Karl Abraham (1877 – 1925)
My prior series on Sigmund Freud positioned him as a lone figure against a great tide of resistance. He certainly was, but everyone is an individual and each individual has their own story. Freud voraciously read and had many partners he bounced ideas off of. Concepts and ideas aren’t in a vacuum and each personality Freud worked with added their own spin and complexity to his work. Even when Freud was territorial about his ideas, especially the Oedipus Complex, all of his interlocutors cut swaths in different directions. This led to many conflicts within Freud’s Congresses, but those conflicts and differences added needed explanations for experiences that didn’t conform to his dogma. One of Freud’s closer collaborators, with the least conflict out of the group, was that of Karl Abraham.
Born in Bremen, 1877, he grew up in a Hanseatic Guild cultural atmosphere of commerce in an old Jewish family. After High School in 1896, Abraham embarked on a medical career at Würzburg. He was very well read and could speak English, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and had decent knowledge of many other languages. He was mainly interested in biology when pursuing his doctorate, and while in Freiburg Ernest Jones described that “he first became acquainted with Switzerland, the country which ever after he loved above all others. He liked the Swiss people and mode of life, but it was certainly the high mountains, which contrasted so much with his home scenery, that constituted the principal attraction. As soon as he had the chance he became an enthusiastic alpinist and made a number of first-class climbs.”
Like so many people, Abraham wanted to find work that would allow him to enjoy his new favorite place. “While at Freiburg he conceived the wish to obtain a post at Burghölzli, partly so as to be in his beloved Switzerland, partly because he had been impressed by Professor Bleuler’s work in psychiatry and esteemed it higher than that of any other psychiatrist.” It wasn’t until “December, 1904, [where] he was made happy by obtaining an appointment at Burghölzli, with the title of Assistant at the University Psychiatric Clinic of Zurich. Here his attention was soon turned in a more definitely psychological direction, and through Bleuler and Jung he became acquainted with Freud’s work…Abraham’s own hope was to be able to work permanently in Switzerland, but experience soon showed him that the chances of a regular psychiatric career there were very remote for a foreigner, so that he had to look elsewhere. His decision to leave was doubtless hastened by the uncomfortable atmosphere resulting from the tension between Bleuler and Jung. He therefore resigned his post in November, 1907. In the same month he met Professor Freud for the first time, on a visit he paid to him in Vienna…The personal relations thus established ripened into a friendship which remained unclouded till the end.”
Jones described well Karl’s attitude and charming characteristics which made him a good student and analyst. “Prominent among Abraham’s character were a refreshing youthfulness and a sanguine optimism…He was singularly youthful, and even boyish at moments when the circumstances were appropriate; though he could be decidedly witty at times, and often very shrewd, [as] was his more characteristic form of humor. This gave his personality, so winning to women and attractive to men, a freshness and vigour that always made him a stimulating companion or colleague. His demeanor was invariably cheerful, courteous and friendly. But these qualities were not to be presumed on. Behind them was a firmness impervious to the [flattery] of man or woman. He could afford to be easy and pliant in his intercourse with others, just because he had himself so completely in hand; knowing that he could not be unduly influenced from either within or without, he was confident in any situation. This complete confidence was ultimately rooted in self-mastery. The same is true of one of his most characteristic traits, what his friends called his incurable optimism. He was always hopeful, however irksome or sinister the prospect, and his buoyancy, together with the confidence that went with it, often contributed materially to bringing about a more successful issue than at first seemed possible. As a rule this optimism was very nicely balanced with a keen sense of reality, so that its effect was purely invigorating, but once or twice in his life it played him false, marring what was otherwise a perfection of stability…Abraham well without realizing that he was one of those men who are endowed with quite exceptional powers of [creativity], and that he had attained an unusually advanced measure of emotional and instinctual development. It is not chance that it was he who taught us what is perhaps the best criterion of full mental development: the overcoming of narcissism and of ambivalence. For we shall not know many men who would emerge as he did when tried by this severe test.”
The Mother and Object-Relations
Karl’s contributions vary widely, including into the historical, and for Ernest Jones, “the most outstanding lesson in psychology we owe to Abraham is the vast importance of the suckling period and the fateful consequences that antagonism aroused to the mother during this period may have for later life.” One of the motifs and symbols of the mother that Karl found was that of darkness. The Mother could be associated with the Sun, but that symbol more often was associated with a Father-imago in the mind. For patients of his who had a photophobia, “every time this subject was approached in the analysis certain mental currents came to the surface. It appeared that all these patients suffered from moods of depression and had an unmistakable tendency to flee from the world. In their unconscious the light of day was a symbol of life and darkness a symbol of death. This symbolic use of light and darkness is also found in usages of speech. Neurotic persons in general are more usually afraid of the day (especially on waking in the morning) and feel better in every respect in the evening, because the day is over and night is drawing near; but they do this without special reference to the question of light or darkness. Day is the time for life in general, for activity; night signifies the opposite. But to those neurotics with whom we are dealing here, it is the light of day that represents life and the darkness of night death…Such a flight from the world is, needless to say, not merely a flight i.e. something purely negative but has a positive pleasure-value as well. The patient withdraws into the depth of the night in order to know nothing of the external world, that is, in order to be alone with himself and his phantasies.” Karl also connects this to those who hate noise, which is also a symbol of life during the day. “The free associations of the patients regularly proceed from these ideas of flight into a darkened, occluded room to ideas which we know as ‘womb phantasies’ and with which we are familiar in other neuroses. This leads us to the view that darkness is to be taken as a symbol of the mother.” Indeed one of these patients in therapy described herself as someone who hadn’t separated from the “umbilical cord.” The child is wounded by the mother, and because the mother is so needed, the child introjects self-blame and pivots on that motivation, to placate those with power and to follow their guidance, even if it’s pathological.
