Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4

The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence

Ego psychology was considered more orthodox Freudian, but in one area it wasn’t. In Sigmund Freud’s view, development comes through conflict, and this conflict leads to so many different outcomes for children and adults. Later critics of Ego psychology wanted to keep the element of conflict as an integral part of development, but others like Anna Freud saw that much of what Freudian therapy aimed at was to reduce internal and external conflict. If neurosis and frustration is to be dealt with via adaptation, then a de-escalation of conflict and an increase in harmony internally and externally would be required for stress to decrease. Earlier methods focused quite a lot on the internal side and how people could conform to the environment, but Anna wanted a more full approach where patients, families and institutions could reshape the environment to make it easier to thrive.

With emphasis on repression and the need to give people the ability to discharge their Id energies on accessible targets, Anna Freud wanted to bring prominence back to the Ego. This was due to the fact that a healthy ego was always the goal of therapy so that clients could navigate their lives independently. In fact, if there were no movements of craving influencing the Ego or Superego, there would be little to indicate about the Id. “Our knowledge of the id—which was formerly called the system Ucs.—can be acquired only through the derivatives which make their way into the systems Preconscious and Conscious. If within the id a state of calm and satisfaction prevails, so that there is no occasion for any instinctual impulse to invade the ego in search of gratification and there to produce feelings of tension and unpleasure, we can learn nothing of the id contents. It follows, at least theoretically, that the id is not under all conditions open to observation.”

The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

The Superego and Ego can also be confusing if certain indicators aren’t there. “[The Super-ego’s] contents are for the most part conscious and so can be directly arrived at by [internal] perception. Nevertheless, our picture of the superego always tends to become hazy when harmonious relations exist between it and the ego. We then say that the two coincide, i.e., at such moments the superego is not perceptible as a separate institution either to the subject himself or to an outside observer. Its outlines become clear only when it confronts the ego with hostility or at least with criticism. The superego, like the id, becomes perceptible in the state which it produces within the ego: for instance, when its criticism evokes a sense of guilt…The proper field for our observation is always the ego. It is, so to speak, the medium through which we try to get a picture of the other two institutions.”

Like in a Flow state, when the Superego is not as active, Id craving and Ego activity become smooth, which points to the Super-ego as being part of the effort to change course, and is actually a little bit like a form of aggression, which is needed in order to learn something new and implant knowledge into the Ego. As learning becomes habitual, the Ego and Id can move from craving to motor activity very easily. When objects of desire are blameless, they can be acted upon with what people normally call a clear conscience. “Different instinctual impulses are perpetually forcing their way from the id into the ego, where they gain access to the motor apparatus, by means of which they obtain gratification…In favorable cases the ego does not object to the intruder but puts its own energies at the other’s disposal and confines itself to perceiving; it notes the onset of the instinctual impulse, the heightening of tension and the feelings of unpleasure by which this is accompanied and, finally, the relief from tension when gratification is experienced. Observation of the whole process gives us a clear and undistorted picture of the instinctual impulse concerned, the quantity of [craving] with which it is [invested], and the aim which it pursues. The ego, if it assents to the impulse, does not enter into the picture at all.”

The reason why Freud looked at the pleasure principle as being in conflict with the reality principle was because external conflicts, especially extreme ones that threaten survival, require control mechanisms to monitor danger. In psychoanalysis, this monitoring can be more or less conscious and requires very quick pivoting, and here you can see where experiences of ambivalence over desire can be paralyzing when it comes to decision-making. The Id is looking for any objects for pleasure, as well as replacements in the environment, called the Primary Process, and here hypocrisy can be found, because in the search for pleasure, if there was no Superego to monitor ethics, the Id could quickly make recognitions from Id to Ego on all the opportunities for gratification accessible in the environment regardless of ethics. With a normal adult mind that has gone through childhood development with parents, the Superego is already there making adjustments in real time, which is the Secondary Process.

How desire works is that it starts with a primitive hallucination of unconscious wishes that can become barely conscious in dreaming, and often forgotten. By studying dreams, which behave differently than conscious thought, Sigmund Freud found that they were not necessarily meaningless as psychology beforehand posited. With Displacement, desires that are dangerous to fulfill, or cannot be fulfilled without some form of punishment or shame, which are both painful, they economically need to invest in alternative thoughts and objects to avoid these forms of pain. This way the totally unethical primary process, that doesn’t think about consequences, needs to be adjusted as soon as possible through the ego territory. What fires together, wires together, and so a bundling of associations builds in the mind with repetition and leads to what Freud called Binding, where energy becomes stable around certain ideas for gratification. Craving, or libido, is the feeling connected with the need to repeat satisfaction with the same ideas and objects, which is why it’s difficult to change habits and addictions if there isn’t a sufficient amount of tolerance or boredom to urge exploration. When new stages of sexual, or energetic development are attempted, failures in achieving satisfaction make the old bindings become attractive to return to, even if they were once boring. There must be a mechanism involved where tolerance and boredom abate if there is enough time away from those gratifications to create a sense of home to return to while at the same time this home can be a platform for further exploration.

Overdetermination appears for Freud when many associations, like from day-to-day life mix in with buried traumas and unconscious wishes in the already altered manifest dream material. Condensation is the process, kind of like beating around the bush with Displacement, where dream materials circle around a point of intersection. It’s pointing to a missing satisfaction, the latent dream material, while being camouflaged enough to keep one safe. This is kind of like wanting to admit to a desire, but only when an environment is found where that confession is allowed without punishment. Starting at the breast and later onto food and sex, the mind is creating identities around repeated savoring and satisfaction. It eventually finds favorites that allow for more repetition and can be gotten away with in terms of punishment or shame, or they are stable sources of pleasure that are blameless, and therefore safe. When these wishes are made conscious and acted upon in skillful ways then they go from unstable forms of energy, that sometimes blurt out in Freudian slips and humor, into more stable enterprises that can be talked about consciously and pursued in a controlled manner. Humor of course taps into the energy of others in which many people connect their own personal understandings leading to outbursts. For example, I remember being in a high school assembly one time and a teacher was speaking and wanted to say a different word but instead said the word orgasm, and the student body erupted in laughter for an extended period of time while she lowered her head in shame. In some ways, her being an authority figure, but having the same desires as the audience, created an endearment because the audience appeared equal with the authority figure for a short period of time.

Desire moves back and forth between the different forces of encouragement and discouragement with hypocrisy and ambivalence in tow. Reactivity can motivate behaviors that are the opposite of what is censured, which are reaction formations, to become a counterattack when one cannot trust oneself. “The instinctual impulses continue to pursue their aims with their own peculiar tenacity and energy, and they make hostile incursions into the ego, in the hope of overthrowing it by a surprise attack. The ego on its side becomes suspicious; it proceeds to counterattack and to invade the territory of the id. Its purpose is to put the instincts permanently out of action by means of appropriate defensive measures, designed to secure its own boundaries.”

As skills increase, along with the boredom, which is kind of like an authentic motivation for development, those skills advance and allow one to explore more of the world and it’s more refined satisfactions, which is the process of sublimation, to make something sublime. It taps into what we consider beautiful, useful, efficient, smart, and culturally meaningful. As culture advances, many forms of gratification are known to adults and there can be common ones identified to help the analyst to understand the mind of the patient and detect what is currently unconscious. “The task of the analytic observer is to split up the picture, representing as it does a compromise between the separate institutions, into its component parts: the id, the ego, and, it may be, the superego…All the defensive measures of the ego against the id are carried out silently and invisibly. The most that we can ever do is to reconstruct them in retrospect: we can never really witness them in operation. This statement applies, for instance, to successful repression. The ego knows nothing of it; we are aware of it only subsequently, when it becomes apparent that something is missing…When we try to form an objective judgment about a particular individual, we realize that certain id impulses are absent which we should expect to make their appearance in the ego in pursuit of gratification. If they never emerge at all, we can only assume that access to the ego is permanently denied to them, i.e., that they have succumbed to repression…The same is true of successful reaction formation, which is one of the most important measures adopted by the ego as a permanent protection against the id. Such formations appear almost unheralded in the ego in the course of a child’s development.”

Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v5qdor5-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-7.html

Now, not all repressions are bad, because from childhood to adulthood, we have to negotiate with others to gain appropriate rewards that are sustainable so as to avoid conflict. The analyst tries to help the patient find more options for gratification that are unnecessarily repressed but just as hard to see in the patient is what is culturally accepted as what should be repressed. Unnecessary repression can involve symptoms of frustration that are witnessed by the analyst as interfering with a patient’s lifestyle, or more acutely leading to symptoms of mental illness. “The obscurity of a successful repression is only equaled by the transparency of the repressive process when the movement is reversed, i.e., when the repressed material returns, as may be observed in neurosis [frustration]. Here we can trace every stage in the conflict between the instinctual impulse and the ego’s defense.”

People can all be different in that they find satisfaction in intimate relationships more than sublimation or vice versa, but for neurosis to happen, there are intense desires in the patient that are struggling to come out, but also this intensity is more likely to manifest when alternative satisfactions are yet to be discovered and acted upon. The patient cannot find an outlet. Again, the example of sublimation shows that one cannot engage in all gratifying activities at the same time. They must concentrate on them one at a time, or mix a small combination together in one activity. When one is in a flow state, part of the pleasure is the lack of ambivalence and stress related to making a decision. Many people have a variety of things they enjoy, which may include not only intimate relationships lusted after, but also coveted vocations and longed for experiences that have been denied thus far. When engaging in them, frustration neurosis is not apparent, even if a lifestyle is out of balance in another area. A healthy person can move from one activity to another and even if common satisfactions are missing in their lives, they may appear completely functional because they have enough with what they can easily access to avoid neurosis. But when frustration arises in a debilitating way, the analyst brings those excitements of what’s missing, from the patients material arising in free association, to consciousness, and then they witness the internal conflicts become manifest in defensive behavior that wants to avoid facing them.

This is partly why psychoanalysts and similar types of psychologists can look like perverse tempters that allow analysands the space to entertain miscreant propositions. Analysts can then be more in line with the culture and religious views that look at consequences for worshipping a “Golden Calf,” so to say, and others are more rebellious and desire for subcultures to arise so as to allow more places for people to exist differently than in an overly conformist body politic. Patients can then choose therapists according to their goals so as to develop confidence and reduce shame for their desires, or in other cases, a person is so wild, they need to increase their shame and control their behavior so as to maintain important relationships. The wrong choice would be to place a patient who needs to close down their counterproductive wild behavior to an analyst that wants them to open up even more or conversely to place a patient that needs to open up with an analyst who closes down too many alternatives. You end up with patients who are heading for very conflictual relationships in the culture or people too inhibited to realize their potentials. Filmmaker Lars Von Trier, who has in the past enjoyed making restrictions with his moviemaking to enhance creativity, in an interview explained his upbringing as an example of too little restriction. “I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not do what I liked. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or got drunk on white wine. After a childhood like that, you search for restrictions in your own life.” This is an example that is rarely talked about that happened more often, later in the 20th century, with the worst consequences of bad therapy, where therapists literally seduced or implanted suggestions for savoring that were ultimately sabotaging to the patient. Earlier in the 20th century there was more of an emphasis to desire to remove restrictions in dress, culture and behavior from the 1800s that were thought to retard intellect and exploration.

The Ten Commandments – The Golden Calf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id6oS3L-D9A

Antichrist trailer – Lars Von Trier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr7xQl2kvd0

Lars Von Trier’s upbringing: http://www.signandsight.com/features/465.html

For patients in neurosis caused by too much restriction, and who have few options for satisfaction in life, they are relying only on their defenses which are exhausting and hard to maintain. Repression provides only a temporary peace in these instances and those eruptions provide clues. Anna Freud used an example of the defense mechanism of reaction formation, and when at times it failed, the analyst had to be quick to notice before the patient began dissembling into what they felt was a more comfortable and acceptable opposite response. “…Reaction formation can best be studied when such formations are in the process of disintegration. In such a case the id’s inroad takes the form of a reinforcement of the [craving investment] of the primitive instinctual impulse which the reaction formation concealed. This enables the impulse to force its way into consciousness, and, for a time, instinctual impulse and reaction formation are visible within the ego side by side. Owing to another function of the ego—its tendency to synthesis—this condition of affairs, which is particularly favorable for analytic observation, lasts only for a few moments at a time. Then a fresh conflict arises between id derivative and ego activity, a conflict to decide which of the two is to keep the upper hand or what compromise they will adopt…If through reinforcement of its energy [attachment] the defense set up by the ego is successful, the invading force from the id is routed and peace reigns once more in the psyche—a situation most unfruitful for our observations.”

This is also why hypnosis was so often unsuccessful as a long-term therapy. “When a piece of unconscious material came to light in hypnosis, the physician introduced it to the ego, and the effect of thus forcibly bringing it into consciousness was to clear up the symptom. But the ego took no part in the therapeutic process. It tolerated the intruder only so long as it was itself under the influence of the physician who had induced hypnosis. Then it revolted and began a new struggle to defend itself against that element of the id which had been forced upon it, and so the laboriously achieved therapeutic success was [destroyed]. Thus it came about that the greatest triumph of hypnotic technique—the complete elimination of the ego during the period of investigation—proved prejudicial to permanent results and disillusionment as to the value of the technique set in.”

Psychoanalysis itself can be a barrier when the ego functions are treated with little value as seen in hypnotism. The Superego should not be treated as a pollutant, but as an entity that provides more useful information. “Even in free association the role of the ego is at first still a negative one. It is true that the patient’s ego is no longer forcibly eliminated. Instead, it is required to refrain from criticizing the associations. The ego is, in fact, requested to be silent and the id is invited to speak and promised that its derivatives shall not encounter the usual difficulties if they emerge into consciousness.” Id derivatives in the form of craving and ego suggestions for satisfaction, as unconscious as they are, provide constant pressure on the ego to act, but when in therapy it is not about acting out. “The warrant is valid only for their translation into word representations: it does not entitle them to take control of the motor apparatus, which is their real purpose in emerging. Indeed, this apparatus is put out of action in advance by the strict rules of analytic technique. Thus we have to play a double game with the patient’s instinctual impulses, on the one hand encouraging them to express themselves and, on the other, steadily refusing them gratification—a procedure which incidentally gives rise to one of the numerous difficulties in the handling of analytic technique.”

As the Ego and Superego relax in free association, more and more material arises, and there the therapist has to notice the different kinds of changes to the material, like in an interrupted meditation, to notice the defenses and when they arose and what topics were interfered with. If there’s an interruption by a defense, can the defense be recognized? One has to look at how the association content changed. Failure to notice the significances of these changes means authentic material coming from the patient fails to be understood and a danger may arise of relying too much on external theories, imitation, and suggestions coming from the analyst and culture, causing fresh repression.

“The ego keeps silence for a time and the id derivatives make use of this pause to force their way into consciousness. The analyst hastens to catch their utterances. Then the ego bestirs itself again, repudiates the attitude of passive tolerance which it has been compelled to assume, and by means of one or other of its customary defense mechanisms intervenes in the flow of associations. The patient transgresses the fundamental rule of analysis, or, as we say, he puts up ‘resistances.’ This means that the inroad of the id into the ego has given place to a counterattack by the ego upon the id. The observer’s attention is now diverted from the associations to the resistance, i.e., from the content of the id to the activity of the ego. The analyst has an opportunity of witnessing, then and there, the putting into operation by the latter of one of those defensive measures against the id which I have already described and which are so obscure, and it now behooves him to make it the object of his investigation…The unconscious elements in the ego have no inclination to become conscious and derive no advantage from so doing. Hence any piece of ego analysis is much less satisfactory than the analysis of the id. It has to proceed by circuitous paths, it cannot follow out the ego activity directly, the only possibility is to reconstruct it from its influence on the patient’s associations.”

