Warning Suicide Themes
Family or Patient?
Anna Freud referenced many case studies of her child analysands in her work, but she maintained more details of drawings and poems of one particular patient from 1929, Peter Heller, 9 years old, who in adulthood collected those drawings and poems from that time, and published them in A Child Analysis with Anna Freud. His adult insights provided information as to his opinion of psychoanalysis as well as the kinds of material one is likely to run into when being a child therapist. In fact, his personal details, along with Anna’s interpretations, illuminated many important insights as to what to look for in any analysis.
What therapists need to know is that the patient will have demands on them for love, hidden or communicated, that will often outstrip what can be reciprocated, often for professional reasons, but also because no human can provide unlimited security for any patient. The adult Peter looked back in a frank manner about his limerence for Anna Freud, while at the same time he had to admit that because the material was embarrassing, he couldn’t make his retrospective in the book 100% candid. “Anna Freud, then a young woman, rather pretty and delicate, dark-eyed, with that pure and penetrating gaze which she retained even in old age. I see her before me: the rounded movement of her delicate, skillful hands; the slight stoop even then, the wisp of stray hair across her forehead adding an absent-minded scholarly note. There was the homey, neat, comfortable, yet austere way she dressed: the citified dirndls, the homespun, stylized simplicity she favored, which was unostentatious and in keeping with the emphasis on unerotic, unseductive femininity; a quality of kindly severity…This was the way she was, or appeared to me, when I fell in love with her; when, in the course of my analysis with her, I came to love and, at times, to hate her, as I continued to do even after analysis and in the decades when Anna Freud lived, as ageing queen of the Freudian movement in its London center, in close companionship with her lifelong friend Dorothy.”
The reputation of psychoanalysis was that of unbridled expression and permissiveness, but with Anna and Dorothy, this was not the case with the mixed analytical family of the Burlinghams. “[Dorothy], Puritan at heart, an enlightened WASP, magnanimous and decent in intent and deed, became a kind of mother also to me, and one who would not desert her children, as I blamed my own mother for doing. But Dorothy aroused mixed feelings in me. I can still hear her, insisting vehemently: ‘Absolutely, app-so-lute-ly not, Bob!’ And this dogmatic vehemence was in accord with an uptight character or demeanor that would erect barriers and enforce a distance between herself and other humans, and stifle spontaneity, quite against her conscious intention. Occasionally though, a teasing, spinsterish sense of humor broke trippingly through the shell of self-righteousness, shyness, and virtuous repression…She was utterly submissive in her pious zeal to turn herself into a vassal of Professor and Anna Freud. When she reported: ‘The Professor thinks’ or ‘Anna says,’ let alone, ‘The Professor and Anna think,’ she was clearly invoking the highest possible authority. Thus, in crass innocence, she came to represent the narrow minded, narrow hearted orthodoxy, the know-it-all-presumption, the petty concern with orders of rank, and the vindictive cliquishness that often made the Freudians so insufferable. Much later, when I married her daughter Tinky, my blonde, slender first love who seemed to me to dissolve in mysterious loveliness, ‘Mother,’ of course, became my mother-in-law. Now, decades after our divorce, Tinky, like me, is confronting old age, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, married to a psychoanalyst, not far from our daughter Anne (named after Anna Freud) who is herself in middle age.”
Peter made a lot of comparisons between himself and other children his age and it’s important for caregivers to notice these comparison reactions which can build into long lasting self-beliefs that are alternatively too high or too low. “My relation to analysis remains ambivalent. This is connected also with my relationship to the Burlingham family, and particularly to the Burlingham children. It was a relationship marked for me, among other things, by the opposition between my darkness and their radiance, my brooding and their seemingly unburdened grace and lightness; or indeed—in keeping with clichés of that period—between the Jewish, reflective, intellectual consciousness of guilt and impurity, and the Aryan children of light. For this antithesis—the foundation of Nazi ideology—was characteristic not only of my childish imagination but quite pervasively alive in the infantile spirit of the time. In love with Tinky, I became closely connected with that highly respected and beloved circle. But later, under the pressure of a marriage which was unsatisfying to both of us, I rebelled against all those who were clustering around Anna Freud and Mother, and whose lives were controlled from that center. Or did my ambivalence toward analysis simply stem from the exaggerated hopes which I nourished concerning its powers of salvation? I had been brought up by atheistic parents. Analysis was my substitute for religion, even more so than Marxism. At the same time I believed that these two systems gave us a double key to the fundamental human questions: Marxism to the collective, social world; psychoanalysis to the life of the individual. For the analysts gravitating around Freud and the circle of the Burlingham family in Vienna, in whose shadow I grew up, psychoanalysis was indeed a religion, a church, a cult. Such expectations of salvation deserved, and were bound, to be disappointed. Moreover, psychoanalysis never entirely cured me. After my childhood analysis with Anna Freud, I went back into analysis in my late twenties with Ernst Kris, in particular because I was haunted and driven by confused, bewildering sexual fantasies which compelled me, as it were, to be unfaithful and interfered with sustained concentration so that, quite frequently, days and weeks would go by for me in a haze of vague desires. And of this second analysis too, it seemed and seems to me that it did not free me of my difficulties altogether. Thus, when Anna Freud sent me the material concerning my child analysis with her, I went to the analyst Heinz Lichtenstein for the purpose, I thought, of discussing this material and its possible utilization. But immediately, and now at an advanced age, I began to speak about my troubles, which, among other things, referred me back to the dilemma between greatness and smallness, which had already preoccupied me as a boy, and to the complex of voyeurism and exhibitionism which had also appeared in the childhood analysis. And surely, the present self-analysis is yet another attempt at productive integration of this complex. Finally, to complete my list of reasons for my ambivalence, I also thought I encountered on an intellectual and academic plane a good deal of dogmatic prejudice on the part of some analysts, and this in turn diminished my respect for a discipline which, to be sure, has had a lasting influence upon my life and thought.”
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 4: https://rumble.com/v4qswdt-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-4.html
Techniques back in the early part of the 20th century were only just starting to take into account the phenomenon of transference and countertransference. The comparison of being psychologically “small” against somebody “large” infiltrates the analytical room and the hierarchy of the professional world. Instead of becoming a person who opens up and releases repression, sometimes forms of repression are instead reinforced. “Analysis, as practiced then, fostered self-observation, but also self-inhibition. It encouraged going back, regression, retreat from presence into the modality of an absence never caught up with, a promise of presence never redeemed. And even if this was and is a condition attendant upon all existence, psychoanalysis frequently intensified it, but without ever eliminating one’s hang-ups or their derivatives. Again and again, analysis as I knew it, fostered a surveillance by the analyst and a self-surveillance, which treated every manifestation of life and every new turn as merely provisional, hence to be scrutinized with a view to latent, probably more essential motifs and impulses that might need correction. This resulted in a pervasive mental reservation, a permanent ‘second look,’ a worried suspicious glance at one’s own life, a reflectiveness raised to a higher power, which did not quite allow one to regard one’s existence as definitive or valuable in itself. In a sense, life is always and never provisional; but to live, self-consciously and continuously, in the provisional mode, is surely inhibiting. And for the therapist the exercise of this reflective grip—in keeping with the patient’s permission and request for it—often proved a dangerous source of power, and a temptation to exercise illegitimate tutelage.”