For Abraham, the parent who controls the organization of the family and relationships tends to take on a predominant role in the minds of the children. When the mother has been hostile to the child in extreme ways, there can be an effect that lasts into adulthood. Importantly for later Object-Relation theories, kind of like the modern term of having people live rent-free inside the mind, children grow up taking in rehearsed scenarios with parents that are created to predict future behavior and can lead to transference, where people take those object-relations and make sometimes accurate or sometimes false predictions of others in authority. Abraham worked with Freud on Mourning and Melancholia, and they noticed that the Super-Ego, the internal critic, can take on parental attitudes and it can distrust the individual and the mind can attack itself masochistically, or it can self-sabotage. “A careful analysis of the self-criticisms and self-reproaches especially those of a delusional nature uttered by melancholic patients will show that the process of introjection takes two forms:
- The patient has introjected his original love-object upon which he had built his ego ideal; so that that object has taken over the role of conscience for him, although, it is true, a pathologically formed one. Our material goes to show that the pathological self-criticism of the melancholiac emanates from this introjected object. One of my patients used to be continually taking himself to task and repeating the same reproaches against himself; and in doing this he copied exactly the tone of voice and actual expressions that he had often heard his mother use when she had scolded him as a little boy.
- The content of those self-reproaches is ultimately a merciless criticism of the introjected object, A patient of mine used to pass judgement on himself in the following words: ‘My whole existence is based on deceit’. This reproach turned out to be determined by certain elements in the relationship of his mother and father.”
Masochism – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Introjection is an oral method of taking in, or eating, characteristics of others and creating an Object-Relation in the mind. How it can happen involves the belief that that internal voice has some validity. Like in Freud’s method of making the unconscious conscious, being able to see things, like having self-criticism and seeing that it may also come from one parent directed towards another, and how one is imitating or taking after the parent who is criticized, can help with emotional distance with that tendency. Elucidating the connections helps to see if something imitated is pathological and should be discontinued. Seeing things in this way helps to emotionally distance and allow more accurate views of oneself. Going further, if the criticisms are actually false or exaggerated, with emotional distance, one can stop believing in those voices and repair the Super-Ego so that it can be more constructive with its criticism. Essentially the pathological Super-ego loses it’s credibility, authority, and gravitas. The Ego essentially wins the debate by using more facts and reality.
Introjection can happen in many ways so its complexity has to be available for exploration. It’s best to see what environments were imitated and to notice how they are triggered by present day scenarios. With Projection, Abraham follows Freud in how the libido creates emotional investments in masculine or feminine energies and if there are objections, like in homosexual situations, the mind displaces with the opposite. The example he uses “I (a man) love him (a man)” can create objections where the displacement responds “I do not love him, I hate him.” In situations where libido is quite strongly homosexual a person may attack the person because they hate the influence and imitation. This doesn’t always have to be about sexuality, though people who have different sexual orientations can frighten those who are afraid of being influenced, leading to phobias, bigotry, and hostility. When people understand that the mind naturally imitates what’s in the environment, and one doesn’t have to unconsciously imitate, the fear and bigotry reduces, and this includes fears of the opposite sex, and different races and ethnicities.
The Wolfman Pt. 3 – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html
Homosexuality – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtqk5-sexuality-pt-3-homosexuality-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
In the realm of anything to do with narcissistic wounding, a wounding of an Ego-ideal, a wounding of an ideal self-narrative, any criticisms, and maybe especially very accurate criticisms, leads to defenses being erected and temptations to release pressure into sadistic hostility aimed at those influential people. Even further, we can see this all the time in politics, especially extreme politics, where people gather together in their woundedness and target not just individuals but whole groups and categories of people. This readily can be seen in Fascism and Communism. “Those people make me feel bad about myself, and since you feel the same, and we have some narrative or excuses for why those people are dangerous, why don’t we work together to defeat them?” In extremes, it turns into classical dehumanization and extermination. In milder forms, there are personal enemies, hatreds, and feuds within the family or the community. Those who are merchants of division are aware of this and love pressing people’s buttons and create victim identities that people can gather around with, and is a way of gaining power over groups as well as financial resources.
