Early Coping and Development
From the beginning, for Melanie, desire is operating in the infant. Desire is about gratification, but it’s also about learning and mastering an environment to make gratification stable and reliable. Because children have a long gestation period, this long period of dependency allows for so many twists and turns in development. The oscillation between comfort, gratification, and scarcity, lack, or abandonment, can take the constitutional inheritance in the child’s body in different developmental directions based on bodily, and mental, strengths and weaknesses. “Dependency is ‘perilous’ because the loved and needed object is also the hated one, putting the ego at risk of both persecutory and depressive anxieties. In mania, at the same time, the ego ‘endeavours ceaselessly to master and control all its objects, and the evidence of this effort is its hyperactivity.’ This control is necessary for two reasons: (a) in order to deny the dread of them [the objects depended upon] which is being experienced, and (b) so that the mechanism…of making reparation to the object may be carried through.” A certain amount of repression is needed to take inappropriate desires and direct them in more harmonious ways, which theoretically defuses the rivalry connected with them and solves the neurosis with more creative object choices. If there’s too much repression it can lead to ignorance and a tendency to dwell in phantasy. Real learning leads to development, and compounded development is the basis for even more complex learning.
Karl Abraham’s work, as well as Freud’s, influenced Melanie with her observations of infantile sadism. These pleasures were loosely organized into categories of Anal, Urethral, Oral, and Genital pleasure. Healthy repression is to aim the child towards genital pleasure and more appropriate relationships free of conflict. “It is therefore plausible to suppose that these character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy, which are so often prominent in people who were formerly anal erotics, are to be regarded as the first and most constant results of the sublimation of anal erotism.” Holding in poo for psychoanalysis is to control and extend anal pleasure via sphincter tension. As these component instincts develop over time, they can connect with activities, like saving money, because of money’s cultural association with dirtiness. For example, money brings up unpleasant associations with the lack of it or the unsavory behavior that is engaged in order to earn that money. Control of feces in this example is connected with control of treasure. In another example, the unrepressed expression of coprophilia, which is the pleasure of relief, it can move towards a natural interest in money via reaction formations to clean and control due to the early threat of punishment during toilet training. A reaction formation is a coerced behavior to do the opposite of the behavior that was originally criticized. Money is also about cleaning things by paying people to clean up dinner or to solve problems that are too dirty for oneself to roll up the sleeves for. You can pay people to do your “dirty work” for you. The concept of money naturally leads to the understanding of ownership, energy, tiredness, and boundaries. Early coping eventually leads to adult coping, which is about how to tolerate unpleasant reality for as far as one can muster.
One of the consequences for patients who have trouble developing and meeting the demands of reality is being stuck in magical thinking and not being able to get out of those early developmental stages. Magical thinking, often includes omnipotent thoughts that prevent realistic adaptation. Going from the pleasure principle to the reality principle is an acceptance for the child to find realistic object-choices, and is also a sign of skill development. Without reality testing, growth is stunted in sexual development as well as interest in vocations and hobbies. “Honesty towards children, frank answering of all their questions, and the inner freedom which this brings about, influence mental development profoundly and beneficially. This safeguards thought from the tendency to repression which is the chief danger affecting it, ie. from the withdrawal of instinctual energy with which goes a part of sublimation, and from the accompanying repression of ideational associations connected with the repressed complexes, whereby the sequence of thought is destroyed. In his article ‘Symbolic Representation of the Pleasure and Reality Principles in the Oedipus Myth’, Ferenczi said, ‘these tendencies that, owing to the cultural upbringing of the race and of the individual, have become highly painful to consciousness and are therefore repressed, drag into repression with them a great number of other ideas and tendencies associated with these complexes and dissociate them from the free interchange of thoughts or at least prevent them from being handled with scientific reality.'” Catastrophic repression leads to a loss of balance or dimensionality. When repression is widespread, culture and its progress can also be delayed, as can be seen in brutal dictatorships that censor.
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
School challenges
Repression from parents is just the beginning in childhood development. As children grow up and attend school, demands are already increasing, which can be taxing when there are repeated assessments, quizzes and examinations. “The fear of examinations, in dreams as in reality, is a fear of castration.”
