Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 5

Studies in Passivity

It’s easy to criticize psychology pioneers at a time when there are now so many modalities available for patients to choose from. A recurring theme of biology vs. the environment contributed friction in the history of psychoanalysis, and it’s instructive to review. Psychoanalysis, even in its failures, allowed for students to learn from it. All techniques eventually come up empty and require a new modality, if it exists, or a new technique needs to be developed within the same modality. In many cases doing less or nothing at all is better. For Anna Freud, there was an advantage in being able to work with children and adults to trace influences. Even if psychoanalysis understood that somethings were biological, or what they called “constitutional” at the time, the method of theory development could only accrue via talking therapy. One has to access the internal world to at least understand drive aims, even if biology in some patients lacks enough flexibility for change. There’s also the human factor in letting adults explore the world their way so as to love, accept, and tolerate differences if they are harmless and if contributions to society are not rigidly valued in a Darwinian and utilitarian way of procreation as the only goal.

In psychoanalysis, the depths of the drives are sexual in the broadest sense, in the pursuit of pleasure in an unending pressure on the body to act, or in the search for objects to apply tension and release for play and pleasure. The pleasure principle bumps up against the reality principle of the environment as it tries to creatively find happiness by avoiding punishment and pursuing pleasure with a variety of replacement objects based on accessibility. As the mind searches, the coping strategies send signals to other people of ways of adapting for that individual which may appear more masculine or feminine. People are such mixtures and can become misfits for a culture, especially in the past, that required masculine and feminine roles to populate vocations and provide for family formation. In Anna’s life this ironically put her in the ambivalent position of an active male in her role of executive decision making while studying males who were more passive. “These cases which threaten to make our efforts in analysis interminable instead of terminable are not those whose conflicts are derived directly from the oedipus complex of the child, or derived directly from traumatic experiences, or even derived from guilt feelings sent out by the superego. All such conflicts are comparatively easy to treat in psychoanalysis…We encounter the greatest difficulty when we deal with those conflicts which are purely internal ones—conflicts between the drives themselves. Among these is the conflict between passivity and activity, masculinity and femininity, and I find it especially fascinating to follow in many patients the eternal struggle, one might call it, between inherent passivity and activity, or the bisexuality of human nature. Of course, if we try to follow the fate of these passive reactions in the male, we have to do so from the beginning of life onward; we have to follow the passive trends in the child’s dependence upon the mother in the oral stage, and then the powerful reinforcement of these trends in the anal stage when the child is passively, and almost painfully, dependent upon the mother.”

Anna then went onto list all the ways the environment could lead to this result of passivity, and it was a list that kept getting longer. To simplify, intimidation, or “castration,” that prevented a masculine approach to life could be one pattern found, or reward, the imitation of savoring influenced by role models of passivity could be another, or most likely a mixture thereof. “I would recall to your minds the variations of the oedipus complex which induce the male child to retreat from the phallic position. This may happen on the basis of [intimidation] fears directed toward the father, or on the basis of [intimidation] fears directed toward the mother—the castrating female. It may happen on the basis of the boy’s love for the father, which keeps him from entering into rivalry with the father; or it may happen on the basis of his feminine dependence upon the father, which urges him to offer himself to the father as a love object instead of entering into rivalry with him. Or it may happen without the father’s interference in the boy’s relationship to the mother in those cases where the boy wants to offer to the mother something he feels the father does not offer her, namely, an asexual love without demands on her passive femininity; in such cases the boy departs from the expression of his phallic masculinity to please his mother. A very curious and contradictory thing happens in him: the climax of his wishes, the possession of the mother, the height of his masculine ideas coincides completely with the giving up of his phallic striving as a sacrifice to the mother. His passivity then becomes at the same time a triumph over his masculinity.”

So much of conditioning that is long lasting comes from childhood which provides strong wiring through habit-repetition in the brain that can be relied upon in the future when new stages and skills are incompletely mastered. To keep it simple, if an active skill is not developed enough, it becomes easier fall back on a passive stance of an earlier stage. “…That the return to the earliest stages and, above all, to the passivity of the anal phase is one of the common hazards of the oedipal conflict of the boy in the phallic stage. It is natural, then, for this regression to go on from the anal phase to earlier levels and to all passive strivings which were present on earlier levels, and for such a boy to enter latency and school life not as an active, masculine, courageous individual, but as a passive, feminine, rather cowardly child and retreating boy. This is a set of circumstances we see only too often when we deal with children in the latency stage. It is commonly thought that the increase in genital activity in adolescence changes this picture and that even the boys who are most passive in the latency stage will later become masculine and active. But this is more or less a misleading picture. When the whole stormy increase of masculinity in adolescence is past, the earlier passivity acquired in the oedipal stage and carried on to the latency stage appears once more and determines the picture of the passive, feminine man whom we see as our patient in psychoanalytic treatment.”