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
What Psychoanalysis tries to get people to do is to look truthfully at those narcissistic woundings, and if there are constructive ways of dealing with those criticisms, one can scan all the wounds and develop skills to overcome those weaknesses. It’s all about facing oneself truthfully and using agency to make realistic improvements where possible. In the case of homosexuality, healthy attitudes would be to admit that a man or woman is “handsome” or “attractive” and move on. True identities are based on much stronger impulses of liking people or activities from beginning, middle and end for stronger authenticity. Short-term impulses arise and pass away too quickly to go into draining defensiveness and negative beliefs.
In these psychoanalytic cases of Paranoia there would be a persecutory defensiveness arising, and with depression a continued defensiveness that blames oneself first to the point of inaccuracy and distortion. Through association, the mind also looks for weaknesses and brings in the masochistic “pronounced feelings of inadequacy from which such patients suffer.” That’s how a sense of being a loser can spiral into very general beliefs about one’s identity as being permanently bad, how it can prevent self-development, because of the reasoning that “if my identity is so bad, why bother improving myself?” These are important subjects because each generation has to go through a period of exposure and where learning about people who are different, in so many ways, can be met without intense triggering.
In Summary, one has to look at past relationships, personal weaknesses, and to adopt a more rational approach where beliefs about oneself and others can updated with more facts and there also needs to be more flexibility to allow behavior change and development. Correcting behaviors doesn’t have to be about an identity, it can just be a reconnection with more authenticity, and renewed attempts to gradually develop areas of deficit and to find places where one can be accepted for who they are.
Alcohol, Repression, and Sexual Trauma
Karl Abraham studied alcohol and how its effects allowed unconscious and repressed impulses and material to surface. He viewed alcohol as a dangerous substance that led many men into impotence and also viewed it as a replacement for the sexual act. “An acute alcoholic intoxication will, as we know, reduce a man’s actual sexual capacity. And we are acquainted with the poisonous effect of alcohol on the embryonic cells. We know that a great number of drinkers become impotent. Alcohol has proved a false friend. They imagined that it increased their virility, because it gave them a feeling of sexual power; and instead, it has robbed them of that power. But even so they fail to recognize the fraud.” He also noticed that, like a Jack-in-the-box, repressions, sublimated desires, etc., would spring out after bouts of alcohol. “In normal individuals the homosexual component of the sexual instinct undergoes sublimation. Between men, feelings of unity and friendship become divested of all conscious sexuality. The man of normal feelings is repelled by any physical contact implying tenderness with another of his own sex. And a number of similar feelings of repugnance or disgust originating in the same source could be mentioned. Alcohol suspends these feelings. When they are drinking, men will fall upon one another’s necks and kiss one another; they feel that they are united by especially close bonds…When sober, the same men will term such conduct ‘effeminate’. Recent events have caused a lot of talk about abnormal friendship between men. The presence of such feelings, which are stigmatized as morbid or immoral in that connection, can be observed by anyone during a drinking bout. In every public-house there is an element of homosexuality. The homosexual components which have been repressed and sublimated by the influence of education become unmistakably evident under the influence of alcohol.”
Karl also blamed incestuous impulses taking hold because of the disinhibited results of alcohol. “We have still to mention one more important limitation of the sexual instinct. As it grows up the normal child first transfers its libido on to the persons of the opposite sex in its immediate environment, the boy on to his mother or sister, the girl on to her father or brother. A long period of cultural development was required before the nearest blood relations were excluded as eligible objects. The repudiation of incest led to the sublimation of the child’s love for his parents, which became converted into filial respect. Every child has to repeat this process of development. At a certain period it transfers its awakening sexual wishes on to the parent of the opposite sex. These impulses become repressed, in the same way as our moral code condemns an unsublimated inclination on the part of a father for his daughter. But alcohol does not spare even these sublimations. Lot’s daughters knew that wine would break down the incest barriers, and they attained their object by making their father drunk.”
Perversion Part 1: Incest – Ferenczi and Beyond: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-incest/
Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
Abraham’s studies of his patients showed the power of incestuous fixations. These didn’t always manifest in actual sexual relations but they could appear in what is called today Emotional Incest, where the bonds between parents and children prevent independence for the children. In Karl Abraham Life and Work, by Anna Bentinck van Schoonheten, the research points to a parentification where Karl’s mother switches roles with her son when she suffers a miscarriage after falling down the stairs and has to rely emotionally on the son as a caretaker. Like many psychologists, Karl wasn’t the only one who had life experiences he could draw from to develop his theories.
