Psychoanalysis, as introduced by Freud, contrasted with past therapeutic
measures by trying to remove magical beliefs.
For example, shamans used to heal psychological problems by projecting
evil forces to sources outside of the patient.
With Exorcism, both the exorcist and the possessed
had to believe in angels and devils for the exorcism to work.
If taboos were violated in primitive cultures,
then only direct punishment, without any attempts at understanding,
would follow. With Mesmerism, the patient had to believe in unbalances
of an invisible substance in the environment.
Magnetism allowed the practitioner to provide suggestions to influence the
patient, and Spiritism tried to connect the
patient with the dead, to access their supposed knowledge.
The patterns we see here are about externalizing all internal conflicts.
With Freud's method the aim was to look inward instead.
Patient's would lay on a sofa with Freud behind them and out of sight,
and Freud's early practice of touching people on the head was removed.
James Strachey described the proceedings.
How it was believed that psychoanalysis was an advancement,
James argued that...
One fatal flaw of psychoanalysis was the age limitation.
Strong habits and forgetfulness become more difficult to deal with as we age.
Yet for a lot of critics in Freud's time, they felt that he was only about sex and
that maybe recovery would be faster than six months to three years
by just simply suggesting patients engage in sexual activity.
Freud responded...
In Wild Analysis, Freud clarified his broad view of sexuality to prevent confusion.
Freud's professional development was like that of a man learning from failure.
Successes were often short-lived and early therapists
such as Freud had to be ready to innovate.
One of the big discoveries for patients unearthing their pasts
had to do with rivalries related to the Oedipus Complex,
including influences from caregivers and competition for scarce attention,
leading to the later defenses we see in adulthood.
The patient then has to change their attitude towards their illness.
Through deep understanding of the illness, the patient learns more about
their instincts. Because instincts provide constant
pressure, they can continue repeating unconsciously until the conscious mind
understands them. The understanding allows for more control of impulses,
and plans to discharge impulses in appropriate ways.
These repressed instincts did achieve early forms of satisfaction,
but most often led inevitably to loss. Loss of loved ones to death, or rejection.
The wounded mind can turn to despondency and begin the pathological process of
infantile compensations. Sometimes there are excessive repressions and
self-denial. This is partly from a fear that "all the
good things in life will being taken away, so why bother?"
Freud's method was to go to the repressed emotions and to discharge them
to an acceptable enough level so that one goes back to a healthy
norm afterwards. Grieving is a normal part of life, and once death
and impermanence are accepted, one can continue enjoying life with an
ability to let go, and also the ability to appreciate
transitory beauty. Just because things don't last forever,
doesn't mean they don't have value. Quite on the contrary.
In his paper On Transience, Freud explored the pathological human response
to impermanence with descriptions of two different
responses. One was despondency or a fear of
risk-taking, and the other was denial. For Freud...
Lost objects, or people we keep in our
memories, are to be appreciated precisely because
their goodness doesn't last. Freud also understood relevance. It feels
relevant for us what we lost because we are the important component of the
loss, because we were the ones there that
could love the object.
What pathological responses are doing in Freud's perspective are attempts to try to avoid
the pain of mourning, but this not need be the case.
One of the ways the mind can get caught is when it has made an emotional
investment and becomes preoccupied with blame of others, but also blame of
oneself. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud talked
about this painful conscience that seems to lose belief in oneself and
attacks the ego.
Instead of healing, the mind can get caught in a destructive loop where the
distinction between the inside and outside is lost.
The loss of self-esteem is essentially how objects can be taken into the sense
of self with identification. Because we identify with the lost person,
their weaknesses become something we identify and attack ourselves with.
There now develops an empty attitude of self-distrust.
The healthy grieving process must include an appreciation for the lost
person's good qualities and a championing of those qualities
without identifying with their bad traits.
Their love and passion can be taken in by us and maintained through our
inspired love. As life moves closer to death, for a
healthy ego, letting go is possible and it allows one
to pass on this passion and appreciation of life for new generations,
so that what is valuable, even if impermanent, can last as long as possible.
Through preservation of good objects, one can leave life with a sense of
contribution.
Naturally as Freud saw more patients he was able to categorize them into a
cute early form of personality typology. The 3 main categories of people he
encountered were erotic, obsessional and narcissistic.
These different personality types can be lopsided but they all have their
specialties. Their skills in each of the domains of
weakness are essentially undeveloped and frustrating to work with.
Frustration in areas of weakness can lead to typical Freudian problems.
Compared to later psychologists, Freud became more of a doctor of desire.
At his time it was too early to really understand psychological problems based
on biological sources of pathology, the way we can now. Freud focused more on
frustrated desire and how a person's experience of
happiness is affected. How we learn to deal with gaining
and losing objects of desire starts early and desire for Freud has to
include sexual desire, especially in regards to...
What we look at as a fixed character is deceptive,
and opens up to more or less a plurality of developed identifications.