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvsvj-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-1.html
Children readily displace their feelings about their mothers and fathers onto teachers and the administration, while at the same time testing their sense of masculinity and femininity, and whether it is keeping up with expectations. In psychoanalysis, both men and women have a mixture of masculine and feminine skills intertwined in a complex way. “The contribution which the feminine component makes to sublimation will probably always prove to be receptivity and understanding, which are an important part of all activities; the driving executive part, however, which really constitutes the character of any activity, originates in the sublimation of masculine potency.” At that time Melanie treated the sense of play, activity, humor, and eating, as forms of pleasure that ultimately derive from sexual pleasure and emotional feeding. The mind has to deem something as GOOD to create basic goals that have the possibility of melding pleasure with activity. The activity to chase after pleasure leads to a challenging tension and then a pleasurable release when there is success. Challenges that are too difficult become accessible when skills are increased in response to them. This is greatly improved if the challenge yields information about what is good about an activity, or it’s meaningfulness. Typical schooling that is devoid of meaning is often felt by students to be a grind. In psychoanalysis, the feelings of being daunted, or that work is a grind, leads to feelings of malaise or impotence. Even before people can hate their jobs, it’s probable that many of those same adults hated school as well. They couldn’t connect their zeal to important activities in childhood. There is also a pollution that can transfer from inhibited activities to stifle playfulness altogether and make all activities globally unpalatable. So the same activities may appear “good” or “bad” depending on the current skill level of the individual assessing the activity. The more skill, the more opportunity for pleasure.
How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
“I have endeavoured to show that the fundamental activities exercised at schools are channels for the flow of libido and that by this means the component instincts achieve sublimation under the supremacy of the genitals. This [craving investment], however, is carried over from the most elementary studies—reading, writing and arithmetic—to wider efforts and interests based upon these, so that the foundations of later inhibitions—of vocational inhibition as well—are to be found, above all, in the frequently apparently evanescent ones concerned with the earliest studies. The inhibitions of these earliest studies, however, are built upon play-inhibitions, so that in the end we can see all the later inhibitions, so significant for life and development, evolving from the earliest play-inhibitions. Starting from the point where the pre-conditions for the capacity for sublimation are given by [craving] fixations on the most primary sublimations—which I considered to be speech and the pleasure in movement—the constantly extending ego-activities and interests achieve [craving investment] by acquiring a sexual symbolic meaning, so that there are constantly new sublimations at different stages. The mechanism of inhibition, owing to common sexual symbolic meanings, [permits] the progress of the inhibitions from one ego-activity or trend to another. Since a removal of the earliest inhibitions also means an avoidance of further ones, very great importance must be attached to inhibitions in the child of pre-school age, even when they are not very strikingly apparent.” So children need to see the GOOD in as many activities as soon as possible so as to have a foundation for further skill development in school. GOOD naturally builds upon GOOD so that pleasurable intuition autogenerates in the super-ego. GOOD is also attributed to being good at a skill, so an assessment of progress, including pleasure in small improvements in a skill, can allow for the child to gain some pride in an activity.
In psychoanalysis, both boys and girls have bisexual potentialities and its not necessary that they always escalate towards overt grotesque sexuality. They appear in talents and abilities that are found across biological sex. Too much repression intimidates these potentials, talents and abilities. For example, not everyone becomes a music conductor or composer, and a player has to respect their authority in order to play a piece collaboratively. If the repression is deep enough, then the super-ego has no commentary related to these budding skills, and therefore no way to develop intuition further. “I was able repeatedly in analyses of boys and girls to see how important the repression of this feminine attitude through the castration complex might be. As an essential part of every activity, repression of it must contribute largely to the inhibition of any activity. It has also been possible to observe in analysing patients of both sexes how, as a part of the castration complex became conscious and the feminine attitude appeared more freely, there often occurred a powerful onset of artistic and other interests. In the analysis of Felix, for instance, when after a solution of part of the castration-fear the feminine attitude to the father became apparent, the musical talent which now appeared showed itself in admiration and recognition of a conductor and composer. Only on the growth of the activity did a severer critical faculty develop, a comparison with his own capacity and consequent endeavours to imitate the achievements of others.”
Excessive criticism and premature demands that don’t connect rudimentary pleasure in a skill will make it difficult to develop further. This is what a “grind” is, it’s the association of torture or intimidation with activity. Castration complexes can make pupils focus too much on results and success and less on authentic development. A sense of independence can arise when one can measure one’s own progress accurately or with a mentor who is honest about both positive things and also flaws. Criticism is a double-edged sword. An entire lack of criticism prevents the GOOD from being noticed. On the other hand, excessive criticism can efface originality and genuine spark. An example of that was the story of Solomon Cutner, who was a child prodigy pianist that was unfortunately exploited by his teacher Mathilde Verne from the Pianoforte School in Kensington. “He had been seriously exploited as a marketable commodity, he had been prematurely forced as a performer and had been given unprecedented publicity at a very early age—which no doubt goes some considerable way in explaining his subsequent profound aversion to all forms of publicity.” In his five year contract “two years on…Solomon openly declared that he was ‘utterly sick of the piano and hated his work.'”