The goal, again like with Freud, is to move those emotional cathexes, or emotional investments from self in the early stages, and family in adolescence, eventually to people who are genetically different in the greater community. Because maturation takes so many years, the process could be interrupted at so many stages and when “Objects” are lost in the real world, or there are significant obstacles to ideal objects, there’s a tendency for regression to replacement objects, including more archaic choices from older psychological strata. Psychoanalysis reminds people that they have animal desires and a grounding in biology and the animal world. A lot of what makes up self-esteem is an attitude of one who wants to escape humanity as it is and become an angel to prevent repeated narcissistic wounding, but the pathway of growing up prevents people from arriving to adulthood unscathed. There are usually many objects that one attaches to and drops before one reaches maturity and shame has to be accepted with maturity and an acceptance of the human condition. In the case of Karl Abraham, he was from a lineage of people who married close relatives for generations, and this informed his opinions of marriages involving cousins, for example. He believed that neurotic character traits through a mutual sympathy, that was stronger than usual, and an inability to transmit feelings of love to strangers, led to the phenomenon. In some cases it’s not just the child switching unsuitable objects while growing up, but they become an unsuitable object for adults.
When adults, either the parents or strangers, attempt sexual relations with a child, for Karl, the pathological results are reduced when the child resists with all their might. There is less guilt, but when the child goes along with the temptation, the guilt that arises later in adolescence, such as an understanding that other families don’t do this and it’s not socially acceptable in society, that’s how if often becomes pathological. There’s a feeling of “why did I like that?” The self-blame can turn into an identity where one doesn’t receive any therapy after an assault, leaving one to repeat the same behaviours if they were enjoyable. There can also be self-disgust, masochism, and self-attacking. “A feeling of guilt cannot be tolerated by [a child’s] consciousness any more than by that of adults. It therefore attempts to deal with the displeasurable recollections in some way or other in order to eliminate their disturbing effect. They are split off from the rest of the contents of consciousness and thenceforward lead a separate existence as a ‘complex’. The case is different with those children who have suffered a sexual trauma without having been in any way responsive to it. These children can speak freely; they do not need to force out of their field of consciousness the recollection of that occurrence.”
In a simplistic form, Karl went with the times and felt that more serious disturbances, like their early description of Borderline Personality Disorder, grouped into Hysteria, and Schizophrenia, grouped into Dementia Praecox, could arise from these types of internal conflicts. Yet he was still open about his doubts when he said “the connection between certain symptoms and that particular psychic trauma was uncertain.”
All these diagnoses ultimately had to be tentative. “The process of eliminating displeasurable ideas from consciousness is the same in hysteria and dementia praecox (or in persons who suffer later from one or other of those diseases). Moreover, we can observe this process going on daily in healthy persons. But sooner or later it turns out that repression is only a make-shift measure. The complex can, no doubt, remain in the unconscious for a long time; but one day some event analogous to the primary sexual trauma takes place and the repressed material is roused to activity. Its conversion into symptoms of hysteria or dementia praecox then follows.”
The usual method of bringing up these memories, to revive them and to release the repressed emotions are helpful for self-esteem related situations, and being able to distance the guilt in the adult mind from the helpless child’s mind, to understand that there are learning processes with healthy disgust towards what is infantile and that one doesn’t have to identify with those past activities, was helpful in reducing guilt related depression for adults who were child victims and it reduced ambivalence. Unfortunately, at the time psychoanalysts weren’t aware of more biological and genetic influences for Schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder.
Karl Abraham saw like Freud that children and then adults, have bouts of psychological poverty where the unconscious drives are constantly looking for replacement objects and moving up and down the hierarchy of regression. The mind can hold in mental complexes and they can be reactivated. In Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams?, Karl insightfully said “Just as the neurotic with autoerotic [self-pleasure] tendencies wants to retain the products of his body and is anxiously concerned to lose as little as possible of his bodily substance, so also he guards against the loss of his mental products.”
The Influence of Absent or Controlling Mothers
While Freud looked almost exclusively at the impact of the father on the child’s psychology, Abraham explored the mother. In his review of the artist Segantini, the impact of a dead mother can lead to an influence that goes into the child’s work and possibly their choice of spouse. “The thought of having caused the death of a beloved person is encountered very frequently in neurotics. As already mentioned, the childhood libido of a neurotic is characterized by strong feelings of hatred. These express themselves in phantasies of the death of the loved person or, if the latter really dies, in feelings of satisfaction, even of cruel pleasure. Later, when repression gains in power, guilt-feelings arise against which the neurotic is powerless to defend himself, although in his conscious mind he finds no grounds for such self-reproaches. He accuses himself of responsibility for the death of his father or mother, although in fact his childhood crime consisted in no more than forbidden phantasies and feelings. These self-reproaches are followed by attempts at making reparation for such crimes, which take an exaggerated form in obsessional neurotics. The memory of the loved person is cherished with excessive fervor and becomes sanctified. Alternatively an attempt may be made to repress the fact of the death into the unconscious, and in phantasy to resurrect the dead one.” These resurrections appear in Segantini’s paintings of loving mothers and the prototypical bad mother like in his painting The Bad Mothers.