Like all these stereotypes, one has to accept that many so called feminine activities have active aspects to them and masculine activities also have passive aspects. Some homosexuals can be both more active and passive in the sexual act, but some may prefer to be more one or another. Once these preferences are marked, the individual can either accept it or reject it, to make it ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic. “There are two types of homosexual patients who seem to be inaccessible to the efforts of the analyst. Either they do not come into treatment, or they make ineffectual patients when they do appear. They have come to terms with their passivity in the sense that they have decided wholly for it or wholly against it, and the result of these efforts has been welcomed by their ego and accepted into their personality as ego syntonic…This is true of the active, manifest homosexual who has excluded every sign of passivity from his life, to the extent that he cannot even tolerate a female partner. The idea of femininity and passivity is appalling to him. He is satisfied with the exclusion of women and would like other people in the world to share his satisfaction with that solution…We also meet in analytic treatment those passive homosexuals who apparently have fully accepted their passivity and in the manifest expression of their sexuality look for an active male partner who will treat them as if they were passive women. They, too, prove themselves in many cases wholly satisfied with their solution. They very often avoid coming into treatment altogether, or when they do come, they do not express the wish to be cured of their homosexuality. On the contrary, they usually come because of other symptoms—obsessional symptoms, or some defect in their sexual expression which makes them dissatisfied with the amount of satisfaction they can experience. But they make it a point with the analyst that on no account do they want to be changed into heterosexuals. If they detect in the analyst’s attitude a criticism of them, or a dissatisfaction with them, they threaten to leave treatment and develop states of anxiety as if they were about to be deprived of something very precious.”

Things of course can get complicated, as mentioned in previous episodes, in that people just don’t savor their own enjoyment, they also savor vicariously the enjoyment the other partner is receiving. People have to be bisexual enough to understand what is GOOD about masculine and feminine pleasure so they can give it, receive it, and understand their own performance. “Though he chooses a passive partner, he identifies with that passive male partner and enjoys in his own active sexuality the passive sexuality of his male partner. This means that under the cover of the same active behavior there are really several kinds of homosexuals…Their manifest activity gives no clue to their sexual character. Their sexual character is expressed in the fantasies which accompany their activity—not in the activity itself. This means that an active homosexual can live out active fantasies, but he can just as well live out passive fantasies, and he can change back and forth between the two during the sexual act; sometimes experiencing pleasure in identification with the partner, then returning to his own role, and perhaps changing again. This is a very important addition to our knowledge of the active homosexual.” You’ll of course have to excuse the language of the mid-20th century which described homosexuality like a nature documentary.

As much as a father may influence unknowingly their son by rewarding the passivity or punishing masculinity, the mother has her influence in the child’s preferences. A woman may appear like a sexual taker sucking out a man’s life forces and a man may appear like a giver that is conversely filling up the subject with life force. If the mother was potty-training the boy, he may associate controlling attitudes onto the mother. Criticizing masturbation may also appear to the boy as hatred for penises. Women may also appear too fragile for masculinity with criticism of and demonstrations of fear of masculine behavior. Eg. Commenting on a man as being a brute or a gentleman. Anna lists it out in her psychoanalytic way. “…Fear of the female partner on the basis of her alleged oral aggression; contempt for the woman due to the projection of the child’s own anal impulses onto her; fear of the woman as castrator, which originates in the phallic phase and combines with the derisive and belittling attitude to all women as penisless objects. On the other hand, there is the male’s fear of his own aggression toward the female, which appears in analysis as fear of killing the woman in sexual intercourse. The man’s impotence can be seen in this light as his consideration for the safety of his partner, a consideration, it is true, for which the woman fails to be grateful and which is no aid to the normality of sexual life.”

Then when you look at the lack of masculine and feminine experiences in childhood, and also biological considerations of physical appearance, what a person can reasonably attract with proper grooming, as well as hormonal responses, fluidity can be limited. “When interpretations such as those mentioned above are given to the patients, many homosexuals lose some of their fear of women and become able to approach them. On the other hand, such successes are limited: many passive homosexuals remain unmoved by them and others do not alter sufficiently to [emotionally invest in] the woman as a true love object or to assign to her her proper role in intercourse.”

