The Actual Conflict
Patterns we can see in the prior episode on feminine psychology can apply overall to humanity and how we face reality. Reality is going to hit you with constraints and resistances, and many of those things can’t be avoided. Psychoanalytic vicissitudes lead to defenses which then lead to pathological life choices. The healthier you are, the more doors you can unlock in the maze of life, and therefore find more fulfillment, but there’s a progressively reduced accessibility as pathology is increased. Like an escape-room, there are lessons to learn from some locations, and sometimes there are limitations that one accepts and tries to make do with. For a person with constitutional factors that can’t be cured by talking therapy, that person is working in a smaller building with limited amenities, warmth or contentment. Psychoanalysis is not like engineering and analysts aren’t locksmiths. Those with more talent, skills, and overall mental health, they can experience consistent well-being in a spacious environment, even if they take it for granted. But any changes in the pathological direction, and the walls close in. With this understanding you can see the positives, and also the limitations of Psychoanalysis, especially it’s narrow focus on regression. It’s true that many people experience open doors at first to only find later a door that is uncooperative, forcing one to walk back to familiar environments, but without a possibility of a complete cure, therapists can only focus on stress related to any one condition.
Blur – St. Charles Square: https://youtu.be/8Iidpm1YLRM
“We might compare a frustration to a wall against which a forward-moving mental force rebounds so that it is compelled to strive backward. This process…we call ‘regression,’ and this regression continues back to those deserted stations of former developments which exercise a peculiar power of attraction. This persistent power of attraction corresponds to ‘fixation.’ It is fixation, and neither the actual cause nor frustration, which is responsible for the type of neurosis, and thus it acquires the character of a dispositional factor…Inner neurotic conflicts arise when the libido is deprived of the possibility of finding an ego-syntonic gratification in the outer world, or when intolerable narcissistic injuries have prevented it from making satisfactory sublimations…[When the] other world appears insoluble to the person concerned, the ‘external frustration’ becomes an internal one, and a vicious circle is set up…The ego disappointed in the outer world finds itself compelled to look for substitute gratifications, and thus enters upon a familiar path of regression…What makes a reality-conditioned actual conflict a neurotic one is its subjective insolubility…[but it] need not necessarily lead to symptom formation…Every civilized person is really in a continuous state of latent conflict, with the real world on one hand, and with his own inner forces on the other, since he has always frustrations to endure and inhibitions to overcome…The latent conflict will become an actual one only when the boundary of endurability for the person in question has been passed.”
Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
Like most religions acknowledge, Helene noticed how the desire that propels us forward, to unlock some of these doors, with successes or regressions, involves the same choice between pursuing the more bumpy road of bliss or the less intense experience of peace, which looks similar to later positive psychology perspectives. The advantage of pursuing bliss is that one can create beautiful memories to bask in later, because memories do release healthy affect. Peace on the other hand has the advantage of reducing risk and it supports the feelings of sobriety, rest and renewal. In reality, most people find that their sense of self is in the bliss, but they need periods of peace to recharge, and therefore a moderate path is usually carved out. On the bliss path, Helene found that no matter what, all desires lead to more or less a feeling of dejection or depression. The way forward is an autotelism where goals are the means and the end, and the repeated solution to the depressing ending of a goal, is to simply choose another goal. People can also use their intelligence and find where predictable conflicts will arise in the pursuit of bliss and find a way to avoid those problems, or just dump those goals altogether. Skills have to increase or goals have to be replaced with ones at the right level of challenge to return to a feeling of zest and aliveness. That brings up the old idiom that “if you’re bored, you’re boring.”
Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
The feeling of bliss is going to be challenged from time to time so a deep rest, with enough hours of sleep, and periods of meditation or inactivity, is needed to recharge. For those on the path of peace, rest is just the beginning. There is a search to maintain that peace for longer periods of time throughout the day. This usually involves a letting go of excessive survival alarms, which can feel like a surrender or an acceptance of death, but the wisdom of meditation is that there are many safe places to do this to give that alarm a rest from overwork. On a third path, one can moderate and bring that wisdom to the world of effort and learn to ramp up effort to efficient levels because work isn’t so bad when there’s better concentration and needless habits to tighten and flinch one’s soma weakens over the years. Part of the moderate path is also to notice that we tend to miss things we don’t have, and by moderating activity or consumption, many things that were boring, can regain some of that allure. For example, if you drink alcohol, tea, or coffee less often, when you reunite with those things, there’s more pleasure, but if you repeat too often, it’s taken for granted. This is even easier to do if one has many sublimations that take up the extra time so that one can’t be addicted to only one thing. It’s an art to use hobbies and interests to regulate your emotions and grief.
