Psychoanalysis and politics
During the early years of Anna’s involvement with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, she was already in a political environment. There were divisions between the first and second generation psychoanalysts. The Great War was followed by inflation and an increasing demand for a black market to acquire more and more of the basic necessities. Again, only the wealthiest could afford a full analysis, but the demand was still high due to war neuroses, and the social problems that today are typically found to be the task of social workers. Freud, as well as other theorists, published and disseminated widely so as to bring in new students and to have a larger influence in other European cities. New methods, like Object Relations were being developed through training analyses, and those theories were eventually published, like those of Melanie Klein. The political conflicts all had the same pattern:
- Analysts applying free association unleashed content from the mind of patients that didn’t always fit orthodox Freudian theories.
- Analysts developed new theories propelled along with their natural ambition to make a name for themselves.
- Psychoanalytic societies splintered into new groups that competed for the same pool of patients.
- Personal ambition clouded scientific candor.
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v4l5hvn-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-3.html
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 9: https://rumble.com/v5uq6vh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-9.html
Even if these different groups tried to write each other off as irrelevant, because of the complexity of the mind, their different pathways added more than they negated. Anna Freud’s trepidation towards infant analysis allowed her to fit her theories much better into the context of pedagogy. Discerning candidates can easily see that if they want to succeed, they have to know that they will be facing gaslighting from rivals and that all professionals have a vested interest in being a gatekeeper, indirectly locking out scientific advancement. The successful tell the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable, but they need the fortitude to be able to suffer all that abuse until the truth finally cannot be ignored anymore by a scientific group or community. The professional also has to tolerate uncomfortable feelings when they are eventually superseded at one time or another. Like the Oedipus Complex, wishes have human obstacles and the desire to annihilate them leads to defensiveness and conflict, internal and external.
The Aftermath of WWI
One of the main reasons why psychoanalysis was sought after was the questioning survivors were going through. There was a desire to find a way to prevent these wars in the future, starting with childhood upbringing and teaching influences in school. What skills can be developed so that people can manage their own internal and external conflicts? Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and Eva Rosenfeld began the Hietzing School in the Vienna Woods to look closer at repression and how to undo it in a balanced way so that childhood could lead to better adult outcomes. There was a debate on how much latitude children should have and what optimal challenges they should experience. Kleinian child analysis was also concerned with preventing psychological knots from developing beyond what adult analysis couldn’t untie.
These experiments in education were treated with skepticism and could at any time be shut down, especially in this time between two world wars. In an era of shifting politics, economics, and scientific experimentation, as exciting as those times can be, for the people living through them, there’s a lack of safety and a sense of homelessness. This included Erik Erikson before he found his way. Like many people in these episodes of the history of psychoanalysis, they were in a desperate career search at the beginning. Germans call that wandering period, Wanderschaft, when people travel in search of inspiration and clues as to where they need to go next. “Peter Blos, who had gone to Vienna to study biology, was very apprehensive about his friend’s emotional state. So he wrote Erik a letter early in the spring of 1927 that Erik never forgot. ‘Nietzsche once said that a friend is the life saver who holds you above water when your divided selves threaten to drag you to the bottom,’ Erik recalled, and Blos had become just that lifesaver.”
Strangers are not good connections and they likely will exploit as they are looking for someone to fill a hole in an inauthentic job which leads to one to delay their calling even further, but true friendship provides real help. “After enrolling at the University of Vienna, Blos became the tutor to Dorothy Burlingham’s four children. [He] lived in the Burlingham home, where he taught the children the sciences and German. Soon, though, he felt his tutoring interfered with his studies, and he resigned as the children’s tutor. Burlingham and Anna Freud offered to establish him in his own school to continue teaching the four children and others (especially English and Americans) who were being analyzed or whose parents were in analysis. Blos felt that he needed a co-instructor in that venture and told Anna Freud that although Erik ‘knows nothing of education or teaching,’ he was ‘more gifted’ than trained educators. Ms. Freud was interested. Burlingham agreed to finance Erik’s trip to Vienna by commissioning him to sketch portraits of her children. Consequently, Blos wrote to Erik of the commission and the opportunity to meet with Anna Freud.”