With therapists always suspecting a deeper agenda for everything, it could put therapists in a dangerous position of power where their identity could be wrapped up in the profession, like being part of a higher religious caste. “For analysis certainly could be used and was used to inhibit self-realization in those who entrusted themselves to therapists and in whose lives the therapists intervened. My most bitter reproach to Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and the circle of orthodox, presumptuously authoritative psychoanalysts has always been that they had an infantilizing and often debilitating influence on their patients, instead of promoting the liberation of man which seemed to be inherent in the potential of psychoanalysis. I cannot forget the expression and tone of voice of some analysts who, not only in therapy but in daily intercourse or discussion, would look you deeply in the eye with a gaze gleaming with indifferent participation, or say in a voice almost vibrant with neutrality: ‘How interesting that you should say this; it certainly would express your perspective…’ or something of that sort. And you could always be sure that they were addressing not the expressed opinion, but the suspected latent motives presumably unknown to the speaker himself, and that they were interested in these motives only and not at all in what you said…And yet behind the pseudo-empathy which never concerned itself with the manifest conduct or content but only with what had yet to be deciphered; behind the false, depersonalized friendliness; the bedside-manner-mask of sympathy; behind the tendentiously penetrating gaze which scrutinized your own, I see the radiant and illuminating eyes and hear the purifying voice and interpretations of Anna Freud whom I loved and revered as a child beyond all other humans. My ambivalence toward analysis has a still more primitive root as well: In analysis I wanted to be loved, and even loved precisely as a patient; and like so many patients, I did not think I was loved enough.”
This distaste for the manifest and obsession towards the latent could also be deadly. In Michael John Burlingham’s, The Last Tiffany, insights can be helpful, but psychology has since added many modalities since then for short-term crises and psychopharmacology to bring needed results when talking therapy has reached its limit. “Of Dorothy’s children Bob and Mabbie, the elder pair, they were her golden boy and girl, as most everyone who knew them agreed. In family parlance they were ‘Boma,’ an acronym which their grandfather C.C.B. had devised. (Tinky and Mikey were ‘Timi’; Dorothy and the Four collectively were ‘Dobomatimi.’) Bob and Mabbie were both sensitive, emotional, and artistic, their charisma such that they virtually eclipsed the younger [faction]. In Robert’s absence, the prince and princess had developed in opposite ways, however, Bob becoming Dorothy’s alternately strahlend (radiant) and stürmisch (stormy) enfant terrible; Mabbie, on the other hand, her adoring soul mate. The rivalry for parental affection is naturally intensified in single parent families, and Bob’s rivalry with Mabbie led to the establishment of two lifelong [factions], Bob and Tinky (‘Boti’), and Mabbie and Mikey (‘Mami’), each strahlend child tying the closest sibling knot with the eclipsed child of the opposite sex.”
To see why one befriends one person and is distant with another, is helpful information, but in a crisis, patients need help as soon as possible. If there is something biological, quick remedies for stress should be attempted to prevent catastrophe. Analysis can also be too mechanical, which drains love, life, and value out of a person, even if it’s not intended. Poor Mabbie couldn’t get back to feeling like a normal kid. “Oh it’s awfully [stupid] because everything has its unknown reasons. I with my many troublys and unknown reasons. Everything has an unknown reason. Oh reason after reason, everything with its reasons. It nearly makes me mad. Wide shoes have it, fears have it, things with Daddy and you have it, well…nearly everything. But hard to live with these [so-called] reasons, it is not only sometimes…I wonder what I would have been without [analysis]. Analysis makes me much nearer to you.”
With the typical ego-psychology prescription to change the environment, Anna seemed to be somewhat aware of how mechanical analysis could be, and so she thought of an antidote. “Mabbie’s confusion must have been glaringly obvious to her analyst. Indeed it seems that Dorothy and Anna had deliberately cultivated the [farmer’s] life to counterbalance these analytic complexities. Anna had written Eva Rosenfeld, perhaps as early as July of 1928, ‘The schoolhouse must only be the beginning; we must have something far more beautiful to share, with all the girls and all the children. Do you think this might come true some day? This would then be your schoolfarm,’ [evidently Eva’s original idea for the Hietzing School].”
Of course, controlling the external world, as well as in the realm of talking therapy, it doesn’t alter biological influences that are strong. Then when you add the fact that these Burlingham children were analyzed and co-parented at the same time, liberating influences and closing down influences would contradict and conflict in the children. Those who were sensitive could hardly get worse therapy. For example, Bob Jr. had to deal with influences cross purposes. “…One of those quirks of fate for which Anna Freud had been on the lookout had seemingly materialized in the form of Rigmor ‘Mossik’ Sørensen, a young Norwegian whom Dorothy would recall as having about her ‘something so alive, brilliantly charming & glowing.’ Anna Freud had witnessed the beneficial effect on Mabbie of her romantic involvement with Simon Schmiderer, a fellow architectural student at the [School of Applied Arts]. The son of a locomotive engineer, steeped in the craftsman ethos of his Hohe Tauern village, Simon seemed so right for Mabbie that her analysis ended even as she prepared to announce their engagement. And Mossik, the daughter of an industrious, small-town merchant, likewise embodied many of those wholesome qualities which Anna Freud had so faithfully labored to instill in the Four…If Anna Freud had indeed foreseen Mossik as the potential match for Bob, Dorothy had not, since she knew Mossik only as Mabbie’s and Tinky’s friend. After learning that Mossik’s application to the University of Wisconsin had arrived too late for consideration that fall, and knowing that she did not want to return to Norway, Dorothy had sympathetically invited her to stay with them while taking courses at the University of Vienna. But then, when she learned that she and Bob had become intimate, her attitude had changed dramatically. Citing her responsibility in loco parentis, she had told Mossik that she would have to make other arrangements. This had been followed by another abrupt about-turn. When Mossik returned from a long, contemplative walk, Dorothy apologized profusely, and said she could stay, after all. Mossik later suspected Dorothy of having learned of their liaison through a breach of analytic confidence, Anna reporting to Dorothy what she had learned from Bob in analysis. Then, believes Mossik, after hearing of Dorothy’s jealous reaction to their romance Anna Freud must have given her a good scolding. This was Mossik’s first glimpse of the submerged cable which bound her future husband and mother-in-law.”
