Freud and Joseph Breuer made a good team -- as short-lived as it turned out to be.
Breuer was the older and in some ways the wiser of the two. He was more conservative and cautious with his 'causal interpretations and generalizations'. He was the more 'grounded' of the two. He was the better 'rational-empiricist' in that he was not quite so quick to jump to fast fast conclusions and over-generalizations.
In contrast, Freud was younger and more ambitious. Freud was quicker to jump to new -- and more provocative, controversial, dramatic -- conclusions. Freud was the better 'marketer' and 'seller'. It's just you had to pay a little closer attention to what Freud was marketing and selling because Freud was quicker to 'jump off the deep end' with his conclusions. When this happened, Freud needed someone to 'reel him back to earth again'. Breuer was that man. Unfortunately, Freud was stubborn and would not take 'no' for an answer. It was his way or the highway. So Breuer took the highway leaving Freud to fend for himself and to deal with whatever provocative, controversial issues he got himself into. They were frequent -- and many.
However, Freud was charismatic and always seemed to attract -- and then lose -- male followers. This would be one of the main 'serial, transference patterns' in Freud's life. Freud would attract all these male 'followers', 'co-workers', and/or students. He would teach them his 'Psychoanalytic system'. Then he would 'spit them out' (or they would 'spit him out') when they 'refused to buy completely into the Psychoanalytic program'.
With Freud, there was not too much room for 'variations on a theme' unless these variations came from the mouth of Freud. Between about 1906 and 1926, a whole host of very brilliant pschologists had passed through Freud's very 'tight Vienna circle', made their impression, rebelled against Freud's very 'tight reign over Freudian theory' -- and either quickly or slowly left. We can included amongst this group: Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, and Otto Rank. (And that is a select list.)
All of this is to say that Psychoanalysis could have offered a much, much richer playing field for understanding human behavior and human neurosis and/or psychopathology. But time and time again, smart men with very smart ideas were turned away by Freud -- to the ongoing and ultimate detriment of Psychoanalysis in terms of its very 'anal-retentive' development which can be viewed as a projection of Freud's very anal-retentive -- and largely 'unemotional' -- character.
Breuer was the first smart man to fall by the way side. He would be far from the last.
Between about 1893 and 1895 Freud and Breuer came up with a 'whole host of partial and interconnected sub-theories' on the various 'causes' and/or 'co-factors' of hysteria which they put together into a more or less integrative theory of hysteria.
Having said this, it could be argued that Breuer's strength was primarily as a scientist and as a doctor -- and his contribution to the 'cause of hysteria' was a more or less 'physio-genic' theory of hysteria that went nowhere. In contrast, Freud's contribution to the 'cause of hysteria' was a psychological one, and a 'theory of resistance or defense' -- that went everywhere. So maybe Breuer had reached the limit of his capabilities even though his greatest contribution to Psychoanalysis was his treatment of 'Anna O' which Freud freely acknowledged as the birthpoint of Psychoanalysis.
Off the top of my head, I will itemize most of the Freudian 'hysterical co-factors' -- and then check them later.
1. Shock: A shocking experience that rattles the personality.
2. Unconscious/Repressed Memory or Memories: The memory of the shocking experience doesn't go through the usual 'conscious memory channel'. Rather it is denied entry into the personality and enters an 'unconscious or repressed memory channel' which is totally different than the usual conscious memory channel.
3. Hysterical Conversion: From its vantage point in the unconcious memory channel, the memory is able to 'cause havoc' in the personality and in the body. 'Repressed emotional energy' gets converted into 'bodily symptoms' that often have an associative and/or symbolic connection with the original shocking experience.
4. There may be something in the 'hysterical personality' that may be 'hyper-sensitive' and prone to 'hysterical conversion pathway'.
5. Unlock the repressed memory -- complete with all emotions locked up with the memory -- and you unlock the hysterical symptom, and 'set the client free' of the particular symptom associated with the particular memory.
6. I am speculating here but I imagine that one of the main problems that a therapist like Breuer or Freud might have had with a hysterical patient is that as fast as you help 'cure' the patient of one symptom, the patient might well 'create one or more new ones'. In doing so, she has the creative capability of keeping you busuy as a therapist for either the rest of her life or the rest of yours.
Here is where the full 'transference relationship' can be seen and diagnosed. It was often the case that these young hysterical women were also 'home nurses' who treated their acutely and chronically sick fathers who, in this regard, were monopolizing all of their time and energy.
How could these women 'break free' of their fathers' constant needs in order to fulfill some of their own 'freedom' and 'womanly' needs? Presto. On a subconscious or unconscious level the women learn how to behave like their fathers were -- i.e., the hysterical young women, in effect, 'identify with their sick fathers'.
Now from a position of previous 'powerlessness', they are 'transferred' into a position of 'power' -- just like their sick father. This is the power of the sick.
The young women go to a doctor with very 'mystifying' symptoms. The doctor is 'stumped' and can't help them. They go to another doctor -- a 'neurological' and/or 'psychological' specialist.
The 'hysterical daughter of a sick father' -- quickly becomes subconsciously very creative in keeping the new doctor 'very busy' just like her father has very creatively kept his daughter busy for the last x number of years.
What goes around comes around. I call this 'transference-reversal'. From an 'underdog' position as 'nurse', the daughter quickly learns the 'power-advantage' of playing the role of 'hysterical patient' -- she gets to control the young doctor just as her sick father controls her. It's more 'fun' 'being in control', 'being in power' and controlling the young doctor.
At least until or unless the young doctor is finally smart enough to figure out what is going on. That is where the therapy really starts. It starts with understanding the full dynamics of the transference complex and the corresponding nature of the therapeutic transference relationship. In 1895, Freud hadn't quite gotten there yet. And I'm not sure he ever fully did.
Transference is not always about 'sex' and/or 'love'. Even more often, it is about 'power' and 'self-esteem' and 'aiming to undo or repair a narcissistic self-esteem injury'. Often, all the factors listed above -- and more (anxiety, guilt, anger, rage, jealousy, possessiveness, hate, revenge...) are 'mixed together' into a whole smorgasboard of different and conflicting emotions and impulses and restraints that make up the entire 'transference package or complex'.
Call this my 'Nietzschean-Adlerian-Jungian' influence when I say this. Freud had part of the transference picture figured out -- more so than anyone else at the time -- but he did not have all of it figured out. Not in 1895. Not when he was treating 'Dora' from 1900-1901. And not when he came to associate transference with 'the repetition compulsion' and 'the death instinct' late in his career.
Freud was constantly hampered in his theorizing about transference by the 'tight constraints of his own very anal-retentive theorizing about Psychoanalysis in general'. Probaby the theorist who could have helped him the most in his understanding of transference -- Alfred Adler with his theories of 'inferiority feeling', 'superiority striving', and 'compensation' -- was not around long enough and/or respected enough for his deviation off the 'main Psychoanalytic path' to have any significant and long-lasting impact on Freud's understanding of transference. For the briefest moment in history -- specifically, Nov. 7th, 1906, in the minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society -- Freud and Adler seemed fully on the same page together:
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Freud first turns against Hitschmann and his 'rationalistic' point of view.
He (Freud) attributes great importance to Adler's work; it has brought his own work a step further. To judge from the immediate impression, much of what Adler said may be correct. (Notes by the editors, Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn: It seems that Freud had in mind what was later characterized as overcompensation or counterbalance for a narcissisitic 'injury' although he uses 'anatomical' language here.)
He singled out two leading ideas as significant and fertile: (1) the concept of compensation, according to which an organic inferiority (later to include the idea of 'psychic inferiority') is counterbalanced by a supervalent cerebral activity, and (2) that the repression is accomplished by the formation of a psychic superstructure. A similar formulation had occurred to him. (Notes by the editors, Nunberg and Federn: This may refer to the formulation that repression is accomplished by the ego.)
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Volume 1: 1906-1908, Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, New York, International Universities Press, Inc., 1962.
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But this was only a fleeting moment in time -- and the rest is history -- Adler ultimately, like so many others, separating from Freud and developing his own school of psychology -- Adlerian or Individual Psychology.
DGB Philosophy-Psychology goes back to re-integrate some of the separated pieces.
In the case of 'Anna O', one of the distinctions that DGB Psychology wants to make is between a simple case of 'Traumacy Neurosis' -- say, in the form of an 'emotional-to-physical hysterical conversion' symptom (such as Anna O 'refusing to drink) -- and a full-blown 'Father-Complex Transference Neurosis' (such as between Anna O and Joseph Breuer or between Freud and Dora).
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From the internet, see Freud, Anna O, and her 'not drinking water'.
Cathartic Method
Psychoanalysis: Cathartic Method
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The so-called "cathartic method" was a treatment for psychiatric disorders developed during 1881-1882 by Joseph Breuer with his patient "Anna O." The aim was to enable the hypnotized patient to recollect the traumatic event at the root of a particular symptom and thereby eliminate the associated pathogenic memory through "catharsis." The term was derived from Aristotle's use of it to describe the emotionally purgative effect of Greek tragedies.
Reading the case history of Anna O., one sees that the method developed gradually. At first, Breuer limited himself to making use of the patient's self-induced hypnotic states in which she would strive to express what she preferred to avoid talking about when normally conscious. Later on, Anna O. began inventing stories around a word or words she heard, at the conclusion of which she awakened serene and improved. After the death of her father, such stories evoked diurnal fears and hallucinations. The cathartic effect, linked to the emotional state that accompanied these fears, required the doctor to listen without actively seeking etiological clues. Anna O. aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a "talking cure", while she referred to it jokingly as "chimney-sweeping" (1895d, p. 30). At this juncture Breuer began to more systematically employ a technique by which, while Anna O. was in a trance, he repeated to her a few words that she herself had muttered while in a self-induced "absence."
It was probably in August 1881 that the method acquired its definitive form. This was when Anna O., after refusing to drink water and suffering near-hydrophobia during hot weather, remembered the disgust she felt when she happened upon her English lady-companion's dog while it was drinking from a water glass. As soon as she described the event, she asked for water and "thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return" (p. 35) Other examples provided Breuer with evidence that "in the case of this patient the hysterical phenomena disappeared as soon as the event which had give rise to them was reproduced in her hypnosis" (p. 35), and that systematic application of what she called "chimney sweeping" would put an end to one after another of such morbid phenomena. To move the treatment along faster, Breuer began use hypnosis, which he had not regularly employed previously.
Freud and Breuer filled out the notion of catharsis with the concept of "abreaction"—a quantity of affect that was linked to memory of a traumatic and pathogenic event that could not be evacuated through normal physical and organic processes as required by the "principle of constancy" and so, thus blocked (eingeklemmt), was redirected through somatic channels to become the process at the origin of the pathological symptoms (1893a).
Tired of poor results and of the monotony of hypnotic suggestion, by 1889 Freud appears to have decided, in treating Emmy von N., to employ "the cathartic method of J. Breuer." But failure to regularly induce hypnotic states inclined him by 1892 to give up hypnosis, which his patient Elisabeth von R. disliked. He asked her to lay down and close her eyes but allowed her to move about or open her eyes as she wished, and he experimented with a "pressure technique": "I placed my hand on the patient's forehead or took her head between my hands and said: 'You will think of it [a symptom or its origin] under the pressure of my hand. At the moment at which I relax my pressure you will see something in front of you or something will come into your head. Catch hold of it. It will be what we are looking for.—Well, what have you seen or what has occurred to you?" (Freud 1895d, p. 110). This procedure "has scarcely ever left me in the lurch since then," (p. 111) Freud added, claiming that this was the case to such an extent that he told patients that it could not possibly fail but invariably enabled him to "at last [extract] the information" (p. 111).
Breuer's method little by little thus became an "analysis of the psyche" which prefigured "psychoanalysis," a term that first appeared in print in 1896. The technique would be developed progressively over the course of a dozen years.By 1907, when Freud undertook analysis of the "Rat Man," he no longer actively demanded that patients produce material, but asked only that they verbalize what spontaneously came to mind.
Freud's thesis, according to which trauma at the root of displaced energy towards the soma is invariably sexual in nature, led to a rupture in his relationship with Breuer, but it also determined the future course of psychoanalysis. His explanation of the difficulties that patients experienced during treatment to defend themselves against pathogenic memories would come to be known as "resistance," while the concept of "transference" would emerge from his understanding of Breuer's sudden termination of Anna O., or the time that a patient, upon waking from hypnosis, threw her arms around his neck.
Catharsis and abreaction, even while still observed during psychoanalytic treatment, no longer constitute therapeutic aims as in 1895. However, they remain prominent in several psychotherapeutic techniques, such as in "Primal Scream" therapy and certain types of psychodrama.
Bibliography
Anderson, Ola. (1962). Studies in the prehistory of psychoanalysis. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget.
Chertok Léon; and Saussure, Raymond de. (1973). Naissance du psychanalyste. Paris: Payot.
Freud, Sigmund. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: Preliminary communication. SE,2.
——. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. SE, 2: 48-106.
Mijolla Alain de. (1982). Aux origines de la pratique psychanalytique. In R. Jaccart (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse. Paris: Hachette.