So a feeling can be noticed by the patient in how the craving discharges into a sense of relief as opposed to the experience of binding, or habit pleasure taking control by the dominant personality that still feels neurotic. So like in a meditation, one has to relax the need to put together meanings in real time and let the material, no matter how incomprehensible it may be, to become conscious. There is room for the ego later on to piece together meaning when there’s enough abundant material to work with, kind of like having enough puzzles pieces to complete the picture.

A relaxed ego allows material to arise, and the ego’s interruptions provides material about defenses. The defenses provide information of what it considers is a “wrong” desire and superimposes a “right” desire, but that would be an ego-content not an id-content, which may be the correct thing to do before someone acts, but that is when one is outside of analysis. It’s important at first to find the real contents to hopefully understand what’s missing in the patient’s life. “It is the analyst’s business first of all to recognize the defense mechanism. When he has done this, he has accomplished a piece of ego analysis. His next task is to undo what has been done by the defense, i.e., to find out and restore to its place that which has been omitted through repression, to rectify displacements, and to bring that which has been isolated back into its true context. When he has re-established the severed connections, he turns his attention once more from the analysis of the ego to that of the id…It is only when observation is focused now on the id and now on the ego and the direction of interest is twofold, extending to both sides of the human being whom we have before us, that we can speak of psychoanalysis, as distinct from the one-sided method of hypnosis.”

Free Association and Dreams

To go into the heart of psychoanalysis there needs to be an examination of free association and dreaming material, which sounds like fun, but there are many pitfalls. The problem is that free association isn’t completely free. One is not allow to act out in a therapeutic environment, because it’s really more of an insight environment. Like in meditation, there are so many rules to keep patients in a state where they are releasing material internally, so that a cookie-cutter approach to interpretation and rationalization is avoided. For example, Lacan emphasized non-omission and non-systemization with his practice. Because wishes are so important to uncover, one has to realize that one wish may be a defense against another wish that is more freeing. As long as information can be connected or associated together, there’s often room to find deeper wishes when the content remains distorted, interrupted, blocked, or if there are prolonged silences. Remember that therapists are doing therapy, so that the sense of freedom allows the patient to be more direct about their desires and more skillful in how they navigate the world and other people. Real obstacles have to be respected, but some freedom can be discovered when obstacles are found to be self-imposed.

Free association also includes insights that popup naturally where the unconscious releases helpful information, and ideally, the client after treatment will be able to just do that on their own independently. These insights are also not set in stone. Just because someone makes an association, it can’t always been assumed to be accurate. False associations should also be cleared up in the name of the reality principle. When following associations towards daydreams, they are also good material to discover wishes and a sign that one is following the pleasure principle. That pursuit of pleasure in ideas will eventually find bumps in the road. “‘The most important sign’ of a connection between two thoughts is the length of the patient’s hesitation between them.”

Beyond hesitations, how the patient reacts to their own surprising content can provide even more information about defenses and self-esteem. The patient may reveal a disconnect from their mind and body. Anna Freud noticed that “‘the attitude of a particular individual toward his free associations in analysis and the manner in which, when left to himself, he masters the demands of his instincts and wards off unwelcome affects enable us to deduce a priori the nature of his symptoms.’ In other words, free associations are both a window and a mirror. Now given the fact that the ego at its nethermost and uppermost levels is a body ego, may we not push Anna Freud’s statement further and say that the body percept is ultimately the source of free associations and the patient’s attitude to free-associating?” The body also provides body language, and how the body moves related to the content can give therapists more clues to the patient’s exhausting defenses.

To remind people of how exhausting defenses are, it’s important to know what may be rattling around in people’s minds at any given time. People are unique but there are many patterns to self-loathing. Patients could be struggling with the following:

• Incestuous thoughts.
• Sadistic or masochistic fantasies.
• Fetishes or non-normative desires.
• Unconscious attraction towards the analyst.
• Hostile wishes towards family and acquaintances.
• Revenge fantasies.
• Resentment towards the analyst.
• Embarrassing childish desires.
• Pathetic desires for dependence.
• Memories of public embarrassment.
• Feelings of impotence and weakness.
• Feeling that one is stupid beyond what is possible.
• Dislike of imperfections in the body and its lack of functionality.
• Fear of one’s impulsive nature.
• Guilt over past mistakes and missed opportunities.
• Fear of loneliness.
• Fear of death.
• Harboring socially unacceptable prejudices and biases.
• Self-punishment fantasies for unresolved guilt.
• Fantasies of punishment and self-sabotage to avoid challenges.
• Fantasies of sickness and malingering to avoid unpleasant activities.

Usually defenses are erected with denial and dismissal, but if there’s a enough safety for the patient to be candid, there is an opportunity in a therapeutic environment to find some release that isn’t normally found in the world out there, because this is the only place where there’s an audience willing to listen, ideally without judgment.

Part of what makes free association work is how it reduces the bonds of narrative that usually repress the honest content that needs to be released. “The more completely we relax into passivity, the more nearly does free association approximate to the psychic mechanisms of dreams and hypnosis. Linkage by sentences begins to loosen, the verbal formulation of thoughts yields noticeably to concrete imagery, to the direct contemplation of living figures as scenes which rise into the mind’s eye. The temporal framework also loosens on equal footing with the consciousness of the complete passivity of our inner experience. Memories of the past and desires for the future are experienced with the vividness of actual current events. That is about the extreme limit of waking thought. With a further increase of psychic relaxation, consciousness becomes more vague and nebulous. After the dissolution of the temporal framework, the spatial objectivity of things begins to weaken; exuberantly fantastic elements, i.e. asyntactical [tense] imaginal [compounds], begin to insert themselves between the scenically arranged groups.”

Releasing Karma Through Sustained Contact with the Absolute – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/wh9liDGaFT0?si=W8sHgA6tcAt2Y1pv

In the next phase, “passivity [is] replaced by activity. [There is] an increase in adaptive and synthetic ego functioning. As in the artistically creative process, so in associating, the temporarily decreased boundaries permit fusion of new [insights], new emergencies or hitherto unperceived relations between the ideational content of different temporal, logical, and other orders; insight emerges, partly as spontaneous necessary wholes, partly by trial and error, as a result of oscillation from regression of certain ego functions to an increase in others.” The speech begins to lose words like conjunctions and resembles a more biblical style. “The situation is analogous to a spring held down by two weights, and when one is removed the spring moves accordingly. The attendant free associations, a controlled regression in service of the ego, is—in spite of its secondary process nature because it is speech—that speech which comes closest to indicating or reflecting primary process.”

In this state, the patient is now dependent on the analyst, and hopefully this is a good analyst, and so they get a chance to imitate and develop through another person. Just like how Anna Freud pointed out the glue of imitation in the mind and how people in our environment leave imprints of themselves in our memories, we tend to be attracted to the ego-ideal, which represents the people in our lives that we think are “cool,” successful, and have all the answers, like a deity. The therapists in that position have to respect the sensitivity of the client. “Regressively mental illness is experienced by the patient as punishment, and health as a gift won through appeasing offended parents and deities; the submission to honest verbalization and the existence of external restrictions ‘lend an aura of confession to the flow of associations, make an inquisition of the analyst’s quest for data, find condemnation in his silences, and sense accusations in his interpretations.’ Functions of auxiliary ego and also superego are delegated to the analyst, and furthermore, the healthy normal cooperative superego is operative within the positive transference and the working alliance as it and not the infantile passivity of the experiencing ego supports the emergence of painful conflicts.” Because many traumas from the past haven’t been verbalized, the affects can now get labels to increase their understandability. “Affects expressed in words are henceforth external as well as internal realities.”

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

As therapeutic results are found here and there, the analysand is actually learning the skill of being a good patient in that they get better at insight and authenticity because they don’t interrupt their mind’s contents with defenses as much as before, and at the same time they are learning to feel impulses fully while not acting on them. They are becoming more balanced. “We must agree that a patient who does not associate is not analyzed, that a good deal of the analyst’s work consists in holding the patient to free association up to the very end, and that throughout the treatment the patient’s capacity to free-associate is an index of his analytical progress.” There also may be a need to air out more pressing issues for the patient that need an audience now. The analyst may have to hear the patient say “I was going to free associate, but I’d better tell you what is really on my mind.”

