to write much about 'altruism' except as a type of 'sublimation' or 'diffusion' of underlying 'sexual impulse and energy' and/or 'narcissistic impulse and energy'.

One could argue that the root of all altruism is still narcissism -- this is a type of Ayn Rand philosophy (as well as Freudian philosophy), the idea being that when we say, 'I love you because you are hugely important to me', well, you can see here a 'merging of altruism and narcissism'....You could call 'love' -- either 'narcissistic altruism' or conversely, 'altruistic narcissism'....We are not going to treat anyone with 'love' (altruism) who we do not deem to be 'important to us' (narcissism).

Anyways, we can say that this Freudian 'problem' of 'narcissism' blowing away the dualistic boundary between 'sex' and 'self-prervation' led to Freud's huge revisionism of 1920 (Beyond The Pleasure Principle) in which 'the life' and 'death instincts' both became incorporated within the concept/confines of 'the id' -- this latter part of the revision not taking place until 1923 when Freud wrote 'The Ego and The Id'.

My conceptuology above which borrows a couple of Nietzschean metaphors follows in line with this last revisionism on the part of Freud where he 'deposited' all 'life and death energy' into the confines of 'the id'.

If you are a psychotherapist or a client engaging in 'depth' psychology, it can be very useful to use the Nietzschean model of 'The Abyss' and 'The Monster'
as I have above, and line it up with 'Classic' Freudian Psychoanalysis with some modifications and extensions such as below...

My concept of 'The ID Vault' (think also of 'Impulse-Defense' Vault) as basically a synonym and substitute for 'The Abyss'. Turning to Jungian language, I also feel comfortable using Jung's famous concept of 'The Shadow' as another synonym and substitute for Nietzsche's metaphor of The Abyss....

The 'It', the 'id', the 'shadow', the 'disowned', the 'dissociated', the 'estranged', the 'suppressed', the 'repressed', the 'projected', the 'transferred', the 'sublimated'....all can be incorporated into one under-riding concept regardless of what we want to call it: I have basically brought this idea down to three or four concepts: 1. The Id (which can have 'free-flowing', 'partly free-flowing', or 'restrained/bound/imprisoned energy' in which case I bring into being my concept of ; 2. The Id Vault (restrained/bound/imprisoned Id energy); 3. The Shadow; 4. The (Nietzschean) Abyss (or 'The Black Pit').

Now the human personality is full of multiple dualisms, paradoxes, contradictions, and even hypocrisies. What might be totally 'intolerable' to one of our 'internal ego states' might be totally 'acceptable' to another....That is why most people can generally accept the dualistic ideas of 'ego' and 'alter-ego'...Robert Louis Stevenson published 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in 1886 which, to give you a time line...

1. Nietzsche had just finished writing 'Thus Spoke Zarathrusta' between 1883 and 1885, and wrote (or published) 'Beyond Good and Evil' the same year that Stevenson published Dr. Jekyll (1886)....Nietzsche would 'lose his sanity' on January 3rd, 1889.

2. Joseph Breuer -- later to hook up with Freud -- had clinically worked with 'Anna. O' (Bertha Pappenheim) between 1880 and 1882, in what is now usually regarded as 'the first case of psychoanalysis'. It would not be written up until the 'preliminary communications' of 'Studies on Hysteria', co-written by Freud and Breuer, in 1893.

3. Freud, in October, 1885 went to study with Charcot in Paris which became the turning point at which Freud moved away from neurology research and into the field of medical psychopathology and what would eventually turn into the study and practice of 'clinical psychology';

4. As Freud started advancing his ideas of a 'split between the conscious and unconscious self' -- and 'the defense/repression against unacceptable ideas' (which started out as 'real memories' in Freud's work between 1893 and 1896, and then became 'repressed fantasies' after 1897, so too was Pierre Janet advancing his ideas of 'splits in consciousness' whereby 'two or more states of consciousness are dissociated from each other'....Janet was probably even a year or two ahead of Freud in that Freud was critiquing Janet's work in Freud's earliest papers on the study of hysteria and neurosis (1893), and trying to clearing distinguish the difference in their work, which may or may not have been more or less conceptually important. Janet coined the terms 'subconscious' and 'dissociation' as opposed to Freud's 'unconcious' and 'repression'. Both of Janet's terms/concepts here I prefer to Freud's because they are less 'definitionally confusing', less 'reductionistic' and, I believe, more clinically useful. I have already shown -- and will show more below -- that 'transference neuroses/complexes' can easily be linked to 'conscious early memories' (which Freud later called 'screen memories', minimizing as opposed to trumpeting their clinical significance). Freud was only interested in 'repressed' memories (or after 1896 'repressed fantasies') because for Freud in his early work it was the 'repression' that 'caused' the neurosis, and nothing less -- like 'suppression' or 'conscious dissociation' would do it. 'Repression', to this day, remains a troublesome concept -- a potential 'smoke and mirrors' concept that has no empirical -- or possibly even 'clinical' validity. Or alternatively, 'repression' -- as in a 'repressed memory' may be a 'rare bird' that only few therapists and/or clients may ever experience in or out of therapy. Most of us 'remember' our childhood traumacies -- only too clearly. And our 'remembering them very clearly' does not stop them from being 'neurotically and/or erotically operative' as 'transference/lifestyle neuroses/complexes/games' for our whole lives. What Freud called 'the repetition compulsion' does not have to be 'unconscious' or 'repressed' to be neurotically/erotically operative although it is usually carried on 'out of consciousness' or 'out of awareness' -- i.e., in Janet's word -- 'subconsciously'.
Are we knit-picking over our choice of words. Maybe -- or maybe not. A discussion or debate that we will perhaps pick up again at another time. There are many similar and different comparative and contrasting angles between the two competing theorists/therapists that are worth investigating in greater depth. Just not here.