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DGB Psychology does not let Freud totally off the hook for abandoning his infamous 'Seduction Theory'. In doing so, Freud put 'the theoretical and therapeutic lid back on child sexual abuse' or 'swept it under the carpet' if you will. However, at the same time, DGB Psychology does not let Freud off the hook for his totally focusing on 'The Seduction Theory' to begin with. Nowhere have I read in the case of 'Anna O' that she was sexually abused by her father. Nor does Anna O's 'refusing to drink water' because 'a dog drank water out of a human glass' constitute anything close to 'The Seduction Theory' in my mind (unless the dog seduced Anna O). Freud had an unfortuante habit of overgeneralizing his theoretical conclusions -- and then 'grandstanding' these conclusions until they collapsed under the weight of his own overgeneralizing. 'One or two robins does not necessarily mean spring.' Any man of Freud's scientific background and training should know that. Sometimes a person's need to 'make scientific or social or political waves' can interfere with, and push into the back seat, the same person's need to 'stay grounded in good, logical, rational-empirical common sense'. Narcissistic bias can easily interfere with scientific, epistemological -- and Psychoanalytic -- evolution.
DGB Psychology mixes and matches elements of Freud's Traumacy, Seduction, Childhood Sexuality, Oedipal, and Life-Death Instinct Theory with elements from other theorists such as Bacon, Nietzsche, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Perls, and Masson.
More on this to come.
-- dgb, Feb. 21st-23rd, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Monday, February 23, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Freud, Psychoanalysis, Hysteria -- and Childhood Traumacy, Sexual Traumacy, Sexual Abuse
I am about to embark on what I view as one of my most difficult tasks as a philosopher and psycho-theorist. I have to go back into Psychoanalytic history -- back to between about 1885 and 1900 and determine for myself what 'right' and 'wrong' turns Freud made when he was learning about -- and treating -- 'hysteria', learning about the connection between hysteria and sexuality, learning about the connection between hysteria and childhood sexuality, and finally learning about the connection between hysteria and childhood sexual traumacy and/or childhood sexual abuse.
Freud was a very provocative and controversial man -- he generally did not run away from provocative and controversial opinions. In fact, he tended to run towards them -- not away from them. Provocative, controversial opinions and theories were 'the name and essence of his character and game' if you will. Psychoanalysis was nothing if it was not provocative and controversial -- particulary about issues of human sexuality.
And yet in the late 1970s, along came another very provocative and controversial man -- trained right here in my area at The University of Toronto as a Freudian Psychoanalyst (1971-1979) while I was finishing up my Honours B.A. in psychology at The University of Waterloo. Jeffrey Masson is one of my few philosophical and psychological mentors (that I know of) who is still very much alive -- and much 'cooking'. Well, back between about 1979 and let us say 1992, Jeffrey Masson sure 'cooked up a storm' in The Freudian Establishment -- kind of like Carl Jung, first viewed as the fastest rising young star in the Freudian World, gaining the trust of Anna Freud at the top of the Freudian hierarchy, gaining access to Freud's most private letters in The Freudian Archives -- and then 'all Hell started to break loose' as Masson obviously didn't like what he was reading...
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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
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Masson basically accused Freud of running away from the issue of childhood sexual abuse after bumping into this very difficult problem in his clinical practise, first incorporating the issue of childhood sexual abuse in one of his earliest and most provocative essays and theories on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- and then something 'very funny happened on the way to the forum' -- Freud essentially 'abandoned' this theoretical position and started to develop one equally provocative and controversial -- but not as legally provocative and controversial -- specifically, Freud began to develop the idea of 'childhood sexuality' and 'childhood sexual fantasies' as opposed to 'real, live sexual traumacies and abuses'. That was one very, very large turn that basically shook, rattled and completely 'reconstructed' the 'etiological foundations' of Psychoanalysis -- and this theoretical changeover seemed to start happening very shortly after Freud read his most controversial essay -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- to a very, very shocked and disbelieving audience of medical professionals on April 21st, 1896.
Masson believes that Freud was basically 'intimidated' by these doctors who held the balance of power over his future career as a medical practictioner -- and had the full power to determine whether he got any patients referred to him or not -- and in effect, 'chickened out' of the theoretical he presented to the doctors that night.
Masson could be right. How many of us can say that our ethical values have not been compromised at some point in our lives because we have 'shut up' in order to stay employed by the company who is signing our paycheque. I, for one, can't. I cannot say that I have always stayed 'ethically strong' in the face of the possibility of losing my employment.
So maybe Freud ethically 'caved in'.
However, maybe there were other mitigating factors at work here that deserve at least some if not equal or superior consideration.
Chief amongst these is possibly the fact that Freud was evolving into a 'more clinically experienced practicitioner' and as such, he was bumping into the fact that life is not always about 'clear-cut theoretical categories'. Or maybe Freud thought that life was about 'clear-cut theoretical categories' and the experiences that Freud was bumping into as he moved along in his clinical practise were not 'fitting neatly' into his early Aetiology of Hysteria Seduction-(Sexual Assault) Theory. Maybe he seriously believed that some significant alterations needed to be made to his earlier theory. Freud was certainly not shy about changing or modifying his theories if he thought he had a better one. (He just didn't like his theories being changed or modified by anyone else!).
Freud was a very complicated man. He was certainly vry 'multi-bi-polar' -- and his theories reflected this. Sometimes Freud oversimplified his theories. Other times, he over-complicated them. Sometimes Freud was very 'anal-retentive' and 'conservative'. Other times he was very 'liberal'. Sometimes he was very 'rational-empirical' -- a student of science and of The Enlightenment. Othertimes, Freud was on 'Pluto' or 'Mars' -- exploring the most outrageous, 'out of this world' theories that any man could reasonably or unreasonably explore. Symbolism, fantasy, sexuality, and childhood sexuality were four areas of Freud's thinking that would remain with him the rest of his life -- even after Freud started to basically or seemingly 'abandon' the idea of 'sexual traumacy and childhood abuse' as being central to his psychological theories.
Maybe Freud didn't have the emotional, ethical, and economic fortitude -- in short, the 'courage' -- to continue to stand up to a roomful of doctors who had the power to control -- and/or destroy -- his future. Or maybe Freud's ideas were simply changing in other directions -- towards more 'symbolism' and 'sexual fantasy' -- that gave a different value priority to the direction of his work, even as he may or may not have every completely abandoned his earlier 'traumacy' and 'seduction' (sexual assault) theories.
Probably, in the end, none of us will never know for sure.
However, I will point out one type of clinical and theoretical problem that I do believe Freud was bumping into in his work -- that was in Freud's eyes -- contradicting both his 'Traumacy' and his 'Seduction' Theory. Why? Because he was getting clinical information from his clients that seemed to be violating one of Freud's most basic underlying principles of Psychoanalysis -- and that was/is 'The Pleasure Principle'.
And here I think there was a question that needed to be clinically answered that Freud could not properly answer -- without in effect, abandoning his traumacy-seduction theory. The question ran something like this:
If these early childhood scenes of childhood traumacy and sexual abuse were really as horrifically traumatic and painful as Freud originally believed them to be, then why now, was Freud many years later in his clinical practise with these 'adult women' of allegedly 'childhood sexual traumacy and seduction and/or assault' -- why were these adult women now 're-creating and re-enacting these early scenes of traumacy and abuse' not as 'painful events' but rather as 'sexually exciting events'?
Maybe this wasn't happening all of the time. But maybe it was happening often enough in Freud's clinical practise that Freud couldn't ignore the evidence. It happened to Breuer when Breuer was treating 'Anna O'. And even more frightening to an evolving therapist -- 'Anna O's' sexual excitement was aimed squared at Breuer. Breuer had a wife and a marriage to protect. Breuer ran from 'Anna O' -- and that was basically the last we heard of Breuer as a 'psychotherapist'.
Obviously, by 1896 or 1897, Freud was probably running into some of the same clinical complications -- specifically, 'love and sexual transference' -- that Breuer ran into with 'Anna O'. How would Freud handle this very difficult clinical problem differently than Breuer?
So that -- for Breuer, Freud, and for me -- may have been the 50 million dollar clinical and theoretical question that Freud could not answer -- without abandoning his 'traumacy-seduction' theory and moving more and more towards a theory of 'childhood sexual fantasy'. How do you account for women re-creating their supposedly painful childhood sexual assaults as 'adult sexual fantasies' -- and how do you account for the phenomenon of 'love transference' -- without changing Freud's original 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory'? And that is exactly what Freud went ahead and did. I will give DGB's answer to this most complicated clinical and theoretical problem in another essay and/or series of essays to come.
Freud may or may not have been wrong in doing what he did. But I can see Freud doing this -- in a spirit of 'maintaining his ethical and theoretical integrity'; not in a spirit of running away from an unpopular social-psychological theory. Or maybe Freud 'killed two birds with one stone' -- I wasn't there, I don't know.
But I will give Freud the benefit of the doubt on this last theoretical account.
He had a very difficult clinical question to answer -- and he answered it by modifying his psychological theory away from 'childhood sexual abuse' and towards 'childhood sexual fantasy'. The second theory would become almost as unpopular as the first one. But there was one critical difference. Fathers would not be called up on 'the red carpet' to account for possible incidents of 'sexually abusing their children'. That was a very big legal difference that would probably make fathers rest a lot easier at night. And perhaps in the process, Freud's future as a medical practictioner was safeguarded and maintained.
No one will probably ever fully know.
-- dgb, Feb. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Freud was a very provocative and controversial man -- he generally did not run away from provocative and controversial opinions. In fact, he tended to run towards them -- not away from them. Provocative, controversial opinions and theories were 'the name and essence of his character and game' if you will. Psychoanalysis was nothing if it was not provocative and controversial -- particulary about issues of human sexuality.
And yet in the late 1970s, along came another very provocative and controversial man -- trained right here in my area at The University of Toronto as a Freudian Psychoanalyst (1971-1979) while I was finishing up my Honours B.A. in psychology at The University of Waterloo. Jeffrey Masson is one of my few philosophical and psychological mentors (that I know of) who is still very much alive -- and much 'cooking'. Well, back between about 1979 and let us say 1992, Jeffrey Masson sure 'cooked up a storm' in The Freudian Establishment -- kind of like Carl Jung, first viewed as the fastest rising young star in the Freudian World, gaining the trust of Anna Freud at the top of the Freudian hierarchy, gaining access to Freud's most private letters in The Freudian Archives -- and then 'all Hell started to break loose' as Masson obviously didn't like what he was reading...
............................................................................
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
.................................................................................
Masson basically accused Freud of running away from the issue of childhood sexual abuse after bumping into this very difficult problem in his clinical practise, first incorporating the issue of childhood sexual abuse in one of his earliest and most provocative essays and theories on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- and then something 'very funny happened on the way to the forum' -- Freud essentially 'abandoned' this theoretical position and started to develop one equally provocative and controversial -- but not as legally provocative and controversial -- specifically, Freud began to develop the idea of 'childhood sexuality' and 'childhood sexual fantasies' as opposed to 'real, live sexual traumacies and abuses'. That was one very, very large turn that basically shook, rattled and completely 'reconstructed' the 'etiological foundations' of Psychoanalysis -- and this theoretical changeover seemed to start happening very shortly after Freud read his most controversial essay -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- to a very, very shocked and disbelieving audience of medical professionals on April 21st, 1896.
Masson believes that Freud was basically 'intimidated' by these doctors who held the balance of power over his future career as a medical practictioner -- and had the full power to determine whether he got any patients referred to him or not -- and in effect, 'chickened out' of the theoretical he presented to the doctors that night.
Masson could be right. How many of us can say that our ethical values have not been compromised at some point in our lives because we have 'shut up' in order to stay employed by the company who is signing our paycheque. I, for one, can't. I cannot say that I have always stayed 'ethically strong' in the face of the possibility of losing my employment.
So maybe Freud ethically 'caved in'.
However, maybe there were other mitigating factors at work here that deserve at least some if not equal or superior consideration.
Chief amongst these is possibly the fact that Freud was evolving into a 'more clinically experienced practicitioner' and as such, he was bumping into the fact that life is not always about 'clear-cut theoretical categories'. Or maybe Freud thought that life was about 'clear-cut theoretical categories' and the experiences that Freud was bumping into as he moved along in his clinical practise were not 'fitting neatly' into his early Aetiology of Hysteria Seduction-(Sexual Assault) Theory. Maybe he seriously believed that some significant alterations needed to be made to his earlier theory. Freud was certainly not shy about changing or modifying his theories if he thought he had a better one. (He just didn't like his theories being changed or modified by anyone else!).
Freud was a very complicated man. He was certainly vry 'multi-bi-polar' -- and his theories reflected this. Sometimes Freud oversimplified his theories. Other times, he over-complicated them. Sometimes Freud was very 'anal-retentive' and 'conservative'. Other times he was very 'liberal'. Sometimes he was very 'rational-empirical' -- a student of science and of The Enlightenment. Othertimes, Freud was on 'Pluto' or 'Mars' -- exploring the most outrageous, 'out of this world' theories that any man could reasonably or unreasonably explore. Symbolism, fantasy, sexuality, and childhood sexuality were four areas of Freud's thinking that would remain with him the rest of his life -- even after Freud started to basically or seemingly 'abandon' the idea of 'sexual traumacy and childhood abuse' as being central to his psychological theories.
Maybe Freud didn't have the emotional, ethical, and economic fortitude -- in short, the 'courage' -- to continue to stand up to a roomful of doctors who had the power to control -- and/or destroy -- his future. Or maybe Freud's ideas were simply changing in other directions -- towards more 'symbolism' and 'sexual fantasy' -- that gave a different value priority to the direction of his work, even as he may or may not have every completely abandoned his earlier 'traumacy' and 'seduction' (sexual assault) theories.
