Has anyone ever given any thought as to what might have happened if Freud had invented the concept of 'the id' much earlier in his career -- like 1894, as opposed to 1923?
The concept might have been totally different -- subscribing to Freud's pre-1897 traumacy-seduction assumptions as opposed to his later post-1896 instinctual demand, childhood sexuality, and Oedipal fantasy assumptions.
With my being an integrative dialectic theorist, I look at the period of roughly 1895 to 1905 -- the period when Freud was creating the main philoosphical and psychological assumptions connected with what was going to be called 'Classical' Psychoanalysis -- as being a period when Freud also created an 'isolative-dissociative chamber or container' in which at the same time that he was bringing in Classical Psychoanalysis, he was also throwing out 'Pre-Classical' (Traumacy-Seduction Theory) Psychoanalysis.
This was, to me -- like it has been for a significantly 'split' number of academics and professionals studying this period of the history and evolution of psychoanalysis -- a big theoretical and clinical mistake in that it dissociated Classical Psychoanalysis of a theory (traumacy-seduction theory) that had been working very well up to 1896, and which showed the potential for continued promise, indeed is still probably being employed in some fashion by most different schools of psychotherapy today.
What is psychotherapy without the psychological unfolding and healing in the context of individual and/or group psychotherapy -- of psychological 'trauma', whether it be physical or emotional, an assault, a death, a sickness, a loss, an abandonment, a betrayal, a rejection, a failure, an exclusion, a criticism, a chastisement, an 'ego-slight'...?
All of these factors which were being built up in Breuer's and then Freud's clinical caseload starting from 1880 (with Breuer's Anna O. case) -- and leading onwards to their combined clinical work, 'Studies on Hysteria' (1895), and then a year later, Freud's 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) in which Freud focused more specifically on the common factor of 'childhood sexual seduction/assault/abuse' -- all of this 'Pre-Classical' traumacy and childhood sexual abuse work remains a critical part of most viable psychotherapies today...
Yet Freud, for whatever reason and/or combination of reasons (and we will certainly talk about this momentous period of Psychoanalysis in greater detail later, as I have already written about it in numerous essays over the last several years), essentially turned his back on this driving force of his early psychotherapy and instead started to develop his now 'Classical Instinct and, to a lesser extent, Ego Theory' which he would basically spend the rest of his life developing (til his death in 1939).
Freud did some great psychoanalytic work after 1896 as well as before but his post-1896 psychoanalytic work became definitively one-sided, reductionistic, and -- sorely lacking the foundational basis of his earlier traumacy theory.
In essence, Psychoanalysis became an institutional example of a 'psycho-neurosis' -- complete with an 'Shadow-Id-Group' or 'Secret-Interest-Group (SIG) Chamber' in which 'bad or threatening ideas' -- whether 'historically traumatic', 'simply unwanted', and/or 'instinctually impulsive' -- are locked away from the rest of the personality/organism/institution.
What I am saying here is that Freud should have integrated his traumacy-seduction, instinct, ego, and ego-defense theory all together -- not dissociated them apart from each other, and then basically, after 1896, he started to bury his traumacy-seduction theory.
Impulses and traumacies often go hand and hand. A person takes a risk -- and then metaphorically, gets his or her neck cut off for taking this risk. The traumatic result of the risk often leads to less risk-taking in future similar circumstances -- 'ego-defensive' adjustments or 'defensive compensations' are taken to guard against future similar traumacy.
Back in 1894-95, the formula for neurosis including 'hysteria', including therapy, was pretty simple.
1. Noxious stimuli/memory; 2. 'an associative (neurotic) false connection'; 3. 'repression of the noxius memory that is being held as a warning sign relative to future similar events'; 4. a 'neurotic symptom' that reflects the false connection; 5. Therapy-Awareness: 'Recover' the repressed/suppressed memory; 6. Therapy-Contact-Abreaction-Catharsis: 'Let the client 're-live' the memory after it has been 'recovered'; 7. Therapy-Conclusion: No more neurotic/hysterical symptom.
An example from the Anna O. case: 1. Noxious stimuli/memory: She saw a dog drinking water out of a human glass; 2. Compensatory defensive self-warning sign and behavior: She would stop drinking; 3 She 'represses' the memory of the dog drinking out of the glass; 4. Neurotic symptom based on 'false associative connection': She won't drink any fluids, only eat fruit; 5. Therapy-Awareness: Hunt down the 'neurotic, repressed memory'; 6. Therapy-Contact-Abreaction-Catharsis: Let the client -- in this case, Anna O. -- 're-live the memory, including all the affect/emotion attached to it; 7. Therapy-Conclusion: No more fear of drinking water -- Anna O. takes a drink of water after her 'memory-catharsis'.
These Victorian 'hysterical ladies' (and some men) were very creative in their 'false connections' to repressed memories. Was it their 'prudent/repressive' sexual family and cultural upbringing? Probably at least partly. The more events -- particularly 'sexual events' -- that are repressed, suppressed, isolated, dissociated from the conscious personality, the greater the likelihood of these 'unconcious dissociations' coming back to 'haunt' the client in the form of 'crazy, creative, neurotic symptoms'.
Freud's main 'character weaknesses' were also his main 'character strengths'. (That is the same with all of us -- our 'extremes' define us, both positively and negatively.) In Freud's case, Freud was overly 'reductionistic' in his theories, highly speculative in some of his memory/dream/phantasy interpretations, very righteously dogmatic and inflexible in his own thinking and/or other people's thinking...
You go back to those old clinical cases and you can pretty easily see that both 'impulses' and/or 'traumacies' were 'neurotically operative' in the form of 'non-remembered memories', and 'bad/false associative connections' relative to these unremembered memories'.
Let us take the 'black snake hallucination' in an Anna O. memory.
She had fallen asleep while nursing her sick father, sitting in a chair beside his bed. She dreamed/hallucinated of a 'black snake' coming from the wall to bite her dad and she tried to 'fend off the snake with her right arm but the arm had 'fallen asleep' on the back of the chair and effectively was 'paralyzed', wouldn't move, as she tried to defend her father but couldn't. In therapy wih Breuer around 1881-82, Anna O's right arm was still 'paralyzed' even though nothing was organically wrong with it. The memory was 'discovered' and 'recovered' under hypnosis, emotionally re-lived, and Anna. O upon waking, moved her right arm.
There is a lot that can still be said about this particular episode with the 'black snake hallucination' alone. To the extent that it 'solved' her paralysis problem, the hypnosis was enough. But Anna O. could create new symptoms faster than Breuer could 'solve' or 'resolve' them. She was a very smart but not a very happy young lady. And getting the 'lion's share' of the nursing responsibility for her father's needs was not likely a responsibility that any young lady would relish -- regardless of how much she loved her father.
Anna O's 'neurotic, hysterical symptoms' could be viewed both individually and collectively as 'compromise-formations' between her 'impulse-traumicy complexes' and the 'repression-isolation-dissociation' of these same impulse-traumacy complexes.
Freud, looking back at this particular Anna O. episode years later (The Five Lectures), was amazingly 'rational-empirical' in stating that Anna O. had probably actually seen a snake around her property which then provided 'fuel' for the dream. This was a lot more 'down to earth' than Freud's later interpretions in the Dora case, The 'Wolf-Man', little Hans, and The 'Rat-Man'.
A therapist should always be extremely careful about his or her interpretations and/or 'reconstructions' -- and always opt for the clients' 'associations' as opposed to imposing his or her own associations on a dream-phantasy interpretation. All else being equal, a simpler interpretation is usually more likely to be on the mark than a highly convoluted one.
Anna O. herself -- who after assorted relapses and trips into a psychiatric institution after her father's death, became a feminist and a social worker later in her life. In the 1920s, she came up with a quotation that is one of the best psychoanalytic quotations that I have ever heard.
Anna O., the woman who partly created and labelled 'the talking cure' and 'chimney sweeping' -- Bertha Pappenheim was her real name -- was quoted some 30 years after her therapeutic work with Breuer in the 1920s as saying:
'Psychoanalysis is in the hand of the physician what the the confessional is in the hand of the Catholic clergyman; it depends upon the person applying it and the (specific) application whether it is a good instrument or a double-edged sword' (Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of The Mind, 1979, 1992).
This having been said, as a dream interpreter -- and I don't profess to be a very experienced one -- you can look either in a person's 'external' and/or 'internal' world for the particular 'stimulus' that might ignite the contents and essence of a dream.
My initial interpretation of the 'black snake' in Anna O's phantasy would be to speculate -- in a more far-reaching fashion than Freud did when he looked back at the phantasy and said that maybe Anna O was frightened by a real snake that she saw on another occasion -- and then 'transferred' it into her dream -- in contrast, my first reaction on the black snake is that it came from her 'mythological' or 'collective' (Jungian) unconscious, and that perhaps it reflected an unconscious/subconscious 'death wish' towards her father --the primary reason for her 'lifeless existence'. While other young women were dating and getting married, she was 'stuck' nursing her father. (God only knows what her mother was doing.)
Whether a therapist -- Breuer at the time of the episode -- would want to share this type of interpretation with Anna O. at that time and place is another question based largely on trust, the client's cognitive-affective capabilities, and timing. Or better still, in a 'Gestalt hotseat', the client could actually 'role play the black snake' and see what awarenesses came out of the role-playing. In Gestalt Therapy -- and I believe in both Freudian and Jungian Psychoanalysis as well, 'every part of the dream reflects a different part of yourself' -- and oftentimes, 'existential splits or conflicts in the personality, in consciousness, and/or between different 'ego-states' -- like between the loving, nursing Anna, and Anna's 'alter-ego' -- the part of her that may have actually been wishing her dad to die so that she could get on with living her life. Also, there is no indication in the case description of Anna O. what Anna's relationship was like with her dad when she was growing up at a younger age when he was not sick -- and whether or not there might have actually been a case of 'childhood (sexual?) abuse between her and her father. That we will never know -- but again, the 'black snake' symbol again throws a possible element of 'evil intent' -- from Anna O. towards her dad, and/or from her dad towards Anna at a younger, healthier age, which might have precipitated angry, reactionary evil intent from Anna towards her dad at the later date. Or it may have been simply anger directed at the fact that she was 'being controlled by her dad's sickness', and then lo and behold, by becoming 'hysterical', she could turn the tables on a 'transference figure of her dad', and 'control her therapist's time and energy by generating new 'hysterical symptoms' faster than Breuer could help her get rid of them. That is what I call 'identification with the sick person in order to gain control of a situation' or alternatively -- 'transference-reversal' with Anna O. playing the role of her 'sick dad' in her 'reverse relationship' with her 'male therapist'. 'What goes around, comes around' -- might be the operative philosophical and psychological piece of wisdom that is most relevant here -- in the style and content of one of the oldest Greek philosophers -- Anaximander. 'You give what you get' -- is just as common as -- 'you get what you give'.
You can see how traumacy, impulse, and the restraint -- repression, isolation, dissociation...-- of threatening ideas impulse all can collectively weave themselves into the same 'transference-complex'. We will develop this complex of ideas as we move along...
Enough for today.
-- dgb, March 18th-19th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
The First True Case of Psychoanalysis
I am about to embark on a critique of as many of Freud's most important and famous essays, ideas, theories, 'anti-theories', and their derrivatives as I can get to.
Now, I am in a bit of a quandry here. I need to do some explaining before I start this ambitious enterprise.
Firstly, I am not a psychoanalyst. I have never seen a psychoanalyst, and never stepped a foot inside a psychoanalytic training session.
Why? Probably money, period. Psychoanalysis has set itself up as an 'aristocratic psychology' -- a 'psychology for the rich' -- and/or that is the stereotype that it has created for itself. To me, this is unfortunate. This in itself restricts Psychoanalysis' potential growth -- theoretically, therapeutically, culturally, and class-wise.
Furthermore, what Freud started, and what The Psychoanalytic Establishment continues to support and maintain -- is a psychology of 'exclusionism'.
This is highly ironic and paradoxical because in my 35 years or so of studying psychology that runs through Humanistic Psychology (Rogers, Maslow, May, Fromm...), Cognitive Therapy (Maltz, Ellis, Beck, Frank, Kelly, Korzybski, Hayakawa, Branden, Rand, Meichenbaum...), Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, et al...), Adlerian Psychology (Adler, Dreikeurs, Mosak...) Transactional Analysis (Berne), and Psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, Masson...), if there is one thing I have learned, it is probably this: that most if not all varieties of human neurosis, psychosis, and psychopathology usually start with the individual's perception -- real and/or imagined -- of some form of 'social/family/school/cultural/racist/sexist/ exclusionism'.
Human neurosis can generally be summed up in the sentence: 'I am not wanted here, not invited, not liked, not accepted, not appreciated, not acknowleged, not relevant...
Transactional Analysis summed up the overarching idea above under two polar headings: 1. You're okay, I'm not okay'; 2. I'm okay, you're not okay'; or the two condensed together: 3. You're not okay, I'm not okay.
This applies to Freud himself just as much as it applies to anyone and everyone else...
Freud once said that you had/have to be a psychoanalyst in order to properly understand what comes out of 'the depths of the unconscious' and particularly the 'dynamics of repression'. I say, Well, repression is still a very controversial concept and subject matter that sometimes (often) defies what most would call 'good rational-empiricism'. It can easily become a 'circular concept' with no apparent foundational basis except in the eyes and ears of the theorist who 'believes in the existence of repression'.
A psychoanalyist says, 'You are repressed.' You reply, 'I am not repressed.' And the psychoanalyst then uses your 'resistance' as further evidence that 'you are repressed'.
How do you ever 'prove' the existence of a 'repression' except for the psychoanalyst's 'interpretation' as such, and how do you distinguish it from a much more common and more easily validated concept/phenomenon of 'suppression' or even 'dissociation'?
All of the concepts of 'suppression', 'subconscious', and 'dissociation' have much more 'tangible rational empiricism' attached to them than Freud's concept of 'repression' -- or even 'unconscious'.
I use the term 'unconscious' but often hesitatingly, and generally speaking, I am much more comfortable with the concept of 'subconscious'. I don't think I will ever use the concept of 'repression'. I believe in 'the psychology of defense' but, generally speaking, I do not support the 'psychology of repression'.
Does this take me out of the 'domain of Psychoanalysis'? The Psychoanalytic Establishment would obviously say 'yes' immediately, further supported by the fact that I have no formal training in Psychoanalysis. But The Psychoanalytic Establishment and Institute is partly like 'Hotel California' -- once you get in, you become 'locked into their particular paradigm' which includes Freud's own 'transference neurosis relative to his father'.
When Freud was alive, you had to be like Melanie Klein (no one els was) -- female and perceived as non-threatening -- in order to 'break through the wall of Freud's paradigm' -- and no man has 'broken through the neurotic paradigm of Freud's father-transference neurosis in Classical Psychoanalysis' unless he has either left Psychoanalysis completely (Adler, Jung, Reich, Rank, Ferenczi, Horney, Sullivan, Erickson, Fromm, Perls, Masson...and many more...) or followed 'Melanie Klein's skirt' into the paradigm of Object Relations and Self-Psychology.
Most of Object Relations and all of Self-Psychology developed after Freud had died. But for a few years, it seems possible that there was perhaps a 'running positive dialectic' between Freud and Melanie Klein where Freud may have actually been partly influenced by Klein's work in a way that Pierre Janet never could. You see, 'Object Relations' -- a 'sub-school' of Psychoanalysis -- founded mainly by Melanie Klein, was an extension of Pierre Janet's ideas of 'the splitting of the ego', 'the alter-ego', and 'the dissociated personality' where 'ego' and 'alter-ego' are 'dissociated', 'alientated', 'disconnected' from each other. It is from Janet's ideas -- not Freud's (indeed, Freud fought long and hard against Janet's ideas (Too bad Janet wasn't a woman) -- that the book and movie 'Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde' were at least partly born from.
With all due respect to Freud, the idea of 'the splitting of the ego' which Freud finally acknowledged and accepted towards the end of his career -- and stated that the idea seemed both strangely old and new at the same time (I wonder why) -- and the associated ideas of 'alter-ego' and 'dissociation between opposing ego-states' -- all of these ideas were much more 'theoretically and therapeutically useful' (at least in this author's strong editorial opinion) than Freud's 'hanging on concept' of 'repression'.
Perhaps even 'the Id' should be viewed as having an 'ego-state' extension that I would/do call 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic (selfish, egotistic, sensual, sexual) Ego' ('DNE' for short). The DNE can in turn be 'split' into 'The DNS' and 'The DNU' -- i.e., 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underdog or Underego', and 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Topdog or Superego'. Thus, you can have 'vertical splits' and 'horizontal splits' in the personality: 'superego' vs. 'underego' being an example of a 'vertical power split', and 'Approval-Seeking Underego' vs. 'Dionsysian-Narcissistic Underego' being an example of a 'horizontal power split'.
In my frame of thinking following this line of thinking, I differentiate between 'six auxilliary ego-states' and 'one Central (Mediating, Executive) Ego.
...........................................................................................................
The Gap-DGB Integrative (Psychoanalytic) Model of The Psyche
The six auxilliary ego-states are:
1. The Nurturing-Supportive Superego (NSS);
2. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Superego (DNS);
3. The Righteous-Rejecting Superego (RRS);
4. The Approval-Seeking Underego (ASU);
5. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underego (DNU);
6. The Righteous-Rejecting (Rebellious) Underego (RRU).
And the main decision-making ego-state is...
7. The Central (Mediating-Executive) Ego (CE)
Working downwards into the subconscious/unconscious, we have
8. The Dream Catcher/Weaver (DCW);
9. The Shadow-Id (Secret Interests) (SI)
10. The Personal Transference-Lifestyle Template (PTLT);
11. The Mythological-Symbolic Archetype Template (MSAT)
12. The Genetic Potential Self Template (GPST);
13. The Undifferentiated to Differentiated (Multi-Bi-Polar) Template (UD-MBP-T)
................................................................................................
The difference between 'repression' and 'suppression' is extremely important because it is easy to conflate, condense, and confuse the two together.
I 'suppress' what I am afraid to ask or tell you -- the concept of 'suppression' is easily validated by self-experience. But 'suppression' implies that I know very well what I want to ask or tell you. In the case of a 'suppressed memory' as opposed to a 'repressed memory', I remember the 'memory' all too clearly -- I am just embarrassed and/or otherwise reluctant to share it with you. A 'repressed memory' implies that I don't remember the memory at all -- which raises doubts about its very existence or is it a 'conceptual construction' created by Freud to explain a phenomena that he couldn't otherwise explain (such as hysteria, or anxiety neurosis, or obsessional neurosis...)?
For much of Freud's career, Freud viewed 'repression' as 'the defense' associated with ALL human neurosis, until he finally realized -- or admitted -- that were many other 'psychological defenses' at man's disposal such as: introjection, identification, projection, displacement, denial, transference, dissociation, retroflection (which is used a lot in Gestalt Therapy) and one that Adler added which is much more important to the etiology of neurosis, and more pervasive than Freud's concept of repression -- and that is the concept of 'compensation'. But even more important and pervasive to the etiology of all neurosis is the concept of 'transference'.
