Neo-Freudianism
Despite Karen drifting away from Sigmund Freud, she still wanted to remain in the lineage, even if that meant for her to carve out a spot for herself like all the other neo-Freudians. Her innovations were subtle but flexible. One could integrate her ideas about culture with the biological understanding, and it was always the same thing that moved people towards innovation, which was noticing patients who didn’t fit a particular theory. “Freud has made us realize that our actions and feelings can be determined by unconscious motivations. We may make our most important decisions without knowing our real reasons for doing so; we may be torn by conflicts without being aware that we have any, much less what they are; we may have profound grievances against someone without being aware that we do…To thrust strivings out of awareness does not prevent them from existing and exerting an influence. This means, for example, that we may entirely repress our desire for human closeness, adopt a ‘don’t care’ attitude, and yet suffer intensely from being lonely. Although we may repress our hostility toward someone, it may nevertheless arouse a panicky feeling within us.”
Because our desires are inconvenient and interrupt our ego functions that have their own views of reality, there’s a need to control impulses, for good or ill, and it leads to a disconnect where we don’t listen to our wishes and we have resistance when those wishes go against our worldview. Sometimes our unconscious wishes are ridiculous but unless we bring them into awareness and adjust our expectations to match reality, internal conflicts continue, which leave us with energetic consequences, like being unmotivated, tired, irritable, etc. “[An] aspect of unconscious motivation that is particularly important is the fact that we suppress feelings and strivings because we are vitally interested in not being aware of them. If an intimidated child feels safe only when giving his mother the blind reverence she expects of him, he must suppress whatever hostile feeling or critical thoughts he may have toward her. If it is imperative for a person always to be unassailably right, then he must never allow himself to be aware that he has done something wrong and must blame others instead. This process can be observed in groups as well. If, for example, a government is set on persecuting a minority group, it is vitally interested in eradicating all notions that this group consists in reality of human beings not much different from others. Because of our interest in suppressing awareness of our deeper motivations, we will put up a struggle if an effort is made to unearth unconscious factors. This accounts for what we describe as ‘resistance,’ which is a key concept for therapy…The warping of the spontaneous individual self must then be recognized as a paramount factor in the genesis and maintenance of neurosis.”
Before Freud, the unconscious was treated as something mysterious, spiritual, or psychic, or something physical like an illness or the result of food poisoning. “Whereas dreams, fantasies, and errors of everyday life were formerly regarded as merely accidental, today we would not be content to say that John had a nightmare because he ate too much pumpkin pie but would ask ourselves whether he is not being torn by some conflict without being aware of it. He could keep it under cover during the day, but in his dream he was searching for a solution to his problem and awoke with anxiety when he was unable to find one. We would not believe that a depression has befallen Mary out of the blue, even though she may be convinced that this is so. Rather, we would patiently ask why she became depressed at this particular time. We may find that her principal at school has criticized her and that she has taken it more to heart than she realized. In that case, we would have to go deeply into her character structure in order to understand why a criticism which actually was of no consequence has had the power to throw her into a depression. We would no longer merely commiserate with Paul when he tells us that each time he is about to complete a brilliant plan something interferes, or that it seems to be his fate to bestow help on others and always to be rewarded with ingratitude. Instead of believing in a mysterious fate, we would look for factors in his personality responsible for his repetitive experiences.”
Our moods and views of what we think is “reality,” colors our consciousness, and how we feel tends to direct our attention towards people and the environment with the same mood. If we think we are right all the time, our negative mood gets transferred into fault towards others in projection. Projection is reduced when people acknowledge their contribution to a bad situation or conflict, and actions are taken to discipline what is in one’s control. Now many people are imperfect so technically we are always at fault in part, but with projection all the fault is dumped on a scapegoat. “We may be irritable toward others, for example, while in reality and without knowing it we are angry with ourselves for not having stood up for our opinion in an argument. This Freud would call a displacement of affect…We may feel that another person is disloyal, unfriendly, or unfair toward us, while, in reality and without knowing it, we are harboring unfair reproaches toward him. This is what Freud calls projection.”
Girardian Primer:
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
The Origin of Envy & Narcissism – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html
Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html
Stalking: World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html
Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html
Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html
Plato: Apology: https://rumble.com/v6tvdm3-plato-apology.html
Naked motives are typically covered up and self-interests are disguised as being something else, so relationships that appear benign on the outside may harbor ulterior motives. Even normal forms of “tact” may just be cultural ways of smooth social manipulation. “Most important of all is the concept of rationalization. Repressed feelings or drives may be expressed if they are made to seem rational, or according to Erich Fromm, who has put it more correctly, if they are made to appear in socially accepted forms. For instance, a tendency to possess or to dominate may be presented as an expression of love. A mother who mistakes her tendencies to domineer for love will reproach her child for a want of love, while in reality the child merely has failed to comply with her demands. Or we may believe that we love someone, while in reality we are merely clinging to them for the sake of reassurance. We may characterize personal ambition as devotion to a cause, a tendency to disparage as intelligent skepticism, or hostile aggression as an obligation to tell the truth. Although in crude ways the process of rationalization has always been recognized, not only has Freud shown its extent and the subtlety with which it is employed, but he has taught us to make use of it systematically for the purpose of uncovering unconscious drives in therapy.”
Free association helps to bring out dream material that is operating during the day, but at night what we ignore simply rattles around looking for solutions, even if the ego is not interested, and our transferences inevitably erupt in day-to-day situations where our past experiences are not skilled enough to react properly to present circumstances. “Freud has given us some basic tools with which to work, the two most important of which are transference and free association…Repressed wishes or impulses may reappear in dreams and fantasies. A boy who is almost choked by the smothering love of his domineering father may develop a fantasy in which he is the commander of a fortress where he sits in a watchtower and orders everyone who approaches to be shot. He thus creates a situation in which he is not only safe from any intrusion but also superior to all around him and can enjoy a vindictive triumph over those who would oppress him…Recognizing the function of dreams and fantasies will probably prove to be even more fruitful than it has been thus far, particularly if we also include unconscious illusions about ourselves, how superior we are mentally or morally. From the point of view of therapy, what is described as a patient’s reluctance to get well is often his unwillingness to abandon his illusions.
Freud’s thinking also moved culture away from vilifying mental illness, where burning the witch is now considered unthinkable today, except in the above described projection where it has been disguised and defanged. “[The mentally ill] are not mysteriously sent by God or by demons; they do not indicate hereditary degeneracy or an indulgence in bad habits. They are an illness like other illnesses; only, instead of concerning the body, they concern the soul, and they can be treated. Thus Freud did away with the wavering between regarding neuroses as incurable and appraising them too lightly, to be cured by advising the patient to pull himself together. Freud discovered that neuroses result from inner conflicts which are unconscious in nature and cannot be resolved without a change in the entire character structure.”