The Anapanasati Sutta: 4 stages of meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html
Grief
That area after bliss, grief, is the wheelhouse of most therapists. Psychoanalysts trace where patients fall from motivation into sadness, and learning about one’s childhood coping mechanisms helps to make aware to the adult how those patterns developed. In A Two-year Old boy’s First Love Comes to Grief, Helene found examples of grief acceptance already at this early age. Part of creating object solidity in the mind, which are memories of important figures in one’s life, is based on the emotional exchange one has with caregivers. Helene referred to an example of a boy, Rudi, who’s mother was a hardworking professional that hired a nurse to handle the day to day child rearing. As you would expect, Rudi treated this nurse like a surrogate mother, because she served “all his autoerotic (self-stimulation) needs; it was she who fed him, assisted him with his excretory functions, and fulfilled his wishes.” When that nurse finally left him, he went through stages of loss and acceptance.
When a younger replacement nurse arrived, the child oscillated between temporary acceptance of the new situation and a strong resistance. Back and forth he was treating feeding and excretory activities as things that can only happen in this loving bubble created by the prior nurse, or begrudgingly for his biological mother when she was present. “Rudi, now fully toilet trained, now wet and soiled his pants. When attempts were made to ‘catch’ him and put him on the ‘potty,’ he would let go a few drops of urine, only to wet his pants a few minutes later. Sometimes he would announce his need to go, but when the nursemaid hastened to help him he would say, ‘On no, Rudi goes wee wee only for Mommy’…Rudi had shown great obstinacy in withholding his excretory products. He had clearly enjoyed retaining his always constipated stool and waiting until the last moment to urinate. Now he relinquished his source of pleasure. His feces, found in his bed or in his pants, were now ideally soft, a state of affairs no medical or dietary measures had been able to produce. It is as if he were protesting, ‘I have something precious, but it is a gift. It is only for my loved one.'”
As the days went by, Rudi jumped into a mode of giving affection to his dolls, trying to embrace and kiss everyone around him. The autoerotic love was transforming to an alloerotic one looking for external objects. From the Freudian standpoint, cravings look for objects but when those objects are lost, there can be pathological consequences, or in healthier situations, children can move onto new objects. The fear that new objects will abandon them or abuse them can be a transference onto these new people that leads to either some kind of fear and avoidance or aggression to control. In Rudi’s case, by the ninth day of separation he was returning to his regular personality but with more of an interest in other people. With more displays of affection and interest in others, he became regular on the toilet.
Psychoanalysts expect certain milestones to be passed at different ages, but when those markers pass without visible development, it’s time to find out why. Hinted at in her paper is a suggestion that a healthy attitude is one where people accept losses, discharge grief by expressing it, and move onto new goals, while at the same time one is interested in other people and willing to have relationships where everyone is working together to find joint fulfillment. Pathology would instead be avoidance, phobias, chronic depression, paranoia, mania, etc., as listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Helene’s writings also clue the reader into another one of the ways one can detect pathology, which is to compare normal vs. abnormal losses and vicissitudes. “Our analytic experience has forced us to recognize this ‘dispositional factor.’ It became abundantly clear that many children were unable to overcome completely normal experiences in a normal way…Even the normal conditions of infantile life make demands which are by no means infrequently beyond the child’s psychic powers. And the incapacity to deal with these difficulties can produce various pathological reactions…[A] type of neurosis [can rest] in a constitutional factor, which can be recognized even in earliest infancy.”