With Bob Jr., Anna noticed the lack of a father figure and how it could end up leading to homosexuality, and so an arranged marriage was to be a culmination of her efforts. “As Anna Freud observed, Bob’s superego had detached itself from the parental influence it mirrored. Yet by laborious work with his superego, it was her intent to reawaken Bob’s original oedipal rivalry with his father for Dorothy, and thereby set Bob back on the heterosexual track.” Things may seem to go well for many years, but inauthenticity eventually crumbles away the best intentions. “By this time his marriage was teetering under the strain, and Mossik came to realize that they had little in common; these then were probable reasons for her own analyses, with Drs. Kronold and Kris (Marianne). Bob spent the next two years vacillating between two jobs (New York Urban Renewal and the London County Council), two analysts (Eissler and Anna Freud), and two women (Mossik and a Flampstead Clinic staffer). He was in London on May 6, 1956 for the celebrations attending the centennial of Freud’s birth, and the following spring settled on the L.C.C., Anna Freud, and Mossik. If not for the urgings of loyal Anna Freudians Eissler and Kronold, Mossik might have remained in Riverdale with the children, as the marriage was effectively over. Instead she joined Bob, settling with the children on Queen’s Grove in St. John’s Wood, a short walk down Finchley Road from Maresfield Gardens. Six years later Bob started another affair and Mossik returned with the children to America…The reasons for Bob’s emotional difficulties are not elusive. He did not, of course, want to be healthy. One recalls Anna Freud laboring in 1925 to win his confidence and establish herself as his ego-ideal, and one is again reminded of her comment about preferring to change children. But in Bob’s case Anna Freud’s superego modification created a façade of values, Bob the husband, father, and city planner were inventions of her educational admixture, superimposed over the musician, who was perhaps also bisexual, but was in any case most definitely still at odds with himself. To believe this, one has only to read a letter which Anna Freud sent Bob a year after his wedding.”
I am sure you are right that your relations in marriage are the center of your other difficulties. Of course it is also true the other way around: all your other difficulties are reflected there. From your description it seems to me as if you still expected to find Mossik a man and as if most of the disappointment arose from that. It was just this men’s side that we were trying to work out when you left. Still, you must not forget how different you are now from the boy you once were. I do not know whether you remember him (yourself) still but I do. That should make you more confident about the bits that are still to come.
“Bob had been ten when Anna Freud had established herself in his eyes as ‘a very powerful person,’ when ‘I had made myself indispensable to him and he had become dependent upon me.’ But now, three decades later, instead of seeing his hidden energy released, she was obligated to putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. If this hurt her pride, she certainly sacrificed a great deal to his restoration, including Mossik’s right to privacy in marriage (imagine, if possible, one’s mother-in-law and one’s spouse’s analyst being the same person)…Bob eventually found himself in his father’s shoes, frequently manic or depressed, the Atlantic Ocean separating him from his family, and viewed by them with similar uneasiness. Since there was the appearance of repetition compulsion and sympathetic illness in this, Anna Freud continued to treat him from the psychoanalytic angle, despite the increasing suggestion of a biochemical, genetic etiology. In that sense, her treatment was limited by her ideology and training. Psychoanalysis directly treats the mind, not the body or brain…Bob was remarried in May 1964 to Annette Muller, a German nurse with whom he shared a cramped, dark apartment in Regent’s Park. They had no children. Annette recalled, ‘We…had three wonderful weeks together until I encountered for the first time, for me, a depression and following that a manic phase…It was not always easy for both of us to see life in a positive way…My request, at the time, for him to change his analyst must have really meant my death warrant as [far as his] feelings [for me] were concerned.’ Bob continued to smoke heavily despite his asthma and emphysema, gradually becoming a gaunt, sickly shadow of his former self. Reduced to working a half day, then hospitalized with increasing frequency, he died of an asthma-induced heart attack in January 1970, at age fifty-four.”
Mabbie’s marriage didn’t fare any better. When her husband’s projects fell through and she realized that she hadn’t accomplished as much with her life as she hoped, both were stuck in depression. “Mabbie’s last letters were alternately hopeful for the future, and suicidal. Perhaps she remembered the case of the woman whose body had been found washed up on the banks of the Seine in the twenties. Her rapturous expression in suicide had prompted an artist to lift a death mask which had been copied and widely admired as I’lnconnue de la Seine. In 1930 Mabbie had written Dorothy in Tegel, ‘When I get the feeling of loving somebody unermesslich viel [‘immeasurably much’] I think of that face, you know, of the girl who made [suicide] in the Seine by Paris. She had such a lovely smile on her face. Really heavenly.’ In July, in her bedroom at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Mabbie took an overdose of sleeping pills, and two weeks later died in the hospital…The deaths of Bob and Mabbie severely strained Dorothy’s relationships with some of her grandchildren in the last decade of her life. Amidst the shambles, Bob’s and Mabbie’s children particularly found it hard to see Dorothy and Anna Freud in a positive light. When the turbulence subsided, what remained was a nagging image: that instead of, or perhaps in addition to, having received a golden key, Bob and Mabbie had been loaded with an enormously heavy cross, and bear it they did, to the very altar of psychoanalysis. There remains the ironic conclusion that psychoanalysis had been foisted upon them unnecessarily, and when dependent upon it, had not helped them. Then, when they had really needed help, Freudian ideology had discouraged them from seeking it, for example, in the realm of pharmacology.”
Hietzing School
Despite the tragedies, it all started with lots of confidence and hope for a better future for the next generation free of divorces, addictions, and hang-ups. “Peter Heller recalls, ‘We children, back in Vienna, all admired the style and grace of the Burlingham family quite uncritically. They were the ruling house in our circle, and to us a model of good taste.’ To Victor Rosenfeld, the Burlinghams seemed like ‘pop stars’; their very teeth seemed whiter, their jawline different from the Viennese; they wore the clothing he associated with Hollywood glamour, and seemed filled with a peculiar American confidence in life. Opinionated and yet well mannered, they were physically stronger and ‘almost too beautiful.’ They observed odd occasions like Mother’s Day and celebrated an old English Christmas with yule log, carols, acrobats, dancers, boar’s head, and mistletoe; they toasted marshmallows and slept under gingham covers; it seemed that they were the only ones in Vienna who had cornflakes for breakfast, bacon with their eggs, and a fireplace in practically every room; ‘special and strange,’ they were ‘objects of interest and veneration.’ Victor Rosenfeld ‘learned to love and hate the Burlinghams.'”