Erik’s analysis with Anna Freud led to obvious conclusions that his artistic talent, demonstrated in his sketches, had no outlet. She could see Erik’s ability to bond with children, which was understandable considering his being influenced by German Romanticism and his parallel discovery with the Freud’s that childhood goes through “stages of character.” At a time of depression he found his lifework. “When Blos returned to Vienna, Ms. Freud told him that if he could provide the children in his school with a solid education, he could retain Erik as a co-teacher. Blos agreed, and Erik secured his first regular job teaching in a facility that was vital to the Freudian psychoanalytic circle.” As Erik’s ambivalence towards psychoanalysis decreased he saw that “it offered a potentially attractive vocation ‘for a young man with some [artistic] talent, but nowhere to go.'”
Anna was a booster of the Montessori school and so she got Erik a chance to develop teaching knowledge by becoming one of the few male members of the Vienna Montessori Women’s Teacher Association. With psychoanalytic stages and Erik’s stages of character, they could fit very well with Maria Montessori’s stages of learning, which is to move children from the unconscious to the conscious. “How is this passage from the unconscious to the conscious accomplished? ‘It is through movement which follows the path of pleasure and love.'”
Development of course requires activity from the subject to develop those skills and reach those milestones and make sense of the world. “Whereas his psychoanalytic training acquainted [Erik] with the deep and symbolic meanings of childhood experience revealed in dreams and talk, Erik recalled, Montessori training induced him to ‘pay attention to and to repeat with my own hands the simplest manipulation and the accompanying thought patterns which acquaint a child with the tangible world and permit him to reconstruct it in play.'” The great thing about this method is that it connects the introverted preoccupations of psychoanalysis, which can be stuck in naval gazing, with external activities more directly. “It pinned down the suggestions in his 1923-24 journal that a person needed ‘meaningful activity’ in the surrounding world (what he later called actuality)…[Anna] urged her students to explore the symbolic content behind children’s behavior and feelings. Others in child analysis relied on play therapy, but Erik moved much faster and farther than most. Within a few years, he would describe the visual form of a child’s play objects as a configuration that simultaneously revealed the ‘outer’ social and material world surrounding the child and the child’s ‘inner emotions.'”
In Education and Peace, by Maria Montessori, she had big hopes with the belief that “preventing conflicts is the work of politics; establishing peace is the work of education.” Education for her was trying to understand the underlying problems that lead to war and to create projects directed towards those social problems so that war becomes a last resort, which requires an educated populace. To see the interdependence that everyone is involved in, whether they like it or not, brings an extroverted attitude of getting involved, and maybe changing institutions, so that they perform better. If they can be reformed successfully then violence is not necessary. “It must aim to reform humanity so as to permit the inner development of human personality and to develop a more conscious vision of the mission of mankind and the present conditions of social life. These aims must be achieved not only because man is almost totally unaware of his own nature, but also because for the most part he does not understand the workings of the social mechanisms on which his interests and his immediate salvation depend.”
Adding psychoanalysis to the equation, to find out why some children are not developing and discovering their own place in the human mosaic, reduces the need to steal from others and join criminal enterprises, which includes extreme political movements, like in the 20th century, based on theft and murder. Like when Erikson was lost and then found, many other generations of people become lost and have to find their way for good or ill.
Differences with Child Analysis
Early psychoanalysis gave off the impression that one is to open up the lizard brain and ignore the control mechanisms of the mammal brain like a psychopath. As much as Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Anna Freud wanted to live a life of free exploration, we have to realize that we are talking about adults here. Many of the skills they learned, sometimes great educations they were privileged to have attended, were not to be abandoned in this freedom. Children have to be able to hold back their instinctual drives until they are old enough for society to grant them permission. Early Object-Relations theoreticians, like Melanie Klein, were able to get children to understand quite a lot of their internal workings as well as the internal workings of their parents and siblings, but once the therapy was ended, or cut short in many cases, the child patient was to be free to choose, but in reality that’s really only for adults with skills. “…The child analyst—in accord with the fact that his patient is a child—should in addition to the analytic aspect also have a second outlook: the educational. I do not see why we should be frightened of this word, or regard such a combination of two attitudes as a disparagement of analysis.”
