Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud & Beyond

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, as introduced by Freud, contrasted with past therapeutic measures by trying to remove magical beliefs. For example, shamans used to heal psychological problems by projecting evil forces to sources outside of the patient. With Exorcism, both the exorcist and the possessed had to believe in angels and devils for the exorcism to work. If taboos were violated in primitive cultures, then only direct punishment, without any attempts at understanding, would follow. With Mesmerism, the patient had to believe in unbalances of an invisible substance in the environment. Magnetism allowed the practitioner to provide suggestions to influence the patient, and Spiritism tried to connect the patient with the dead, to access their supposed knowledge. The patterns we see here are about externalizing all internal conflicts. With Freud’s method the aim was to look inward instead.

Patient’s would lay on a sofa with Freud behind them and out of sight, and Freud’s early practice of touching people on the head was removed. James Strachey described the proceedings. “The session thus proceeds like a conversation between two people equally awake, but one of whom is spared every muscular exertion and every distracting sensory impression which might divert his attention from his own mental activity…In order to secure these ideas and associations he asks the patient to ‘let himself go’ in what he says, ‘as you would do in a conversation in which you were rambling on quite disconnectedly and at random’. Before he asks them for a detailed account of their case history he insists that they must include in it whatever comes into their heads, even if they think it unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical; he lays special stress on their not omitting any thought or idea from their story because to relate it would be embarrassing or distressing to them…Gaps appear in the patient’s memory even while he narrates his case: actual occurrences are forgotten, the chronological order is confused, or causal connections are broken, with unintelligible results. No neurotic case history is without amnesia… If the patient is urged to fill these gaps in his memory by an increased application of attention, it is noticed that all the ideas which occur to him are pushed back by every possible critical expedient, until at last he feels positive discomfort when the memory really returns. From this experience Freud concludes that the amnesias are the result of a process which he calls ‘repression’ and the motive for which he finds in feelings of un-pleasure. The psychical forces which have brought about this repression can also be detected, according to him, in the ‘resistance’ which operates against the recovery of the lost memories…The greater the resistance, the greater is the distortion.”

How it was believed that psychoanalysis was an advancement, James argued that “the objection to hypnosis is that it conceals the resistance and for that reason has obstructed the physician’s insight into the play of psychical forces. Hypnosis does not do away with the resistance but only evades it and therefore yields only incomplete information and transitory therapeutic success…Freud has developed on this basis an art of interpretation which takes on the task of, as it were, extracting the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas…The task of the treatment is to remove the amnesias. When all gaps in memory have been filled in, all the enigmatic products of mental life elucidated, the continuance and even a renewal of the morbid condition are made impossible. Or the formula may be expressed in this fashion: all repressions must be undone…Another formulation reaches further: the task consists in making the unconscious accessible to consciousness, which is done by overcoming the resistances. But it must be remembered that an ideal condition such as this is not present even in the normal, and further that it is only rarely possible to carry the treatment to a point approaching it…So the aim of the treatment will never be anything else but the practical recovery of the patient, the restoration of his ability to lead an active life and of his capacity for enjoyment. In a treatment which is incomplete or in which success is not perfect, one may at any rate achieve a considerable improvement in the general mental condition, while the symptoms (though now of smaller importance to the patient) may continue to exist without stamping him as a sick man.”

One fatal flaw of psychoanalysis was the age limitation. Strong habits and forgetfulness become more difficult to deal with as we age. “If the patient’s age is in the neighbourhood of the fifties the conditions for psycho-analysis become unfavourable. The mass of psychical material is then no longer manageable; the time required for recovery is too long; and the ability to undo psychical processes begins to grow weaker…Freud requires long periods, six months to three years, for an effective treatment.” Yet for a lot of critics in Freud’s time, they felt that he was only about sex and that maybe recovery would be faster than six months to three years by just simply suggesting patients engage in sexual activity. Freud responded “…would it not be simpler to aim directly at recovery by recommending sexual activity as a therapeutic measure, instead of pursuing the circuitous and laborious path of mental treatment?…Sexual need and deprivation are merely one factor at work in the mechanism of neurosis; if there were no others the result would be dissipation, not disease. The other, no less essential, factor, which is all too readily forgotten, is the neurotic’s aversion from sexuality, his incapacity for loving, that feature of the mind which I have called ‘repression’. Not until there is a conflict between the two tendencies does nervous illness break out, and therefore to advise sexual activity in the psychoneuroses can only very rarely be described as good advice.”

In Wild Analysis, Freud clarified his broad view of sexuality to prevent confusion. “In psychoanalysis, the concept of sexuality certainly embraces much more; in both higher and lower senses it reaches beyond the popular meaning. This extension is justified in terms of the human genetic heritage; for us, ‘sexual life’ includes everything that prompts those tender feelings deriving from the original source of primitive sexual impulses, even if those impulses have been subjected to inhibitions placed upon their original sexual aims, or if they have exchanged these aims for others that are no longer sexual. That is why we prefer to talk about psychosexuality, and thus stress the importance of not overlooking or underestimating the emotional factor in sexual life. We employ the word ‘sexuality’ in the same broad sense as the German language uses the word ‘lieben’ [to love]. We have also known for some time that emotional frustration can persist even where there is no lack of normal sexual intercourse…and often hardly lend themselves at all to being channeled off into coitus or other sexual acts.”