Freud was an early precursor to Vittorio Gallese's work on mirror neurons,
the ability to imitate, and he saw that we are all mapping out desires of
other people so we can understand who, what, when, where,
why and how they desire. This way we can
ingest their benefits through the imitation.
A lot of the motivation for learning is contained in our wishes to achieve
satisfaction with what we learn. As we get good at different
identifications, they can condition and strengthen with a variety of intensities
and change throughout life.
How people can flip on sexual desire and any other desire
is based on having and being. Part of our empathy and love is to be
able to imagine ourselves as the love-object
with our ability to imitate their desires by intuiting their purposes.
The success with one or more sexual dispositions
depends on how skillfully a person identifies with them.
When people partner up, each individual is a mixture of masculine and feminine
in highly variegated ways. When Freud was thinking about this and
the sexual act he said:
As we sexually fantasize, how we are able to see all the steps in our minds of
getting masculine or feminine satisfaction,
essentially the accessibility vs. frustration dichotomy,
arouses us, or turns us off. These are pleasure procedures, and are
not only related to sexuality. Any skills we don't understand tend to
inhibit or frighten us. Inevitably, what we are not skilled at
has to look cooperative to us so we can HAVE them if we can't BE
them. When we lose objects we HAD, there is a panic to try
and replace what we lost by BEING them. Freud said
Much of what Freud was working with patients on was their sense of
frustration with reality compared to their wishes.
What he usually treated was Neurosis and Psychosis,
which are two pathological ways to deal with...
One of the escapes for Freud is going inward and satisfying oneself in
dreaming and substitute pleasures, but this has a danger of focusing on
past forms of conditioning. Instead of further development, there is
regression.
How people can fall ill is through frustration, but also illness based on
inflexibility. Essentially a Darwinian problem.
Naturally, frustrations happen throughout life and they create...
There are people...
Like with Csikszentmihalyi's Flow system, there is a need to balance
craving with pursuits and sometimes it's not the pursuits that
cause frustration, but something else.
In A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis, Freud described another problem with
frustrated desires, which includes extreme forms
of repression, where alternative demonic evil objects are chosen for
satisfaction. Since so many of us are capable of bad
desires, we project what we hate in ourselves onto ghosts and demons
influencing the public.
In simple terms, demonic influences outside ourselves are signals of our potential for bad desires.
How can they influence, unless we have a potential to enjoy them?
They would look like a blank wall, disgusting or uninteresting.
If we are capable of imagining those pleasure procedures and feel excitement,
then we have to admit that we are afraid of the social consequences
of imitating bad desires, but we don't pretend that we aren't
capable of them. The devil is inside all of us, and so is
much of the conflict.
With Freud's Ego, Id and Super-ego system, he was able to map out these
frustrations with reality in the mind.
The conflict is exacerbated by demands of civilization
and harmony with the super-ego, which imitates cultural demands.
Psychosis for Freud has some similarities to Neurosis,
but a difference is that the id is able to use the super-ego to overwhelm the
ego's grip with reality.
Freud includes melancholia, where the super-ego depresses the ego,
and essentially becomes a narcissistic psychoneuroses.
It becomes a psychosis when the Super-ego takes over
and all the cultural ideals remove one from a connection to reality.
This is partly why narcissists can be depressed, but also they can steamroll
other people on their way to places in the world that provide Prestige
that the Super-ego wants fervently. These leverage points of power in the
world relieve the depression temporarily, that is until a new point of Prestige is
chosen and the old one becomes boring. When higher levels of Prestige are lost,
then the lower levels are idealized once more.
The Id feeds the Super-ego desire and the Super-ego provides excuses for
short-cutting the path to the goal that unfortunately will
cause conflicts with the goals of others, since a grip on reality has been lost.
Freud summarized these theories of confrontations with reality in The Loss of Reality in
Neurosis and Psychosis.
When people have neurosis, they run away from reality with repression,
and avoid contact with the parts of reality that are unsatisfying,
to gain short-term relief. In Psychosis, relief is found when reality is replaced
with a preferred fantasy.
One of the later innovations that Freud brought to his Psychoanalysis
was the understanding that we project our internal attitudes onto reality.
It's a transfer of attitudes that patients are only partially conscious of.
These attitudes can be more or less
developed, and they can help to explain the psychological experience the patient
is going through.
These differing levels of development help to explain how extroverted or
introverted a person's cravings are depending on whether fantasy or action
predominate in the patient. We can fantasize what we would like to
happen: introversion, or we can actively think
and act to make something happen: extroversion.
The problems with our internal cinemas are that they can be an escape,
just like the external ones. Then there's the danger that we can cling to those
internal movies, preventing psychological development.
This is where therapists can provide realistic
suggestions so that escape isn't necessary.
Yet the analyst has to be careful not to overuse suggestions
so that the patient is just copycatting the therapist.
Patients are looking for permission to develop themselves, and with a good
analyst and analysand pairing, the patient is
free to develop themselves in the sessions
and eventually out in the world.