As Anna understood back then, craving and daydreaming have to go together and then lead to attempts to actualize those fantasies. If there are no craving-fantasies to work with, there are no exciting goals for the patient to pursue. The therapist might be sending their patient to a sexual competitor instead of a partner. You need to be able to give what the partner wants and they have to in turn give what the subject wants. If there are any reversals, then the partner has to be interested in those as well for exploration. “Some years ago, as mentioned above, I was able to study analytically some cases of passive male homosexuality and to lead these patients to a choice of a partner of the opposite sex. This happened not on the basis of the interpretations enumerated above, but via equation I made between these passive homosexuals and their active counterparts: namely, that the active male partner, whom these men are seeking, represents to them their lost masculinity, which they enjoy in identification with him. This implies that these apparently passive men are active according to their fantasy, while they are passive only so far as their behavior is concerned.”

Like in Pt. 3, the sexual curiosity can go both ways based on familiarity and boredom. For example, pleasure naturally involves unconscious skill development, and so the partner may get tired of being in the passive locus and witness the pleasure their active partner is enjoying and envy their position in their new attempts to emulate it. People need to realize that this can easily be seen in role model advertising and how powerful it is in shifting perceptions with customers. People learn about pleasure from others at the very beginning of life and only later develop their own preferences after giving up vicarious entertainment when the body responds negatively or there are consequences that are disgusting or boring. That would be an example of ego development to counter imitative influences in the superego. A heterosexual man will typically find wearing women’s clothing ridiculous as not fitting his ego-ideal of masculine mastery that customers come to expect from serious, practical, efficient, business people, and a typical heterosexual woman will feel that masculine clothing reduces the attention that they get. As skills develop, a heterosexual man may take on a bisexual, or what is called a metrosexual approach today, with their attire, because the ego-ideal found a place where there is no derision or they perceive some pleasure or advantage from changing it up with more colorful clothing, for example, and as long as it doesn’t interfere with their ability to be taken seriously by important stakeholders. Also, women may grow tired of wearing only skirts and enjoy wearing pants, and this is handled with ease since there is now little to no cultural derision to be found. It’s all about savoring, prestige, or glamor.

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v6b5odm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-3.html

Group Psychology – Freud & Beyond – War Pt. (3/3): https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

A recurring theme throughout the history of psychoanalysis is that an integral part of what people will find attractive in partners is if they narcissistically aid their self-esteem. These partners provide pleasure in ways that don’t get boring too easily but they are also not embarrassing when it comes to their skills with survival and practicality. It helps with attraction if they want someone who is also wanted by others. It becomes a competition where couples compare their ability to savor continuously while also living harmoniously with each other. This may appear unconscious to them, and it may even be taken for granted, until they witness other friends and family drop appreciation or admiration and demonstrate envy and contempt for their successful example. These are social forms of feedback that communicate to people how well they compare. Those relationships then breakup so that the subjects spend more time with people who are admired or comport themselves with a sense of equality. People enjoy being admired until their contempt is communicated to this student of social praise in subtle slights about how their aura is diminished in the presence of riffraff or the student simply perceives contempt where there is none, like in a transference, or they decide to judge themselves unfavorably at that time. Royalty, celebrities, tycoons, and powerful bureaucrats always signal new trends for the population. That imitation can also be a weakness as their powerful influence is used for political purposes. “If you like my art or contributions, you have to like my political preferences if you want to be accepted by me.” Those with leverage in society can also buck trends to appear revolutionary and stimulating by enjoying being a contrarian when conformism becomes too dull and rigid. Patterns laughably move from progressive to conservative and back again as jaded generations move to be “different” when its their turn.

Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

All this is an unending exploration until one becomes set in their ways and also the reality of age, declining health and the need to face death. It’s difficult to try different things when habits have been formed for so long and when one ages and the well of partners dries up. The end results are a myriad of personalities to get acquainted with in psychology who are symbolically using transfers from train station to train station to get to their final destination. “My four homosexual patients were very different in their mental make-up and similar only in one point—in the formation of their sex life. Their age ranged from twenty-six to over forty. Their personalities ranged from the irresponsible to the highly conscientious, from a quasi-asocial man to one with an assured and respected position in life. One was an alcoholic addict. One had passed through a phase of passive homosexuality only in adolescence and had then turned to a heterosexual relationship, but of the Don Juan type, unable to keep his female partner after he had intercourse with her…In spite of the homosexual’s love life being carried on under gloomy and very difficult circumstances, under the constant threat of discovery and blackmail, one of the patients never spoke of his sex life other than in terms of glamor. The whole situation held for him a fascination which could not be equaled by anything else in life, and it took a long time in analysis to understand what that glamor was. It was the glamor of the masculinity of the penis which he did not acknowledge possessing himself but which lit up his whole life if he found it in his partner. Watching the homosexual partner was part of that glamor, and at the climax of this experience he really was not himself but the other man. This realization finally led us to the conclusion that he lost his own personality completely in that of his partner and that he was therefore active and not passive in makeup.”