In the past, it was the realm of religious confession, philosophy and literary classics that could even attempt to look at unconscious motives, but now it has been put into a science and spread to the general public so we can now analyze ourselves and dispel the illusions that drove our more unconscious past actions. “Freud’s discovery is all the greater because it concerns all of us. Although we are not all neurotic, we all suffer from conflicts similar to those of neurotics, since we all live under the same difficult cultural conditions that are, in my opinion, ultimately responsible for neuroses. Quite apart from providing relief from suffering, the understanding of human conflicts that has been opened up by Freud has expanded our horizon in a way that is similar to the contribution of the greatest writers and philosophers, such as Shakespeare, Balzac, and Nietzsche…Psychotherapy provides a unique situation in which one human being confides in another without reservations and with a reasonable hope of being understood. To my knowledge, that is something new in the history of mankind. Religious confession is not really comparable, for both priest and confessor focus only on guilt and atonement. Of course, many people are prone to believe that one’s sins, or what one regards as such, are one’s deepest secrets; and this may include Freud, who ascribes an enormous role to unconscious guilt feelings. But, in contrast to confession, psychoanalysis embraces the whole personality, with all its calamities, wishes, and fears. It enables the patient to be sincere to an otherwise unheard-of degree, partly because he can expect an equal sincerity on the part of the analyst.”
With those acceptances of Freud’s contributions, Karen embarked on a refinement of psychoanalysis to deal with the patients that she saw, who in many cases were not the types that Freud ran into when he practiced 30 years before. “Two great limitations have hampered the development of psychoanalysis, both of which can be overcome. One is that Freud did not realize the complexity of the problems he himself laid open to research. As will happen to everyone opening a new vista in unknown territory, he was prone to simplify and to generalize. It is a simplification, for instance, to assume that experiences in later life are almost direct repetitions of infantile experiences and to harbor the expectation that neurotic disturbances will be cured by unearthing appropriate infantile recollections. It is a generalization to contend that peculiarities observed in neurotic patients have equal application to healthy persons…The other limitation is that despite his unique ability to make pioneering observations, in his theoretical thinking Freud is deeply rooted in the mentality of the nineteenth century. Like many great thinkers of that century—William James, for instance—Freud was to a large extent an instinct theorist; that is, he believed that psychic peculiarities that occurred frequently were ultimately determined by biological drives of a physiological-chemical nature. Nowadays we would search primarily for the cultural conditions engendering these peculiarities.”
The difficulty for Karen was seeing that Biology was intertwined with culture. Our biology, which is our phenomenological experience, develops a worldview that becomes standardized as to what is considered more advantageous than what went before. The libido, or craving, will then be tempted to attach to any new higher standards by a considerable number of people, even if they are so difficult as to be not worth it for many others in the same culture. We are handed down different standards from different parents, and different cultures have specialties in one area and weaknesses in another. Depending on which parents we are born to and which countries we live in, our worldview, when it takes power, will reward and punish others according to what is ultimately supportive of the powerful. These views and attitudes remain unconscious until we decide that they should be revaluated, if that project is ever attempted at all.
Nine Inch Nails – As Alive As You Need Me To Be: https://youtu.be/SnMyroAH0rg?si=k_mXWr42TBZ63ng2
Nine Inch Nails – Copy of A: https://youtu.be/yA281OuU3rk?si=qKXb0x4BcZ_AmkoI
Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v6b5odm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-3.html
There was, and still is, a big fight over how “objective” a person can be when self-interest is activated in our brains at all times, where it monitors every scrap of information related to power and consumption. “Freud contends that ‘every praiseworthy and valuable quality is based on compensation and overcompensation’ of instinctual drives. His contention that all judgment is a product of instincts is unsubstantiated and misleading. The fact that love, pity, generosity may be determined by some sexual or destructive drive does not prove that these qualities cannot also be genuine and exist in their own right. That we may criticize a person or a theory out of emotional resentment does not prove that criticism cannot spring from our judgment about what is right or wrong.”
The ideal of therapy is to have patients be a light unto themselves, where they can navigate reality without the need for escape or energy depleting defense mechanisms. When they experience a rejection, or an outcome fails to materialize, they can think realistically about actions they can control and move away from trying to control what cannot be, like in ruminations about a past that is already gone, or living in fantastical daydreams that over-compensate. “The aim of therapy, then, is not to help the patient gain mastery over his instincts but to lessen his anxiety to such an extent that he can dispense with his ‘safety-devices.’ Beyond this aim there looms a new therapeutic goal, which is to restore the individual to himself, to help him regain his spontaneity and find his center of gravity in himself.”
New Ways in Psychoanalysis
As disliked as Karen was for her changes to mechanistic psychoanalysis of the 19th century, she wanted nuance to pervade so that the sexual etiology of everything could give way to accept that emotions have many different qualities, even if they are derived by a nervous system that repeatedly goes into tension looking for a release. For most analysts who like to integrate, they would still like the mechanistic view of energy looking for discharge, but also to see that different qualities of emotions need discharges that don’t necessarily have to be about intimate relationships, even if in the long run it may be the case. This is especially helpful when people have trauma that happened later in adolescence or in adulthood. It doesn’t always have to go back to infancy. “In the conversion of water into steam the mechanistic presupposition would emphasize the fact that steam is merely water appearing in another form. Non-mechanistic thinking, on the other hand, would emphasize that though steam has developed out of water, in doing so it has assumed an entirely new quality, regulated by different laws and having different effects. In considering the development of the machine from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, mechanistic thinking would point out mainly the various types of machines and factories which had already been in existence in the early eighteenth century, and would look at this development solely as one of quantity. Non-mechanistic thinking would emphasize that the increase in quantity brought with it a change in quality; that the quantitative development brought with it entirely new problems, such as a new scale of production, the rise of an entirely new group of employees, new types of labor problems and so on; that change is not simply a question of growth but brings with it entirely new factors. In other words, stress would be laid on the point that quantity is converted into quality. The non-mechanistic viewpoint would be that in organic development there can never be a simple repetition or regression to former stages.”
These evolutionary qualities, according to Horney, have their own motives and goals that can’t easily be explained by sexuality. That’s why concepts like sublimation and noticing patterns of tension and release in Anna Freud’s daydreaming were used to bridge the knowledge gap. Tension without release, is stress. Goals with no tension may appear boring, like when a tension has a form of release that comes too soon for the skill to become enjoyable. Effort and aggressiveness does go into the support of protecting what we love, but the short-term goals don’t immediately go into sexuality. For example, if we have a tension, that someone is disrespecting us, the release is not sexual when their behavior stops, but there is a relief simply because the irritant is now absent. “Even when this much influence on psychic life was attributed to sexuality it was impossible to interpret on a sexual basis the manifold strivings and attitudes which apparently have nothing to do with sexuality—for instance, attitudes of greediness, stinginess, defiance or other character peculiarities, artistic strivings, irrational hostilities, anxieties. The sexual instinct as we are accustomed to regard it could not possibly cover this enormous field. If Freud desired to explain all these psychic phenomena on a sexual basis he was forced to enlarge the concept of sexuality. This was at any rate the theoretical necessity for such an enlargement. Freud himself has always declared that it was on the basis of his empirical findings that he had to enlarge the concept of sexuality. It is true that he had gathered a great number of clinical observations before he began to propound his libido [craving] theory.”