Constant development

Freud’s professional development was like that of a man learning from failure. Successes were often short-lived and early therapists such as Freud had to be ready to innovate. “In its first phase – that of Breuer’s catharsis – it consisted in bringing directly into focus the moment at which the symptom was formed, and in persistently endeavouring to reproduce the mental processes involved in that situation, in order to direct their discharge along the path of conscious activity. Remembering and [emotional discharge], with the help of the hypnotic state, were what was at that time aimed at. Next, where hypnosis had been given up, the task became one of discovering from the patient’s free associations what he failed to remember. The resistance was to be circumvented by the work of interpretation and by making its results known to the patient. The situations which had given rise to the formation of the symptom and the other situations which lay behind the moment at which the illness broke out retained their place as the focus of interest; but the element of [emotional discharge] receded into the background and seemed to be replaced by the expenditure of work which the patient had to make in being [required] to overcome his [now new criticisms] of his free associations…Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used to-day, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind, and he employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient. From this there results a new sort of division of labour: the doctor uncovers the resistances which are unknown to the patient; when these have been got the better of, the patient often relates the forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty.”

One of the big discoveries for patients unearthing their pasts had to do with rivalries related to the Oedipus Complex, including influences from caregivers and competition for scarce attention, leading to the later defenses we see in adulthood. The patient then has to change their attitude towards their illness. “He has usually been content with lamenting it, despising it as nonsensical and under-estimating its importance; for the rest, he has extended to its manifestations the ostrich-like policy of repression which he adopted towards its origins.” Through deep understanding of the illness, the patient learns more about their instincts. Because instincts provide constant pressure, they can continue repeating unconsciously until the conscious mind understands them. The understanding allows for more control of impulses, and plans to discharge impulses in appropriate ways. “Only where the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses.”

Grieving

These repressed instincts did achieve early forms of satisfaction, but most often led inevitably to loss. Loss of loved ones to death, or rejection. The wounded mind can turn to despondency and begin the pathological process of infantile compensations. Sometimes there are excessive repressions and self-denial. This is partly from a fear that “all the good things in life will being taken away, so why bother?” Freud’s method was to go to the repressed emotions and to discharge them to an acceptable enough level so that one goes back to a healthy norm afterwards. Grieving is a normal part of life, and once death and impermanence are accepted, one can continue enjoying life with an ability to let go, and also the ability to appreciate transitory beauty. Just because things don’t last forever, doesn’t mean they don’t have value. Quite on the contrary.

In his paper On Transience, Freud explored the pathological human response to impermanence with descriptions of two different responses. One was despondency or a fear of risk-taking, and the other was denial. For Freud, “transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.” Lost objects, or people we keep in our memories, are to be appreciated precisely because their goodness doesn’t last. Freud also understood relevance. It feels relevant for us what we lost because we are the important component of the loss, because we were the ones there that could love the object. “A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.”

Louvre – Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vuFh6NNa70

What pathological responses are doing in Freud’s perspective are attempts to try to avoid the pain of mourning, but this not need be the case. “Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our [cravings are] once more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious…When the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”

One of the ways the mind can get caught is when it has made an emotional investment and becomes preoccupied with blame of others, but also blame of oneself. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud talked about this painful conscience that seems to lose belief in oneself and attacks the ego. “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same.”

Instead of healing, the mind can get caught in a destructive loop where the distinction between the inside and outside is lost. “The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning… an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better. This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and…what is psychologically very remarkable…by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life…The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego.”

The loss of self-esteem is essentially how objects can be taken into the sense of self with identification. Because we identify with the lost person, their weaknesses become something we identify and attack ourselves with. There now develops an empty attitude of self-distrust. The healthy grieving process must include an appreciation for the lost person’s good qualities and a championing of those qualities without identifying with their bad traits. Their love and passion can be taken in by us and maintained through our inspired love. As life moves closer to death, for a healthy ego, letting go is possible and it allows one to pass on this passion and appreciation of life for new generations, so that what is valuable, even if impermanent, can last as long as possible. Through preservation of good objects, one can leave life with a sense of contribution.

Craving/libido types

Naturally as Freud saw more patients he was able to categorize them into a cute early form of personality typology. The 3 main categories of people he encountered were erotic, obsessional and narcissistic. “Observation teaches us that individual human beings realize the general picture of humanity in an almost infinite variety of ways. If we yield to the legitimate need to distinguish particular types in this multiplicity, we shall at the start have the choice as to what characteristics and what points of view we shall take as the basis of our differentiation. If we confine our effort to setting up purely psychological types, the libidinal situation will have a first claim to serve as a basis for our classification. It may fairly be demanded that this classification should not merely be deduced from our knowledge or our hypotheses about the libido, but that it should be easily confirmed in actual experience and that it should contribute to the clarification of the mass of our observations and help us to grasp them. It may at once be admitted that these libidinal types need not be the only possible ones even in the psychical field, and that, if we proceeded from other qualities, we might perhaps establish a whole set of other psychological types. But it must be required of all such types that they shall not coincide with clinical pictures. On the contrary, they must comprehend all the variations which according to our practical judgement fall within the limits of the normal. In their extreme developments, however, they may well approximate to clinical pictures and in that way help to bridge the gulf that is supposed to lie between the normal and the pathological.”

“The erotic type is easily characterized. Erotics are those whose main interest – the relatively largest part of whose libido – is turned towards love. Loving, but above all being loved, is the most important thing for them. They are dominated by the fear of loss of love and are therefore especially dependent on others who may withhold their love from them. Even in its pure form this type is a very common one. Variants of it occur according as it is blended with another type and in proportion to the amount of aggressiveness present in it. From the social and cultural standpoint this type represents the elementary instinctual demands of the id, to which the other psychical agencies have become compliant.”

Can’t buy me love – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srwxJUXPHvE

“The second type is what I have termed the obsessional type – a name which may at first seem strange. It is distinguished by the predominance of the super-ego, which is separated from the ego under great tension. People of this type are dominated by fear of their conscience instead of fear of losing love. They exhibit, as it were, an internal instead of an external dependence. They develop a high degree of self-reliance; and, from the social standpoint, they are the true, pre-eminently conservative vehicles of civilization.”

