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me (Patrick
McEvoy-Halston change)
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9/12/17
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My apologies Ken. I
thought you were the editor of Journal of Psychohistory for some reason. My
mistake. I wish we would acknowledge that going wide is also the way to be
taken seriously right now, that it's part of our socio-cultural
environment--the way to, not guarantee, but certainly to begin being accepted
and lauded. For some of us this "socio-cultural" context collapses
almost absolutely to the aggregate nature of the childrearing... to,
specifically, the emotional health of the mothers within a society. We see even
economics as having a lot to do with addressing that that was within our early
relationship with our mothers that, unaddressed by our subsequent efforts of
societal structuring, of recompensing for it, could make it difficult to live
somewhat independent lives as adults at all. To us this seems obvious, and we
get dismayed that someone who might provide very little that is challenging but
who agrees with you to find cooperative findings amongst various disciplines,
is due to be lauded to the hills. We're beginning to suspect that there are
people out there whose real expertise is in keeping their findings within what
a scholarly community can psychologically accept... are becoming aces at,
really, posturing, keeping things within safe limits, all to keep a very
intelligent community that has lived very enjoyably over the last few decades
at ease.
Here's a challenging
thing for us to contemplate. Have we been projecting aspects of ourselves we
need to reject into hillbilly nation, into white working class men, for several
decades, and this gross mass depositing has somehow helped us stabilize for
discussions that are so wickedly agile, dextrous, circumventing, and
confidently calm? What members of the group of scholars that you favour have
suggested that that is something we have been doing, deliberately making one
group of people seem sort of shit-filled and horrible perhaps so that our
explorations of cultures can seem so exclusively respectful and civilized, that
is? All our aggression gets shipped into one, and all our benightedness,
applied everywhere else? If no one has, then perhaps this community is a
shared.... um, psychotic state... somehow disassociated? One enters this
community of scholars, and by agreeing to de facto imply all sorts of violence
towards misogynistic, racist Americans, one continues to enable a community
that can't see a flaw amongst themselves for they all truly display every
manner of open consideration and politeness--they're perfect, only flawed in a
way which keeps them human, i.e., part of the flattery. If you couldn't agree
to do the former, then you couldn't be counted on to not reflect some of the
disorderedness that comes from trying to contain the violence within oneself,
that the rest of the group depends on feeling exempt from for their being
self-evidently humanity at its highest evolved state--the only ones to be
listened to, for they keep decorum. I think what I'm getting at is that someone
like me is probably hoping that people like yourself, who seem in the way, are
going to have to start showing flaws in how composed they seem for our own say
to gain some ground. And that this is going to come through the vile agents,
people who are not emotionally your equal, not at all, that are popping up
everywhere that are arguing that respectable scholarship has for some time been
been covering up a lot of fundamentally sick societies/communities. As this
view gains ground, even within (especially within?) the left, and you can't
mention "socio-cultural" without drawing suspicions from your
audience rather than rapt, respectful full attendance, then I believe we may
get to a point where whose view is correct will count on truth rather than
having one's having all societal weight behind them.
On Tuesday, September
12, 2017 at 10:35:42 AM UTC-4, Ken Fuchsman wrote:
Patrick,
In studying Freud's
theory of the Oedipus complex I found that to evaluate Freud's theories
findings from other disciplines were indispensable. In other areas I have
examined I have also frequently found out that an interdisciplinary approach
was necessary to get a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. To go
deep you also often need to go wide. I have found that the wider I go the
deeper my understanding becomes.
The mother child dyad
is central to being human. Yet it occurs within social-cultural contexts.
Borrowing from E. O. Wilson, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy says that
cooperative breeding across generations is about as central to what makes us
human as the mother-infant bond, especially in cultures where the mother has
other economic functions that limit the time she has to care for her newborn.
The economic roles of mothers outside of child rearing is found in
hunter-foraging cultures and in contemporary industrial nations. Once
again, we need to cross disciplines to know all the factors involved in an area
of investigation. There is much more to say on this subject of child care.
If I don't sound like
a deMausian, it is because I have not been positively influenced by his work.