Despite this beautiful façade of a school, that Erik Erikson described as “the best possible school,” and that it confirmed “John Dewey’s theory that children learn only where their interest is fully engaged and centered,” Peter felt there were some flaws even if he enjoyed his time there. “…There was something fashionably faddish and mysteriously arbitrary about the school, evidenced, for example, by the dilettantic, lopsided, or single-minded concentration on relatively remote topics. I grant that the Eskimos were closer to the consciousness of Americans than to a Central European Viennese. Still, there was an excessive, if utopian concern with their tribes, mores, kayaks, implements, igloos, their tales, their hunting of whales, and the like; all of which was, preferably, to be richly illustrated with self-made linoleum-cuts, a medium favored above all others by the style of our school. And so it came to pass that there was little systematic learning, especially in what the world around us considered to be the major subjects and disciplines. We ultimately failed to meet, or met only ‘barely and skimpily, the scholastic standards and requirements imposed by the state and its school system. It was a chore later on to prepare for the entrance examination into a public school. Nor did our school accustom us to the need to learn and to master techniques and subjects which might not happen to interest us at a given moment. And yet there can be no true accomplishment, even in a field of one’s own choice, without the acceptance and the training of this kind of discipline…Perhaps our school was too good or too sheltered and pleasant to prepare us soundly either didactically or existentially for requirements imposed by the harsher social realities of the world we lived in and were to encounter later on. However, this bleaker, meaner, poorer, and rougher environment represented the true state of the country and indeed of every nation on earth. A similar dilemma has generally been characteristic of educational ventures of this kind, including the ‘free schools’ which flourished at the time. To a lesser degree it even applies to more orthodox establishments. For our schools, and even or especially the best of them, generally prepare us poorly for what awaits us ‘out there.’ And yet I cherish the memory of the Burlingham-Rosenfeld School, and of all schools I went to, it remains the one I would regret most having missed.” In comparison, Peter wrote an example of public schools and their disappointment. “Under a varnish of knowledge and learning, the public school is a mixture of idiocy and compulsion. The only thing it gives to its students is a training in hardening and dulling.”
From a Jungian point of view, it appears that the school allowed more intuition to enter into the learning environment, even if children had to supplement their homework with the more thinking and sensing activities to increase skill. In the end, each skill that is learned repetitively can be brought up like an intuitive skill, now that it is a habit, but the development of skill is more effortful than the use of it when it’s mastered. There is also a sense of the power of choice and how it provides added motivational energy, so even if a student does choose a difficult subject, the lack of being commanded to do it increases their ownership of it and emotional investment. “The Burlingham-Rosenfeld School was a marvellously promising, privileged experiment, animated and inspired by a purer, more humane, and more sincere ideal of humanity than any school I ever went to. It was suffused with a genuine sense of community and housed in a light, sunny, warm place which even smelled pleasantly of fresh wood and clean linoleum. The people who directed and guided the school were of superior character; educated, cultured, fully formed human beings, not mere specialists in a field, nor mere professional pedagogues. They were conscious of a dominant human concern beyond the concern with subject matter or careers. Young and enthusiastic, as they were at a time when analysis itself was in the vanguard, they were inspired by a sense of mission. Eva Rosenfeld once said to me: ‘What we did was not nearly as important as who we were.’ They put together, for a few years, a school where students could learn to love their work. This was so because everything was geared to learning through intensive ‘free’ work on ‘creative projects,’ chosen by the pupil of his own accord or assigned to him with his consent.”
Psychoanalytic Links
Peter’s analysis does provide a lot of food for thought, along with his schooling. Here I’ll focus more on heuristics and what can be gleaned from any analysis. Like Melanie Klein, Anna Freud did emphasize sexuality, but to make it more palatable for readers, the reality is that the sexuality is really just a search for pleasure with an element of tension and release. The sexuality does not have to be so overt in every occasion. In many cases, patients are only trying to maintain family and friend relationships with conflicting goals. In this instance, the analysis all started with Peter’s night terrors. By this time, despite being so young, he had already lived in a turbulent family. “Peter’s father was educated, cultured, and well-off—equally familiar with the work of Marx and Freud, radical politics and radical self-examination. Heller describes his mother as ‘a dashing, elegant young woman (fesch, as one would say in Vienna) with dark hair, large expressive, dark eyes, and a slightly oversized nose about which she was unhappy…She had intense intellectual and artistic interests…and tended to be radically open and, occasionally, embarrassingly exhibitionistic in her reporting of intimate details.’ Although her later life was deeply unhappy (she would ultimately commit suicide, as her own mother had done), at the time of his referral Heller’s mother seemed glamorous and daring to her little boy…Peter’s parents had fallen in love when they were both quite young, but the relationship deteriorated in the years after Peter’s birth, as both took other lovers. They separated when he was four years old, though they kept up a semblance of a marriage for several years after this, despite his mother’s long absences. Unusually for that time, part of the separation agreement was that Peter would live with his father, while his mother moved back and forth between Vienna and Berlin (where her lover lived), appearing and disappearing from Peter’s early life with regular irregularity.”
In Peter’s analysis, Anna’s associations found how preferences could color how people and situations were perceived. For example, whether a parent provides for the child more or less, whether they show more or less love, and how much time they provide company for the child more or less. Children can demand responses from their parents and be more or less frustrated. Parents, as well as caretakers, like governesses, can display to the child the level of comparative wealth they have and what the consequences might be if they imitate one individual or another, or a group of them. If a parent is chosen as a priority to gain attention from, then the other parent in the Oedipus Complex may appear frustrating. In the case of Peter, he went through the usual feelings of castration, or intimidation, that seemed to be important to his sense of self in how he compared with his father. Many of his dreams would include the father but in the usual Freudian disguises to reduce reactivity and pain. Being alone with his father increased his fear of being punished and also the homosexual desire to want attention from his father, especially when he wasn’t around, but would create uncomfortable feelings when alone with him. He would want time with him, and when that time was available he couldn’t appreciate it.
The usual criticisms of being dirty in the bathroom, and also in the case with Peter, of picking his nose, connected shame with the presence of his father, and the habit of anticipation of criticism. This intimidation leads to low self-esteem for sensitive types and a resentment can build, as it did for Peter, so that authority figures, and all that is associated with them, becomes tainted. Peter also grew up with the beliefs that masturbation was unhygenic, that he wasn’t masculine enough, and he developed transferences from his parents to other students, like his reaction of a fear of rejection to Tinky’s criticism of another child’s lack of cleanliness.