I see 'transference' as the over or under-riding 'defense mechanism' in all neuroses, and every other defense mechanism is a subset of transference.
I distinguish between: 'identification transferences', 'introjective transferences', 'projective transferences', 'compensatory transferences', 'positive transferences', 'negative transferences', 'oral transferences', 'anal transferences', 'genital transferences', 'distancing transferences', 'anal-schizoid transferences', 'anal-rejecting transferences', 'oral-nurturing transferences', 'narcissistic transferences', 'anti-narcissistic transferences', 'altruistic transferences', 'impulse-desire-fantasy transferences', 'impulse-restraint transferences' 'anxiety transferences', 'rebellious transferences', 'violent transferences'... and on and on we could go...
The concept of 'transference' is totally Psychoanalysis as are the concepts of 'narcissism', 'defense', 'projection', 'introjection', 'identification', and most of the other concepts listed above. So how can you call my work anything but 'psychoanalytic' other than perhaps the 'extensions' and 'disagreements' that I have with The Psychoanalytic Establishment...And oh yes, my 'lack of formal training' -- or shall we call that 'brain-washing'?
So call me an 'underground psychoanalytic theorist' if you will -- operating outside the walls of The Psychoanalytic Establishment, and even operating outside of 'The Academic Establishment'. I admire Spinoza's philosophical approach: Don't lock me into any kind of 'Establishment' that is going to try to 'muzzle my thinking' -- or at least the 'public demonstration of my thinking' .
As soon as you become affiliated with any kind of 'organization' or 'institution' or 'political party' or 'religious denomination' or 'corporation' or 'school of thought', you become subject -- and often a 'slave' -- to the organization's agenda and particular brand of 'group think'.
At times 'group think' can be 'enlivening' and 'multi-dialectically challenging and evolutionary'. But this is probably by far the exception rather than the rule. Much more often, 'group think' becomes synonomous with 'no think' or thinking inside a 'stagnant paradigm', or worse a 'dangerous or even evil paradigm'.
The worst cases of 'group think' that come quickly to mind are 'Nazi Germany', 'McCarthyism', 'Witch Hunting', 'The Reign of Terror', any form of 'racial cleansing', 'stereotyping', 'discrimination', 'reverse-discrimination', 'religious extremism', 'political extremism', 'righteous trash-talking', any form of 'supremacy thinking that is socially divisive and exclusionist, let alone violent', 'narcissistic collusions that are non-democratic and exclusionist', 'political and corporate conflict of interests', 'lobbyist special-interest groups that do not have to face up to their 'bi-polar, anti-special interest group' in an open, democratic forum. (All lobbyist groups should have to operate through public, open, democratic forums.)
Back to 'Psychoanalysis'...
In the case of a 'conscious' memory, a 'conscious memory' can also be called a 'subconscious memory' if it is 'psychodynamically alive' in our subconscious (or even in our unconscious) and yet, if someone asks us to recall this particular memory, we can usually recall it within a few minutes, given the right 'prompter' and/or 'association'.
So 'defining' Psychoanalysis can be -- indeed, usually is -- a very subjective, narcissistic-righteous matter.
Freud had a very 'anal-retentive' habit of defining it 'extremely tightly' according to his own parameters (which paradoxically sometimes changed 180 degrees like his still controversial switchover from 'The Traumacy-Seduction Theory' to 'The Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory'). If Freud had said 'the world was flat', I am sure that would have been included in 'The Freudian Bible of Classical Psychoanalysis'.
Freud did a brutal job (meaning no job) of reconciling his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory with his post 1897 evolving Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Symbolic-Oedipal Theory. He just 'dumped' the first as if it never existed -- that it came from nowhere -- and then developed an 'opposite thesis'. I guess he could do that fairly easily because in 1897 he had no following -- just three volumes of work in The Standard 24 volume Edition to support his work during this time period, and Joseph Breuer 'one too many evenings and a thousand miles left behind'...
But that is why you have me here: to integrate what Freud did not know how to properly integrate. Dialectically integrate. That is why you have me 'trumpeting' the metaphorical structure of Hegel's Hotel as a larger and more useful 'multi-dialectic-humanistic-existential, philosophical and psychological paradigm' -- than 'Freud's Classical Hotel'.
If I am coming down hard on Freud here -- like thousands before me -- it is not because I do not respect Freud. Because I do. Indeed, I believe that he was one of the creatively most brilliant thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. But this still doesn't mean that he wasn't commonly -- wrong. And stuck inside a cultural Victorian paradigm, not to mention the theoretical paradigms of his own making.
In Victorian society, masturbation was commonly -- and/or at least publicly -- viewed as 'self-abuse'. So for Freud, stuck inside this Victorian paradigm, ending such 'neuroses' as 'neurasthenia' (chronic depleted energy) would logically involve 'stopping self abuse' -- i.e., stopping masturbation. (Maybe the opposite prescription might have been more appropriate.) In Victorian culture, 'castration anxiety' sounds like it was a very real -- and scary -- phenomenon, especially for a small boy growing up. 'If you keep wanking your thing there, little Siggy, daddy's going to cut it off!'
Personally, I think I partly understand Freud better than he understood himself -- and a thousand psychoanalysts after him have purported to understand him, such as the one and only Ernest Jones -- because such 'biographers' of Freud were all 'psychoanalyzing' Freud according to Freud's own theoretical parameters and assumptions. 'Towing the company' line if you will. 'Upholding the corporate image'. 'Giving Freud -- and all psychoanalysts -- what he and they wanted to hear.'
How can you possibly get any kind of significantly different understanding of Freud unless you have someone who is willing and/or able to see some of the 'deficiencies', 'liabilities', and 'limitations' of these same parameters and assumptions that Freud -- and all Classical Psychoanalysts -- have been locked inside for over 100 years?
I like 'Hegel's Hotel' better than 'Freud's Hotel' because Hegel's Hotel incorporates a better assortment of assumptions, parameters, paradigms, and 'glasses' than those that Freud was using at the time he was theorizing, and that essentially all, or most, Classical Psychoanalysts -- like 'good corporate employees' -- have been using since.
This is not to say that Classical Psychoanalysis has not evolved since Freud died -- it's just that some of the most important assumptions that Freud was using -- and that Classical Psychoanalysis continues to use with little to no modifications and/or updated extensions since Freud died -- are also some of his most flawed assumptions. Like 'Childhood Sexuality Theory' and 'Fantasy Theory' and 'Oedipal Theory'-- without their bipolar 'alter-ego' theory: 'Traumacy-Seduction-Assault Theory'.
The two theories are still clamoring to be integrated. And without trying to be arrogant, I am probably the only theorist with enough of the right type of 'outside knowledge' and (read Adlerian Theory, Gestalt Theory, Transactional Analysis Theory...) -- and internal focus and creativity -- to properly do it.
If this makes me an 'egotist' and/or a 'narcissist', I can live with that. So was Freud. So was Masson. So are most professional athletes. You have to be an 'egotist' to get to the top of whatever 'mountain' you are trying to climb.
Like Ayn Rand would write, that simply means that /I/you/we believe in the strength and power of my/your/our skills and abilities....the skills and abilities that can make us all 'Supermen' and/or 'Superwomen' to the upper threshold of how high these skills and abilities can take us, just as long as we work hard enough, persevere enough, and meet the challenge of any and all obstacles in order to to get to where we want to go...our 'end visualization', our 'end fantasy', whatever that might be...
Not too many 'classical psychoanalysts' had'have the courage to 'think outside the classical box' -- at least publicly -- and if they did/do, then they were/are no longer likely considered to be 'Classical Psychoanalysts'. In Spinozian style, they were/are 'ex-communicated'. They were/are -- 'excluded'. Just look at Masson's rebellion against Freud in the 1980s. Masson stood up for what he believed was right -- and for that -- he is no longer a 'Psychoanalyst', let alone 'The Project Director of The Freud Archives'.
But alas things can change. Resentments can smooth over. 'Dissociations' can 'melt away', given the right circumstances, over time -- and 'bridges' and 'integrations' can start to take their place.
This is Hegel's World. This is Hegel's Hotel. 'Thesis'. 'Anti-thesis'. And finally -- 'synthesis'...'integration'...'either/or', 'right or wrong' melting away into a more harmonious, dialectic union...Perhaps with an 'agreement to disagree'. Or perhaps with a 'compromise towards the middle'. But most importantly, with more 'tolerance' and 'acceptance' for the right of any individual to 'disagree' with 'group think'. And not to be condemned for this...ex-communicated...excluded...
Freud was The Great Excluder...
I wrote already that he got this 'transference-characteristic' from his dad...
How come Freud couldn't see this clearly? Or could he? How come most Classical Psychoanalysts 'minimized' the 'negative transference' relationship between Freud and his dad? Or couldn't see it -- and worse, what the negative repercussions on Classical Psychoanalysis were.
Why? Because most Psychoanalysts -- read in particular Ernest Jones (his biography of Freud) -- did what Freud did. And Freud 'minimized' his dad. Sigmund 'excluded' his dad like his dad excluded -- and minimized -- little Siggy.
Most academics agree that the case of 'Anna O' is the first 'case' of Psychoanalyis. I agree -- in part.
But the 'template' case -- the case on which all of Psychoanalysis rests -- is little Sigmund's first, early childhood -- conscious -- memory.
And Freud -- and thousands of psychoanalysts -- continue to 'walk right around this first conscious memory of little Sigmund', like 'lemmings that follow their leader over a cliff'. I am partly sorry if I am coming across as being overly harsh here, or 'unfair to some more rebellious, individual thinking, psychoanalysts' but in the end we are all responsible and accountable for our own personal and collective 'transference neuroses' -- and doing something about them -- otherwise, why call 'Psychoanalysis' a 'first-rate form of psychotherapy'?
Psychoanalysts have to start thinking about 'conscious early memories' not as 'screen memories' that both hide and allude to other more important 'repressed memories and/or fantasies' but rather as important 'transference memories' in and by themselves. And for that, Psychoanalysts can thank Adler indirectly -- through me. Because what I am doing here is essentially turning 'Adlerian lifestyle and conscious early memory theory' back into an 'updated' form of 'Classical Transference Theory'. Which is so psychodynamically different than 'standard Freudian Classical Transference Theory' that many would ask, how can it possibly be called 'Classical' -- in which case I propose the alternative names of 'Quantum-Integrative Transference Theory' and 'Quantum-Integrative Psychoanalysis'.
'Screen Memories' (1899) is the worst paper that Freud ever wrote -- and Jones loved it....lap, lap, lap... while as Masson argued and I am paraphrasing, Freud was starting to 'conflate' and 'confuse' 'symbolic dream and fantasy material' with 'cold, hard, remembered reality'.
I am sure that Jones had his character strengths -- he did, I believe, support the growth and career of Fritz Perls when Freud wanted nothing to do with Perls because of the latter's 'rebellious' paper on 'Oral (as opposed to 'Anal') Resistances...
Freud excluded and excommunicated all significant 'male rebellers' just like his father 'excluded and excommunicated' little Sigmund...
Freud was a great rebel himself -- but once he achieved power -- he squashed all masculine rebellion in his ranks... This was a major part of his 'topdog/underdog transference bi-polarity and neurosis'... His 'excluding topdog' was his 'introjected dad'; and his 'rebellious underdog' was little Sigmund 'proving to his dad -- and to the world -- that he would find out all his dad's -- and his mom's -- private, most hidden sexual secrets -- with or without the help of his dad...and by transference extension -- with or without the help of his clients/patients, and the world at large.
Oh, yes. The memory. The conscious memory that has been so overlooked by so many psychoanalysts claiming to 'know all the hidden secrets of the mind'...And yet you all let Dr. Freud pull one over on you....as he pulled one over on himself...
Step out of Dr. Freud's 'false paradigm', gentlemen -- and gentlewomen.
Even Freud could -- and still continues to -- lead you down false corridors.
Even Freud could make serious 'false connections'.
Why would an 'archaeologist dig deep' if what he or she is looking for -- some 'supposedly hidden treasure' -- is sitting on the ground right in front of his or her eyes -- and nose?
Why would a psychoanalyst 'dig deep' into a client's unconscious if the answer to 'the riddle of the Sphynx' of the client's personality is lying right in front of the psychoanalyst's ears in an 'ignored', 'minimized', 'excluded' conscious early memory...
Note once again that I am partly Adlerian trained....and I would not have arrived at my own 'transference answer' to the riddle of the Sphynx of Freud's character if I had not been Adlerian trained. I superimposed 'Adlerian Lifestyle and Conscious Early Memory Theory' onto Classical Psychoanalysis.
Indeed, what I am doing here is superimposing the theoretical and therapeutic templates of all of Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, and Pre-Classical Freudian Theory -- right back where they belong on top of the template of Classical Psychoanalysis.
Because I am not -- at least in this essay -- and Hegel's Hotel in general -- an exclusionist. In the philosophy and psychology ideas, I am aiming to be much more of an inclusionist and an integrationist.
Now, obviously, I am going to exclude that which I do not believe to be important and/or value-laden. But most certainly, my flexibility, my liberal openess, is much greater than Freud's fixed, anal-retentive theoretical and therapeutic boundaries.
There is no one else in the world who is capable of doing what I am doing here for two reasons: 1. no one has exactly the same 'knowledge template' that I am carrying in my brain; and 2. just as importantly, no one is carrying exactly the same 'transference template' that I am carrying in my brain that demands that I push this story, that I push the integration of the history of Western Philosophy and Clinical Psychology to my vision and version of its evolutionary conclusion...push 'Hegel's Hotel' to its evolutionary conclusion...which will only be fleeting, because all essays are 'thought bites' that have a context in time and place, and even Hegel's Hotel which has already been in the works for 5 years since July, 2006, I believe, and I hope will be finished by March 3rd, 2012, will also be a six year 'thought bite' by the time it is finished if my estimate is accurate...with part of it aging -- like me...
Regarding my own personal transference template, consisting of a network of associated transference 'complexes' and/or 'neuroses', two of them seem to have associative connections with Freud's 'network of transference complexes and neuroses': 1. his 'father-transference complex'; and 2. his 'first conscious memory transference complex' in which he was evicted from the doorway of his parents' master bedroom for 'intruding' at the wrong time. My first conscious memory was very similar although connected with my friend's mother who was very angry at me for pushing her front doorbell more times 'than I should have, too early in the morning'.
Add these two transference similarities to my partial Adlerian training in 'interpreting conscious early memories' from an Adlerian 'lifesyle' perspective, and you have the three most important ingredients that explain why I have been better able to interpret Freud's 'first conscious memory-transference complex' better than anyone before me, particularly any 'Inside The Freudian Box Classical Psychoanalyst'.
Freud copied (introjected, identified with) his dad's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego' around the issue of 'exclusionism'.
And in similar fashion, Classical Psychoanalysis copied (introjected, identified with) Sigmund Freud's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego around this same issue of 'exclusionism'. That makes Classical Psychoanalysis a product of Sigmund Freud's own 'exclusionism-abandonment transference neurosis'.
For those of you who are not familiar with little Sigmund's first conscious memory, he 'busted in on his parents in their bedroom while they were doing the nasty'....and little Sigmund's father screamed at him to get out...(just as the woman/mother in my first conscious memory screamed at me to leave her front door).
A pretty understandable reaction by Sigmund's father...given the circumstances and his likely embarrassment, but that sure didn't help little Siggy any...He needed an explanation..
Indeed, little Siggy ended up spending the rest of his life -- via his transference complex -- vicariously trying to understand perfectly what exactly had transpired in his parents' bedroom...and he was certainly no stranger years and years later to 'his patients' resistance to telling the truth about their sexual secrets'... Indeed, from a transference perspective, he entirely expected it...It was 'deja-vu' for little Siggy turned big Sigmund...the beginning of a very long 'repetition compulsion' and 'mastery compulsion'.
Freud unconsciously re-created his own transference projection scene...the surrogate scene of his earliest conscious memory...The bed was 're-created' as the couch, and the female hysterical patients had become 'transference surrogates' to his mother lying on the bed...Was this his own private 'Oedipal Complex' playing itself out? Freud's own 'narcissistic transference fantasy' relative to 'surrogates' of his mother? Well, part of the transference component was certainly attached to his mother.
At what point the 'erotic' component of transference enters into the picture is a point of debate. Is the erotic component early childhood based, or does it enter into the picture as puberty turns on our 'sexual hormones'?
In DGB conceptuology, 'sublimation' is a 'transference projection phenomenon' first and foremost, with the 'sexual component' being a subset of the transference complex.
'Truth' often has two 'dialectical polar halves' attached to it, and it is very, very common for most of us to miss one of these 'polar halves'...In the family...in our schools...in our ruling political party, in the court system, in philosophy, in psychology...'the squeeky wheel gets the oil while the silent wheel remains in the Shadows of Non-Attention'...the dominant paradigm gets the sunshine, gets the spotlight, gets the goodies, while the 'invisible paradigm' gets lost in The Shadows of Non-Attention...not getting its share of the 'goodies'...and/or the 'equal rights' in many cases...
This was the philosophical brilliance of Anaxamander who foreshadowed the philosophy of Hegel, Derrida, and Foucault over two thousand years before the latter three philosophers came into existence. and this Freud could not see very well before, during, and after his abandonment of his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory. It is possible that Freud was at least partly 'overly naive' coming into 1896, or shortly thereafter...
Was he overly naive to believe that all his female hysterical patients had been either 'sexually assaulted' or 'manipulated' and 'seduced' as children? Or were some of his female clients manipulating and lying to him? Or both?
This could have been a significant part of Freud's theoretical and therapeutic dilemma back around 1896-1897? Was Freud right or wrong to take his female clients' assertions regarding their childhood history of sexual abuse at face value? And/or were some or all of his female clients hiding their own narcissistic sexual fantasies behind these assertions of childhood sexual abuse?
Or was there another over-riding disturbing network of political, economic, and professional factors? Did the men who had power over the future of Freud's career essentially intimidate and coerce Freud into 'shutting his story down, shutting his theory of childhood sexual abuse down'?
And what if Freud was getting a complicated and confusing mixture of clinical behaviors and symptoms? Freud's whole theory of 'repression' and 'the pleasure-unpleasure' theory hinged on the idea that his clients were 'hiding the unbearable past' from themselves through the process of 'repression' (excluding traumatic memories from their consciousness). Freud's whole theory leading up to 1896 rested on 'making these unconscious, repressed traumatic memories conscious'...And then presto, the 'hysterical symptom associated with the traumatic, repressed memory, now conscious again, disappeared!'
However, there were complications to this nice, tidy story, with a happy ending...
For example, sometimes a 'hysterical' (neurotic) patient could keep a therapist busy for a lifetime with the continual creation of a vast array of new physical symtoms...Just read the Anna O. case, and see how busy she kept pooer Dr. Joseph Breur in what is generally viewed as the 'first psychoanalytic case'...Not to mention when she started to have 'erotic fantasies' of poor, Dr. Breuer, and told him that she was 'carrying his child'! (Presumably, she wasn't.)
Then there were an assortment of other cases where patients were fantasizing having 'romantic-sexual liasions' with bosses' and the like...Human, all too human...