Probably, in the end, none of us will never know for sure.
However, I will point out one type of clinical and theoretical problem that I do believe Freud was bumping into in his work -- that was in Freud's eyes -- contradicting both his 'Traumacy' and his 'Seduction' Theory. Why? Because he was getting clinical information from his clients that seemed to be violating one of Freud's most basic underlying principles of Psychoanalysis -- and that was/is 'The Pleasure Principle'.
And here I think there was a question that needed to be clinically answered that Freud could not properly answer -- without in effect, abandoning his traumacy-seduction theory. The question ran something like this:
If these early childhood scenes of childhood traumacy and sexual abuse were really as horrifically traumatic and painful as Freud originally believed them to be, then why now, was Freud many years later in his clinical practise with these 'adult women' of allegedly 'childhood sexual traumacy and seduction and/or assault' -- why were these adult women now 're-creating and re-enacting these early scenes of traumacy and abuse' not as 'painful events' but rather as 'sexually exciting events'?
Maybe this wasn't happening all of the time. But maybe it was happening often enough in Freud's clinical practise that Freud couldn't ignore the evidence. It happened to Breuer when Breuer was treating 'Anna O'. And even more frightening to an evolving therapist -- 'Anna O's' sexual excitement was aimed squared at Breuer. Breuer had a wife and a marriage to protect. Breuer ran from 'Anna O' -- and that was basically the last we heard of Breuer as a 'psychotherapist'.
Obviously, by 1896 or 1897, Freud was probably running into some of the same clinical complications -- specifically, 'love and sexual transference' -- that Breuer ran into with 'Anna O'. How would Freud handle this very difficult clinical problem differently than Breuer?
So that -- for Breuer, Freud, and for me -- may have been the 50 million dollar clinical and theoretical question that Freud could not answer -- without abandoning his 'traumacy-seduction' theory and moving more and more towards a theory of 'childhood sexual fantasy'. How do you account for women re-creating their supposedly painful childhood sexual assaults as 'adult sexual fantasies' -- and how do you account for the phenomenon of 'love transference' -- without changing Freud's original 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory'? And that is exactly what Freud went ahead and did. I will give DGB's answer to this most complicated clinical and theoretical problem in another essay and/or series of essays to come.
Freud may or may not have been wrong in doing what he did. But I can see Freud doing this -- in a spirit of 'maintaining his ethical and theoretical integrity'; not in a spirit of running away from an unpopular social-psychological theory. Or maybe Freud 'killed two birds with one stone' -- I wasn't there, I don't know.
But I will give Freud the benefit of the doubt on this last theoretical account.
He had a very difficult clinical question to answer -- and he answered it by modifying his psychological theory away from 'childhood sexual abuse' and towards 'childhood sexual fantasy'. The second theory would become almost as unpopular as the first one. But there was one critical difference. Fathers would not be called up on 'the red carpet' to account for possible incidents of 'sexually abusing their children'. That was a very big legal difference that would probably make fathers rest a lot easier at night. And perhaps in the process, Freud's future as a medical practictioner was safeguarded and maintained.
No one will probably ever fully know.
-- dgb, Feb. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Thursday, February 19, 2009
DGB Transference and Personality Theory Integrates Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, Masson
It's funny. Freud was a Gestalt Therapist before he was a Psychoanalyst.
All of Freud's early work with hysterical patients, using hypnosis (let us loosely say between 1886 and the early 1890s) was geared towards 'finishing the unfinished situation'. Some might say 'making the unconscious, conscious'. Alternatively, I would say 'emotionally resolving unresolved emotional situations from years gone by'.
In conceptuology and terminology that had not been close to fully developed yet, we might say that: Hysterical symptoms were 'compromise-formations' between deep, underlying impulses for self-expression and more surface-level, social resistances, restraints, and/or defenses against the underlying and 'rising' impulses for self-expression.
Let's back up and do a quick history lesson before we go any further.
...............................................................................
From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
II. HISTORY
Suggestion x Free Association
Hysteria, Charcot, Breuer, Anna O.
Hysteria, now commonly referred to as a conversion disorder, displays physical symptoms (numbness/paralysis of a limb, loss of voice or blindness) that occur in a healthy body.
The French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, who was concerned with the treatment of hysteria, believed it to be a genuine ailment that afflicted men and women, and tried to free his patient's from their symptoms through hypnotic suggestion.
Joseph Breuer, a Vienese physician who also chose hypnosis as a clinical procedure, didn't intend just to suppress his patient's symptoms but rather searched for the deep causes of their suffering. He realized, during the treatment of his young patient "Anna O." (1880-82), that the results were far reaching if he let her talk about her feelings and thoughts. He named "spontaneous hypnosis" her trance-like states. Anna named 'talking cure' or 'chimney sweeping' the process that lead to the disappearance of her symptoms whenever she was able to recollect their root events.
Freud studied with Charcot in 1885-86. He collaborated with Joseph Breuer, while progressively formulating his theory on the mind, and considered hypnosis far more satisfactory than the electrotherapy he had tried until 1890.
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From the internet...
Hypnosis and Catharsis in Freud
David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University
Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralyses and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in nonhysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.
Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. In his work with Anna O, he found that by tracing her associations in an autohypnotic state, he could not only find an original repressed incident, but could actually cure her of her symptom. When she related an event to a symptom while in a hypnotic state, her symptom would become terribly powerful and dramatic, but would then be purged, never to trouble her again. This powerful and often traumatic transfer of an memory from the unconscious to the conscious is known as catharsis, an effective method which also seems to corroborate Freud's theories on the mind.
However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Now understand that I am a 'freelance and/or integrative theorist' who does not feel restricted by the boundaries of any one theorist's language, conceptuology, and/or theorizing. In fact, I can, and do, easily integrate them all -- particularily Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and Masson.
When it comes to pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian integrative theorizing about the nature, structure, and different process-dynamics in the personality -- in other words, in this instance, DGB Integrative Personality and Transference Theory -- I will call these 12 personality theorists who preceded me 'The Imperative 12'.
More history...
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
Breuer and Freud published their findings and theories in Studies in Hysteria , in 1895. They assumed that hysterical symptoms occurred when a mental process highly charged with affect found its normal path blocked to consciousness and movement. This 'strangulated' affect diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (conversion).
Through hypnosis, the thoughts and memories connected with the symptoms would eventually reach consciousness. 'Catharsis' (cleansing in Greek) would come about bringing a normal discharge of affect; despite these facts, symptoms tended to reappear if the relation with the physician was disturbed in any way, signaling that an intense emotional tie with him played an important role in the cure.
The authors stated that these symptoms had sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts and were caused by unconscious wishes and forgotten memories (psychic traumas).Thus, hysterics suffered mainly from 'reminiscences' that had not been worked-through.
The cornerstone of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes that follow laws that do not apply to conscious thinking. Later, these processes were better understood and the mechanisms of psychological productions such as dreams could be grasped.
The Fundamental Technical Rule
Finding hypnosis inadequate, Freud refined Breuer's methods, based on his increasing clinical understanding of neuroses. He realized that success of the treatment depended upon the patient's relation to his physician whose task was to make the unconscious become conscious.
An entirely new relation between patient and physician developed out of a change in the technique and the surprising results thus obtained extended themselves to many other forms of neurotic disorders. Freud named this procedure Psychoanalysis - an art of interpretation, in 1896.
Freud thought that disturbing thoughts and conflicting urges were kept unconscious (repression) but, even so, they caused strong guilty feelings and great anxiety, interfering with conscious mental activity, as they consumed vital psychic energy in their struggle for release. As they were incompatible with the individual's normal standards, he would feel compelled to raise defenses against the intrusive ideas and the release of such urges, in order to maintain his inner equilibrium (defense mechanisms).
As Freud believed in the strict determination of mental events and assumed that all memories were interconnected, so that one recollection would lead to the next, he insisted that the patient should tell him everything that came to his mind, regardless of how irrelevant, senseless or disagreeable the idea might seem to him (free association). He found it possible for the patient to recover crucial memories while conscious.
By surrendering to his own unconscious mental activity (a state of evenly-suspended attention), Freud would follow the unconscious flow of his patient's mental productions, in order to trace the connections between the chain of allusive associations and the forgotten memories.
Occasionally, the patient might omit some material and this very gap in the communication would reveal that the association was avoided (resistance) due to its potential evocative power to bring the underlying forgotten memories to the surface of consciousness, along with the emergence of its previously inaccessible meaning.
Freud noticed that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual ideas. In 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, they were the residues of infantile impulses and desires (fantasies). Thus he assumed that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed libido, which found expression in various symptoms.
By being in touch with his inner experiences in a state of regression, in which long-forgotten 'events' would be remembered, the analysand would relate to the analyst as if the latter were a figure from his past (transference).
Freud would communicate the connection between the patient's fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences (interpretation).
This powerful re-experience of original conflicts caused great distress to the patient, but the working-through of the emotional pain (insight) rendered the treatment efficient, due to a new balance and distribution of psychic energy, promoting a reorganization of the psychological structures into healthier mental configurations.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Integrative theorizing is not a completely 'random' and/or 'democratic' process. As an integrative theorist, there are times when I have make 'either/or' judgments and decisions. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Adler's ideas. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Adler's ideas. Or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Freud's 'Traumacy and Seduction Theories' or I support his Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theories. Sometimes -- indeed, oftentimes -- compromise-formations can be arrived at between the different theories. But not always. Like every theorist before me, my brain becomes a 'filter and editorial screening process' for those ideas that I let into my brain to become a vital part of DGB Personality and Transference Theory -- and those ideas that I don't let through this editorial screening process.
Example 1:
I think Freud invested way too much Psychoanalytic time and energy locked up in the concepts of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These ideas play no part in DGB Personality and Transference Theory. To put it bluntly, they get tossed away.
Between 1974 and 1979, while I was at The University of Waterloo working through my Honours B.A. in psychology, I was involved in numerous 'group psychotherapy' processes. Never once, did I witness -- either in myself or someone else -- an 'unconscious memory becoming conscious'. Never once did I witness the so-called phenomenon of 'repression'. I don't believe in concepts that I can't -- or don't -- experience. In this regard, I am an John Locke rational-empiricist, through and through. Don't give me any 'no-sense' concepts that do not have a 'sensory-experiential' ('phenomenological-existential') foundation. If you do -- then at least properly label these concepts as 'metaphysical' and/or 'mythological'. DGB Philosophy-Psychology uses metaphysical-mythological concepts but they are labelled as such. Metaphysical and/or mythological concepts are not to be confused with 'down-to-earth' concepts that have 'physical referents' that can be seen, heard, and/or touched. Our loved ones, we can see, touch, experience. I've never seen an 'unconscous memory' or a 'repression' seen, touched, experienced. My roughly 12 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute (1979-1991) in Toronto only further reinforced what I am saying here.
I've never seen a 'memory therapeutically worked with' that couldn't be brought to the client's awareness usually in pretty easy and timely fashion. 'Resistance' and 'suppression' are verifiable concepts.
With some degree of apprehension, I will use the concepts of 'suppressed memories' and 'subconscious memories' -- meaning 'out-of-awareness' memories that can usually be quickly brought into awareness with the right associations and/or the right degree of focus of attention -- but these are not to be confused with the ideas of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These latter two concepts give a psychotherapist far too much liberty and license to 'project his or her own theoretical and/or experiential material' onto the client. Psychotherapeutically and legally there is the potential for much abuse and damage here -- in essence, creating or interpreting or reconstructing or analysing 'unconscious or repressed memories that don't exist, and that never existed' in a client's life history. Perhaps Freud, as an Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theorist was the worst violator of supposedly unconscious or repressed memories -- see 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' -- but the potential for this type of violation exists just as strongly, maybe even more so, at the hands of present-day Traumacy-Seduction Theory Psychotherapists. I cringe at the very real event of some father being dragged into court -- and his life ruined -- because some Traumacy-Seduction-Repressed Memory Therapist has 'interpreted or analyzed or reconstructed' a supposedly repressed memory from a client who doesn't even remember this memory. At least until the therapist convinces him or her elsewise. In most courts, that is called 'leading the witness'. All such cases should be thrown out of court. If a person can't remember something -- it's not a memory. Period.
Don't let some psychotherapist's or even some school of psychotherapy's theorizing --whether from one polar extreme, such as 'Classical Psychoanlytic-Oedipal-Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy' Theorizing; or from another polar extreme, such as Childhood-Traumacy-Seduction-Sexual-Assault' Theorizing -- destroy a person's life and/or a family's life because he/she/they 'projected his/her/their own theory onto a client whose case material didn't support this theory but rather was 'forced' into this theory like trying to put a circular piece into a rectangular box. We are talking about any situation where the therapist is playing the 'fitting game' with the client -- and the client's life experiences don't neatly 'fit into the therapist's theory, diagnosis, and therapeutic gameplan'. Any use of 'unconscious' or 'repressed' memories gives a therapist far too much liberty, license -- and potential for abuse -- of what a client does and doesn't remember.
How many men or women who as children or as adults were sexually assaulted -- don't remember the assault? They may not want to talk about it. But that is a different thing entirely from 'not remembering' it. I don't support everything that Jeffrey Masson has written about Freud's Controversial Abandonment of his Traumacy-Seduction Theory but I support Masson's editorial opinion on this account (The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory) -- people can almost always remember if they have been sexually assaulted, to what extent, and the particular details around this event. 'Commit to flames' the ideas of 'unconscious and repressed memories'. Work with 'conscious memories'!