Whether we want to talk about 'dissociative splits in consciousness' as in 'dissociative splits between ego states' or we want to talk about 'splits between conscious and sub/unconscious impulses' (the ego vs. the id, or the personna vs. the shadow), all of this partly similar, partly different conceptuology and terminology can be viewed as being like one big 'spider's nest' that weaves its way inward towards the 'core figure' of 'the spider', the Monster in the Abyss and/or in The Superego, the Identification and/or Compensatory Hero...'the transference neurosis'....

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Nor could Freud...properly...

Because he was too busy looking for either 'sexually repressed memories' and/or 'sexually repressed fantasies'....

Which drew the common criticism of 'pansexualism' and 'scientific (or non-scientific) reductionism'...

Let me give you this example, kinda like an 'excavation' example that Freud used to use.

Let us say that Freud was a 'building contractor' and had information suggesting that there was 'gold' -- or alternatively a 'skeleton' -- buried somewhere behind one of the walls in your house, although he didn't know which wall. If you wanted it taken out from behind one of the walls, then he and his work crew would have to start opening up the walls in the house, wall by wall, until he found where the 'gold' (or 'skeleton') in your house was actually hidden....

Then I came along as a second building contractor and concurred with Freud that there was indeed 'gold' (or a 'skeleton' -- indeed, maybe more than one 'gold bar' or more than one 'skeleton') buried behind one of the walls in your house but that I knew just exactly which wall that it was, indeed, it was the wall in your front closet, and that therefore, I would not have to tear apart all of the rest of the walls in your house, needlessly....

Which 'contractor' would you hire to 'find your gold' (or get rid of your 'skeleton')?

The one likely to be cheaper, faster, and more efficient, which, in this case, would be me -- providing I was telling you the truth, and that I indeed knew what I was talking about -- i.e., more specifically knew where the 'gold' or 'skeleton' was exactly hidden....

I am not trying to underestimate, or undervalue, the meaning and importance of good 'psychotherapy' -- regardless of what school of psychology it derives from. There are good and bad psychotherapists, and ones who care more than others, in every school of psychology out there, and there are often 'different routes' to the same 'core, nuclear conflict or problem'.

Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, and Fritz Perls learned more about 'body and character armour' than most therapists, and could get a client quickly to a point of 'grief and crying' simply by say, rubbing his/her eyes, or to a point of 'anger and rage' by perhaps 'rubbing his/her jaw' or getting him to 'clench and unclench his fist'...assuming their was 'locked in tension' in one of these three areas...

A properly trained, reputable massage psychotherapist can often do the same...and perhaps cut through 'intellectual and/or emotional resistances' much faster than other types of therapists from other schools of psychotherapy who are working with words only that may keep a client 'locked up in his head' -- and unable and/or unwilling to 'feel' his or her bodily and/or emotional sensations.

There are different 'phases' of psychotherapy -- an 'awareness' phase, a 'working and sorting through' phase, and a 'willingness to try different choices' phase -- and there has always been a push both inside and outside Psychoanalysis to cut down the number of inefficient sessions to help a client to get to a better place involving better day to day choices as quickly and efficiently/effectively as possible.

Coming at least partly from an Adlerian (as well as a Gestalt) paradigm, I am prepared to say to you that...

You can usually, if not always, find 'your gold' and/or your 'skeleton', or alternatively, find some of the most important answers to 'The Riddle of your Id, Ego, and/or Superego Monster(s)' -- as well as your 'Internalized Super Heroes' -- in your earliest, conscious memories...which you can get to in a matter of minutes as opposed to seemingly endless, far less efficient, sessions...searching for unconscious and/or 'repressed' memories that may or may not exist, and/or may not even be worth 'the transference interpretation value', time, and energy that it takes to 'dig them out'.

The Adlerian route -- or my modified Freudian-Adlerian route -- can take far less time to find 'valuable transference-lifestyle memories' that do not have to take you half of your lifetime as a 'student analyst' to figure out how and where to find them, and how to interpret them properly -- or let the client 'play out' the memory in such a fashion that he or she can learn 'more experientially' how he or she has, in effect, 'introjected' the 'entire memory' into his or her 'transference template' and 'character structure' in such a way that the memory becomes the 'initial prototype' for an ongoing, evolving, 're-creation' and/or 'repetition compulsion' that takes on a life of its own -- in a 'phobic' and/or 'counter-phobic, obsessive-compulsive' manner -- for likely the rest of the person's life...'To be or not to be' -- in the sphere of a 'transference phobia and/or obsession' -- can essentially become...'To strive for perceived self-psychotherapy at the risk of perceived self-destruction...If you want to get back on the horse again, you have to risk falling off of it again....

Put another way, ideally, if I have 'three clusters of points on your personal, evolutionary graph' -- 1. your childood early memories, plus a brief description of your 'family constellation' (i.e. your relationship growing up with your mother, father, sisters and brothers, plus any important extended family members...), any other close friends and/or mentors and/or 'enemies' who might have influenced the direction of your early life...2. a brief, evolutionary history of the time period between your early childhood and present adulthood, including any major relationships, relationship breakups, deaths or sicknesses, other possible types of traumacies...achievements and celebrations, mentors....3. your present, here and now ('existential') life, including all major relationships, recent or current stresses and/or traumacies, achievements and celebrations, etc.....