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v5e1o7d-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-2.html
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v5s37ne-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-8.html
Children have a different story from adults. Returning them home may be returning them to an environment that actually was the problem in the first place. “There is no assurance that after we have secured a successful resolution of the transference, the child will find his own way to the right objects. He returns home at a time when he has become a stranger there; and his further guidance may be entrusted to the very persons from whom we have forcibly detached him. On inner grounds he is not capable of self-reliance. We would thus be placing him in a position of renewed difficulty, in which he would again find most of the conditions that originally gave rise to his conflicts. So he could once more take either the path to neurosis, or, if this is closed to him by the successful outcome of the analytic treatment, the opposite line of open rebellion. From the purely therapeutic point of view, this may seem an improvement; but from the aspect of social adjustment which after all is demanded from every child, it will not appear in that light.”
Sure, children get to learn from analysis that their desires to want the attention of an authority figure, like a particular parent, for example, means a temptation to indulge in stressful death-wishes against obstacles, but these insights do not teach the child how they can flourish in their current environment. This translates into fear of rejection and a very legitimate question about where one fits in the world. The child will only feel comfortable somewhere when they know where their masculine and feminine vitalities have meaning and purpose. Craving for food and important emotions will only be pacified when those children find vocations that are accessible and provide an acceptable livelihood in trade for the demands they ask of others for their consumption. This is a long road from infant to adult that requires educational professionals to have a better understanding of their students. “…Teachers will not be in a more favorable position in relation to their employers, i.e., society, until psychology really succeeds in understanding children, the raw material of education. Only then will they be able to point out the discrepancy between the goal set up by society and the capacity of the child to reach this goal. Only then will they weigh the psychological potentialities of the individual child against the demands made on him by society as factors deserving equal consideration. Only when it becomes clear which educational goals are compatible with mental health and which are attainable only at the expense of this health will greater justice be done the child.”
The Matrix Resurrections – Official Trailer 2: https://youtu.be/nNpvWBuTfrc?si=e5QE3qZf3uV07kNt
The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony: https://youtu.be/1lyu1KKwC74?si=JG1YzaZ8D29Up8r2
This is a difficult balance that requires cooperation from parents, children and teachers. Parenting can be overly simplistic and lead to arrested development, especially when parents have the the view that “the child is always in the wrong. The extreme of this is illustrated by a well-known anecdote. A mother says to her nursemaid: ‘Go and see what the children are doing and tell them to stop.'” Some repression and suppression is needed for self-discipline, but the balance can be off if skill development is hampered, where skill is termed by Anna as personality. “Education has obviously two cardinal functions. We can summarize one of them under the caption ‘allowing and forbidding,’ by which we mean the educator’s behavior toward the spontaneous expressions of the child. The other function concerns the building up of the child’s personality. Psychology will have achieved what education has a right to expect of it if, on the one hand, it describes the primitive nature of the child, and, on the other hand, opens up new avenues for possible development and offers new techniques for the further expansion of the child’s personality.” Of course, authenticity has to be allowed for the child to know themselves and their strengths. “One of the claims that whatever the child has as native endowment is good. We must respect it and leave it alone, a point of view which Rousseau formulated and which in modern education is sponsored especially by Montessori. According to this attitude the child is always right in what he wants; adults only cause trouble when they interfere.”