Taxman – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0zaebtU-CA

“The third type, justly called the narcissistic type, is mainly to be described in negative terms. There is no tension between ego and super-ego (indeed, on the strength of this type one would scarcely have arrived at the hypothesis of a super-ego), and there is no preponderance of erotic needs. The subject’s main interest is directed to self-preservation; he is independent and not open to intimidation. His ego has a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal, which also manifests itself in readiness for activity. In his erotic life loving is preferred above being loved. People belonging to this type impress others as being ‘personalities’; they are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or to damage the established state of affairs.”

Money (That’s what I want) – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeWjEYhk7Xo

“In the erotic-obsessional type it appears that the preponderance of instinctual life is restricted by the influence of the super-ego. In this type, dependence at once on contemporary human objects and on the residues of parents, educators and exemplars, is carried to its highest pitch.”

Oh! Darling – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BznFjbcBVs

“The erotic-narcissistic type is perhaps the one we must regard as the commonest of all. It unites opposites, which are able to moderate one another in it. One may learn from this type, as compared with the two other erotic ones, that aggressiveness and activity go along with a predominance of narcissism.”

She loves you – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S302kF8MJ-I

“Finally, the narcissistic-obsessional type produces the variation which is most valuable from a cultural standpoint; for it adds to independence of the external world and a regard for the demands of conscience a capacity for vigorous action, and it strengthens the ego against the super-ego.”

Think for yourself – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtx5NTxebJk

“One might think one was making a jest if one asked why no mention has been made here of another mixed type which is theoretically possible – namely, the erotic-obsessional-narcissistic type. But the answer to this jest is serious. Such a type would no longer be a type at all: it would be the absolute norm, the ideal harmony.”

Michelle – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoBLi5eE-wY

These different personality types can be lopsided but they all have their specialties. Their skills in each of the domains of weakness are essentially undeveloped and frustrating to work with. Frustration in areas of weakness can lead to typical Freudian problems. “It seems easy to infer that when people of the erotic type fall ill they will develop hysteria, just as those of the obsessional will develop obsessional neurosis; but these inferences, too, share the uncertainty which I have just stressed. People of the narcissistic type who are exposed to a frustration from the external world, though otherwise independent, are peculiarly disposed to psychosis; and they also present essential preconditions for criminality.”

Alterations of sources, aims, and objects

Compared to later psychologists, Freud became more of a doctor of desire. At his time it was too early to really understand psychological problems based on biological sources of pathology, the way we can now. Freud focused more on frustrated desire and how a person’s experience of happiness is affected. How we learn to deal with gaining and losing objects of desire starts early and desire for Freud has to include sexual desire, especially in regards to “the triangular character of the Oedipus situation and the constitutional bisexuality of each individual…A boy has not merely an ambivalence towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother.” What we look at as a fixed character is deceptive, and opens up to more or less a plurality of developed identifications. “It is interesting that in connection with early experiences, as contrasted with later experiences, all the various reactions to them survive, of course including contradictory ones.”

Freud was an early precursor to Vittorio Gallese’s work on mirror neurons, the ability to imitate, and he saw that we are all mapping out desires of other people so we can understand who, what, when, where, why and how they desire. This way we can ingest their benefits through the imitation. A lot of the motivation for learning is contained in our wishes to achieve satisfaction with what we learn. As we get good at different identifications, they can condition and strengthen with a variety of intensities and change throughout life. “Analytic experience then shows that in a number of cases one or the other constituent disappears, except for barely distinguishable traces; so that the result is a series with the normal positive Oedipus complex at one end and the inverted negative one at the other…At the dissolution of the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists will group themselves in such a way as to produce a father-identification and a mother-identification. The father-identification will preserve the object-relation to the mother which belonged to the positive complex and will at the same time replace the object-relation to the father which belonged to the inverted complex: and the same will be true…of the mother-identification. The relative intensity of the two identifications in any individual will reflect the preponderance in him of one or other of the two sexual dispositions.”

Vittorio Gallese – From Mirror neurons to Embodied Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlV7F3MHuEk

How people can flip on sexual desire and any other desire is based on having and being. Part of our empathy and love is to be able to imagine ourselves as the love-object with our ability to imitate their desires by intuiting their purposes. The success with one or more sexual dispositions depends on how skillfully a person identifies with them. When people partner up, each individual is a mixture of masculine and feminine in highly variegated ways. When Freud was thinking about this and the sexual act he said “…I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as an event between four individuals.”

As we sexually fantasize, how we are able to see all the steps in our minds of getting masculine or feminine satisfaction, essentially the accessibility vs. frustration dichotomy, arouses us, or turns us off. These are pleasure procedures, and are not only related to sexuality. Any skills we don’t understand tend to inhibit or frighten us. Inevitably, what we are not skilled at has to look cooperative to us so we can HAVE them if we can’t BE them. When we lose objects we HAD, there is a panic to try and replace what we lost by BEING them. Freud said “‘having’ and ‘being’ in children…After loss of the object it relapses into ‘being’. Example: the breast. ‘The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.’ Only later: ‘I have it’ – that is, ‘I am not it’ . . .”

Neurosis and Psychosis

Much of what Freud was working with patients on was their sense of frustration with reality compared to their wishes. What he usually treated was Neurosis and Psychosis, which are two pathological ways to deal with “frustration. The subject was healthy so long at his need for love was satisfied by a real object in the external world; he becomes neurotic as soon as this object is withdrawn from him without a substitute taking its place. Here happiness coincides with health and unhappiness with neurosis. It is easier for fate to bring about a cure than for the physician; for it can offer the patient a substitute for the possibility of satisfaction which he has lost…Frustration has a pathogenic effect because it dams up [craving], and so submits the subject to a test as to how long he can tolerate this increase in psychical tension and as to what methods he will adopt for dealing with it. There are only two possibilities for remaining healthy when there is a persistent frustration of satisfaction in the real world. The first is by transforming the psychical tension into active energy which remains directed towards the external world and eventually extorts a real satisfaction of the [craving] from it. The second is by renouncing satisfaction, sublimating the dammed-up [craving] and turning it to the attainment of aims which are no longer erotic and which escape frustration.”