One of the more controversial reviews that Karl Abraham embarked on, and that mirrored some of his personal concerns about parental engulfing was his paper on Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten. Like Freud, Abraham was tempted to analyze historical characters. Akhenaten was known for abandoning polytheism for monotheism in the worship of Aten, the disc of the sun, a part of the Sun God Ra. For Abraham, Akhenaten suffered from neurotic attacks as opposed to the popular belief that he had epilepsy, due to Karl’s experience of patients with progressive degeneration that typically occurs with epilepsy and he believed it would not be possible for someone as vigorous as Amenhotep IV to be commensurate with his achievements.
In his analysis of the parent-complex between Akhenaten and his parents Karl describes his emotional incest theory mixed with the Oedipus Complex. “In the union between his parents, King Amenhotep III and Queen Tiy, the latter without doubt played the dominant role. A woman of great intelligence and alertness, she gradually took over the reins of the government into her own hands. In energy, initiative, and practical sagacity she far surpassed her husband who, during the last years of his life, seems to have evinced little interest in government affairs. In the life of her son the mother’s influence is everywhere clearly discernible. The boy must have been especially close to her from early childhood. His libido had fixed itself on the mother to an extraordinary degree, whereas in his relationship to his father an equally outspoken negative attitude is evident.” The desire for his mother was also due to her beauty. “In addition to her intellectual superiority, we may mention yet another cause for the lasting fixation of the young king on his mother: that is, Tiy’s beauty…the queen as she must have been, a rare combination of beauty, shrewdness and energy…And to the initiated it must seem very plausible that the high-strung, sensitive son should have had a fixation on just this mother…So strong and lasting an attachment of the libido to the person of the mother has very definite after-effects on the erotic life of the maturing or full-grown son. Such an attachment makes it difficult for the son, at the time of puberty, to disengage his libido from the mother and transfer it to new objects; not infrequently this transference fails completely. In most cases it succeeds to an imperfect degree, and the tendency develops to bind one’s self monogamously to one person who then becomes a substitute for the mother. The transference of the libido once accomplished is usually final.”
The review then matches that pattern for Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. It was expected at the time that Pharaohs would have had a harem, but he was monogamous, though this is debated in modern historical commentaries. “He thus renounced for his entire life a personal object choice and attached himself to his wife with as much intensity as to his mother. Even after he had become of age he preferred to appear in public accompanied by the two women who, because of the king’s support, were able to exercise an important influence on the government.” The story continues that after Amenhotep III died, the queen mother favored the cult of Aten and made her son the high priest of the cult.
“At about the age of fifteen Amenhotep IV took over the government. Now embracing physical maturity, the youth’s strong individuality soon became apparent and in time everyone had to recognize that the young king would go his own way. Nevertheless, the mother’s influence remained unmistakable as long as she lived. With all his youthful enthusiasm, the son continued the work she had begun. When one draws a comparison between this attitude and Amenhotep’s efforts to free himself from his father, the mother-fixation becomes manifest in its full strength.” Even with the father long dead, the influence of the imago in the mind still remains and the Oedipus Complex continues. “…They unconsciously cleave to their fathers as in childhood, while as adults they seek to free themselves from this inner dependence. Outwardly it seems as if they were struggling against the person of the father; in reality it is the father fixation in the unconscious against which they rebel, the father image from whose rule they want to shake themselves free. Only thus can one account for the fact that the neurotic often carries on a struggle which, according to outward appearances, is directed against a dead person.”
The neurotic symptoms convey Karl’s theory of the danger of ambivalence. “In the young king, then, there were two opposing forces-the conservative and the rebellious. Experience teaches us that such circumstances give rise to psychic compromises.” In this case, the father is already deceased, so the desire to transcend the father is aimed at replacing the tradition. “In the case of Amenhotep IV we observe a course of events which are well known to us from our study of neurotics. These reject the authority of the father in religious, political, or other matters, but replace it with another authority and consequently show that they have not actually lost the need for paternal control.”
Yet we still have worshipping, so the Sun God becomes the new father. “The meaning of these first changes in religion and art brought about by Amenhotep IV is very clear: the king does not wish to be son and successor of his father, but son of the god Ra. He does not want to worship the god of his true father, but prefers to idolize his imaginary father, Ra.” This conclusion matches Freud’s on his Family Romances and how a narcissistic self can be created in the mind when the disappointed child decides to find a replacement parent based on more powerful others in the community. “Amenhotep IV proceeds quite in this manner: he scorns descent from his real father and replaces him with a more lofty one. Since he was in reality a king’s son, he could not exalt himself above his father through the fantasy of kingly origin usual in other cases. He must go a step higher to the gods…No mortal existed who could have excelled him in power. There remained for his fantasy only the one possibility, to join his own existence with that of a supernatural being. The father role could not devolve upon Amon, for he was the god worshipped by Amenhotep III. The mother’s influence pointed to Aten, or Ra, who had, moreover, been considered the progenitor of the first kings of antiquity.” This then becomes a theory of how monotheism was developed and the mentality and attitude that preserve monotheism.