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 12, 2017, at
9:46 AM, Patrick McEvoy-Halston <pmcevoyhalston@gmail.com> wrote:
Ken, if someone was a
through and through deMausian, would they be in compliance with all that you
would expect of someone to be listened to, or wouldn't they? I'm not sure, but
it does seem that s/he would only be interested in the nature of the
childrearing someone had undergone, and wouldn't really recognize the world
outside the mother-child dyad as being so much a cultural environment, or a
historical environment... that is, something that requires a different
expertise, a different sort of expert, and who's calling in to have their say
would provide a wonderful sense of evolved reaching out, but just the
exoskeleton produced by the aggregate of everyone else's childhoods.... it's
all contained by the expert in early childhood. My concern is, are we in an
intellectual environment where someone could be almost entirely right, have in
their own focused research come up with most essential of research, but be
overlooked because he unlike others doesn't entwine himself within the larger
scholarly community, doesn't acknowledge the intrinsic limitation of only one
area of knowledge/expertise? Your way of assessing how truth is uncovered
sounds very evolved, it sounds like the kind of lubricant of manners that made
our Obama era seem so inspiringly cosmopolitan, professional, peaceful,
inspiring, evolved. But I am worried that it's become a useful weapon to
vaporize people who in their own focussed research might be digging at
truths... we don't actually want touched, because secretly its been in
occluding them that we've been able to function so well, so we say to them, how
can what you say be so useful when you've spend so much time in your burrow
that you've missed the multidisciplinary splendour produced by worldwide
collection of ....?
I know you must have
deep respect for deMause, but boy you sound the opposite of him.
On Monday, September
11, 2017 at 9:23:25 AM UTC-4, Ken Fuchsman wrote:
1. Brian D'Agostino
said that Freud's work needs to be placed in intellectual and historic
perspective. Trevor Pederson disagrees. He thinks that to understand Freud's
internal logic we examine the writings themselves.
2. To do so,
Trevor explores Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex, as he does in his
valuable book, The Economics of Libido. Arnie Richards and Brian also
discuss the meaning of the Oedipus complex. As Freud wrote about the Oedipus
complex for over 40 years, there are twists and turns, gaps and contradictions.
There are challenges to finding Freud’s internal logic.
3. In their short
expositions, neither Trevor, Arnie, nor Brian mention Freud's notion of the
positive and negative Oedipus complex. In the positive side, the boy, for
instance, chooses his mother as his object choice, and his father is the rival.
In the negative version, the boy makes his father the object choice and the
mother is the rival. In looking for any writer's internal logic, it sometimes
happens that we find selected parts of the work explicated instead of treating
the whole.
4. Freud
characteristically describes the Oedipus complex as universal. For ninety
years, anthropologists have examined Freud's Oedipal claims cross-culturally
and many have found different family structures and dynamics than Freud did.
His response is to turn to Lamarck's discredited notion of what Freud calls the
phylogenetic inheritance. Freud claims that if the child's actual experiences
do not fit into his Oedipal notions, the child's unconscious imagination has
them fit into Freud's conception. Clearly, here and in other places, Freud
finds ways of avoiding inconvenient evidence from other disciplines and
perspectives, and sometimes becomes dogmatic. The meanings of Freud's concepts
can sometimes be illuminated by going beyond Freud's own writings.
5. Not all
recent writers on Freud seek to understand his internal logic only through his
published works. In the last year, three full length biographies of Freud have
been published in English. One by literary critic Frederick Crews, and two by
psychoanalysts. The two analysts, Elisabeth Roudinesco and Joel Whitebook, each
claim that to understand the logic of Freud's work we need to see him as a
representative of the Dark Enlightenment, which questions the sufficiency of
the rational and explores the non-rational. Both Roudinesco and Whitebook, as
Brian would advocate, then turn to the intellectual and historical to
understand Freud's theoretical development and significance.
6. Arnie
Richards in the first two volumes of his selected papers seeks to comprehend
the historic context, power struggles and dynamics within the psychoanalytic
movement. He too goes beyond textual explication to find understanding.
7. The
approaches Trevor, Brian, and Arnie take are necessary, each can illuminate
aspects of the whole. To understand Freud the person and thinker, any other
psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic clients, or any of us, we need to see the
individual as a whole person, to see the self in psychological, intellectual,
emotional, relational, historic, and cultural context. In other words, to grasp
the entirety of the individual, psychohistory with its integration of the
individual, the group and the past is an essential element in this quest.