So you can maybe start to see how Freud was getting into an entangled mess between trying to sort out the workings of 'human sexual traumacy' vs. the workings of 'human sexual fantasy'. The one certainly did not necessarily preclude or exclude the other. But Freud was building up an 'either/or' case for the stronger of the two theories.
1. Repression of sexual traumacy/seduction/assault? Or;
2. Repression of sexual fantasy.
It should be noted that not all of Freud's (or Breuer's) patients traumacies were of a 'sexual' nature. Anna O. stopped drinking liguids when she saw her dog drinking out of her cup or bowel. This memory was brought back to her awareness through 'hypnosis' and 'the talking cure' and she started drinking again. But Freud was locked into the 'sexual etiology'. Breuer was a much more cautious, rational-empirical scientist than Freud and was far more careful than Freud with his generalizations and theories...
However, no-one heard much from Breuer after he and Freud split company. Breuer's theoretical caution was less exciting and less shocking than Freud's dramatic exclamations and explanations...It wasn't as 'newsworthy' as Freud's brash statements, and to be fair to Freud, not as creatively brilliant in many cases...It was Freud who wrote the 24 volume Standard Edition, not Breuer.
Freud was perplexed -- and amazed -- by women's (and men's) sexual secrets.
Aren't we all oftentimes?
Sexual traumacy or sexual fantasy?
What was going on? Which way was Freud to go? Stuck inside Aristotlean logic, he set the whole dichotomy up as an 'either/or' choice. Big mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistate in Freud's career -- at least on the theoretical front. What he needed to do -- and what he didn't do -- was to 'dialectically embrace' the alleged dichotomy and figure out how both sides of the quandry contributed to a larger, 'Bi-Polar, Dialectic Truth', or 'Dialectic Bi-Polar Wholism'.
Freud could see the one 'polar truth' before 1897 but not the other; then, slowly, after 1897, Freud could see the 'opposite polar truth' (wishful fantasy) but not the original one (traumacy, seduction, assault) that he had spent the first 10 years of his professional career learning. What was that if it was not 'professional repression'? The irony of the whole matter is that both existed before 1897, and both existed after 1897.
You show, or tell me, of one person who has lived on this earth for even 5 years who has not experienced the twin polarities of 'traumacy' and 'fantasy', and I will agree to the Freudian concept of 'repression'!
Back between the summer of 1896 and say 1905, it was Freud who was 'The Grand Represser'. (After 1905, he became 'The Grand Excluder' -- as in excluding anyone -- or any male -- from Psychoanalysis who didn't agree with his 'childhood sexuality' , 'sexual fantasy' and 'Oedipal Theory'.
Did political, economic, and professional 'convenience' or 'or perceived necessity' contort and distort and 'unobjectify' Freud's brain? Freud wouldn't be the first to succumb to such a pressure? I am not trying to make excuses for Freud, or even assert that this is what necessarily happened -- Masson put out such a 'theory' in the 1980s, and for this he lost his job and his career. Is it possible that Masson chose to not ethically back down -- where Freud did?
Nobody -- not men or women (Freud had no huge 'women's movement' supporting him back then) -- wanted to hear publicly about 'child sexual abuse' in the 1890s. It was easier to blame the child than it was to blame the father, or the uncle, or the family friend... And nothing had really changed by the 1980s. It was obvious that The Psychoanalytic Establishment still did not want to publicly talk about child sexual abuse when confronted Classical Psychoanalysis on this account. Worse still, was Masson 'theorizing' that it was quite possible/likely that 'Freud lost moral courage'.
Meanwhile, there was a huge article in The Globe and Mail less than a week ago saying that women in prision were not getting the 'mental health' help that they needed -- whereas there were more avenues along this line already in place for men in prison.
I believe the estimates of 'childhood sexual abuse' I saw in the article amongst women in prison and/or amongst other women seeking psychiatric help was up in the 50 percentile, or probably even significantly higher. There was something that was bringing these 'hysterical women' or 'neurotic women with physical symptoms that seemed to go hand in hand with their mental processes' into Freud's practice in the 1890s, and it wasn't all about their 'repressed or suppressed erotic fantasies' (although this did seem to often play a part).
And still in the 1980s, The Psychoanalytic Establishment did not want to talk about how Freud's Oedipal Complex was leading analysts away from diagnosing 'real childhood sexual abuse', not 'figments of their patients Oedipal imagination'.
This might 'defame' Freud's character to say that Freud made such a huge theoretical, diagnostic, and therapeutic blunder! Is it any different today in 2011 or is The Psychoanalytic Establishment still hanging on with a 'Classical Freudian Oedipal hanging on pitbull bite'? Perhaps the more Psychoanalysts who move into Object Relations and Self Psychology, the less they have to stand up as an organization and actually publicly confront this 'ugly' problem.
I still like, and have no problem of using, The Oedipal Complex in my own theoretical work. But not to the 'literal' sense that Freud did. And not to the extent of 'diagnostically and therapeutically distorting a client's childhood reality'.
Economic, political, legal, and professional pressures can have a huge impact in all of us -- and turn us all away from 'the truth', at least as we personally believe in it.
How many of us don't engage in this type of practise every single day we go to work when we tell our boss 'what he or she wants to hear' or conversely, 'suppress' telling him or her what he or she doesn't want to hear?
How can we expect anyone to 'engage in freedom of speech' and 'tell his or her boss' what they really believe when the 'unemployment line' looms so large -- particularly in a bad recession -- as a 'very real factual possibility, a factual truth'?
It was very possible that Freud was no different. But since we are dealing with -- and 'speculating' about -- what 'was going through Freud's own mind at the time' -- none of us will ever know definitively. That is one secret -- his 'ethical innocence and/or guilt' -- that Freud probably took to the grave with him. Now, the 'ethical ramifications' of his decision still lies out in the open - - or at least partly in the open -- for all to see, and judge. Nobody -- other than a working pscyhoanalyst (and his or her clients) -- knows exactly what transpires behind closed psychoanalytic doors... and how many psychoanalysts may actually believe in the client experiential 'validity' of childhood and/or teenage sexual manipulation/assault, in this case, that case, or in many cases....and still 'tow the public company pathological anal-retentive Freudian Oedipal line'...
Not too many of us will ever know that realm of 'psychoanalytic-client privacy' as well...unless psychoanlysts and/or clients start going public with their personal stories... I'm not counting on it...
At best, Freud was too much an Aristotlean 'either/or' thinker, who couldn't get his head around 'dialectic engagement and integration'. He had the right idea with the concept of 'compromise formations'.
However, he didn't properly understand the dynamics of the transference except in his own 'tightly restricted, anal-retentive paradigm' of 'relationship transference between therapist and client'. Brian Bird hadn't written his paper on the 'universality of the transference' yet. That wouldn't happen until the 1960s.
Because of Freud's 'abandonment of the traumacy-seduction theory' and his evolving 'fixation' with 'fantasy theory', Freud -- nor any psychoanalytic theorist since -- until me -- has centred on the concept of 'transference memory'. (Actually, I have to give significant creative and chonological credit to both Alfred Adler, founder of Adlerian Psychology and the creator of the idea of 'conscious early memories as lifestyle memomies', as well as Arthur Janov, author of 'The Primal Scream').
In Psychoanalysis, we hear of 'transference relationships' but we never hear about 'transference encounters' -- and by logical association -- 'transference memories' (concious and/or unconscious).
Yet here is the future of Classical Psychoanalysis -- if Classical Psychoanalysis is to have any future.
From the idea of 'dialectic engagement, negotiation, and integration' -- comes the name of 'Quantum' Psychaoanalysis -- just as previously, in the realm of Physics, and 'thermogenics' -- 'particle' theory was integrated with its anti-thesis, 'wave' theory, to get 'Quantum Theory'.
Likewise here, 'Traumacy-Seduction-Manipulation-Assault' Theory becomes integrated with 'Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory' to become 'Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
We have heard that every 'killer returns to the scene of his crime'. I don't know how true it is or not. But the same idea applies here.
Because, metaphorically and symbolically speaking, every 'neurotically traumatized child' returns to the scene of his 'childhood traumacy-transference scene' over and over and over again...This is what Freud ended up calling the 'repetition compulsion'. But Freud didn't properly understand the repetition complulsion -- he almost did with his concept of 'the mastery compulsion' but perhaps thought he was getting too close to 'Adlerian Theory' (the inferiority complex and superiority striving). Instead, Freud made the mistake of connecting the repetition compulsion to his evolving idea of 'The Death Instinct' (Beyond The Pleaaure Principle, 1920).
The repetition compulsion is often tied to 'death', 'destruction', and/or 'self-destruction', but only in the context of 'psychologically fighting for life', and the 'healing' of one's 'traumatic-transference neurosis'.
The traumatic-transference progression and/or regression goes like this: 1. chilhood traumacy; 2. 'Traumacy-tranference Memory'; 3. 'Compensation', 'Master Compulsion'; and 4. the creation of a 'Traumacy-Transference Fantasy Template' often 'cathected' with romantic and/or sexual energy of a supreme force; that is 5. 'Projected onto an adult 'surrogate transference figure' and this transference erotic love fantasy reigns supreme until one day, one's adult 'surrogate transference lover 'rejects us' in a style that unconsciously on purpose reminds us of our initial childhood traumacy-transference rejection, and childhood traumacy transference rejector (abandoner, betrayer, excluder, assaulter, manipulator...); and then 6. we suddenly and radically change 180 degrees in our thinking and feeling, like Freud did in 1896, and enter a 'heavy negative transference phase' of our 'transference love relationship' ,'heavily cathected with childhood negative energy'; and often end up 7. 'doing unto our rejector what our childhood and/or adult rejector did unto us, or we think our adult surrogate transference figure is about to do to us'...This is what I call 'negative transference identification', 'identification with the rejector, abandoner, betrayer, assaulter, aggressor, manipuator, excluder'.... and it often ends many 'transfernce relationships... This is what I call our full 'transference complex, neurosis, and/or game'. (as in Berne's 'Games People Play' -- meaning for the most part, 'The Positive and Negative Transference Games That We Play'...To stop playing the game (which many people don't want to do because of its heavy romantic-sexual component), we have to come to a full conscious understanding of the psycho-dyanmics of our trnasference complex/neurosis/game, and be able to consciousl choose to 'get off the transference ferris wheel, off the transference roller coaster, off the transference merry-go-round', which by the time we finish our unique, particular good and bad ride is often not very 'merry'....
Freud never got here...although he came close sometimes in different ways...'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896; 'The Dynamics of The Transference', 1912; 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' 1920...
The psycho-sexual secrets of men and women...
Did not usually come easy to Freud,
Nor to any psychotherapist,
Like a Christmas present from client to therapist, with a nice, neat, tidy ribbon and bow attached to it...
No, more often these secrets come together from different 'life experiences, built into psychological compensatory pieces -- woven together, subconsciously into a psycho-sexual transfernce whole'...
It is not only where we have come from with our childhoood transferences, but also, where we are trying to get to subconsiously or unconsciously, in order to 'subjectively feel more whole again'...
But Freud already knew this deep in his own subconscious,
He just couldn't quite completely figure out the psycho-dynamics of his own unconscious (or was unwilling to publicly share all of his private awenesses)...
Regardless, for his clients too, he couldn't quite put all their different psychological pieces together,
Trying as hard -- indeed, obsessing as hard -- as he did....
Where did this 'transference obsession' come from?
From the first time he busted...
Into his parents' bedroom,
This is why Freud's first conscious memory can easily be declared...
The 'first true case of Psychoanalysis'...
-- dgb, Jan. 30th-31st, Feb. 1st, Feb. 3rd., 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Posted by david gordon bain at 10:39 AM 0 comments
Now, I am in a bit of a quandry here. I need to do some explaining before I start this ambitious enterprise.
Firstly, I am not a psychoanalyst. I have never seen a psychoanalyst, and never stepped a foot inside a psychoanalytic training session.
Why? Probably money, period. Psychoanalysis has set itself up as an 'aristocratic psychology' -- a 'psychology for the rich' -- and/or that is the stereotype that it has created for itself. To me, this is unfortunate. This in itself restricts Psychoanalysis' potential growth -- theoretically, therapeutically, culturally, and class-wise.
Furthermore, what Freud started, and what The Psychoanalytic Establishment continues to support and maintain -- is a psychology of 'exclusionism'.
This is highly ironic and paradoxical because in my 35 years or so of studying psychology that runs through Humanistic Psychology (Rogers, Maslow, May, Fromm...), Cognitive Therapy (Maltz, Ellis, Beck, Frank, Kelly, Korzybski, Hayakawa, Branden, Rand, Meichenbaum...), Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, et al...), Adlerian Psychology (Adler, Dreikeurs, Mosak...) Transactional Analysis (Berne), and Psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, Masson...), if there is one thing I have learned, it is probably this: that most if not all varieties of human neurosis, psychosis, and psychopathology usually start with the individual's perception -- real and/or imagined -- of some form of 'social/family/school/cultural/racist/sexist/ exclusionism'.
Human neurosis can generally be summed up in the sentence: 'I am not wanted here, not invited, not liked, not accepted, not appreciated, not acknowleged, not relevant...
Transactional Analysis summed up the overarching idea above under two polar headings: 1. You're okay, I'm not okay'; 2. I'm okay, you're not okay'; or the two condensed together: 3. You're not okay, I'm not okay.
This applies to Freud himself just as much as it applies to anyone and everyone else...
Freud once said that you had/have to be a psychoanalyst in order to properly understand what comes out of 'the depths of the unconscious' and particularly the 'dynamics of repression'. I say, Well, repression is still a very controversial concept and subject matter that sometimes (often) defies what most would call 'good rational-empiricism'. It can easily become a 'circular concept' with no apparent foundational basis except in the eyes and ears of the theorist who 'believes in the existence of repression'.
A psychoanalyist says, 'You are repressed.' You reply, 'I am not repressed.' And the psychoanalyst then uses your 'resistance' as further evidence that 'you are repressed'.
How do you ever 'prove' the existence of a 'repression' except for the psychoanalyst's 'interpretation' as such, and how do you distinguish it from a much more common and more easily validated concept/phenomenon of 'suppression' or even 'dissociation'?
All of the concepts of 'suppression', 'subconscious', and 'dissociation' have much more 'tangible rational empiricism' attached to them than Freud's concept of 'repression' -- or even 'unconscious'.
I use the term 'unconscious' but often hesitatingly, and generally speaking, I am much more comfortable with the concept of 'subconscious'. I don't think I will ever use the concept of 'repression'. I believe in 'the psychology of defense' but, generally speaking, I do not support the 'psychology of repression'.
Does this take me out of the 'domain of Psychoanalysis'? The Psychoanalytic Establishment would obviously say 'yes' immediately, further supported by the fact that I have no formal training in Psychoanalysis. But The Psychoanalytic Establishment and Institute is partly like 'Hotel California' -- once you get in, you become 'locked into their particular paradigm' which includes Freud's own 'transference neurosis relative to his father'.
When Freud was alive, you had to be like Melanie Klein (no one els was) -- female and perceived as non-threatening -- in order to 'break through the wall of Freud's paradigm' -- and no man has 'broken through the neurotic paradigm of Freud's father-transference neurosis in Classical Psychoanalysis' unless he has either left Psychoanalysis completely (Adler, Jung, Reich, Rank, Ferenczi, Horney, Sullivan, Erickson, Fromm, Perls, Masson...and many more...) or followed 'Melanie Klein's skirt' into the paradigm of Object Relations and Self-Psychology.
Most of Object Relations and all of Self-Psychology developed after Freud had died. But for a few years, it seems possible that there was perhaps a 'running positive dialectic' between Freud and Melanie Klein where Freud may have actually been partly influenced by Klein's work in a way that Pierre Janet never could. You see, 'Object Relations' -- a 'sub-school' of Psychoanalysis -- founded mainly by Melanie Klein, was an extension of Pierre Janet's ideas of 'the splitting of the ego', 'the alter-ego', and 'the dissociated personality' where 'ego' and 'alter-ego' are 'dissociated', 'alientated', 'disconnected' from each other. It is from Janet's ideas -- not Freud's (indeed, Freud fought long and hard against Janet's ideas (Too bad Janet wasn't a woman) -- that the book and movie 'Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde' were at least partly born from.
With all due respect to Freud, the idea of 'the splitting of the ego' which Freud finally acknowledged and accepted towards the end of his career -- and stated that the idea seemed both strangely old and new at the same time (I wonder why) -- and the associated ideas of 'alter-ego' and 'dissociation between opposing ego-states' -- all of these ideas were much more 'theoretically and therapeutically useful' (at least in this author's strong editorial opinion) than Freud's 'hanging on concept' of 'repression'.
Perhaps even 'the Id' should be viewed as having an 'ego-state' extension that I would/do call 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic (selfish, egotistic, sensual, sexual) Ego' ('DNE' for short). The DNE can in turn be 'split' into 'The DNS' and 'The DNU' -- i.e., 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underdog or Underego', and 'The Dionysian-Narcissistic Topdog or Superego'. Thus, you can have 'vertical splits' and 'horizontal splits' in the personality: 'superego' vs. 'underego' being an example of a 'vertical power split', and 'Approval-Seeking Underego' vs. 'Dionsysian-Narcissistic Underego' being an example of a 'horizontal power split'.
In my frame of thinking following this line of thinking, I differentiate between 'six auxilliary ego-states' and 'one Central (Mediating, Executive) Ego.
...........................................................................................................
The Gap-DGB Integrative (Psychoanalytic) Model of The Psyche
The six auxilliary ego-states are:
1. The Nurturing-Supportive Superego (NSS);
2. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Superego (DNS);
3. The Righteous-Rejecting Superego (RRS);
4. The Approval-Seeking Underego (ASU);
5. The Dionysian-Narcissistic Underego (DNU);
6. The Righteous-Rejecting (Rebellious) Underego (RRU).
And the main decision-making ego-state is...
7. The Central (Mediating-Executive) Ego (CE)
Working downwards into the subconscious/unconscious, we have
8. The Dream Catcher/Weaver (DCW);
9. The Shadow-Id (Secret Interests) (SI)
10. The Personal Transference-Lifestyle Template (PTLT);
11. The Mythological-Symbolic Archetype Template (MSAT)
12. The Genetic Potential Self Template (GPST);
13. The Undifferentiated to Differentiated (Multi-Bi-Polar) Template (UD-MBP-T)
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The difference between 'repression' and 'suppression' is extremely important because it is easy to conflate, condense, and confuse the two together.
I 'suppress' what I am afraid to ask or tell you -- the concept of 'suppression' is easily validated by self-experience. But 'suppression' implies that I know very well what I want to ask or tell you. In the case of a 'suppressed memory' as opposed to a 'repressed memory', I remember the 'memory' all too clearly -- I am just embarrassed and/or otherwise reluctant to share it with you. A 'repressed memory' implies that I don't remember the memory at all -- which raises doubts about its very existence or is it a 'conceptual construction' created by Freud to explain a phenomena that he couldn't otherwise explain (such as hysteria, or anxiety neurosis, or obsessional neurosis...)?