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
After reviewing Karl’s work, Freud made some editing suggestions to allow for neuroticism to exist in all people, being the difference between facing neuroticism or succumbing to it. He wanted to allow a little human ambivalence, even if one tendency was stronger than another. Freud also sidestepped Karl’s paper and focused on the murder of Moses, described as a priest of Akhenaten in his Moses and Monotheism, as a beginning of monotheism through a sense of guilt that passed down through the ages, like in his Totem and Taboo, where there’s a primal murder of the father and guilt experienced by the children which leads to the origin of civilization in that case. There are also perennial critiques of Karl’s work in much the same way that all psychoanalysis had to grapple with, which is how we introject a world through our own individual experience, which can be narrow, and project it in our beliefs, theories, and predictions of the future. Anna’s commentary notes that “Abraham foreswore the orthodox Jewish faith of his childhood and put Freud and psychoanalysis in its place. It would be very unfair to Abraham to say that psychoanalysis was a religion to him well versed in diagnostics, and his contributions to psychoanalysis were fundamental. But there was something religious about the way he converted to psychoanalysis…Abraham’s transition to psychoanalysis was radical and unconditional. It was as if he were adopting a new religion, with Freud as its authority. His critical, scientific stance developed only later.”
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
Through these analyses, one can see a theory of Objects where interrelationships within families, leading to traumatic conflicts, creates emotional relationships in the mind of descendants that operate emotionally whether those people are alive or dead, present or absent. These objects are transferred onto people who resemble the Objects and are projected when these objects are used as information for predicting human behaviors. What we go through in our lives, our experiences, the books we’ve read, the knowledge we acquire, create a limited expanse for our projections, which can be very accurate at times or a form of tunnel vision where we mislead ourselves. Like Abraham demonstrated, the best evidence comes from the analysis and a collection of facts. Theories have to give way to new evidence.
So much of Psychoanalysis deals with how people are triggered and go into defense mechanisms. It’s great that some people can afford analysis and have enough education and desire for self-knowing and self-development. It may seem like a frivolous pursuit for spoiled wealthy people, but there is a consequence for staying blinkered to our psychology. Those unconscious emotions, distorted perceptions, and pent up angst looking for a place to vent, and they don’t go away. They can organize into mass movements that threaten violence.
The ‘Ratman’ – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html
Eric Hoffer and Mass Movements
When triggered people get together in mutual solidarity there are certain patterns that repeat. They can exist on the political right or the left and can happen in many contexts. Eric Hoffer, who was brilliantly quoted in Mark Levin’s American Marxism, and who wrote The True Believer, the later book looks at the connection between inner psychology and mass movements. In many ways it would be a good addendum to Freud’s Group Psychology. In the book, Eric tries to compare practical organizations with more chaotic mass movements. By looking at the individual, one can see a healthy self-interest connected with productive activities that are traded throughout society, but what happens when people gather together who have unhealed narcissistic wounds, and are full of ambivalence?
Group Psychology – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html
“There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth— or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement…To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources…Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”
Cult Psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvih9-cult-psychology.html
As people get more involved in these mass movements, there’s a direction of thinking that wants to escape the present moment and move into a futuristic utopia. The present can never be satisfying, and therefore the present is felt as dissatisfying all the time. One gets strung along by promises of a better future, but in most cases that’s all they remain as, promises. Because the present is treated with the attitude of struggle and sacrifice, it becomes dehumanized, and as long as this utopia has not yet manifested, there can be no pleasure, happiness, or rest, like in a healthy human existence. At the same time as these pleasures are renounced, which are individual pleasures, collective goals can take hold. “Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral…The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most movements is to breed contempt for the present. The campaign against the appetites is an effort to pry loose tenacious tentacles holding on to the present. That this cheerless individual life runs its course against a colorful and dramatic background of collective pageantry serves to accentuate its worthlessness…All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium. To a religious movement the present is a place of exile, a vale of tears leading to the heavenly kingdom; to a social revolution it is a mean way station on the road to Utopia; to a nationalist movement it is an ignoble episode preceding the final triumph…The self-sacrifice involved in mutual sharing and co-operative action is impossible without hope. When today is all there is, we grab all we can and hold on. We are afloat in an ocean of nothingness and we hang on to any miserable piece of wreckage as if it were the tree of life. On the other hand, when everything is ahead and yet to come, we find it easy to share all we have and to forego advantages within our grasp…A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present…Religious movements go back to the day of creation; social revolutions tell of a golden age when men were free, equal and independent; nationalist movements revive or invent memories of past greatness. This preoccupation with the past stems not only from a desire to demonstrate the legitimacy of the movement and the illegitimacy of the old order, but also to show up the present as a mere interlude between past and future.”