One of the escapes for Freud is going inward and satisfying oneself in dreaming and substitute pleasures, but this has a danger of focusing on past forms of conditioning. Instead of further development, there is regression. “…There is a risk of the [craving] becoming ‘introverted’. It turns away from reality, which, owing to the obstinate frustration, has lost its value for the subject, and turns towards the life of phantasy, in which it creates new wishful structures and revives the traces of earlier, forgotten ones. In consequence of the intimate connection between the activity of phantasy and material present in everyone which is infantile and repressed and has become unconscious, and thanks to the exceptional position enjoyed by the life of phantasy in regard to reality-testing, the [craving] may thenceforward move on a backward course; it may follow the path of regression along infantile lines, and strive after aims that correspond with them. If these strivings, which are incompatible with the subject’s present-day individuality, acquire enough intensity, a conflict must result between them and the other portion of his personality, which has maintained its relation to reality.”

How people can fall ill is through frustration, but also illness based on inflexibility. Essentially a Darwinian problem. “He falls ill of his attempt to adapt himself to reality and to fulfill the demands of reality – an attempt in the course of which he comes up against insurmountable internal difficulties…In the first type the subject falls ill from an experience; in the second type it is from a developmental process. In the first case he is faced by the task of renouncing satisfaction, and he falls ill from his incapacity for resistance; in the second case his task is to exchange one kind of satisfaction for another, and he breaks down from his inflexibility. In the second case the conflict, which is between the subject’s effort to remain as he is and the effort to change himself in order to meet fresh purposes and fresh demands from reality, is present from the first.”

Blow up the outside world – Soundgarden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC2GjXMk7i4

Naturally, frustrations happen throughout life and they create “an inhibition in development.” There are people “who have thus never reached a phase of health – a phase, that is, of capacity for achievement and enjoyment which is on the whole unrestricted. Their [craving] has never left its infantile fixations.”

Like with Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow system, there is a need to balance craving with pursuits and sometimes it’s not the pursuits that cause frustration, but something else. “As a result of their having reached a particular period of life, and in conformity with regular biological processes, the quantity of [craving] in their mental economy has experienced an increase which is in itself enough to upset the equilibrium of their health and to set up the necessary conditions for a neurosis…Here the damming-up of [craving] is the primary factor; it becomes pathogenic as a consequence of a relative frustration on the part of the external world, which would still have granted satisfaction to a smaller claim by [craving]. The unsatisfied and dammed-up [craving] can once again open up paths to regression and kindle the same conflicts which we have demonstrated in the case of absolute external frustration.”

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

In A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis, Freud described another problem with frustrated desires, which includes extreme forms of repression, where alternative demonic evil objects are chosen for satisfaction. Since so many of us are capable of bad desires, we project what we hate in ourselves onto ghosts and demons influencing the public. “In our eyes, the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, [alterations] of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed. We merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world which the middle ages carried out; instead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient’s internal life, where they have their abode.” In simple terms, demonic influences outside ourselves are signals of our potential for bad desires. How can they influence, unless we have a potential to enjoy them? They would look like a blank wall, disgusting or uninteresting. If we are capable of imagining those pleasure procedures and feel excitement, then we have to admit that we are afraid of the social consequences of imitating bad desires, but we don’t pretend that we aren’t capable of them. The devil is inside all of us, and so is much of the conflict.

With Freud’s Ego, Id and Super-ego system, he was able to map out these frustrations with reality in the mind. “…Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis in the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relations between the ego and the external world.” The conflict is exacerbated by demands of civilization and harmony with the super-ego, which imitates cultural demands. “…Neuroses originate from the ego’s refusing to accept a powerful instinctual impulse in the id or to help it to find a motor outlet, or from the ego’s forbidding that impulse the object at which it is aiming. In such a case the ego defends itself against the instinctual impulse by the mechanism of repression. The repressed material struggles against this fate. It creates for itself, along paths over which the ego has no power, a substitutive representation (which forces itself upon the ego by way of a compromise) – the symptom. The ego finds its unity threatened and impaired by this intruder, and it continues to struggle against the symptom, just as it fended off the original instinctual impulse. All this produces the picture of a neurosis. It is no contradiction to this that, in undertaking the repression, the ego is at bottom following the commands of its super-ego – commands which, in their turn, originate from influences in the external world that have found representation in the super-ego. The fact remains that the ego has taken sides with those powers, that in it their demands have more strength than the instinctual demands of the id, and that the ego is the power which sets the repression in motion against the portion of the id concerned and which fortifies the repression by means of the anti-[emotional investment] of resistance. The ego has come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and of reality; and this is the state of affairs in every…neurosis.”

Psychosis for Freud has some similarities to Neurosis, but a difference is that the id is able to use the super-ego to overwhelm the ego’s grip with reality. “It consists in a frustration, a non-fulfilment of one of those childhood wishes which are for ever undefeated and which are so deeply rooted in our [inherited] determined organization. This frustration is in the last resort always an external one; but in the individual case it may proceed from the internal agency (in the super-ego) which has taken over the representation of the demands of reality. The pathogenic effect depends on whether, in a conflictual tension of this kind, the ego remains true to its dependence on the external world and attempts to silence the id, or whether it lets itself be overcome by the id and thus torn away from reality…”

Shine on you crazy diamond – David Gilmour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiXNIjGX1hY

Freud includes melancholia, where the super-ego depresses the ego, and essentially becomes a narcissistic psychoneuroses. It becomes a psychosis when the Super-ego takes over and all the cultural ideals remove one from a connection to reality. This is partly why narcissists can be depressed, but also they can steamroll other people on their way to places in the world that provide Prestige that the Super-ego wants fervently. These leverage points of power in the world relieve the depression temporarily, that is until a new point of Prestige is chosen and the old one becomes boring. When higher levels of Prestige are lost, then the lower levels are idealized once more. The Id feeds the Super-ego desire and the Super-ego provides excuses for short-cutting the path to the goal that unfortunately will cause conflicts with the goals of others, since a grip on reality has been lost.