Solomon reconnected with his authenticity and inspiration again by shaking up lessons and working with Simon Rumschisky, who meditatively understood the value of conserving energy. “The Lithuanian insisted in taking Solomon right back to square one. They began their work together with nothing but scales, eternal scales, with Rumschisky all the time emphasising that every note had to be a fine sound, ‘a pearl’ as he called it…Rumschisky fully understood the physical involvement in playing the piano. He consequently taught Solo how to approach piano playing with maximum relaxation by insisting that all the non-playing parts of the body, including the shoulders, should be totally relaxed and at ease. It was necessary only for the elbows, lower arms and hands to be actively employed at the keyboard…It was thanks to Rumschisky that Solo understood how he physically played every note on the piano. He ended up by knowing every movement that was required to achieve different kinds of tones and how to attain a wide dynamic range…Rumschisky certainly has to take the credit for Solo’s marvellous control of the keyboard.”
Solomon’s authentic sound developed further when he began working with Lazar Lévy. “While of supreme importance, technique was, to him, never an end in itself.” Lévy understood that technical skill was important but in the classical music world, stars are made by interpretation and not by trying to make every audience member love you. If there are enough ardent fans, the performer has made their unique stamp on the music world, and in the early days of recording, making reference material for private music collections was becoming more and more important. “I once played [Lazare] one of the Chopin Ballades. ‘I don’t like the way you play that at all’, he commented. ‘In fact, I dislike it intensely.’ This naturally worried me, and I asked him what I was to do about it. ‘Don’t alter a note,’ came the surprising reply. ‘That’s your interpretation. Stand by it. As many people will like that as they do mine. The great thing is that that is what you think of the music, and not something that has been drilled into you.’ Such a free, spontaneous approach to interpretation, one that was always open to consideration and reassessment, underpinned Solomon’s attitude to the score for the rest of his life.”
The balance is to accept constructive criticism that allows for development. “It is clear that an understanding teacher who considers the child’s complexes will diminish more inhibitions and achieve more favourable results than the non-understanding or even brutal teacher, who from the first represents for the child the castrating father.” Ultimately, this doesn’t always affect the child’s later development if they can independently assess their own skills in a realistic way. It’s important to take charge of one’s own learning when one is an adult. Some people are also more sensitive and the transference they bring to the situation can color how the teacher is viewed. Pleasurable intuition and inspiration on how to move forward, as well as patience to tolerate long periods of practice leads to progress and skill development.
Beethoven: Piano Sonata no. 29 “Hammerklavier” (Solomon): https://youtu.be/YKlLPe86Flk?si=f8CL_YsYLgtDQcHp
Appassionata, 3rd Movement, performed by Solomon Cutner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqYJJeyHe7A
Steven Isserlis Interview – Living the Classical Life (12:55) “Is it important to be kind to your student?” (17:37) “Anti-anxiety drugs”: https://youtu.be/rtkRbpRvkrg?si=SmPkK8sic7JaNTe2
Ailyn Pérez Interview – Living the Classical Life (17:21) “I forget to breathe.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7euUEOWKpP8
Lisette Oropesa Interview – Living the Classical Life (15:05) “Nerves.”: https://youtu.be/Yq869_BUdSQ?si=q2kMg8_S8bvExTvL
Ilya Itin Interview – Living the Classical Life (8:14) “Playing for yourself”: https://youtu.be/mPG82PkM8ZM?si=tWfVC1kbtV6WUdF_
Golda Schultz – Living the Classical Life (34:04) “Stage Fright”: https://youtu.be/BcEhav1oumE?si=zH0T1Ivhjdzi5igM
Trading Up
When the child reaches puberty, there is still a lot of shameful old sediment from the past that gets carried along. “Bombarded by his sexuality, he feels himself at the mercy of wishes and desires which he cannot and may not satisfy…Every normal little boy will show a passionate love for his mother and declare his desire to marry her at least once between the ages of three and five; soon after, his sister will replace his mother as the object of his longing…Their incestuous nature evokes severe social stricture, since their fulfilment would cause cultural regression and dissolution. They are thus destined for repression to form in the unconscious Oedipus complex.” There is an internal struggle now that is aimed at being an adult that is independent of their parents, and one’s sordid past history. The child has to trade up from their parents and siblings to classmates, and eventually an adult partner after school is completed. It requires a continuous development of new skills and adaptions for the increased demands of the greater society. Depending on how well parents prepare their children, the real world will look like an interesting place to explore or a hellscape. “The battle now joined between emerging desires and phantasies clamouring for recognition and the repressing forces of the ego taxes his strength excessively. The ego’s failure will cause problems and inhibitions of every kind, including overt illness. In favourable circumstances the embattled elements achieve a kind of balance. The outcome of the struggle will determine for good the character of his sexual life, and hence is decisive for his future development, bearing in mind that what has to be done during puberty is to organize the incoherent partial sexual instincts of the child towards procreative functions. The boy must achieve an inner detachment from the incestuous links to his mother, though these will remain the foundation and model for later love. A measure of external detachment from his fixation to his parents is also necessary if he is to develop into a vigorous, active and independent man.” Ideally, when all else fails, “analysis restores the aliveness lost under repression.”