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'Hysteria' and 'Neurotic Symptoms' as 'Compromise-Formations' and 'Allusions to Immediacy'
We have to be very careful that we not abuse the label of 'hysteria' and that it represents a legitimate diagnostic phenomenon, and not some 'medically unknown and/or undiagnosed phenomenon' either in present day or in Freud's time such as perhaps 'epilepsy' or a 'brain tumor' or 'schizophrenia' or 'hypochondria'.
Having said this, Freud, in his earliest psychotherapy sessions, worked in much more 'immediacy-oriented, Gestalt-fashion' than he did in his later more interpretive and analytical Psychoanalytical sessions.
I believe that Freud might have taken some serious steps backwards in this regard.
It is important that any form of psychotherapy be well-grounded in immediacy, contact, and the client's experience. The higher a therapist climbs into his or her own abstractions, interpretations, and analysis, more often than not, the less meaningful and therapeutically important this 'flight into therapist interpretation and abstraction' is going to be for the client. Did 'Dora' get anything out of Freud's rather 'wild transference interpretation' of Dora's symptoms? Or did she cut off Freud's treatment of her believing that perhaps she had met a therapist who was crazier than she was? (See Freud's 'Dora case' for your own interpretation and judgment here.)
In contrast, you look back at the way Breuer handled the 'Anna O' case and you have the classic essence of any form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a 'talking cure' -- meaning the client is doing most of the talking, not the therapist. The 'talking cure' leads to 'chimney sweeping' and 'emotional catharsis' -- turning an 'unfinished emotional event' into a 'finished' one. This is the Gestalt theory of 'paradoxical change'. By accepting first who we are, and who we have been, and by 'closing unclosed emotional events' or by 'finishing unfinished emotional events', we then give ourselves the opportunity to move beyond who we are and/or who we have been, to who we now can be. 'The truth shall set you free.'
The further Freud moved away from Breuer's more 'client-centred approach' (which Breuer basically 'fluked' upon) where 'Anna O' basically led the way and 'closed some of her own emotional issues and neurotic symtoms', and the further Freud moved into his own more 'therapist-directed, interpretive and analytic directed, and Oedipal-sexual fantasy directed' form of psychotherapy -- i.e., Classic Psychoanalysis -- the more it is quite possible if not probable that Freud was leaving patients behind in his own 'unilateral dust'. 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' being two cases in point.
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From the internet...
Freud:
A Very Short
Introduction
Anthony Storr
Neville Jason, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
Civilization and Its Discontents, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Anna (and Anna O!), penis envy, the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, cigars, Charcot, Fleiss, hysteria, infantile sexuality, jokes, the unconscious, neuroses, slips of the tongue, the oral, the anal, and death. It is astonishing what the man accomplished in his almost eight decades on earth.
At one point, Storr wonders out loud why Freud was so influential. He cites his marvelous writing style (and it is wondrous, even in translation --- Norman Mailer said Freud was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century). But we suspect it is more simple than that.
Most of us want to know what makes us tick, and most of us run into people and events that affect us strangely, that make no sense. We wonder where they come from, what it all means, how could we --- for example --- fall into a trap, any trap, that trap again.
Positing id, ego, and the hidden unconscious gave us a chance to explain these oddities. For those lucky enough, or rich enough, psychoanalysis offered the chance to peer into one's own mind with the assistance of a nonjudging, tolerant, and infinitely patient helper.
§ § §
Storr was a practicing psychoanalyst, which would mean that he should also be patient, observant, non-judgmental. In writing about Freud, he is patient and observant but very judgmental. He wants to make sure that we know that when Freud defined the obsessional character ("order, cleanliness, control") the master was talking about himself: a man of detail, one who was detached, one who did not brook rebellion in the ranks.
Storr suggests that although Freud repeatedly called his handiwork a science --- not a philosophy, not a religion --- those who deviated from the dogma (Fleiss, Jung, Rank) were cut off, even labeled by the other followers as "Neurotic" or "Psychotic."
There are some surprises here. Freud was called "my golden Ziggy" by his mother. He took a dim view of humanity, called it "trash." He was generous. One of his long-term patients he christened The Wolf Man because of a dream he related to Freud --- a dream, perhaps, next to the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the most famous in existence:
I dreamed that it was night and I was lying in my bed. Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
Wolf Man lived into the 1970s, was often interviewed on the master's technique. He tells us that Freud chatted with him about his own life, talking of his children, daily events; he even loaned him money, arranged for loans from others when he was broke. The only thing Freud did not do, Storr tells us, was to cure him. Even in later life Wolf Man suffered from depression, from the frightening thoughts that first brought him to treatment when he was a young man.
Freud's books, and monographs as published constitute some twenty-four volumes, but Storr informs us that he did not even begin writing until he was thirty-nine years old. Storr doesn't think much of most of Freud's writings outside of his theories (although he does make an exception for his paper on Michelangelo's Moses). Moreover, he suggests that Freud was not all that great an analyst. He offers up the idea that he saw patients mainly to create or shore up his own theories of the mind.
Storr also gives short shrift to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. He points out that modern psychoanalysts do not see dreams as hiding repressed sexual fantasies or memories. He merely credits Freud for rescuing dreams from the realm of mystics and witches, and he ignores Freud's insight that dreams represent one of the richest treasure-chests of insight to those who bother to record them.
Many of us who bother to interpret our own dreams learn quickly that they are as Freud saw them --- puns and games, a superb internal movie going on nightly, with hints and clues that can tell us more than we ever dreamed possible what the hell is going on there in our psyches, creating its own subtle symbolic system, the system that possibly rules us, possibly can free us.
Freud preferred his patients --- they weren't called "clients" in those pre-Carl Rogers' days --- to be well educated. He also was not interested in treating the overtly mad, nor those over the age of fifty. (In 1900 the life expectancy was such that to analyze an older person, he suggested, would be a waste). Freud also chose the couch for his analysands because he didn't like "being stared at for eight hours a day."
From his time with Charcot, Freud learned that the traumas could be retrieved and defused through hypnosis. This led to one of his major theories, that of trauma and repression. From his own experience, he learned of the significant phenomena of transference and counter-transference --- a subtle but powerful tool that brought the reality of a patient's passions and needs right into the consulting room where they could be examined by doctor and patient to understood where he or she came from, where he or she was going.
Patients were thus given permission to fall in love with the analyst without fear or shame. And an artful analyst could help one define fears and hopes from childhood, artfully transferred to the consulting room.
He cites Freud's showing the profound importance of how children are raised, and how they are hurt. The child, he proved, is indeed "father of the man." You and I as we exist now were formed by those who created us, nurtured us --- or in some cases, maltreated us.
The major gift of the master, in Storr's view, is that individuals were offered the opportunity to have an uncritical, sympathetic listener, one who would devote extensive time to those who may have needed it the most. It was the chance to be in the presence of one who would listen, would not judge nor criticize, and at appropriate times, could guide one into soul-changing insight.
These three discs run for four hours. Nevill Jason is a fine and precise (and dare we say , a compulsive) reader ... in the dry, BBC sense. Storr's judgmental view of his subject would be more befitting a parent rather than a historical figure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Storr emphasizes Wolf Man's oft repeated sentiment that Freud was "like a father" to him.
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DGB Editorial Comments
The only point on which I take issue with the writer above is on just how 'non-interpretive and non-judgmental a listener' Freud really was -- particularly the older Freud got and the more 'entrenched' his own theories became in his own mind.
I think that there may have been a point at which Freud's theoretical conclusions and the clinical applications of these theories may have come to supersede and dominate any client's feeling of being 'freely and non-judgmentally listened to'.
That point may have come very early in Freud's evolutionary clinical development, maybe as early as 1895 or 1896, maybe even earlier back to the time when Freud actually was practising hypnosis.
Indeed, I wonder if something very important in the evolution of Psychoanalysis wasn't lost in the first Psychoanalytic case -- i.e., Breuer's case -- of 'Anna O'.
Or shortly thereafter.
That was the point at which Freud ceased to be a Gestalt Therapist -- and started to become a 'Psycho-analyst'.
-- dgb, Feb. 18th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
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Jeffrey and his family
Skeptical that humans could be understood (at least by psychologists) Masson turned to animals. In 1995 he published When Elephants Weep, an international best seller, followed by the equally popular Dogs Never Lie About Love.
Since those two books he has published 6 more books about animals, looking in every one at their emotions: About cats he wrote The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (along with a fable, The Cat Who Came in from the Cold); He looked at fatherhood in the animal world and the lessons to be learned for humans in The Evolution of Fatherhood; writing about the emotional world of farm animals in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon turned Jeff into a vegan.
Lately he wondered why animals did not engage in genocide, and wrote Raising the Peaceable Kingdom. Finally he wrote an encyclopedia of his 100 favorite animals (often with an animal-rights angle) called Altruistic Armadillos - Zenlike Zebras. He has just signed a contract with W.W. Norton to write a book about vegetarianism (Veganism) called The Face on Your Plate.
Leila, Jeff and Manu are all vegan. Ilan and his three rats are vegetarian. The cats could not be persuaded to follow either philosophy, and are, alas, carnivores.
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What I believe:
I believe that in 500 years (maybe less) people will look back on us and wonder about many things. No doubt behavior we consider normal today will inspire horror in our more enlightened successors. War, for example. But I also think they may believe our disdain of insects is incomprehensible. Perhaps they will marvel that we could so easily cut down trees and perhaps even flowers.
I am completely opposed to any form of animal exploitation, including animal experimentation, keeping animals in zoos or in circuses, (indeed any form of captivity for animals), the use of leather, fur, wool and silk. I am even questioning my use of hearts of palm and maple syrup (thinking about the wounds necessary to create the sap). I also have begun to wonder whether any domesticated animal can lead an ideal life in the company of humans. Cats seem to me to come the closest, when they are able to wander freely and in safety.
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Take a look at some of Jeff's favorite books.
Copyright © 2000-2008, All Rights Reserved.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's website is dedicated to the emotional lives of animals, vegetarianism, veganism (the ethics of food), animal rights, and human-animal interactions.
Painting of Jeff and family on their beach in New Zealand, by Carina Koning
All of Freud's early work with hysterical patients, using hypnosis (let us loosely say between 1886 and the early 1890s) was geared towards 'finishing the unfinished situation'. Some might say 'making the unconscious, conscious'. Alternatively, I would say 'emotionally resolving unresolved emotional situations from years gone by'.
In conceptuology and terminology that had not been close to fully developed yet, we might say that: Hysterical symptoms were 'compromise-formations' between deep, underlying impulses for self-expression and more surface-level, social resistances, restraints, and/or defenses against the underlying and 'rising' impulses for self-expression.
Let's back up and do a quick history lesson before we go any further.
...............................................................................
From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
II. HISTORY
Suggestion x Free Association
Hysteria, Charcot, Breuer, Anna O.
Hysteria, now commonly referred to as a conversion disorder, displays physical symptoms (numbness/paralysis of a limb, loss of voice or blindness) that occur in a healthy body.
The French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, who was concerned with the treatment of hysteria, believed it to be a genuine ailment that afflicted men and women, and tried to free his patient's from their symptoms through hypnotic suggestion.
Joseph Breuer, a Vienese physician who also chose hypnosis as a clinical procedure, didn't intend just to suppress his patient's symptoms but rather searched for the deep causes of their suffering. He realized, during the treatment of his young patient "Anna O." (1880-82), that the results were far reaching if he let her talk about her feelings and thoughts. He named "spontaneous hypnosis" her trance-like states. Anna named 'talking cure' or 'chimney sweeping' the process that lead to the disappearance of her symptoms whenever she was able to recollect their root events.
Freud studied with Charcot in 1885-86. He collaborated with Joseph Breuer, while progressively formulating his theory on the mind, and considered hypnosis far more satisfactory than the electrotherapy he had tried until 1890.
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From the internet...
Hypnosis and Catharsis in Freud
David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University
Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralyses and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in nonhysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.
Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. In his work with Anna O, he found that by tracing her associations in an autohypnotic state, he could not only find an original repressed incident, but could actually cure her of her symptom. When she related an event to a symptom while in a hypnotic state, her symptom would become terribly powerful and dramatic, but would then be purged, never to trouble her again. This powerful and often traumatic transfer of an memory from the unconscious to the conscious is known as catharsis, an effective method which also seems to corroborate Freud's theories on the mind.
However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Now understand that I am a 'freelance and/or integrative theorist' who does not feel restricted by the boundaries of any one theorist's language, conceptuology, and/or theorizing. In fact, I can, and do, easily integrate them all -- particularily Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and Masson.
When it comes to pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian integrative theorizing about the nature, structure, and different process-dynamics in the personality -- in other words, in this instance, DGB Integrative Personality and Transference Theory -- I will call these 12 personality theorists who preceded me 'The Imperative 12'.
More history...
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
Breuer and Freud published their findings and theories in Studies in Hysteria , in 1895. They assumed that hysterical symptoms occurred when a mental process highly charged with affect found its normal path blocked to consciousness and movement. This 'strangulated' affect diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (conversion).
Through hypnosis, the thoughts and memories connected with the symptoms would eventually reach consciousness. 'Catharsis' (cleansing in Greek) would come about bringing a normal discharge of affect; despite these facts, symptoms tended to reappear if the relation with the physician was disturbed in any way, signaling that an intense emotional tie with him played an important role in the cure.