Freud summarized these theories of confrontations with reality in The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis. “…In a neurosis the ego, in its dependence on reality, suppresses a piece of the id (of instinctual life), whereas in a psychosis, this same ego, in the service of the id, withdraws from a piece of reality. Thus for a neurosis the decisive factor would be the predominance of the influence of reality, whereas for a psychosis it would be the predominance of the id.” When people have neurosis, they run away from reality with repression, and avoid contact with the parts of reality that are unsatisfying, to gain short-term relief. In Psychosis, relief is found when reality is replaced with a preferred fantasy. “The [next] step of the psychosis is indeed intended to make good the loss of reality, by the creation of a new reality which no longer raises the same objections as the old one that has been given up.”

On the Dynamics of Transference

One of the later innovations that Freud brought to his Psychoanalysis was the understanding that we project our internal attitudes onto reality. It’s a transfer of attitudes that patients are only partially conscious of. “…Transference arises not just from conscious expectations but from repressed or unconscious ones.” These attitudes can be more or less developed, and they can help to explain the psychological experience the patient is going through. “Our experience shows that not all the impulses that determine erotic life have undergone a complete psychological development; the portion that has, is aligned towards reality, is available to the conscious personality and constitutes a part of it. Another portion of these libidinous impulses has been arrested in its development; it is removed both from the conscious personality and from reality, and has either been unable to create a space for itself anywhere but in the imagination, or has remained in the unconscious and thus unknown to the individual’s consciousness. If somebody’s erotic needs are not completely gratified by reality, he is obliged to project his libidinous expectations on to every new person he meets, and it is very likely that both parts of his libido, conscious and unconscious, are involved in this projection.”

These differing levels of development help to explain how extroverted or introverted a person’s cravings are depending on whether fantasy or action predominate in the patient. We can fantasize what we would like to happen: introversion, or we can actively think and act to make something happen: extroversion. “[With Introversion of [craving]…there is a decrease in the portion of the libido that can be raised to the conscious level and is aligned with reality, while there is a corresponding increase in the portion that is unconscious, turned away from reality, and able to nourish the fantasies of the individual while remaining in the unconscious. The libido has retreated – in the whole or in part – into regression and reactivated the childhood imagos. The analytical cure pursues it to the same place, with the aim of seeking out the [craving] and making it accessible to consciousness and eventually amenable to reality. A conflict is guaranteed whenever analytical inquiries locate a [craving] that has withdrawn to its hiding places. All the energies released by the libido’s regression will rise up as ‘resistances’ against the analyst’s efforts, in order to preserve this new status quo.” The problems with our internal cinemas are that they can be an escape, just like the external ones. Then there’s the danger that we can cling to those internal movies, preventing psychological development. This is where therapists can provide realistic suggestions so that escape isn’t necessary.

Yet the analyst has to be careful not to overuse suggestions so that the patient is just copycatting the therapist. Patients are looking for permission to develop themselves, and with a good analyst and analysand pairing, the patient is free to develop themselves in the sessions and eventually out in the world. “…The results of psychoanalysis depend upon suggestion. But ‘suggestion’ must be understood as…influencing an individual by means of whichever transference-phenomena are possible in his case. Our concern is to create independence in the patient by using suggestion to permit him to complete a psychological operation that will necessarily result in a permanent improvement in his psychological condition.”

Constructions in Analysis

Getting at the purpose of Psychoanalysis, Freud in Constructions in Analysis, wanted patients to learn more about themselves. As they learn about their regressions, repressions, over-compensations, patterns of avoidance and defense mechanisms, there’s a gradual appreciation for how stressful, and inhibiting these behaviours are. To live with less defensiveness, to allow development of new skills, helps the patient complete their infantile development. With free associations, dream analyses, and transferences, which are like the patient’s guesses/suspicions, help to describe their current skill level and pathology. The analyst can then piece together the associations with historical facts, and with enough imagination, they can reconstruct an individual’s past: a semblance of a prior life that is now more or less understood by the patient. Much like a noting meditation where the ego can be dystonic when labeling thoughts/defense mechanisms/avoidances etc., or syntonic when lost in identification, the patient can learn to disidentify from past defense mechanisms, avoidances, and by understanding their avoidance motivations, the patient can let go of weak tools and replace them with superior ones.

To recognize “this is a defense mechanism and it doesn’t work,” helps to begin a search for new skills. To realize “this is a pattern of avoidance and it makes things worse,” helps one to face problems head on. To realize, “this is a form of magical thinking, unrealistic wishing, and thoughts not based on facts,” brings a healthy sense of reality to life, and realistic responses to the real environment. To trace an imitation that goes back to a role-model outside oneself, that now doesn’t have to be identified with anymore, frees one to choose differently. To let go of perfectionism, allows one to drop inhuman standards to be able to learn. To see that one’s current desires have a mixture of regret, and realizing that addictive replacements are unfufilling, allows one to prioritize to chase more satisfying goals. How energy is waylaid with these habitual reactions is that it gets tied up with the lower levels of pleasure, and the relief that they provide create resistance to change. Old habits are comfortable. The difficulty is that the ego can’t function properly with this energy drain. “…Inhibitions….constitute a restriction of ego function, occurring either as a precautionary measure, or because so much energy has already been used up elsewhere.”