Freud connected pleasure with release and the fact that sexuality was polymorphously perverse, it allowed him to expand his mechanistic view to explain the variety of objects that humans can pursue. “Sexual strivings are not exclusively directed toward heterosexual objects; they may be directed toward persons of the same sex, toward the self or toward animals. Also, the sexual aim is not always toward the union of the genitals, but other organs, particularly the mouth and the anus, may replace the genitals. And sexual excitement is promoted not only by a partner with whom intercourse is wanted, but also by sadistic, masochistic, voyeuristic, exhibitionistic practices, to mention the most important ones. Such practices are not restricted to sexual perverts but signs of them are found in otherwise healthy persons. Under the stress of long frustration normal persons may, for instance, turn to the same sex; immature persons may be seduced to any perversion; traces of such practices may occur in the normal sexual foreplay, as in kissing or aggressive actions; they occur also in dreams and fantasies and often seem to be an essential element in neurotic symptoms. Finally, infantile pleasure strivings have a certain resemblance to strivings occurring in perversions, such as thumb-sucking, intense pleasurable attention to the processes of defecation or urination, sadistic fantasies and activities, sexual curiosity, the pleasure of showing oneself naked or of observing others naked…Freud concluded that since sexual drives can be easily attached to various objects, and since sexual excitement and satisfaction can be found in various ways, the sexual instinct itself is not a unit but a composite. Sexuality is not an instinctual drive directed toward the opposite sex, aiming at genital satisfaction; the heterosexual genital drive is only one manifestation of a non-specific sexual energy, the libido. The libido [or craving] may be concentrated at the genitals, but it may be localized with equal intensity at the mouth or the anus or at other ‘erogenic’ zones, lending these zones the value of genitals…Besides the oral and anal drives Freud stipulated other component drives of sexuality—sadism and masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism—which despite many endeavors could not be satisfactorily located in any bodily zone. Since the extra-genital expressions of libido prevail in early childhood, they are called ‘pre-genital’ drives. Around the age of five, in a normal development, they are subordinated to the genital drives, thus forming the unit which is usually called sexuality.”
Sexuality Pt 1: The Aberrations – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtn0r-sexuality-pt-1-the-aberrations-sigmund-freud.html
Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html
Sexuality Pt 3: Homosexuality – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtqk5-sexuality-pt-3-homosexuality-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Perversion Part 1: Incest – Ferenczi and Beyond: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-incest/
Perversion Part 2: Bestiality: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-2-bestiality/
Perversion Part 3: Necrophilia: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-3-necrophilia/
Perversion Part 4: Sexual Offending, Pedohebephilia and Ritual Abuse: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-4-pedohebephilia-ritual-abuse/
Perversion Part 5: Sadomasochism: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-5-sadomasochism/
Perversion Part 6: Recidivism: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-6-recidivism/
Perversion Part 7: Technology: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-7-technology/
As Freud’s theory stretched further, he had to use components that may have been evermore separate from sexuality, with the possibility that they were in fact separate. “Disturbances in the [craving] development may occur in two principal ways: either by fixation—some of the component drives may resist integration into ‘adult’ sexuality because they are too strong constitutionally; or by regression—under the stress of frustration a composite sexuality already achieved may split into its constituent drives. In both cases the genital sexuality is disturbed. The individual then pursues sexual satisfaction along the paths prescribed by the pre-genital drives…Freud has greatly contributed to our knowledge concerning the variety of factors which may stimulate sexual excitement or may become the condition for satisfaction. But he has not proved that these factors themselves are sexual. Furthermore, inadvertent generalizations are involved in his reasoning. From the fact that certain types derive sexual satisfaction from witnessing acts of cruelty it does not follow that cruelty is an integral part of the sexual drive in general…Freud has neglected as a possible explanation the fact that a substitution of one pleasure striving for another does not prove that the second is in any way akin to the first. If a person wants to go to the movies but cannot do so and instead listens to the radio, it does not follow that the pleasure in seeing the movies and the pleasure of listening to the radio are similar in nature. If a monkey cannot obtain a banana and finds a substitute pleasure in swinging, this is not conclusive evidence that the swinging is a component drive of eating, or of the pleasure found in eating…Freud suggests several ways in which the [craving] molds character and directs attitudes and strivings. Some attitudes are considered to be aim-inhibited libidinous drives. Thus not only the striving for power, but every kind of self-assertion is interpreted as an aim-inhibited expression of sadism. Any kind of affection becomes an aim-inhibited expression of libidinal desires. Any kind of submissive attitude toward others becomes suspect of being the expression of a latent passive homosexuality.”
The furthest away connection between sexuality and activity was Freud’s concept of sublimation, which is to make something better, or more sublime, in activities or creativity. “Closely akin to the concept of aim-inhibited strivings is that of the sublimation of [craving] drives. According to this concept a [craving] excitement and satisfaction, originally localized in some ‘pre-genital’ drive, may be carried over to non-sexual strivings of a similar character, thus transforming the original libidinal energy into a nondescript form of energy. As a matter of fact, there is no sharp distinction between sublimation and aim-inhibition; the common denominator of both concepts is the dogmatic assertion that various traits, though not libidinal themselves, are to be regarded as an expression of desexualized libido. One reason why the distinction is not sharp is that the term sublimation originally contained the notion of transforming an instinctual drive into something socially valuable. It would be difficult to say, however, whether such a transformation as the use of narcissistic self-love for the formation of ego-ideals is a sublimation or an aim inhibited form of self-love…The term sublimation is reserved mostly for the transformation of ‘pre-genital’ drives into non-sexual attitudes. In the view of this theory character traits, such as stinginess, are a sublimated anal-erotic pleasure, consisting of holding on to faeces; pleasure in painting is a desexualized pleasure in playing with faeces; sadistic strivings may reappear in a predilection for surgery or for executive jobs, and they may also show in general non-sexual tendencies to subdue, to hurt, to abuse; sexual masochistic drives may be transformed into such character traits as a propensity to feel unfairly treated or to feel insulted or humiliated; oral libidinal cravings may be converted into a general attitude of receptivity, acquisitiveness or greediness; urethral eroticism may be transformed into ambition…Also, competitiveness is regarded as the desexualized continuation of a sexual rivalry with parents or siblings; the wish to create something is explained partly as a desexualized wish for a child from one’s father, partly as an expression of narcissism; sexual curiosity may be sublimated into a propensity for doing scientific research, or may be the reason for inhibitions on that score.”
Aphex Twin – AFX – Shit Smothered – Derek and Clive: https://youtu.be/QZ5RbfZ6fEI?si=unAML0ZLd6zGrzlX
The advantage that Karen found in her method was that by separating the desires in such a way that sexuality did not have to be the endgame, she was free to explore more motivations and therefore find more solutions for her patients. Many patients are looking for solutions related to survival, and when actualized, it may not be a problem anymore, even if they are not in an intimate relationship. “Certain attitudes are regarded not as a direct or modified outcome of [craving] drives, but as patterned after a similar attitude in sexual life. Freud speaks of the Vorbildlichkeit [exemplary behavior] of sexual drives for life in general. The practical consequence of this concept is the expectation that difficulties in the non-sexual sphere will be solved if difficulties in the sexual sphere are removed, an expectation which frequently fails to be realized. Schematically, the interpretation required by this concept is that the reason for a compulsion to restrain feelings, for example, lies in an inability to abandon oneself sexually. The original frigidity would also be attributed to sexual factors, such as the aftermath of early sexual traumata or of incestuous fixations, homosexual trends, sadistic or masochistic elements, the latter being regarded as essentially sexual phenomena…A difficulty arises as to classification: is a certain type of behavior masochistic because it follows automatically the sexual pattern? Or are the non-sexual masochistic tendencies a desexualized aim-inhibited expression of the sexual ones? But actually these differences do not matter, as all the groups concerned are but various expressions of the same basic conviction: man is primarily and peremptorily driven to fulfill certain elemental instincts; they are so powerful that they force him, not only directly but in the most devious ways, toward the goals they prescribe. Even when man believes himself to have the most sublime feelings, such as religious ones, or to pursue the most noble activities, as art or science, he still serves inadvertently his masters, the instincts…[This] constitutes a temptation to understand a whole machine out of one wheel, instead of trying to understand how the interrelation of all parts brings about certain effects, and in the process to understand also why one wheel is located where it is and why it has to function as it does.