The authors stated that these symptoms had sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts and were caused by unconscious wishes and forgotten memories (psychic traumas).Thus, hysterics suffered mainly from 'reminiscences' that had not been worked-through.
The cornerstone of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes that follow laws that do not apply to conscious thinking. Later, these processes were better understood and the mechanisms of psychological productions such as dreams could be grasped.
The Fundamental Technical Rule
Finding hypnosis inadequate, Freud refined Breuer's methods, based on his increasing clinical understanding of neuroses. He realized that success of the treatment depended upon the patient's relation to his physician whose task was to make the unconscious become conscious.
An entirely new relation between patient and physician developed out of a change in the technique and the surprising results thus obtained extended themselves to many other forms of neurotic disorders. Freud named this procedure Psychoanalysis - an art of interpretation, in 1896.
Freud thought that disturbing thoughts and conflicting urges were kept unconscious (repression) but, even so, they caused strong guilty feelings and great anxiety, interfering with conscious mental activity, as they consumed vital psychic energy in their struggle for release. As they were incompatible with the individual's normal standards, he would feel compelled to raise defenses against the intrusive ideas and the release of such urges, in order to maintain his inner equilibrium (defense mechanisms).
As Freud believed in the strict determination of mental events and assumed that all memories were interconnected, so that one recollection would lead to the next, he insisted that the patient should tell him everything that came to his mind, regardless of how irrelevant, senseless or disagreeable the idea might seem to him (free association). He found it possible for the patient to recover crucial memories while conscious.
By surrendering to his own unconscious mental activity (a state of evenly-suspended attention), Freud would follow the unconscious flow of his patient's mental productions, in order to trace the connections between the chain of allusive associations and the forgotten memories.
Occasionally, the patient might omit some material and this very gap in the communication would reveal that the association was avoided (resistance) due to its potential evocative power to bring the underlying forgotten memories to the surface of consciousness, along with the emergence of its previously inaccessible meaning.
Freud noticed that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual ideas. In 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, they were the residues of infantile impulses and desires (fantasies). Thus he assumed that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed libido, which found expression in various symptoms.
By being in touch with his inner experiences in a state of regression, in which long-forgotten 'events' would be remembered, the analysand would relate to the analyst as if the latter were a figure from his past (transference).
Freud would communicate the connection between the patient's fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences (interpretation).
This powerful re-experience of original conflicts caused great distress to the patient, but the working-through of the emotional pain (insight) rendered the treatment efficient, due to a new balance and distribution of psychic energy, promoting a reorganization of the psychological structures into healthier mental configurations.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Integrative theorizing is not a completely 'random' and/or 'democratic' process. As an integrative theorist, there are times when I have make 'either/or' judgments and decisions. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Adler's ideas. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Adler's ideas. Or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Freud's 'Traumacy and Seduction Theories' or I support his Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theories. Sometimes -- indeed, oftentimes -- compromise-formations can be arrived at between the different theories. But not always. Like every theorist before me, my brain becomes a 'filter and editorial screening process' for those ideas that I let into my brain to become a vital part of DGB Personality and Transference Theory -- and those ideas that I don't let through this editorial screening process.
Example 1:
I think Freud invested way too much Psychoanalytic time and energy locked up in the concepts of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These ideas play no part in DGB Personality and Transference Theory. To put it bluntly, they get tossed away.
Between 1974 and 1979, while I was at The University of Waterloo working through my Honours B.A. in psychology, I was involved in numerous 'group psychotherapy' processes. Never once, did I witness -- either in myself or someone else -- an 'unconscious memory becoming conscious'. Never once did I witness the so-called phenomenon of 'repression'. I don't believe in concepts that I can't -- or don't -- experience. In this regard, I am an John Locke rational-empiricist, through and through. Don't give me any 'no-sense' concepts that do not have a 'sensory-experiential' ('phenomenological-existential') foundation. If you do -- then at least properly label these concepts as 'metaphysical' and/or 'mythological'. DGB Philosophy-Psychology uses metaphysical-mythological concepts but they are labelled as such. Metaphysical and/or mythological concepts are not to be confused with 'down-to-earth' concepts that have 'physical referents' that can be seen, heard, and/or touched. Our loved ones, we can see, touch, experience. I've never seen an 'unconscous memory' or a 'repression' seen, touched, experienced. My roughly 12 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute (1979-1991) in Toronto only further reinforced what I am saying here.
I've never seen a 'memory therapeutically worked with' that couldn't be brought to the client's awareness usually in pretty easy and timely fashion. 'Resistance' and 'suppression' are verifiable concepts.
With some degree of apprehension, I will use the concepts of 'suppressed memories' and 'subconscious memories' -- meaning 'out-of-awareness' memories that can usually be quickly brought into awareness with the right associations and/or the right degree of focus of attention -- but these are not to be confused with the ideas of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These latter two concepts give a psychotherapist far too much liberty and license to 'project his or her own theoretical and/or experiential material' onto the client. Psychotherapeutically and legally there is the potential for much abuse and damage here -- in essence, creating or interpreting or reconstructing or analysing 'unconscious or repressed memories that don't exist, and that never existed' in a client's life history. Perhaps Freud, as an Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theorist was the worst violator of supposedly unconscious or repressed memories -- see 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' -- but the potential for this type of violation exists just as strongly, maybe even more so, at the hands of present-day Traumacy-Seduction Theory Psychotherapists. I cringe at the very real event of some father being dragged into court -- and his life ruined -- because some Traumacy-Seduction-Repressed Memory Therapist has 'interpreted or analyzed or reconstructed' a supposedly repressed memory from a client who doesn't even remember this memory. At least until the therapist convinces him or her elsewise. In most courts, that is called 'leading the witness'. All such cases should be thrown out of court. If a person can't remember something -- it's not a memory. Period.
Don't let some psychotherapist's or even some school of psychotherapy's theorizing --whether from one polar extreme, such as 'Classical Psychoanlytic-Oedipal-Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy' Theorizing; or from another polar extreme, such as Childhood-Traumacy-Seduction-Sexual-Assault' Theorizing -- destroy a person's life and/or a family's life because he/she/they 'projected his/her/their own theory onto a client whose case material didn't support this theory but rather was 'forced' into this theory like trying to put a circular piece into a rectangular box. We are talking about any situation where the therapist is playing the 'fitting game' with the client -- and the client's life experiences don't neatly 'fit into the therapist's theory, diagnosis, and therapeutic gameplan'. Any use of 'unconscious' or 'repressed' memories gives a therapist far too much liberty, license -- and potential for abuse -- of what a client does and doesn't remember.
How many men or women who as children or as adults were sexually assaulted -- don't remember the assault? They may not want to talk about it. But that is a different thing entirely from 'not remembering' it. I don't support everything that Jeffrey Masson has written about Freud's Controversial Abandonment of his Traumacy-Seduction Theory but I support Masson's editorial opinion on this account (The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory) -- people can almost always remember if they have been sexually assaulted, to what extent, and the particular details around this event. 'Commit to flames' the ideas of 'unconscious and repressed memories'. Work with 'conscious memories'!
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'Hysteria' and 'Neurotic Symptoms' as 'Compromise-Formations' and 'Allusions to Immediacy'
We have to be very careful that we not abuse the label of 'hysteria' and that it represents a legitimate diagnostic phenomenon, and not some 'medically unknown and/or undiagnosed phenomenon' either in present day or in Freud's time such as perhaps 'epilepsy' or a 'brain tumor' or 'schizophrenia' or 'hypochondria'.
Having said this, Freud, in his earliest psychotherapy sessions, worked in much more 'immediacy-oriented, Gestalt-fashion' than he did in his later more interpretive and analytical Psychoanalytical sessions.
I believe that Freud might have taken some serious steps backwards in this regard.
It is important that any form of psychotherapy be well-grounded in immediacy, contact, and the client's experience. The higher a therapist climbs into his or her own abstractions, interpretations, and analysis, more often than not, the less meaningful and therapeutically important this 'flight into therapist interpretation and abstraction' is going to be for the client. Did 'Dora' get anything out of Freud's rather 'wild transference interpretation' of Dora's symptoms? Or did she cut off Freud's treatment of her believing that perhaps she had met a therapist who was crazier than she was? (See Freud's 'Dora case' for your own interpretation and judgment here.)
In contrast, you look back at the way Breuer handled the 'Anna O' case and you have the classic essence of any form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a 'talking cure' -- meaning the client is doing most of the talking, not the therapist. The 'talking cure' leads to 'chimney sweeping' and 'emotional catharsis' -- turning an 'unfinished emotional event' into a 'finished' one. This is the Gestalt theory of 'paradoxical change'. By accepting first who we are, and who we have been, and by 'closing unclosed emotional events' or by 'finishing unfinished emotional events', we then give ourselves the opportunity to move beyond who we are and/or who we have been, to who we now can be. 'The truth shall set you free.'
The further Freud moved away from Breuer's more 'client-centred approach' (which Breuer basically 'fluked' upon) where 'Anna O' basically led the way and 'closed some of her own emotional issues and neurotic symtoms', and the further Freud moved into his own more 'therapist-directed, interpretive and analytic directed, and Oedipal-sexual fantasy directed' form of psychotherapy -- i.e., Classic Psychoanalysis -- the more it is quite possible if not probable that Freud was leaving patients behind in his own 'unilateral dust'. 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' being two cases in point.
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From the internet...
Freud:
A Very Short
Introduction
Anthony Storr
Neville Jason, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
Civilization and Its Discontents, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Anna (and Anna O!), penis envy, the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, cigars, Charcot, Fleiss, hysteria, infantile sexuality, jokes, the unconscious, neuroses, slips of the tongue, the oral, the anal, and death. It is astonishing what the man accomplished in his almost eight decades on earth.
At one point, Storr wonders out loud why Freud was so influential. He cites his marvelous writing style (and it is wondrous, even in translation --- Norman Mailer said Freud was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century). But we suspect it is more simple than that.
Most of us want to know what makes us tick, and most of us run into people and events that affect us strangely, that make no sense. We wonder where they come from, what it all means, how could we --- for example --- fall into a trap, any trap, that trap again.
Positing id, ego, and the hidden unconscious gave us a chance to explain these oddities. For those lucky enough, or rich enough, psychoanalysis offered the chance to peer into one's own mind with the assistance of a nonjudging, tolerant, and infinitely patient helper.
§ § §
Storr was a practicing psychoanalyst, which would mean that he should also be patient, observant, non-judgmental. In writing about Freud, he is patient and observant but very judgmental. He wants to make sure that we know that when Freud defined the obsessional character ("order, cleanliness, control") the master was talking about himself: a man of detail, one who was detached, one who did not brook rebellion in the ranks.
Storr suggests that although Freud repeatedly called his handiwork a science --- not a philosophy, not a religion --- those who deviated from the dogma (Fleiss, Jung, Rank) were cut off, even labeled by the other followers as "Neurotic" or "Psychotic."
There are some surprises here. Freud was called "my golden Ziggy" by his mother. He took a dim view of humanity, called it "trash." He was generous. One of his long-term patients he christened The Wolf Man because of a dream he related to Freud --- a dream, perhaps, next to the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the most famous in existence:
I dreamed that it was night and I was lying in my bed. Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
Wolf Man lived into the 1970s, was often interviewed on the master's technique. He tells us that Freud chatted with him about his own life, talking of his children, daily events; he even loaned him money, arranged for loans from others when he was broke. The only thing Freud did not do, Storr tells us, was to cure him. Even in later life Wolf Man suffered from depression, from the frightening thoughts that first brought him to treatment when he was a young man.
Freud's books, and monographs as published constitute some twenty-four volumes, but Storr informs us that he did not even begin writing until he was thirty-nine years old. Storr doesn't think much of most of Freud's writings outside of his theories (although he does make an exception for his paper on Michelangelo's Moses). Moreover, he suggests that Freud was not all that great an analyst. He offers up the idea that he saw patients mainly to create or shore up his own theories of the mind.
Storr also gives short shrift to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. He points out that modern psychoanalysts do not see dreams as hiding repressed sexual fantasies or memories. He merely credits Freud for rescuing dreams from the realm of mystics and witches, and he ignores Freud's insight that dreams represent one of the richest treasure-chests of insight to those who bother to record them.
Many of us who bother to interpret our own dreams learn quickly that they are as Freud saw them --- puns and games, a superb internal movie going on nightly, with hints and clues that can tell us more than we ever dreamed possible what the hell is going on there in our psyches, creating its own subtle symbolic system, the system that possibly rules us, possibly can free us.
Freud preferred his patients --- they weren't called "clients" in those pre-Carl Rogers' days --- to be well educated. He also was not interested in treating the overtly mad, nor those over the age of fifty. (In 1900 the life expectancy was such that to analyze an older person, he suggested, would be a waste). Freud also chose the couch for his analysands because he didn't like "being stared at for eight hours a day."
From his time with Charcot, Freud learned that the traumas could be retrieved and defused through hypnosis. This led to one of his major theories, that of trauma and repression. From his own experience, he learned of the significant phenomena of transference and counter-transference --- a subtle but powerful tool that brought the reality of a patient's passions and needs right into the consulting room where they could be examined by doctor and patient to understood where he or she came from, where he or she was going.
Patients were thus given permission to fall in love with the analyst without fear or shame. And an artful analyst could help one define fears and hopes from childhood, artfully transferred to the consulting room.