Awareness increases control
Even with problems related to constitutional factors, the role of talking therapy is to focus on stress, especially stress that is optional, and to reduce it. You want to reduce pain and increase pleasure and satisfaction. Awareness in all these early modalities is about having the patient acknowledge their reactions and see what they are doing to themselves, and ideally an analysand can see the worthlessness of their reactions and lose the attraction to repeat them, because having less pain is good and having more pleasure is better. In psychoanalysis, one of the main ways to see reactivity is to realize that a lot of the reason why people have “locked doors” in their life experience is because they feel that someone has purposefully locked them in. Those bad memories of people trigger defenses that then are mentally rehearsed and transferred to other people in a series of predictions, and some of those reactions are pathological and get in the way of satisfaction, especially in relationships. One way to clarify this is to imagine the life of a person with no trauma. They likely go where they please, speak to who they please, and satisfy their libido without the anticipation of punishment or a fear of loss. On the contrary, a person who has had a traumatic life experience, they will likely have many expectations that anticipate abuse, rejection, neglect, and further loss. This limits adaptive behavior, which is like a self-sabotage, and healthy relationships suffer or are not pursued.
Following Freud, Helene agreed that a therapist has to be willing to be in the role of an authority figure or a reminder of a past caregiver. The reactions of the patient afterwards bring up a lot for awareness to digest, and the best information comes from developing a positive transference first and then seeing how things evolve or devolve from there. “The first aim of the treatment consists in establishing a well-developed rapport, in attaching the patient to the treatment and to the person of the physician. To ensure this one need do nothing but allow him time. If one devotes serious interest to him, clears away carefully the first resistances that arise, and avoids certain mistakes, such an attachment develops in the patient of itself, and the physician becomes linked up with one of the imagoes of those persons from whom he used to receive kindness.”
Case Studies: The ‘Ratman’ – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html
For the analyst, a lot of clues appear when they are brought into the mental world of the patient and are treated like a family member. Positive transference is first setup and then afterwards negative transferences begin to appear at the first sign a therapist is being viewed as disappointing, or the patient feels slighted, even if it’s only in their mind. While listening to their stories, different pathologies provide different clues. In Helene’s example of phobias, patients can have an “inner danger [that] is projected outward and attached to a situation or a particular object.” Tracing those reactions to actual incidents in the past helps to bring awareness to the patient that their phobias are a number of degrees away from the current situations they living through, for example, a fear of animals, a fear of large spaces, or in converse, a fear of enclosed spaces. Interrupting false associations allows patients to find safety in the real world and also to accept without delusion the real dangers that do exist. This way reality is not over or underestimated, and the ego can now navigate a more accessible world, and ideally find many forms of satisfaction.
With obsession, the patient has to see the “…unrelenting severity of the super-ego…” and see through the superstitions of obsessive rituals and the inaccurate beliefs that “if you shun the instinct you will escape the punishing authority.” Instincts are there for a reason and punishment should only happen when people are encroaching on each other’s territory. The obsessive patient has to realize that they have rituals that prevent a normal life from eventuating and the fact that these rituals don’t work, or there’s no real magic to them, should be a reason to abandon them. The therapeutic results also comes from all the energy saved when rituals are not taken up anymore, and when there’s confirmation that the world is essentially the same even when rituals are not followed.
With melancholia, the patient has to see “the cleft between the ego and the superego and the murderous struggle between the two psychic systems which this gives rise to.” Again, there can be rituals that are created to appease the superego, but a way to face the reality of life is to balance the expectations of the superego with the ego’s understanding of the very real limitations found in life. Melancholiac patients also need to look at their goal systems and de-cathect, or abandon emotional investment, from people and projects that predictably fail or abandon. When there are failures there can be overly strong signals of inferiority from the superego that devalues one’s actual skills and strengths in the ego. It’s like the superego stops believing in the ego’s ability to learn from trial and error. This creates a depressive impasse where no learning is possible, and healthy satisfactions are denied. Reengaging with goals with persistent reality testing, and acknowledging small wins along the way, can help to rehabilitate self-esteem. Again, the talking therapy aims to bring awareness, and as patients progressively abandon useless rituals or perfectionistic beliefs, it should be easier to choose better goals which naturally motivate action towards fulfillment. If there are any pathological resistances left, it is usually some kind of constitutional factor that thwarts well-being.