When in a proper free association state, the patient has to maintain immediacy with the content as it comes out in real time. “One of the commonest problems in free association occurs when the patient tells about rather than tells as it is or as it is happening. Telling about lacks immediacy and points to a certain self-awareness on the part of the speaker. In this connection we recall the postulate of medieval mystics: if one is aware that one is praying, it’s not the perfect prayer. Ferenczi judged, ‘So long as the patient introduces every idea with the phrase, ‘I think that’, he shows that he is inserting a critical examination between the perception and the communication of the idea.’ In this connection, what I call framing devices are indicators of the ego’s manifest control in associating.” Patients may also desire to insert interpretations in the middle of the phase where data needs to be gathered. “The patient cannot simultaneously free associate and observe its sequence.” This includes defensive measures to distance from traumatic memories by describing them in the past tense. It means that the affect associated with the memories is being blocked. “The present [tense]…has the property of conveying most readily…’the feeling of presence.’ The therapist’s chamber is like a control-room in a submerged submarine with the patient looking into the periscope and describing to the analyst what he sees there.” In this presence, it’s not just the patient saying what they are thinking, but also communicating internal images, sounds, memories of smells and tastes, and also bodily sensations and non-verbal sounds.

When inevitably the patient’s mind wanders too much, the analyst can refocus with presence. “I find it helpful to stimulate free association at various times during the session by asking the patient in a definite way: ‘Tell me what is in your mind right now.’ The difference sounds small, yet it is considerable. What matters is the now, the urgency of the request. Usually the patient will answer this request more spontaneously than the general question, ‘What comes to mind?'”

Similar to free association and hypnosis, dreaming in sleep also prevents motor activity, unless there’s sleep walking. “The dreamer’s psychic state differs little from that of the patient during the analytic hour. When he obeys the fundamental rule of analysis he voluntarily suspends some functions of the ego; in the dreamer this suspension takes place automatically under the influence of sleep.” Sleep also provides some insight into how parts of the Ego and Superego are active in censorship. Much like studying for an exam and letting the mind sleep so as to organize the materials learned, it’s a reminder to the skeptical that the mind is active in the unconscious, because without activity, the ability to habituate new information would be absent when the patient wakes up in the morning and finds the recall more effortless than the day before. “The effect of the censorship, the translation of latent dream thoughts into manifest dream content, with the distortions, condensations, displacements, reversals, and omissions which this involves, corresponds to the distortions which take place in the associations under the pressure of some resistance. Dream interpretation, then, assists us in our investigation of the id, insofar as it is successful in bringing to light latent dream thoughts (id content), and in our investigation of the ego institutions and their defensive operations, insofar as it enables us to reconstruct the measures adopted by the censor from their effect upon the dream thoughts.”

The difficulty of dream interpretation is that one cannot instantly know what these image contents really mean from the get go. Analysts need to gain experience, have a lot of cultural knowledge, and in a modern environment of multiculturalism, there is the common hazard of falling into misinterpretation. As cultures also secularize, traditional religious symbols are waning as they are replaced by different ones, so being culturally informed improves accuracy with interpretations. “One by-product of dream interpretation, namely, the understanding of dream symbols, contributes largely to the success of our study of the id. Symbols are constant and universally valid relations between particular id contents and specific word or thing representations. The knowledge of these relations enables us to draw reliable inferences from conscious manifestations as to the unconscious material behind them, without having first laboriously to reverse some measure which the ego has adopted in defense. The technique of translating symbols is a short cut to understanding, or, more correctly, a way of plunging from the highest strata of consciousness to the lowest strata of the unconscious without pausing at the intermediate strata of former ego activities which may in time past have forced a particular id content to assume a specific ego form. The knowledge of the language of symbols has the same sort of value for the understanding of the id as mathematical formulae have for the solution of typical problems. Such formulae may be used with advantage. It does not matter if one is ignorant of the way in which they were originally arrived at.” Regardless of symbols, the focus has to be on the wishes trying to break free and the defenses desiring more adaptation to the external world. There’s always a conflict between desire and safety, with materials occasionally breaking out in unconscious speech or behaviors, as found in periods of acting out.

There are many ways to analyze dreams and each psychology sub-modality in psychoanalysis had their own opinions. Certainly if Id irruptions were allowed to happen in an unrestricted way, many people would not be able to get any sleep. There’s an element of mental processing that allows for sleep and the clarification of material. Some believed in manifest content that needs to be decoded into the latent content. Orthodox Freudian views emphasized imitation, jealousy and rivalry found in the Oedipus Complex, but others want to delve into pre-Oedipal timelines before language. Psychoanalysts saw transference situations that were reflective of more recent events as well as personality elements. Later psychologists focused on problem solving in dreams to resolve ambivalence. Freudian analysis is more focused on removing repression to improve adaptability with wishes and to foster an enjoyment of well-being coming from a reduced effort towards defensiveness. Like in free association, there should be a feeling of freedom to say something that was prohibited before hand, like a feeling of “finally, I can say what I really want to.” A discharge satisfaction. That catharsis connects with an understanding for people who finally learn where to go to develop new skills and increase their mastery in a consciously direct way, so repetition compulsions reduce their influence, and anger is channeled towards movements of progress, as opposed to more conflict or self-sabotage.

These feelings that look for pleasure and want to avoid pain orient the psychologist when they are lost in a sea of material. If wishes were frustrated, when were they, and by whom, or what circumstances? If material beats around the bush, what temptations existed in the environment at the time? What family members, caregivers, or friends were in the environment? What objects of desire were accessible? What actions in the environment could provide pleasure in a way that could be punished or is shameful? If a victim of abuse feels safe enough to talk about what happened, or if there’s enough trust for there be a confession of shameful behavior, a discharge of energy can be enjoyed that before upheld the defenses: An energy savings. The more a patient is able to convince themselves about how much they learned, especially how to master these situations, or avoid them, the less shame they carry going forward. They can explain themselves to others when interrogated because they are or have improved the situation in their lives and that becomes proof of their development and how they are now. Here’s a Freud summary for convenience on how content gets distorted:

• Displacement: The emotional intensity or significance of a latent thought is shifted to a less important or seemingly unrelated element in the manifest dream, to redirect attention away from threatening or anxiety-inducing thoughts, protecting the dreamer from conscious distress. If the affect is too strong for the unrelated material, where would it fit more appropriately in the patient’s history?
• Condensation: The merging of multiple latent thoughts or elements into a single image or idea in the manifest dream, to compact and obscure the latent content, making it harder for the conscious mind to decipher. “One element in the manifest dream may correspond to numerous elements in the latent dream-thoughts; but, conversely too, one element in the [latent] dream-thoughts may be represented by several images in the dream.” Is there a pattern of repeated content that points to many repressed memories, or is there one repressed memory that points to many different conscious contents?
• Symbolization: Abstract thoughts, desires, or conflicts are translated into symbolic, often visual images or actions in the manifest dream, to disguise the latent content in ways that make it less recognizable and less likely to provoke conscious resistance. Are there symbolic images that express themes, meanings, or patterns? When these meanings are explored, are there feelings that now finally begin to arise related to wishes, conflicts, and obstacles?
• Dramatization/Rationalization/Rehearsal: After the dream is constructed, the mind tries to make the fragmented, disjointed manifest content more coherent and logical by filling gaps, editing out what doesn’t fit or creating a narrative, to make the dream appear more understandable to the conscious mind upon recollection, further disguising the latent content. Are there stories that alter any facts or fill in gaps that are verified to be false? Is there a rationalization that prevents a person from developing a difficult skill? Is a patient acting out in ways that look like a rehearsal of past situations?