On Sun, Sep 10, 2017
at 4:45 PM, Trevor Pederson <trevor.pederson@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Brian
On Sun, Sep 10, 2017
at 12:59 PM, Brian D'Agostino <bdagostino2687@gmail.com> wrote:
Trevor,
I agree that a deeper
understanding of Freud’s historical context does not shed much light on the
details of Oedipal theory, but that misses my point about the importance of
historical context.
I don't think it does.
You have to have a coherent theory first, both in order to test it, and in
order to criticize it.
What you are dealing
with here are speculations about what might have influenced Freud.
When things in Freud's
theories turn out to be false then it is valuable and interesting to look into
potential causes (whether psychological or sociological), but the theories need
to be tested themselves to establish their value, and this won't happen until
there is a theoretical framework in which to understand and operationalize
different concepts.
Let me sketch a little
more of what I have in mind and why historical context cannot be dismissed as
“nice window dressing.” As I said in my previous email, I am a beginner
in Freudian studies and can only present what I have gotten out my limited
reading of the literature. If I misstate anything, don’t hesitate to
point it out so I can continue to learn.
Let’s start with
Pierre Janet, whose published lectures beginning in 1889 outlined the role of
early childhood trauma, especially sexual abuse, in the etiology of hysteria.
Janet pioneered the concepts of the unconscious and of dissociation, and
connected the dots between early childhood abuse, dissociation, and the
symptoms of “hysterics.” Freud acknowledged his debt to Janet in his “Studies
in Hysteria,” coauthored with Joseph Breuer in 1895. It is not possible
to understand the significance of Freud’s Seduction Theory without
understanding this historical context.
I disagree. Its
significance is to be determined clinically, and Freud gave his reasons for
retracting this view. He never said that trauma had no part in neurosis, after
this, but instead that it wasn't always the cause. However, even back then,
there was a more generalized view of sexual seduction or abuse as part of
suffering mortification:
In the earliest case
accounts, reported in Studies on Hysteria, Breuer and Freud had
assigned “mortification,” a variant of the shame family, a central role in
symptomformation. They observed that “an injury suffered in silence” is a
“mortification”—a “kran-kung”—which literally means to “make sick.” When one
suffers an injury, they wrote, one tries to get revenge, as a catharsis. Or one
can confess a tormenting secret. Or one can right the memory of a humiliation
by remembering his worth. By contrast, an injury suffered in silence makes one
ill.
Breuer and Freud had
also emphasized, however, that they were addressing themselves to the mechanism
of symptom formation rather than to the etiology of neurosis. The early
formulations about the role of mortification in neurosis have therefore
suffered neglect as incomplete, first formulations, which were superseded by
later theoretical developments.
It is interesting that
in the Outline of Psychoanalysis, written some forty-five years after
the Studies on Hysteria, Freud again refers to the role of mortification
in neurosis. He uses the same metaphor of a “mortification suffered in silence”
as the source of neurosis.
Lewis, H.B. (1971). Shame and Guilt
in Neurosis (p. 436-7)
Only when read in the
context of Janet’s earlier work do we see what was original and what was not
original in Freud’s Seduction Theory. What was original to Freud was the
notion that sexual trauma could be the cause of a wider range of psychological
disorders than hysteria. In other words, he went beyond the clinical data
to a general theory of psychopathology. When Freud revised his Seduction
Theory beginning in 1897, he backtracked on this general theory—which
attributed psychopathology to early trauma—and replaced it with a very
different kind of general theory (Oedipal Theory), which attributes psychopathology
to the repression of sexual drives. In The Assault on Truth
(1984), psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson reconstructed the historical context of
this reversal, which was the beginning of Freudian psychoanalysis as it came to
be known in the early 20th century.
Freud himself mentioned that he didn't
take sexuality in hysterical symptom formation to be his own idea. He
writes:
A year later when I had
begun my medical activities in Vienna as a private dozent in nervous
diseases I was as innocent and ignorant in all that concerned the etiology of
the neuroses as any promising academician could be expected to be. One day I
received a friendly call from Chrobak, who asked me to take a patient to whom
he could not give sufficient time in his new capacity as lecturer at the
university. I reached the patient before he did and learned that she suffered
from senseless attacks of anxiety, which could only be alleviated by the most
exact information as to the whereabouts of her physician at any time in the day.