For much of Freud's career, Freud viewed 'repression' as 'the defense' associated with ALL human neurosis, until he finally realized -- or admitted -- that were many other 'psychological defenses' at man's disposal such as: introjection, identification, projection, displacement, denial, transference, dissociation, retroflection (which is used a lot in Gestalt Therapy) and one that Adler added which is much more important to the etiology of neurosis, and more pervasive than Freud's concept of repression -- and that is the concept of 'compensation'. But even more important and pervasive to the etiology of all neurosis is the concept of 'transference'.
I see 'transference' as the over or under-riding 'defense mechanism' in all neuroses, and every other defense mechanism is a subset of transference.
I distinguish between: 'identification transferences', 'introjective transferences', 'projective transferences', 'compensatory transferences', 'positive transferences', 'negative transferences', 'oral transferences', 'anal transferences', 'genital transferences', 'distancing transferences', 'anal-schizoid transferences', 'anal-rejecting transferences', 'oral-nurturing transferences', 'narcissistic transferences', 'anti-narcissistic transferences', 'altruistic transferences', 'impulse-desire-fantasy transferences', 'impulse-restraint transferences' 'anxiety transferences', 'rebellious transferences', 'violent transferences'... and on and on we could go...
The concept of 'transference' is totally Psychoanalysis as are the concepts of 'narcissism', 'defense', 'projection', 'introjection', 'identification', and most of the other concepts listed above. So how can you call my work anything but 'psychoanalytic' other than perhaps the 'extensions' and 'disagreements' that I have with The Psychoanalytic Establishment...And oh yes, my 'lack of formal training' -- or shall we call that 'brain-washing'?
So call me an 'underground psychoanalytic theorist' if you will -- operating outside the walls of The Psychoanalytic Establishment, and even operating outside of 'The Academic Establishment'. I admire Spinoza's philosophical approach: Don't lock me into any kind of 'Establishment' that is going to try to 'muzzle my thinking' -- or at least the 'public demonstration of my thinking' .
As soon as you become affiliated with any kind of 'organization' or 'institution' or 'political party' or 'religious denomination' or 'corporation' or 'school of thought', you become subject -- and often a 'slave' -- to the organization's agenda and particular brand of 'group think'.
At times 'group think' can be 'enlivening' and 'multi-dialectically challenging and evolutionary'. But this is probably by far the exception rather than the rule. Much more often, 'group think' becomes synonomous with 'no think' or thinking inside a 'stagnant paradigm', or worse a 'dangerous or even evil paradigm'.
The worst cases of 'group think' that come quickly to mind are 'Nazi Germany', 'McCarthyism', 'Witch Hunting', 'The Reign of Terror', any form of 'racial cleansing', 'stereotyping', 'discrimination', 'reverse-discrimination', 'religious extremism', 'political extremism', 'righteous trash-talking', any form of 'supremacy thinking that is socially divisive and exclusionist, let alone violent', 'narcissistic collusions that are non-democratic and exclusionist', 'political and corporate conflict of interests', 'lobbyist special-interest groups that do not have to face up to their 'bi-polar, anti-special interest group' in an open, democratic forum. (All lobbyist groups should have to operate through public, open, democratic forums.)
Back to 'Psychoanalysis'...
In the case of a 'conscious' memory, a 'conscious memory' can also be called a 'subconscious memory' if it is 'psychodynamically alive' in our subconscious (or even in our unconscious) and yet, if someone asks us to recall this particular memory, we can usually recall it within a few minutes, given the right 'prompter' and/or 'association'.
So 'defining' Psychoanalysis can be -- indeed, usually is -- a very subjective, narcissistic-righteous matter.
Freud had a very 'anal-retentive' habit of defining it 'extremely tightly' according to his own parameters (which paradoxically sometimes changed 180 degrees like his still controversial switchover from 'The Traumacy-Seduction Theory' to 'The Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory'). If Freud had said 'the world was flat', I am sure that would have been included in 'The Freudian Bible of Classical Psychoanalysis'.
Freud did a brutal job (meaning no job) of reconciling his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory with his post 1897 evolving Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Symbolic-Oedipal Theory. He just 'dumped' the first as if it never existed -- that it came from nowhere -- and then developed an 'opposite thesis'. I guess he could do that fairly easily because in 1897 he had no following -- just three volumes of work in The Standard 24 volume Edition to support his work during this time period, and Joseph Breuer 'one too many evenings and a thousand miles left behind'...
But that is why you have me here: to integrate what Freud did not know how to properly integrate. Dialectically integrate. That is why you have me 'trumpeting' the metaphorical structure of Hegel's Hotel as a larger and more useful 'multi-dialectic-humanistic-existential, philosophical and psychological paradigm' -- than 'Freud's Classical Hotel'.
If I am coming down hard on Freud here -- like thousands before me -- it is not because I do not respect Freud. Because I do. Indeed, I believe that he was one of the creatively most brilliant thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. But this still doesn't mean that he wasn't commonly -- wrong. And stuck inside a cultural Victorian paradigm, not to mention the theoretical paradigms of his own making.
In Victorian society, masturbation was commonly -- and/or at least publicly -- viewed as 'self-abuse'. So for Freud, stuck inside this Victorian paradigm, ending such 'neuroses' as 'neurasthenia' (chronic depleted energy) would logically involve 'stopping self abuse' -- i.e., stopping masturbation. (Maybe the opposite prescription might have been more appropriate.) In Victorian culture, 'castration anxiety' sounds like it was a very real -- and scary -- phenomenon, especially for a small boy growing up. 'If you keep wanking your thing there, little Siggy, daddy's going to cut it off!'
Personally, I think I partly understand Freud better than he understood himself -- and a thousand psychoanalysts after him have purported to understand him, such as the one and only Ernest Jones -- because such 'biographers' of Freud were all 'psychoanalyzing' Freud according to Freud's own theoretical parameters and assumptions. 'Towing the company' line if you will. 'Upholding the corporate image'. 'Giving Freud -- and all psychoanalysts -- what he and they wanted to hear.'
How can you possibly get any kind of significantly different understanding of Freud unless you have someone who is willing and/or able to see some of the 'deficiencies', 'liabilities', and 'limitations' of these same parameters and assumptions that Freud -- and all Classical Psychoanalysts -- have been locked inside for over 100 years?
I like 'Hegel's Hotel' better than 'Freud's Hotel' because Hegel's Hotel incorporates a better assortment of assumptions, parameters, paradigms, and 'glasses' than those that Freud was using at the time he was theorizing, and that essentially all, or most, Classical Psychoanalysts -- like 'good corporate employees' -- have been using since.
This is not to say that Classical Psychoanalysis has not evolved since Freud died -- it's just that some of the most important assumptions that Freud was using -- and that Classical Psychoanalysis continues to use with little to no modifications and/or updated extensions since Freud died -- are also some of his most flawed assumptions. Like 'Childhood Sexuality Theory' and 'Fantasy Theory' and 'Oedipal Theory'-- without their bipolar 'alter-ego' theory: 'Traumacy-Seduction-Assault Theory'.
The two theories are still clamoring to be integrated. And without trying to be arrogant, I am probably the only theorist with enough of the right type of 'outside knowledge' and (read Adlerian Theory, Gestalt Theory, Transactional Analysis Theory...) -- and internal focus and creativity -- to properly do it.
If this makes me an 'egotist' and/or a 'narcissist', I can live with that. So was Freud. So was Masson. So are most professional athletes. You have to be an 'egotist' to get to the top of whatever 'mountain' you are trying to climb.
Like Ayn Rand would write, that simply means that /I/you/we believe in the strength and power of my/your/our skills and abilities....the skills and abilities that can make us all 'Supermen' and/or 'Superwomen' to the upper threshold of how high these skills and abilities can take us, just as long as we work hard enough, persevere enough, and meet the challenge of any and all obstacles in order to to get to where we want to go...our 'end visualization', our 'end fantasy', whatever that might be...
Not too many 'classical psychoanalysts' had'have the courage to 'think outside the classical box' -- at least publicly -- and if they did/do, then they were/are no longer likely considered to be 'Classical Psychoanalysts'. In Spinozian style, they were/are 'ex-communicated'. They were/are -- 'excluded'. Just look at Masson's rebellion against Freud in the 1980s. Masson stood up for what he believed was right -- and for that -- he is no longer a 'Psychoanalyst', let alone 'The Project Director of The Freud Archives'.
But alas things can change. Resentments can smooth over. 'Dissociations' can 'melt away', given the right circumstances, over time -- and 'bridges' and 'integrations' can start to take their place.
This is Hegel's World. This is Hegel's Hotel. 'Thesis'. 'Anti-thesis'. And finally -- 'synthesis'...'integration'...'either/or', 'right or wrong' melting away into a more harmonious, dialectic union...Perhaps with an 'agreement to disagree'. Or perhaps with a 'compromise towards the middle'. But most importantly, with more 'tolerance' and 'acceptance' for the right of any individual to 'disagree' with 'group think'. And not to be condemned for this...ex-communicated...excluded...
Freud was The Great Excluder...
I wrote already that he got this 'transference-characteristic' from his dad...
How come Freud couldn't see this clearly? Or could he? How come most Classical Psychoanalysts 'minimized' the 'negative transference' relationship between Freud and his dad? Or couldn't see it -- and worse, what the negative repercussions on Classical Psychoanalysis were.
Why? Because most Psychoanalysts -- read in particular Ernest Jones (his biography of Freud) -- did what Freud did. And Freud 'minimized' his dad. Sigmund 'excluded' his dad like his dad excluded -- and minimized -- little Siggy.
Most academics agree that the case of 'Anna O' is the first 'case' of Psychoanalyis. I agree -- in part.
But the 'template' case -- the case on which all of Psychoanalysis rests -- is little Sigmund's first, early childhood -- conscious -- memory.
And Freud -- and thousands of psychoanalysts -- continue to 'walk right around this first conscious memory of little Sigmund', like 'lemmings that follow their leader over a cliff'. I am partly sorry if I am coming across as being overly harsh here, or 'unfair to some more rebellious, individual thinking, psychoanalysts' but in the end we are all responsible and accountable for our own personal and collective 'transference neuroses' -- and doing something about them -- otherwise, why call 'Psychoanalysis' a 'first-rate form of psychotherapy'?
Psychoanalysts have to start thinking about 'conscious early memories' not as 'screen memories' that both hide and allude to other more important 'repressed memories and/or fantasies' but rather as important 'transference memories' in and by themselves. And for that, Psychoanalysts can thank Adler indirectly -- through me. Because what I am doing here is essentially turning 'Adlerian lifestyle and conscious early memory theory' back into an 'updated' form of 'Classical Transference Theory'. Which is so psychodynamically different than 'standard Freudian Classical Transference Theory' that many would ask, how can it possibly be called 'Classical' -- in which case I propose the alternative names of 'Quantum-Integrative Transference Theory' and 'Quantum-Integrative Psychoanalysis'.
'Screen Memories' (1899) is the worst paper that Freud ever wrote -- and Jones loved it....lap, lap, lap... while as Masson argued and I am paraphrasing, Freud was starting to 'conflate' and 'confuse' 'symbolic dream and fantasy material' with 'cold, hard, remembered reality'.
I am sure that Jones had his character strengths -- he did, I believe, support the growth and career of Fritz Perls when Freud wanted nothing to do with Perls because of the latter's 'rebellious' paper on 'Oral (as opposed to 'Anal') Resistances...
Freud excluded and excommunicated all significant 'male rebellers' just like his father 'excluded and excommunicated' little Sigmund...
Freud was a great rebel himself -- but once he achieved power -- he squashed all masculine rebellion in his ranks... This was a major part of his 'topdog/underdog transference bi-polarity and neurosis'... His 'excluding topdog' was his 'introjected dad'; and his 'rebellious underdog' was little Sigmund 'proving to his dad -- and to the world -- that he would find out all his dad's -- and his mom's -- private, most hidden sexual secrets -- with or without the help of his dad...and by transference extension -- with or without the help of his clients/patients, and the world at large.
Oh, yes. The memory. The conscious memory that has been so overlooked by so many psychoanalysts claiming to 'know all the hidden secrets of the mind'...And yet you all let Dr. Freud pull one over on you....as he pulled one over on himself...
Step out of Dr. Freud's 'false paradigm', gentlemen -- and gentlewomen.
Even Freud could -- and still continues to -- lead you down false corridors.
Even Freud could make serious 'false connections'.
Why would an 'archaeologist dig deep' if what he or she is looking for -- some 'supposedly hidden treasure' -- is sitting on the ground right in front of his or her eyes -- and nose?
Why would a psychoanalyst 'dig deep' into a client's unconscious if the answer to 'the riddle of the Sphynx' of the client's personality is lying right in front of the psychoanalyst's ears in an 'ignored', 'minimized', 'excluded' conscious early memory...
Note once again that I am partly Adlerian trained....and I would not have arrived at my own 'transference answer' to the riddle of the Sphynx of Freud's character if I had not been Adlerian trained. I superimposed 'Adlerian Lifestyle and Conscious Early Memory Theory' onto Classical Psychoanalysis.
Indeed, what I am doing here is superimposing the theoretical and therapeutic templates of all of Adlerian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, and Pre-Classical Freudian Theory -- right back where they belong on top of the template of Classical Psychoanalysis.
Because I am not -- at least in this essay -- and Hegel's Hotel in general -- an exclusionist. In the philosophy and psychology ideas, I am aiming to be much more of an inclusionist and an integrationist.
Now, obviously, I am going to exclude that which I do not believe to be important and/or value-laden. But most certainly, my flexibility, my liberal openess, is much greater than Freud's fixed, anal-retentive theoretical and therapeutic boundaries.
There is no one else in the world who is capable of doing what I am doing here for two reasons: 1. no one has exactly the same 'knowledge template' that I am carrying in my brain; and 2. just as importantly, no one is carrying exactly the same 'transference template' that I am carrying in my brain that demands that I push this story, that I push the integration of the history of Western Philosophy and Clinical Psychology to my vision and version of its evolutionary conclusion...push 'Hegel's Hotel' to its evolutionary conclusion...which will only be fleeting, because all essays are 'thought bites' that have a context in time and place, and even Hegel's Hotel which has already been in the works for 5 years since July, 2006, I believe, and I hope will be finished by March 3rd, 2012, will also be a six year 'thought bite' by the time it is finished if my estimate is accurate...with part of it aging -- like me...
Regarding my own personal transference template, consisting of a network of associated transference 'complexes' and/or 'neuroses', two of them seem to have associative connections with Freud's 'network of transference complexes and neuroses': 1. his 'father-transference complex'; and 2. his 'first conscious memory transference complex' in which he was evicted from the doorway of his parents' master bedroom for 'intruding' at the wrong time. My first conscious memory was very similar although connected with my friend's mother who was very angry at me for pushing her front doorbell more times 'than I should have, too early in the morning'.
Add these two transference similarities to my partial Adlerian training in 'interpreting conscious early memories' from an Adlerian 'lifesyle' perspective, and you have the three most important ingredients that explain why I have been better able to interpret Freud's 'first conscious memory-transference complex' better than anyone before me, particularly any 'Inside The Freudian Box Classical Psychoanalyst'.
Freud copied (introjected, identified with) his dad's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego' around the issue of 'exclusionism'.
And in similar fashion, Classical Psychoanalysis copied (introjected, identified with) Sigmund Freud's 'rejecting topdog/object/superego around this same issue of 'exclusionism'. That makes Classical Psychoanalysis a product of Sigmund Freud's own 'exclusionism-abandonment transference neurosis'.
For those of you who are not familiar with little Sigmund's first conscious memory, he 'busted in on his parents in their bedroom while they were doing the nasty'....and little Sigmund's father screamed at him to get out...(just as the woman/mother in my first conscious memory screamed at me to leave her front door).
A pretty understandable reaction by Sigmund's father...given the circumstances and his likely embarrassment, but that sure didn't help little Siggy any...He needed an explanation..
Indeed, little Siggy ended up spending the rest of his life -- via his transference complex -- vicariously trying to understand perfectly what exactly had transpired in his parents' bedroom...and he was certainly no stranger years and years later to 'his patients' resistance to telling the truth about their sexual secrets'... Indeed, from a transference perspective, he entirely expected it...It was 'deja-vu' for little Siggy turned big Sigmund...the beginning of a very long 'repetition compulsion' and 'mastery compulsion'.
Freud unconsciously re-created his own transference projection scene...the surrogate scene of his earliest conscious memory...The bed was 're-created' as the couch, and the female hysterical patients had become 'transference surrogates' to his mother lying on the bed...Was this his own private 'Oedipal Complex' playing itself out? Freud's own 'narcissistic transference fantasy' relative to 'surrogates' of his mother? Well, part of the transference component was certainly attached to his mother.
At what point the 'erotic' component of transference enters into the picture is a point of debate. Is the erotic component early childhood based, or does it enter into the picture as puberty turns on our 'sexual hormones'?
In DGB conceptuology, 'sublimation' is a 'transference projection phenomenon' first and foremost, with the 'sexual component' being a subset of the transference complex.
'Truth' often has two 'dialectical polar halves' attached to it, and it is very, very common for most of us to miss one of these 'polar halves'...In the family...in our schools...in our ruling political party, in the court system, in philosophy, in psychology...'the squeeky wheel gets the oil while the silent wheel remains in the Shadows of Non-Attention'...the dominant paradigm gets the sunshine, gets the spotlight, gets the goodies, while the 'invisible paradigm' gets lost in The Shadows of Non-Attention...not getting its share of the 'goodies'...and/or the 'equal rights' in many cases...
This was the philosophical brilliance of Anaxamander who foreshadowed the philosophy of Hegel, Derrida, and Foucault over two thousand years before the latter three philosophers came into existence. and this Freud could not see very well before, during, and after his abandonment of his pre-1897 Traumacy-Seduction Theory. It is possible that Freud was at least partly 'overly naive' coming into 1896, or shortly thereafter...
Was he overly naive to believe that all his female hysterical patients had been either 'sexually assaulted' or 'manipulated' and 'seduced' as children? Or were some of his female clients manipulating and lying to him? Or both?
This could have been a significant part of Freud's theoretical and therapeutic dilemma back around 1896-1897? Was Freud right or wrong to take his female clients' assertions regarding their childhood history of sexual abuse at face value? And/or were some or all of his female clients hiding their own narcissistic sexual fantasies behind these assertions of childhood sexual abuse?
Or was there another over-riding disturbing network of political, economic, and professional factors? Did the men who had power over the future of Freud's career essentially intimidate and coerce Freud into 'shutting his story down, shutting his theory of childhood sexual abuse down'?
And what if Freud was getting a complicated and confusing mixture of clinical behaviors and symptoms? Freud's whole theory of 'repression' and 'the pleasure-unpleasure' theory hinged on the idea that his clients were 'hiding the unbearable past' from themselves through the process of 'repression' (excluding traumatic memories from their consciousness). Freud's whole theory leading up to 1896 rested on 'making these unconscious, repressed traumatic memories conscious'...And then presto, the 'hysterical symptom associated with the traumatic, repressed memory, now conscious again, disappeared!'
However, there were complications to this nice, tidy story, with a happy ending...
For example, sometimes a 'hysterical' (neurotic) patient could keep a therapist busy for a lifetime with the continual creation of a vast array of new physical symtoms...Just read the Anna O. case, and see how busy she kept pooer Dr. Joseph Breur in what is generally viewed as the 'first psychoanalytic case'...Not to mention when she started to have 'erotic fantasies' of poor, Dr. Breuer, and told him that she was 'carrying his child'! (Presumably, she wasn't.)