These oversimplifications also extend into the Oedipus Complex. Like in most modalities in psychology, theories do explain behaviors, but they can also expand too far and take over behaviors that could be better explained by other theories. “When this theory is applied to the child-parent relationship it suggests several conclusions: the wish to be like a parent may be a derivate of wishes toward oral incorporation; a dependent clinging to a parent may be the expression of an intensified oral organization; any kind of submissive devotion to a parent of the same sex is probably the expression of passive homosexuality or of sexual masochistic trends, while a rebellious rejection of a parent of the same sex is probably an inner fight against existing homosexual desires; more generally, any kind of affection or tenderness toward a parent is by definition aim-inhibited sexuality; fears concern mainly punishment for forbidden instinctual desires (incestuous desires, masturbation, jealousy), and the anticipated danger is the prohibition of physical satisfaction (fear of castration, fear of loss of love); finally, hostility toward a parent, if not related to the frustration of instinctual drives, may be understood as the ultimate expression of sexual rivalry.”
Freud wanted the Oedipus Complex to be considered the kernel of neuroses, but as decades passed, this awareness wasn’t able to solve all neuroses by itself. “The theory of the Oedipus complex has greatly influenced present-day education. On the positive side, it has helped to make parents conscious of the lasting harm inflicted on children by exciting them sexually and also by being overindulgent, overprotective and too prohibitive in sexual matters. On the negative side, it has fostered the illusion that it is enough to enlighten children sexually and to refrain from forbidding masturbation, from whipping them, from letting them witness parental intercourse and from attaching them too strongly to parents. The danger lies in the one-sidedness of such suggestions. Even if they are all religiously adhered to, the germs for later neuroses may be laid. Why? The answer is in principle the same as the answer to the charge that psychoanalytical therapy is insufficiently successful: too many factors extremely relevant to a child’s growth are regarded as comparatively superficial, and hence are not given the weight they deserve. I am thinking of such parental attitudes as having real interest in a child, real respect for it, giving it real warmth, and of such qualities as reliability and sincerity…As some of these feelings or attitudes are present in every child-parent relationship—as they are in every human relationship—the evidence for an omnipresent Oedipus complex is overwhelming indeed to anyone accepting the theoretical premise. There is no doubt that persons who later develop a neurosis or a psychosis may be closely tied to the parents, whether the nature of this tie be sexual or not. It is Freud’s merit to have seen this in spite of existing social taboos and to have recognized its implications. The question remains, however, as to whether fixations on the parents arise in a child for biological reasons or whether they are the product of describable conditions. I firmly believe that the latter is true. There are in the main two series of conditions provoking a stronger attachment to one of the parents. They may or may not be allied, but both are created by the parents…One of them is, briefly, sexual stimulation by the parents. This may consist in a gross sexual approach to the child; it may arise from sexually-tinged caresses, or from an emotional hothouse atmosphere surrounding all members of the family or including some members and excluding others who are regarded with animosity…The other series of conditions is entirely different in nature. While in the above group there is a genuinely sexual response to stimulation, the second group is connected in no way with either spontaneous or stimulated sexual desires of the child, but with its anxiety.”
Pearl Jam – Alive: https://youtu.be/qM0zINtulhM?si=plWbvMOW5EcHtZiV
Culture and Narcissism
In Freud’s theory of Narcissism, the pathological element in it only appears when love moves out to objects, gets wounded, by rejection for example, and then returns to a self-love that fails to trust others out of that wounding. The theory is that love is a limited energy and when energy fails to go out to objects, because of past experiences of rejection or abuse, it has to go somewhere and that is to love one’s self-image by re-writing the past, lying by omission in the present, and fantasizing about an ideal future. This way the emotional investment is free from obstacle, but to Karen, the quantity has now changed into a different quality, and it’s not love anymore. This self-image is an important focus, but the wounding itself is often downplayed or covered over, because wounding is also influenced by culture, and self-esteem may also be decoupled from sexuality in many situations, leading to differences in quality, such as love turning into adulation, admiration, or cold forms of respect that vanish with any hint of human weakness. “If narcissism is considered not genetically but with reference to its actual meaning it should, in my judgment, be described as essentially self-inflation. Psychic inflation, like economic inflation, means presenting greater values than really exist. It means that the person loves and admires himself for values for which there is no adequate foundation. Similarly, it means that he expects love and admiration from others for qualities that he does not possess, or does not possess to as large an extent as he supposes. According to my definition, it is not narcissistic for a person to value a quality in himself which he actually possesses, or to like it to be valued by others. These two tendencies, appearing unduly significant to oneself and craving undue admiration from others—cannot be separated. Both are always present, though in different types one or the other may prevail…Why must people aggrandize themselves? The factor which contributes most fundamentally to the development of narcissistic trends appears to be the child’s alienation from others, provoked by grievances and fears. His positive emotional ties with others become thin; he loses the capacity to love.”
On Narcissism – Sigmund Freud (Narcissism 1 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v5s37ne-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-8.html
The cultural environment becomes clear as to how development moves in this direction, and more importantly, narcissistic people lose access to that craving energy to love others precisely because of the vulnerability that love puts a person into. This is why they have trouble with free association, meditation, etc., because genuine contents from the true self have to be distorted into a false self for protection at all times. Any tightening related to meditation or free association, diminishes internal symbols and authentic content, and even to the point of being a dead zone where disconnection with the true self becomes permanent. “Various influences operate to this effect: the unquestioned authority of righteous parents, creating a situation in which the child feels compelled to adopt their standards for the sake of peace; the attitudes of self-sacrificing parents who elicit the feeling from the child that he has no rights of his own and should live only for the parents’ sake; parents who transfer their own ambitions to the child and regard the boy as an embryonic genius or the girl as a princess, thereby developing in the child the feeling that he is loved for imaginary qualities rather than for his true self. All these influences, varied as they are, make the child feel that in order to be liked or accepted he must be as others expect him to be. The parents have so thoroughly superimposed themselves on the mind of the child that he complies through fear, thus gradually losing what James’ calls the ‘real me.’ His own will, his own wishes, his own feelings, his own likes and dislikes, his own grievances, become paralyzed. Therefore he gradually loses the capacity to measure his own values. He becomes dependent on the opinion of others. He is bad or stupid when others think he is bad or stupid, intelligent when others order him to be intelligent, a genius when others consider him one. While in all of us self-esteem is to some extent dependent upon the estimate of others, in this case nothing but the estimate of others counts…The same unfavorable environment produces disturbances in his feeling for self. In more severe cases these mean more than a mere impairment of self-esteem; they bring about a complete suppression of the spontaneous individual self.”