When Chrobak appeared, he took me aside and disclosed to me that the patient's
anxiety was due to the fact that though she had been married eighteen years,
she was still a virgo intacta, that her husband was utterly impotent. In
such cases the physician can only cover the domestic mishap with his reputation
and must bear it if people shrug their shoulders and say of him: “He is not a
good doctor if in all these years, he has not been able to cure her.” He added:
“The only prescription for such troubles is the one well-known to us, but which
we cannot prescribe. It is:
Penis normalis
dosim
Repetatur!
I had never heard of
such a prescription and would like to have shaken my head at my informant's
cynicism. (History of the Psychoanalytic Movement)
Also, Oedipal theory
doesn't just involve the repression of the sexual drives, there are also
aggressive impulses that are linked to parental imagos. Moreover, even when
they are sexual, in the general sense of eros (love) the Oedipal aspect also
involves a real object. For example, when he is looking at melancholia, he is
looking at the death of a real love object and even just being jilted by a
lover:
The object has not
perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (e.g. in the case
of a betrothed girl who has been jilted). In yet other cases one feels
justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but
one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more
reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has
lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss
which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom
he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that
melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from
consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing
about the loss that is unconscious.
In Melancholia the
self-reproach is linked to an aggressive instinct towards the the beloved that
is turned on the self, along with the defense enacted in object loss.
However, the object loss
from which the defense and symptom breakout, still references an earlier loss
that reaches back to the past.
In the attached 1989 Psychoanalytic
Review article, Dorothy Bloch argues, plausibly in my opinion, that Masson
overlooks a major psychobiographical component of Freud’s reversal, namely the
death of his father in 1896 less than five months after he and Breuer presented
their hysteria paper on May 2, 1896. Since Freud had developed his
seduction theory in part from his observation of sexual abuse of his siblings
by their father, the death of Freud’s father and its timing very likely
elicited massive guilt for Freud, which is also suggested by Freud’s “One is
requested to close the eyes” dream around this same time. Freud’s new
Oedipal explanation of psychopathology relegated parental abuse of young
children to the margins of psychoanalysis for many years. According to
Bloch, this new mindset helps explain why Freud attributed Daniel Schreber’s
psychosis to Daniel’s own homosexual fantasies towards his father, which
overlooks the overwhelming evidence of physical abuse by Schreber’s father.
This is a quotation
from Freud's analysis of Schreber
In my Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality [Standard Ed., 7, 235] I have expressed the
opinion that each stage in the development of psychosexuality affords a
possibility of ‘fixation’ and thus of a dispositional point. People who have
not freed themselves completely from the stage of narcissism—who, that is to
say, have at that point a fixation which may operate as a disposition to a
later illness—are exposed to the danger that some unusually intense wave of
libido, finding no other outlet, may lead to a sexualization of their social
instincts and so undo the sublimations which they had achieved in the course of
their development. This result may be produced by anything that causes the
libido to flow backwards (i.e. that causes a ‘regression’): whether, on the one
hand, the libido becomes collaterally reinforced owing to some disappointment
over a woman, or is directly dammed up owing to a mishap in social relations
with other men—both of these being instances of ‘frustration’; or whether,
on the other hand, there is a general intensification of the libido, so that it
becomes too powerful to find an outlet along the channels which are already
open to it, and consequently bursts through its banks at the weakest spot. (p.
61-2)
There is a part played
by psychosexual development at the beginning, and the onset of the neurosis
goes along with the parental-substitute causing some ego injury, frustration,
etc. that causes repression. This is Oedipal.
More precisely, Freud
has 3 steps to symptom formation and these are the first and 3rd stages.
As Arnie and his
coauthors indicated, psychoanalysis subsequently developed in ways that went
beyond Freud’s own thinking. Most notably, the object relations school
has returned psychoanalysis to a focus on the importance of early trauma and
the effects of parenting, a focus that Freud originally shared with Janet but
which he mainly abandoned after 1896 in favor of the Oedipal Theory. Such
historical thinking about the origins and present state of psychoanalysis is
necessary if we want to learn from the past and not simply repeat its mistakes.