If I have these 'three major clusters of points' to work with, then in my head, I can start 'drawing lines' between individual and clusters of points in each time period and their similar (or opposite) type of occurence in the other two time periods of your life....This is what I call a 'transference-lifestyle analysis' which intermixes some of the fundamental concepts and theories of both Freudian and Adlerian Theory (Adler didn't believe in 'conflict' in the personality whereas I do) with perhaps some elements of Nietzschean, Jungian, and/or Gestalt philosophy-psychology thrown into the 'psychic stew' as well...

We 'introject' (or 'internalize') our earliest, conscious memories in such a fashion that they 1. become 'templates' for our 'psychic structure'; and 2. become metaphors for our entire life history -- or at least the seemingly 'pre-determined, fatalistic part of it'...the 'lifestyle-transference' part of it...

These 'lifestyle-transference scripts' are partly amenable to change but with usually great difficulty and only partly....I support much of what Freud wrote in his classic paper on transference -- 'The Dynamics of The Transference' (1912). Combine that paper with what Adler wrote on his concept of 'lifestyle' and the interconnection between a person's 'lifestyle' and his 'conscious early memories' and you have the essence of my concept of 'transference-lifestyle scripts'...

If you buy into this strategy, you will easily find that it also solves the 'memory' vs. 'fantasy' conundrum....

We live a life that is both 'reality-bound' and 'fantasy-driven'....and very, very often the two are as interconnected as our left and right hands, our left and right brains, and Adler's concepts of 'inferiority/insecurity feelings' and 'superiority-striving'....The superiority-striving -- regardless of what direction it might take, if it is linked to 'the inferiority feeling' becomes a 'compensatory and/or defensive measure' taken to 'alleviate', 'reverse', and/or 'celebrate' our 'mastery' over previously debilitating inferiority/insecurity feeling....

For Freud to 'abandon' his 'traumacy-reality theory' in favor of his later 'fantasy-longing-wish-fulfillment theory', would be like Adler abandoning his 'inferiority complex' theory in favor of his 'superiority-striving' theory....
For Adler, the two 'half theories' made up a 'complete whole' theory...Why Freud didn't do the same thing in terms of integrating his 'fantasy-wish-fulfillment' theory with his previous 'reality-traumacy' theory is beyond me...To me, it implies to this day that there were 'neurotic elements' in Freud's own personal and professional life back in 1895 and 1896 that 'motivated' Freud to 'dissociate' his 'reality-traumacy' theory from his 'fantasy-longing theory'... And Classical Psychoanalysis has paid to this day for Freud's 1896 'dissociation' of his previous 'reality-traumacy' theory....

In contrast, if you read my paper 'The First True Case of Psychoanalysis', I don't think you will find any psychoanalyst or psychoanalytic historian, or Adlerian psychologist for that matter, before or after Freud died who has given a 'transference-lifestyle analysis' the way that I did in the paper cited above.

I credit that analysis with my being able to integrate a part of Freudian theory with what I learned studying Adlerian theory for two years in Toronto -- backed up by what I learned at The Gestalt Institute in different workshops and programs between 1979 and 1991. And the fact that my own earliest memory just happens to be remarkably similar to Freud's -- allowing for some 'creative tranference projection' on my own part...

Little Siggy was evicted from his parents' master bedroom by his irate dad for busting in at the most inappropriate time....

Little David, about 4 years old, the same age as little Siggy, was evicted from the front door of my friend's house by my friend's irate mother for ringing their doorbell too many times, too early in the morning...I can only surmise that she was sleeping or otherwise not wanting to come to the door...but that didn't take away any of the shock and petrification that prevented yours truly from being able to coherently say anything, or even being able to move a muscle, until the door was slammed in my face....To this day, I still have nightmare-dreams of being caught in a perilous situation -- and not being able to move a muscle...

Freud's 'rejecting topdog' or 'internal object' was his rejecting father....as pertains to the 'transference complex' stemming from his first memory...

My 'rejecting topdog' or 'internal object' was a 'strange woman' (although it could be extended to the relationship with my father as well -- regarding 'petrification in response to his volatile temper')....

The 'transference game' out of Freud's earliest conscious memory had several different variations or elements off the same overall theme -- 'reversing the transference rejection'....Such as:

1. Two men 'analyzing' a female 'client' (sexual object);

2. Freud 'taming' a 'here-and-now, adult, projective transference figure' of his father (i.e, Freud's own internalized rejecting object) by keeping the 'projective transference figure' (eg. Fliess, Jung) 'happy' with Freud's ongoing 'performance of achievement' -- as Freud strove to do with Fliess, and to a lesser extent, Jung (caught inside his 'approval-seeking ego state' until the point at which he finally became cold on both of them -- his 'rejecting topdog or underdog ego-state' and/or 'anal-schizoid' topdog or underdog ego state);

3. Freud rejecting other adult men (his co-workers and students) as his father rejected little Siggy for 'unbecoming behavior' and/or 'unacceptable performance'.