He cites Freud's showing the profound importance of how children are raised, and how they are hurt. The child, he proved, is indeed "father of the man." You and I as we exist now were formed by those who created us, nurtured us --- or in some cases, maltreated us.
The major gift of the master, in Storr's view, is that individuals were offered the opportunity to have an uncritical, sympathetic listener, one who would devote extensive time to those who may have needed it the most. It was the chance to be in the presence of one who would listen, would not judge nor criticize, and at appropriate times, could guide one into soul-changing insight.
These three discs run for four hours. Nevill Jason is a fine and precise (and dare we say , a compulsive) reader ... in the dry, BBC sense. Storr's judgmental view of his subject would be more befitting a parent rather than a historical figure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Storr emphasizes Wolf Man's oft repeated sentiment that Freud was "like a father" to him.
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DGB Editorial Comments
The only point on which I take issue with the writer above is on just how 'non-interpretive and non-judgmental a listener' Freud really was -- particularly the older Freud got and the more 'entrenched' his own theories became in his own mind.
I think that there may have been a point at which Freud's theoretical conclusions and the clinical applications of these theories may have come to supersede and dominate any client's feeling of being 'freely and non-judgmentally listened to'.
That point may have come very early in Freud's evolutionary clinical development, maybe as early as 1895 or 1896, maybe even earlier back to the time when Freud actually was practising hypnosis.
Indeed, I wonder if something very important in the evolution of Psychoanalysis wasn't lost in the first Psychoanalytic case -- i.e., Breuer's case -- of 'Anna O'.
Or shortly thereafter.
That was the point at which Freud ceased to be a Gestalt Therapist -- and started to become a 'Psycho-analyst'.
-- dgb, Feb. 18th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
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Jeffrey and his family
Skeptical that humans could be understood (at least by psychologists) Masson turned to animals. In 1995 he published When Elephants Weep, an international best seller, followed by the equally popular Dogs Never Lie About Love.
Since those two books he has published 6 more books about animals, looking in every one at their emotions: About cats he wrote The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (along with a fable, The Cat Who Came in from the Cold); He looked at fatherhood in the animal world and the lessons to be learned for humans in The Evolution of Fatherhood; writing about the emotional world of farm animals in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon turned Jeff into a vegan.
Lately he wondered why animals did not engage in genocide, and wrote Raising the Peaceable Kingdom. Finally he wrote an encyclopedia of his 100 favorite animals (often with an animal-rights angle) called Altruistic Armadillos - Zenlike Zebras. He has just signed a contract with W.W. Norton to write a book about vegetarianism (Veganism) called The Face on Your Plate.
Leila, Jeff and Manu are all vegan. Ilan and his three rats are vegetarian. The cats could not be persuaded to follow either philosophy, and are, alas, carnivores.
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What I believe:
I believe that in 500 years (maybe less) people will look back on us and wonder about many things. No doubt behavior we consider normal today will inspire horror in our more enlightened successors. War, for example. But I also think they may believe our disdain of insects is incomprehensible. Perhaps they will marvel that we could so easily cut down trees and perhaps even flowers.
I am completely opposed to any form of animal exploitation, including animal experimentation, keeping animals in zoos or in circuses, (indeed any form of captivity for animals), the use of leather, fur, wool and silk. I am even questioning my use of hearts of palm and maple syrup (thinking about the wounds necessary to create the sap). I also have begun to wonder whether any domesticated animal can lead an ideal life in the company of humans. Cats seem to me to come the closest, when they are able to wander freely and in safety.
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Take a look at some of Jeff's favorite books.
Copyright © 2000-2008, All Rights Reserved.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's website is dedicated to the emotional lives of animals, vegetarianism, veganism (the ethics of food), animal rights, and human-animal interactions.
Painting of Jeff and family on their beach in New Zealand, by Carina Koning
The Birth of Psychoanalysis From Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, 'The Birth of Tragedy', Apollo, Dionysus, 'Anna O' -- and 'The Neurotic Clinch'
DGB
You have to understand that even as I criticize Freud and Psychoanalysis -- like many, many before me -- I am still trying to make it better. From my little corner of the universe here in Hegel's Hotel, I am still examining -- probably with the beginning of more thoroughness than ever before -- Freud's every move, his every theoretical move, why he did it, and what the eventual outcome of his moves were relative to the ongoing evolution of Psychoanalysis. Again, many, many others have been here before me, some with far greater expertise than me, on the exact historical details relative to the development and changes in direction of Psychoanalysis.
I come into the picture -- let us say about 120 years after Freud started making his first theoretical, clinical, and psychotherapeutic moves towards the birth of Psychoanalysis.
And I have to go back to that first case of 'Anna O' treated by Joseph Breuer -- like thousands and thousands of academics have been here before me -- and I say, 'Herein lies the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate beauty of the birth of Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic intervention even though it basically involved Breuer simply sitting by in awe and listening while 'Anna O' treated and cured herself of some of her various 'neurotic or hysterical symptoms' -- 'physical conversion symptoms' (see below) -- with 'her talking cure' and what she called 'chimney sweeping'.
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From the internet...wikipedia
Anna O. was the pseudonym of a patient of Josef Breuer, who published her case study in his book Studies on Hysteria, written in collaboration with Sigmund Freud.
Anna O was, in fact, Bertha Pappenheim, an Austrian-Jewish feminist, treated by Breuer for severe cough, paralysis of the extremities on the right side of her body, and disturbances of vision, hearing, and speech, as well as hallucination and loss of consciousness. She was diagnosed with hysteria. Freud implies that her illness was a result of the grief felt over her father's real and physical illness that later led to his death[1].
Her treatment is regarded as marking the beginning of psychoanalysis. Breuer observed that whilst she experienced 'absences' (a change of personality accompanied by confusion), she would mutter words or phrases to herself. In inducing her to a state of hypnosis, Breuer found that these words were "profoundly melancholy phantasies...sometimes characterized by poetic beauty". Free Association came into being after Anna/Bertha decided (with Breuer's input) to end her hypnosis sessions and merely talk to Breuer, saying anything that came into her mind. She called this method of communication "chimney sweeping", and this served as the beginning of free association.
Anna's/Bertha's case also shed light for the first time on the phenomenon called transference, where the patient's feelings toward a significant figure in his/her life are redirected onto the therapist. By transference, Anna imagined to be pregnant with the doctor's baby. She experienced nausea and all the pregnancy symptoms. After this incident, Breuer stopped treating her.
Pappenheim under her real name translated the diary of her ancestor Gluckel of Hameln.
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DGB
Now, I want to back up a few steps further in history.
The case of 'Anna O' may have marked the beginning of psychoanalysis from a 'therapeutic treatment' point of view.
However, from an 'academic-philosophical' point of view, I will say again what I have said before -- and not too many -- if any -- academics before me that I know of have made this claim: In juxtaposing the work of Hegel in 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807) with the work of Schopenhauer in 'The World as Will and Representation', Nietzsche's first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT) marked the true academic-philosophical birth of Psychoanalysis.
In this respect, we might look at the case of 'Anna O' as the first clinical-psycho-therapeutic application of Nietzsche's BT. Let me make my case.
My case is symbolic, metaphorical, metaphysical -- and mythological, a growing tendency in Hegel's Hotel here.
Let us enter a world of 'As If' -- See Hans Vaihinger.
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From the internet...wikipedia
Hans Vaihinger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Hans Vaihinger Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Hans Vaihinger
Birth September 25, 1852 (Nehren)
Death December 18, 1933 (Halle)
School/tradition Neo-Kantianism
Main interests idealism, positivism
Notable ideas fictionalism, instrumentalism, nominalism
Influenced by[show]
Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer[1], Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced[show]
Alfred Adler
Hans Vaihinger (September 25, 1852 – December 18, 1933) was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of As If), published in 1911, but written more than thirty years earlier.[2]
Vaihinger was born in Nehren, Württemberg, Germany, near Tübingen, and raised in what he himself described as a "very religious milieu". He was educated at Tübingen, Leipzig, and Berlin, became a tutor and later a philosophy professor at Strasbourg before moving to the university at Halle in 1884. From 1892, he was a full professor.
In Philosophie des Als Ob, he argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. In particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protons, electrons, and electromagnetic waves. None of these phenomena have been observed directly, but science pretends that they exist, and uses observations made on these assumptions to create new and better constructs.
This philosophy, though, is wider than just science. One can never be sure that the world will still exist tomorrow, but we usually assume that it does. Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, was profoundly influenced by Vaihinger's theory of fictions, incorporating the idea of psychological fictions into his personality construct of a fictional final goal.
Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (1967) was an early mention of Vaihinger as a useful methodologist of narrativity.
Later, James Hillman developed both Vaihinger and Adler's work with psychological fictions into a core theme of his work Healing Fiction in which he makes one of his more accessible cases for identifying the tendency to literalize, rather than "see through our meanings," (HF 110) with neurosis and madness.
[edit] Works
1876 Hartmann, Dühring und Lange (Hartmann, Dühring and Lange)
1897-1922 Kant-Studien, founder and chief editor
1899 Kant — ein Metaphysiker? (Kant — a Metaphysician?)
1902 Nietzsche Als Philosoph (Nietzsche as Philosopher)
1906 Philosophie in der Staatsprüfung. Winke für Examinatoren und Examinanden. (Philosophy in the Degree. Cues for teachers and students.)
1911 Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of "As If", translated by C. K. Ogden, 1924)
1922 Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), edited by Raymund Schmidt
[edit] References
^ "Schopenhauer's love of truth was a revelation to me." The Philosophy of As–If, p. xxix.
^ Loewenberg, J. Untitled Review. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 9, No. 26. (Dec. 19, 1912), pp. 717-719.
................................................................................
DGB
So here is the metaphor, here is the mythology. For our purposes here -- which does not sway far from Nietzsche's purposes in BT -- Apollo represents The God of Self-Restraint and Self-Defense. Juxtaposed against Apollo is -- Dionysus, The God of Self-Expression and Self-Impulse. Put into Classic Psychoanalytic terminology, Apollo is The God of The Superego, while Dionysus is The God of The Id.
Let us now make another metaphorical or symbolic leap into the 'World of As If'.
Apollo is The God of The White Blood Cells.
Dionysus is The God of The Red Blood Cells.
Both are crtical to the life process. One defends, restrains, and deconstructs (Apollo and the white blood cells.) The other surges forward and embraces life and all of life's impulses -- birth, creativity, sensuality, sexuality, pleasure, romance, intimacy...(Dionysus and the red blood cells.)
The two -- Apollo and Dionysus -- are forever locked in 'compromise formations' with each other that express themselves in all elements of human behavior, and stand out particularly in 'neurotic symptoms' -- in 'neurotic clinches or impasses between Apollo and Dionysus, between red and white blood cells'.
What is a 'joke'? A joke is an 'allusion to immediacy'. A joke is a compromise-formation between Dionysus and Apollo, between Superego and Id.
In 'either/or' terminology, there are two different types of 'neruoses'.
For our purposes here, we will define a 'neurosis' as a 'homeostatic imbalance' in the mind and/or body such as between Apollo and Dionysus.
In a 'Narcissistic and/or Dionysian Neurosis', Narcissus and/or Dionysus rules, while Apollo succumbs to Dionysus' and/or Narcissus' greater power.
In an 'Anxiety and/or Distancing Neurosis' Apollo rules while Dionysus and/or Narcissus succumb to Apollo's greater power.
A third type of neurosis might be called a 'Neurotic Clinch or Impasse'. Here, Apollo and Dionysus are locked in a fairly evenly matched power battle where neither one is really winning or losing -- but the health of the mind and/or body as a whole is losing. Too much energy is being locked up in the 'neurotic stalemate'. This can be seen in the case of Anna O.
We probably all have 'hysterical conversions' at one time or another. They may not be as pronounced and as dramatic as Anna O's refusing to talk or eat but still different types of 'clinches in the human body' can be viewed as hysterical conversions.
We may have a 'tightness of jaw' where we are holding back anger or grief or saying something, we might have a 'tightness around our eyes' where we are holding back tears, we might be holding back grief around our chest area or in the pit of our stomach, we may be holding back anger or rage in the 'clinch of a migraine headache', we might be holding back sadness in the back of our neck. A partly clenched fist could obviously involve the holding back of anger...
How about the tragedy just recently involving the little girl whose dentist pulled all her baby teeth? She stopped eating -- and died -- her obvious and dramatically tragic protest against the supremely perceived narcissistic traumacy of all her teeth being pulled. What was the dentist thinking? He obviously was not thinking one iota about the little girl's self-image, her self-esteem. I had to almost cry about that one.
Unravel the pain, unravel the anger or rage, uravel the fantasy or impulse -- let Dionysus 'free' within the safe confines of the therapeutic setting -- and you set in motion 'the talking cure', 'chimney sweeping' and the unclinching of the neurotic sypmtom, the hysterical conversion. 'Talk -- and the truth will set you free.'
Sometimes a 'massage psychotherapist' might get faster and more efficiently to an area of the 'body-psyche' -- the neurotic clinch -- where a psychoanlyst might be having much more trouble -- or take much longer -- to get to.
The 'no touching' rule was/is? quite prohibitive in Psychoanalysis but certain Psychoanalysts broke into new therapeutic ground when they broke this Psychoanalytic rule. (Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich...) And a long chain of psychotherapists followed...
..........................................................................