Psychoanalysis takes months and years because of the resistances, fear of embarrassment, fears of being found-out as being a pathetic person, and shame. Like Freud’s example of psychological archaeology, the process isn’t perfect and there are always some doubts and imperfections in the reconstruction. The patient will always have some information that is forgotten, repressed, or evaded. Success in an analysis has more to do with how independent minded the patient becomes and how they are able to become more assertive and rely on themselves more and more. “…The object of analytical work is to bring the patient to the point of removing the repressions – in the widest sense of the term – of his early development, to replace them with reactions more in keeping with a state of psychological maturity. To do this he has to recall certain experiences and the emotional impulses they gave rise to, which he has now forgotten. We know that his present symptoms and inhibitions are the result of such repressions; in other words, they operate as surrogates for what he has forgotten.”

The ‘Ratman’ – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

Female Sexuality

One of the difficult areas for Sigmund Freud to reconstruct in analysis was female sexuality. It ended up being one of the areas that Freud would have to punt towards other psychoanalysts, including many female psychoanalysts. Famously in a letter to Marie Bonaparte he said, “the great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'” Using another form of the Oedipus Complex, Freud pieced out female development in On Femininity, as beginning with a desire for the mother, just like the boy, but eventually a gravitation towards the father. The early period towards the mother in many cases reached a duration of up the 4th year, in one case Freud saw, up to the 5th year. “Indeed, we had to reckon with the possibility that a number of women remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men. There’s a negative Oedipus complex at the beginning and during that phase a little girl’s father is not much else for her than a troublesome rival, although her hostility towards him never reaches the pitch which is characteristic of boys.”

Part of the haziness of the subject for Freud related to transference. He felt that female analysts like Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Helene Deutsch could learn more when they received a mother-transference. What Freud could still see was “that the bisexuality, which is present, as we believe, in the innate disposition of human beings, comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men. A man, after all, has only one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas a woman has two: the vagina and the clitoris…The sexuality is divided into two phases, of which the first has a masculine character, while only the second is specifically feminine.”

Freud posits a castration complex for women, but it comes about in his controversial penis envy. “She acknowledges the fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her inferiority; but she rebels against this unwelcome state of affairs. From this divided attitude three lines of development open up. The first leads to a general revulsion from sexuality. The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life’s aim; and the phantasy of being a man in spite of everything often persists as a formative factor over long periods. This ‘masculinity complex’ in women can also result in a manifest homosexual choice of object. Only if her development follows the third, very circuitous, path does she reach the final normal female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object and so finds her way to the feminine form of the Oedipus Complex.”

How women go from the strong attachment to the mother to that of the father Freud lists out many possible events:

• Childhood love is unlimited, and not being able to be content with less than all, hostility and disappointments are inevitable. Unsatisfying objects can be replaced by new ones.
• Early passionate love of the mother can lead to disenchantment with all the disappointments, hostilities and boredom that arise later. Freud here compares this to a passionate 1st marriage that burns brightly but unsustainably. He viewed 2nd marriages as better.

Freud also ventured into mimetics. Being nursed is a passive situation, and all children, and even adults, move between to have or to be. “The first sexual and sexually coloured experiences which a child has in relation to its mother are naturally of a passive character. It is suckled, fed, cleaned, and dressed by her, and taught to perform all its functions. A part of the libido goes on clinging to those experiences and enjoys the satisfactions bound up with them; but another part strives to turn them into activity.” For Freud this partially explains the girl’s desire to play with dolls. Both passive and active developments help to create active and passive options for the later adult.

Like with ‘The Wolfman,’ Freud also posits a biological block. Part of the mind rebels against homosexuality due to the presence and use of the genitals. This is often triggered by a new arrival, where both the boy and the girl wish that they could give birth, whether the boy replaces the father, or the girl replaces the mother in their phantasies. “With the turning-away from the mother, clitoridal masturbation frequently ceases as well; and often enough when the small girl represses her previous masculinity a considerable portion of her sexual trends in general is permanently injured too. The transition to the father-object is accomplished with the help of the passive trends in so far as they have escaped the catastrophe.”

Being this 1931, naturally a lot of development on the subject has advanced. A summary of these in the modern discussion in On Femininity, is as follows:

• Venturing out for sexual partners has an element of betrayal towards the mother, but also of compromise. Girls can essentially take the mother’s place, and have the father, by finding someone outside of the nuclear family. Early feelings of the mother owning the daughter’s sexuality, can create a sense of guilt in the daughter after a rebellion, which is more or less resolved over time.
• Identification with the mother and her relationship attitudes and beliefs have a large impact on the daughter relationship patterns.
• There is more ambivalence than Freud thought. Daughters can oscillate between loyalty to mother and father much more rapidly. It’s not just one big shift.
• Part of the separation of daughter and mother comes from direct competition where the daughter becomes more independent, but fears losing support from the mother at the same time.
• Girls often try to hide their aggression in jealous conflicts. “While bullying, punching and other forms of overt aggression are the preferred outlets for boys in the schoolyard, girls resort to cattiness, backbiting, secretiveness, and social exclusion to express their aggression and competitiveness.”
• A castration complex is not as important for the formation of a Super-ego for girls as a fear of a loss of love from important authority figures. For both boys and girls, a Super-ego develops from multiple influences throughout childhood and adolescence.
• Genital self-stimulation happens much more early than Freud thought, and yes they do feel a sense of limitation for being a girl, but they are also aware of the pleasure female bodies are capable of.
• Girls also become aware that they can have a baby and fantasize having one. These are positive identifications, so girls don’t necessarily have to be stuck in hatred for their genitals. Here there are more fears of accommodating a penis and a baby, as the girl repeatedly imagines the process while growing up.
• Boys can manifest envy for the positive qualities of girls, just as girls can envy boys.
• Girls can also compare their bodily characteristics, body shape, and breasts with the mother and other women they feel they have to compete with. How a mother looks in comparison to the daughter can have many consequences for self-esteem depending on how well or badly the daughter compares.