Ego integration
When children are offered up for analysis, due to one particular failure or another, analysts are looking at a shell of a patient that is blocked off from satisfaction. “We frequently find in psycho-analysis that neurotic inhibitions of talents are determined by repression having overtaken the [yearning thoughts] associated with these particular activities, and thus at the same time the activities themselves. In the course of the analysis of infants and older children, I came upon material that led to the investigation of certain inhibitions which had only been recognized as such during the analysis. The following characteristics proved in a number of cases and in a typical way to be inhibitions: awkwardness in games and athletics and distaste for them, little or no pleasure in lessons, lack of interest in one particular subject, or, in general, the varying degrees of so-called laziness; very often, too, capacities or interests which were feebler than the ordinary turned out to be ‘inhibited.’ In some instances it had not been recognized that these characteristics were real inhibitions and, since similar inhibitions make up part of the personality of every human being, they could not be termed neurotic. When they had been resolved by analysis we found—as Abraham has shown in the case of neurotics suffering from motor inhibitions—that the basis of these inhibitions, too, was a strong primary pleasure which had been repressed on account of its sexual character. Playing at ball or with hoops, skating, tobogganing, dancing, gymnastics, swimming—in fact, athletic games of every sort—turned out to have a [craving investment], and genital symbolism always played a part in it. The same applied to the road to school, the relation with men and women teachers, and also to learning and teaching in themselves. Of course a large number of active and passive, heterosexual and homosexual determinants, varying with the individual and proceeding from the separate component instincts, were also found to be of importance.”
Melanie was of course influenced by other theoreticians at the time on how to do analysis, and she was especially influenced by Franz Alexander. Franz also wondered how much therapy should be based on catharsis and interpretation. Her studies led her to look at the signal that anxiety brings to therapy. She believed that anxiety is to be found beyond resistance to reveal the source of original intimidation. “I came to see that in far the greater number of these inhibitions, whether they were recognizable as such or not, the work of reversing the mechanism was accomplished by way of anxiety, and in particular by the ‘dread of castration’; only when this anxiety was resolved was it possible to make any progress in removing the inhibition.” When a source of anxiety is found out, it allows the conscious mind to find solutions, especially if one is older and the unconscious inhibitions are from a time in life when one was dependent and powerless. So much knowledge has been gathered since then.
Franz knew the end game would have to be for the patient to be able to control themselves better, and act on the world more independently, which he called Integration. “The aim of the therapy can thus be defined as the extension of conscious control over instinctual forces which were isolated from the conscious ego’s administrative power, either as symptom or as neurotic behavior.” When psychoanalytic books were being read more and more, practitioners would bump into problems with procedure and the complexity of each analysand. It’s not so easy. “We saw that [catharsis] without insight is insufficient. We understand now why. The process of integration, by which the repressed tendency becomes an organized part of the ego, does not take place without insight; insight is the condition—perhaps the very essence—of this integrating process. Equally obvious on the other hand, insight without emotional experience, that is to say, without [catharsis], is of little value. Something which is not in the ego cannot be integrated into it, and emotional experience is the sign that the tendency is becoming conscious. Therefore theoretical knowledge of something which is not experienced emotionally by the patients is perforce therapeutically ineffective, though it must be admitted that in certain situations a merely intellectual insight may prepare the way for [catharsis].”
Repression for psychoanalysis includes a forgetfulness of possibilities and behaviors that were originally prohibited. One forgets because one feels that the possibility has been barred from access forever. The mind then wanders after other possibilities. Earlier on in these theories, Freud started by mapping out the past to recover what was repressed and forgotten. Each of the following methods below led to evermore integration, but no one method was enough. “Recollection seems to be an indispensable precondition if a repressed tendency is to be thoroughly integrated into the ego system, in that it is recollection which connects the present with the past. Although the direct therapeutic value of the process of recollection may be questioned, the removal of the infantile amnesia must be considered as a unique indicator of the successful resolving of repressions.” At the time, these considerations influenced many analysts to pursue one line of cure versus another, leading to methodologies that were lopsided. Those who emphasized catharsis, “represent an emphasis of intensive transference analysis and neglect of the intellectual integrating side of therapy, the working through.” Those who focused on interpretations, “overintellectualized psychoanalytic treatment, in which intellectual insight was overstressed, and in which reconstructions and interpretations were made by the analyst upon material which had not yet appeared in the consciousness of the patient.”
Case Studies: The ‘Ratman’ – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html
Once memories are recovered, the patient’s attitude towards those memories has to be investigated as well. “Even after Freud’s publications on technical recommendations many analytic pioneers apparently persistently overintellectualized the analytic process, and stressed the interpretation of content and reconstruction of infantile history, overlooking the more dynamic handling of resistance and transference.” Regardless, the target can be missed and for Franz that target he felt was “the repressing tendencies and repressed content [that] are closely connected…The more the analyst is able to help the patient to understand his resistance in connection with what it is directed against, the sooner the resistance itself can be resolved. Mostly the verbalization of what the patient is resisting diminishes the resistance itself.”