Dreams – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtl55-the-psychopathology-of-everyday-life-sigmund-freud.html

Humour – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtm13-humour-sigmund-freud.html

Transference

One of the means of gaining information about patients and their unconscious ego structures come from transference reactions in the analytical sphere. Because of repetition, binding, and habit, there’s an ease of slipping into these experiences and a difficulty in letting go of them. They can show how a person has used these catastrophizing predictions as a way to understand the world and cope with themselves. It provides a history for the analyst to explore and understand. When were these defenses used in the past? Are these skills obsolete now? What are more advanced responses to similar situations? When they are deeply embedded habits they can be a form of repetition compulsion where these transference reactions literally are repetitive and compulsive. As a refresher, Repetition Compulsion is often described as being motivated by a need to master a difficult situation. Remembering difficult situations in a repetition compulsion is exactly that, a compulsion, which means it interrupts conscious day-to-day functioning with a motor response of reactivity to rehearse a skill until it is confident that it can be ready for a similar situation in the future. If the skills aren’t there, then it keeps repeating, even if people are caught in addictions, repeated conflicts, and reproduced attempts at self-sabotage. Making these patterns conscious allows the conscious ego to face a problem and develop more appropriate skills in a less compulsive way. Like in the Flow model, the brain unconsciously seeks challenges to surmount, and if the person is in over their head, there can be an obsession with finishing off the challenge if the consequences do not make it into awareness for the patient. “By transference we mean all those impulses experienced by the patient in his relation with the analyst which are not newly created by the objective analytic situation but have their source in early—indeed, the very earliest—object relations…[For example], the patient finds himself disturbed in his relation to the analyst by passionate emotions, e.g., love, hate, jealousy, and anxiety, which do not seem to be justified by the facts of the actual situation. The patient himself resists these emotions and feels ashamed, humiliated, and so forth, when they manifest themselves against his will…Because these impulses are repetitions and not new creations, they are of incomparable value as a means of information about the patient’s past affective experiences.”

Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Freud & Beyond – War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

With repeated Oedipus Complex situations in the past as well as repeated humiliations leading to an intimidation, or Castration Complex, the patient can see how unskillful these reactions are, and by making conscious what was unconscious, the compulsive nature begins to wane. “Further investigation reveals the true character of these affects—they are irruptions of the id…They become comprehensible and indeed are justified if we disengage them from the analytic situation and insert them into some infantile affective situation. When thus put back into their proper place, they help us to fill up [memory gaps] in the patient’s past and provide us with fresh information about his infantile instinctual and affective life. Generally he is quite willing to cooperate with us in our interpretation, for he himself feels that the transferred affective impulse is an intrusive foreign body. By putting it back into its place in the past we release him from an impulse in the present which is alien to his ego, thus enabling him to carry on the work of analysis.” Defense measures also point to the character of the Id desires and what it is about them that need a particular defense. Those defenses can also be layered based on the age the patient used them and how they adapted over time or if new defenses took their place at a later stage. Going as far back as possible in the history of the patient also helps them to disidentify with those defenses so that better methods for dealing with desire can be taken on. Anna viewed the Id as “a libidinal or aggressive element,” and to the ego is attributed the defense mechanism. The reality is that they are conjoined so qualitative characteristics are needed to figure out which is which. It pops the bubble of belief in the conceptual ego as being an independent entity when so many defensive measures were found to be imitated from earlier environments and Id desires were also contingent on proximity and availability for temptations to arise, therefore object choices have to be accessible before they can be identified with. This of course is difficult because the most habitual behaviors are now considered ego syntonic, or a part of one’s personality, so “whenever the interpretation touches on the unknown elements of the ego, its activities in the past, that ego is wholly opposed to the work of analysis. Here evidently we have the situation which we commonly describe by the not very felicitous term ‘character analysis.'”

Another way of comparing Id contents from Ego defenses is looking at the automatic nature of thoughts and the effort made on the part of the patient to stop or control. “The uninterrupted flow of associations throws light on the contents of the id; the occurrence of a resistance, on the defense mechanisms employed by the ego. The only difference is that interpretations of the transference relate exclusively to the past and may light up in a moment whole periods of the patient’s past life, while the id contents revealed in free association are not connected with any particular period and the ego’s defensive operations, manifested during the analytic hour in the form of resistance to free association, may belong to his present life also.” Any so called acting out, may happen at this time with the patient where their desires and defenses are acted on in a compulsive way that is damaging, which has to be negotiated at the beginning of treatment as something to never act on, but if that contract is broken, there need to be interpretations applied as soon as possible so as to reduce their compulsive nature based on further understanding.

Defenses

By focusing not only on id contents, in terms of translations of symbols, but also including defenses as well as transferences, a fuller picture will arise for the analyst and more of the unconscious, including unconscious Ego and Superego elements will become conscious for the patient. These insights will include not just their unfulfilled desires but also all the obstacles in life that got in the way and certain realities will appear that require the patient to develop new skills, hence the emphasis Anna Freud made about the importance of education. If the goal in psychoanalysis is love and work, both of these require skills before satisfaction can be realistically had. Many people are well acquainted with their fantasies, and them being conscious may not mean they can act on them at the level of development they have. Desire follows a path of least resistance, which may lead to bad choices, and questions about the necessary resources, including the time and money required to upskill, can be a strong force that demotivates change. Any goals related to social concerns about rejection are potent in how they can discourage a patient from developing further. There are also challenges that can never be solved and acceptance is the only therapeutic response possible. Here are some examples of how desire, obstacles, and defensiveness can lead to anxiety and internal conflict.

• Criticism leading to reaction formations based on cultural norms and the need for social attention or recognition. Feeling better by getting social rewards or reducing social punishments.
• Anticipation of criticism (eg. witnessing others being criticized). Feeling better by avoiding criticism.
• Physical obstacles or consequences (dangers hidden behind façade, or a fear of loss of important relationships or rewards). Feeling better by avoiding challenges that are considered too difficult and providing safety by avoiding traps.
• Skill/intelligence obstacles (low self-esteem and low self-efficacy). Avoiding challenges that make one feel low self-esteem and avoiding skill development.
• A comparison with better object choices. Feeling better by choosing the optimal choice. Maximizer vs. Satisficer.
• Avoidance of unpleasant thoughts. Feeling better by actively thinking about neutral or positive subjects.
• Projection: Not accepting repressed thoughts as one’s own. Feeling better by avoiding consequences and shifting them to someone else.
• Sublimation of original object-choice to a socially acceptable one. Feeling better by enjoying activities that are free of social sanction.
• Denial of reality, because reality is too unpleasant. Enjoying fantasies that feel better than reality.
• Forgetting unpleasant events. Feeling better by not having painful memories arise.

By taking advantage of all the different types of information coming from the client, a fuller picture arises that is more authentic for that particular patient and not just a cut and paste job with theories overlaid. This is why the analyst will appear more positive or negative because sooner or later all the psychological institutions will have been touched upon. The patient may feel a tingling as electricity looking for discharge and freedom, which leads to a positive transference towards the analyst, but feelings of embarrassment and shame can bring on criticism. “We know that the id impulses have of themselves no inclination to remain unconscious. They naturally tend upward and are perpetually striving to make their way into consciousness and so to achieve gratification or at least to send up derivatives to the surface of consciousness. The analyst’s work follows the same direction as, and reinforces, this upward tendency. Thus to the repressed elements in the id he appears in the light of a helper and liberator…With the ego and the superego the case is different. Insofar as the ego institutions have endeavored to restrain the id impulses by methods of their own, the analyst comes on the scene as a disturber of the peace. In the course of his work he abolishes repressions which have been laboriously achieved and destroys compromise formations whose effect, indeed, was pathological but whose form was perfectly ego syntonic. The analyst’s aim in bringing the unconscious into consciousness and the efforts of the ego institutions to master the instinctual life are contrary to one another. Hence, except insofar as the patient’s insight into his illness determines matters otherwise, the ego institutions regard the analyst’s purpose as a menace…The ego is antagonistic to the analysis, in that it is unreliable and biased in its self-observation and, while conscientiously registering and passing on certain facts, falsifies and rejects others and prevents them from coming to light—a procedure wholly contrary to the methods of analytic research, which insists on seeing everything that emerges, without discrimination. Finally, the ego is itself the object of analysis, in that the defensive operations in which it is perpetually engaged are carried on unconsciously and can be brought into consciousness only at a considerable expenditure of effort, very much like the unconscious activity of any of the prohibited instinctual impulses.”