The trouble that’s caused ends up in the super-ego which appears differently depending on the age of the patient. “We have learned from the adult neurotic how inaccessible to reason the superego is, how steadfastly it resists every attempt at external influence, and how it will not consent to modify its demands until we have historically dissected it in analysis and traced back every single command and prohibition to the identification with one of the persons who loomed large and were loved in childhood…I believe that here we have come upon the main and most important difference between the analysis of adults and that of children. In the analysis of adults we are dealing with a situation in which the superego has achieved full independence and is no longer subject to external influences. Here our sole task is to raise all the strivings which contributed to the formation of the neurotic conflict to the same level by bringing them into consciousness. On this new conscious level the conflict can then be dealt with in new ways and brought to a different solution…In the analysis of children, however, we deal with situations where the superego has not yet achieved full independence; where it operates all too clearly for the sake of those from whom it received its commands, the parents and persons in charge of the child, and is swayed in its demands by every change in the relationship with these people and by all the alterations that may occur in their own outlook. As in the case of adults, we work by purely analytic means with children insofar as we attempt to lift the repressed parts of the id and ego from the unconscious. But our task with the childish superego is a double one. It is analytic and proceeds from within in the historical [layers] of the superego, so far as it is already an independent structure, but it is also educational (in the widest sense of that word) in exercising influences from without, by modifying the relations with those who are bringing up the child, by creating new impressions, and revising the demands made on the child by the environment.” An adult can change the environment, but the parents must be cooperative to allow the necessary adjustments.
How Anna noticed the difference between her method from those who didn’t have an educational bent, was that the negative emotions of neuroticism disappeared once the parents made those changes at home that relieved the conflict. This is partly why Melanie Klein had to be involved in letter writing with parents after the conclusion of treatment. The parents were expecting results but were not looking at their own contribution to the child’s neuroticism. “If the cause of anxiety was fear of the displeasure of her real, living parents, and not of their internalized images, then it is easy to understand that the symptom could be removed…This analytically trained teacher describes how neurotic children from strict homes, who come to school while still of kindergarten age, after a first period of surprise and suspicion become acclimatized to the free atmosphere and gradually lose their neurotic symptoms, which are usually reactions to the prohibition of masturbation…A similar result would be impossible in the case of an adult neurotic. The freer the surroundings into which he is transplanted, the stronger the fears of his drives, his neurotic defense reactions, and his symptoms. The demands which his superego makes upon him are no longer open to influence from his surroundings. In contrast, once the child has begun to lower his superego demands, he is apt to go to extremes, and to indulge himself further than even the freest environment is ready to permit. Even when liberated he cannot dispense with some limiting influences from the external world…Since we have found that the forces with which we have to contend in the cure of an infantile neurosis are not only internal, but linked to external sources as well, we have a right to require that the child analyst should also assess the child’s external situation, not only the internal one. For this part of his task, however, the child analyst needs some basic knowledge of the upbringing of children in general. This will enable him to assess and criticize the influences which have an impact on the child’s development; and, if it should prove necessary, to take the child’s upbringing out of the hands of those in authority, and for the period of the analysis be in charge of it himself.” This is the beginning of social work mixed with psychology, which requires knowledge of what good parenting is before any interventions are prescribed for parents. For those clinicians who don’t have children of their own, they have to rely on the milestones and markers of development to then clarify what might be hindering the child.
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 4: https://rumble.com/v4qswdt-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-4.html
Psychoanalysis and the Upbringing of the Child
How psychoanalysis looks at childhood development, and how it finds problems with parenting and socialization, is by working backwards from a goal. From a Darwinian perspective, that goal is coupling and procreation. Pleasure connects people together but human gestation takes so long that pleasure can come about in many different ways before the final iteration of family life. Anything closer to family life is considered more developed than any of the developmental stages along the way. Humans have a tendency to backpedal in times when their skill level cannot reach up. The pleasure of a skill is what develops it, and how the pleasure-habits form in the mind lead to being in balance or out of balance. Violence, envy, sadism, and sexual abuse are common interruptions that can veer a child in an unintended direction when there’s no therapeutic help to address the resulting internal conflicts. “We meet with pathological conditions, such as perversions and certain forms of [anti-social behavior] which are characterized by an adherence or a regression to an infantile type of instinctual gratification, to the exclusion of all other forms of gratification. In the history of such an illness we usually find a specific event, for instance, [sexual manipulation], a suddenly overwhelming experience or other traumatic events, which have allowed the particular instinctual impulse to break through and achieve complete gratification. The child’s [craving] development remains fixated at this point and does not progress to the desired adult level of instinctual life. These two entirely different types of illness, however, have something in common. In both, the child has been caught and held at an infantile level of development, with the result that what should have been only a way station has become a final destination…Thus we see that a fixation and subsequent neurotic illness may occur either when the impulse is allowed full expression, or, conversely, when it is entirely denied expression. The path to mental health lies somewhere between these two extremes. Evidently the problem is to find a middle course. The instinctual urge must neither be driven into repression, thus preventing its sublimation, i.e., its diversion into other and acceptable channels, nor must it be allowed full satisfaction. It is as if we had to teach the child not to put his hand into the fire because it burns, but dare not express it so directly, lest he become afraid of all fire and be unable in later life to light a match, smoke a cigarette or cook a meal. Our task is to teach the child to keep away from the fire without arousing in him a horror of it.”