My transference pattern follows much the same route as numbers 2 and 3 in Freud's case...More particularly, I would say that I have:

1. 'Power battle-Abandonment Issues with both 'anal-schizoid' women and 'authoritarian men';

2. An 'approval-seeking neurosis' with both men and women -- or at least with some men and women of more judgmental personalities;

3. A 'narcissistic, anal-schizoid neurosis' where I would prefer to be in my own fantasy world (in my head, thinking, integrating, creating, writing) than in the company of other live, people (not always but often) -- to the point where I will 'snap' at someone who interrupts me at the wrong moment or 'rings my doorbell too loud and too often' when I am 'preocuppied' with what's happening inside my own 'fantasy world';

4. An over-compensating, over-liberal, over-nurturing father who didn't come down hard enough on his/my son's homework and essay procrastinations -- but he's doing well enough in his career as a young arborist and as foreman of his work crew to put his father's guilt to rest;

I have another early memory of driving in the deserts outside of Yakama, Washington with my dad (we lived in Yakama when I was about 5 or 6 years old and my dad spent a lot of time driving with me on both business trips -- I am his eldest son -- and on social family trips ) and somehow, perhaps through direct questioning, or simply his informing me, I ascertained that there were 'rattlesnakes living up in the desert hills', which left an anxiety-provoking image in my head, and my deciding that the desert hills were no place that I wanted to visit on foot...

In our early childhood memories -- just as in our dreams -- we are every part of our memory: indeed, our memory becomes our own personal 'psycho-drama' templated into our psyche in the form of what are being referred to here as 'transference-lifestyle scripts'....And like Freud said in his earliest works (Studies on Hysteria, The Aetiology of Hysteeria), memories 'co-operate' with each other in that they can be like the different angles of a spider's net weaving towards the centre of the net: the 'primary or integrative transference-lifestye complex'

In this memory, the 'rattlesnake' 'co-operates and integrates' with the 'rejecting friend's mother' from my first memory....creating the image of the 'rattlesnake mother' (the anti-thesis of my own mother) who can 'strike' with a 'ratttlesnake bite', with or without a 'rattle warning'....vs. the kid who has learned from prior experience 'not too get too close' or within 'striking distance'....Thus, the rattlesnake lives his own solitary existence is a very desolate, non-human environment, and the curious little boy has learned not to encroach into the rattlesnake's territory....

On the other hand, this memory also has created a 'transference template' within me around the activity of 'driving' both for business and for pleasure....and whenever I get too close to the 'rattlesnakes' of the corporate world, I usually go back to 'driving' for a living where I am generally a safer distance away from the 'corporate rattlesnakes'....

The metaphor of the 'rattlesnake' might be a bit of 'overkill'....

But memories -- as well as dreams -- can be analyzed in terms of their 'symbolic, metaphorical signifance' (in addition to their 'reality content')...and so too, can the 'obsessive-compulsive, adult transference scenes' played out many years later be symbolically or metaphorically analyzed in terms of their childhood 'prototype transference scenes'...

You get the idea...

We will leave it at that..

Perhaps I am also partly warming up for an eventual critical analysis of Freud's often acclaimed masterpiece, 'The Interpretation of Dreams'....
We will get there when we get there...
-- dgb, October 21st, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain

-- Dialectical Bridges are still being crossed...

A Tribute To Nietzsche on His Birthday and His Foreshadowing of The Work of Freud and Jung....My Integrations....'The Monster in The Abyss'....and 'The Taming of The Transference Dragon'....

2011-10-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Reconstructed and expanded again, October 17th, 2011...

Friedrich Nietzsche, born October 15th, 1844....Died August 25th, 1900...

Maybe I am not doing proper justice to Nietzsche here...but I thought I would pay tribute to him on his birthday by combining two of his more famous quotes...and then adding a little more...

However, before we get there, below is an assortment of original Nietzschean quotes from the website 'Brainy Quotes'...

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Here is one that I really like....

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Another one I like...

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.
Friedrich Nietzsche

And an assortment more...

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?
Friedrich Nietzsche

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions. (This one sounds like Hegel and/or Nietzsche from his first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy'. -- dgb)
Friedrich Nietzsche

This one has a zinger attached to it...

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche

They keep coming...

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Fear is the mother of morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Here's the other quote I was looking for...the first and the last one, often highlighted on the tv show, Criminal Minds

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche

........................................................................................

And now for my integrative creation....for better or for worse...I think I have something worthwhile to add here....
..............................................................................................

If we stare too long or too deeply into our own private Abyss, our 'Id Vault' or 'Shadow', we may find a 'Monster' that stares back at us....(Or perhaps the ghost of Nietzsche still trying to free himself from the Abyss of his own insanity)...a 'Monster' -- symbolic or real --ready to pull us down with him....or ready to jump up, out of our Abyss, and into our Conscious Personality...our 'Conscious Ego-as-a-Whole'....to bring either darkness to the light of our day...or conversely....to bring 'light' and 'healing' to the darkness of our day...

Our 'Monster' can be a 'Bad Guy' who brings us nothing but bad will, destruction and self-destruction....and/or our 'Monster'...our 'Id' or 'It' or 'Shadow' can sometimes be a'Superhero' who has the potential to 'cure us' of our 'neurosis' and/or 'psychopathology' or even to cure the 'socio-neurosis' and/or 'socio-psychopathology' of a whole culture that cannot or will not see its own 'neurotic cultural blindspot' or 'centre of socio-psychopathology'....Erich Fromm called this 'the pathology of normalcy' and R.D. Laing and Thomas Szaz -- as well as many other well-known socio-psychologists -- spent much of their professional careers emphasizing the 'neurotic and/or pathological cultural factors' involved in 'individual neurosis and psychopathology' that can be like 'the canary in the coal mine'...