With experience, analysis begins to show predictable patterns for the analyst that will give them insight into the patient who is learning interpretations about these contents for the first time. “…In analysis all the material which assists us to analyze the ego makes its appearance in the form of resistance to the analysis of the id. The facts are so self-evident that explanation seems almost superfluous. The ego becomes active in the analysis whenever it desires by means of a counteraction to prevent an inroad by the id. Since it is the aim of the analytic method to enable ideational representatives of repressed instincts to enter consciousness, i.e., to encourage these inroads by the id, the ego’s defensive operations against such representatives automatically assume the character of active resistance to analysis. And since, further, the analyst uses his personal influence to secure the observance of the fundamental rule which enables such ideas to emerge in the patient’s free associations, the defense set up by the ego against the instincts takes the form of direct opposition to the analyst himself. Hostility to the analyst and a strengthening of the measures designed to prevent the id impulses from emerging coincide automatically. When, at certain moments in the analysis, the defense is withdrawn and instinctual representatives can make their appearance unhindered in the form of free associations, the relation of the ego to the analyst is relieved of disturbance from this quarter.”

As defenses become recorded along with diagnoses of personality disorders, more patterns appear that can connect those disorders to them and timelines of development can predict which defenses are used at which time. When a diagnosis is made, then treatments may be targeted to not just the individual but also the class of disorder the patient falls into. “We know that there is a regular connection between particular neuroses and special modes of defense, as, for instance, between hysteria and repression or between obsessional neurosis and the processes of isolation and undoing. The symptom formation of hysterical patients in their conflict with their instincts is based primarily on repression: they exclude from consciousness the ideational representatives of their sexual impulses. On the other hand, we learn that the mode of defense adopted in symptom formation by the ego of the obsessional neurotic is that of isolation. It simply removes the instinctual impulses from their context, while retaining them in consciousness.”

Anna Freud’s rough chronology of defense deployments

Side-by-side with instinctual processes

Isolation – Isolating thoughts or behavior so that their links with other thoughts or with the remainder of the subject’s life are broken. Eg. Pauses in train of thought, formulas, rituals and in a general way all those measures which facilitate the insertion of a hiatus into the temporal sequence. Magical thinking that prevents psychological pain.

Undoing – Acts are hoped to be undone by an opposite action.

The period after the ego has been differentiated from the outside world

Projection – Taking internal knowledge and making guesses in the outside world.

Incorporation / Introjection / Identification – Incorporation is sampling to detect good and bad objects outside. Introjection is making a preference. Identification is when that preference becomes a habit. Identification is often synonymous with Internalization.

Repression / Suppression – Repression comes about by controlling impulses that may draw social criticism or there’s an anticipation of social criticism. Suppression involves controlling impulses because they are unpleasant to satisfy at the present time for the subject.

Reaction formation – Doing the opposite behavior after criticism or anticipation of criticism.

After Super-ego is partially developed (skill development)

Sublimation – Sublimation, i.e., the displacement of the instinctual aim in conformity with higher social values, presupposes the acceptance or at least the knowledge of such values, that is to say, presupposes the existence of the superego.

Identification with an aggressor – Imitating the forms of leverage found in authority figures to try and take power and move out of powerlessness.

Moving within stages of psychic structure

Turning against the self – Vicissitudes of the instinct. “Were it not for the intervention of the ego or of those external forces which the ego represents, every instinct would know only one fate—that of gratification.”

Reversal – Activity transformed into passivity. Eg. Sadism into masochism. Exhibitionism into voyeurism.

Regression – Reverting to a developmental past. Eg. Oral phase, Anal phase. A transition of modes of expression that are on a lower level as regards to complexity, structure and differentiation.

Superego Anxiety

The difference between the Ego and Superego are pronounced by their relationship to contents from the Id. “…Some instinctual wish seeks to enter consciousness and with the help of the ego to attain gratification. The latter would not be averse to admitting it, but the superego protests. The ego submits to the higher institution and obediently enters into a struggle against the instinctual impulse, with all the consequences which such a struggle entails…The ego itself does not regard the impulse which it is fighting as in the least dangerous. The motive which prompts the defense is not originally its own. The instinct is regarded as dangerous because the superego prohibits its gratification and, if it achieves its aim, it will certainly stir up trouble between the ego and the superego. Hence the ego of the adult neurotic fears the instincts because it fears the superego. Its defense is motivated by superego anxiety.”

This anxiety is necessary to have a conscience and not be an anti-social type, but it can also go too far in the other direction. “[The superego] sets up an ideal standard, according to which sexuality is prohibited and aggression pronounced to be antisocial. It demands a degree of sexual renunciation and restriction of aggression which is incompatible with psychic health. The ego is completely deprived of its independence and reduced to the status of an instrument for the execution of the superego’s wishes; the result is that it becomes hostile to instinct and incapable of enjoyment. The study of the situation of defense as revealed in the neurosis of adults impels us to pay very special attention in our therapeutic work to the analysis of the superego. A modification of its severity is bound to relieve the ego and to lessen the neurotic conflict.” For Anna, the parents must mirror the goals of education which are to control impulses for tactfulness but not to the point where neurosis and anxiety begin to enter the picture.

Reality must also be heeded when dealing with the aggressive impulses. Everything has to be modulated to avoid extremes.  “…The child’s aggressiveness must have an outlet in the outside world, so that it does not become dammed up and turned inward, for, if it does, it will endow the superego with cruel characteristics.” Again, the differences between children and adults is that the children are responding to external authority figures whereas the adult does deal with them but also their internal representatives. Children can best be helped by changing the environment, whereas adults need unconscious influences to become conscious so as to control those influences. Where analysis can fail is in psychosis when the patient fears their impulses because they may drown their already weak ego to begin with and lose reality for extended periods of time.

Denial

For a defense mechanism like Denial, Anna Freud put a special focus on it and how it connects with psychosis and a patient’s rejection of reality. There are many different kinds of psychoses, and in the early days of psychology many disorders and symptoms were lumped together. What Anna was talking about more closely matches with Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective Disorder, Narcissistic Psychosis, Delusion, Depersonalization, Derealization, Severe Depression, Avoidant Personality Disorder, and Postpartum Psychosis. All these situations are more emotional than an obvious psychosis based on brain injury. Anna gave an example of a patient Hans. “Hans denied reality by means of his fantasy; he transformed it to suit his own purposes and to fulfill his own wishes; then, and not till then, could he accept it…[He] denied a painful fact and in his lion fantasy turned it into its pleasurable opposite. He called the anxiety animal his friend, and its strength, instead of being a source of terror, was now at his service.”

Anna also targeted daydreams and waking fantasies with psychosis being just at the extreme end of this phenomenon. “It is difficult to say when the ego loses the power of surmounting considerable quantities of objective unpleasure by means of fantasy. We know that, even in adult life, daydreams may still play a part, sometimes enlarging the boundaries of a too narrow reality and sometimes completely reversing the real situation. But in adult years a daydream is almost of the nature of a game, a kind of byproduct with but a slight [craving attachment]; at most it serves to master quite trifling quantities of discomfort or to give the subject an illusory relief from some minor unpleasure. It seems that the original importance of the daydream as a means of defense against objective anxiety is lost when the earliest period of childhood comes to an end. For one thing, we conjecture that the faculty of reality testing is objectively reinforced, so that it can hold its own even in the sphere of affect; we also know that, in later life, the ego’s need for synthesis makes it impossible for opposites to coexist; perhaps, too, the attachment of the mature ego to reality is in general stronger than that of the infantile ego, so that, in the nature of the case, fantasy ceases to be so highly prized as in earlier years. At any rate it is certain that in adult life gratification through fantasy is no longer harmless. As soon as more considerable quantities of [emotional investment] are involved, fantasy and reality become incompatible: it must be one or the other. We know, too, that for an id impulse to make an irruption into the ego and there to obtain gratification by means of hallucination spells, for an adult, psychotic disease. An ego which attempts to save itself anxiety and renunciation of instinct and to avoid neurosis by denying reality is overstraining this mechanism.”