Alexander wanted the abundant material to come from the patient first before interpretations could be applied, where hopefully, even more new material would arise. “The ideal of the standard technique is a permanent, steady, uninterrupted flow of repressed material…This steady flow can, however, only be obtained by a judicious economic use of resistance and content interpretations in such connections as they appear, by helping the patient connect the emerging material with the rest of his conscious mind and with his past and present experience.” The goal is always to lead towards integration in the patient so the relief as well as the insights are taken with the patient outside of therapy into real life. First there is “the inviting of unconscious material into consciousness and [second] the assimilation of this material by the conscious ego. To the first phase our literature refers by different expressions: emotional experience, abreaction, transformation of unconscious into conscious material; the second phase is called insight, digestion or assimilation of unconscious material by the ego or synthesis and integration.”
Initial consulting usually involves getting a summary from the patient as to their particular problem that is insoluble. These are usually inhibitions and resistances related to repressed desires, threats of punishment, and or victimization. Because these topics are so unpleasant, embarrassing, and stigmatizing, the trust earned by the therapist allows the patient to entertain these ideas and express the emotions related to them. After discharge and catharsis, insights and interpretations are provided, which lead to practical lessons, and then a desire arises from the patient to trade up their situation for a better suited one. Confidence increases when there is less splitting, meaning that the situation is understood as a mix of pleasures and consequences, and is therefore less distorted. Because the emotions related to the topic are ever more exhausted and understood, the ego can integrate and move towards better suited activities or environments. Using the Id, Ego, and Super-ego model, the Id is a desire without an object. The super-ego in this case, may have had inappropriate objects causing distress by directing the ego towards choices with unpleasant consequences. When the super-ego chooses to imitate objects free of blame and shame, and precisely because there is a desire for peace, for a clear conscience, the ego now says “I would like to be like that guy, or gal.” The ego learns to adapt.
The purpose of doing anything is to gain pleasure from an activity. If the role modeling changes in response to therapy, the desire to gain pleasure from mental peace, and different forms of bliss, that are blameless, the ego can now gain pleasure from responsibility as well. “I’m the kind of guy or gal who gets things done,” and therefore enjoy a clear conscience. Once the analysand gains experiences of a clear conscience, they can move beyond perfectionism towards their sordid past because they have an authentic method of gaining relief, and even further, they can imagine what that relief would feel like before acting and become self-motivated. Role modeling then becomes more about authentic sampling and satisfaction of desire with longer lasting results. A narcissist would still be stuck in the pathological super-ego and resist feedback from reality testing, especially if it didn’t confirm any prestige that was sought after.
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
“The quality of consciousness in itself involves an integrating act: a psychological content in becoming conscious becomes included in a higher, richer, more complex system of connections. The preconscious material’s becoming conscious has long been considered by Freud as the establishment of a new connection: that between object images and word images. Obviously what we call abstractions, or abstract thinking, represent again a higher grade of synthesis between word images. Although we do not yet know much about its details, what we call conscious thinking consists mainly in the establishment of new connections between conscious contents. It must be remembered, however, that these new connections of higher grade cannot be established arbitrarily by the ego. The connections must be correct, that is to say, they must be in conformity with the results of the reality testing of the ego.” Solutions have to conform to reality testing, adaptation, and survival for the ego to let go of inhibition. New goals have to be accessible.
Once the ego has integrated the various insights, it now has more control over impulses and reactions than when they were completely unconscious. “The process by which an unconscious content becomes conscious consequently consists in the disruption of primitive synthetic products and the reassembling of the elements in the higher synthetic system of consciousness, which is more complex, more differentiated and consequently more flexible. Thomas M. French’s studies of consecutive dreams clearly demonstrate that during the course of the treatment a progressive breaking up of primitive emotional patterns takes place, together with a building up of new more complex relationships between the elements. This new synthesis allows behavior to be more flexible than the rigid automatic behavior which is determined by unconscious synthetic patterns. It is the ego’s function to secure gratifications of instinctive needs harmoniously and within the possibilities of the existing external conditions. Every new experience requires a modification in the previously established patterns of instinct gratification. The unconscious consists of psychological units, expressing more primitive, usually infantile connections between instinctual needs and external observations. These primitive units as we know are not harmonized with each other, nor do they correspond to the external conditions of the adult. Therefore they must undergo a new integrating process into higher systems: a new adjustment between instinctual needs and external reality must be accomplished, in which process the ego plays the part of a mediator. The establishment of these new connections, however, necessitates the breaking up of the old units—in other words, of symptoms or fixed behavior patterns which correspond to earlier phases of the ego development.”