1. The first phase
consists in fixation, which is the precursor and necessary condition of every
‘repression’. Fixation can be described in this way. One instinct or
instinctual component fails to accompany the rest along the anticipated normal
path of development, and, in consequence of this inhibition in its development,
it is left behind at a more infantile stage. The libidinal current in question
then behaves in relation to later psychological structures like one belonging
to the system of the unconscious, like one that is repressed. We have already
shown [pp. [61-2] that these instinctual fixations constitute the basis for the
disposition to subsequent illness, and we may now add that they constitute
above all the basis for the determination of the outcome of the third phase of
repression.
2. The second phase of
repression is that of repression proper—the phase to which most attention has
hitherto been given. It emanates from the more highly developed systems of the
ego—systems which are capable of being conscious—and may in fact be described
as a process of ‘after-pressure’. It gives an impression of being an essentially
active process, while fixation appears in fact to be a passive lagging behind.
What undergo repression may either be the psychical derivatives of the original
lagging instincts, when these have become reinforced and so come into conflict
with the ego (or ego-syntonic instincts), or they may be psychical trends which
have for other reasons aroused strong aversion. But this aversion would not in
itself lead to repression, unless some connection had been established between
the unwelcome trends which have to be repressed and those which have been
repressed already. Where this is so, the repulsion exercised by the conscious
system and the attraction exercised by the unconscious one tend in the same
direction towards bringing about repression. The two possibilities which are
here treated separately may in practice, perhaps, be less sharply
differentiated, and the distinction between them may merely depend upon the
greater or lesser degree in which the primarily repressed instincts contribute
to the result.
3. The third phase,
and the most important as regards pathological phenomena, is that of failure of
repression, of irruption, of return of the repressed. This irruption takes its
start from the point of fixation, and it implies a regression of the libidinal
development to that point. We have already [p. 61 f.] alluded to the
multiplicity of the possible points of fixation; there are, in fact, as many as
there are stages in the development of the libido. We must be prepared to
find a similar multiplicity of the mechanisms of repression proper and of the
mechanisms of irruption (or of symptom-formation), and we may already begin to
suspect that it will not be possible to trace back all of these multiplicities
to the developmental history of the libido alone. It is easy to see that
this discussion is beginning to trench upon the problem of ‘choice of
neurosis’, which, however, cannot be taken in hand until preliminary work of
another kind has been accomplished.1 Let us bear in mind for the present that
we have already dealt with fixation, and that we have postponed the subject of
symptom-formation; and let us restrict ourselves to the question of whether the
analysis of Schreber's case throws any light upon the mechanism of repression
proper which predominates in paranoia.
In Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety the second phase is discussed again:
As regards the
metapsychological explanation of regression, I am inclined to find it in a
‘defusion of instinct’, in a detachment of the erotic components which, with
the onset of the genital stage, had j
Mark as complete
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Trevor Pederson
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9/12/17
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Hi Ken
On Tue, Sep 12, 2017
at 9:25 AM, Ken Fuchsman <kfuchsman@gmail.com> wrote:
Trevor,
Freud’s statements on
the importance of biology for psychoanalytic understanding not only have gaps
but on occasion are actually contradictory. From the 1890s to the 1930s, there
are wild fluctuation in Freud’s statements on the roles of heredity and
experience in psychology. Towards the end of his life in 1937, Freud wrote: “for
the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the
underlying bedrock.” Eleven years earlier, Freud had said: “There is no more
urgent need in psychology than for a securely founded theory of the
instincts….Nothing of the sort exists…and psychoanalysis is driven to making
tentative efforts towards some such theory.”
Do you mean these as
contradicting statements? He's right to say that there is an underlying brain
chemistry to all mental activities, in the first, and when he's mentioning the
instincts, he's talking about ego and object drives and understanding how we
are driven in different ways.
But in 1935, Freud had
declared: “we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology.” Over twenty
years before, he had written that it is “necessary to hold aloof from
biological considerations…so that we may not be misled in our impartial
judgment of the psychoanalytic facts before us.” This is part of a general
strategy, for “psycho-analysis must keep itself free from any hypothesis that
is alien to it, whether of an anatomical, chemical or physiological kind, and
must operate entirely with purely psychological auxiliary ideas.” Freud did not
want “to subordinate the psychological material to biological
considerations,” nor did he want psychoanalysis to be dependent “on philosophy,
physiology, or brain anatomy.”