Getting at the purpose of Psychoanalysis, Freud in
Constructions in Analysis, wanted patients to learn more about themselves.
As they learn about their regressions, repressions, over-compensations,
patterns of avoidance and defense mechanisms, there's a gradual
appreciation for how stressful, and inhibiting these behaviours are.
To live with less defensiveness, to allow development of new skills,
helps the patient complete their infantile development.
With free associations, dream analyses, and transferences, which are like the
patient's guesses/suspicions, help to describe
their current skill level and pathology. The analyst
can then piece together the associations with historical facts,
and with enough imagination, they can reconstruct an individual's past:
a semblance of a prior life that is now more or less understood by the patient.
Much like a noting meditation where the ego can be
dystonic when labeling thoughts/defense mechanisms/avoidances
etc., or syntonic when lost in identification, the patient can
learn to disidentify from past defense mechanisms, avoidances,
and by understanding their avoidance motivations, the patient can let go of
weak tools and replace them with superior
ones. To recognize "this is a defense mechanism
and it doesn't work," helps to begin a search for new skills.
To realize "this is a pattern of avoidance
and it makes things worse," helps one to face problems head on.
To realize, "this is a form of magical thinking, unrealistic wishing,
and thoughts not based on facts," brings a healthy sense of reality to life,
and realistic responses to the real environment.
To trace an imitation that goes back to a role-model outside oneself,
hat now doesn't have to be identified with anymore,
frees one to choose differently. To let go of perfectionism, allows one to
drop inhuman standards to be able to learn.
To see that one's current desires have a mixture of regret,
and realizing that addictive replacements are unfufilling,
allows one to prioritize to chase more satisfying goals.
How energy is waylaid with these habitual reactions
is that it gets tied up with the lower levels of pleasure,
and the relief that they provide create resistance
to change. Old habits are comfortable.
The difficulty is that the ego can't function properly
with this energy drain.
Psychoanalysis takes months and years
because of the resistances, fear of embarrassment, fears of being
found-out as being a pathetic person, and shame. Like Freud's example of
psychological archaeology, the process isn't perfect and there are
always some doubts and imperfections in the reconstruction.
The patient will always have some information that is forgotten, repressed,
or evaded. Success in an analysis has more to do
with how independent minded the patient becomes
and how they are able to become more assertive and rely on themselves more
and more.
One of the difficult areas for Sigmund Freud to reconstruct in analysis was
female sexuality. It ended up being one of the areas that
Freud would have to punt towards other psychoanalysts, including
many female psychoanalysts. Famously in a letter to Marie Bonaparte
he said...
Using another form of the Oedipus Complex, Freud pieced out female development in
On Femininity, as beginning with a desire for the mother,
just like the boy, but eventually a gravitation towards the father.
The early period towards the mother in many cases reached a duration of up to
the 4th year, in one case Freud saw, up to the 5th year.
Part of the haziness of the subject for
Freud related to transference. He felt that female analysts like Jeanne
Lampl-de Groot and Helene Deutsch could learn more when they received a
mother-transference. What Freud could still see was...
Freud posits a castration complex for women, but it comes about in his controversial
penis envy.
How women go from the strong attachment to the mother to that of the father
Freud lists out many possible events:
Childhood love is unlimited, and not being able to be content with
less than all, hostility and disappointments are inevitable.
Unsatisfying objects can be replaced by new ones.
Early passionate love of the mother can lead to disenchantment with all the
disappointments, hostilities and boredom that arise later.
Freud here compares this to a passionate 1st marriage
that burns brightly but unsustainably. He viewed 2nd marriages as better.
Freud also ventured into mimetics. Being nursed is a passive situation,
and all children, and even adults, move between
to have or to be.
For Freud this partially explains the girl's desire to play with dolls.
Both passive and active developments help to create active and passive
options for the later adult. Like with 'The Wolfman,' Freud also posits
a biological block. Part of the mind rebels against
homosexuality due to the presence and use of the genitals.
This is often triggered by a new arrival, where both the boy and the girl
wish that they could give birth, whether the boy replaces the father,
or the girl replaces the mother in their phantasies.
Being this 1931, naturally a lot of development on the subject has advanced.
A summary of these in the modern discussion in
On Femininity, is as follows:
Venturing out for sexual partners has an element of betrayal towards
the mother, but also of compromise. Girls can essentially take the mother's
place, and have the father, by finding someone outside of the
nuclear family. Early feelings of the mother owning the
daughter's sexuality, can create a sense of guilt in the
daughter after a rebellion, which is more or less resolved over time.
Identification with the mother and her relationship attitudes
and beliefs have a large impact on the daughter relationship patterns.
There is more ambivalence than Freud thought. Daughters can oscillate between
loyalty to mother and father much more rapidly.
It's not just one big shift.
Part of the separation of daughter and mother comes from direct
competition where the daughter becomes more independent,
but fears losing support from the mother at the same time.
Girls often try to hide their aggression in jealous conflicts.
A castration complex is not as important for the formation of a Super-ego for girls as a fear of a loss of love from important authority figures.