The sexual exploration becomes a “to be or to have” market exchange where a person needs to be able to give what someone else wants so they can receive the pleasure they can access for themselves. “The alcoholic patient in turn would roam the streets, not unlike a normal young man looking for a female partner; only he looked for a man in the position of exposing himself. The man’s penis was the fetish he looked for and to which he was tied. It became quite clear, in the course of analysis, that it was his own lost masculinity, the masculinity which he had sacrificed to his mother in the oedipal stage, which he found and reacquired in fantasy when he was this other man…While feminine in appearance himself, this patient admired, next to the penis, the secondary sex characteristics, namely, hair, hairiness, height, width of body, speech and manner, etc. The surprising factor was that during analysis, when he became more normal, he acquired some of these secondary sex characteristics on his own body, to a certain extent at least…My work with these patients led me to understand the extreme fear with which they had entered analytic treatment—the fear of being deprived of their homosexual partners. This is very understandable so long as the partner represents the patient’s masculinity; the patient’s fear is equal to a castration fear. What these patients dreaded was that the analyst would deprive them of the masculinity represented by other men. The promise of a cure turned to a castration threat. This is a very useful piece of information regarding the difficulties that every analyst encounters with patients of this type.”

If there are to be authentic changes to an orientation, they can only come internally from an imbalance between perceived advantages and disadvantages of the current orientation. The curiosity has to come less from admonishing, punishing, or mocking suggestions but from a natural desire to explore pleasure. When the subject can gain skills in pleasing another person, then that orientation can develop and deepen into an identity as they feel they are now ready to take the place of the role model, with this particular intimate partner at least. One can feel that one is enjoying GOOD but is also GOOD for a particular partner. Because intimate relationships are full of derision and repeated rejections, a person can tolerate only so much. They will likely revert to what worked well in the past and for most people that will harden into a long lasting orientation. If there are any unexpected changes, it’s because the skill level and curiosity advanced imperceptibly to others. There may also be new inspirational role models that showed the way unexpectedly to other forms of pleasure. As skills advance, new role models appear accessible while old ones now appear pathetic like a washed-up celebrity. “Above all, this representation of the boy’s masculinity by another man is a normal process in childhood; it is the young boy’s attitude toward the father which is reflected here. While admiring the father’s masculinity, the boy at the same time has a part in it, shares in it in his fantasy, borrows it from the father occasionally, even if he borrows it only in the form of a piece of clothing, a penknife, a fountain pen, or a motor car. This means that at a certain age the boy remains quite uncertain in his fantasy who really is the possessor of all these desired things. This same attitude which is overcome in latency recurs normally in adolescence in the form of hero worship, when the young man once more shares in the heroic exploits of his hero, making them his own in his fantasy. So far as normal manifestations go, such as admiration of the father and adolescent hero worship, these are transitional stages which should lead, and normally do lead, to the boy’s gradually acquiring masculinity by growing into it through imitation and identification. Usually the father or the hero will become deflated as the boy’s own masculinity grows.”

For Anna, normality was to not stay in homosexual relationships with heterosexual fantasies but to actualize those fantasies because of the biological harmony of the sexual equipment. “The admiration of the masculine partner does not lead to the individual’s own masculinity. On the contrary, we see the homosexual become insatiable in his wish for the partner’s masculinity. The abnormal development of these patients corresponds to an arrest at or a regression to this particular phase of normal development.” Yet, psychoanalysis goes back to skill level, and any prospective partners are likely to have higher heterosexual skill levels, that people often call taste, which are pleasure standards that are ready to reject poor lovers who are lousy in bed. They don’t know what to do. Does an advanced partner really want to train a beginner? Does a wine connoisseur prefer cheap box wine? Does a physicist want to go back to Kindergarten? As will be described below, any sexual difficulties can only blossom in friendly environments. A seed cannot grow in harsh climates. In truth, long-term relationships can only be such if love is present and allows for nurturing in all kinds situations where people need help, beyond sexuality. “I made another observation in the treatment of these patients. When they, after initial progress in their psychoanalysis, entered into a love life on a heterosexual basis, it was soon quite clear that although they were able to choose women as partners and to perform intercourse with them, they had not regained emotional potency. Further analysis revealed that the partner was not really a love object, but a necessary adjunct to the phallus which they had reacquired. All that analysis had been able to restore so far was their phallic masculinity. They were once more like boys five years old, but boys five years old are not very good lovers, in spite of the oedipus complex. They love the mother, but they demand from the mother more than they give. And what they demand above all is her admiration of their masculinity…It was interesting to observe these men whose phallic masculinity had been restored. They now loved, not other men in the outside world, but narcissistically they loved their own genital, just as in childhood they had wanted someone to admire it or to share their own admiration of it with them. I found it extremely fascinating to see in these men once more the phallic fantasies belonging to childhood, which are well known to us from our analytic exploration of children.”