Only there may be thousands and thousands of 'canaries' showing basically the same pathological symtoms -- metaphorically speaking, 'lack of oxygen, vibrancy, passion, movement, and life' -- for example, some form of 'existential neurosis', 'chronic depression', 'covert, overt, and/or displaced/transferred anxiety and/or rage', etc...

Our 'monster from our abyss' could be our own personal 'Compensatory Superhero' to protect us against those might be trying to 'squeeze the existential life and passion out of us'...

These 'cultural pathologies -- disguised as 'cultural norms and written or unwritten laws' in a society that may not be 'normal' at all -- may indeed be hostile to human growth and wellness -- and, in their cultural pathology, these sociopathological norms may contribute to the growth of individual 'psychopathology', 'neurosis', 'mental illness', physical illness, the imprisonment and/or institutionalization of men and women who do not deserve to be imprisoned or institutionalized, and the suppression, repression, oppression... of upper, middle, and/or lower classes for the same or different reasons...

'The Monster', the 'Bad Guy' or 'The Bad Guy turned Superhero' --  such as Nietzsche in his hayday with his 'rhetorically hard-hitting Hammer' -- can be either 'bad' or 'good' depending on the context of the situation -- and what is being 'rhetorically hammered away at' (i.e., 'deconstructed'), metaphorically speaking, of course.

Every 'corrupt' or 'narcissistically pathological' culture needs a 'Bad Guy-Superhero' to stand up with courage against all that needs to be 'culturally detoxified and cleansed'...and against all those with power who abuse and exploit that power, and do not want to see the status-quo changed...who profit or otherwise benefit from the status-quo the way it is -- in ways that are conspiring to hurt and/or even kill innocent people in the process...

Freud could have been one of those Courageous-Bad Guy-Superheroes' (and still partly was one) but he either ran out of ethical-moral courage (Masson's thesis) and/or he simply had other 'fish to fry' -- namely his Dream Theory, Fantasy Theory, Instinctual Impulse Theory, Childhood Sexuality Theory, Oedipal Theory...-- that he thought (he was mistaken) opposed his Traumacy and Seduction Theories...

Professionally speaking, it was not Freud's 'traumacy theory' that his scientific co-workers and superiors were 'all bent out of shape about'...For example, on November 29th, 1895, Freud writes to Fliess that 'I am in top working form, have nine to eleven hours of hard work, six to eight analytic cases a day -- the most beautiful things, of course, all sorts of new material.'

It was not Freud's and Breuer's 'traumacy theory' that was causing the good doctors of Vienna grief but rather Freud's sliding more and more into the 'sexual traumacy etiology' formula -- which evolved into 'The Seduction Theory' of early 1896: Freud theorized -- much to chagrin of his co-author of 'Studies on Hysteria', Breuer, who Freud was becoming more and more estranged from -- that his adult patients had been 'sexually assaulted' and/or, more lightly put, 'seduced' as young children, and that it was 'the repression' of this childhood memory of a 'real event' (or series of memories of such events) that was the underlying 'essential cause' of 'hysteria'. This was the part of Freud's theory -- not entirely supported by even Breuer (Breuer thought that Freud was 'overgeneralizing' which he was, and furthermore, Breuer was more 'politically attuned' to what kind of 'reaction' Freud was going to get if he launched this new theory -- uncompromised and unconditionalized -- on the scientfic community. On both counts, Breuer was right, and on the evening of April 21st, 1896, Freud took the full wrath and ridicule of The Vienna Psychiatry and Neurology Society...the leader, Krafft-Ebing, again calling Freud's newest essay and theory a 'scientific fairy tale'....

However, there were underlying 'ethical' (and/or narcissistic, unethical) reasons, at work amongst the scientific community, some of which they would own up to, and some of which, perhaps they wouldn't.

First and foremost, none of the doctors of Vienna wanted to 'probe into the privacy of their patiencts' sexual lives'. There was also the issue of how much 'reality story' a therapist/doctor was getting from his 'hysterical client' vs. how much 'fantasy story' the therapist/doctor might be getting from his patient, with neither the patient nor the well-intentioned doctor perhaps being able to 'sort out what was what' -- how much was 'reality story' and how much was 'fantasy story'. Perhaps, in the end, this too became Freud's own biggest conundrum.

Beneath that, there was the 'unadmitted potential conspiracy theory' advanced by Masson that none of the 'good doctors' wanted anything to do with the legal ramifications of Freud's 'childhood sexual assault' theory, nor in particular, might some of the doctors want anyone prying into their own private sexual lives, and what they might be doing behind their own closed doors at home.

Has any of this really changed today?