Why the perception of reality is so important is because what we believe to be true triggers stronger affect than fantasies do. For example, talking therapy doesn’t cure Schizophrenia or Bi-polar disorder, but being aware of how internal feelings are projected onto the outside world, like with Schizophrenia, it can help to reduce anxiety when those delusions arise and they are not given the significance of reality. Helene also saw the role of denial, particularly in Bi-polar disorder, and how the superego can blame-shift to the outside world while at the same time deny very real boundaries when acting in the world. With a reduction of boundaries a manic episode can easily arise. A vicious cycle can then develop when out of control impulses invite blame, making the patient depressed, and then when new excuses are found to project blame to the outside world, another bout of mania can arise from the continued lack of boundaries. Being aware of one’s denial could introduce more self-reflection so that the peaks and valleys of manic depression can be smoothed out somewhat. But, as Helene later stated, “what we conquer are only parts of psycho-genesis: expressions of conflicts, developmental failures. We do not eliminate the original sources of neurosis; we only help to achieve a better ability to change neurotic frustrations into valid compensations.” As a reminder, we need a sense of reality to find places where we can effectively discharge affect and enjoy compensations. If there are serious mental illnesses, then it’s still the same situation but the compensations provide only a partial recovery.
The Power of Suggestion and Induced Insanity
One of the ways of getting a grip on reality is to continually assess information that one receives and whether it leans more towards fact or more towards theory. For most people, they don’t operate completely in the world of science, but more in the world of suggestion. Suggestions are a way for people to share ideas of how they can find fulfillment in the world, and ideally share those ideas and pursue gratification individually and as a society without the need to go to war with other people and fight over scarcity, or to succumb to deprivations or health issues when following a pathological suggestion. Suggestions can be word of mouth or come via mass advertising, propaganda, or awareness campaigns. Suggestions can be pathological when they point to satisfactions that don’t conform to reality and steer a healthy person towards addictions, health problems, or conflict. Regular people can fall into periods of life where pathological suggestions were operating a lot of the decision making. It’s true that some suggestions are well-informed and one can see that when suggestions bare fruit, but when there are no “valid compensations” found when following a suggestion, it’s time for a reality check.
For most normal people, what Helene calls a “valid compensation,” would include a significant part of the economy. A lot of our economy is about temporarily numbing the pain related to stress, and not necessary finding a healthy long-term sublimation or lasting fulfillment. This can be seen in addictions, but these patterns can be also found in normal pursuits and leisure, which fall into the category of a healthy sublimation. She published an early version of Sports Psychology that really could apply to all hobbies and interests. Life can be full of negative feedback and for her the purpose of leisure is to “…compensate for the inferiority feelings in which that complex expressed itself.” One of the main complexes is the Castration Complex, starting with parental authority figures criticizing and ridiculing, and through transference, that complex develops an expectation that other authority figures will behave the same way. Unrelenting criticism and demands require a release somewhere, and hobbies can “…[project] a source of anxiety into the outside world and discharge [it].” The way to separate a valid compensation that discharges properly, from an addiction, would be a loose demarcation that highlights some kind of damage sustained or reduced well-being. One could make further distinctions between activities that provide thriving in the real world from entertainments that are solely releases in the imagination, and an even further devaluation for those pleasures that cause physical or psychological damage. Even healthy things like exercise suddenly change if it’s excessive and there’s injury. Intimate relationships can release a lot of instinctual tension, and provide opportunities for bonding, but if one is sleeping with a toxic person, the opposite is true.
With one example of a patient, Helene was able to define emotional compensation or satisfaction. This person had a phobia who “…ineffectually took to flight, while in games he endeavored effectually to master the situation…The possibility of discharge in an ego-syntonic form lessens the conflict between ego-tendencies and sexual instincts, and the harmonious operation of the two leads to an increase of feelings of power within the ego…The original situation between ego and external world is thus restored; the whole battle is waged no longer between the institutions of the ego, but between the ego and the external world. The social value of sport, too, from the point of view of psychology, lies partly in the fact that, through this process of displacing the battlefield, aggressive tendencies are discharged in a manner consonant with the ego. By the increase in narcissistic gratification the wound inflicted by the castration-complex is assuaged, and, above all, the subject is afforded a possibility of getting rid of part of the dread of castration or the fear of death which is common to all mankind.”