The concept of the
drive, repetition, etc. shouldn't be reduced to biology or to erotogenic zones.
Freud made clear that he wanted analysis of these drives to stay at the level
of common language for motivations:
in ego-psychology it will be difficult
to escape from what is universally known; it will rather be a question of new
ways of looking at things and new ways of arranging them than of new
discoveries. (Freud, 1933, p. 60)
We call this organization their “ego.”
Now there is nothing new in this. Each one of us makes this assumption without
being a philosopher … In psycho-analysis we like to keep in contact with the
popular mode of thinking and prefer to make its concepts scientifically
serviceable rather than reject them. (Freud, 1926b, p. 195)
Ironically, Freud
reluctantly recognizes that psychoanalysis cannot be kept segregated from
biology. “In spite of all our efforts to prevent biological terminology and considerations
from dominating psychoanalytic work, we cannot avoid using them even in our
descriptions of the phenomena that we study. We cannot help regarding the
term ‘instinct’ as a concept on the frontier between the spheres of psychology
and biology.”
When someone just
talks the language of physicalism, and be reductionistic, they have nothing
interesting to say about human interactions and motivations. They simply say
things like we are programmed by our DNA or talk about neural images.
Additionally, many
early psychoanalysts tried to use the erotogenic zone references and speak of
oral and anal and genital drives, for example. They didn't just use them to say
someone who smokes has an oral drive, but in a larger sense they were either
linked to different id aggressions or "sadisms" and the underlying
relation to the parental imago that the id impulses are paired with. However,
that language eventually disappeared because the links to the motivations and
character weren't firmly established.
For example, Freud
recognizes that the psychological phenomenon of the Oedipus complex has a
biological foundation. The “Oedipus complex is the psychical correlate of two
fundamental biological facts: the long period of the human child’s dependence,
and the…way its sexual life reaches a first climax in the third to fifth year
of life, and then…sets in again at puberty.”
In this way, Freud
would also say that the death drive was "biological," but part of the
issue is that the death drive acts precisely against the self-preservation of
the organism.
I'm not opposed to him
saying there is a biological ground of "id erotic object choices"
that are programmed to come out in a stable way for most people, and that the
"instinctual renunciation" of these becomes the ground for the ego
and object drives.
Yet he continues to
vacillate on the centrality of biology to psychoanalysis. In
particular, Freud has great trouble integrating the relationship of biology and
experience. In a 1911 letter, he says: “The question as to which is of
greater significance, constitution or experience…can in my opinion only be
answered by saying that…not one or the other are decisive.” Twenty years
later, Freud confesses: “we are not as yet able to distinguish…between what is
rigidly fixed by biological laws and what is open to movement and change under
the influence of accidental experience.”
Until all the ego and
object drives are understood and differences in character are plotted, then it
is hard to know the basis for the id object choices underneath.
He also, as Arnie
points out, leaves himself open to the dialectic of nature vs. nurture and the
idea that some of the id object choices may be inherited and some created anew:
Freud (1939, 1917c)
resolves the tension between the two groups of causes— nature (what is
heritable) and nurture (what is created in one’s own ontogenetic experience)—
in his concept of the complemental series. He writes:
the gap between the
two groups appears not to be unbridgeable. It is quite possible to unite the
two aetiological determinants under a single conception; it is merely a
question of how one defines ‘traumatic’. If we may assume that the experience
acquires its traumatic character only as a result of a quantitative factor—that
is to say, that in every case it is an excess in demand that is responsible for
an experience evoking unusual pathological reactions—then we can easily arrive
at the expedient of saying that something acts as a trauma in the case of one
constitution but in the case of another would have no such effect. In this way
we reach the concept of a sliding ‘complemental series’ as it is called in
which two factors converge in fulfilling an aetiological requirement. (Freud,
1939, p. 73)
Instead of nature vs.