For both boys and girls, a Super-ego develops from multiple influences
throughout childhood and adolescence.
Genital self-stimulation happens much
more early than Freud thought, and yes they do feel a sense of
limitation for being a girl, but they are also aware of the pleasure
female bodies are capable of.
Girls also become aware that they can
have a baby and fantasize having one. These are positive identifications, so
girls don't necessarily have to be stuck in hatred for their genitals.
Here there are more fears of accommodating a penis and a baby,
as the girl repeatedly imagines the process while growing up.
Boys can manifest envy for the positive qualities of girls,
just as girls can envy boys.
Girls can also compare their bodily characteristics, body shape,
and breasts with the mother and other women they feel they have to compete
with. How a mother looks in comparison to the
daughter can have many consequences for self-esteem
depending on how well or badly the daughter compares.
Freud opened up a can of worms with is bibliography,
but it inspired later psychoanalysts to add detail.
Freud was from the 1800's but helped to usher in much of the 20th century and
still influences today. The goal of course for
modern therapists is to add much more detail to their
insights so as to resonate with patients more effectively.
Freud has been a big exploration for me since 2017,
and there was nothing like actually reading and engaging with his ideas.
Listening to other's opinions of Freud's work, reading about the petty fights
between different psychological schools, and reading truncated textbooks on his
on his ideas, were all misleading in the end. Like a
form of splitting, Freud didn't have the answer to
everything, yet he wasn't someone to just cast aside or to worship.
Freud's story is a long one but it's also a foundation for understanding the
modern world, and all the later intellectuals who
imitate, borrow and steal from him. If you're being stolen from it's because
you did something really good. Knowing what is good can sometimes be
buried in endless lists of what is bad, but below are a sample of some
pathological defenses that become a hindrance for enjoyment in life,
and learning about them can only be a help.
Being able to recognize optional reactions and diffusing them,
is a benefit of Psychoanalysis. Truth be told, defenses are needed in a
hostile world, but there are many periods of time when
they are not needed, and we can fail to experience peace even
when we are free to be at peace. The mind scoops up so many influences
and they have a life of their own in our minds as Objects.
These rehearsed Objects follow us wherever we go,
drain a lot of energy in how they talk to us, and especially in how they
judge. Excessive judgment is exhausting. Psychoanalysis can help the mind get
rest from those reactive entities, by seeing clearly, and losing trust in
these weak skills. When one wants to save energy, one can
learn to drop excessive judgment and transform it into discernment.
Imitations, or introjections take in so much from family and culture
that they can develop in an adult brain to the point where one can feel a tug of
war between the different voices in the mind.
The exploration of these influences is a real challenge to our beliefs about our
authenticity. If imitated desires can often lead to less than good results,
one is free to question how authentic that conditioning really is.
In Freud's Super-Ego, we collect a lot of critical voices from authority figures
that obviously were picked up after birth,
and some of these voices are self-destructive.
Detecting as many pathological voices as possible,
and recognizing who those voices belong to, helps to disidentify from them.
Some defense mechanisms actually behave in an opposite way,
as offensive mechanisms. An example of this would be an
identification with an abuser. Abusers provide role-modeling of
sadistic pleasure in their behaviours, based on their ability to instill fear
in others and to maintain control. At some point many abused people will
get fed up with masochism and take on the sadistic stance to
recover their self-esteem. The important thing for a patient that
identifies with an abuser needs to see, is that attacking as a form
of defense is rarely needed and most certainly will
worsen relationships. Worse relationships, again means more
optional stress.
With introjection, the negative side of it relates to blaming oneself for what's
on the outside, even though what is blamed is out of
control for the subject. It leads to depression and a lack of
self-trust to be able to take control over one's life.
For example, in pathological grieving, a loss of a loved one can lead to a sense
that one is lost and at fault. Finding fault with oneself
for anything in the universe that one cannot control,
is more optional stress. In projection, people can transfer prior
experiences onto new ones to try and predict behaviours and events.
Unfortunately many of those predictions are wrong and tell more about the
personal experiences of the subject making the prediction. Of course,
some predictions are correct, so to understand projection is that
we all use it and need to use it, but relief can only happen when we try to
wait to get confirmation for things before we make a judgment.
Constant judgment of course means constant stress.
Melanie Klein's projective identification is more complex.
Here a person has already made the judgement or prediction,
based on their own experiences they've introjected,
and then they repeatedly, and aggressively, nudge the other person to
behave according to their expectations. Patients like this cause a lot of damage
because they utilize the social desires we all
have to be open to influence. They use the naivety of targets, and
literally brainwash them with their own prescribed associations,
and repeat them until targets begin to cave to imitation.
It creates a similar feeling as Kafka's K. in The Trial,
and Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. The perpetrator of course enjoys the
control of an environment that is already understood
in their point of view, and holds no surprises.
But having your identity snatched from others in this way
is another form of stress and conflict.