“The main function of psychoanalytic interpretations obviously consists precisely in the establishment of new correct connections and in the breaking up of old overgeneralized and more primitive connections. The effect of interpretation can most simply be compared with the process of the child’s learning to connect and differentiate objects. At first, when the child learns the word ‘stick,’ it begins to call every longitudinal object a stick, and then gradually learns to differentiate between stick, pencil, poker, umbrella, etc. When a neurotic patient learns to differentiate between incestuous and non-incestuous objects, that is to say, to react differently toward them, he essentially repeats the same process.” At that point in the therapy, the patient goes through “a gradual establishment of new and more differentiated connections between the psychic representatives of instinctual needs and the data of sense perception,” which is a fancy way of defining trading up, or learning. And typical of learning, the leap between one insight to the next can’t be too great. Skill development is usually cumulative or step-by-step, so “interpretation can only contain just a little more than the patient is able to see for himself at the moment.”
Learning eventually leads to mastering skills and situations so that they are less daunting over time, and that’s why insight can’t be skipped over to mastery so easily. This is also why developmental weaknesses in the adult require improvements in the environment and relationships, or new sublimations into hobbies and interests to generate satisfaction more reliably, and therefore to avoid illness or pathology. As skills develop, the cutting edge of any skill is within reach of the next level of skills, and with the possibility of gaining more life balance. “The basis of the ego’s resistance is its inability to master or to assimilate unconscious material. Everything which the patient can understand, that is to say, everything which he can connect with other familiar psychological content of which he already is master, relieves fear. In other words, every new synthesis within the ego, by increasing the ego’s ability to face new unconscious material, facilitates the appearance of [even newer] unconscious material…The ideal we strive for in our technique is that whatever unconscious material appears in consciousness should be connected at the same time with what is already understood by the patient…Interpretations which connect the actual life situation with past experiences and with the transference situation—since the latter is always the axis around which such connections can best be made—I should like to call total interpretations. The more interpretations approximate this principle of totality, the more they fulfill their double purpose: they accelerate the assimilation of new material by the ego and mobilize further unconscious material.” The pattern here is to remove inhibition enough so as to take general, archaic, and abstract goals in the unconscious and pre-conscious, and then make them more detailed, nuanced, and practical in the real world. This of course requires action and reality testing to make the general more specific. Once the challenge is mastered, the tension related to it, releases feelings of euphoria. The more challenging the goal is when it’s mastered, the more euphoria will cascade in the mind. This is where effort, skill acquisition, and preparation must be tolerated so as to get ever closer to mastery.
Repression is not always coming from the outside entirely, because life is full of challenges, but it’s also our preparedness for those challenges. “Repression [is] a phenomenon which Freud has explained as resulting from the infantile weak ego’s inability to deal with certain instinctual needs.” In a way, the therapist is being a surrogate ego by providing interpretations the analysand wouldn’t find out on their own. “Through our interpretations, without fully realizing it, we actually do help the synthesis in the ego.”
Melanie Klein’s idea of strengthening the ego is similar to Franz Alexander’s, but she also added the need to create positive memories, even if only in the analysis, so that the patient could derive enough hope so that reality testing and trial and error could be tolerated long enough for progress to be noticeable. That hope is also a pleasure or anticipation towards new goals that are exciting as well as newly accessible. “By successful removal I do not simply mean that the inhibitions as such should be diminished or removed, but that the analysis should succeed in reinstating the primary pleasure of the activity.”
Primary pleasure is the pleasure principle and instant gratification. The reality principle is to find suitable objects for gratification. Because the environment may be too repressive, or there are not enough learning opportunities, or seductions that lead to wrong object choices or exploitation, it can be a long endeavor to find suitable environments and activities, including suitable work, relationships, or hobbies. When there is anxiety with these failures, the mind may move into escapism, or there may be symptoms of mental disturbance or even somatic reactions. These scenarios can be mitigated by having strong abilities to amuse oneself, develop personal interests, so that some form of discharge and satisfaction can occur reliably. “I think it is quite evident that, just in proportion as the sublimations hitherto effected are quantitatively abundant and qualitatively strong, so will the anxiety with which they are now invested be completely and imperceptibly distributed amongst them and thus discharged.” When there is a strong inhibition, it motivates reaction-formations to adjust behavior in the opposite direction of the behavior criticized, for survival reasons, but this may drain energy in other areas where there is a similar performance demand, and a similar threat of punishment for failure. That can spill into play, if play activities include anticipation of criticism that the subject finds intolerable.
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
“‘As we know, the development of anxiety is the reaction of the ego to danger and the signal preparatory to flight; it is then not a great step to imagine that in neurotic anxiety also the ego is attempting a flight from the demands of its [craving], and is treating this internal danger as if it were an external one. Then our expectation, that where anxiety is present there must be something of which one is afraid, would be fulfilled. The analogy goes further than this, however. Just as the tension prompting the attempt to flee from external danger is resolved into holding one’s ground and taking appropriate defensive measures, so the development of neurotic anxiety yields to a symptom-formation, which enables the anxiety to be bound.'” The symptom here for Melanie are pathological defenses used to reduce anxiety. For her, the strength of the ego to control instinctual energy depends on constitutional factors and how strong the craving or emotional investment is to modify the environment, the strength of the “libidinal cathexis.”