Wilhelm Reich
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Wilhelm Reich
Born March 24, 1897(1897-03-24)
Dobrzanica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died November 3, 1957 (aged 60)
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Residence Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine,
United States
Citizenship Austria, United States
Fields Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis
Alma mater University of Vienna
Known for Freudo-Marxism, body psychotherapy, Orgone
Influences Max Stirner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx
Influenced Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Ronald Laing, Arthur Janov
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[1] He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Marie Louise Berneri Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Colin Wilson, Shulamith Firestone, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.[2] [3]
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having succumbed to mental illness or somehow gone astray. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and other prominent psychoanalysts.[4]
He was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. As a communist of Jewish descent, he was in danger, and he therefore fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's,[5] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims about orgone, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison[6], and on 23 August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA[7][8]. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.[9]
...........................................................................
Sándor Ferenczi
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(Redirected from Sandor Ferenczi)
Jump to: navigation, search
The native form of this personal name is Ferenczi Sándor. This article uses the Western name order.
Sándor Ferenczi
Born July 7, 1873(1873-07-07)
Miskolc, Hungary
Died April 22, 1933 (aged 59)
Budapest, Hungary
Fields Psychoanalysis
Institutions International Psychoanalytical Association - (president)
Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society - (founder)
Known for "Budapest School of Psychoanalysis"
Influences Sigmund Freud
Influenced Mihály Bálint, Aliz Bálint, Imre Hermann, Sigmund Freud
Sándor Ferenczi (July 7, 1873, Miskolc, Hungary – April 22, 1933, Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Ferenczi’s main ideas
3 Notes
4 Further reading
5 See also
6 External links
[edit] Biography
Born Sándor Fraenkel to Baruch Fraenkel and Rosa Eibenschütz, both Polish Jews, he later magyarized his surname to Ferenczi.
Over the course of his psychiatric work, he came to believe that his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as children were truthful, having verified those accounts through other patients in the same family. This was a major reason for his eventual break with Sigmund Freud.
Prior to this break he was a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis and was notable for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual in psychoanalytic practice. In the early 1920s, criticizing Freud's "classical" method of neutral interpretation, Ferenczi collaborated with Otto Rank to create a "here-and-now" psychotherapy that, through Rank's personal influence, led the American Carl Rogers to conceptualize person-centered therapy (Kramer 1995).
Ferenczi has found some favor in modern times among the followers of Jacques Lacan as well as among relational psychoanalysts in the United States. Relational analysts read Ferenczi as anticipating their own clinical emphasis on mutuality (intimacy), intersubjectivity, and the importance of the analyst's countertransference. Ferenczi's work has strongly influenced theory and praxis within the interpersonal-relational movement in American psychoanalysis, as typified by psychoanalysts at the William Alanson White Institute.
Ferenczi presided over the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1918 to 1919.
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.Ernest Jones, a biographer of Freud, termed Ferenczi as "mentally ill" at the end of his life, famously ignoring Ferenczi's battle with pernicious anemia, which killed him in 1933. Though desperately ill with the then-untreatable disease, Ferenczi managed to deliver his most famous paper, "Confusion of Tongues"[1] to the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden, Germany, on September 4, 1932.[2]
In 2002 Ferenczi's reputation was revived by publication of Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis[3] One of the book's chapters dealt with the tragic nature of the relationship between Freud and Ferenczi.
[edit] Ferenczi’s main ideas
1. Activity in psychoanalytic therapy.
Contrary to Freud’s view of an abstinence therapeutic stance, Ferenczi purposed a more active role for the analyst. For example, instead of the relatively “passive” stance of the listening analyst encouraging the patient to free associate, Ferenczi used to curtail certain responses, verbal and non-verbal alike, on the part of the analysand so as to allow suppressed thoughts and feeling to emerge. Ferenczi (1980) described in a case study how he used a kind of behavioral activation (uncommon in the psychoanalytic therapy at that time) when he asked an opera singer with performance anxiety to “perform” during therapy session and this way to face her fears (Rachman, 2007).
2. Clinical empathy in psychoanalysis.
Ferenczi viewed the empathic response during therapy as the core of clinical interaction. He based his intervention on responding to the subjective experience of the analysand; if more traditional views saw the analyst in the role of the physician, administering a treatment to the patient based upon diagnostic judgment of psychopathology, Ferenczi wanted the analysand to become a co-participant in an encounter created by the therapeutic dyad. This shift to empathic reciprocity during the therapeutic encounter was an important contribution to the evolution of psychoanalysis. Ferenczi also believed that self-disclosure of the analyst is an important therapeutic reparative force. The practice of bringing the therapist’s personality into therapy led to the development of the idea of the mutual encounter: the therapist is allowed to bring to the therapy some content from his own life and from his inner world, as long as it is relevant to the therapy. This is in contrast to the Freudian abstinence therapeutic stance according to which the therapist should not bring to therapy content which relates to his personal life, and should remain neutral (ibid). The mutual encounter is a forerunner of the psychoanalytic theory of two person psychology.
3. The “confusion of tongues” theory of trauma.
Ferenczi believed that the persistent traumatic effect of chronic overstimulation, deprivation, or empathic failure (a term further elaborated by Heinz Kohut) in childhood is what causes neurotic, character, borderline and psychotic disorders (ibid). According to this concept trauma develops as a result of sexual seduction of the child by a parent or authority figure. The confusion of tongues takes place when the child plays, in an infantile way, to be the spouse of the parent. The pathological adult interprets this infantile and innocent game according to his adult “passion tongue” and then forces the child to conform to his “passion tongue”. The adult uses a tongue the child does not know, and interprets the child’s innocent game (his infantile tongue) according to his disturbed perspective. For example, a father is playing with his little girl. During their common game, she offers him the role of her husband and wants him to sleep with her like he sleeps with her mother. The pathological father misinterprets this childish offer, and touches his daughter in an inappropriate way while they are in bed together. Here, the child spoke her innocent childish tongue, and the father interpreted her offer with his passionate adult sexual tongue. The adult abuser also attempts to convince the child that the lust on his part is really the love for which the child yearns. Ferenczi broadened the idea of trauma to emotional neglect, physical maltreatment, and empathic failure. The prominent manifestation of these disturbances would be the sexual abuse.
[edit] Notes
^ Ferenczi, S. (1933). The Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and Children: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion. Sándor Ferenczi Number. M. Balint (Ed.) International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30: Whole No.4, 1949 [The First English Translation of the paper.]
^ Section V - Continuing Education - Ferenczi
^ Andre E. Haynal (ed.),Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books
[edit] Further reading
Ferenczi's Turn in Psychoanalysis, Peter L. Rudnytsky, New York University Press, 2000, Paperback, 450 pages, ISBN 0814775454
Final Contributions to the Problems & Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Sandor Ferenczi, H. Karnac Books, Limited, Hardback, 1994, ISBN 1855750872.
Development of Psychoanalysis (Classics in Psychoanalysis, Monograph 4), Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi, International Universities Press, Inc, 1986, Hardback, ISBN 0823611973.
First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, Sandor Ferenczi, translated by Ernest Jones, H. Karnac Books, Limited, 1994, Hardback, ISBN 1855750856.
Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention, Martin Stanton, Jason Aronson Publishers, 1991, Hardcover, 1991, ISBN 0876685696.
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, Sandor Ferenczi, H. Karnac Books, Limited, 1989, Paperback, ISBN 0946439613.
Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi, Edited by Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron, Analytic Press, 1996, Hardback, ISBN 0881631493.
Antonelli, Giorgio, Il Mare di Ferenczi, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 1996 ISBN 8886044445
Triad: the physicists, the analysts, the kabbalists, Tom Keve, Rosenberger & Krausz, London, 2000, ISBN 0953621901. (http://www.rosenbergerandkrausz.com/)
Paul Roazen: Elma Laurvik, Ferenczi's Step-Daughter from the pages of PSYCHOMEDIA
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914, Harvard University Press
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, Harvard University Press
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920-1933, Harvard University Press
The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, by Sándor Ferenczi. Edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Harvard University Press. ISBN 067413527X
Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, Number 4, pp. 54-110.
Ferenczi, S. (1980). Technical difficulties in the analysis of a case of hysteria: Including observations of larval forms of onanism and onanistic equivalents (J. I. Suttie, Trans.) In J. Rickman (Ed.), further contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis (pp. 291-294). New York: Bruner/Mazal. (Original work published 1919).
Rachman, A. W. (2007). “Sandor Ferenczi’s contributions to the evolution of psychoanalysis”, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 74-96.
Wolman, B. B. (1977). International encyclopedia of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, & neurology, (vol. 5). Aesculapius Publishers, New York.
[edit] See also
Psychoanalysis
Otto Rank
................................................................................
It is my DGB perspective that much of Psychoanalysis is simply different extensions and applications of the basic formula outlined above.
-- dgb, Feb. 19th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
You have to understand that even as I criticize Freud and Psychoanalysis -- like many, many before me -- I am still trying to make it better. From my little corner of the universe here in Hegel's Hotel, I am still examining -- probably with the beginning of more thoroughness than ever before -- Freud's every move, his every theoretical move, why he did it, and what the eventual outcome of his moves were relative to the ongoing evolution of Psychoanalysis. Again, many, many others have been here before me, some with far greater expertise than me, on the exact historical details relative to the development and changes in direction of Psychoanalysis.
I come into the picture -- let us say about 120 years after Freud started making his first theoretical, clinical, and psychotherapeutic moves towards the birth of Psychoanalysis.
And I have to go back to that first case of 'Anna O' treated by Joseph Breuer -- like thousands and thousands of academics have been here before me -- and I say, 'Herein lies the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate beauty of the birth of Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic intervention even though it basically involved Breuer simply sitting by in awe and listening while 'Anna O' treated and cured herself of some of her various 'neurotic or hysterical symptoms' -- 'physical conversion symptoms' (see below) -- with 'her talking cure' and what she called 'chimney sweeping'.
..........................................................................
From the internet...wikipedia
Anna O. was the pseudonym of a patient of Josef Breuer, who published her case study in his book Studies on Hysteria, written in collaboration with Sigmund Freud.
Anna O was, in fact, Bertha Pappenheim, an Austrian-Jewish feminist, treated by Breuer for severe cough, paralysis of the extremities on the right side of her body, and disturbances of vision, hearing, and speech, as well as hallucination and loss of consciousness. She was diagnosed with hysteria. Freud implies that her illness was a result of the grief felt over her father's real and physical illness that later led to his death[1].
Her treatment is regarded as marking the beginning of psychoanalysis. Breuer observed that whilst she experienced 'absences' (a change of personality accompanied by confusion), she would mutter words or phrases to herself. In inducing her to a state of hypnosis, Breuer found that these words were "profoundly melancholy phantasies...sometimes characterized by poetic beauty". Free Association came into being after Anna/Bertha decided (with Breuer's input) to end her hypnosis sessions and merely talk to Breuer, saying anything that came into her mind. She called this method of communication "chimney sweeping", and this served as the beginning of free association.
Anna's/Bertha's case also shed light for the first time on the phenomenon called transference, where the patient's feelings toward a significant figure in his/her life are redirected onto the therapist. By transference, Anna imagined to be pregnant with the doctor's baby. She experienced nausea and all the pregnancy symptoms. After this incident, Breuer stopped treating her.
Pappenheim under her real name translated the diary of her ancestor Gluckel of Hameln.
..........................................................................
DGB
Now, I want to back up a few steps further in history.
The case of 'Anna O' may have marked the beginning of psychoanalysis from a 'therapeutic treatment' point of view.
However, from an 'academic-philosophical' point of view, I will say again what I have said before -- and not too many -- if any -- academics before me that I know of have made this claim: In juxtaposing the work of Hegel in 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807) with the work of Schopenhauer in 'The World as Will and Representation', Nietzsche's first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT) marked the true academic-philosophical birth of Psychoanalysis.
In this respect, we might look at the case of 'Anna O' as the first clinical-psycho-therapeutic application of Nietzsche's BT. Let me make my case.
My case is symbolic, metaphorical, metaphysical -- and mythological, a growing tendency in Hegel's Hotel here.
Let us enter a world of 'As If' -- See Hans Vaihinger.
............................................................................
From the internet...wikipedia
Hans Vaihinger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Hans Vaihinger Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Hans Vaihinger
Birth September 25, 1852 (Nehren)
Death December 18, 1933 (Halle)
School/tradition Neo-Kantianism
Main interests idealism, positivism
Notable ideas fictionalism, instrumentalism, nominalism
Influenced by[show]
Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer[1], Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced[show]
Alfred Adler
Hans Vaihinger (September 25, 1852 – December 18, 1933) was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of As If), published in 1911, but written more than thirty years earlier.[2]
Vaihinger was born in Nehren, Württemberg, Germany, near Tübingen, and raised in what he himself described as a "very religious milieu". He was educated at Tübingen, Leipzig, and Berlin, became a tutor and later a philosophy professor at Strasbourg before moving to the university at Halle in 1884. From 1892, he was a full professor.
In Philosophie des Als Ob, he argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. In particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protons, electrons, and electromagnetic waves. None of these phenomena have been observed directly, but science pretends that they exist, and uses observations made on these assumptions to create new and better constructs.
This philosophy, though, is wider than just science. One can never be sure that the world will still exist tomorrow, but we usually assume that it does. Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, was profoundly influenced by Vaihinger's theory of fictions, incorporating the idea of psychological fictions into his personality construct of a fictional final goal.
Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (1967) was an early mention of Vaihinger as a useful methodologist of narrativity.