Idealization is a defense mechanism that's used to control
stress and boredom. Since childhood, a need to believe in authority figures
as being there for our well-being has to be outgrown. Most people who take
a good look at politicians, workplace politics, and modern intimate
relationships are forced, even painfully, to let go of
the belief in a great protector. That protector is either absent in this
world or exists only in an afterlife. Stress may be avoided in the short-term,
but it returns when there's a betrayal.
Devaluation naturally follows idealization
when the illusion is finally seen through. This is quite common when people
chase perfection in life. The constant disappointment that life
can only provide fleeting moments of perfection
leads to a hatred of normality and endless devaluation.
Devaluations are also judgments, and therefore they are another optional form
of stress.
Connected with idealization and devaluation is splitting.
Here child-like beliefs in people can reflect all good or all bad
characteristics in others, which can make for bad relationships as
an adult. Most people are a mixed bag, but for some,
any imperfections are treated as if the person is
ALL BAD. For example, and especially in politics,
every election appears as the end of the world in a fight between
pure good and evil. It's true that some events
in life have higher stakes, and that there is evil in the world,
but to split mundane experiences into stark contrasts of good and evil
means that stress will be triggered constantly throughout life.
Every small infraction is treated with the same intensity as a major betrayal.
Again these are stressful judgments that are self-inflicted forms of pain,
and they also hurt others. More deeply in splitting
is the need for people to understand different points of view,
but without the concerted effort to see objects as they are,
a mixture, it can be hard for people to see things clearly.
For example, reward and consequence. Part of the ego splits off into varying
points of view, and the way to heal these conflicts and rifts between different,
political points of view, ideas of what happiness is,
costs and consequences of pleasures, the ego has to take in all the
perspectives and weigh them purposefully so that extreme idealization and
devaluation dissolves into intelligent responses to reality.
For psychoanalysts, splitting can come from the pressure to discharge
instinctual cravings, and the need to assess danger
in reality. Sometimes the mind just wants the
discharge and disavows the reality to get
to that pleasure as soon as possible, even if part of the mind is aware of the
danger. The mind can also be hooked through
splitting by manipulators providing hazy promises that turn into
disappointment, and devaluation, when more unsavory details are observed.
I reviewed this in Cult Psychology. Cultists can control your reality by
constantly promising things that hook on your instinctual wishes, but
facing reality can be a form of freedom where one can assess reality for oneself,
without giving transference to emotionally and financially draining
cultist vampires. We don't have to give transference to
others once we understand why we were doing that.
We were doing that because we had a habit since childhood to ask parents for
permission. We can learn from trial and error and
give ourselves permission to explore what reality is really like.
In the end, a healthy patient does things for themselves,
and only outsources when the limitations are real,
and not self-imposed.
Despite the endless number of stressful defenses, what is underneath
them is a happiness that is based on absorption in interesting and fulfilling
projects. There's a possibility for Flow when
there's a lack of self-preoccupation. Csikszentmihalyi provides a meditative question...
Most meditation questions are answered by actively engaging in projects.
Look at the questioning in the mind that prevents you from engagement and try to
find the defenses that are preventing you from continuing.
Those are the self-imposed stumbling blocks.
When you are able to "get on with it," and when there's a lack of
self-preoccupation in the super-ego, there's less paralysis,
and more presence for the ego to work with.
Actions to take responsibility for one's life are taken as signs of progress in
the mind, and re-establish that sense of
self-trust, and a grip on reality.
Tellingly, with a process such as psychoanalysis,
all the prior forms of talking therapy, including religions themselves, came
under scrutiny. As with prior episodes, religion is hard
to avoid even if you are an atheist. If you have
role models in life there's always some element of prestige
you have for those who have something you want.
As said before, we want to either be our role models
or have them, if being is not possible. Then the imitation squeezes tight on our
choices with these limited binary options.
It's like the mind is looking for quick replacements, or substitutes
for advantages that cannot easily be attained.
Like in The Ego and the Id, some of these desires we pursue
involve big life goals or are replacements.
As we fill our lives with replacements, the repressive side of the mind creates
a sense of remorse that is similar to how
Judeo-Christian religions describe sin. Whether we are religious or not, we have
to face up to remorse.
Freud's difficulty here is in expanding beyond religion without going into
complete nihilism. It requires developing some distance from culture to see how
traditional religions operate. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud said that...
For Freud, religion is a cultural artifact that provides comfort for the
helplessness we all feel towards our inevitable death,
and a glue that keeps a society together to avoid a complete breakdown.
Freud then connects this to our ultimate wishes to continue on and be protected,
and when these wishes become desperate and impossible to realize,
the panic leads to obsessive rituals that are similar to those
modern bird experiments referenced in my Totem and Taboo review.
Rituals have a sense of desperate hope, and any successful coincidences that
match up with the ritual become associated.
Whether the methods are scapegoating, prayer,
or different kinds of rituals, the successes that coincide with a ritual,
become projected with the supernatural. These powers are expected to prevent
worldly punishment from celestial parents,
who also instill guilt on top of our natural remorse as we grow
up. Eventually these rituals become an indispensable method to regulate
emotions.