Signs of going too far one way or another would be not gratifying sexual desires too early in an adult context, using sex for emotional regulation to the detriment of curiosity about the world, or any situations where creativity is so stifled that important problem solving and autonomy is buried and undeveloped. “We may say, on the one hand, that whatever we do, the child is going to feel that he is denied and forbidden all satisfactions, so why should we try to avoid being stern? On the other hand, we may say that no matter how much a child may be spared, he still has to be subjected to a great deal, so why not at least reduce our interference to the minimum? But the fact is that we do struggle with the child over his instinctual gratifications. We want him to have control over his sexual drives, for if they are constantly breaking through, there is the danger that his development will be retarded or arrested, that he will be content with gratifying himself instead of sublimating, with masturbating instead of learning, that he will confine his quest for knowledge to sexual matters instead of extending it to the whole wide world. This we want to prevent…However, the course of development itself helps to remedy the situation. The period in which the child tries to satisfy his instinctual wishes exclusively on his own person is a relatively short one, whether these wishes be oral, anal, or sadistic. The instinctual impulses soon turn toward the outer world. The child seeks out the people in his immediate environment who are most important to him and insistently demands of them the gratification of his wishes. This is what we call the oedipus situation. We say that the child now has a love object. The peak of this early development is reached when the greater part of his search after pleasure is no longer directed toward his own person but toward an object in the outer world and, above all, when it is concentrated on a single object, the mother or the father.”
Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html
As more development accrues, the child knows how to gratify themselves but they also are dependent on another for gratification, which entails more risk. “By turning his impulses toward an outside object he has only complicated matters to an extraordinary degree. As soon as an external love object is introduced, the child becomes dependent on the goodwill of this object. The satisfaction of every single wish now depends on the consent of the loved being. For instance, the child who has been accustomed to a certain amount of satisfaction from the bodily care given him by his mother must experience a sudden disappointment when she turns him over to the care of someone else who cannot take her place as a love object, thereby depriving him of the possibility of gratification. That is, the child is constantly being threatened, not only with interference from the outer world, but also with rejection at the hands of the love object.”
When the child desires to move from self-stimulation to object-love, which starts with the parents, if the parents are responsible enough, they can refuse rewards when there’s disobedience to discipline the child. “The earliest fears of being left alone and helplessly exposed to the dangers of the outer world tend to make the child obedient at first. With his attachment to a love object, he experiences a new kind of fear, that of losing this person’s love if he fails to obey. So we see that the educator’s tools increase in number as the child grows older. The adult can threaten him physically, he can leave him, he can threaten to withdraw his love; and he can do all of these things as punishment for the child’s disobedience or refusal to give up his instinctual pleasures.”