Later, James Hillman developed both Vaihinger and Adler's work with psychological fictions into a core theme of his work Healing Fiction in which he makes one of his more accessible cases for identifying the tendency to literalize, rather than "see through our meanings," (HF 110) with neurosis and madness.
[edit] Works
1876 Hartmann, Dühring und Lange (Hartmann, Dühring and Lange)
1897-1922 Kant-Studien, founder and chief editor
1899 Kant — ein Metaphysiker? (Kant — a Metaphysician?)
1902 Nietzsche Als Philosoph (Nietzsche as Philosopher)
1906 Philosophie in der Staatsprüfung. Winke für Examinatoren und Examinanden. (Philosophy in the Degree. Cues for teachers and students.)
1911 Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of "As If", translated by C. K. Ogden, 1924)
1922 Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), edited by Raymund Schmidt
[edit] References
^ "Schopenhauer's love of truth was a revelation to me." The Philosophy of As–If, p. xxix.
^ Loewenberg, J. Untitled Review. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 9, No. 26. (Dec. 19, 1912), pp. 717-719.
................................................................................
DGB
So here is the metaphor, here is the mythology. For our purposes here -- which does not sway far from Nietzsche's purposes in BT -- Apollo represents The God of Self-Restraint and Self-Defense. Juxtaposed against Apollo is -- Dionysus, The God of Self-Expression and Self-Impulse. Put into Classic Psychoanalytic terminology, Apollo is The God of The Superego, while Dionysus is The God of The Id.
Let us now make another metaphorical or symbolic leap into the 'World of As If'.
Apollo is The God of The White Blood Cells.
Dionysus is The God of The Red Blood Cells.
Both are crtical to the life process. One defends, restrains, and deconstructs (Apollo and the white blood cells.) The other surges forward and embraces life and all of life's impulses -- birth, creativity, sensuality, sexuality, pleasure, romance, intimacy...(Dionysus and the red blood cells.)
The two -- Apollo and Dionysus -- are forever locked in 'compromise formations' with each other that express themselves in all elements of human behavior, and stand out particularly in 'neurotic symptoms' -- in 'neurotic clinches or impasses between Apollo and Dionysus, between red and white blood cells'.
What is a 'joke'? A joke is an 'allusion to immediacy'. A joke is a compromise-formation between Dionysus and Apollo, between Superego and Id.
In 'either/or' terminology, there are two different types of 'neruoses'.
For our purposes here, we will define a 'neurosis' as a 'homeostatic imbalance' in the mind and/or body such as between Apollo and Dionysus.
In a 'Narcissistic and/or Dionysian Neurosis', Narcissus and/or Dionysus rules, while Apollo succumbs to Dionysus' and/or Narcissus' greater power.
In an 'Anxiety and/or Distancing Neurosis' Apollo rules while Dionysus and/or Narcissus succumb to Apollo's greater power.
A third type of neurosis might be called a 'Neurotic Clinch or Impasse'. Here, Apollo and Dionysus are locked in a fairly evenly matched power battle where neither one is really winning or losing -- but the health of the mind and/or body as a whole is losing. Too much energy is being locked up in the 'neurotic stalemate'. This can be seen in the case of Anna O.
We probably all have 'hysterical conversions' at one time or another. They may not be as pronounced and as dramatic as Anna O's refusing to talk or eat but still different types of 'clinches in the human body' can be viewed as hysterical conversions.
We may have a 'tightness of jaw' where we are holding back anger or grief or saying something, we might have a 'tightness around our eyes' where we are holding back tears, we might be holding back grief around our chest area or in the pit of our stomach, we may be holding back anger or rage in the 'clinch of a migraine headache', we might be holding back sadness in the back of our neck. A partly clenched fist could obviously involve the holding back of anger...
How about the tragedy just recently involving the little girl whose dentist pulled all her baby teeth? She stopped eating -- and died -- her obvious and dramatically tragic protest against the supremely perceived narcissistic traumacy of all her teeth being pulled. What was the dentist thinking? He obviously was not thinking one iota about the little girl's self-image, her self-esteem. I had to almost cry about that one.
Unravel the pain, unravel the anger or rage, uravel the fantasy or impulse -- let Dionysus 'free' within the safe confines of the therapeutic setting -- and you set in motion 'the talking cure', 'chimney sweeping' and the unclinching of the neurotic sypmtom, the hysterical conversion. 'Talk -- and the truth will set you free.'
Sometimes a 'massage psychotherapist' might get faster and more efficiently to an area of the 'body-psyche' -- the neurotic clinch -- where a psychoanlyst might be having much more trouble -- or take much longer -- to get to.
The 'no touching' rule was/is? quite prohibitive in Psychoanalysis but certain Psychoanalysts broke into new therapeutic ground when they broke this Psychoanalytic rule. (Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich...) And a long chain of psychotherapists followed...
..........................................................................
Wilhelm Reich
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Wilhelm Reich
Born March 24, 1897(1897-03-24)
Dobrzanica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died November 3, 1957 (aged 60)
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Residence Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine,
United States
Citizenship Austria, United States
Fields Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis
Alma mater University of Vienna
Known for Freudo-Marxism, body psychotherapy, Orgone
Influences Max Stirner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx
Influenced Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Ronald Laing, Arthur Janov
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[1] He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Marie Louise Berneri Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Colin Wilson, Shulamith Firestone, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.[2] [3]
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having succumbed to mental illness or somehow gone astray. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and other prominent psychoanalysts.[4]
He was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. As a communist of Jewish descent, he was in danger, and he therefore fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's,[5] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims about orgone, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison[6], and on 23 August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA[7][8]. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.[9]
...........................................................................
Sándor Ferenczi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Sandor Ferenczi)
Jump to: navigation, search
The native form of this personal name is Ferenczi Sándor. This article uses the Western name order.
Sándor Ferenczi
Born July 7, 1873(1873-07-07)
Miskolc, Hungary
Died April 22, 1933 (aged 59)
Budapest, Hungary
Fields Psychoanalysis
Institutions International Psychoanalytical Association - (president)
Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society - (founder)
Known for "Budapest School of Psychoanalysis"
Influences Sigmund Freud
Influenced Mihály Bálint, Aliz Bálint, Imre Hermann, Sigmund Freud
Sándor Ferenczi (July 7, 1873, Miskolc, Hungary – April 22, 1933, Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Ferenczi’s main ideas
3 Notes
4 Further reading
5 See also
6 External links
[edit] Biography
Born Sándor Fraenkel to Baruch Fraenkel and Rosa Eibenschütz, both Polish Jews, he later magyarized his surname to Ferenczi.
Over the course of his psychiatric work, he came to believe that his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as children were truthful, having verified those accounts through other patients in the same family. This was a major reason for his eventual break with Sigmund Freud.
Prior to this break he was a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis and was notable for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual in psychoanalytic practice. In the early 1920s, criticizing Freud's "classical" method of neutral interpretation, Ferenczi collaborated with Otto Rank to create a "here-and-now" psychotherapy that, through Rank's personal influence, led the American Carl Rogers to conceptualize person-centered therapy (Kramer 1995).
Ferenczi has found some favor in modern times among the followers of Jacques Lacan as well as among relational psychoanalysts in the United States. Relational analysts read Ferenczi as anticipating their own clinical emphasis on mutuality (intimacy), intersubjectivity, and the importance of the analyst's countertransference. Ferenczi's work has strongly influenced theory and praxis within the interpersonal-relational movement in American psychoanalysis, as typified by psychoanalysts at the William Alanson White Institute.
Ferenczi presided over the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1918 to 1919.
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.Ernest Jones, a biographer of Freud, termed Ferenczi as "mentally ill" at the end of his life, famously ignoring Ferenczi's battle with pernicious anemia, which killed him in 1933. Though desperately ill with the then-untreatable disease, Ferenczi managed to deliver his most famous paper, "Confusion of Tongues"[1] to the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden, Germany, on September 4, 1932.[2]
In 2002 Ferenczi's reputation was revived by publication of Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis[3] One of the book's chapters dealt with the tragic nature of the relationship between Freud and Ferenczi.
[edit] Ferenczi’s main ideas
1. Activity in psychoanalytic therapy.
Contrary to Freud’s view of an abstinence therapeutic stance, Ferenczi purposed a more active role for the analyst. For example, instead of the relatively “passive” stance of the listening analyst encouraging the patient to free associate, Ferenczi used to curtail certain responses, verbal and non-verbal alike, on the part of the analysand so as to allow suppressed thoughts and feeling to emerge. Ferenczi (1980) described in a case study how he used a kind of behavioral activation (uncommon in the psychoanalytic therapy at that time) when he asked an opera singer with performance anxiety to “perform” during therapy session and this way to face her fears (Rachman, 2007).
2. Clinical empathy in psychoanalysis.
Ferenczi viewed the empathic response during therapy as the core of clinical interaction. He based his intervention on responding to the subjective experience of the analysand; if more traditional views saw the analyst in the role of the physician, administering a treatment to the patient based upon diagnostic judgment of psychopathology, Ferenczi wanted the analysand to become a co-participant in an encounter created by the therapeutic dyad. This shift to empathic reciprocity during the therapeutic encounter was an important contribution to the evolution of psychoanalysis. Ferenczi also believed that self-disclosure of the analyst is an important therapeutic reparative force. The practice of bringing the therapist’s personality into therapy led to the development of the idea of the mutual encounter: the therapist is allowed to bring to the therapy some content from his own life and from his inner world, as long as it is relevant to the therapy. This is in contrast to the Freudian abstinence therapeutic stance according to which the therapist should not bring to therapy content which relates to his personal life, and should remain neutral (ibid). The mutual encounter is a forerunner of the psychoanalytic theory of two person psychology.
3. The “confusion of tongues” theory of trauma.
Ferenczi believed that the persistent traumatic effect of chronic overstimulation, deprivation, or empathic failure (a term further elaborated by Heinz Kohut) in childhood is what causes neurotic, character, borderline and psychotic disorders (ibid). According to this concept trauma develops as a result of sexual seduction of the child by a parent or authority figure. The confusion of tongues takes place when the child plays, in an infantile way, to be the spouse of the parent. The pathological adult interprets this infantile and innocent game according to his adult “passion tongue” and then forces the child to conform to his “passion tongue”. The adult uses a tongue the child does not know, and interprets the child’s innocent game (his infantile tongue) according to his disturbed perspective. For example, a father is playing with his little girl. During their common game, she offers him the role of her husband and wants him to sleep with her like he sleeps with her mother. The pathological father misinterprets this childish offer, and touches his daughter in an inappropriate way while they are in bed together. Here, the child spoke her innocent childish tongue, and the father interpreted her offer with his passionate adult sexual tongue. The adult abuser also attempts to convince the child that the lust on his part is really the love for which the child yearns. Ferenczi broadened the idea of trauma to emotional neglect, physical maltreatment, and empathic failure. The prominent manifestation of these disturbances would be the sexual abuse.
[edit] Notes
^ Ferenczi, S. (1933). The Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and Children: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion. Sándor Ferenczi Number. M. Balint (Ed.) International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30: Whole No.4, 1949 [The First English Translation of the paper.]
^ Section V - Continuing Education - Ferenczi
^ Andre E. Haynal (ed.),Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books
[edit] Further reading
Ferenczi's Turn in Psychoanalysis, Peter L. Rudnytsky, New York University Press, 2000, Paperback, 450 pages, ISBN 0814775454
Final Contributions to the Problems & Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Sandor Ferenczi, H. Karnac Books, Limited, Hardback, 1994, ISBN 1855750872.
Development of Psychoanalysis (Classics in Psychoanalysis, Monograph 4), Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi, International Universities Press, Inc, 1986, Hardback, ISBN 0823611973.
First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, Sandor Ferenczi, translated by Ernest Jones, H. Karnac Books, Limited, 1994, Hardback, ISBN 1855750856.
Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention, Martin Stanton, Jason Aronson Publishers, 1991, Hardcover, 1991, ISBN 0876685696.
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, Sandor Ferenczi, H. Karnac Books, Limited, 1989, Paperback, ISBN 0946439613.
Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi, Edited by Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron, Analytic Press, 1996, Hardback, ISBN 0881631493.
Antonelli, Giorgio, Il Mare di Ferenczi, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 1996 ISBN 8886044445
Triad: the physicists, the analysts, the kabbalists, Tom Keve, Rosenberger & Krausz, London, 2000, ISBN 0953621901. (http://www.rosenbergerandkrausz.com/)
Paul Roazen: Elma Laurvik, Ferenczi's Step-Daughter from the pages of PSYCHOMEDIA
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914, Harvard University Press
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, Harvard University Press
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920-1933, Harvard University Press
The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, by Sándor Ferenczi. Edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Harvard University Press. ISBN 067413527X
Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, Number 4, pp. 54-110.
Ferenczi, S. (1980). Technical difficulties in the analysis of a case of hysteria: Including observations of larval forms of onanism and onanistic equivalents (J. I. Suttie, Trans.) In J. Rickman (Ed.), further contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis (pp. 291-294). New York: Bruner/Mazal. (Original work published 1919).
Rachman, A. W. (2007). “Sandor Ferenczi’s contributions to the evolution of psychoanalysis”, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 74-96.
Wolman, B. B. (1977). International encyclopedia of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, & neurology, (vol. 5). Aesculapius Publishers, New York.
[edit] See also
Psychoanalysis
Otto Rank
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It is my DGB perspective that much of Psychoanalysis is simply different extensions and applications of the basic formula outlined above.
-- dgb, Feb. 19th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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