All the challenges in life experienced through reality testing that create this dislike are put under the heading of repression for Anna and on the side of the patient, there is an acute weakness for adaptation. “We do not yet know precisely what takes place in the adult ego when it chooses delusional gratification and renounces the function of reality testing. It severs itself from the outside world and entirely ceases to register external stimuli. In the instinctual life such insensitiveness to inner stimuli can be acquired in only one way—by the mechanism of repression…It can be employed only so long as it can exist side by side with the capacity for reality testing without disturbing it. The organization of the mature ego becomes unified through synthesis and this method of denial is then discarded and is resumed only if the relation to reality has been gravely disturbed and the function of reality testing suspended. In psychotic delusions, for instance, a piece of wood may represent love objects which the patient longs for or has lost, just as children use similar things to protect them.” Anna also suggests that parenting and cultural environment shouldn’t protect the child too much from reality and allow them to develop reality-testing skills early on so that reality becomes something reliable for the adult’s psyche. “The fate of anxiety is sometimes determined by the indulgence extended by other people to such protective measures.”

Reality is unpleasant for most people some of the time and it can be a cul-de-sac when children or adults cannot find a place in life where they can win. When the child or adult turns only to a spectator, an envy arises to interfere with the other children or co-workers for the adult and sabotage their engaged activity leading to conflict. “A game with me in which [the patient] did not win, in fact, anything which he could not do quite as well as I could was enough to produce the same sudden change of mood. He lost all pleasure in what he was doing, gave it up, and automatically, as it seemed, ceased to be interested in it. On the other hand, he would become obsessed with occupations in which he felt himself to be my superior and would spend unlimited time on them. It was only natural that, when he first went to school, he behaved just as he did with me. He steadily refused to join the other children in any game or lesson in which he did not feel quite sure of himself. He would go from one child to another and ‘look on.’ His method of mastering unpleasure by reversing it into something pleasurable had undergone a change. He restricted the functioning of his ego and drew back, greatly to the detriment of his development, from any external situation which might possibly give rise to the type of unpleasure which he feared most. Only when he was with children much younger than himself did he get rid of these restrictions and take an active interest in their doings…The mere comparison of their achievements with those of the other children robs their work of all its value in their eyes. If they fail in a task or a constructive game, they conceive a permanent disinclination to repeat the attempt. So they remain inactive and reluctant to bind themselves to any place or occupation, contenting themselves with looking on at the work of the others. Secondarily, their idling about has an antisocial effect, for, being bored, they begin to quarrel with the children who are absorbed in work or play…When children defend themselves against the unpleasure which they experience on comparing their own performances with those of others, the feeling in question is merely substitutive. The sight of another person’s superior achievement signifies (or at least it did so in my patient) the sight of genitals larger than their own, and these they envy. Again, when they are encouraged to emulate their fellows, it suggests the hopeless rivalry of the oedipus phase or the disagreeable realization of the difference between the sexes.”

Anna’s educational background found situations where children like this made a turn around and it involved removing the comparisons to avoid the Oedipus Complex, Penis Envy and Castration Complexes. “The children who insist on playing the part of spectators recover their capacity for work if the conditions under which they have to work are changed. One little girl of the former type was obliged for external reasons to stay away for a time from her first school, where it had been her habit to ‘look on.’ She was taught privately and she at once mastered, in the form of play, lessons which had remained a closed book to her so long as she was with other children. I know of a similar instance of a complete turnabout in another little girl of seven. As she was backward at school, she had some private coaching. In these lessons at home her behavior was normal and there was no sign of any inhibition, but she was quite unable to produce these good results at school, where the lessons were on just the same lines. Thus, these two little girls could learn, provided that there was no question of their achievements being compared with those of other children, just as the little boy whom I analyzed could take part in the games of younger but not of older playmates. To outward appearance such children behave as if the activities in question were subject to both an inner and an external prohibition. In reality, however, the check is automatic and takes place as soon as a particular activity results in a disagreeable impression. The psychic situation of these children is similar to that which the study of femininity has shown to be characteristic of little girls at a particular turning point in their development. Independently of any fear of punishment or anxiety of conscience, a little girl at a certain period in her life gives up clitoral masturbation, thus restricting her masculine strivings. Her self-love is mortified when she compares herself with boys, who are better equipped for masturbation, and she does not want to be constantly reminded of her disadvantages by indulging in the practice.”

Outside of removing the fear of comparison, Anna tends to look at competition as a more masculine trait, but what’s missing is the need to learn from sports and sportsmanship, for example, in which losers learn from losses to make renewed attempts at winning later. Then the comparison does not matter because one’s expectations that one always has to win is not indulged. There’s less fear of retaliation in a society that accepts merit and winning. Societies that fan the flames of envy will lead to political movements that punish success, which just increases poverty. Certainly the child that is “looking on” with envy may need to be privately tutored, but in reality, the bullying from the envious child is a trauma and a major distraction for the children who were doing the right thing all along. Quite often private tutoring is requested precisely because the child who is putting in the effort needs to remove all the bullying from the environment so they can continue their development. These influences easily reach from childhood, into the workplace, and into the greater political world that we are living with today.

Even if the child is privately tutored, there’s still the inherent resistance when inner conflict continues in the child when doing their studies. When this reaction is severe, it becomes self-sabotage that prevents development of the child into adulthood because work becomes something that is not worth it and reality must be escaped. When it’s less severe, there may be a lopsided development in the child’s gifts, which isn’t all bad, but it can lead to a lack of balance where important skills need to be developed regardless of personality preference. Resilience is required in order to become well-rounded. “The obstinacy with which each separate id impulse sets itself to attain its goal transforms the simple process of inhibition into a fixed neurotic symptom, which represents a perpetual conflict between the wish of the id and the defense set up by the ego. The patient exhausts his energy in the struggle; his id impulses adhere with but little modification to the wish to calculate, to speak in public, to play the violin or whatever it may be, while at the same time the ego with equal persistence prevents or at least mars the execution of his wish…It drops the activities which liberate unpleasure or anxiety, and has no further desire to engage in them. Whole fields of interest are abandoned and, when the ego’s experience has been unfortunate, it will throw all its energies into some pursuit of an entirely opposite character. We have instances of this in the little football player who took to literature and the little dancer whose disappointment led to her becoming a prize scholar. Of course, in these cases the ego does not create new capacities; it merely makes use of those which it already possesses…When the ego is young and plastic, its withdrawal from one field of activity is sometimes compensated for by excellence in another, upon which it concentrates. But, when it has become rigid or has already acquired an intolerance of unpleasure and so is obsessionally fixated to the method of flight, such withdrawal is punished by impaired development. By abandoning one position after another it becomes one-sided, loses too many interests, and can show but a meager achievement.”

Identification with an aggressor

Children who are sensitive to criticism, which all people are to one extent or another, can lead to deliberations as to how fair or unfair these criticisms are, and that’s why corrupt authority figures do so much damage when the criticisms are unfair and are just a projection of power and exploitation. It sends the signal and role modeling for younger generations to look at criticisms as a weapon that puts people in a more secure position of power and so power is sought, even if constructive criticism is experienced. Criticism becomes something that takes the spotlight off the corrupt leader and like with many politicians, for example, they have no intention of changing their ways and so they go to war and play people off of each other to distract and deflect while they continue stealing from the populace, or they continue being a drug lord, gangster, or continue some other corrupt practice with no change. Children see all this and become the new generation of criminals in a fairly predictable and smooth path. “By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat. In ‘identification with the aggressor’ we recognize a by no means uncommon stage in the normal development of the superego. When [children in] cases I [worked on] identified themselves with their elders’ threats of punishment, they were taking an important step toward the formation of that institution: they were internalizing other people’s criticisms of their behavior. When a child constantly repeats this process of internalization and introjects the qualities of those responsible for his upbringing, making their characteristics and opinions his own, he is all the time providing material from which the superego may take shape. But at this point children are not quite whole-hearted in acknowledging that institution. The internalized criticism is not yet immediately transformed into self-criticism. It is dissociated from the child’s own reprehensible activity and turned back on the outside world. By means of a new defensive process identification with the aggressor is succeeded by an active assault on the outside world.”