The benefit of activity in leisure is that at least there is some reality to it. If you won the game, then that is real too, but there can be further pathologies related to the superego when it takes over the reality checking function of the ego. Via the vehicle of idealism, Helene found in the story of Don Quixote, that one could live in a self-created world and try to operate within it and deny reality in the senses as far as possible. “With relinquishment of the real object there takes place a [suppression] of all instinctual drives…There is no doubt that in connection with this impoverishment of the ego in the interest of the ego ideal, reality testing likewise undergoes impairment…beyond any adaptation to reality…The demand that these idealists make upon reality—that it shall adjust itself to their narcissistic ego ideal, instead, vice versa, of subordinating the latter to the demands of reality—this is the eternal quixotism of the human spirit. It is in poets, artists, and in fanatics that it is particularly well-developed…[but] those who are adjusted to reality and accept rather than deny their instincts enjoy a pleasing triumph in seeing the ascetic ego ideal robbed of value by its caricature. This devaluation, however, refers equally to the infantile past in which the child believed himself the possessor of every perfection…” Here you could say that being in reality and getting satisfaction that is real is better than fantastical satisfaction because the affect, assuming no constitutional pathologies exist, will be stronger and more satisfying.
As idealistic people persist in ignoring reality, they can become chained to unscrupulous manipulators and other deluded authority figures. This especially happens when people put leaders on a pedestal and expect extraordinary results from them. Both leaders and followers have wishes to be fulfilled and Helene saw the power of suggestion and how it can spread like a virus when whole populations act without reality testing, and the predictable consequences of misery. “…In the form of mass suggestion they can take the form of psychical epidemics such as were especially frequent in the Middle Ages and occurred sporadically in later times; and in the individual they can take the form of the illness known to us under the clinical picture of induced insanity.” How the brain feels satisfaction through suggestion is via the ego-ideal, which is the entity individuals want to serve when in this mode. Randomly bumping into a meditation book by Jean Klein, I noticed how Advaita types and Buddhists are very familiar with this particular superego imago and how powerful it is, and possibly dangerous because of how one’s idol worshiping can be exploited by others for money and resources. In a way, you are getting lost in thought when you follow a conceptual version of yourself as a hero or villain in a story about one kind of consumption or another to master. “A wealth of second-hand knowledge, [a lot of it via suggestions from others], has given you a certain image and when you say, ‘I am this,’ you identify yourself with this image. Every time you look at a flower, or you look at a tree or a child, or face a situation in your life, it is the self-image that looks and everything refers to this image that you have of yourself. So, my advice is: Free yourself from the self-image, be nothing.”
Now I wouldn’t go as far as Jean Klein and I prefer to look at the language itself. In English the superego feels distant like it’s a goal post that keeps moving away, especially when you’ve achieved something. Following a self-image that chases something unreal is definitely a problem. This is called an unreal conditional in English grammar. Eg. “I would like to be,” but the Ego under a real conditional opportunity, has reality testing on its side and says “I will be…” The self-image is only a problem when it is disconnected from the real obstacles that exist and has no plan for them, or is pursuing something that isn’t going to provide much satisfaction. Whether someone is more or less in reality, it’s about living up to the ego-ideal, but as Freud also stated, it’s a “rebuilding of the vanished object world.” We don’t only want new things, but we want lost objects returned to us. This can easily be seen in mass movements, like trends, fads, and political initiatives to restore a golden age.
The danger of replacing reality testing with suggestion is relying on the fallacy of appealing to authority, which is part of the reason why people think they are responding to what is real, and feeling strong emotions in consequence. Leaders throughout history have disappointed people and caused nightmares because they aren’t as all knowing as they present themselves to be. “All education, for instance, depends, strictly speaking, on suggestion, for the transfer of ideas and intellectual content owes its strength solely to the suggestive resources at the disposal of the person in authority.” When the wish-fulfillment energies get harnessed by the authority figure, which also have their own wish-fulfillments that may not be in your interest, it’s very easy to lose control of one’s autonomy and one can turn into a puppet. Then the only way out of cult-like influences is a “separating [of] those involved from each other, preventing them from influencing each other, sober refutation of their delusional ideas, and finally confession of deception on the part of the suggesting parties…” Of course the last part is difficult to get out of authority figures who usually gaslight people into more beliefs about the reality of their fake world or move onto the next delusion or willful manipulation.