Politics also entered into Peter’s interests. He didn’t like his capitalist father and early on became much more interested in Marxism, despite the fact that his father was also interested in those subjects. The fear of rejection fueled this political viewpoint because capitalism was associated with rejection, including the rejection from his father, and that came up in Anna’s materials where Peter hated the idea of “every man for himself.” His competition for his mother simply extended towards competition with his classmate Victor for Tinky. Fear of losing her would make him ambivalent and try to seek comfort and more closeness in regression with his mother, but even resentment towards his mother required at times, that instead of him chasing the women, he wanted them to chase him some of the time. The final nail in the coffin for capitalism was it’s connection with the money required to attract the girl and it added pressure to perform in school. “Interpretation: Capitalism = castrator; whoever has the bigger penis, has the woman.” As an adult he added some context. “The discussion of socialism, anxiously taken back right away, also points to a forbidden sphere (‘not that—’). For socialism would do away with rich manufacturers like my father, in spite of his socialist opinions. And perhaps this too is a reference to National ‘Socialism,’ though, to be sure, these are belated interpretations; ex post facto, from hindsight.” His hope for togetherness in the scary world was noted by Anna: “Fantasy from earlier days: that all [family] would move to Hietzing, live together.”
For many children like Peter, being sexually forward is a risk, and he had a fear that rejection would increase, especially towards his childhood sweetheart Tinky. He was also ambivalent with his father’s mistress, especially when Tinky preferred her to Peter’s biological mother. There was a desire for everyone to mirror the same desires, like with his mother and preferences for Grieg vs. Beethoven. The need for preferences to match also led to a fear of rejection if politics was brought up too much in conversation. The need to be accepted required some control over candid dialogue, but there remained a yearning to find people who resonated with deep conversation.
Transference appeared in the analysis between loving Anna Freud, imagining her being his father’s actual mistress, and see-sawing back into criticism as a form of control. Anna noted as follows: “High point of transference: Again very excited and angry, scolds me, tells me not to speak, calls me disgusting, I should not smile. Suddenly shouts at me: Where did you get this necklace? I do not want you to get such presents. Like a jealous husband. You should not have a private life. Then jealousy of the Burlinghams whom I like privately, him only professionally. How it would be if I were suddenly to kiss him. That his [Mom] spoke well of me, wants to come and see me. I say: Tell her I shall look forward to it. He: I will not tell her this, because it is a lie: That he would like to be the most loved person in all the world or be loved as much as the person one loves most (summit-love). Shouts, kicks, but asks cautiously in between, whether he is making too much noise. Takes leave very tenderly with both hands. I promise that I will some day knit a sweater for him too.” In terms of overt sexuality, Peter was naturally embarrassed by spontaneous erections he had and would get caught in over-analysis as to which people in the environment were the cause of the uncontrolled erection. “Height of transference: He becomes aroused as soon as he is with me. He says: that has to stop, otherwise he can’t do analysis.”
Adult Analysis
As technique improved, obvious weaknesses in the method, as tragically found with The Wolfman, and the Burlingham children, there was a lack of self-directedness about the end result. Dependency on an analyst can prevent adult autonomy that is the hoped for end goal of psychoanalysis. If biological aspects were not addressed, and if an educational bent created too much dependency, as well as an unresolved transference where patients desire enormous love from incapable therapists, results were disappointing in many instances. “With alarming self-honesty, he acknowledges not only that he struggled with bisexual conflicts and a preoccupation with ‘confused, bewildering sexual fantasies’ that led him back into analysis with Ernst Kris in New York in 1946, but that he also went through the rest of his life with a sense of a weakened self, a ‘self-prevention of decisive action’ alongside a sense of ‘unsettled megalomania’ and a profound feeling that he had not achieved what he had hoped for with his life.’ Of course one cannot say to what degree these later difficulties were a result of missing aspects of his child analysis. But it does seem likely that the unsatisfactory ending of Peter Heller’s analysis may have led Anna Freud to realize the limitations of trying to combine an educational with an analytic role. When she came to revisit her views about child analysis in 1945, she was to recall that her fears about reawakening repressed wishes in the child patient ‘were shared to a degree by some [adult] analysts who thought it quite possible that child-analysis might need some special form of educational guidance as its constant accompaniment and counterpart.’ However, she continued:
Case Studies: The Wolf Man (2/3) – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gug9n-case-studies-the-wolf-man-23-freud-and-beyond.html
But, as experience proved, this was not as often necessary as had been expected. It was demonstrated repeatedly that the ego and super-ego of a child which were consistent and severe enough to produce an infantile neurosis could also, with some help, be relied upon to deal with the sexual and aggressive instincts which emerged from repression after the neurosis had been analysed successfully.
Now, no readers I would think believe that children do not need education, but there seems to be a balance between an individual that is learning and requires help from the teacher, guide, or parent when they choose to ask for it. No limits leads to excessive permissiveness and a danger that the child will be caught up in the dangers of the world without skills, but micromanaging kills the energy of passion and intuition to such a level that everything becomes a mechanical chore. Then when a patient is looking to solve a problem, they look to others too soon when they already have enough of their own resources. They don’t trust themselves, or their motives, and are too self-conscious to make progress on their goals. An over-intellectualization. One needs to ask for help when timing, schedules, or resources are challenged enough. The disconnect between achievement in the mind, the engagement, effort and skill required, needs to be bridged before the brain can finally see reality undistorted. There also seems to be a perfectionistic streak that creeps in and is described above by Peter. Life is full of problems and challenges that actually cannot be solved, but instead must be endured. Psychoanalysis is more in the realm of emotional intelligence and cannot claim to make patients into geniuses, or even brilliant people that will solve most everything.
The study of Anna Freud’s method of Ego Psychology was to emphasize sublimation for Peter. Sublimation became superior to sexuality for Anna, when for her father it was merely an option when other possibilities were barred. “Dorothy’s sublimation also reflected a Freud family practice, and was a link to father and daughter. Because psychoanalysis lays so much emphasis on sex, much has been made of Professor’s own sex life. But his belief in the sexual etiology of neurosis did not generate as much enthusiasm for genital love as one might suppose. His prodigious capacity for work alone makes it unlikely that his exploration of sexuality took frequent physical form. He was frank about the midlife death of coital relations with his wife, Martha Bernays, was critical of Wilhelm Reich’s advocacy of the curative powers of the ‘perfect orgasm,’ and frowned on sexual permissiveness, once writing the American psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam, ‘I stand for a much freer sexual life. However, I have made little use of such freedom…’ As for Anna Freud, there was in her truly something of the virgin schoolmarm, an ascetic, moral puritanism that her former analysand Peter Heller calls her ‘spinsterish holiness.’ ‘She was very strong when it came to demanding and furthering sublimation,’ recalls Professor Heller. ‘She was not really friendly to sexuality.’ She disliked kissing or being kissed and, in her eighty-seven-year lifetime, there is no incontrovertible evidence of her having had sexual relations with anyone. This was surely the ulterior point of a remark made by old guard analyst Eduard Hitschmann at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Leaning toward Richard Sterba he said caustically, pointing to Anna’s chair, ‘There Freud sat and taught us the drives, and now Anna sits there and teaches us the defenses.’ Anna’s sexuality was, in fact, a cardinal point of worry for Freud in regard to her. In the spring of 1927, when Dorothy had replaced Eva in Anna’s affections, he had written Lou Andreas-Salomé about Anna, ‘Since the poor heart must absolutely have something, it clings to women friends, one taking the place of another.’ Then, in December, he had added, ‘Anna is splendid and intellectually independent, but [has] no sexual life. What will she do without her father [i.e., when I am gone]?’ And finally during the spring of 1936, in a letter to writer Arnold Zweig, Freud, referring to Anna, would return to the same worrisome theme of the ‘passionate woman [who] almost wholly sublimates her sexuality.'”