The only theory I am prepared to advance at this point in time is that there was a 'Perfect Storm' coming together in the spring of 1896:

1. Freud's advancing 'Dream and Fantasy Theory', some of it perhaps more influenced by Fliess than academics have usually given him credit for. Fliess might have been a far more intelligent man than most of the academics have surmised -- intelligent, assertive, persuasive, self-confident, narcissistic -- even if he and/or some/many of his 'seemingly hare-brained, offside' theories didn't go anywhere except perhaps down a 'neurotic, pathological trail' that Freud unbelievably followed, like a little puppy dog or like a man completely intoxicated and/or in love -- 'starry-eyed, approval-seeking, and submissive' in the context of another man's perceived intellectual superiority and willingness to stand alone in the face of significant social and professional confrontation and ostracism brought on by the man's 'outrageous, risky, new theories' that others are dumbfounded by, and/or abhorred by....There were some heavy-duty, over-idealized and over-idolized 'projective transferences' going on here that suggest that Freud was looking through a mirror at his 'idealized, narcissistic, self'...and Freud for the better part of seventeen years between 1887 and 1904 basically used Fliess as his own private 'psychoanalyst';

2. The Emma Ekstein medical fiasco of February, 1895, with Freud and Fliess as her unintentional 'medical victimizers' -- the incident didn't seem to bother Fliess much even though it was he who left 'the long piece of gauze' in her nasal cavity without telling anyone, and then headed back from Vienna to Berlin. Freud was much more bothered by it -- for the better part of a year he was riddled with guilt -- until, under Fliess' influence -- on April 26th, 1896, Freud writes to Fliess...

...............................................

'First of all, Ekstein. I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing, and probably occurred at the sexually relevant times (the woman, out of resistance, has not yet supplied me with the dates).'

........................................

Ouch! This, to me, reads like Freud himself having difficulty separating 'reality theory' from 'fantasy theory'....'rationalization', 'justification', 'denial'...seemed to have been his relevant 'defence mechanisms'...for what seems like a pretty clear-cut story of two 'medically offside doctors' in this case engaging in an application of Fliess' brand new 'nasal-sexual theory' that Freud bought into and which may have had more to do with their shared 'cocaine misadventures' than anything else that makes sense (and quite possibly, knowing Freud's propensity for 'giving out cocaine like candy in his earlier years' perhaps even Emma Ekstein was involved). Horrifically, Ekstein almost bled to death due to another unsuspecting doctor, weeks later, arriving at the scene of Emma's infected nasal passage that wouldn't heal (Fliess was long gone back to Berlin) -- and pulling at something in her nasal passage that shockingly became visible as the 'lost gauze in her nasal passage' that Fliess put in there -- and then forgot about. Freud put together this 'longing' theory in his April 26th and May 4th letters to Fliess, this 'longing' theory became the essence of Freud's evolving 'fantasy' and 'wish-fulfillment' theory which lay at the heart of his thesis in 'The Interpretation of Dreams', also his new, evolving theory of hysteria...and the essence of what is still known today as 'Classical' Psychoanalysis, built on the ashes of Freud's earlier 'traumacy, sexual traumacy, and/or seduction theories';

3. The Scientific Meeting of the evening of April 21st, 1896 seems to have been the 'icing on the cake' for the demise of the 'traumacy-seduction theories'....Freud partly held on a little longer but by the fall of 1897, he no longer believed in the traumacy and seduction theories; in their place he was just in the process of creating his new 'childhood sexuality' and 'Oedipal' theories...and the rest is history...

Freud could have been a Hero for The Women's Rights Movement, and instead, for whatever the reason, he ended up seemingly 'betraying' The Women's Rights Movement, seemingly betraying his female clients -- at least betraying a trust in their credibiltiy to deliver to him, 'true, reality-based memories' -- and in particular, Freud betrayed those women amongst his clients, and indeed, those female clients belonging to the whole history of Psychoanalysis after 1897 who actually were sexually assaulted as children...and treated like they were not...

Ah, Freud could have been a greater hero than he was if only he had known how to 'put Humpty Dumpty back together again -- properly -- which he did not'...

In order to have done this, Freud would have had to hang in there more forcefully with his 'traumacy' and 'seduction' theories which of course he did not -- perhaps he started to 'lose moral courage in the light of The Emma Ekstein affair, and/or in light of professional, political, and economic leverage possibly being used against him 'to help motivate him' -- shall we call it 'negative reinforcement' -- to change his latest 'scientific fairy tale theory', after April 21st, 1896.

We will never know for sure.

Freud's 'Abandonment of The Traumacy-Seduction Theories' remains an essentially, unsolved mystery except in the eyes of those academics and professionals who hang hard on Freud's reasons to Fliess, and later publicly written up reasons for doing what he did back in his obviously very stressful spring of 1896... In one letter to Fliess -- I cannot find the exact letter right now -- Freud wrote that he was 'morally exhausted'....But did he 'morally cave'....or did he hang in there strong enough to do what he thought was 'morally, theoretically, and clinically right' -- that is the question! One thing for sure, he did not write much about childhood sexual abuse for the rest of his life...it is hard not to say that he knew 'which side of his bread was buttered on'....Would any of us have been any different under the extenuating circumstances where none of his professional co-workers and superiors wanted to read or hear about what he had to say in this department? Not that the whole subject matter of 'childhood sexuality' was anymore welcomed, but at least it didn't have any possible 'legal ramifications' attached to it...

The paradoxical part of this whole theoretical and therapeutic conundrum is that you can reach back into most of Freud's and Breuer's case histories and find just as much 'fantasy theory' as you can 'reality theory'...women suppressing their 'fantasies' as well as their 'traumacies'...both 'sexual' and 'non-sexual', 'romantic' and 'non-romantic'...the minute you try to 'compartmentalize' human thinking, feeling, and acting, you are bound to be dissappointed unless you decide to use 'multi-bi-polar compartments' because, otherwise, 'human behavior' will always 'slip outside of your theorized compartments' -- even your/my 'multi-bi-polar ones'....But at least my 'multi-bi-polar compartments' can capture more human behavior than either of Freud's 'reality theory' or 'fantasy theory' taken separately....