Then there were an assortment of other cases where patients were fantasizing having 'romantic-sexual liasions' with bosses' and the like...Human, all too human...
So you can maybe start to see how Freud was getting into an entangled mess between trying to sort out the workings of 'human sexual traumacy' vs. the workings of 'human sexual fantasy'. The one certainly did not necessarily preclude or exclude the other. But Freud was building up an 'either/or' case for the stronger of the two theories.
1. Repression of sexual traumacy/seduction/assault? Or;
2. Repression of sexual fantasy.
It should be noted that not all of Freud's (or Breuer's) patients traumacies were of a 'sexual' nature. Anna O. stopped drinking liguids when she saw her dog drinking out of her cup or bowel. This memory was brought back to her awareness through 'hypnosis' and 'the talking cure' and she started drinking again. But Freud was locked into the 'sexual etiology'. Breuer was a much more cautious, rational-empirical scientist than Freud and was far more careful than Freud with his generalizations and theories...
However, no-one heard much from Breuer after he and Freud split company. Breuer's theoretical caution was less exciting and less shocking than Freud's dramatic exclamations and explanations...It wasn't as 'newsworthy' as Freud's brash statements, and to be fair to Freud, not as creatively brilliant in many cases...It was Freud who wrote the 24 volume Standard Edition, not Breuer.
Freud was perplexed -- and amazed -- by women's (and men's) sexual secrets.
Aren't we all oftentimes?
Sexual traumacy or sexual fantasy?
What was going on? Which way was Freud to go? Stuck inside Aristotlean logic, he set the whole dichotomy up as an 'either/or' choice. Big mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistate in Freud's career -- at least on the theoretical front. What he needed to do -- and what he didn't do -- was to 'dialectically embrace' the alleged dichotomy and figure out how both sides of the quandry contributed to a larger, 'Bi-Polar, Dialectic Truth', or 'Dialectic Bi-Polar Wholism'.
Freud could see the one 'polar truth' before 1897 but not the other; then, slowly, after 1897, Freud could see the 'opposite polar truth' (wishful fantasy) but not the original one (traumacy, seduction, assault) that he had spent the first 10 years of his professional career learning. What was that if it was not 'professional repression'? The irony of the whole matter is that both existed before 1897, and both existed after 1897.
You show, or tell me, of one person who has lived on this earth for even 5 years who has not experienced the twin polarities of 'traumacy' and 'fantasy', and I will agree to the Freudian concept of 'repression'!
Back between the summer of 1896 and say 1905, it was Freud who was 'The Grand Represser'. (After 1905, he became 'The Grand Excluder' -- as in excluding anyone -- or any male -- from Psychoanalysis who didn't agree with his 'childhood sexuality' , 'sexual fantasy' and 'Oedipal Theory'.
Did political, economic, and professional 'convenience' or 'or perceived necessity' contort and distort and 'unobjectify' Freud's brain? Freud wouldn't be the first to succumb to such a pressure? I am not trying to make excuses for Freud, or even assert that this is what necessarily happened -- Masson put out such a 'theory' in the 1980s, and for this he lost his job and his career. Is it possible that Masson chose to not ethically back down -- where Freud did?
Nobody -- not men or women (Freud had no huge 'women's movement' supporting him back then) -- wanted to hear publicly about 'child sexual abuse' in the 1890s. It was easier to blame the child than it was to blame the father, or the uncle, or the family friend... And nothing had really changed by the 1980s. It was obvious that The Psychoanalytic Establishment still did not want to publicly talk about child sexual abuse when confronted Classical Psychoanalysis on this account. Worse still, was Masson 'theorizing' that it was quite possible/likely that 'Freud lost moral courage'.
Meanwhile, there was a huge article in The Globe and Mail less than a week ago saying that women in prision were not getting the 'mental health' help that they needed -- whereas there were more avenues along this line already in place for men in prison.
I believe the estimates of 'childhood sexual abuse' I saw in the article amongst women in prison and/or amongst other women seeking psychiatric help was up in the 50 percentile, or probably even significantly higher. There was something that was bringing these 'hysterical women' or 'neurotic women with physical symptoms that seemed to go hand in hand with their mental processes' into Freud's practice in the 1890s, and it wasn't all about their 'repressed or suppressed erotic fantasies' (although this did seem to often play a part).
And still in the 1980s, The Psychoanalytic Establishment did not want to talk about how Freud's Oedipal Complex was leading analysts away from diagnosing 'real childhood sexual abuse', not 'figments of their patients Oedipal imagination'.
This might 'defame' Freud's character to say that Freud made such a huge theoretical, diagnostic, and therapeutic blunder! Is it any different today in 2011 or is The Psychoanalytic Establishment still hanging on with a 'Classical Freudian Oedipal hanging on pitbull bite'? Perhaps the more Psychoanalysts who move into Object Relations and Self Psychology, the less they have to stand up as an organization and actually publicly confront this 'ugly' problem.
I still like, and have no problem of using, The Oedipal Complex in my own theoretical work. But not to the 'literal' sense that Freud did. And not to the extent of 'diagnostically and therapeutically distorting a client's childhood reality'.
Economic, political, legal, and professional pressures can have a huge impact in all of us -- and turn us all away from 'the truth', at least as we personally believe in it.
How many of us don't engage in this type of practise every single day we go to work when we tell our boss 'what he or she wants to hear' or conversely, 'suppress' telling him or her what he or she doesn't want to hear?
How can we expect anyone to 'engage in freedom of speech' and 'tell his or her boss' what they really believe when the 'unemployment line' looms so large -- particularly in a bad recession -- as a 'very real factual possibility, a factual truth'?
It was very possible that Freud was no different. But since we are dealing with -- and 'speculating' about -- what 'was going through Freud's own mind at the time' -- none of us will ever know definitively. That is one secret -- his 'ethical innocence and/or guilt' -- that Freud probably took to the grave with him. Now, the 'ethical ramifications' of his decision still lies out in the open - - or at least partly in the open -- for all to see, and judge. Nobody -- other than a working pscyhoanalyst (and his or her clients) -- knows exactly what transpires behind closed psychoanalytic doors... and how many psychoanalysts may actually believe in the client experiential 'validity' of childhood and/or teenage sexual manipulation/assault, in this case, that case, or in many cases....and still 'tow the public company pathological anal-retentive Freudian Oedipal line'...
Not too many of us will ever know that realm of 'psychoanalytic-client privacy' as well...unless psychoanlysts and/or clients start going public with their personal stories... I'm not counting on it...
At best, Freud was too much an Aristotlean 'either/or' thinker, who couldn't get his head around 'dialectic engagement and integration'. He had the right idea with the concept of 'compromise formations'.
However, he didn't properly understand the dynamics of the transference except in his own 'tightly restricted, anal-retentive paradigm' of 'relationship transference between therapist and client'. Brian Bird hadn't written his paper on the 'universality of the transference' yet. That wouldn't happen until the 1960s.
Because of Freud's 'abandonment of the traumacy-seduction theory' and his evolving 'fixation' with 'fantasy theory', Freud -- nor any psychoanalytic theorist since -- until me -- has centred on the concept of 'transference memory'. (Actually, I have to give significant creative and chonological credit to both Alfred Adler, founder of Adlerian Psychology and the creator of the idea of 'conscious early memories as lifestyle memomies', as well as Arthur Janov, author of 'The Primal Scream').
In Psychoanalysis, we hear of 'transference relationships' but we never hear about 'transference encounters' -- and by logical association -- 'transference memories' (concious and/or unconscious).
Yet here is the future of Classical Psychoanalysis -- if Classical Psychoanalysis is to have any future.
From the idea of 'dialectic engagement, negotiation, and integration' -- comes the name of 'Quantum' Psychaoanalysis -- just as previously, in the realm of Physics, and 'thermogenics' -- 'particle' theory was integrated with its anti-thesis, 'wave' theory, to get 'Quantum Theory'.
Likewise here, 'Traumacy-Seduction-Manipulation-Assault' Theory becomes integrated with 'Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy-Oedipal Theory' to become 'Quantum Psychoanalysis'.
We have heard that every 'killer returns to the scene of his crime'. I don't know how true it is or not. But the same idea applies here.
Because, metaphorically and symbolically speaking, every 'neurotically traumatized child' returns to the scene of his 'childhood traumacy-transference scene' over and over and over again...This is what Freud ended up calling the 'repetition compulsion'. But Freud didn't properly understand the repetition complulsion -- he almost did with his concept of 'the mastery compulsion' but perhaps thought he was getting too close to 'Adlerian Theory' (the inferiority complex and superiority striving). Instead, Freud made the mistake of connecting the repetition compulsion to his evolving idea of 'The Death Instinct' (Beyond The Pleaaure Principle, 1920).
The repetition compulsion is often tied to 'death', 'destruction', and/or 'self-destruction', but only in the context of 'psychologically fighting for life', and the 'healing' of one's 'traumatic-transference neurosis'.
The traumatic-transference progression and/or regression goes like this: 1. chilhood traumacy; 2. 'Traumacy-tranference Memory'; 3. 'Compensation', 'Master Compulsion'; and 4. the creation of a 'Traumacy-Transference Fantasy Template' often 'cathected' with romantic and/or sexual energy of a supreme force; that is 5. 'Projected onto an adult 'surrogate transference figure' and this transference erotic love fantasy reigns supreme until one day, one's adult 'surrogate transference lover 'rejects us' in a style that unconsciously on purpose reminds us of our initial childhood traumacy-transference rejection, and childhood traumacy transference rejector (abandoner, betrayer, excluder, assaulter, manipulator...); and then 6. we suddenly and radically change 180 degrees in our thinking and feeling, like Freud did in 1896, and enter a 'heavy negative transference phase' of our 'transference love relationship' ,'heavily cathected with childhood negative energy'; and often end up 7. 'doing unto our rejector what our childhood and/or adult rejector did unto us, or we think our adult surrogate transference figure is about to do to us'...This is what I call 'negative transference identification', 'identification with the rejector, abandoner, betrayer, assaulter, aggressor, manipuator, excluder'.... and it often ends many 'transfernce relationships... This is what I call our full 'transference complex, neurosis, and/or game'. (as in Berne's 'Games People Play' -- meaning for the most part, 'The Positive and Negative Transference Games That We Play'...To stop playing the game (which many people don't want to do because of its heavy romantic-sexual component), we have to come to a full conscious understanding of the psycho-dyanmics of our trnasference complex/neurosis/game, and be able to consciousl choose to 'get off the transference ferris wheel, off the transference roller coaster, off the transference merry-go-round', which by the time we finish our unique, particular good and bad ride is often not very 'merry'....
Freud never got here...although he came close sometimes in different ways...'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896; 'The Dynamics of The Transference', 1912; 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' 1920...
The psycho-sexual secrets of men and women...
Did not usually come easy to Freud,
Nor to any psychotherapist,
Like a Christmas present from client to therapist, with a nice, neat, tidy ribbon and bow attached to it...
No, more often these secrets come together from different 'life experiences, built into psychological compensatory pieces -- woven together, subconsciously into a psycho-sexual transfernce whole'...
It is not only where we have come from with our childhoood transferences, but also, where we are trying to get to subconsiously or unconsciously, in order to 'subjectively feel more whole again'...
But Freud already knew this deep in his own subconscious,
He just couldn't quite completely figure out the psycho-dynamics of his own unconscious (or was unwilling to publicly share all of his private awenesses)...
Regardless, for his clients too, he couldn't quite put all their different psychological pieces together,
Trying as hard -- indeed, obsessing as hard -- as he did....
Where did this 'transference obsession' come from?
From the first time he busted...
Into his parents' bedroom,
This is why Freud's first conscious memory can easily be declared...
The 'first true case of Psychoanalysis'...
-- dgb, Jan. 30th-31st, Feb. 1st, Feb. 3rd., 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
Posted by david gordon bain at 10:39 AM 0 comments
Friday, January 28, 2011
In Hegel's Hotel, Adler, Jung, Rank, Reich, Ferenczi, Stekel, Fromm, Horney, Federn, Berne, Perls, Masson... All Are Welcomed Back and Re-Integrated With Freud...
Updated Dec. 19th-20th, 2010.
In DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis, there are no theoretical boundaries except to the extent that the subject matter, the clinical domain, and the case by case facts within this domain may dictate certain boundaries along the way...
Every generalization is always going to be partly wrong; otherwise it would not be called a generalization.
Since theories are made up of generalizations, no theory is ever going to be 100 per cent right. 'Counter-theories' are always going to spring up in the minds of men and women in those areas where a theory seems to, and/or does, come up weak, one-sided, or just plain wrong...
Every perspective, every theory, has its own particular strength or set of strengths...and likewise, at the same time, its own particular weakness or set of weaknesses...Oftentimes, the particular strength of a theory -- when played out too far -- becomes its inherent main weakness. The same general rule of thumb also applies to 'characteristics'.
If one of my main strengths is my boldness and my willingness to 'try something new', this may also be one of my potential main downfalls, one of my main weaknesses.
Indeed, we can see this in Freud's life. His boldness and willingness to 'try new things' largely opened up our study of the 'unconscious', dreams, sexuality, 'neurosis', jokes, the psychology of defenses...and so on... However, sometimes his boldness and willingness to try new things got him into serious ethical trouble such as a 'botched nasal surgery operation that should have never been conducted in the first place, and such as when Freud started 'experimenting' with cocaine around 1884 before he knew what its full chemical properties were, probably taking too much himself, giving it to his fiancee Martha, recommending it in 'glowing terms' to his fellow physicians and researchers, and its potential usage by their patients, giving it to a friend who was addicted to morphine, who subsequently became much more severely addicted to cocaine and eventually died (although he had a very serious and painful illness before he even became addicted to morphine).
........................................................
The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs
by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972
Chapter 35. Cocaine
The chief active ingredient in coca leaves, the alkaloid cocaine, was isolated in pure form in 1844. 1 Little use was made of it in Europe, however, until 1883, when a German army physician, Dr. Theodor Aschenbrandt, secured a supply of pure cocaine from the pharmaceutical firm of Merck and issued it to Bavarian soldiers during their autumn maneuvers. He reported beneficial effects on their ability to endure fatigue. 2
Among those who read Dr. Aschenbrandt's account with fascination was a poverty-stricken twenty-eight-year-old Viennese neurologist, Dr. Sigmund Freud (whose subsequent ordeal with nicotine was recounted in Chapter 24). Young Freud at the time was suffering from depression, chronic fatigue, and other neurotic symptoms. "I have been reading about cocaine, the essential constituent of coca leaves, which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to resist privations and hardships," Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, on April 21, 1884. "I am procuring some myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion. . . ." 3 The account of Freud's experiences which follows is drawn largely from the three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, by Ernest Jones.
Freud "tried the effect of a twentieth of a gram [50 milligrams] and found it turned the bad mood he was in into cheerfulness, giving him the feeling of having dined well 'so that there is nothing at all one need bother about,' but without robbing him of any energy for exercise or work." 4
In addition to taking cocaine himself, Freud offered some to his friend and associate, Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who was suffering from an exceedingly painful disease of the nervous system (which was later to prove fatal), and who was addicted to morphine. Freud also prescribed cocaine for a patient with gastric catarrh. The initial results in all three cases were favorable. Freud decided cocaine was "a magical drug," and he wrote his fiancee, Martha:
If it goes well I will write an essay on it and I expect it will win its place in therapeutics by the side of morphium and superior to it. I have other hopes and intentions about it. I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion, and with the most brilliant success.... In short it is only now that I feel I am a doctor, since I have helped one patient and hope to help more. If things go on in this way we need have no concern about being able to come together and to stay in Vienna. 5
Freud even sent some of his precious cocaine to Martha, "to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color." Indeed, Dr. Jones writes, "he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients; he gave it to his sisters. In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace." 6
..............................................
Life is essentially 'multi-bi-polar' in its very evolutionary essense and the only type of theory that is going to 'capture' the essence of this multi-bi-polar quality of life, is a theory that is also 'multi-bi-polar'...
Bi-polar theories of life can also be called 'dualistic' and/or 'dialectic' theories of life...philosophical theories like those espoused by Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, to a certain extent Plato, to a certain extent Kant, Schelling, and the 'Super-Philosopher' of all 'dialectic theories' -- G.W. Hegel. That is why this philosophical treatise is called 'Hegel's Hotel' because no theory of life addresses the contradictions, paradoxes, dichotomies, and bi-polarities in life better than Hegel's dialectic theory which is generally summarized in the endless cycle of 1. theory; 2. 'anti-or counter-theory'; 3. 'synthesis', or 'integration', or 'synergy'; and 4. start all over again...at a 'better' or 'worse' stage of evolution...
No one has the final word on whether or not a 'movement' in life is to a 'better' or 'worse' stage of evolution although we all have the freedom to pipe in and pipe up with our own editorial conclusions...
Certainly, Hegel's dialectic theory has received arguably more than its full share of criticism over the many years since he published his classic work, 'The Phenomenology of Mind(Spirit)' in 1807.
But still, Hegel's dialectic theory is probably the only theory out there that paradoxically explains the inherent weakness in each and every theory...
Every theory, every characteristic, carries the seeds of its own self-destruction...is a slightly paraphrased Hegelian quote that I cannot find at this exact minute...
Here are some Hegelian quotes (not all of them that I agree with) that I did find:
....................................................
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes
Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Education is the art of making man ethical.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
World history is a court of judgment.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
...........................................................
Why should we limit ourselves to the inevitable weakness of every one-sided theory?
Like a good husband and wife team working in harmony with each other,
Opposing theories can be used harmoniously and integratively to supplement each other's weakness...
To provide a more balanced, wholistic perspective...
When it comes to theories,
The only boundaries that should dictate,
Are those governed by subject-matter, ethics, and integrity...
And even here there is going to be ambiguity and plenty of room for debate,
For example, the subject matter is going to be influenced by 'outside factors',
That can change the nature of the discussion,
Or the boundaries of the subject matter,
Thus, we get 'bio-chemistry', and 'bio-physics',
And an essay like Freud's 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894).
Some boundaries are inherent to the subject-matter under investigation,
But many are simply 'made-made' conceptual and label boundaries,
That are meant to make thinking and understanding easier,
And oftentimes, these can come back to haunt us,
And cause us endless grief,
Until we finally figure out that we have created a man-made conceptual-semantic trap.
Boundaries are meant to be broken...(especially when we make them in the first place).
Giving proper respect to ethical and legal boundaries that are there for good reason.
This aside, we need to keep thinking 'inside and outside the box'.
Ascertaining how inside and outside factors influence each other,
Co-determine each other,
This is what Hegel called 'dialectic thinking'.
I sometimes call it 'dialectic-democratic thinking'.
Or the 'dialectic-integrative evolution of theories'...
Which constantly looks for 'win-win solutions and conflict resolutions'...
To seemingly unsolvable and unresolvable paradoxes, dichotomies, impasses, and riddles...
When a theory becomes too self-limiting by the constriction of its own self-boundaries...
Think outside the boundary...