Narcissism is also not only in narcissistic personality disorder, it can creep up in any disorder where there’s a lack of trust in others. People have to meditate and notice how their feeling of self-esteem is tied to their usefulness to authority figures and how unreliable a foundation that is compared to that of a person who treats life as the experiment that it is and accepts imperfect reality as it is. “Narcissistic trends may be combined also with a tendency to withdraw from people, a tendency that is found in the schizoid personality. In psychoanalytical literature withdrawal from others is regarded as inherently a narcissistic trend; but while alienation from others is inherent in narcissistic trends withdrawal is not. On the contrary, a person with pronounced narcissistic trends, though incapable of love, nevertheless needs people as a source of admiration and support. Thus it would be more accurate in these cases to speak of a combination of narcissistic trends with a tendency to withdraw from others…Narcissistic trends are frequent in our culture. More often than not people are incapable of true friendship and love; they are egocentric, that is, concerned with their security, health, recognition; they feel insecure and tend to overrate their personal significance; they lack judgment of their own value because they have relegated it to others. These typical narcissistic features are by no means restricted to persons who are incapacitated by neuroses.”
These fantasies that people retreat to cannot be only seen in their fantastical positive elements. They have to be seen as a lifeline for a desperate person who can’t face reality, and who prefers positive fantasy to suicidal ideation. “By creating a fantasy world of his own in which he is the hero he also consoles himself for not being loved and appreciated. He may feel that though others reject him, look down on him, do not love him for what he really is, it is because he is too far above their understanding. My personal impression is that the illusions do far more than give secret substitute satisfactions. I often wonder whether they do not save the individual from being crushed entirely and thus whether they are not literally life-saving.”
Binary sunset… from A New Hope, Star Wars: https://youtu.be/41ak2jr55fE?si=UjRhg2XGS457D4Pz
Relationships still do exist, but they can now only be done with inauthenticity, which are the replacement emotions for love, that include pride and admiration. Real love involves people allowing for a creative space where spontaneous desire toward self-development can emerge and each supports the other in becoming. The problem is that self-development must happen in a learning environment so that the foundation of learning is not based on lies. Lies and illusions literally prevent skill development in the real world, and this is why there can be a disconnect between the ego-ideal and real achievement. “Self-inflation represents an attempt to put relationships to others on a positive basis. If others do not love and respect the individual for what he is they should at least pay attention to him and admire him. The obtainment of admiration is substituted for love—a consequential step. From then on he feels unwanted if he is not admired. He loses any understanding of the fact that friendliness and love can include an objective or even a critical attitude. What falls short of blind adoration is to him no longer love; he will even suspect it of being hostility. He will judge others according to the admiration or flattery he receives from them. People who admire him are good and superior, people who do not are not worth bothering with. Thus his main gratification lies in being admired, but also his security rests on it, because it gives him the illusion that he is strong and that the world around is friendly. It is a security on a rickety basis, however. Any failure may bring to the surface all the underlying insecurity. In fact, not even a failure is needed to elicit this effect; admiration paid to someone else may be sufficient to bring it about.”
Plato: Lysis: https://rumble.com/v6vs8dr-plato-lysis.html
There is still productivity, and maybe even enormous productivity, but it’s done without the juice of authentic desire, and so productivity decreases when the true self is engaged. The motivation to gain admiration becomes the only way to generate action, but it’s mechanical and done for-the-sake-of in all manifestations, and so productivity is situational based on the favor of others. Scientific and experimental attitudes based on truth and facts, on the contrary, allow for enjoyment for its own sake, which crucially can allow for people skills capable of relationship growth and independence from needing the approval of others, which is the basis of ethical behavior and sportsmanlike conduct in competitive environments. Some people do things for a benevolent God or deity so as to maintain ethics and chase spiritual rewards like a clear conscience. If one cannot believe in a benevolent deity promising some rewarding afterlife, then this is the only life and one must amass power and wealth while living as long as possible. Recently, for example, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were talking like the Pharaohs of Egypt, wishing to be bring their wealth and power to the afterlife. “The exchange began with Xi remarking through his interpreter, ‘People rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70 you are still a child.’ Putin and Xi are both 72 years old. ‘Biotechnology is making advances. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become—even achieve immortality,’ Putin responded. ‘Some predict that in this century, humans may live to 150 years old,’ Xi said. The New York Times (NYT) noted on Wednesday that Putin has a longstanding ‘personal interest in longevity,’ and has even ordered the Russian health ministry to make increased life expectancy a ‘key priority.’ Dr. James Markmann, president of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons Executive Council, told Fox News that while transplants are ‘a lifesaving and life-prolonging procedure for patients with organ failure,’ there is no evidence they could help people live to be 150, much less become immortal.”
“A striving for admiration may be a powerful motor toward achievement, or toward developing qualities which are socially desirable or which make a person lovable, but it involves the danger that everything will be done with both eyes on the effect it has on others. An individual of this type chooses a woman not for her own sake but because her conquest would flatter him or add to his prestige. A piece of work is done not for its own sake but for the impression it might make. Brilliancy becomes more important than substance. Hence the danger that superficiality, showmanship, opportunism will choke productivity. Even if the individual succeeds in winning prestige this way, he rightly feels that it cannot last, though he is not aware of the reasons for his uneasiness about it. The only available means for silencing his uneasiness is to reinforce the narcissistic trends: to chase for more success and to build up more inflated notions about himself. Sometimes a baffling capacity is developed to transform shortcomings and failures into something glorious. If his writings are not recognized sufficiently it is because he is far ahead of his time; if he cannot get along with his family or friends it is because of their shortcomings.”
When the situation doesn’t call for a competitive motivation to prove oneself in front of others, the productivity diminishes, and this is why hobbies and interests appear lifeless with no zest. Work situations where recognition is not constant means that the narcissist has to create those conditions on his or her own to generate downward comparisons and make the reward system of the culture move towards admiration, when many other people are thinking about their families, their personal goals as an intrinsic motivation, which came out of them spontaneously. “He feels he should be recognized as a genius without having to give evidence of it by actual work. Women should single him out without his actively doing anything about it. Deep down he may feel, for example, that it is inconceivable that any woman knowing him could fall in love with another man. The characteristic feature of these attitudes is the expectation that devotion or glory can be obtained without effort and initiative of his own. This peculiar type of expectation is strictly determined. It is necessary because of the damage that has been done to the individual’s spontaneity, originality and initiative, and because of his fear of people. The factors which originally pushed him toward self-inflation also paralyze his inner activity. Hence the inner insistence that fulfillment of his wishes should come from others. This process, which is unconscious in its implications, leads in two ways to a reinforcement of narcissistic trends: the claims made on others must be justified by emphasis on his own alleged values; and this emphasis must be renewed in order to cover up the disappointments which inevitably ensue from his exaggerated expectations.”
When the ego-ideal becomes too far to reach, the distance between the real ego and the ego-ideal becomes a source of negativity projected out to the world. This is especially true if the ego-ideal is unsustainable in the culture and perfectionistic. “A last source feeding the basic narcissistic trends is the increasing impairment of human relationships. The individual’s illusions about himself, and his peculiar kind of expectations of others, are bound to make him vulnerable. Since the world does not recognize his secret claims he often feels hurt and develops greater hostility toward others, becomes more isolated and as a result is driven again and again to take refuge in his illusions. Grievances toward others also may grow because he holds them responsible for his failures to realize his illusions. As a consequence he develops traits which we regard as morally objectionable, such as pronounced egoism, vindictiveness, distrust, disregard for others if they do not serve his own glory. These traits, however, are incompatible with his notion that he is a wonderful being, far above the average of human frailties. Therefore they must be covered up. They are either repressed, in which case they appear only in disguise, or they are simply denied. Self-inflation thus acquires the function of concealing the existing disparity, in line with the maxim: it is out of the question that I, this superior being, have such shortcomings, and therefore they are nonexistent…Repressions resulting from self-inflation seem to be less radical than those resulting from perfectionistic strivings; frequently trends not fitting into the individual’s inflated picture of himself are merely denied or embellished.”