Once in a heterosexual relationship, the once homosexual, or in most cases a bisexual living a homosexual lifestyle, they need their ego-ideal to process the biological power of their member. Are they weak? Are they in fact too powerful? Do they demand a godly libido from themselves? It becomes quickly an assessment of self-efficacy and self-esteem in their ability to gain pleasure but to also be of satisfactory pleasure for their new partner. “The conscientious patient, after he had married and was potent in intercourse and his wife was about to have a child, suddenly woke up in the night after intercourse and felt anxiety. This anxiety did not need much interpretation. He was a professor of physics and the frightening presence in his bedroom was Einstein. A few nights later he woke again in an anxiety state, but this time there was a bull in the room—that is to say, he woke up in fear of his phallic potency…The alcoholic patient used to have fantasies expressing deep dissatisfaction with normal sex activities. What he demanded of himself was an unheard-of potency which represented a phallic fantasy of grandeur…Another patient was not satisfied with the idea of having only one woman. Life made sense only if all the women in the world belonged to him. And when he met women on the street, for instance, something would appear on his face which he himself described as a secret smile. It meant that none except himself knew that every woman he saw was really his. It was the phallic fantasy of a little boy…The Don Juan patient actually lived out that fantasy by forming a series of relationships as if all the women in the world belonged to him.”

All these changes lead to those early fears rising up again about performance, and flashbacks to disappointments in childhood. The need for development continues if they are to move on from a childish phallic stage. There has to be craving for an emotional relationship with the wife where the demands of the woman are negotiated in a way where the man can feel comfortable in his role, where castration-intimidation is not present, and their energy is not drained by demands that go beyond their ability to provide. “I had to realize that what analysis had restored in these patients was the fantasy of grandeur of phallic narcissism before their regressive abandonment of the oedipal conflict. They were caught up in a narcissistic overvaluation of the phallus, a position in which most of their [craving] was not available for the formation of true emotional relationships. Women were welcome so far as they served their phallic needs and helped to create an illusion of masculine potency. They still represented dangers due to the demands made by them which aroused anxious oral fantasies of being sucked dry, impoverished, etc. It was dangers of this kind that were warded off by emotional withdrawal and negative behavior. One patient, before actually entering marriage, pictured his future home as being divided between him and his wife, i.e., he would have part of the house to which he could retreat in safety. It was only after the analysis of the relevant anxieties that his married life became one where everything was shared…Naturally, we look to analogies in normal development which might help to elucidate this transitory phase. I think we can find such hostile withdrawal in male children whose mothers feel inimical to their phallic development and refuse them the admiration to which the boy feels he has a justified claim.” That sense of pride permeates all the complexity.

In the 1960s, homosexuality was viewed with the attitude that stress and pleasure alter orientation, as per psychoanalyst Sandor Rado, in that a person looks for replacements when there are too many rejections, and when enough therapy solves those initial blocks, then heterosexuality is more likely. The next level is skill in being able to please others as well as oneself. Skills that are excellent increase craving to use them, whereas a lack of skill leads to indifference or inhibition. Researcher Evelyn Hooker found that there was some wiggle room in Rado’s views in that many homosexuals did not have these traumas and stresses, and outside of fear of blackmail or losing their careers after being recognized at a gay bar, for example, they were quite successful, even if other homosexuals did struggle with adverse upbringings with hostile parenting, bullies in school, or if there was a missing parent due to death or abandonment. On the biological side, the reactivity towards sexual orientation was found to be the deciding factor for many people. There are many homosexual adults who looked back at their early obsessions and feelings of “excitement, euphoria, mystery.” There could be attractive people of the opposite sex, often students fantasizing about different teachers and staff, and their obsession would select in the same way towards male or female, or both. There were also early desires to hang out with the opposite sex as if one of their same sex friend groups while finding the actual same sex mysterious and alluring. The reality is that actual, not fantasized, heterosexual experiences compared to a real homosexual experiences provided the measurement needed to make a preference. They could eventually let go of “sex without feelings,” that they “kept trying,” but did not particularly find rewarding or fulfilling. Once people accept what gives them the strongest and most happy response in the body, and what they are most skilled at, it’s just a matter of letting go of the resistance.

Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/