Mass Formation – Mattias Desmet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmloBdLnX3A
As If
The consequences of abandoning the reality one sees in one’s own life can be a life long problem with self-disorders that Helene lumped together into her category of “As If” personalities, where satisfaction is only mediated through authority figures and we are in turn controlled by the honor and affection that they can bestow or withdraw from us. She quibbled about the differences readers saw in the character pathologies of her analysands and quick associations they made with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), but the similarities are striking, and it’s not comforting when she states that “…the ‘as if’ personality is common among leaders and political figures.” Yet her examples often involve people who are in fact not leaders, but followers. One could also argue that current leaders were once followers in the past.
“The ‘as if’ is such a widespread psychological phenomenon that we can almost speak of a ‘type’ rather than of pathology.” Like the puppet on a string analogy, there is a lack of inner guidance. All work and endeavour is permeated with imitation. “They are intellectually intact and gifted and show great understanding in all intellectual matters. When they try to be productive—and efforts in that direction are always present—their work is formally good but totally devoid of originality. It is always a laborious though skillful imitation of a model without the slightest personal trace. Close observation shows that the same applies to their affective relationships. These are generally intense; they bear all the marks, for instance, of friendship, love, and sympathy, [yet]…these relationships lack all trace of warmth and that all their expressions of feeling are such in form only—it is like a performance by a technically well-trained actor who lacks truth to life—and that inner feeling has been totally eliminated. Thus the first characteristic of this human type is that formally they behave as if they possessed a fully felt emotional life. The important point about this behavior is that the patients themselves are not aware that anything is missing in their affective life and that they believe their empty performances to be identical with the feelings and experiences of others.”
These pathologies often start young, and when there is a lack of acknowledgement, let alone development, of a self, which is the feeling of love for people and activities, the individual ends up with “…object poverty and its persistence at a narcissistic level…” To simplify, it’s like the ego is totally subservient to the ego-ideal which is molded by a series of role models in the outer world and those role models point to some kind of godly example of success we should aim for. Subjective love towards real objects is weak, but the need for love from fantastical authority figures is strong. In a parasitical way, one needs to receive love much more than one can give. Real satisfactions always pale in comparison for the deluded person with promised forms of happiness. The way to notice this, especially when an “as if” person is a good actor, is to pay attention to how they behave in different environments. They usually change their personality to suit the authority figure at present, even if there are wild swings in ethical values. It’s “…mild benevolence that may nevertheless be capable of any kind of evil.” This can be dangerous when environments themselves provide bad influences and it’s possible that there are “…many criminal acts carried out by previously completely noncriminal personalities…”
As many experts point out about narcissism, there is no cure at the moment because of how early these pathologies arise. It’s hard to develop a self when there isn’t a childhood foundation. In agreement, Helene also acknowledged that “the result of this defect is the persistence of the earliest ego-identifications, in which the dependency on the object [parents] expressed itself in imitation as a method of adaptation.” When you get love only when it’s 100% conditional, the only rewarding pleasures available are one-up comparisons with others to prove one’s value to parents, and then eventually to authority figures in society, hence the need for early childhood mirroring where parents love their kids as they are. Without that you see a skill being developed in children to play act the emotions they think they need to feel in order to receive affection. For example, Helene described one patient as having “no primary, vital, warm object relations with her parents. These were impoverished from the outset; their role in her fantasy life was narcissistic, in that the objects served only to substitute increased self-feeling for the lack of love.”
It also doesn’t help that most people have some narcissism and it’s very common for people to look to authority figures for inspiration, and narcissists will point that out while not noticing more independent manifestations of libido in personal preferences, and they likely will say that “everyone is like me. Therefore there’s nothing’s wrong.” Like in previous episodes of Psych Reviews, the “as if” imago operates powerfully like an exercised muscle and if people are unaware of what it’s like to have an independent love for people and activities, which allows one to use personal experience contra social suggestion, one doesn’t know what one is missing. The advertising and the promise of happiness dominates personal experience. It’s like being stuck in thoughts and questions about “what do cool people normally like? What should I dislike?” Like a slave, the instincts need an ego-ideal permission slip before acting, and love for someone is based instead on how it affects one’s self-image and reputation. Any weaknesses in the person can appear as slights to the ego-ideal and motivate rejection and the need to find another circle of people. This deficiency of self further passes down the generations the same desire to make others into useful tools, and to ignore any inherent human value. If you didn’t receive love, can’t feel it, then logically you won’t be able to impart it to the next generation. As described above, authority figures can then overrule preferences and exploit the ‘as if’ personality’s “…passive readiness to be influenced…” It’s very easy to see how a totalitarian society can arise from such a population.