The difficulty is defining what authenticity is so that patients can easily discover it and move towards it. As described above, many people marry and only find out later that it was a mismatch. Not knowing what one wants, which is ambivalence, has a deleterious effect on relationships. People feel they are held back by the people closest to them, and there’s always a temptation to indulge in only wanting what one does not currently have, like a new shiny object, or partner. There’s a lack of patience to grow with a partner. Even with sublimation itself there has to be a reminder that love is involved and that people have to put love into their activities as much as possible to reduce wasted energy in resistance and defenses, and there has to be enough rest to recover from effort. As long as people are caught in a cycle of dissatisfaction, the education side is reinforcing self-consciousness against the animal sexual side, which is the source of energy needed to engage with the world. It’s tension without release. The promise of psychoanalysis is undercut by poor execution. Whether envy and rivalry has creeped in and brought in draining defenses, they’re based on desire and one has to be unashamed of one’s desire as long as it is not harming oneself or others. The therapeutic knowledge of normalizing gets lost when one feels inferior for having desire and falls into the illusion that role models in society are the only ones deserving love and attention because they are desireless angels. It’s supposed to be love and work, not just work.
Repetition Compulsion
There are different theories today on what constitutes temptations to infidelity in psychoanalysis. Peter in his early writings wrote freely about relationship suspicion and the need to divorce and move on to other relationships. One often doesn’t know enough detail about a person until they are married, and Peter put himself creatively in a future marriage with that sentiment when he wrote, “I had every good reason to hate her because she was horrible to me. She was a real shrew and tyrannized me all day long. She could do nothing but scold. She showed her true spirit.” Lawrence Josephs alternatively theorized that a fear of betrayal could also go back to a primal scene as he quotes Freud in The impulse to infidelity and oedipal splitting, where “the boy ‘does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness’. This betrayal trauma generates a love/hate relationship with his mother. As a result, the boy splits the imago of his mother into ‘a person of unimpeachable moral purity’ and a prostitute, thinking ‘that the difference between his mother and a whore is not so great after all, since basically they do the same thing.'” Here you can see how splitting can have an attitude of wanting something from the environment even when all environments have elements that are independent.
As Peter was wrestling with this, he was found to be copying his father in not being a good host to his friends by providing a ride back home, and so one wonders about the influence of his father marrying a different woman. Then you have Anna Freud making suggestions and commandments on these children that may appear like a chore so as to make the child want to escape, as well developing hardened repetitive adult behavior. “The defensive organization deriving from oedipal infidelity rests on the paranoid idea that appearances can be deceiving. What on the surface appears to be eminently trustworthy, like parental love and devotion, may be but an ensnaring illusion. This illusion can seem to be a form of entrapment that provides the setup for a humiliating betrayal trauma. This paranoid anxiety generates fundamental doubts about the human capacity for loyalty to others and honesty with oneself in the face of a strong temptation to sexually betray the ones we love. [‘Everyone does it.’] The relative neglect of the issue of oedipal infidelity in the clinical literature may be a way of evading full awareness of the exquisite human vulnerability to the trauma of seduction and betrayal in our most intimate and trusting relationships.” With parents providing false appearances to the child, only to later reveal that the relationship is over, and new partners are then introduced, can implant in the child a suspicion that this is common and premature paranoid thoughts could intervene and the lack of trust may make a person want to do revenge in anticipation of a letdown, which leads to the same kind of betrayal nonetheless. This insight was found by exploring in adults the negative transference, which in childhood, Anna focused more on making a positive transference to keep children truthful and trusting. As described below in the psychoanalysis of play, repetition compulsion may also be a factor.
The conundrum about the school and how to get students to choose appropriate subjects of study, including having a moral compass, but to also put pleasure into those meaningful activities, was the key to problems that all parents and schools struggle with. Authenticity, but with a brain. “But in a letter to Eva Rosenfeld in 1929, Anna Freud hinted at some of her own difficulties with this approach. In the letter, Anna Freud complains of the teachers at the school (i.e. Blos and Erikson): ‘All they know is compulsion or liberation from compulsion–and the latter results in chaos.’ The letter implies that Rosenfeld had suggested that the pupils at the school needed to be forced to study certain things, even if they were not interested in doing so. Anna Freud’s response is interesting and makes an important (but subtle) distinction:
We really don’t disagree. I also believe that school must be compulsion. Our disagreement concerns only one point. I want the children to be made to want to do what they are supposed to do. You want them to be made to do what they don’t want to do as well…My example–which you grant–is Aichhorn.
This method can work in the sense that if enough repetition of a skill is made, the skill becomes internal and motivation becomes so as well, but the risk is that the skill may not be acquired in the time allotted and resistance from the student will likely reduce the repetition required for mastery and pride. “Anna Freud’s reference to Aichhorn makes clear how influenced she was by his way of working, in which he fostered the young person’s positive attachment to an adult as a means of providing the child with motivation to ‘renounce’ the pleasure principle and deal with frustration and ‘work.’ In Anna Freud’s letter one can see how she was transferring this idea of Aichhorn’s to the normal school setting, in order to argue for a ‘middle path’ between compulsion and liberation: the child must be made to want to do what he or she is supposed to do. For such an approach to be successful, the teacher must work with both that which has been repressed (the instincts) and that which is doing the repressing (the defences, the ego). The teacher, in other words, must offer him/herself as an ego-ideal with whom the child can identify, so that the child will then willingly comply with social demands and find a substitute satisfaction through sublimated activities–including learning itself.”
So the school was struggling with leadership and how to motivate people in a genuine way. The problem with Anna’s and Aichhorn’s method is that students may feel manipulated. Teachers who are inspirational also find personal enjoyment in the subjects and can translate that through their tone and body language, yet it’s not likely that teachers are motivated by the subjects all the time and students will sense this. Repeatedly using role model influences can also train dependence on the role model so that when they are missing, there’s no internal compass available to rely on. The student hasn’t developed the skill of using play with responsibility. Teachers are also flawed individuals so any foibles detected may reduce motivation to follow a stupid suggestion or attempt a difficult problem. Too much directing of children can also remove time needed for the child to make their own choices based on their strengths. As Peter described, the school may have see-sawed back and forth while Anna and Dorothy tried to emphasize too much the compulsion side to counterbalance the “free school.”