Once the mass movement begins to take hold, the sense of self begins to find it’s collective pleasure, which is to nullify disparities of all kinds to reduce the sense of triggering and inferiority. “What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as they decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more—and there is. By expatiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation. It is as if they said: ‘Not only our blemished selves, but the lives of all our contemporaries, even the most happy and successful, are worthless and wasted.’ Thus by deprecating the present they acquire a vague sense of equality…Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”
The difficulty in such collective desires, which are about lifting up individual people from their predicaments, is that it may be an impossible situation. Often times the next best goal is to bring others down in order to reduce the disparity, and to replace pride in achievement with schadenfreude. It’s easier to destroy than it is to build. Yet, the person who succeeds in bringing down others hasn’t improved him or herself. The wounds are still there and the return to everyday life is a return to the same drab life requiring another cycle of joining a mass movement and their next project. “The self-mastery needed in overcoming the appetites gives them an illusion of strength. They feel that in mastering themselves they have mastered the world. The mass movement’s advocacy of the impracticable and impossible also agrees with their taste. Those who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. It is a device to camouflage their shortcomings. For when we fail in attempting the possible, the blame is solely ours; but when we fail in attempting the impossible, we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task. There is less risk in being discredited when trying the impossible than when trying the possible. It is thus that failure in everyday affairs often breeds an extravagant audacity. One gains the impression that the frustrated derive as much satisfaction—if not more—from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates. The delight of the frustrated in chaos and in the downfall of the fortunate and prosperous does not spring from an ecstatic awareness that they are clearing the ground for the heavenly city. In their fanatical cry of ‘all or nothing at all’ the second alternative echoes perhaps a more ardent wish than the first…One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have ‘something worth fighting for,’ they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worth-while lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause. Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.”
This is why the unhealthy sense of self can become dangerous because when people who have serious problems with their personal life, and get together to change society, what prospects are there for them to succeed? “The successful businessman is often a failure as a communal leader because his mind is attuned to the ‘things that are’ and his heart set on that which can be accomplished in ‘our time.’ Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs. And it is perhaps fortunate that some proud natures when suffering defeat in the practical world do not feel crushed but are suddenly fired with the apparently absurd conviction that they are eminently competent to direct the fortunes of the community and the nation.”
This problem manifests in excessive striving and forcing in order to change society when the skill levels are not up to the task. It is even more apparent when those goals are supposedly about increasing peace and harmony. Underneath the outward false self of peace broils an unconscious shadow, as Carl Jung pointed out, that breaks out due to the frustrations with those lack of skills, and also frustration with endless self-sacrifice. Blame shifting within ranks and scapegoating those who actually are more competent, begins to escalate. “Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind…Whether it is true or not as Pascal says that ‘all men by nature hate each other,’ and that love and charity are only ‘a feint and a false image, for at bottom they are but hate,’ one cannot escape the impression that hatred is an all-pervading ingredient in the compounds and combinations of our inner life. All our enthusiasms, devotions, passions and hopes, when they decompose, release hatred.”
Hoffer provides a warning that is informed of the great mistakes of the 20th century, and how that hatred can turn the mass movement into mass murderers. That pent up sadism requires a release, and the mass movement in a machine like way, can provide the condoning and the resources to carry it out. “There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment. When we lose our individual independence in the corporate-ness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement.”
Sadism – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Psychoanalysis – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
The value of Psychoanalysis, and other forms of psychology, is to focus on the individual again. When the individual wakes up from the mimetic slumber of a mass movement, there’s a healthy disenchantment with their promises and one regains that feeling that one should apply one’s own self-judgment again, and seek help that is directed toward individual improvement, and to regain that pleasure of the present moment where humanity returns with it’s color and vibrancy. One opens up to self-honesty. “Maybe I do have flaws? Maybe I am incompetent in certain ways? Maybe I do need help, but not from a surrogate parent, but from a consultant?” One can do this by enhancing introjections by paying attention to more detail and to update the internal framework of the world. Then the projections begin to become more accurate which in turn increases self-trust. The individual reconnects with practical organizations and learns to work with “what is.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t victims and victimization, but one again looks to practical organizations that get things done in a realistic way with realistic outcomes, not utopian ones. Instead of being like Amenhotep IV, and trying to connect to a utopian religion, a surrogate father, one increasingly parents oneself.
Death and influence
Karl Abraham unfortunately died prematurely in 1925 after a prolonged series of health problems with his lungs. His last days were involved in a dispute over production of a film about Psychoanalysis, Secrets of a Soul, leading the IPA congress as president, and continuing to analyze patients, and mentor new comers, including prominent ones such as Karen Horney, Helen Deutsch, Alix Strachey, and Melanie Klein. Despite a short life, his influence continues to this day.
Secrets of a Soul – G.W. Pabst: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYoXy3bYD1k
Karl was a good speaker and could influence skeptical crowds. Anna describes what one of these seminars in the last year of his life was like. “From his speech, it turns out that he saw very many physical things as mental…The response of the gynecologists to Abraham’s lecture was extremely critical, but that did not bother Abraham in the least. In his closing speech, he calmly addressed their criticism point by point. The gynecologists knew little about psychoanalysis and at first they listened with the familiar skeptical smiles on their faces, but those smiles disappeared in the course of the evening and they became interested, especially during the discussion.”