nurture, Freud is drawing attention to the quantitative factor that leads to a
trauma or the ‘primal repression’ of the impulses, as the mediating third term
(Freud, 1911b, p. 67). In other words, one can inherit a disposition to
aggression or affection, and this can come with its projection onto the
internal object, at a certain stage or phase of development. However, parenting
can be such that the child isn’t overwhelmed by it and it doesn’t become
traumatic. Conversely, one’s caregivers can treat one in such a way that an
instinctual reaction is coaxed or born out of frustration to the point of it
becoming traumatic; thus, one can form mental pathology that was never, or
isn’t common in the gene pool. What applies to the quantitative aspect of
trauma, would also apply to the quantitative question of what kind of relation
with the maternal imago is enough for her to become the phallic mother or a
combined parent imago. Id drives of affection, for example, may have a genetic
disposition to be projected at the phallic stage so that the maternal imago is
experienced as being seductive with one, even though the real caregiver might
not have actively tried to denigrate the paternal imago.
I think there is sense
to be made of this in Freud's work and I don't see him as confused here.
This is obviously
difficult terrain and many generations of analysts, as you've mentioned, have
also gone on to different schools and theories. For me this doesn't point to a
post-modernistic idea of the truth, but the inherent difficulty in
understanding human beings as being made up of many selves, many egos, or many
drives.
For most
psychologists, this is too difficult and they keep the old Cartesian dualism
and the free will around, so that they don't have to break people down into
parts.
Trevor
On Tue, Sep 12, 2017
at 9:42 AM, Trevor Pederson <trevor.pederson@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ken
Can you say more about
what you see as Freud's biological approach? As I understand it, it's not
separate from his ontogenetic one.
I agree that there are
many competing approaches to the clinical realm, but I still see that as
illustrating the need for a better conceptual framework so that these
approaches can be assessed.
I also agree about
overlap with other fields, but until the individual aspect is understood in the
clinic, I'm not sure how seriously people in other fields can take the claims.
I'd like to think that there are a few psychodynamic claims that we could say
are established, but overarching ones like the Oedipus complex are not.
Trevor
On Tue, Sep 12, 2017
at 5:46 AM, Ken Fuchsman <kfuchsman@gmail.com> wrote:
Trevor,
I think Freudian
theory is tested not at first exclusively in clinical settings. First, clinical
findings are not always conclusive. After all, within psychoanalysis there have
been a diversity of theoretical and clinical approaches which give divergent
interpretations of the same materials, and struggle to find criteria to resolve
the differences. Second, there are many psychoanalytic claims that
overlap with research in other fields. It makes sense to critically evaluate
those findings and apply what's solid to psychoanalytic claims.
I do not use the terms
objectivity or tribalism, and the only way for you to know if these terms apply
to what Freud's recent biographer's claim is for you to read the books
yourself. As you know, Freud from time to time used a biological approach to
illuminate the works of significant writers.
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 11, 2017, at
10:43 AM, Trevor Pederson <trevor.pederson@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ken
You can't have it both
ways. If there are power struggles, "ideological" or
"tribal" conflicts that influence interpretations, then when
different biographers or others are making their case for Freud being
influenced, how do we know it's objectivity and not their tribalism?
I know that many would
dismiss Freud's concept of the superego with a straw man, but I think this has
very little to do with understanding the concept and seeing that it fails any
tests.
Theory must be
combined with the clinical and prove itself there. Then when things pass and
fail, we can turn to biography and sociology to make sense of the failures.
Trevor
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Hi Brian
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Penis normalis
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bdagostino2687
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9/12/17
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Dear all,
On this list we have a
few Freudians, a few deMausians, and an assortment of academically and/or
clinically trained eclectics in search of an inclusive but coherent theoretical
framework, yet to be created. Joel has been promoting an orthodox
Freudian viewpoint on this list for many years and Patrick has been promoting
an orthodox deMausian viewpoint. This is perfectly OK; you are welcome
here, but don’t expect to get converts. If you have truthful and
interesting things to say, people will listen on the merits but in most if not
all cases will not find your overall theoretical commitments compelling..