Modern modalities are fully aware of these 20th century challenges and they provide alternatives for the reader to explore. Self-determination theory tries to convey the Why? of the goal that is compulsory. If the goal feels important for the child, which means that the goal fosters positive connections with others, and an opportunity to master something meaningful, then they can choose with their autonomy without the feeling of compulsion. This is because if the Why? of the goal is not convincing, they have the opportunity to choose differently. Inquiry-Based Learning can also bring up important questions so that curiosity can fuel a study of history, for example, where research becomes motivated by the interesting question, which is probably my main motivation with this learning project of PsychReviews. Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset allows students to choose their own metrics for mastery so fear of failure can be reduced. Failure just becomes part of the learning process so that learning is fueled internally and the addictive mind becomes less attached to pointless gold-stars but instead to real mastery, which is what the work world actually hopes to find in employees: self-directed motivation. Project-Based Learning can also take abstract problems and create real world case studies, like found in internships, so that the oversimplification that drains meaning from goals in sterile academic settings can be replaced by authenticity in setting and natural interest. Social-Emotional Learning can also teach students to prize persistence as a goal in of itself. Again, where the priority of attention is aimed at sends the signals in the dopamine brain to gain a sense of pride and identity with self-chosen goals that disentangle from a heavily end-result, fear of rejection, monetary based motivational system that drains most people and creates a feeling of needing to escape.
In Short-Term Psychodynamic Therapy, they also realize that the need for action actually brings up the defenses quite well and identifying the feelings that are preventing action can be done with some confrontation. They call it “Head-on-collision.” Like in the working-through phase of classical Freudian psychoanalysis, one can be stuck in intellectualization and knowing what to do isn’t enough. Therapists today are not stuck on a fear of failure and they put some onus onto the patient. “Let’s take a look at what’s happening here. You have come on your own free will, because you are experiencing a problem which causes you pain. We have set out to get to the root of your difficulties, but every time we attempt to move toward it, you put up this massive wall. The wall keeps me out, and it keeps you from knowing your own true feelings. If you keep me out, you keep me useless. Is that what you want? Because, as you see, you are certainly capable of keeping me useless to you. My first question is, why would you want me to be useless? You see, the consequences of this would be that I would be unable to help you. I’d like to, but the nature of this work is that I can’t help everyone. Sometimes I fail. However, can you afford to fail? How much longer do you want to carry this burden?”
Sometimes therapy requires some effort to be decisive against one’s own resistances. In Anna’s poetry, one can see quite a lot of action, which requires ego strength, and a learning mentality, which includes some shamelessness mixed with reality testing and trial and error. There’s an inherent attitude of persisting as a goal in of itself, and this could also be seen with Lou Andreas-Salomé, but if one is just passive and acts on impulses, it’s easy to be lost. Patient’s like Peter starved for a role model in therapy to believe in them so they could believe in themselves. Instead many patients in early psychoanalysis were stuck in learned helplessness, repetition compulsion, over-intellectualization, draining defense mechanisms, and ultimately: low ego-strength. Today, mindfulness, which is a form of ego-exercise from Buddhist practices, is now a popular modality to allow people to feel impulses and strengthen the ability to let go. There has to be a balance between activity and inactivity to conserve energy, and there is an irony in that passive people may actually be draining a lot of energy in their defenses even if they are outwardly sitting still. They don’t know how to meditate, or enjoy being. Then the irony is layered on further when patients do finally act on their own volition and those actions end up causing more stress and drain more energy. Only when good actions are taken that provide good results can the chain of habit be broken and show to the patient that they are capable of making different choices that are meaningful. This is especially important if people are worried about generational trauma and repeating what parents and ancestors did. Endless repetition compulsion.
Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v61mn9e-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-1.html
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 5: https://rumble.com/v5lk7uh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-5.html
Seven Veils Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G2tHm1BROc
From the psychoanalytic perspective, tension and release, is another name for gratification, which is a desire to “attain peace” or to “come to rest.” When matched with Buddhist mindfulness, many Westerners can face their trouble with staying still and enjoying pure inactivity. For those reactive types, the entire day has to be filled with activity and distraction, but many of those activities are not helpful and drain energy even further. Stress and reactivity leads to repetition compulsion where a need for mastery can arise in response to difficult situations. In parallel, our current level of skill creates unconscious, therefore effortless, motivation to choose the next logical step in development without the need to lean on a sense of grind to make things happen. With trauma, that mechanism can go haywire. “This unabsorbed, or incompletely absorbed experience weighs heavily upon his psychic organization and calls for a new effort at handling and for a reexperience.” Freud said, “the ego, which has passively experienced the trauma, now actively repeats an enfeebled reproduction of it, hoping that in the course of this, it will be able through its own action to direct it. We know that the child takes the same attitude to all impressions painful to him, reproducing them in the form of a game; through this manner of proceeding from passivity to activity he seeks to master mentally the impressions received from life…In every field of mental activity, and not in the realm of sexuality alone, it is easy to observe that a passively received impression provokes an active response in the child. It, itself, tries to do that which was done to it or with it. This process is part of the work it must undertake to master its environment; it may even lead the child to a painstaking repetition of the very impressions which, because of their unpleasant content, it has every reason to avoid. Children’s play also serves as a method of adding an active counterpart to the passive experience.” What constitutes a trauma instead of an interesting challenge depends upon the strength of the stress.
Robert Wälder summarized the phenomenon of skill development. “Psychoanalysis assumes that the psychic organism is able to ingest and assimilate the stimulations of the outer world in small doses only, if so quantitative a figure of speech may be used. If, in a given unit of time, the excitations of the outer world impinge upon the individual excessively, the ability to absorb them fails and the mechanism of the repetition compulsion comes into play. The stimuli not disposed of exert a pressure and must be dealt with repeatedly and, so to speak, belatedly, must be divided into small portions…As one grows older, the ego becomes stronger, and consequently the capacity to endure difficulties grows; the difficult experiences of the past function as preparations for future tolerance (a sort of hardening). With an increasing rigidity of the personality, the protective crust against outer excitations becomes denser and less permeable (this becomes especially conspicuous in old age, but is already indicated in adult life) and with this diminishing plasticity the receptivity and readiness of the individual to react decline. All these circumstances, along with many others, contribute toward the fact that, infinitely more often than an adult, a child is confronted with experiences which he cannot immediately assimilate…According to the conclusions arrived at by psychoanalysis, play may be a process like a repetition compulsion, by which excessive experiences are divided into small quantities, reattempted and assimilated in play…Play may now be characterized as a method of constantly working over and, as it were, assimilating piecemeal an experience which was too large to be assimilated instantly at one swoop…The simple fact that the child reproduces in playing a passively received experience, a transformation from passivity to activity, is significant. In one group of games, in addition, the child adopts another role than the one played in reality; if in real life, it was the sufferer or a frightened spectator, it becomes in play the active party, the rescuer or the deus ex machina. In this group, then, the turning from passivity to activity is emphasized by the choice of role; the child changes the outcome of the situation experienced and furnishes it with a different solution.” Preferences then can be defined in psychoanalysis as fantasy. “Fantasy woven about a real object is, however, nothing other than: play.” For an adult stuck in dryness and grind with activity it’s because “in the case of an adult, reality is severed from the world of fantasy.” By taking on the role of Hero, the adult can infuse some playfulness into his or her activities.