In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, Freud described these ritual
behaviours in psychological obsession.
Many rituals involve a sense of cleanliness on the outside
and the inside, like one is trying to cleanse emotions,
and Freud zeroed on the reason.
Freud wants patients to continue growing in their humanity instead of
relying on rituals. Originally our helplessness was in
childhood when we had to rely on our mortal "gods,"
our parents, and they could only provide intermittent forms of comfort and
protection. The difficulty in growing up is that
death, disease, conflict, power, exploitation, injustice and despair are
very real. Some people are able to accept this, but
others find that religious beliefs help to create resilience for people who
expect that all injustices will be righted in the afterlife.
Beliefs in a celestial parent go back for Freud
to the early days of Totemism. Fights over scarcity of sexual partners, and
and wealth, including intergenerational fights, lead
eventually to threats of a breakdown in society.
At some point the protection of the primal father is missed by the rebels,
and prohibitions, especially the prohibition against incest,
slowly develops a desire to expand and create relationship choices
towards others in a tribe, and to think of cultural solutions to societal
breakdown, however superstitious.
As expected, religion continued in Freud's time,
and still does so today. For many people it works. Religions also include the
results of prayer and meditation. For Freud, prayer and meditation are
regressions, though pleasant ones. The purpose of contemplative practice is
to reduce the stress that the ego falls under in a pitiless world,
and to rest in an oceanic unconscious.
The problem of course is that the drives are still pressing for satisfaction,
and for Freud maturity is to not go back to that oceanic feeling,
or to at least not rely on it, but to develop a civilization that can satisfy
drives more effectively. People...
Happiness as Freud sees it in people is
to increase pleasurable feelings and to reduce pain.
Regardless of what methods people use, there's always a threat of aggression
when people try to correct injustices that naturally
occur as people conflict over their pleasures. In the modern world this is precisely
the challenge to religion, to be able to find a way to prepare each
generation on how to deal with these conflicts.
Freud felt that religion was still a regression in that
it ill prepares generations for conflict. What happens if one is pious and follows
good ethics? In a modern society, that person could
easily fall behind creating a moral quandary between doing
the right thing and satisfying drives. Freud was worried
about too much renunciation leading to psychological, or somatic symptoms.
Freud also criticized parenting as he saw it then.
The fight between love and aggression, in societies
struggling to satisfy wishes, presents the great difficulty for each new
generation, and development for Freud has to go
beyond religion, and culture, towards a rational science.
Leading up to WWII, Freud saw
that as technology increased our wealth it could also be our destruction.
Towards the end of Freud's life, he came to a more solid conclusion of what his
method entailed. Similar to what you notice from the
Buddhist mindfulness technique, one instead is working with a therapist
to mindfully explore together what impulses, thoughts and defenses are
running amok in the mind and to understand them very well. In
Freud's system, the pre-conscious is where the Ego stores
knowledge about internal and external experiences.
The more one knows about oneself, the less surprising reactions
are, and the ego progressively gains control over the psyche.
The aim of the method...
It's like a vigilance to catch impulses and to assert the ego again and again to herd reactions back to where the ego has already chosen its goals.
It's important to see that how we talk inside our minds has an energy of
judgment that is painful, and habitual defense mechanisms that
aren't needed should be relaxed so that the pleasure
principle can act more effectively, and can also be enjoyed without
unnecessarily being tainted by overbearing criticism from these
imitated, abstract, and distorted voices.
In Freud's late years, he was very popular amongst
amongst aficionados, and reviled by many critics. His fans warned him of the onslaught
coming to Austria from Nazi Germany, and of course Freud's books were amongst
other books written by prominent Jewish authors
that were burned by Nazis. Freud refused to leave Austria due his familiarity
and comfort with Vienna. When his daughter Anna Freud was
interrogated by the Gestapo, he had the motivation necessary to make
the move to England. There he basked in his glory and began
to see many offshoots of his psychoanalysis with younger theorists.
In Freud and Beyond, by Stephen Mitchell, he covered
those new schools most influenced by Freud:
Kleinian, Self-psychology, Ego psychology, Object-Relations,
and identity schools.
Sigmund Freud eventually ended his life at the age of 83 in an
assisted suicide with morphine administered by
Max Schur, to end the suffering of his mouth cancer.
He remained atheist to the end, despite many letters attempting to save his soul
before it was too late. Within his family, his work continued on with his daughter
Anna Freud.
Sigmund Freud left the world during a tumult that many modern people find hard
to understand, but is precisely why psychology is so
important. This inability to grasp what happened in
Europe during the 1st half of the 20th century
is precisely why it can come back again and again.
Götz Aly of Why the Germans? Why the Jews?,
saw the danger in forgetting the precursors to the Holocaust.
Not being aware of those precursors dooms future generations to repeat them.