The following are common patterns of the “As If” personality and how it can be seen in the modern world:
- Patients experience a depersonalization where there’s a lack of affect.
- They have incredible abilities to imitate and learn behaviours and skills from role-models, but without any healthy passion, love, warmth, creativity or originality.
- One finds abilities to move between perversion and morality with relative ease and swiftness. There are no signs of remorse, but if there are signs, it’s just a pantomime to make one appear like others with the exact same goal of getting affection and sympathy from authority figures. If there are any values, it’s environmentally dependent. Change the environment and the values change.
- He has abilities to change professions quickly in order to launder one’s public image.
- She has placid emotions that can cover an ill-will underneath.
- They obey rules and laws with great exactness in order to get more positive attention from authorities, if they are in such an environment, so as to feed an omnipotent narrative that one is closing the gap between oneself and the role model, which is a primary motivation of these types.
- He had parenting that was emotionally cold or excessively spoiling, or a mixture thereof.
- She feigns warmth and excitement to solidify a relationship, but partners repeatedly realize that the affect was always simulated. Confrontations about this lead to a quick exit and a chameleon-like transformation to attract another partner.
- There can be past sexual interference with parents during a time when role-models are supposed to provide healthy super-ego development for the child.
- They live in ego-ideal fantasy worlds that can’t be supported by facts or reality.
- After undergoing analysis and achieving some success, the patient finds it easier to return to the habitual false self that is so well practiced and effective. This is also supported by a modern society which rewards compliant and subservient behavior, and detests independent people who threaten their power and control.
The Narcissist – Blur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gr8Z3rUeJM
The False Self – Various Authors (Narcissism 2 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gth6h-the-false-self-various-authors-narcissism-2-of-4.html
Like other composite illnesses of these early days of Psychoanalysis, the ‘As if’ personality could cover a range of Cluster B Personality disorders and has Schizoid features of depersonalization that many clinicians have since separated out into their own categories with different treatments for each. It has also been noticed that Helene herself had ‘As if’ tendencies, based on content in her memoirs. For example when Helene didn’t feel satisfied with her relationships, or partners disappointed her ego-ideal in some way, she thought about replacing them. Her parenting also involved abuse and neglect while Helene vied for her father’s attention to be the most beautiful and smart child. Lisa Appignanesi suspected that Freud’s early termination of Helene’s analysis was because “he was refusing Helene’s tendency to love by identifying herself with the object, then experiencing that love as betrayed and running to the next object. It was a tendency she herself explored in her various studies on the ‘as if’ personality. Indeed, her memoir sometimes fills one with the sense that she experienced her own existence to be an ‘as if’ – living her life first ‘as if’ a socialist in her identification with Lieberman; ‘as if’ a conventional wife with Felix; ‘as if’ a mother in her identification with her saintly friend; then ‘as if’ a psychoanalyst in the identification with Freud.” Regardless of how Helene expressed her personal experiences along with that of her case studies, or making herself into a case study, she moved to the United States in the 1930s when politics was becoming more extreme, and managed to pull off many successful seminars on psychoanalysis that helped to popularize the method. She also hosted Saturday night card games with students who wanted to learn more, and in turn influenced new generations of analysts, including “the Hartmann’s, the Hoffers, the Krises, the Waelders, and the Bibrings.”
Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst’s Life by Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780385197465/
Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue by Helene Deutsch: https://isbns.net/isbn/9780393336412/
The Therapeutic Process, the Self, and Female Psychology by Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780887384295/
The Psychoanalysis of Sexual Functions of Women by Helene Deutsch, Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780946439959/
Neuroses and Character Types: Clinical Psychoanalytic Studies by Helene Deutsch: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823635603/
Freud’s Women by Lisa Appignanesi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465025633/
Beyond Knowledge – Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780955176289/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/