And then come back to integrate...
What is inside and outside the boundary...
You might be amazed at where it takes you, and what it gets you!
-- dgb, Feb. 26th, 2010; updated March 19th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
In DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis, there are no theoretical boundaries except to the extent that the subject matter, the clinical domain, and the case by case facts within this domain may dictate certain boundaries along the way...
Every generalization is always going to be partly wrong; otherwise it would not be called a generalization.
Since theories are made up of generalizations, no theory is ever going to be 100 per cent right. 'Counter-theories' are always going to spring up in the minds of men and women in those areas where a theory seems to, and/or does, come up weak, one-sided, or just plain wrong...
Every perspective, every theory, has its own particular strength or set of strengths...and likewise, at the same time, its own particular weakness or set of weaknesses...Oftentimes, the particular strength of a theory -- when played out too far -- becomes its inherent main weakness. The same general rule of thumb also applies to 'characteristics'.
If one of my main strengths is my boldness and my willingness to 'try something new', this may also be one of my potential main downfalls, one of my main weaknesses.
Indeed, we can see this in Freud's life. His boldness and willingness to 'try new things' largely opened up our study of the 'unconscious', dreams, sexuality, 'neurosis', jokes, the psychology of defenses...and so on... However, sometimes his boldness and willingness to try new things got him into serious ethical trouble such as a 'botched nasal surgery operation that should have never been conducted in the first place, and such as when Freud started 'experimenting' with cocaine around 1884 before he knew what its full chemical properties were, probably taking too much himself, giving it to his fiancee Martha, recommending it in 'glowing terms' to his fellow physicians and researchers, and its potential usage by their patients, giving it to a friend who was addicted to morphine, who subsequently became much more severely addicted to cocaine and eventually died (although he had a very serious and painful illness before he even became addicted to morphine).
........................................................
The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs
by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972
Chapter 35. Cocaine
The chief active ingredient in coca leaves, the alkaloid cocaine, was isolated in pure form in 1844. 1 Little use was made of it in Europe, however, until 1883, when a German army physician, Dr. Theodor Aschenbrandt, secured a supply of pure cocaine from the pharmaceutical firm of Merck and issued it to Bavarian soldiers during their autumn maneuvers. He reported beneficial effects on their ability to endure fatigue. 2
Among those who read Dr. Aschenbrandt's account with fascination was a poverty-stricken twenty-eight-year-old Viennese neurologist, Dr. Sigmund Freud (whose subsequent ordeal with nicotine was recounted in Chapter 24). Young Freud at the time was suffering from depression, chronic fatigue, and other neurotic symptoms. "I have been reading about cocaine, the essential constituent of coca leaves, which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to resist privations and hardships," Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, on April 21, 1884. "I am procuring some myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion. . . ." 3 The account of Freud's experiences which follows is drawn largely from the three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, by Ernest Jones.
Freud "tried the effect of a twentieth of a gram [50 milligrams] and found it turned the bad mood he was in into cheerfulness, giving him the feeling of having dined well 'so that there is nothing at all one need bother about,' but without robbing him of any energy for exercise or work." 4
In addition to taking cocaine himself, Freud offered some to his friend and associate, Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who was suffering from an exceedingly painful disease of the nervous system (which was later to prove fatal), and who was addicted to morphine. Freud also prescribed cocaine for a patient with gastric catarrh. The initial results in all three cases were favorable. Freud decided cocaine was "a magical drug," and he wrote his fiancee, Martha:
If it goes well I will write an essay on it and I expect it will win its place in therapeutics by the side of morphium and superior to it. I have other hopes and intentions about it. I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion, and with the most brilliant success.... In short it is only now that I feel I am a doctor, since I have helped one patient and hope to help more. If things go on in this way we need have no concern about being able to come together and to stay in Vienna. 5
Freud even sent some of his precious cocaine to Martha, "to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color." Indeed, Dr. Jones writes, "he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients; he gave it to his sisters. In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace." 6
..............................................
Life is essentially 'multi-bi-polar' in its very evolutionary essense and the only type of theory that is going to 'capture' the essence of this multi-bi-polar quality of life, is a theory that is also 'multi-bi-polar'...
Bi-polar theories of life can also be called 'dualistic' and/or 'dialectic' theories of life...philosophical theories like those espoused by Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, to a certain extent Plato, to a certain extent Kant, Schelling, and the 'Super-Philosopher' of all 'dialectic theories' -- G.W. Hegel. That is why this philosophical treatise is called 'Hegel's Hotel' because no theory of life addresses the contradictions, paradoxes, dichotomies, and bi-polarities in life better than Hegel's dialectic theory which is generally summarized in the endless cycle of 1. theory; 2. 'anti-or counter-theory'; 3. 'synthesis', or 'integration', or 'synergy'; and 4. start all over again...at a 'better' or 'worse' stage of evolution...
No one has the final word on whether or not a 'movement' in life is to a 'better' or 'worse' stage of evolution although we all have the freedom to pipe in and pipe up with our own editorial conclusions...
Certainly, Hegel's dialectic theory has received arguably more than its full share of criticism over the many years since he published his classic work, 'The Phenomenology of Mind(Spirit)' in 1807.
But still, Hegel's dialectic theory is probably the only theory out there that paradoxically explains the inherent weakness in each and every theory...
Every theory, every characteristic, carries the seeds of its own self-destruction...is a slightly paraphrased Hegelian quote that I cannot find at this exact minute...
Here are some Hegelian quotes (not all of them that I agree with) that I did find:
....................................................
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes
Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Education is the art of making man ethical.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
World history is a court of judgment.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
...........................................................
Why should we limit ourselves to the inevitable weakness of every one-sided theory?
Like a good husband and wife team working in harmony with each other,
Opposing theories can be used harmoniously and integratively to supplement each other's weakness...
To provide a more balanced, wholistic perspective...
When it comes to theories,
The only boundaries that should dictate,
Are those governed by subject-matter, ethics, and integrity...
And even here there is going to be ambiguity and plenty of room for debate,
For example, the subject matter is going to be influenced by 'outside factors',
That can change the nature of the discussion,
Or the boundaries of the subject matter,
Thus, we get 'bio-chemistry', and 'bio-physics',
And an essay like Freud's 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894).
Some boundaries are inherent to the subject-matter under investigation,
But many are simply 'made-made' conceptual and label boundaries,
That are meant to make thinking and understanding easier,
And oftentimes, these can come back to haunt us,
And cause us endless grief,
Until we finally figure out that we have created a man-made conceptual-semantic trap.
Boundaries are meant to be broken...(especially when we make them in the first place).
Giving proper respect to ethical and legal boundaries that are there for good reason.
This aside, we need to keep thinking 'inside and outside the box'.
Ascertaining how inside and outside factors influence each other,
Co-determine each other,
This is what Hegel called 'dialectic thinking'.
I sometimes call it 'dialectic-democratic thinking'.
Or the 'dialectic-integrative evolution of theories'...
Which constantly looks for 'win-win solutions and conflict resolutions'...
To seemingly unsolvable and unresolvable paradoxes, dichotomies, impasses, and riddles...
When a theory becomes too self-limiting by the constriction of its own self-boundaries...
Think outside the boundary...
And then come back to integrate...
What is inside and outside the boundary...
You might be amazed at where it takes you, and what it gets you!
-- dgb, Feb. 26th, 2010; updated March 19th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
On The Monumental Achievements of Otto Rank and His Unofficial Title as 'The Founder of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis'
Written August 18th, 2009.
Let me begin by giving you a 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware).
I am current engaged in by far my most vigorous investigation into the history of Psychoanalysis that is turning up new and partly different information each and every day that I didn't know previously.
Thus, an essay of this type right here -- and every one like it -- that I write on the subject and history of Psychoanalysis is necessarily of a continually evolving nature -- with sometimes strong new information entering my interpretive and evaluative system that may necessitate a sudden, perhaps radical change in judgment based on the relevance of this new information and what it means relative to the issue or problem as a whole that I am addressing.
I can only imagine -- with reasonable confidence -- that the same type of scenario was present for Freud between around 1889 and 1900 as Freud learned from both Breuer and Charcot, and sought for the first time, to start to put these ideas that he was learning from them, from himself, and from his patients, into therapeutic practice.
It is interesting to note for example that in 1889, in Freud's first case, the Frau Emmy case, cited in 'Studies on Hysteria' (1893-1895), Freud is using massage therapy as well as hypnosis, in contrast to the strict 'no touch' policy that Freud would begin to adhere to later in his career (let us say after 1900 although it was probably earlier than this), and which Freud would strictly enforce in his 'orthodox teachings of Psychoanalysis' while other psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi wanted to -- and were -- practicing a 'wilder', non-orthodox and non-approved, form of touch-based Psychoanalysis.
It would not be the first or the last time that other theorists and therapists would pick up a particular idea and/or technique that Freud had basically 'been there and done that' -- and for one reason or another -- abandoned and/or marginalized the specific idea and/or technique that other theorists/therapists still wanted to go back to and re-investigate because they thought Freud had left something important behind. We can include Reich, Rank, and Ferenczi in this category, as well as Perls and Masson -- and I am sure there are numerous others.
For example, it defies my imagination how in 37 years of studying psychology from the time I first picked up the best-selling book 'Psycho-Cybernetics' (Maxwell Maltz, 1960) in around 1972, to the present, Aug 18th, 2009, I could largely overlook the momentously creative work of Otto Rank, who I will describe as holding the unofficial title of 'the founder of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis',
Otto Rank has been an indirect, 'under the cover of darkness', influential lynch pin of my thinking, my beliefs, my values, in Hegel's Hotel through his influence on the growth of Humanistic-Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy, through such theorists and therapists as Rollo May and Carl Rogers, probably Karen Horney, and most notably Frederick Perls and all of Gestalt Therapy.
While Dr. Masson was complaining in the 1980s and 1990s about the 'emotional sterility' of Psychoanalysis, Rank and Ferenczi, in collaboration with each other, were saying essentially the same thing back in the 1920s and 1930s. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Perhaps most remarkable in Rank's system of ideas is his ideas on creativity, his ideas on the dialectic dichotomy between man's 'fear of life' and his 'fear of death', and his ideas on 'separation anxiety' as first experienced in 'birth trauma' which then becomes an 'existential metaphor' of his and/or her whole life.
Man is caught in a life-long approach-avoidance conflict between the twin poles of life and death, and the paradoxical wish for individuality and union at the same time.
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the creative impulse and the "will to unite" with the need for love. To respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate "totally" or to merge "totally" -- is to have the other thrown back at one's self. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Writes Rank,
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou "harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss." (See the Wikipedia article below.)
In 1979, in my Honours Thesis, as well as a preceding essay leading up to my Honours Thesis, I was mesmerized by the following Erich Fromm quote which I can see now as showing a definite Rankian influence.
'It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. (Erich Fromm, Man For Himself,
I will say and do no more in this essay than to pay special tribute to this man's special contributions to the evolution humanistic-existential psychology and psychotherapy as detailed below from Wikipedia.
-- dgbn, Aug. 18th, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process.
...............................................................................
Otto Rank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born April 22, 1884 (1884-04-22)
Vienna, Austria
Died October 31, 1939 (1939-11-01)
New York, New York
Fields Psychology
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater University of Vienna
Influences Sigmund Freud, Henrik Ibsen, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer
Influenced Jessie Taft, Carl Rogers, Paul Goodman, Rollo May, Ernest Becker, Stanislav Grof, Matthew Fox, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Irvin Yalom
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Anna Freud • Sigmund Freud
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Ernest Jones • Carl Jung
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Otto Rank (April 22, 1884 – October 31, 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's publishing house and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, after Freud accused Rank of "anti-Oedipal" heresy, he chose to leave the inner circle and move to Paris with his wife, Tola, and infant daughter, Helene. For the remaining 14 years of his life, Rank had an exceptionally successful career as a lecturer, writer and therapist in France and the U.S.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
* 2 Post-Vienna life and work
* 3 Influence
* 4 Major publications by date of first publication
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
In 1905, at the age of 21, Otto Rank presented Freud with a short manuscript on the artist, a study that so impressed Freud he invited Rank to become Secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of his Viennese disciples.
Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with Adler and then Jung developed. Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of legend, myth, art, and other works of creativity. He worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work for many years. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910. Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding psychoanalytic theory.
In 1924 Rank published Das Trauma der Geburt (translated into English as The Trauma of Birth in 1929), exploring how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by separation anxiety in the “phase before the development of the Oedipus complex” (p. 216). But there was no such phase in Freud’s theories. The Oedipus complex, Freud explained tirelessly, was the nucleus of the neurosis and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. Rank was the first to use the term “pre-Oedipal” in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925 (Rank, 1996, p. 43). In a 1930 self-analysis of his own writings, Rank observes that "the pre-Oedipal super-ego has since been overemphasized by Melanie Klein, without any reference to me" (ibid., p. 149n). In the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Rank will be credited with coining the term "pre-Oedipal", which was previously mistakenly thought to have been introduced by Freud or Klein.
After some hesitation, Freud distanced himself from The Trauma of Birth, signalling to other members of his inner circle that Rank was perilously close to anti-Oedipal heresy. Confronted with Freud’s decisive opposition, Rank resigned in protest from his positions as Vice-President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, director of Freud’s publishing house, and co-editor of Imago and Zeitschrift. His closest friend, Sándor Ferenczi, with whom Rank collaborated in the early Twenties on new experiential, object-relational and "here-and-now" approaches to therapy, vacillated on the significance of Rank's pre-Oedipal theory but not on Rank's objections to classical analytic technique.
The recommendation in Freud’s technical papers for analysts to be emotionless, according to Ferenczi and Rank (1924), had led to "an unnatural elimination of all human factors in the analysis" (pp. 40-41), and to "a theorizing of experience [Erlebnis]" (p. 41): the feeling experience of the intersubjective relationship, two first-person experiences, within the analytic situation. "The characteristic of that time," remembers Sándor Rado, who was in analysis with Karl Abraham from 1922 to 1925, "was a neglect of a human being's emotional life." Adds Rado: "Everybody was looking for oral, pregenital, and genital components in motivation. But that some people are happy, others unhappy, some afraid, or full of anger, and some loving and affectionate -- read the case histories to find how such differences between people were then absent from the literature." (Roazen & Swerdloff, 1995, pp. 82-83)
All emotional experience by human beings was being reduced by analysis to a derivative, no matter how disguised, of libido. For Freud, emotion was always sexual, derived from a dangerous Id that must be surgically uprooted: "Where Id was [Wo es war]," Freud said famously, "there ego shall be [soll ich werden]" (S.E., 22:80).
“Libido,” according to Freud’s 1921 work on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (S.E., 18: 90), “is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions.” Emotion is the cause of neurotic disorder. Increases in emotion, according to Freud, are unpleasurable. Cure, for Freud, means analyzing, "working through" and eventually uprooting the emotions of the patient, “like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (Freud, S.E., 22:80). The analyst makes the unconscious conscious by providing cognitive insight to the patient, thereby subduing the pressing drive for the irrational, for emotions—for the Id—to emerge from the patient’s unconscious.
In a 1927 lecture, Rank (1996) observes that “surgical therapy is uprooting and isolates the individual emotionally, as it tries to deny the emotional life” (p. 169), the same attack he and Ferenczi had leveled against psychoanalytic practice in their joint work. Reducing all emotional experience—all feeling, loving, thinking, and willing—to sex was one of Freud's biggest mistakes, according to Rank, who first pointed out this confusion in the mid-twenties. Emotions, said Rank, are relationships. Denial of the emotional life leads to denial of the will, the creative life, as well as denial of the interpersonal relationship in the analytic situation (Rank, 1929-31).
For Freud, said Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), "the emotional life develops from the sexual sphere, therefore his sexualization in reality means emotionalization" (p. 165), two experiences that psychoanalysts continued to conflate for half a century after Freud’s death. Until the end of the 20th century, psychoanalysis had no theory of emotional experience and, by extension, no theory of emotional intelligence. Weinstein (2001) identified over two dozen articles in the major psychoanalytic journals lamenting the absence of a theory of emotions. "[S]uch comments persisted through to the 1990s" (Weinstein, 2001, p. 40).
"The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis," wrote Ernest Becker (1973) in The Denial of Death, which was strongly influenced by Rank's ideas, "must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psychiatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps explain the terrible deadness of emotion that one experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of the character armor erected against the world" (p. 195n).
Written privately in 1932, Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary identified the “personal causes for the erroneous development of psychoanalysis” (Ferenczi, 1995, p. 184). According to Ferenczi, "… One learned from [Freud] and from his kind of technique various things that made one’s life and work more comfortable: the calm, unemotional reserve; the unruffled assurance that one knows better; and the theories, the seeking and finding of the causes of failure in the patient instead of partly in ourselves … and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless" (Ferenczi, 1995, pp. 185-186).
But terrified at the prospect of losing Freud's approval, Ferenczi aborted his enthusiasm for The Trauma of Birth and began to distance himself personally from Rank – whom he shunned during a chance meeting in 1926 at Penn Station in New York. "He was my best friend and he refused to speak to me," Rank said (Taft, 1958, p. xvi).
Ferenczi's rupture with Rank cut short radical innovations in practice, and left no one in the inner circle who would champion relational, pre-Oedipal or "here-and-now" psychotherapy. Classical psychoanalysis, along the lines of Freud's 1911-15 technical writings, would now be entrenched in training institutes around the world. The attack leveled in 1924 by Ferenczi and Rank on the increasing "fanaticism for interpretation" and the "unnatural elimination of all human factors" from the practice of analysis would be forgotten.
Relational, expressive and "here-and-now" therapy would not be acceptable to most members of the American Psychoanalytic Association or the International Psychoanalytic Association for half a century. "[T]hose who had the misfortune to be analyzed by [Rank] were required to undergo a second analysis in order to qualify" for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (Lieberman, 1985, p. 293). As far as classical analysis was concerned, Rank was dead.
[edit] Post-Vienna life and work
In May 1926, having made emotional relationship in the "here-and-now" central to his practice of psychotherapy, Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985).
According to Rank, all emotional life is grounded in the present. In Will Therapy, published in German in 1929-31, Rank uses the term “here and now” for the first time in the psychotherapeutic literature: “Freud made the repression historical, that is, misplaced it into the childhood of the individual and then wanted to release it from there, while as a matter of fact the same tendency is working here and now” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 39). Instead of the word Verdrängung (repression), which laid stress on unconscious repression of the past, Rank preferred to use the word Verleugnung (denial), which focused instead on the emotional will to remain ill in the present: “The neurotic lives too much in the past [and] to that extent he actually does not live. He suffers … because he clings to [the past], wants to cling to it, in order to protect himself from experience [Erlebnis], the emotional surrender to the present” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 27).
In France and later in America, Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer from 1926 to 1939. Traveling frequently between France and America, Rank lectured at universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and University of Pennsylvania on relational, experiential and “here-and-now” psychotherapy, art, the creative will, and “neurosis as a failure in creativity” (Rank, 1996).