Anna describes an important factor of attachment and how imitation gets involved when objects are lost. To preserve the memory of the lost loved one, which is a memory of some survival-pleasure that was shared, we can become like them and even include aspects that a neutral observer would find disagreeable, as if it was integral to the pleasure that must be preserved. When two or more people share a pleasure, it becomes like a mental glue that shares personality elements between individuals. We start talking like them and acting like them. If you notice how music can repeat in the mind, and how self-governing that repeating is, it demonstrates how the superego can overpower the ego, where people sometimes have to meditate to reacquaint themselves with the present moment if their life is full of endless stimulation and imitation. Music can even be negative but have some enjoyment at the same time and glue negativity to it in a wallowing masochistic way, or the way horror movies create paranoia in the audience. The ego has trouble stopping it, unless it’s strong and exercised with repeated presence. If you take music out of the equation and include any kind of savoring in the environment, you can see how people can be influenced by environments and be carried away. If the environment is impoverished, the id becomes a scavenger and looks for the next best thing available. If a culture is impoverished then the public imitates decadent role models or exploiters to their detriment.
The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense – Gad Saad: https://youtu.be/wsyxveS2rOg?si=7YrEvF8jSIxEpBTK
Understanding Mass Formation with Mattias Desmet – Mark Groves: https://youtu.be/7VJ1QQHrV_0?si=FmsT7awOAKc0Lcj8
When imitation involves relationships, it unlocks the “to be or to have” aspect of identity. “To be” involves being able to give what the other person wants. “To have” is to be able to find enjoyment in what the other gives. Pleasure can be the obvious masculine and feminine pleasures of giving and receiving, but it’s also the sex roles and contributions that the missing partner used to accomplish. If you are a man with children and the wife disappears, you have to take on some female sex roles to keep the house together. If you are a woman and the man has vanished, you have to imitate some of the masculine roles for the children. This can as well be confounded with the preservation of sexual pleasure. In a bisexual way a man needs to know what a wife wants from a man and therefore a homosexual curiosity can appear, and this is the same for the woman. Understanding what they want and why they like it gives us the information necessary to provide what they need, and if we can’t do that skillfully, then we may settle by taking what we learned, identifying with giving or taking, and intimately provide homosexual gifts with those that are more impressive at the role we failed at. If both imitations fail, then one prefers to be one’s own company, which can happen throughout life or be stages in between relationships.
Pleasure is connected with survival and so identity and pleasure go together to such an extent that we often judge character based on how we get pleasure, if we have impulse control, and we also give names to people based on ancestral jobs and vocations for the contributions they made back when everyone lived in small villages. “Let us recall how hard it is for an adult to give up a love object on whom he has lavished all his affection, on whom he has hoped not only to gratify every single wish, but whom he also desired to possess completely and, if possible, without rivals. When such a person withdraws, this cannot be but a great shock to the one who is deserted. We find that we are actually unable to free ourselves of the unfaithful object, and although to all outward appearances he has left us, deep within us we find him in all sorts of memory traces; yes, even more than that, we find that we ourselves become more like the object, as if we would say, ‘Even if you have deserted me in the real world, I have retained your image in myself.'” The retained memory object is processed autonomously in the hopes that there will be a reunion and a revival that includes the lessons learned about why the relationship failed. If the reunion does not materialize, the skills of the lost person can be preserved in the abandoned partner.
Some of this feeling of abandonment can be very archaic when children don’t understand that adults are needed in many different environments and they are forced to share their loved ones out of responsibility. “The child must consent to share [the mother] with his brothers and sisters, must recognize that she belongs in the first place to the father. He must learn to renounce the idea of exclusive possession and all that it means to him.”
That fearful loss is the loss all children must undergo when they have to give up a parent’s exclusive attention. That loss requires knowledge of masculinity and femininity to try to be what the desired parent wants. A man who can’t savor masculinity, like when they can’t find the right vocation, can feel like a failure as a male provider. A woman who is a bad nurturer and who is incapable of giving love to the family can feel a failure as a wife and mother. Their ability to demonstrate masculine and feminine happiness sends signals to the children that provide opportunities for them to try out both roles and to find a balance between the two. They need to know what males want and what females want and then fit themselves in adult roles that give off a signal of savoring to prospective partners who think those signatures are a good fit for them. You can then add biological and physical characteristics that send signals to others as well as their behaviors. All these experiences lead to the voices in the mind that we are conversing with when alone and talking to oneself. “The child can internally give up his adult love object only at a great price: he must at least partially incorporate the object and modify himself to resemble his mother or father. Strangely enough the child takes over from the object the very things which were most unpleasant and disturbing to him, the commands and the prohibitions. Thus it comes about that toward the end of the oedipus situation, the child, although in part he remains what he has previously been, now carries within himself another part: that of the object and educator. The educator within the child, i.e., this incorporated part—the part with which the child has identified himself, as we express it—now internally treats the other part of the child’s personality in the same way as the parental object actually treated the child. This part assumes such an outstanding and overwhelming position in the child’s inner life that psychoanalysis has given it a special name. We call it the ‘superego.’ It dominates the child’s ego just as the parents previously dominated the child.”