From Symbolism to Gratification
Melanie also studied symbolism in the works of Ernest Jones to gain further insight into how symbols can appear to motivate a sense of GOOD and BAD in the mind and inspire basic activity or to inhibit. “In his examination of the sexual origin of speech, Sperber showed that sexual impulses have played an important part in the evolution of speech, that the first spoken sounds were the alluring calls of mate to mate and that this rudimentary speech developed as a rhythmic accompaniment to work, which thus became associated with sexual pleasure. Jones draws the conclusion that sublimation is the ontogenetic repetition of the process described by Sperber.”
Ernest Jones agrees with Freud that symbolism is a disguise of the instinctual wish in a symbol to pass by repressive internal censorship. “The essential function of all forms of symbolism, using the word in the broadest and most popular sense, is to overcome the inhibition that is hindering the free expression of a given feeling-idea, the force derived from this, in its forward urge, being the effective cause of symbolism. It always constitutes a regression to a simpler mode of apprehension. If the regression proceeds only a certain distance, remaining conscious or at most preconscious, the result is metaphorical, or what Silberer calls functional/symbolism.” For Jones, if symbols or metaphors cannot lead to the intended actions, then those symbols and metaphors are attempting something beyond their strength or are wrong object choices that are socially unacceptable and have the need to be partially repressed and sublimated.
Dreams – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html
These symbols try to say something about a subject and they usually include a verb to explain an expected or desired action, which is a predicate. “Therefore, when it is wished to apprehend or convey a vivid impression, a strong feeling, recourse is had to the primitive method of likening the idea to an associated concrete image, because in this way some inhibition is overcome and feeling released; what is popularly called stimulating the imagination is always really releasing the imagination from its bonds. The over-profuse use of metaphors, as that of slang—which fulfils the same psychological function—is well known to be the mark of expressional incapacity; the person belongs to what, in association work, is called the predicate type.”
For Ernest, a simile is more primordial and explanatory before it is fused into a metaphor that is more economical. “Theoretically and logically the simile is the first stage of the metaphor. But, for the motives expounded above in connection with the process of identification, the two sides of the equation become fused into one at the very onset, with a resulting economy in psychical effort. The savage does not say ‘John is like a lion’; still less does he say ‘John is as brave as a lion’; he boldly asserts that ‘John is a lion.’ And when we cannot find language sufficiently vivid to convey our admiration of John’s courage, we revert to the primitive method of the savage and say likewise that ‘John is a lion.'” Ernest’s example is that of something laudable, like courage, but one would have to think of abusive characters, embarrassing wishes, etc., to get how this is used in analysis. I am like this. I am this. He or she is like this. He or she is this. It is like this. It is this. “A metaphor, therefore, presupposes a simile, which is the more primitive figure; in it the words ‘as’ or ‘like’ are suppressed, though always implied.” Free association and dreamwork brings out these symbols and then connections have to be made so that resistances, inhibitions, desires, transferences, and wishes can be associated with reality. If those desires become free of inhibition and choose objects for satisfaction that are blameless, then the super-ego can relax its criticism at the same time there is satisfaction.
Symbols can be imitated from culture and they point to influences and seduction. For Jones, if there are no cultural examples in the symbol, it may be phylogenetically older. “The symbolic relationship seems to be the remains and sign of an identity that once existed.” I would add though that modern people who don’t read a lot of older cultural materials, and do not follow a traditional religious system, are likely to find symbols that are more connected with modern culture. Associations are also developed as one ages and has more experiences. Children, for example, like to use fewer associations and apply them to many comparisons, and so it becomes imperative to study symbols that are within the patient’s culture. “The unexpected associations made by a child when confronted by a novelty are often very amusing to us—for example, the remark that soda-water tastes like a foot that has gone to sleep. Darwin’s oft quoted example of the child who, on first seeing a duck, onomatopoetically named it ‘quack’ and then later applied this word also to flies, wine, and even a sou (which had eagle’s wings), is rightly explained by Meumann, who points out that the child noticed only what interested him—namely, the flying and the relation to fluid, and so used this word to denote these two phenomena in whatever form they occurred; it was not the duck as a whole that was named ‘quack’ but only certain abstracted attributes, which then continued to be called by the same word. The second of the two reasons referred to above is of a more general and far-reaching order. When a new experience is presented to the mind it is certainly easier to perceive the points of resemblance between it and previous familiar experiences…If we can relate the new experience in some way to what is already familiar, then we can ‘place’ it and understand it; it becomes intelligible.” Intelligibility can then solve problems by finding new opportunities for gratification.