You cannot separate man from either of his 'real perceptions' or his 'fantasized perceptions' and try to pretend that you have a theory that covers 'the all of human behavior'...That's what Freud tried to do -- first going the one way, then the opposite way, like physisists first postulated the 'particle theory' of matter and then 'the wave theory' until one 'dialectically integrative' physicist -- I have forgotten which one at this moment -- came up with the brilliant idea of integrating the two opposing theories together in what became known as 'Quantum Physics'....

Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis unfortunately never evolved that far -- at least until now, and what you are reading here -- 'the anal retentive, introjecting' Classical Psychoanalysts continued to buy into the fossilized 'Classical' version of what Freud gave us, and the 'smarter, more flexible, evolving psychoanalysts opted out of Classical Psychoanalysis, and into Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Bionian Psychoanalysis, or whatever else...

And I am doing what someone should have done a long time ago -- 're-integrating a split personality in Psychoanalysis' -- or today it might be called 'dissociative identity disorder'....'Fantasy' Psychoanalysis (1896-1939) was -- and still is -- the alter-ego of 'Reality Psychoanalysis' (1893-1896)...And Freud couldn't put the two together properly....thus, Psychoanalysis became 'dissociated' from its 'Central, Reality-Processing, Ego -- or that part of the Central Ego dealing with the proper perception, interpretation, and evaluation of reality' once Freud fell in love with 'Instinct Theory, Fantasy Theory, Dream Theory, Childhood Sexuality Theory, and of course...'The Oedipal Complex'....Perhaps Freud's 'Narcissistic Theory' was meant as a 'compromise-formation' between 'ego and self-esteem theory' (Adler) on the one hand, and his sexually based theories on the other hand. Also, Freud's 'death instinct' theory was purposely or non-purposedly used to go back and 'cover up' where Freud's earlier 'Traumacy Theory' went AWOL...

Even Freud had his 'Abysses' and 'Monsters' and he did not always handle them properly...

What have you got holed up down there in your Abyss, or 'locked up in your 'Id Vault'? -- a 'good, life energy' that you are 'over-suppressing', 'over-restraining'? Or a 'toxic, death or destructive energy' that may need the help of a good therapist to help you 'detoxify' and 'heal' it slowly?

If we have 'over-suppressed life energy' trapped down in our Abyss, in our Id Vault, then with or without help, we need to bring it up out of 'The Shadow' of our personality and into our 'Conscious Ego Domain' -- into your interactions with the world to give our life more of the 'passion, intensity, vibrancy, and engagement' that we all need to live a 'full life', not a 'half a life' or an 'estranged life'.

On the other hand, if our Abysss or Id Vault is full of 'toxic, transference complexes', then it would be prudent to be a lot more careful -- probably with professional help -- in the way that we deal with and aim to 'detoxify' or 'tame' these 'bad Monster transference complexes'.

Maybe some of these negative forces shouldn't be released at all -- and in the worst case scenarios -- it may be the person himself who needs to be 'institutionalized' if he or she has shown an inability to 'restrain toxic id forces' in his or her personality that are capable of unleashing 'harmful destruction' on either the world and/or on him or herself. We see this type of person -- the worst of the worst -- in horrific newspaper articles, journals, and/or books, on any 'Criminal Minds' show that we may happen to watch...'the violent serial victimizers'...

Nietzsche's 'Abyss' and 'Monster' were the precursors to Freud's 'Id'....and Jung's 'Shadow'...

When I was writing my earliest papers on 'Transference' back in the 1980s, I once was going to title the largest of these papers: 'Transference: Taming The Dragon'....the idea being that the 'tail of the dragon' was our 'childhood traumatic memories' and 'the head of the dragon was our 'here-and-now transference projections, identifications, compensations, reaction-formations, re-creations, repetition-compulsions, sublimations, dissociations, complexes, ego-games...'.

Our 'transference complexes and/or games' are largely subconscious, very obsessive-compulsive, very addictive, and at times, can be highly destructive and/or self-destructive...or the reverse....brilliantly creative, enlightening, constructive to the ongoing evolution of man and society....

Freud at the toddler age of 3 or 4 was prevented by his dad from 'being enlightened' on just exactly what he saw when he busted in unexpectedly to his parents' bedroom....He spent most of his entire adult life addressing the issue of 'sexuality' relative to 'normal' and 'neurotic' human behavior, spending thousands of hours on this subject matter, 'enlightening himself' where his dad wouldn't...

Alfred Adler had a case of 'rickets' that prevented him from walking until he was four years old, and Adler also came close to dying of pneumonia when he was four years old...Hearing the doctor say to his father, 'Your boy is lost' due to the pneumonia, it was at this young age that Adler decided he was going to be a physician.

Furthermore, Adler introduced Freud and The Vienna Circle to the idea of 'organ inferiority' and 'organ compensation' that later, after Adler had separated from Freud, Adler turned into two of his most important concepts -- 'the inferiority feeling' and 'the (compensatory) striving for superiority' (which can be in either a positive and/or a negative, 'neurotic' or 'pathological' way)...