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
This delicate balance of being a good cop or bad cop shows up in the mind of the child. If the prohibitions were too extreme, like a parent who loves to disparage and make fun of the child, then the superego can become pathological and be an incessant voice that the child has trouble controlling. It can create mental resistances, depressions, frights, and paranoia in the later adult that are distorted beliefs and prevent normal adult functioning. The superego is the house of the human conscience, but one can have a bad conscience as well. Therapy tries to bring out the correct balance by looking at the transference, which is a rehearsal of past experiences that try to understand the world and make predictions that can be more or less accurate. This is why parenting ends up being so important for Anna Freud. “The educator of the older child can rely on this superego to support him, he knows that he and the superego will join forces against the child. Thus the child finds himself confronted by two authorities, the transformed part of his own personality and his love object who is still present in reality. This docile obedience which we thus create—and which the educators bent on making their task easier often produce to an excessive degree—is precisely what drives the child to excessive repression of instinctual drives and thus into neurosis.”
Neurosis is another psychoanalytic term that lumps many negative mind states into one category. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who has a Western background, likes to use more contemporary examples in his Buddhist teachings. His illustration explains the effects of reality on the senses and of how there’s instant gratification in the womb, and depending on the love of the mother, the child is the center of the world for a period of time, but life eventually will not provide instant gratification, and all people have to come to terms with that one way or another. “There’s an old experiment they did with pigeons. They put some pigeons in a cage. The life of the first group of pigeons was pretty simple. There was a red bar and a green bar. If they tapped the red bar, nothing would happen. If they tapped the green bar, they’d get food. So they just tapped the green bar when they were hungry, and they got food every time. They were very well adjusted…In another cage, though, life was more complex. If the pigeons there tapped the red bar, sometimes they’d get food, and sometimes not. If they tapped the green bar, sometimes they’d get food, and sometimes not. In the original report, they said that the pigeons in the second group were very neurotic…Recently I talked to someone who worked in a lab where they recreated that experiment, and she said neurotic was not the word for their mental state. Enraged: That was the word. They were furious that they couldn’t figure things out…This is the way it is, living in the world. Things are very complex and hard to figure out. We do our best but we’re bound to meet up with limitations. So, in that area of life, we have to make sure to learn how to figure out what we can do, and take the opportunities as they come to do something good.”
Limitations – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/audio/evening/2024/241101-limitations.html
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Involuntary volition
Dreams and Fantasies
- A reaction to the day’s experience.
- Day-by-day continuations of stories.
- Unsatisfied revenge and reciprocity stories.
- Plans to take back power by copying the abuser’s methods.
Insight found in the Environment
Like Melanie, Anna interpreted drawings, but she felt that a positive transference was needed to get the most out of the situation. “But I fear that I have sketched for you, thus far, too ideal a picture of the conditions obtaining in the analysis of children. In this picture the family readily provides all requisite information; the child is disclosed as an eager dream interpreter bringing a rich outpouring of daydreams and furnishing a series of interesting drawings, from all of which conclusions about his unconscious impulses can be drawn…It is indeed true that when one has attached a child to oneself in the ways I have described, and made oneself indispensable to him, one can make him do almost anything. Thus he will occasionally associate on being invited to do so, for a short time and to please the analyst. Such an interpolation of associations can certainly be very useful and lead to sudden enlightenment in a difficult situation. But such assistance will be an isolated, temporary occurrence; it will never be the secure foundation on which the whole analytic work can be based.”