Going beyond verbs in the predicate, the symbol harbors adjectives that include emotional elements. “…A symbol of that kind represents not only the idea symbolised, but also the affects relating to it, or, at all events, some of these. It does this in the same way as the simile indicates an adjectival attribute—namely, by likening the object in question to another one that obviously possesses this attribute, except that in the case of symbolism the one idea is altogether replaced by the other. The affective attitude in this way indicated may be either a positive or a negative one. It may be either unconscious or conscious, the primary attitude or that resulting from repression.” Analysis has to uncover meanings with actual life history, including daily life experiences used as symbols, and to reconstruct gaps in memory, and to release affect, as well as provide opportunities for integration. If the symbols aren’t overtly sexual, like something protruding, or a space to go inside, then for Melanie it can be a “rhythmic accompaniment to [activity], which [is thus] associated with sexual pleasure.” A tension and release that can create satisfaction in other activities, like in vocations, hobbies and interests. When people feel a craving for an activity, and it’s not overtly sexual, for psychoanalysts, that’s a sublimation of libido, or craving energy, into side activities. The sexual symbolism here is more akin to an interest.
St. Vincent Teaches Creativity and Song Writing | Official Trailer | MasterClass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toD5c_OOirY
“Accordingly, we see that identification is a stage preliminary not only to symbol-formation but at the same time to the evolution of speech and sublimation. The latter takes place by way of symbol formation, [craving] phantasies becoming fixated in sexual-symbolic fashion upon particular objects, activities and interests. I may illustrate this statement as follows. In the cases I have mentioned of pleasure in motion—games and athletic activities—we could recognize the influence of the sexual-symbolic meaning of the playing field, the road, etc. (symbolizing the mother), while walking, running, and athletic movements of all kinds stood for penetrating into the mother. At the same time, the feet, the hands and the body, which carry out these activities and in consequence of early identification are equated with the penis, served to attract to themselves some of the phantasies which really had to do with the penis and the situations of gratification associated with that organ.”
Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
Part of the appeal for child psychology is this hope to reignite passion in the child before it is buried in repression and becomes inaccessible to the adult. “In discussing the question of sublimation I suggested that one determining factor in its success was that the fixations destined for sublimation should not have undergone repression too early, for this precludes the possibility of development.” Adaptive goals that provide rhythmic tension and release will only be therapeutic when the patient is able to find interest, zest, or zeal for them. Any forced attitudes, like it’s a “means to an end,” will make the activity a grind full of resistance. Even a basic meditation practice, to check with the breath and to find useless tensions in the muscles, provides opportunities to relax them and find release, just like the example of relaxation with the pianist Solomon. Energy savings in meditation provide a basic pleasure that can be included in many activities when one is used to the practice. Deliberate practice of skills also helps the patient prepare for challenges. Sometimes pleasure will not appear until the grinding practice leads to skillfulness. Once skill is more effortless, the effortlessness increases pleasure. Unfortunately, many people are afraid to learn because they expect that they will be criticized or intimidated mercilessly before the required time passes that is necessary to upskill.
How to motivate yourself – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv3zl-how-to-motivate-yourself-freud-and-beyond.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 5: https://rumble.com/v2oezde-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-5.html
Meditation: Being Awareness Knows Being Awareness | Francis Lucille: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NosKSHaUu3U
This is why courage to persist is so important in skill development, as well as an independent mind that can discern between malicious and constructive criticism. This courage is needed against external critics, but also the ones absorbed in the super-ego that follow you wherever you go. The insight into this provides hope, and at the time Melanie was waxing utopian with the possibilities for mankind. “Accordingly the impulsion constantly to effect by means of fixations a libidinal cathexis of fresh ego-activities and interests genetically (i.e. by means of sexual symbolism) connected with one another, and to create new activities and interests, would be the driving force in the cultural evolution of mankind. This explains, too, how it is that we find symbols at work in increasingly complicated inventions and activities, just as the child constantly advances from his original primitive symbols, games and activities to others, leaving the former ones behind.”
Symbolizing appears in so many interpretations in analysis, so when material arises in free association, it’s important to find connections of similarity between people and things to help uncover repressed wishes, and often the analyst has to mull over what the internal censorship is trying to repress, what anxiety the patient is trying to avoid, and where catharsis and release can be found. Free association is also relaxing like a meditation, and that relaxation allows for symbols to arise in the first place, which means the patient will need time for reflection so as to allow content to come up in the mind’s eye as well as spontaneous intuitions in their regular life going forward.
Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Works 1921-1945 – Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237659/
The Scope of Psychoanalysis – Franz Gabriel Alexander: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781199363497/
JONES, E. (1918), THE THEORY OF SYMBOLISM. British Journal of Psychology, 1904-1920, 9: 181-229.
Solo: the biography of Solomon – Bryan Crimp: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781904331360/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/