Freud opened up a can of worms with is bibliography, but it inspired later psychoanalysts to add detail. Freud was from the 1800’s but helped to usher in much of the 20th century and still influences today. The goal of course for modern therapists is to add much more detail to their insights so as to resonate with patients more effectively.

Freud and Beyond

Freud has been a big exploration for me since 2017, and there was nothing like actually reading and engaging with his ideas. Listening to other’s opinions of Freud’s work, reading about the petty fights between different psychological schools, and reading truncated textbooks on his ideas, were all misleading in the end. Like a form of splitting, Freud didn’t have the answer to everything, yet he wasn’t someone to just cast aside or to worship. Freud’s story is a long one but it’s also a foundation for understanding the modern world, and all the later intellectuals who imitate, borrow and steal from him. If you’re being stolen from it’s because you did something really good. Knowing what is good can sometimes be buried in endless lists of what is bad, but below are a sample of some pathological defenses that become a hindrance for enjoyment in life, and learning about them can only be a help. Being able to recognize optional reactions and diffusing them, is a benefit of Psychoanalysis. Truth be told, defenses are needed in a hostile world, but there are many periods of time when they are not needed, and we can fail to experience peace even when we are free to be at peace. The mind scoops up so many influences and they have a life of their own in our minds as Objects. These rehearsed Objects follow us wherever we go, drain a lot of energy in how they talk to us, and especially in how they judge. Excessive judgment is exhausting. Psychoanalysis can help the mind get rest from those reactive entities, by seeing clearly, and losing trust in these weak skills. When one wants to save energy, one can learn to drop excessive judgment and transform it into discernment.

Climbing up the walls – Radiohead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkOz9Ve2mio

Imitations, or introjections take in so much from family and culture that they can develop in an adult brain to the point where one can feel a tug of war between the different voices in the mind. The exploration of these influences is a real challenge to our beliefs about our authenticity. If imitated desires can often lead to less than good results, one is free to question how authentic that conditioning really is. In Freud’s Super-Ego, we collect a lot of critical voices from authority figures that obviously were picked up after birth, and some of these voices are self-destructive. “Other inhibitions serve the purposes of self-punishment…These are things that the ego is not allowed to do because they would bring advantage and success, something that the stern super-ego has forbidden. The ego therefore refrains from these activities too – in order not to enter into conflict with the super-ego.” Detecting as many pathological voices as possible, and recognizing who those voices belong to, helps to disidentify from them.

Some defense mechanisms actually behave in an opposite way, as offensive mechanisms. An example of this would be an identification with an abuser. Abusers provide role-modeling of sadistic pleasure in their behaviours, based on their ability to instill fear in others and to maintain control. At some point many abused people will get fed up with masochism and take on the sadistic stance to recover their self-esteem. The important thing for a patient that identifies with an abuser needs to see, is that attacking as a form of defense is rarely needed and most certainly will worsen relationships. Worse relationships, again means more optional stress.

With introjection, the negative side of it relates to blaming oneself for what’s on the outside, even though what is blamed is out of control for the subject. It leads to depression and a lack of self-trust to be able to take control over one’s life. For example, in pathological grieving, a loss of a loved one can lead to a sense that one is lost and at fault. Finding fault with oneself for anything in the universe that one cannot control, is more optional stress.

In projection, people can transfer prior experiences onto new ones to try and predict behaviours and events. Unfortunately many of those predictions are wrong and tell more about the personal experiences of the subject making the prediction. Of course, some predictions are correct, so to understand projection is that we all use it and need to use it, but relief can only happen when we try to wait to get confirmation for things before we make a judgment. Constant judgment of course means constant stress.

Melanie Klein’s projective identification is more complex. Here a person has already made the judgement or prediction, based on their own experiences they’ve introjected, and then they repeatedly, and aggressively, nudge the other person to behave according to their expectations. Patients like this cause a lot of damage because they utilize the social desires we all have to be open to influence. They use the naivety of targets, and literally brainwash them with their own prescribed associations, and repeat them until targets begin to cave to imitation. It creates a similar feeling as Kafka’s K. in The Trial, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. The perpetrator of course enjoys the control of an environment that is already understood in their point of view, and holds no surprises. But having your identity snatched from others in this way is another form of stress and conflict.

Idealization is a defense mechanism that’s used to control stress and boredom. Since childhood, a need to believe in authority figures as being there for our well-being has to be outgrown. Most people who take a good look at politicians, workplace politics, and modern intimate relationships are forced, even painfully, to let go of the belief in a great protector. That protector is either absent in this world or exists only in an afterlife. Stress may be avoided in the short-term, but it returns when there’s a betrayal.

Devaluation naturally follows idealization when the illusion is finally seen through. This is quite common when people chase perfection in life. The constant disappointment that life can only provide fleeting moments of perfection leads to a hatred of normality and endless devaluation. Devaluations are also judgments, and therefore they are another optional form of stress.