Narcissists can be more or less successful based in the end on how real their skills are, and so those holding onto fictional skills will likely go more into a narcissistic psychosis to avoid painful reality altogether. “In order to understand the differences that are found in types with pronounced narcissistic trends we have to consider two main factors. One of them is how far the phantom of admiration is pursued in reality or only in the realm of fantasy; this difference ultimately boils down to quantitative factors in genesis, briefly, to the extent to which the individual’s spirit has been broken. The other factor is the way in which narcissistic trends are combined with other character trends; they may be entangled, for example, with perfectionistic, masochistic and sadistic trends. The frequency of these combinations is accounted for by the fact that all of them emanate from a similar source, that they represent different solutions for similar calamities. The bewildering number of contradictory qualities attributed to narcissism in psychoanalytical literature results in part from a failure to recognize that narcissism is but one specific trend within a personality structure. It is the combination of trends which gives a personality a certain coloring.”
In the end, narcissists do not love themselves too much quantitatively, but are disconnected qualitatively from true self-love and so Freud’s system has to be updated to include the love replacement of self-admiration, because qualitatively, a lack of true love is not a poverty of depletion of love towards others, but instead it’s not being applied at all. This is where you get the common cultural saying that one must be able to love oneself before being able to love others. “Finally, narcissism is an expression not of self-love but of alienation from the self. In rather simplified terms, a person clings to illusions about himself because he has lost himself. As a consequence the correlation between love for self and love for others is not valid in the sense that Freud intends it. Nevertheless, the dualism which Freud assumes in his second theory of instincts—the dualism between narcissism and love—if divested of theoretical implications contains an old and significant truth. This is, briefly, that any kind of egocentricity detracts from a real interest in others, that it impairs the capacity to love others. Freud, however, means something different by his theoretical contention. He interprets the tendency toward self-inflation as originating in self-love, and he believes that the reason why the narcissistic person does not love others is that he loves himself too much. Freud thinks of narcissism as a reservoir which is depleted to the extent that the individual loves (that is, gives libido to) others. According to my view, a person with narcissistic trends is alienated from self as well as from others, and hence to the extent that he is narcissistic he is incapable of loving either himself or anyone else.”
These conclusions led Karen to revalue Freud’s death instinct, and remove it from the instinctual drive system. “The disputable point in Freud’s assumption is not the declaration that man can be hostile, destructive and cruel, nor the extent and frequency of these reactions, but is the declaration that the destructiveness manifesting itself in actions and fantasies is instinctual in nature. The extent and frequency of destructiveness are not proof that it is instinctual…If we want to injure or to kill, we do so because we are or feel endangered, humiliated, abused; because we are or feel rejected and treated unjustly; because we are or feel interfered with in wishes which are of vital importance to us. That is, if we wish to destroy, it is in order to defend our safety or our happiness or what appears to us as such. Generally speaking, it is for the sake of life and not for the sake of destruction.”
When Freud’s view of the death instinct was allowed to be appropriated and oversimplified by therapists, who wanted analysands to vent their “natural” frustrations, it often covered over the real reason why frustrations were there in the first place, including cultural influences that actively tried to damage or destroy the patient. By doing this, Karen removed the feeling of frustration from being a part of a destruction instinct full stop. Aggression related to abuse as one goes about their way to make effortful contributions in society should not automatically be treated as something like lava that has to erupt due to geology. Expressing love through effort may be a threat to others in a neurotically competitive society, but those are reactions, resistances, and sabotaging behaviors related to defensiveness and insecurity that describe a toxic environment, not a separate biological drive. Cultural groups threatened by individual contributions may punish all things constructive, and political frustration may in fact be a sign that one is doing a good job and not really a negative instinct that needs venting. “The theory of a destruction instinct is not only unsubstantiated, not only contradictory to facts, but is positively harmful in its implications. In regard to psychoanalytical therapy it implies that making a patient free to express his hostility is an aim in itself, because, in Freud’s contention, a person does not feel at ease if the destruction instinct is not satisfied. It is true that to the patient who has repressed his accusations, his egocentric demands, his impulses of revenge, it is a relief if he can express these impulses. But if analysts took Freud’s theory seriously, a wrong emphasis would have to ensue. The main task is not to free these impulses for expression but to understand their reasons and, by removing the underlying anxiety, remove the necessity of having them. Furthermore, the theory helps to maintain the confusion that exists between what is essentially destructive and what essentially pertains to something constructive, that is, self-assertion. For example, a patient’s critical attitude toward a person or cause may be primarily an expression of hostility arising from unconscious emotional sources; if, however, every critical attitude suggests to the analyst a subversive hostility, interpretations expressing such possibilities may discourage the patient from developing his faculties for critical valuations. The analyst should try instead to distinguish between hostile motivations and attempts toward self-assertion.”
Culture and Aggression
This is why it’s so important to look into the nature of the family, which is culturally pressured, and then those pressures are passed down to the children. Much of what Freud looked at was the influence of the family outside of the fact that cultures influence adults as well, which in turn affects how the child is ultimately raised. An unrealistic culture will lead to parenting that doesn’t prepare the child for reality. “Is the child being exposed to realistic discipline and are the necessary limitations conveyed to him without his being intimidated or spoiled? Or, is he growing up in an atmosphere rife with orders, prohibitions, threats, and anxiety? The basic emotional attitude of the parents is more significant than any specific method of child-rearing. If the parents live under excessive pressures, they will in turn be forced to pressure their children. These pressures, if rooted in sexual frustration, may be manifested in excessive tenderness toward the child. Other forms of parental discontent may lead to overt or covert hostility toward the child. The less a child is burdened by superimposed pressures connected with the emotional problems of the parents, the less likelihood there is that he will suffer from destructiveness.”
Karen had already listed out these adult pressures that leak into parenting, but one has to keep in mind what I described above that humans are still biological and they naturally want standards to increase in life, which can exacerbate the sense of competition that she was worried about. Biology feeds culture and cultural standards mold childhood development. One should criticize inhuman standards, but one shouldn’t throw out efficiency all together. It’s about balance, and new technology must not surpass human capability to such a level that humans become extinct or turn into robotic monsters. “Among the factors in western civilization which engender potential hostility, the fact that this culture is built on individual competitiveness probably ranks first. The economic principle of competition affects human relationships by causing one individual to fight another, by enticing one person to surpass another and by making the advantage of one the disadvantage of the other. As we know, competitiveness not only dominates our relations in occupational groups, but also pervades our social relations, our friendships, our sexual relations and the relations within the family group, thus carrying the germs of destructive rivalry, disparagement, suspicion, begrudging envy into every human relationship. Existing gross inequalities, not only in possessions but in possibilities for education, recreation, maintaining and regaining health, constitute another group of factors replete with potential hostilities. A further factor is the possibility for one group or person to exploit another…As to factors creating insecurity, our actual insecurity in the economic and social fields should probably be named first. Another powerful factor in creating personal insecurity is certainly the fears created by the general potential hostile tensions: fear of envy in case of success, fear of contempt in case of failure, fear of being abused and, on the other hand, retaliation fears for wanting to shove others aside, to disparage and exploit them. Also the emotional isolation of the individual, resulting from disturbances in interpersonal relations and the accompanying lack of solidarity, is probably a powerful element in engendering insecurity; under such conditions the individual, thrust upon his own resources, is and feels unprotected. The general feeling of insecurity is increased by the fact that for the most part neither tradition nor religion is strong enough today to give the individual a feeling of being an integral part of a more powerful unity, providing shelter and directing his strivings.”