This list is devoted
to an exchange of ideas. I also have strong convictions (which include my
own heretical appropriations of DeMause, Marx, Jung, Shankara and others) but I
feel I would be wasting my time to try to convince others on this list about
the validity of my convictions. Instead, opportunities continually arise
to exchange ideas and information about topics of mutual interest, and the
diversity of theoretical viewpoints represented here, including orthodox
viewpoints, makes for very rich and informative discussions. That is the
most anyone can hope for from this list, but in my opinion it is a lot and not
something you find on many internet discussion groups.
A few items of
organizational history might also be helpful for anyone who does not know them.
Lloyd DeMause, Paul Elovitz, David Beisel, and others founded the
International Psychohistorical Association in 1977. DeMause was president
for many years and edited The Journal of Psychohistory for many years,
but the IPA has always been a big tent. Paul Elovitz founded the
Psychohistory Forum and the peer-reviewed journal Clio’s Psyche, which
sponsors this unmoderated list. Lloyd deMause has not been well for more
than five years, and The Journal of Psychohistory is now edited by
psychoanalyst and long-time IPA member David Lotto and published by Susan Hein,
Lloyd’s wife. There is no orthodoxy that the founders of the IPA or the
majority of its members have ever agreed upon; this theoretical diversity has
always been a source of frustration for proponents of deMausian or any other
orthodoxy, and I suspect this will always be the case.
Brian
www.bdagostino.com
917-628-8253
From: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com [mailto:cliospsyche@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Patrick
McEvoy-Halston
Sent: Tuesday, September
12, 2017 11:45 AM
To: Clio’s Psyche
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche]
Psychoanalysis After Freud: Disentangling the historical Freud from
psychoanalysis
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Joel Markowitz
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9/13/17
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No wonder Freud
couldn’t decide how far biological forces went, and where psychodynamic factors
took over. We STILL can’t separate biological from psychological
determinants with certainty.
For example, oedipal
determinism dominates the natural selection of other mammals. Wolf and
lion cubs and young male baboons wrestle with and nip at each other from early
on
in preparing to
challenge the alpha-male (who often IS the father)— to dominate the pack,
pride, and troop; and to mate the females. Same with us, of course,
though more complexly.
But it’s still
impossible to know.HOW MUCH of human oedipal determinism is biological and how
much has been determined by societally based psychodynamic forces.
Also: in my
experience obsessive-compulsive and phobic TENDENCIES seem genetically transmitted
in different families. But in AN INDIVIDUAL who has a serious obsessional
or phobic problem in such a family
I often can’t
determine the EXTENT to which that symptom results from psychic trauma.
( Therapy often confronts both possibilities. Psychotherapy
and, sometimes, medication may both be helpful. )
Joel
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In my Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality [Standard Ed., 7, 235] I have expressed the
opinion that each stage in the development of psychosexuality affords a
possibility of ‘fixation’ and thus of a dispositional point. People who have
not freed themselves completely from the&
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bdagostino2687
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9/13/17
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Thanks for providing
some comic relief, Patrick. Trevor is a Gradiva award winning author who
hardly needs the approval of this list for legitimacy. I, who you imagine to be
selling out my true deMausian self in search of academic legitimacy,
never got to square one in academia. All I can say is, if I played
the game, I did a pretty lousy job of it. Or maybe I was just not playing
the same game as everyone else. :-) --Brian
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Trevor Pederson
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9/13/17
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You didn't insult me,
I'm asking you as an onlooker.
People are right to
suspect me, there's a history of Freud worship in psychoanalysis and this has
often been replaced by idols in other schools. I've also been arguing for an
interpretation of Freud that has been marginal at best in the scholarship and
for people who have been taught or understood Freud in another way, I hardly
expect them to enthusiastically take up another interpretation. You have to
have at least a little ego to make it through graduate school.
Whatever kind of
legitimacy you see this list as granting to someone sounds strange to me.
Legitimacy in conferred in journals, publishing, and in organizations outside
of this list. There are some members on the list who are part of that
apparatus, but I don't think they are watching to see who appears more powerful
in the little squabbles that erupt on here.
Make your arguments,
show the evidence that you can for them, and let your work speak for itself.
Don't expect others to help you do it. And, if Brian is really as pathetic or
pitiable as you say, then don't lower yourself to his level by insulting him.
Choose an enemy that you have more respect for and with whom you have smaller
disagreements.
You are capable of
nuanced thinking, but you seem more interested in broad proclamations.
Trevor
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