How to motivate yourself – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv3zl-how-to-motivate-yourself-freud-and-beyond.html
The repetition compulsion can be detected in therapy when encountering “an adult who has been through some unusually difficult experience and who is constantly occupied in his thoughts with this experience, or who talks about it incessantly for a period of time—sometimes forever. The unassimilated invasion of reality into the psychic organism has the same disturbing effect as a foreign body. That which is not disposed of harasses the individual and demands that it be tackled again; the ego at the same time through dealing with the experience anew attempts to assimilate it. Here again we see the Janus face of the repetition compulsion turned both to the id and the ego…The trauma insists on returning because it has not been assimilated, and, at the same time, the ego strives to conquer the experience.” So tension and release in education requires some engagement from the student who is passive and who needs motivation for activity. If the challenges are meaningful to the child and if there are opportunities to master them in bits and pieces, there will likely be more motivation than in scenarios where the challenges are pitiless, impossible, and too risky to attempt. They become something to avoid and to never approach. Teachers can then be the facilitator in helping the child breakdown problems into smaller pieces that can be assimilated. As an aside, if one is perceptive in an evil way about school and work and how students and employees are filtered out, dialing up the challenges and dialing down the help, is a great way of making people give up.
For someone like Peter, who struggled to find authenticity, his temptation to infidelity could be a repetition compulsion to master relationships that failed with his parents. His dependency on role models also weakened his ability to achieve difficult things in life, and with the example of lax schooling. Role models can be a form of escape where they represent peace and safety in the provisional world of academia. This could easily make the world of capitalism appear very dangerous and socialism alternatively comforting, manifesting in Peter’s intellectual interests. In fact, many political attitudes from all stripes could be a repetition compulsion as people try to understand economic and political trauma. Capitalism requires people who can be assertive, and are capable of taking on risk with a rational bent to avoid situations that are daunting. They also need to be able to recover from trauma quickly, and resume reality testing, persistence, trial and error. This is also what is required of highly trained professionals who receive the lion share of rewards in our Western system.
Peter was endlessly preoccupied by the fear of being found inferior, which then led to complicated reactions and behaviors, including a tainting for him of what was considered good. It can turn into a reversal against what is considered good in society and desire to do the opposite to maintain independence or to gain it. Low self-esteem leads to unconscious needs for punishment fostering an inhibition towards important personal goals, like one doesn’t deserve success. The original hopes for a person scatter in the wind and they become lost, with people living lives that are awkward and unseemly, which includes a large portion of any society. Being stuck in resentment or becoming weary is a common result. “The focus is on greatness and smallness, glory and shame, being a genius and being a pig, but also on mind and body, purity and filth; and the increasing confessions move to the worst of all, the confession of the most embarrassing, humiliating, threatening, ‘pig-gishly’ lustful compulsion…There is the odd contrast between shame in private and shamelessness in public toilets; the fact that a boy who admits hanging about disreputable places in aimless lust cannot bring himself to pronounce the ‘anal words.’ But breaking through [ineffective] shame, preferably connected with a sense of danger, will turn into a fascinating game and compulsion, so that the never-assuaged guilt feelings and the avid need for punishment should not be short-changed…Anna Freud interpreted Peter’s compulsion as compulsion to compare himself to the father, and derives it from the wish to take away the ‘big one’ from the father in order to have it oneself; hence the fear of him, the ceaseless ‘measuring’ of adults; the guilt feelings and fear of death as punishment for a criminal wish…And this is also why I half feared Anna Freud’s cathartic, purifying influence. From an excess of purity sprang the wish to throw oneself back into dirt. Promises given for the sake of someone else or in a moment of moral euphoria, inspired by the wish to will at last only the good, gave rise too easily to a sense of constraint or the compulsion and the wish to put one over on himself and the other. In brief, it was the appeal of the forbidden which I mitigated or sought to mitigate by not promising too solemnly or firmly…It was one of my basic perils: this tendency to bring about adversity out of mere fear, and eventually to find pleasure in inducing misfortune, with a mixture of gratification in self-punishment, anxiously prophylactic testing of the pain and unhappiness, and a greed for catastrophe, an addiction to catastrophe, a pleasure in sharp excitation, all coupled with repetition compulsion.”
Wendell Gee – R.E.M.: https://youtu.be/W__V4BqfChI?si=g8hqpnaNzdZhlJuB
With traumas unconsciously creating resistances and distractions towards important goals, and with a society of older generations that want to exploit the new generation for their goals, it’s easy for people to become lost as they grow up. The proper balance would be for education, and especially parenting, to provide access to a wide variety of forms of happiness for children to pursue. Difficult skills can also be learned piecemeal, instead of daunting students with whole problems all at once. Students’ talents and abilities become more obvious after a lot of sampling, incorporation, and their introjections and habitual identities will flourish with chosen happiness goals, and that becomes the core personality and specialty that becomes the strength to rely on when non-specialties become traumatized, responding with repetition compulsion, and it’s important to remember that we are not alone, since relationships and partnerships can provide important help when we on occasion rely on the expertise of others.
The Last Tiffany: a biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780689118708/
Midgley, Nick. (2012). Peter Heller’s a Child Analysis with Anna Freud: The Significance of the Case for the History of Child Psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 60. 45-70.
The Historiography of Psychoanalysis – Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780765800190/
Freud/Tiffany – Elizabeth Ann Danto, Alexandra Steiner-Strauss: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138342088/
Reading Anna Freud – Nick Midgley: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415601009/
Josephs L. The impulse to infidelity and oedipal splitting. Int J Psychoanal. 2006 Apr;87(Pt 2):423-37.
From learning for love to love of learning;: Essays on psychoanalysis and education – Rudolf Ekstein, Rocco L. Motto: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780876300107/
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly Vol. II April 1933 No. 2 – Feigenbaum, Dorian (Ed.); Lewin, Bertram D. (Ed.); Williams, Frankwood E. (Ed.); Zilboorg, Gregory (Ed.)
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/