If people are already struggling with survival, then Freud’s entities of Id, Ego, and Super-ego have to be revaluated. They appear to be entities that focus the individual to look for external solutions and resemble weapons for attack and shields for defense. “It will be seen then that an ‘ego’ approximating Freud’s description is not inherent in human nature but is a specifically neurotic phenomenon. Nor is it inherent in the constitution of the individual who later develops a neurosis. It is in itself the result of a complex process, the result of an alienation from self. This alienation from self, or as I have called it on other occasions, the stunting of the spontaneous individual self, is one of the crucial factors which not only is at the root of a neurotic development but also prevents an individual from outgrowing his neurosis. If he were not alienated from himself it would not be possible for the neurotic to be driven by his neurotic trends toward aims which are essentially alien to him. Furthermore, if he had not lost his capacity for evaluating himself or others he could not possibly feel as dependent on others as he actually does, because in the last analysis neurotic dependency of whatever kind is based on the fact that the individual has lost his center of gravity in himself and shifted it to the outside world…As long as the ‘ego’ is considered to be by its very nature merely a servant and a supervisor of the ‘id,’ it cannot be itself an object of therapy. Therapeutic expectations must then be restricted to bringing about a better adaptation of the ‘untamed passions’ to ‘reason.’ If, however, this ‘ego,’ with its weakness, is regarded as an essential part of the neurosis, then changing it must become a task of therapy. The analyst then must deliberately work toward the ultimate goal of having the patient retrieve his spontaneity and his faculty of judgment, or in William James’ term, his ‘spiritual self.'”
By decoupling Freud’s tripartite self from the drives, Karen could focus more on the common sense understanding of the need for survival and connection. “According to my concept, the neurotic trends are not as such the source of danger but are the thing endangered, inasmuch as safety rests on their unhampered operation. Anxiety emerges as soon as they fail to operate. Another slant on the difference is that what is endangered is not the ‘ego,’ as Freud contends, but the individual’s security, inasmuch as his security rests on the functioning of his neurotic trends…My difference from Freud concerning anxiety in neuroses boils down ultimately to the difference presented in the discussions of the libido theory and the ‘super-ego.’ What Freud regards as instinctual drives or their derivatives are, in my judgment, trends developed for the sake of safety. They are conditioned by an underlying basic anxiety. Thus, according to my interpretation of neuroses, we must distinguish two types of anxiety: the basic anxiety, which is the response to a potential danger, and the manifest anxiety, which is the response to a manifest danger. The term manifest does not in this context mean conscious. Every type of anxiety, whether potential or manifest, may be repressed for various reasons; anxiety may manifest itself only in dreams, in concomitant physical symptoms, in a general restlessness, without being felt consciously…The basic anxiety is itself a neurotic manifestation. It results largely from a conflict between existing dependency on the parents and rebellion against them. Hostility toward them has to be repressed because of the dependency. As I have elaborated in an earlier publication, repression of hostility helps to render a person defenseless because it makes him lose sight of the danger which he should fight. If he represses his hostility it means that he is no longer aware that some individual represents a menace to him; hence he is likely to be submissive, compliant, friendly in situations in which he should be on his guard. This defenselessness, in combination with the fear of retaliation, which remains in spite of its repression, is one of the powerful factors accounting for the neurotic’s basic feeling of helplessness in a potentially hostile world.”
This improves psychoanalysis, because it includes cultural situations of oppression, that when brought into consciousness, can relieve some of the anxiety because the obstacles can be faced with problem-solving and patients can accept that they need to fight, instead of always blaming themselves. A therapist can search for a survival threat and the fear of what would happen if the patient advocated for themselves. “An analyst following Freud’s concept will respond to the patient’s anxiety with a search for repressed drives. When anxiety arises during the psychoanalytic treatment he would raise in his own mind such questions as whether the patient has repressed any hostile impulses toward the analyst, or whether he has sexual desires he is not aware of. Furthermore—in so far as the analyst’s thoughts are directed by theoretical presuppositions—he would expect to find a huge quantity of these affects and, finding himself embarrassed in accounting for these quantities in the actual situation, would ultimately resort to the notion that the amount of desire or hostility represents an unbroken infantile affect which was once repressed but is now revived and transferred to him…According to my interpretation of anxiety an analyst confronted with the problem of the patient’s anxiety should explain to the patient, at the appropriate time, that anxiety is frequently the result of being in some acute dilemma without being aware of it, thereby encouraging him to search for the nature of the dilemma. To return to our first example of a patient who shows an emerging hostility toward the analyst, the latter, after understanding the reasons for the hostile reaction, should tell the patient that the unearthing of this hostility, though it relieves the patient, does not solve completely the problem of his anxiety; that one may feel hostile without having anxiety; that if anxiety has ensued he probably felt that something important was endangered by the hostility. The pursuit of this question—if successful—would reveal the neurotic trend which was endangered by the hostility.”
This clarifies what it means to “strengthen the ego,” which for Karen simply means that the person has to solve their problem of helplessness by focusing on their character structure of defenses, so as to not confuse ego strengthening with the activity of adding even more defenses. If anything, the ego needs to be more flexible and the therapist has to detect the rigidity so that the patient sees how futile it is to repeat the same defenses arising from the character structure while expecting a different result. “Freud holds that the cause of this helplessness is the weakness of the ‘ego,’ conditioned by its dependency on the ‘id’ and the ‘super-ego.’ According to my view the helplessness is to some extent implicit in the basic anxiety. Another reason for it is that the neurotic’s situation is a precarious one. His rigid adherence to his safety devices protects him in some ways, but renders him defenseless in others. He is like a rope dancer whose ability to keep balanced protects him from a fall caused by losing his equilibrium but leaves him helpless toward other possible dangers.”
The Super-ego in turn is a result of losing the center of gravity of one’s true self in worldly obligations, and if those environments are not decoupled from self-esteem, it’s quite easy to return from therapy and continue on with a severe super-ego. A lot of what people struggle with has to do with economics and politics, and these things are not easy to confront when stakeholders have conflicting interests and there are literally trillions of moving parts in the world economy. To be authentic and connect it to the greater society requires a lot of soul searching and external examination of institutions with acceptance that one has to make some compromises if one wants to survive. “By his overconformity to standards or to expectations he puts himself beyond reproach and attack and thereby eliminates conflicts with the environment; his compulsory inner standards regulate his human relationships…The impulse of this type to triumph vindictively over others arises from many sources. Such a person has but scant possibilities of deriving satisfaction from either human relationships or from work. Both love and work turn into imposed duties against which he rebels inwardly. Spontaneous positive feelings for others are choked, reasons for resentment are plenty. But the specific source from which sadistic impulses are incessantly generated is his feeling that his life is not his own, that he always must live up to outside expectations. Not knowing that he himself has relegated his will and his standards to others, he suffocates under the yoke of obligations. Hence his desire to triumph over others in the only way he can do it, which is through excelling in righteousness and in virtues.”