Just as Erik Erikson was the first analyst to focus on identity and adulthood, Rank was the first to propose that separation from outworn thoughts, emotions and behaviors is the quintessence of psychological growth and development. In the late 1920s, after he left Freud’s inner circle, Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
Foreshadowing the central themes of Piaget, Kohlberg, McClelland, Erikson and Kegan, Rank was the first to propose that human development is a lifelong construction, which requires continual negotiation and renegotiation of the dual yearnings for individuation and connection, the will to separate and the will to unite. Decades before Ronald Fairbairn, now credited by many as the inventor in the 1940s of modern object-relations theory, Rank's 1926 lecture on "The Genesis of the Object Relation" marks the first complete statement of this theory (Rank, 1996, pp. 140-149). By 1926 Rank was persona non grata in the official psychoanalytic world. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that any of the other writers credited with helping to invent object relations theory (Melanie Klein or Donald Winnicott, for example) ever read the German text of this lecture, published as Zur Genese der Object-beziehung in Vol. 1 of Rank's Genetische Psychologie (1927, pp. 110-22).
Rank died in New York City in 1939 from a kidney infection, one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement. "Komisch" (strange, odd, comical), Rank said on his deathbed (Lieberman, 1985, p. 389).
[edit] Influence
Rollo May, a pioneer of existential psychotherapy in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank’s post-Freudian lectures and writings and always considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank’s American lectures. “I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud’s circle,” said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).
In 1936 Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist in America after William James, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank’s post-Freudian models of experiential and relational therapy. Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Rank with having profoundly shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counselling. "I became infected with Rankian ideas," said Rogers (Kramer, 1995).(http://www.ottorank.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/rogers.pdf).
The New York writer Paul Goodman, who was co-founder with Fritz Perls of the Gestalt method of psychotherapy, one of the most popular in the world today, and one that makes Otto Rank's "here-and-now" central to its approach, described Rank’s post-Freudian ideas on art and creativity as “beyond praise” in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p. 395). According to Ervin Polster (1968), a pre-eminent Gestalt therapist, "Rank brought the human relationship directly into his office. He influenced analysts to take seriously the actual present interaction between therapist and patient, rather than maintain the fixed, distant, 'as though' relationship that had given previous analysts an emotional buffer for examining the intensities of therapeutic sensation and wish. Rank's contributions opened the way for encounter to become accepted as a deep therapeutic agent" (p. 6).
Rank also affected the practice of action-oriented and reflective therapies such as dramatic role-playing and psychodrama. "Although there is no evidence of a direct influence, Rank's ideas found new life in the work of such action psychotherapists as Moreno, who developed a psychodrama technique of doubling ... and Landy [director of the drama therapy program at New York University], who attempted to conceptualize balance as an integration of role and counterrole" (Landy, 2008, p. 29).
Rank's psychology of creativity has recently been applied to action learning, an inquiry-based process of group problem solving, team building, leadership development and organizational learning (Kramer 2007; 2008). The heart of action learning is asking wicked questions to promote the unlearning or letting go of taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. Questions allow group members to “step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology,” as Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 70), reflect on their assumptions and beliefs, and reframe their choices. The process of “stepping out” of a frame, out of a form of knowing – a prevailing ideology – is analogous to the work of artists as they struggle to give birth to fresh ways of seeing the world, perspectives that allow them to see aspects of the world that no artists, including themselves, have ever seen before.
The most creative artists, such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, know how to separate even from their own greatest public successes, from earlier artistic incarnations of themselves. Their “greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered,” according to Art and Artist (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 368). Through the lens of Otto Rank’s work on understanding art and artists, action learning can be seen as the never-completed process of learning how to “step out of the frame” of the ruling mindset, whether one’s own or the culture’s – in other words, of learning how to unlearn.
Comparing the process of unlearning to the “breaking out” process of birth, Rank was the first psychologist to suggest that a continual capacity to separate from “internal mental objects” – from internalized institutions, beliefs and neuroses; from the restrictions of culture, social conformity and received wisdom – is the sine qua non for life-long creativity.
In a 1938 lecture, Rank said: "Life in itself is a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death – which represents the final separation. At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome. In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments off his old self that are now outlived. Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself for which he has no further use ….The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution"(Rank, 1996, p. 270).
Unlearning necessarily involves separation from one’s self concept, as it has been culturally conditioned to conform to familial, group, occupational or organizational allegiances. According to Rank (1932/1989), unlearning or breaking out of our shell from the inside is “a separation [that] is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom, and in some form, won over a part of one’s ego” (p. 375).
In the organizational context, learning how to unlearn is vital because what we assume to be true has merged into our identity. We refer to the identity of an individual as a “mindset.” We refer to the identity of an organizational group as a “culture.” Action learners learn how to question, probe and separate from, both kinds of identity—i.e., their “individual” selves and their “social” selves. By opening themselves to critical inquiry, they begin to learn how to emancipate themselves from what they "know" – they learn how to unlearn.
In 1974, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer prize for The Denial of Death (1973), which was based on Rank’s post-Freudian writings, especially Will Therapy (1929-31), Psychology and the Soul (1930) and Art and Artist (1932/1989). The feeling of anxiety, writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), divides into two currents, running in opposite directions: one toward separation and individuation; the other toward union and collectivity. The outbreak of neurosis typically comes from the streaming together of these two fears—which Rank also calls the "fear of living" [Lebensangst] and the "fear of dying" [Todesangst] – “which, even in The Trauma of Birth, I had designated as the fear of both going forward and of going backward” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 124). A crisis "seems to break out at a certain age when the life fear which has restricted the I’s development meets with the death fear as it increases with growth and maturity," writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31). "The individual then feels himself driven forward by regret for wasted life and the desire to retrieve it. But this forward driving fear is now death fear, the fear of dying without having lived, which, even so, is held in check by fear of life" (pp. 188-189).
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the creative impulse and the "will to unite" with the need for love. To respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate "totally" or to merge "totally" -- is to have the other thrown back at one's self.
According to Rank (1929-31), "Birth fear remains always more universal, cosmic as it were, loss of a connection with a greater whole [einen größeren Ganzen], in the last analysis with the 'All' [dem All] ... The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear [Urangst] corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole [vom All], therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole [ins All). Between these two fear possibilities these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life, which accounts for the fact that we have not been able to trace fear back to a single root, or to overcome it therapeutically" (ibid., p. 124).
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou "harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss."
"[T]he love feeling," Rank observes in a lecture delivered in 1927 at the University of Pennsylvania, "unites our I with the other, with the Thou [dem Du], with men, with the world, and so does away with fear. What is unique in love is that—beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the I. Not only, I love the other as my I, as part of my I, but the other also makes my I worthy of love. The love of the Thou [des Liebe des Du] thus places a value on one's own I. Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one's own I. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self [unser eigene Selbst] as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is." (Rank, 1996, p. 154)
On a macrocosmic level, taking the experience of love as far as humanly possible, to the boundary of the spiritual, Rank compared the artist's "giving" and the enjoyer's "finding" of art with the dissolution and rediscovery of the self in mutual love. "The art-work," says Rank in Art and Artist, "presents a unity, alike in its effect and in its creation, and this implies a spiritual unity between the artist and the recipient" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113). It is in art, and its correlative, love, that microcosm meets macrocosm, the human meets the spiritual. At the height of the individuating impulse, the "will to separate," artists feel most strongly the longing for attachment, the "will to unite." Although artists begin the creative process by separating from their fellow human beings and liberating themselves from conforming to the past, escaping from the anxiety of influence, eventually the creative impulse merges into a desire for a return to "a greater whole," to "the ALL" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 155) -- in human terms, to the "collective" that alone has the power to immortalize the artist with the approval it grants the artwork:
"For this very essence of man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual ... and not on a psychological identification with the artist that [aesthetic pleasure] ultimately depends... But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling (Rank, 1932/1989, pp. 109-110).
In one of his most poetic passages, Rank suggests that this transcendent feeling implies not only a "spiritual unity" between artist and enjoyer, I and Thou, but also "with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113)--an identity with "the ALL" that once was but is no more. The healing nature of artistic experience, Rank believed, affirms difference but, paradoxically, also "leads to the release from difference, to the feeling of unity with the self, with the other, with the cosmos" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 58). In art, microcosm meets macrocosm. Of the uncanny feeling of emotional unity we experience in surrendering ourselves—giving up temporarily the burden of our difference—to the Other in art, Rank writes in Art and Artist: "[It] produces a satisfaction which suggests that it is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, that it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113).
No one has expressed the conflict between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker (1973), whose award-winning The Denial of Death captured the largest—macrocosmic—meaning of separation and union for Rank: "On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart" (Becker, 1973, pp. 151-152). "You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof ..." (ibid., p. 155).
On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two "poles of fear" can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one's uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires "seeking at once isolation and union" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, "originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life" (1932/1989, p. xxii).
On a macrocosmic level, the consciousness of living—the dim awareness that we are alive for a moment on this planet as it spins, meaninglessly, around the cold and infinite galaxy—gives human beings "the status of a small god in nature," according to Ernest Becker: "Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still has the gill marks to prove it ... Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with" (Becker, 1973, p. 26).
Through the influence of Ernest Becker's writings, Rank's eternal dialectic between "life fear and death fear" has been tested experimentally in Terror Management Theory by Skidmore College psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, University of Arizona psychology professor Jeff Greenberg, and Colorado University at Colorado Springs psychology professor Tom Pyszczynski.
The American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and Wisdom University, considers Rank to be one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. See, especially, Fox's book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), paperback: ISBN 1-58542-329-7.
Stanislav Grof, a founder of transpersonal psychology, based much of his work in prenatal and perinatal psychology on Rank's The Trauma of Birth (Kripal, 2007, pp. 249-269).
In 2008, the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone published The Roots of Morality (Pennsylvania State University Press), which contains an analysis of Rank's argument that "immortality ideologies" are an abiding human response to the painful riddle of death. Sheets-Johnstone compares Rank's thought to that of three major Western philosophers—René Descartes, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida: "Because immortality ideologies were originally recognized and in fact so named by Rank, a close examination of his writings on the subject is not only apposite but is itself philosophically rewarding ... Rank was a Freudian dissident who, in introducing the concept of immortality ideologies, traced out historical and psychological roots of 'soul-belief' (Seelenglaube)... [My chapter] points up the extraordinary cogency of Rank's distinction between the rational and the irrational to the question of the human need for immortality ideologies" (Sheets-Johnstone, 2008, p. 64). Sheets-Johnstone concludes her book on a note reminiscent of Rank's plea for the human value of mutual love over arid intellectual insight: "Surely it is time for Homo sapiens sapiens to turn away from the pursuit of domination over all and to begin cultivating and developing its sapiential wisdom in the pursuit of caring, nurturing and strengthening that most precious muscle which is its heart" (ibid., pp. 405-06).
Today, Rank can be seen as one of the great pioneers in the fields of humanistic psychology, existential psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology.
[edit] Major publications by date of first publication
Year German Title (Current Edition) English Translation (Current Edition)
1907 Der Künstler The Artist
1909 Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Turia & Kant, 2000, ISBN 3-85132-141-3) The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Johns Hopkins, 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7883-7)
1911 Die Lohengrin Sage [doctoral thesis] The Lohengrin Saga
1912 Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Johns Hopkins, 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4176-3)
1913 Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fur die Geisteswissenschaften [with Hanns Sachs] The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences
1914 "Traum und Dichtung" and "Traum und Mythus" in Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung The Interpretation of Dreams eds. 4-7: "Dreams and Poetry"; "Dreams and Myth" added to Ch. VI, "The Dream-Work." In Dreaming by the Book L. Marinelli and A. Mayer, Other, 2003. ISBN 1-59051-009-7
1924 Das Trauma der Geburt (Psychosozial-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-932133-25-0) The Trauma of Birth, 1929 (Dover, 1994, ISBN 0-486-27974-X)
1924 Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse [with Sandor Ferenczi] The Development of Psychoanalysis / Developmental Goals of Psychoanalysis
1925 Der Doppelgänger [written 1914] The Double (Karnac, 1989, ISBN 0-946439-58-3)
1929 Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit Truth and Reality (Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00899-1)
1930 (Consists of Volumes II and III of "Technik der Psychoanalyse": Vol. II, "Die Analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elementen"; Vol. III, "Die Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituaton". Copyright 1929, 1931 by Franz Deuticke.) Will Therapy, 1929-31 (First published in English in 1936;reprinted in paperback by Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00898-3)
1930 Seelenglaube und Psychologie Psychology and the Soul (Johns Hopkins, 2003, ISBN 0-8018-7237-5)
1932 Kunst und Künstler (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89806-023-3) Art and Artist (Norton, 1989, ISBN 0-393-30574-0)
1933 Erziehung und Weltanschauung : Eine Kritik d. psychol. Erziehungs-Ideologie, München : Reinhardt, 1933 Modern Education
1941 Beyond Psychology (Dover, 1966, ISBN 0-486-20485-5)
1996 A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer] (Princeton, 1996, ISBN 0-691-04470-8)
Let me begin by giving you a 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware).
I am current engaged in by far my most vigorous investigation into the history of Psychoanalysis that is turning up new and partly different information each and every day that I didn't know previously.
Thus, an essay of this type right here -- and every one like it -- that I write on the subject and history of Psychoanalysis is necessarily of a continually evolving nature -- with sometimes strong new information entering my interpretive and evaluative system that may necessitate a sudden, perhaps radical change in judgment based on the relevance of this new information and what it means relative to the issue or problem as a whole that I am addressing.
I can only imagine -- with reasonable confidence -- that the same type of scenario was present for Freud between around 1889 and 1900 as Freud learned from both Breuer and Charcot, and sought for the first time, to start to put these ideas that he was learning from them, from himself, and from his patients, into therapeutic practice.
It is interesting to note for example that in 1889, in Freud's first case, the Frau Emmy case, cited in 'Studies on Hysteria' (1893-1895), Freud is using massage therapy as well as hypnosis, in contrast to the strict 'no touch' policy that Freud would begin to adhere to later in his career (let us say after 1900 although it was probably earlier than this), and which Freud would strictly enforce in his 'orthodox teachings of Psychoanalysis' while other psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi wanted to -- and were -- practicing a 'wilder', non-orthodox and non-approved, form of touch-based Psychoanalysis.
It would not be the first or the last time that other theorists and therapists would pick up a particular idea and/or technique that Freud had basically 'been there and done that' -- and for one reason or another -- abandoned and/or marginalized the specific idea and/or technique that other theorists/therapists still wanted to go back to and re-investigate because they thought Freud had left something important behind. We can include Reich, Rank, and Ferenczi in this category, as well as Perls and Masson -- and I am sure there are numerous others.
For example, it defies my imagination how in 37 years of studying psychology from the time I first picked up the best-selling book 'Psycho-Cybernetics' (Maxwell Maltz, 1960) in around 1972, to the present, Aug 18th, 2009, I could largely overlook the momentously creative work of Otto Rank, who I will describe as holding the unofficial title of 'the founder of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis',
Otto Rank has been an indirect, 'under the cover of darkness', influential lynch pin of my thinking, my beliefs, my values, in Hegel's Hotel through his influence on the growth of Humanistic-Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy, through such theorists and therapists as Rollo May and Carl Rogers, probably Karen Horney, and most notably Frederick Perls and all of Gestalt Therapy.
While Dr. Masson was complaining in the 1980s and 1990s about the 'emotional sterility' of Psychoanalysis, Rank and Ferenczi, in collaboration with each other, were saying essentially the same thing back in the 1920s and 1930s. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Perhaps most remarkable in Rank's system of ideas is his ideas on creativity, his ideas on the dialectic dichotomy between man's 'fear of life' and his 'fear of death', and his ideas on 'separation anxiety' as first experienced in 'birth trauma' which then becomes an 'existential metaphor' of his and/or her whole life.
Man is caught in a life-long approach-avoidance conflict between the twin poles of life and death, and the paradoxical wish for individuality and union at the same time.
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the creative impulse and the "will to unite" with the need for love. To respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate "totally" or to merge "totally" -- is to have the other thrown back at one's self. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Writes Rank,
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou "harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss." (See the Wikipedia article below.)
In 1979, in my Honours Thesis, as well as a preceding essay leading up to my Honours Thesis, I was mesmerized by the following Erich Fromm quote which I can see now as showing a definite Rankian influence.
'It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. (Erich Fromm, Man For Himself,
I will say and do no more in this essay than to pay special tribute to this man's special contributions to the evolution humanistic-existential psychology and psychotherapy as detailed below from Wikipedia.
-- dgbn, Aug. 18th, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process.
...............................................................................
Otto Rank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born April 22, 1884 (1884-04-22)
Vienna, Austria
Died October 31, 1939 (1939-11-01)
New York, New York
Fields Psychology
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater University of Vienna
Influences Sigmund Freud, Henrik Ibsen, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer
Influenced Jessie Taft, Carl Rogers, Paul Goodman, Rollo May, Ernest Becker, Stanislav Grof, Matthew Fox, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Irvin Yalom
Part of a series of articles on
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Concepts
Psychosexual development
Psychosocial development
Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious
Psychic apparatus
Id, ego, and super-ego
Libido • Drive
Transference
Countertransference
Ego defenses • Resistance
Projection • Denial
Important figures
Alfred Adler • Michael Balint
Wilfred Bion • Nancy Chodorow
Erik Erikson • Ronald Fairbairn
Sándor Ferenczi
Anna Freud • Sigmund Freud
Erich Fromm • Harry Guntrip
Karen Horney
Ernest Jones • Carl Jung
Melanie Klein • Heinz Kohut
Jacques Lacan
Margaret Mahler • Otto Rank
Wilhelm Reich
Harry Stack Sullivan
Susan Sutherland Isaacs
Donald Winnicott
Important works
The Interpretation of Dreams
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Civilization and Its Discontents
Schools of thought
Self psychology • Lacanian
• Object relations
Interpersonal • Relational
Ego psychology
Psychology portal
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Otto Rank (April 22, 1884 – October 31, 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's publishing house and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, after Freud accused Rank of "anti-Oedipal" heresy, he chose to leave the inner circle and move to Paris with his wife, Tola, and infant daughter, Helene. For the remaining 14 years of his life, Rank had an exceptionally successful career as a lecturer, writer and therapist in France and the U.S.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
* 2 Post-Vienna life and work
* 3 Influence
* 4 Major publications by date of first publication
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
In 1905, at the age of 21, Otto Rank presented Freud with a short manuscript on the artist, a study that so impressed Freud he invited Rank to become Secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of his Viennese disciples.
Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with Adler and then Jung developed. Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of legend, myth, art, and other works of creativity. He worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work for many years. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910. Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding psychoanalytic theory.
In 1924 Rank published Das Trauma der Geburt (translated into English as The Trauma of Birth in 1929), exploring how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by separation anxiety in the “phase before the development of the Oedipus complex” (p. 216). But there was no such phase in Freud’s theories. The Oedipus complex, Freud explained tirelessly, was the nucleus of the neurosis and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. Rank was the first to use the term “pre-Oedipal” in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925 (Rank, 1996, p. 43). In a 1930 self-analysis of his own writings, Rank observes that "the pre-Oedipal super-ego has since been overemphasized by Melanie Klein, without any reference to me" (ibid., p. 149n). In the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Rank will be credited with coining the term "pre-Oedipal", which was previously mistakenly thought to have been introduced by Freud or Klein.