A lot of psychology involving the unconscious has to deal with deep unconscious likes or dislikes that aren’t always seen for what they are. The unconscious wants to ingest or spit out people and situations psychologically. The controversy of course is between what is emotional and what is a biological pathology. There are connections but there are many areas where emotions and physical diseases have to be studied further before any claims can be substantiated. Yet there are modern miracles that are influenced by these old papers from psychoanalysts. One of the most curious ones from Karl Abraham was about premature ejaculation. Freud in a letter to Ferenczi responded with interest. “Abraham has sent me a very good article on premature ejaculation as a personal gift.”
The emotional split between love and hate in premature ejaculation involved a mixture of ejaculation and urination, as a form of pleasure vs. hostility. For Abraham, this problem was because of the mental association connecting urination with ejaculation leading to the limp results of the former and leaving the Urethra as the leading erotogenic zone at the expense of normal sexual activity. The muscles relax in ejaculation the same as when urinating. “Many patients say that at the moment of premature emission they experience a feeling of shame with which anxiety and palpitation of the heart are associated.” This was possibly due to a late development in the control of bladder functions while growing up and possibly past exhibitionistic pleasures with urinating in public. “…Memories of childhood connected with exhibitionistic pleasure in passing urine in the sight of another person and with the assistance rendered by that person in such a situation.”
This would be like his focus on ambivalence. There’s a narcissistic risk in giving the products of oneself to a person and they can be overestimated in value. “Just in the same way as the small child wets his mother with his urine, which he cannot as yet contain, the patient wets his partner in his premature ejaculation…[and] is not able to give love, but only to receive it.” Frigidity in women can also be a narcissism where the risk is overestimated and the libido collapses. This overestimation can happen at different strengths but the attitude is that of self-protection creating ambivalence in the activity, and this is precisely the area that is blocked of with displacement. “Some patients delude themselves with the belief that [premature ejaculation] is a sign of an unusually passionate temperament.”
How Abraham analyzed this was with free association and following the details where they went and also the fact that these patients didn’t have this problem when masturbating. For patients, Karl put them into two groups: Those who rush all the time with everything, including sex, and those who are passive and don’t want to put the effort, and their lack of healthy sadism. Fear of rejection or of hurting the woman can also reduce libido. “There remains to them a remnant of potency only if they are certain of the complete consent of the woman; and their aggressive impulses are so suppressed that all sexual initiative, in the strict sense of the term, is absent. Many of them are quite unable to establish any relations with women on their own initiative; others are capable of beginning such a relationship, but lose their activity at the moment when it ought to pass over into physical action.” This manifested for his patients when the husband was in argument with his wife. In those situations there was no potency, but it returned after a reconciliation. For women there’s a primal fear of the father about to interrupt the sexual act and is ever watchful. “They dread his all-seeing eye and his chastising hand.” This leads to women treating sex with haste like when completing a daily task and not having enough time. There are also infantile theories that children have that remain unconscious in adulthood. “It is not rare for patients to tell the physician of a fear which they have had since puberty that they may not be able to withdraw their penis from the body of the woman, and have to leave it behind. This fear is founded on one of the infantile sexual theories which are re-vivified at puberty. According to it there is only one union between the woman and the man, and in it she robs him of his genital organ by tearing it off…In consciousness he reacts to this unmanly retreat with lively and tormenting feelings of insufficiency.”
The goal for Abraham is to remove the narcissism and hostility to the opposite sex and allow both partners to desire to please the other partner and think less about their old hang ups with their mother, old desires for revenge, and past rejections. Both partners have to be comfortable together and lower their emotional armor. “It is the task of psycho-analytical treatment to free the patient from his narcissistic attitude, and to point out to him the path to a normal transference of feelings. If we can succeed in removing his narcissistic rejection of the female, the path is made free for him to carry out the normal sexual functions. Psycho-analysis acts in a similar manner in removing the female counterpart…frigidity.”
Professor Brett Kahr recounts how he presented this paper in a modern context. “As a little example of the ongoing usefulness of Abraham as a clinical teacher, it might be of interest to know that I recently presented a paper to a conference on the treatment of psychosexual difficulties, and drew heavily upon Abraham’s almost completely neglected paper…Many of the conference participants—mostly devotees of modern methods of psychosexual therapy who prescribe practical genital exercises for couples struggling with premature ejaculation—listened in open-minded fashion as I described my work with several patients whom I treated in a classical Abrahamian fashion, and whose [problems] vanished after we had thoroughly explored the split-off hostilities. After the conference, many participants asked me for the reference to Abraham’s paper, explaining that they had never come across this essay, or, indeed, upon Abraham himself!”
Selected Papers of Karl Abraham – Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781376216677/
Karl Abraham (1935) A Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Understanding of his Personality and the Monotheistic Cult of Aton, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4:4, 537-569
Karl Abraham Life and Work, a Biography – Anna Bentinck van Schoonheten: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367325251/
Karl Abraham the birth of object relations theory – Isabel Sanfeliu: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367325244/
The True Believer – Eric Hoffer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780060505912/
American Marxism – Mark Levin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781501135972/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/