This is also a process that can be included with projection where if a person doesn’t care about their own behavior, they can enjoy being hypercritical of others as a strategy for dominance, as long as they can hide their hypocrisy. The benefit here is to continue corrupt and perverse incentives while using higher standards on competitors. It leads to a blackmail society found heavily in political environments. “Even when the external criticism has been introjected, the threat of punishment and the offense committed have not yet been connected up in the patient’s mind. The moment the criticism is internalized, the offense is externalized. This means that the mechanism of identification with the aggressor is supplemented by another defensive measure, namely, the projection of guilt.” Then when you add normalizing behaviors coming from a culture of corruption that doesn’t see it as such, including quid pro quo financial incentives, cultivated dependencies, coercion against gatekeepers and whistleblowers for ethical behavior, and threats against disloyalty, it’s easy to see people accept hypocrisy more consciously as an adult because it becomes simply a business procedure and “how things are done here.” Eventually everyone is corrupt to one degree or another and the projection mechanism becomes a “you first” attitude when it comes to improving ethical standards. Anna perceptibly sees the inflection point when this happens. “[Their] indignation increases automatically when the perception of [their] own guilt is imminent.” Nobody wants a traffic ticket when all the other speeders get away scot-free. Living a moral life of course is not easy when incentives are there to erode their willpower. The moral will feel more internal pain, which includes empathy, than an anti-social type. “This stage in the development of the superego is a kind of preliminary phase of morality. True morality begins when the internalized criticism, now embodied in the standard exacted by the superego, coincides with the ego’s perception of its own fault. From that moment, the severity of the superego is turned inward instead of outward and the subject becomes less intolerant of other people. But, when once it has reached this stage in its development, the ego has to endure the more acute unpleasure occasioned by self-criticism and the sense of guilt.”

You can see the beginnings of Ego-psychology where one cannot just analyze the Ego and Superego as monolithic entities without seeing how the internal Ego and Superego behave compared to the external representatives. Both sides have to be developed. “It is possible that a number of people remain arrested at the intermediate stage in the development of the superego and never quite complete the internalization of the critical process. Although perceiving their own guilt, they continue to be peculiarly aggressive in their attitude to other people. In such cases the behavior of the superego toward others is as ruthless as that of the superego toward the patient’s own ego in melancholia. Perhaps when the evolution of the superego is thus inhibited, it indicates an abortive beginning of the development of melancholic states.” People also want others to be punished as harshly as they were. Many feel that because they know that they hide their corruption that others do as well. If they are caught they want all the other ones who got away with the same behavior to be rounded up and punished just the same. Because policing is always limited in what it can do, the injustices of the imperfect world motivate an external strategy and no internal changes are made. Too much external worry about others can lead to paranoia that criminals often feel. “‘Identification with the aggressor’ represents, on the one hand, a preliminary phase of superego development and, on the other, an intermediate stage in the development of paranoia.”

Anna sees this also in intimate relationships and threats of infidelity when different types of pleasure compete in the mind, and when the adult has never developed the internal part of the Superego, but only the external portion of the institution. Even identification with an aggressor harbors a pleasure, which is the pleasure of double standards, entitlement, superiority, and commodification of others. Others are a tool for pleasure and exploitation, not a person to negotiate with. The example she uses of a husband where he already has a craving attachment to his wife, but yet is still tempted by other women, leads to a pre-emptive strike. The knowledge that temptation is possible for his wife brings it into the present moment without evidence that she is currently cheating. What he doesn’t see is that he is trying to enjoy the pleasure of bigamy while not wanting to allow equality and share his wife with other men. The pleasure is so distracting in denial that he doesn’t see what is disgusting for himself, like the sharing of possible diseases, or the inferior comparison with the performance of other men, would be disgusting for his wife as well when she detects a female competitor. It’s the lack of acceptance in his Superego to witness his bad behavior as being significant, which is still hidden from his wife in Anna’s example, while also trying to maximize pleasure, and with a narcissistic attitude of having special rights. “When a husband displaces onto his wife his own impulses to be unfaithful and then reproaches her passionately with unfaithfulness, he is really introjecting her reproaches and projecting part of his own id. His intention, however, is to protect himself not against aggression from without but against the shattering of his positive [craving] fixation to her by disturbing forces from within. Accordingly the result is different. Instead of an aggressive attitude toward some former external assailants the patient develops an obsessional fixation to his wife, which takes the form of projected jealousy.”

As complicated as this psychoanalytic jargon is, when you look closely, he is actually trying to preserve a double standard for more pleasure for himself and denying her independence to do the same. It’s a deficit of morality and the denial mechanism that allows the hypocrisy. Here you can say it’s an inability for this hypothetical husband to find enjoyment in a clear conscience and an unwillingness to forego exploration and tolerate boredom that is found in most long-term relationships. That boredom covers over the reality that his partner does have negotiation options and there are consequences for an imperial attitude emanating from the husband. All these are forms of double standards and royal entitlement. In a therapeutic environment, all these unconscious processes would have to be pointed out, and because this is unpleasant, patients are likely to indulge the denial further and go into a negative transference towards the analyst. The denial pleasure evades the knowledge of boundaries for the short-term pleasure that is afforded in infidelity. It’s the childish lack of development of not wanting sacrifices to accept standards, while seeing the benefit of demanding standards for other people: A maximizing of pleasure with no boundaries.

Boundarilessness can also develop from childhood when seeing authority figures get away with bad behavior because real world punishments can’t always be there to censure every infraction. The hiding of infractions becomes paramount in being able to extend this expansion of pleasure beyond the boundaries of others before they force a negotiation and threaten consequences. Anna saw that people only confess their sins when they know there is no criticism or punishment forthcoming, and modern therapists have long learned that it requires a non-judgmental attitude on the part of the therapist to identify with their greed to access those confessions. If we can communicate and resonate with patients of how tempting their object-choices are, the more likely they will fess up their actual infractions. The powerful, or those with entitlement attitudes, are denying the independence of others and without a confession of their misdeeds, there’s no way to bring up the rights of others and the powerful will continue their paranoia of what others will do to them and accuse others of what they do. Whenever you see people accusing others of what they are guilty of, you can see that there’s a tyrannical desire behind it in defense of their privilege.

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html

The correct attitude that provides therapeutic results, which is to reduce the expenditure of energy on defense mechanisms, is to admit one’s flaws and negotiate with other flawed people so that one is conscious of one’s temptations. As repeatedly emphasized in Anna’s book, we are better able to control impulses that are conscious to us than to deny their influence. Then a discussion about consequences, or even negotiations where people accept their desires and create new combinations, can begin so that the effort to hide and compartmentalize impulses can be put down. Consequences are so important to consider because imitation of authority figures, which is chasing the ego-ideal and superegos of others, will be chasing an illusion, because all partners will have flaws and temptations to cheat, usually denying realistic details and default on the attitude of putting new candidates on a pedestal. Unless one is in an abusive relationship, new partners are not likely to meet the standards of a deity that ego-ideals request of them.

The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence – Anna Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855750388/

Psychoanalysis and Discourse – Patrick Mahoney: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780422617208/

Essential Papers on Dreams – Melvin R. Lansky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780814750629/

The Language of Psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328139/

Alperin, R. M. (2004). Toward an Integrated Understanding of Dreams. Clinical Social Work Journal, 32(4), 451–469.

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