After some hesitation, Freud distanced himself from The Trauma of Birth, signalling to other members of his inner circle that Rank was perilously close to anti-Oedipal heresy. Confronted with Freud’s decisive opposition, Rank resigned in protest from his positions as Vice-President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, director of Freud’s publishing house, and co-editor of Imago and Zeitschrift. His closest friend, Sándor Ferenczi, with whom Rank collaborated in the early Twenties on new experiential, object-relational and "here-and-now" approaches to therapy, vacillated on the significance of Rank's pre-Oedipal theory but not on Rank's objections to classical analytic technique.
The recommendation in Freud’s technical papers for analysts to be emotionless, according to Ferenczi and Rank (1924), had led to "an unnatural elimination of all human factors in the analysis" (pp. 40-41), and to "a theorizing of experience [Erlebnis]" (p. 41): the feeling experience of the intersubjective relationship, two first-person experiences, within the analytic situation. "The characteristic of that time," remembers Sándor Rado, who was in analysis with Karl Abraham from 1922 to 1925, "was a neglect of a human being's emotional life." Adds Rado: "Everybody was looking for oral, pregenital, and genital components in motivation. But that some people are happy, others unhappy, some afraid, or full of anger, and some loving and affectionate -- read the case histories to find how such differences between people were then absent from the literature." (Roazen & Swerdloff, 1995, pp. 82-83)
All emotional experience by human beings was being reduced by analysis to a derivative, no matter how disguised, of libido. For Freud, emotion was always sexual, derived from a dangerous Id that must be surgically uprooted: "Where Id was [Wo es war]," Freud said famously, "there ego shall be [soll ich werden]" (S.E., 22:80).
“Libido,” according to Freud’s 1921 work on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (S.E., 18: 90), “is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions.” Emotion is the cause of neurotic disorder. Increases in emotion, according to Freud, are unpleasurable. Cure, for Freud, means analyzing, "working through" and eventually uprooting the emotions of the patient, “like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (Freud, S.E., 22:80). The analyst makes the unconscious conscious by providing cognitive insight to the patient, thereby subduing the pressing drive for the irrational, for emotions—for the Id—to emerge from the patient’s unconscious.
In a 1927 lecture, Rank (1996) observes that “surgical therapy is uprooting and isolates the individual emotionally, as it tries to deny the emotional life” (p. 169), the same attack he and Ferenczi had leveled against psychoanalytic practice in their joint work. Reducing all emotional experience—all feeling, loving, thinking, and willing—to sex was one of Freud's biggest mistakes, according to Rank, who first pointed out this confusion in the mid-twenties. Emotions, said Rank, are relationships. Denial of the emotional life leads to denial of the will, the creative life, as well as denial of the interpersonal relationship in the analytic situation (Rank, 1929-31).
For Freud, said Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), "the emotional life develops from the sexual sphere, therefore his sexualization in reality means emotionalization" (p. 165), two experiences that psychoanalysts continued to conflate for half a century after Freud’s death. Until the end of the 20th century, psychoanalysis had no theory of emotional experience and, by extension, no theory of emotional intelligence. Weinstein (2001) identified over two dozen articles in the major psychoanalytic journals lamenting the absence of a theory of emotions. "[S]uch comments persisted through to the 1990s" (Weinstein, 2001, p. 40).
"The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis," wrote Ernest Becker (1973) in The Denial of Death, which was strongly influenced by Rank's ideas, "must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psychiatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps explain the terrible deadness of emotion that one experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of the character armor erected against the world" (p. 195n).
Written privately in 1932, Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary identified the “personal causes for the erroneous development of psychoanalysis” (Ferenczi, 1995, p. 184). According to Ferenczi, "… One learned from [Freud] and from his kind of technique various things that made one’s life and work more comfortable: the calm, unemotional reserve; the unruffled assurance that one knows better; and the theories, the seeking and finding of the causes of failure in the patient instead of partly in ourselves … and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless" (Ferenczi, 1995, pp. 185-186).
But terrified at the prospect of losing Freud's approval, Ferenczi aborted his enthusiasm for The Trauma of Birth and began to distance himself personally from Rank – whom he shunned during a chance meeting in 1926 at Penn Station in New York. "He was my best friend and he refused to speak to me," Rank said (Taft, 1958, p. xvi).
Ferenczi's rupture with Rank cut short radical innovations in practice, and left no one in the inner circle who would champion relational, pre-Oedipal or "here-and-now" psychotherapy. Classical psychoanalysis, along the lines of Freud's 1911-15 technical writings, would now be entrenched in training institutes around the world. The attack leveled in 1924 by Ferenczi and Rank on the increasing "fanaticism for interpretation" and the "unnatural elimination of all human factors" from the practice of analysis would be forgotten.
Relational, expressive and "here-and-now" therapy would not be acceptable to most members of the American Psychoanalytic Association or the International Psychoanalytic Association for half a century. "[T]hose who had the misfortune to be analyzed by [Rank] were required to undergo a second analysis in order to qualify" for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (Lieberman, 1985, p. 293). As far as classical analysis was concerned, Rank was dead.
[edit] Post-Vienna life and work
In May 1926, having made emotional relationship in the "here-and-now" central to his practice of psychotherapy, Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985).
According to Rank, all emotional life is grounded in the present. In Will Therapy, published in German in 1929-31, Rank uses the term “here and now” for the first time in the psychotherapeutic literature: “Freud made the repression historical, that is, misplaced it into the childhood of the individual and then wanted to release it from there, while as a matter of fact the same tendency is working here and now” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 39). Instead of the word Verdrängung (repression), which laid stress on unconscious repression of the past, Rank preferred to use the word Verleugnung (denial), which focused instead on the emotional will to remain ill in the present: “The neurotic lives too much in the past [and] to that extent he actually does not live. He suffers … because he clings to [the past], wants to cling to it, in order to protect himself from experience [Erlebnis], the emotional surrender to the present” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 27).
In France and later in America, Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer from 1926 to 1939. Traveling frequently between France and America, Rank lectured at universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and University of Pennsylvania on relational, experiential and “here-and-now” psychotherapy, art, the creative will, and “neurosis as a failure in creativity” (Rank, 1996).
Just as Erik Erikson was the first analyst to focus on identity and adulthood, Rank was the first to propose that separation from outworn thoughts, emotions and behaviors is the quintessence of psychological growth and development. In the late 1920s, after he left Freud’s inner circle, Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
Foreshadowing the central themes of Piaget, Kohlberg, McClelland, Erikson and Kegan, Rank was the first to propose that human development is a lifelong construction, which requires continual negotiation and renegotiation of the dual yearnings for individuation and connection, the will to separate and the will to unite. Decades before Ronald Fairbairn, now credited by many as the inventor in the 1940s of modern object-relations theory, Rank's 1926 lecture on "The Genesis of the Object Relation" marks the first complete statement of this theory (Rank, 1996, pp. 140-149). By 1926 Rank was persona non grata in the official psychoanalytic world. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that any of the other writers credited with helping to invent object relations theory (Melanie Klein or Donald Winnicott, for example) ever read the German text of this lecture, published as Zur Genese der Object-beziehung in Vol. 1 of Rank's Genetische Psychologie (1927, pp. 110-22).
Rank died in New York City in 1939 from a kidney infection, one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement. "Komisch" (strange, odd, comical), Rank said on his deathbed (Lieberman, 1985, p. 389).
[edit] Influence
Rollo May, a pioneer of existential psychotherapy in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank’s post-Freudian lectures and writings and always considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank’s American lectures. “I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud’s circle,” said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).
In 1936 Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist in America after William James, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank’s post-Freudian models of experiential and relational therapy. Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Rank with having profoundly shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counselling. "I became infected with Rankian ideas," said Rogers (Kramer, 1995).(http://www.ottorank.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/rogers.pdf).
The New York writer Paul Goodman, who was co-founder with Fritz Perls of the Gestalt method of psychotherapy, one of the most popular in the world today, and one that makes Otto Rank's "here-and-now" central to its approach, described Rank’s post-Freudian ideas on art and creativity as “beyond praise” in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p. 395). According to Ervin Polster (1968), a pre-eminent Gestalt therapist, "Rank brought the human relationship directly into his office. He influenced analysts to take seriously the actual present interaction between therapist and patient, rather than maintain the fixed, distant, 'as though' relationship that had given previous analysts an emotional buffer for examining the intensities of therapeutic sensation and wish. Rank's contributions opened the way for encounter to become accepted as a deep therapeutic agent" (p. 6).
Rank also affected the practice of action-oriented and reflective therapies such as dramatic role-playing and psychodrama. "Although there is no evidence of a direct influence, Rank's ideas found new life in the work of such action psychotherapists as Moreno, who developed a psychodrama technique of doubling ... and Landy [director of the drama therapy program at New York University], who attempted to conceptualize balance as an integration of role and counterrole" (Landy, 2008, p. 29).
Rank's psychology of creativity has recently been applied to action learning, an inquiry-based process of group problem solving, team building, leadership development and organizational learning (Kramer 2007; 2008). The heart of action learning is asking wicked questions to promote the unlearning or letting go of taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. Questions allow group members to “step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology,” as Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 70), reflect on their assumptions and beliefs, and reframe their choices. The process of “stepping out” of a frame, out of a form of knowing – a prevailing ideology – is analogous to the work of artists as they struggle to give birth to fresh ways of seeing the world, perspectives that allow them to see aspects of the world that no artists, including themselves, have ever seen before.
The most creative artists, such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, know how to separate even from their own greatest public successes, from earlier artistic incarnations of themselves. Their “greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered,” according to Art and Artist (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 368). Through the lens of Otto Rank’s work on understanding art and artists, action learning can be seen as the never-completed process of learning how to “step out of the frame” of the ruling mindset, whether one’s own or the culture’s – in other words, of learning how to unlearn.
Comparing the process of unlearning to the “breaking out” process of birth, Rank was the first psychologist to suggest that a continual capacity to separate from “internal mental objects” – from internalized institutions, beliefs and neuroses; from the restrictions of culture, social conformity and received wisdom – is the sine qua non for life-long creativity.
In a 1938 lecture, Rank said: "Life in itself is a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death – which represents the final separation. At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome. In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments off his old self that are now outlived. Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself for which he has no further use ….The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution"(Rank, 1996, p. 270).
Unlearning necessarily involves separation from one’s self concept, as it has been culturally conditioned to conform to familial, group, occupational or organizational allegiances. According to Rank (1932/1989), unlearning or breaking out of our shell from the inside is “a separation [that] is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom, and in some form, won over a part of one’s ego” (p. 375).
In the organizational context, learning how to unlearn is vital because what we assume to be true has merged into our identity. We refer to the identity of an individual as a “mindset.” We refer to the identity of an organizational group as a “culture.” Action learners learn how to question, probe and separate from, both kinds of identity—i.e., their “individual” selves and their “social” selves. By opening themselves to critical inquiry, they begin to learn how to emancipate themselves from what they "know" – they learn how to unlearn.
In 1974, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer prize for The Denial of Death (1973), which was based on Rank’s post-Freudian writings, especially Will Therapy (1929-31), Psychology and the Soul (1930) and Art and Artist (1932/1989). The feeling of anxiety, writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), divides into two currents, running in opposite directions: one toward separation and individuation; the other toward union and collectivity. The outbreak of neurosis typically comes from the streaming together of these two fears—which Rank also calls the "fear of living" [Lebensangst] and the "fear of dying" [Todesangst] – “which, even in The Trauma of Birth, I had designated as the fear of both going forward and of going backward” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 124). A crisis "seems to break out at a certain age when the life fear which has restricted the I’s development meets with the death fear as it increases with growth and maturity," writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31). "The individual then feels himself driven forward by regret for wasted life and the desire to retrieve it. But this forward driving fear is now death fear, the fear of dying without having lived, which, even so, is held in check by fear of life" (pp. 188-189).
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the creative impulse and the "will to unite" with the need for love. To respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate "totally" or to merge "totally" -- is to have the other thrown back at one's self.
According to Rank (1929-31), "Birth fear remains always more universal, cosmic as it were, loss of a connection with a greater whole [einen größeren Ganzen], in the last analysis with the 'All' [dem All] ... The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear [Urangst] corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole [vom All], therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole [ins All). Between these two fear possibilities these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life, which accounts for the fact that we have not been able to trace fear back to a single root, or to overcome it therapeutically" (ibid., p. 124).
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou "harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss."
"[T]he love feeling," Rank observes in a lecture delivered in 1927 at the University of Pennsylvania, "unites our I with the other, with the Thou [dem Du], with men, with the world, and so does away with fear. What is unique in love is that—beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the I. Not only, I love the other as my I, as part of my I, but the other also makes my I worthy of love. The love of the Thou [des Liebe des Du] thus places a value on one's own I. Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one's own I. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self [unser eigene Selbst] as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is." (Rank, 1996, p. 154)
On a macrocosmic level, taking the experience of love as far as humanly possible, to the boundary of the spiritual, Rank compared the artist's "giving" and the enjoyer's "finding" of art with the dissolution and rediscovery of the self in mutual love. "The art-work," says Rank in Art and Artist, "presents a unity, alike in its effect and in its creation, and this implies a spiritual unity between the artist and the recipient" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113). It is in art, and its correlative, love, that microcosm meets macrocosm, the human meets the spiritual. At the height of the individuating impulse, the "will to separate," artists feel most strongly the longing for attachment, the "will to unite." Although artists begin the creative process by separating from their fellow human beings and liberating themselves from conforming to the past, escaping from the anxiety of influence, eventually the creative impulse merges into a desire for a return to "a greater whole," to "the ALL" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 155) -- in human terms, to the "collective" that alone has the power to immortalize the artist with the approval it grants the artwork:
"For this very essence of man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual ... and not on a psychological identification with the artist that [aesthetic pleasure] ultimately depends... But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling (Rank, 1932/1989, pp. 109-110).
In one of his most poetic passages, Rank suggests that this transcendent feeling implies not only a "spiritual unity" between artist and enjoyer, I and Thou, but also "with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113)--an identity with "the ALL" that once was but is no more. The healing nature of artistic experience, Rank believed, affirms difference but, paradoxically, also "leads to the release from difference, to the feeling of unity with the self, with the other, with the cosmos" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 58). In art, microcosm meets macrocosm. Of the uncanny feeling of emotional unity we experience in surrendering ourselves—giving up temporarily the burden of our difference—to the Other in art, Rank writes in Art and Artist: "[It] produces a satisfaction which suggests that it is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, that it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113).
No one has expressed the conflict between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker (1973), whose award-winning The Denial of Death captured the largest—macrocosmic—meaning of separation and union for Rank: "On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart" (Becker, 1973, pp. 151-152). "You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof ..." (ibid., p. 155).
On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two "poles of fear" can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one's uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires "seeking at once isolation and union" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, "originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life" (1932/1989, p. xxii).
On a macrocosmic level, the consciousness of living—the dim awareness that we are alive for a moment on this planet as it spins, meaninglessly, around the cold and infinite galaxy—gives human beings "the status of a small god in nature," according to Ernest Becker: "Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still has the gill marks to prove it ... Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with" (Becker, 1973, p. 26).
Through the influence of Ernest Becker's writings, Rank's eternal dialectic between "life fear and death fear" has been tested experimentally in Terror Management Theory by Skidmore College psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, University of Arizona psychology professor Jeff Greenberg, and Colorado University at Colorado Springs psychology professor Tom Pyszczynski.
The American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and Wisdom University, considers Rank to be one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. See, especially, Fox's book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), paperback: ISBN 1-58542-329-7.
Stanislav Grof, a founder of transpersonal psychology, based much of his work in prenatal and perinatal psychology on Rank's The Trauma of Birth (Kripal, 2007, pp. 249-269).
In 2008, the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone published The Roots of Morality (Pennsylvania State University Press), which contains an analysis of Rank's argument that "immortality ideologies" are an abiding human response to the painful riddle of death. Sheets-Johnstone compares Rank's thought to that of three major Western philosophers—René Descartes, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida: "Because immortality ideologies were originally recognized and in fact so named by Rank, a close examination of his writings on the subject is not only apposite but is itself philosophically rewarding ... Rank was a Freudian dissident who, in introducing the concept of immortality ideologies, traced out historical and psychological roots of 'soul-belief' (Seelenglaube)... [My chapter] points up the extraordinary cogency of Rank's distinction between the rational and the irrational to the question of the human need for immortality ideologies" (Sheets-Johnstone, 2008, p. 64). Sheets-Johnstone concludes her book on a note reminiscent of Rank's plea for the human value of mutual love over arid intellectual insight: "Surely it is time for Homo sapiens sapiens to turn away from the pursuit of domination over all and to begin cultivating and developing its sapiential wisdom in the pursuit of caring, nurturing and strengthening that most precious muscle which is its heart" (ibid., pp. 405-06).
Today, Rank can be seen as one of the great pioneers in the fields of humanistic psychology, existential psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology.
[edit] Major publications by date of first publication
Year German Title (Current Edition) English Translation (Current Edition)
1907 Der Künstler The Artist
1909 Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Turia & Kant, 2000, ISBN 3-85132-141-3) The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Johns Hopkins, 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7883-7)
1911 Die Lohengrin Sage [doctoral thesis] The Lohengrin Saga
1912 Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Johns Hopkins, 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4176-3)
1913 Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fur die Geisteswissenschaften [with Hanns Sachs] The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences
1914 "Traum und Dichtung" and "Traum und Mythus" in Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung The Interpretation of Dreams eds. 4-7: "Dreams and Poetry"; "Dreams and Myth" added to Ch. VI, "The Dream-Work." In Dreaming by the Book L. Marinelli and A. Mayer, Other, 2003. ISBN 1-59051-009-7
1924 Das Trauma der Geburt (Psychosozial-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-932133-25-0) The Trauma of Birth, 1929 (Dover, 1994, ISBN 0-486-27974-X)
1924 Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse [with Sandor Ferenczi] The Development of Psychoanalysis / Developmental Goals of Psychoanalysis
1925 Der Doppelgänger [written 1914] The Double (Karnac, 1989, ISBN 0-946439-58-3)
1929 Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit Truth and Reality (Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00899-1)
1930 (Consists of Volumes II and III of "Technik der Psychoanalyse": Vol. II, "Die Analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elementen"; Vol. III, "Die Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituaton". Copyright 1929, 1931 by Franz Deuticke.) Will Therapy, 1929-31 (First published in English in 1936;reprinted in paperback by Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00898-3)
1930 Seelenglaube und Psychologie Psychology and the Soul (Johns Hopkins, 2003, ISBN 0-8018-7237-5)
1932 Kunst und Künstler (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89806-023-3) Art and Artist (Norton, 1989, ISBN 0-393-30574-0)
1933 Erziehung und Weltanschauung : Eine Kritik d. psychol. Erziehungs-Ideologie, München : Reinhardt, 1933 Modern Education
1941 Beyond Psychology (Dover, 1966, ISBN 0-486-20485-5)
1996 A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer] (Princeton, 1996, ISBN 0-691-04470-8)
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