The closest Freud came to Adler's concept of 'compensation' and 'superiority striving' was towards 1920 (particularly in 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle', 1920), when Freud started writing about 'the mastery compulsion' but unfortunately Freud left this path and went 'the death instinct' path instead....Bad choice -- Freud would have been better off advancing the idea of 'the mastery compulsion', particularly if he hadn't become 'professionally neurotic' himself because then he could have reached back into his 'full bag of theoretical and therapeutic wisdom' and advanced a theory like this (with Adler's help):

1. 'Traumatic and/or Narcissistic Early Childhood Transference Memory and/or Relationship' leads to....

2. 'Inferiority Feeling and Complex' ('Lifelong Narcissistic/Self-Esteem Injury) which leads to...

3. 'Compensatory Superiority Striving of Different But Interconnected Types (Melanie Klein's 'Positions'; Eric Berne's 'Ego States' such as: 'The Approval-Seeking Child' Position, 'The Angry, Schizoid Child' Position, 'The Angry, Aggressive Child' Position, 'The Narcissistic, Hedonistic, Rebellious Child' Position, 'The Nurturing (and/or 'Approval-Seeking') Parent' Position, 'The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Parent' Position, 'The Righteous, Ethical Parent' Position...)

Usually one of these particular 'ego-positions or states' tends to dominate and becomes what Adler called the person's 'life style (plan)', or what Jung called 'The Personna'...while another particular 'opposing position' (alter-ego) becomes 'suppressed' or 'dissociated' and is pushed back into the 'The Id Vault', 'The Abyss', 'The Shadow'....of the subconscious or 'the strongly restrained conscious (alter-ego)'...

From the 'intra-psychic dynamics' of our different 'ego-states' interacting with each other, and their 'projection' into 'our external world encounters' so too follows the particular dynamics of our 'transference ego-complexes and games'...which we often tend to either play out 'neurotically and erotically with our chosen love partner' or alternatively often play out in 'authoritarian employer/employee relations' or even 'family or friendship relationships' and very often also through 'the sublimation of our transference work energies'....

Such is 'The Universal Nature of Transference Intra-Psychic and Inter-Social Dynamics'

In order to 'tame our transference dragon' -- Nietzsche's Monster -- we need to be able to fully understand all of the 'characteristics' of our dragon and how it can pull us down into our own Private Abyss, our Private Hell...or alternatively, 'break loose' -- like in a 'prison break' (often under the influence of alcohol, drugs, stress, rejection, loss...) and visit us up in our 'Conscious Ego' from the depths of our 'Id Vault'...or 'Nietzschean Abyss' or the 'place of residence' ('Hell') of our 'Faustian Devil'...

Ideally speaking, once we have a full transference understanding of our own unique particular dragon....and its particular strengths, attractions, repulsions, and dangers....

Then perhaps we might be able to look down into our own Private Abyss...and not be quite so afraid...

When we look face to face with our own private dragon...

Perhaps we really have 'tamed' it....

Perhaps we can say to ourselves -- and mean it -- 'I am not going to play this silly, destructive 'Transference Dragon' game anymore...

It may be exciting, scary, dangerous, exhillarating when we win....

But I am tired and getting too old to keep falling off this 'Dragon Roller Coaster game of love and hate...serial seduction and abandonment... lust, power, sexual conquest, and/or rejection...The Don Juan Syndrome, Sexual Addiction, Serial Seductionism and its Neandrathal Cousin -- Serial Sexual Assault....often attractive men in either looks and/or charismatic charm....coming from a subjectively perceived position of 'narcissistic sexual power' and/or its opposite -- with the 'partial id monster' of a rejecting and/or abandoning female transference figure in his childhood (usually the mother) playing a dominant role in this type of man's 'transference psycho-dynamics'.....

Maybe there is an interconnection between our sexual hormones and our Transference Dragon....as our sexual hormones start to slow up, so too does our Transference (Love and Lust) Dragon start to get a little more lethargic....Personally, I would say that 'transference dynamics' tend to escalate and/or remain steady between about 20 and 50 and then start to de-escalate after that with more transference awareness and/or less transference energy....or simply the reluctance to continue to get involved in this type of 'rocky, unstable, high psycho-drama' fashion...

Maybe...

Or maybe not...

Battling with our 'transference dragons' is usually more or less...

A lifelong process....

Those first five or six years are pretty darn critical...

A network of early childhood experiences turned into a network of 'transference learning templates' that create our own private...

'Semi-psychic determinism'...

A ready-made path with a predictable destination and outcome...

Is easier to travel...perhaps...

Than trying to thrash our way through dense, new, uncut forest...with no paths to direct our way...

And no known destination and/or outcome...

New territory can be scary, anxiety-provoking...

With rough terrain,

Mountains...

And new, uncharted abysses...

At four or five years old....

We can make the definitive decision...subconsciously...

That the devil we do know is better than the devil we don't know...

And/or we can bounce back and forth between 'opposite types of devils'...

Or we can play it safe and do our best to 'bury all devils' way down below...

Big life decisions for a four or five year old....

Who certainly doesn't have an 'adult range of experiences' nor an 'adult more logical reasoning process' upon which to draw....

These fast made, early childhood 'prototype', 'template', 'transference' decisions,

Get 'cemented' in fast...

And don't change much over time...

They remain our 'lifelong buddies' -- and/or 'monsters'...

Our 'Bainian Transference Dragons' or 'Nietzschean Abyss Monsters' from down below...

Nietzsche led the way into 'The Psychic Abyss'...

And Freud (The Id) and Jung (The Shadow) followed where Nietzsche left off....

-- dgb, October 15th, 16th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain

My son was born on October 15th, 1984...