The reason why this is so important to understand can be seen in psychology,
or psychoanalysis for that matter. Being inhibited,
envious, self-attacking, identifying with an abuser,
and destroying others to restore self-esteem, are attitudes that many
humans can have. The story doesn't have to include only
the Germans and the Jews. Any society that peddles social projects
that look heroic, for the common good, and noble, can be
in fact ways to attack success, diminish others, and to scapegoat,
and have the potential to be the new authoritarianism that people gather
around with, and often unknowingly.
People say "I would never be a NAZI!" Yet people forget that hazy cult-like
promise of prestige and utopia. "We are demanding justice!
Climate Justice! Racial justice! Economic justice! It's scientific! It's a
public health initiative! We care more than you! We have empathy!"
It takes effort to think about consequences of new social experiments.
Those caught in what may seem like cutting edge social experimentation
may just be deflecting their emotions of inadequacy and embarrassment.
Most especially, they are deflecting their envy and schadenfreude
by trying to improve their personal situations by joining moralistic social
movements. Like in Bandura's Moral Disengagement,
there's an eerie tendency to hypocrisy that we all are
all capable of.
Moral Disengagement is the ability to make excuses to hurt others
by reframing those behaviours in moral standards.
The irony seems unavoidable, and the reality of most members of social
movements, is that they only partially follow their
own rules. Part of the unconscious is trying to
thrive in ways that most people find recognizable.
People want to feed literally and emotionally,
and what they want to feed on is imitated and therefore predictable.
When people don't like rich people, it's quite possible that secretly
they want what rich people have. When people are emotionally hungry, the
sadism can be hard to control. As in the prior episode, Sadism has a
quality of separating wheat from chaff, but this is dangerous when
involving human beings. This abuse becomes easier
to fall into when entire groups of people are labeled as a PEST,
an OTHER, that interferes with social, and especially individual goals.
The reality is that anybody can be an authoritarian,
as long as they are capable of ENVY. The trick is to take a stigmatized
symbol and change into a heroic or benign
one. It seems like a simple trick, but these
tricks work for many people. Peter Hitchens, a recovered communist
himself, explained his view on the gullibility of people.
For example, people can talk about the environment, but as people become activists,
how much unconscious self-interest is buried underneath?
Once people gain power, they have access to more consumption,
and naturally economic data shows that as people make more money,
they spend more money. To separate consumptive self-interest from any
social movement is next to impossible. What most people are doing, whether they
will admit it or not, is trying to narrow the gap between
themselves and envied Others.
A creepy modern example came from leaked
Seattle government documents on "white culture."
It was full of personality characteristics that could exist in any
culture, but in particular the envy stands out.
Signs of envy are when good qualities are criticized.
but can you imagine food safety without
perfectionism, and
objectivity? What are companies like
without meritocracy?
Many of the other items on the list
could be forms of projection where
people are complaining about traits they
have themselves.
For example power grabbing?
Most people have experienced
defensiveness emotional avoidance,
and a sense of urgency. This is
completely human and cannot be
only attributed to white people.
Can you imagine ambulances and emergency rooms without a sense of urgency?
The overwhelming fear in these documents
is a fear of accountability that's often
required of highly complex
and responsible jobs. These jobs can pay
very well, but not everyone can handle them.
Of course in a free society people
should put effort into finding the right
jobs for their skill set.
If people want to complain that life is
getting too complex.
Then it would be easier to just state it
plainly and come up with solutions that
directly answer the question.
instead of coming up with a chimera of
white culture,
which anyone with any knowledge of
culture, travel,
languages, and ethnicity would find way
too simplistic but I guess that's the
problem. People are forcing simplicity onto
complex problems, and that is the greatest sign that they
would be even more incompetent
if they gained power. In the early part
of the 20th century the jews in europe provided examples of
people being self-made,
and naturally social mobility is the
visible marker that onlookers measure their own
self-esteem with and used to elevate their terror at the
prospect of being left behind. Because these feelings are unconscious
though very powerful envy is too embarrassing to admit.
Embarrassing feelings always have to be
displaced or reframed to maintain
comfort. The refraining can also provide
creative excuses
that make it easier for people to
satisfy their schadenfreude and
resentment.
Aly quoted one of the few perceptive
critics who predicted the holocaust,
Siegfried Lichtenstaedter.
In Forecasting the Holocaust,
Lichtenstaedter was quoted as predicting that the Nazis...
The problem of course with being a
Cassandra that people don't want to listen to, is when they finally get
get around to your prediction, it's too late.
Lichtenstaedter even predicted Hitler's
annex of Austria only 2 years too late. The obvious way that Siegfried was able
to predict so much was because he read Nazi publications
and refused to look away. If people are willing to look at political opponents,
the clues are right there to follow in their communications with each other.
Aly's description of what envy does to people helps to remove that sense of
strangeness of the Nazi period. In a lot of ways it reminds me of modern
White Supremacist groups and Communists. They appear proud, special, and they
expect we should take them seriously, but if one is sensitive enough to notice,
there's an insecurity and emptiness there.