This is why the concept of transference had to be uncoupled from childhood development, even if those influences are important, but what happened in childhood was quite possibly connected to the overall culture, and transference responses may be understandable reactions to a culture that is slow to catch up. Not all negative transference reactions are covering over a repressed desire. These solutions end up being political as interest groups gather together to lift oppression where it’s found. “There is, however, this to be added: the more we disregard the repetition aspect of transference, the more stringent must be the analyst’s own analysis. For it requires incomparably more inner freedom to see and understand the patient’s actual problems in all their ramifications than to relate these problems to infantile behavior. It is impossible, for instance, to analyze all the implications of neurotic ambition or of masochistic dependency if one has not worked out these problems in oneself…Neuroses are ultimately the expression of disturbances in human relationships; the analytical relationship is one special form of human relationships and existing disturbances are bound to appear here as they appear elsewhere; the particular conditions under which an analysis is conducted render it possible to study these disturbances here more accurately than elsewhere and to convince the patient of their existence and of the role they play. If the concept of transference is thus disentangled from the theoretical bias of the repetition compulsion, it will in time yield the results which it is intrinsically capable of producing.”
Because biologically, and therefore culturally, people all want constant rising standards of living, the cure for an overactive super-ego is to accept that perfectionism can move to the level of being inhuman and our societies need to be structured in such a way as to understand that. Perfectionism is also a distortion, because in the real world nobody is perfect, but we do try to improve things from what they were before, and believing that one is perfect literally makes one ignore one’s own imperfections and the possibility of self-improvement or accountability. Perfectionism clearly leads to double-standards, projection, and then scapegoating becomes the way to deflect from even constructive and necessary criticism coming from whistleblowers. “My difference from Freud in regard to the ‘superego’ and guilt feelings entails a different approach to therapy. Freud regards unconscious guilt feelings as an obstacle to a cure of severe neuroses, as elaborated in his theory of the negative therapeutic reaction. According to my interpretation the difficulty in leading the patient to acquire a real insight into his problems lies in the seemingly impenetrable front he offers because of his compulsory need to appear perfect. He comes to psychoanalysis as a last resort, but he comes with the conviction that at bottom he is all right, that he is normal, that he is not really ill. He resents any kind of interpretation which questions his motivations or which shows him that there are problems, and at best he follows only intellectually. He is so bound to appear infallible that he has to deny any deficiency or even any problem existing in himself. With a certainty approximating that of a real instinct his neurotic self-recriminations avoid what are actually the weak points. In fact their very function is to prevent him from facing any real deficiencies. They are a perfunctory concession to the existing goals, a mere means of reassurance that he is not so bad after all and that his very qualms of conscience make him better than others. They are a face-saving device, for if a person really wishes to improve and sees a possibility of doing so, he will not waste time on self-recriminations; at any rate, he will not feel that enough is accomplished by accusing himself; he will make constructive efforts toward understanding and changing. The neurotic, however, does nothing but scold himself.”
Psychoanalytic Therapy
Because of the complexities of the character structure, Karen wanted to move more towards consequences of that character structure, to illuminate what it means for the patient’s future. “I differ from Freud in that, after recognition of the neurotic trends, while he primarily investigates their genesis I primarily investigate their actual functions and their consequences. The intention in both procedures is the same: to diminish the holds the neurotic trends have on the person. Freud believes that by recognizing the infantile nature of his trends the patient will automatically realize that they do not fit into his adult personality and will therefore be able to master them. The sources of error involved in this contention have been discussed. I believe that all the obstacles which Freud holds responsible for therapeutic failures—such as depth of unconscious guilt feelings, narcissistic inaccessibility, unchangeability of biological drives—are really due to the erroneous premises on which his therapy is built…My contention is that by working through the consequences the patient’s anxiety is so much lessened, and his relation to self and others so much improved, that he can dispense with the neurotic trends. Their development was necessitated by the child’s hostile and apprehensive attitude toward the world. If analysis of the consequences, that is, analysis of the actual neurotic structure, helps the individual to become discriminately friendly toward others instead of indiscriminately hostile, if his anxieties are considerably diminished, if he gains in inner strength and inner activity, he no longer needs his safety devices, but can deal with the difficulties of life according to his judgment.”
Consequences have a way of getting into the patient, because they originally believed that they benefitted from their defenses, which was exacerbated by the cultures that rewarded them, but the reason why they are in therapy is precisely because these defenses are not working out as well as they liked, due to contradicting goals between the true self and those defenses, as well as the ignorance that cultures can also be sick, so this realization brings the patient more in line with the therapist and now they can revolutionize the world by actively changing a culture where nothing is good enough and only a robotic lifestyle will do. “The difference between our present attitude and that which prevailed before psychoanalysis is that we regard these problems now from another viewpoint. We have learned that the neurotic is inherently as little lazy, mendacious, grabbing, conceited, as anyone else, that the adverse circumstances of his childhood have forced him to build up an elaborate system of defenses and gratifications resulting in the development of certain unfavorable trends. Hence we do not consider him responsible for them. In other words, the contradiction between the medical and the moral concepts of psychic disturbances is less irreconcilable than it appeared to be: the moral problems are an integral part of the illness. As a consequence we should regard as belonging to our medical task the function of helping the patient in the clarification of these problems.”
Contradictions create internal conflict and by making the patient face those contradictions, they are now left with a decision to make between goals that behave like oil and water. “Freud realizes that the basic neurotic conflicts must eventually be solved by the patient’s decision. Here too the question is whether this process should not be deliberately encouraged. Many patients, after having seen certain problems, take a stand spontaneously. When a patient recognizes the calamities ensuing from his peculiar kind of pride, for instance, he may spontaneously call it his false pride. Others, however, are too involved in their conflicts to make such judgments. In such cases it appears useful to indicate the eventual necessity for a decision. For example, if in one hour a patient expresses his admiration for persons who unscrupulously use any available means for success, and in another hour asserts that he does not care for success but is interested only in the subject matter of his work, the analyst should not only point out the contradiction implied but also indicate that eventually the patient will have to make up his mind as to what he really wants. I would, however, discourage quick and superficial decisions; the important point is to urge the patient to analyze what drives him in either direction and what he has to gain and renounce in either case.”
Therapy can then turn into self-therapy, because life cannot be solved completely by the end of analytical sessions. Challenges are with us until the end of life, but when the center of gravity is retained in the true self, the patient has resources with which to operate and make experimental decisions that accept the process of trial and error that are more authentic and alive. “At bottom, the question again touches upon a personal philosophy of life. Do we intend to put out a finished product with all problems solved for good and all? If we consider this possible, do we believe it to be desirable? Or do we think of life as a process of development which does not end and should not end until the very last day of existence? I believe that a neurosis arrests the individual’s development by making him rigid in his pursuits and his reactions, that it traps him in conflicts which he cannot solve himself. Thus I hold that the aim of analysis is not to render life devoid of risks and conflicts, but to enable an individual eventually to solve his problems himself…But when is the patient able to take his development into his own hands? This question is identical with the question as to the ultimate goal of psychoanalytical therapy. In my judgment, freeing the patient from anxiety is only a means to an end. The end is to help him to regain his spontaneity, to find his measurements of value in himself, in short, to give him the courage to be himself.”
New Ways in Psychoanalysis – Karen Horney: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393312300/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/