The inner core of insecurity can also move from the individual to national
identifications.
Aly quoted Julius Fröbel who was a supporter of German unification, that
failed to materialize in 1848-49.
Aly also matches with Susan Fiske in looking at a big source of envy,
which is the fear of competition and
rejection.
In Psychoanalysis this would be a narcissistic wounding, or castration.
Naturally, when there are wounds, the mind looks for a cure,
or a place to vent frustration.
The Neo-Freudian René Girard in particular influenced many to take
Freud's love triangle to include any desires for anything scarce,
including positions of respect, power and savouring.
Redekop and Ryba in René Girard and creative reconciliation,
describe this need to narrow the gap between rivals.
I would also add some meditative detail in that when people observe a Model
savouring an Object or situation, their imitative
abilities are already feeding in wishes and
fantasies. These wishes and fantasies are loaded
with pressure and clinging to imitate. That pressure and clinging is the
beginning of entitlement, a need for equality and fairness, but
also a relief from hankering. This means it can work fast and
unconsciously on people, like a hunger pang. As we know with the
unconscious, it can motivate behaviour before more
aware parts of the mind can assess the possible damage of such actions.
Now German readers, if they're still here, may be feeling that they don't
identify with these descriptions and are tired of narratives of Germans and Jews.
But I say it's important to study because it was well documented,
and it helps to understand motivations wherever there are humans.
A later example, which didn't involve Germans and Jews directly, was in Rwanda.
Though as I continued reading, it does indirectly involve
Germans, so bare with me!
The authors describe this very feeling of resentment and unfairness with the
history of the Hutus and the Tutsis.
I would continue
to add to this narrative some elements of projection.
Why people often tell on themselves with projection is partly because
envy and imitation are intertwined. If one side is considered hostile,
then they can be labeled as deserving hostility.
Then with moral disengagement, those who feel oppressed can now start to oppress
without cognizance of the similarities. The reason people aren't aware of their
hypocrisy is partially that they are so certain
that the other side is all evil, and their side is justified.
This way you can enjoy vengeance with a double-standard.
It's like tunnel vision. Eventually each side is so compromised morally
that no one can really be pure, but one can feel that one is pure when one
identifies with the struggle of one group over another.
René Girard described this conflict as a conflict of sameness.
As people imitate each other's Being, there is a conflict because the sameness
can't always be shared. As people become more the same, get
caught up in social climbing, apply for the same jobs as everyone else,
try to live in the same countries that everyone wants to live in,
try to live in the same gentrified neighborhoods, the sense of Otherness
increases in each person as they all become obstacles to each
other. Sameness in objectivity and Otherness
in subjectivity. For Girard, the cure is to realize that
all possession leads to emptiness, because it's really about the thrill of
the chase and the sadism of conflict. When you remove role-models from objects,
the objects often lose their luster, or at least they remain
only in their practical qualities. This can be a blessing in disguise if
one is capable of enjoying what is undervalued.
For those who can't see, a lot of the envy is knowing that another person is
enjoying something, and it's not going to be shared with you.
The greed partially is about making sure that all known
forms of savouring are owned by oneself, and one can rest assured nobody has a
surprising angle. One's status is safe and confirmed.
Then when a new angle is discovered, the stamped to imitate starts again.
So there's boredom in possession, but urgency in poverty.
It's like the wild cat chasing the moving object,
and the sweet spot is in the chase to acquire lines of possibility,
or to investigate mysteries. There has to be movement.
Complete knowledge is static and boring, and lacking fresh projects to chase is
depressing.
Eric Rohmer's Love in the Afternoon, describes that feeling of emptiness,
anticipation and greed when the main character in a café, is struck by boredom
towards married life. The boredom then is cast aside by envy
of Parisian women going about their day towards lines of
possibility that are inaccessible to him through
barriers of natural time and resources. One cannot be everywhere at the same
time.
Yet does he really want to possess them all?
Earlier in that sequence he says...
So there's a fear of giving into the seduction because it may turn into
boredom or disappointment. The chasing in the mind continues to
thread one thought after another and one chase after another to maintain
the high of intensity. Even death becomes a concept to chase
after or run away from, yet the body just does it on its own.
There's nothing the ego has to do. The same goes with appreciation. The
perception is able to recognize what is interesting and beautiful,
and the ego doesn't need to do anything to appreciate except to get out of the
way. Relaxing the predatory ego is a must if
This emptiness of modern life shows the
value of psychology in that the unconscious can take good things,
like a good marriage, and completely wreck them.
It can take a successful society, and periodically tear it down.
The civilization and its discontents are always struggling
to achieve endless meaning, in work or relationships,
or to stumble on deep and long-lasting peace,
or at least to find enough entertainment to distract us from our mortality.
When it periodically fails, often with economic downturns,
many people can only find surrogate meaning in violence.
Self-destruction, and or destruction of others. When talking about the
controversy over Freud's Death Drive theory, Otto Kernberg reminds us why it can't be so easily cast aside.