Connected with idealization and devaluation is splitting. Here child-like beliefs in people can reflect all good or all bad characteristics in others, which can make for bad relationships as an adult. Most people are a mixed bag, but for some, any imperfections are treated as if the person is ALL BAD. For example, and especially in politics, every election appears as the end of the world in a fight between pure good and evil. It’s true that some events in life have higher stakes, and that there is evil in the world, but to split mundane experiences into stark contrasts of good and evil means that stress will be triggered constantly throughout life. Every small infraction is treated with the same intensity as a major betrayal. Again these are stressful judgments that are self-inflicted forms of pain, and they also hurt others. More deeply in splitting is the need for people to understand different points of view, but without the concerted effort to see objects as they are, a mixture, it can be hard for people to see things clearly. For example, reward and consequence. Part of the ego splits off into varying points of view, and the way to heal these conflicts and rifts between different, political points of view, ideas of what happiness is, costs and consequences of pleasures, the ego has to take in all the perspectives and weigh them purposefully so that extreme idealization and devaluation dissolves into intelligent responses to reality.

For psychoanalysts, splitting can come from the pressure to discharge instinctual cravings, and the need to assess danger in reality. Sometimes the mind just wants the discharge and disavows the reality to get to that pleasure as soon as possible, even if part of the mind is aware of the danger. The mind can also be hooked through splitting by manipulators providing hazy promises that turn into disappointment, and devaluation, when more unsavory details are observed. I reviewed this in Cult Psychology. Cultists can control your reality by constantly promising things that hook on your instinctual wishes, but facing reality can be a form of freedom where one can assess reality for oneself, without giving transference to emotionally and financially draining cultist vampires. We don’t have to give transference to others once we understand why we were doing that. We were doing that because we had a habit since childhood to ask parents for permission. We can learn from trial and error and give ourselves permission to explore what reality is really like. In the end, a healthy patient does things for themselves, and only outsources when the limitations are real, and not self-imposed.

Despite the endless number of stressful defenses, what is underneath them is a happiness that is based on absorption in interesting and fulfilling projects. There’s a possibility for Flow when there’s a lack of self-preoccupation. Csikszentmihalyi provides a meditative question, “how absorbed are you?” Most meditation questions are answered by actively engaging in projects. Look at the questioning in the mind that prevents you from engagement and try to find the defenses that are preventing you from continuing. Those are the self-imposed stumbling blocks. When you are able to “get on with it,” and when there’s a lack of self-preoccupation in the super-ego, there’s less paralysis, and more presence for the ego to work with. Actions to take responsibility for one’s life are taken as signs of progress in the mind, and re-establish that sense of self-trust, and a grip on reality.

Religion

Tellingly, with a process such as psychoanalysis, all the prior forms of talking therapy, including religions themselves, came under scrutiny. As with prior episodes, religion is hard to avoid even if you are an atheist. If you have role models in life there’s always some element of prestige you have for those who have something you want. As said before, we want to either be our role models or have them, if being is not possible. Then the imitation squeezes tight on our choices with these limited binary options. It’s like the mind is looking for quick replacements, or substitutes for advantages that cannot easily be attained. Like in The Ego and the Id, some of these desires we pursue involve big life goals or are replacements. As we fill our lives with replacements, the repressive side of the mind creates a sense of remorse that is similar to how Judeo-Christian religions describe sin. Whether we are religious or not, we have to face up to remorse.

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

Freud’s difficulty here is in expanding beyond religion without going into complete nihilism. It requires developing some distance from culture to see how traditional religions operate. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud said that “…people generally experience the present naively, so to speak, without being able to appreciate it’s contents; they must first gain some distance from it…The present must have become the past before one can derive from it clues for making judgments about the future.” For Freud, religion is a cultural artifact that provides comfort for the helplessness we all feel towards our inevitable death, and a glue that keeps a society together to avoid a complete breakdown. “The defense against helplessness in childhood lends its characteristic features to the reaction to the helplessness the adult must acknowledge; this reaction is the formation of religion.”

Freud then connects this to our ultimate wishes to continue on and be protected, and when these wishes become desperate and impossible to realize, the panic leads to obsessive rituals that are similar to those modern bird experiments referenced in my Totem and Taboo review. Rituals have a sense of desperate hope, and any successful coincidences that match up with the ritual become associated. Whether the methods are scapegoating, prayer, or different kinds of rituals, the successes that coincide with a ritual, become projected with the supernatural. These powers are expected to prevent worldly punishment from celestial parents, who also instill guilt on top of our natural remorse as we grow up. Eventually these rituals become an indispensable method to regulate emotions.

In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, Freud described these ritual behaviours in psychological obsession. “Neurotic ceremonials consist in making small adjustments to particular everyday actions, small additions or restrictions or arrangements, which have always to be carried out in the same, or in a methodically varied, manner. These activities give the impression of being mere formalities, and they seem quite meaningless to us. Nor do they appear otherwise to the patient himself; yet he is incapable of giving them up, for any deviation from the ceremonial is visited by intolerable anxiety, which obliges him at once to make his omission good. Just as trivial as the ceremonial actions themselves are the occasions and activities which are embellished, encumbered and in any case prolonged by the ceremonial—for instance, dressing and undressing, going to bed or satisfying bodily needs. The performance of a ceremonial can be described by replacing it, as it were, by a series of unwritten laws.”

Many rituals involve a sense of cleanliness on the outside and the inside, like one is trying to cleanse emotions, and Freud zeroed on the reason. “The lesson that bodily cleanliness is far more readily associated with vice than with virtue often occurred to me later on, when psycho-analytic work made me acquainted with the way in which civilized men to-day deal with the problem of their physical nature. They are clearly embarrassed by anything that reminds them too much of their animal origin.”

Jesus Christ Pose – Soundgarden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0_zzCLLRvE

Freud wants patients to continue growing in their humanity instead of relying on rituals. Originally our helplessness was in childhood when we had to rely on our mortal “gods,” our parents, and they could only provide intermittent forms of comfort and protection. The difficulty in growing up is that death, disease, conflict, power, exploitation, injustice and despair are very real. Some people are able to accept this, but others find that religious beliefs help to create resilience for people who expect that all injustices will be righted in the afterlife. Beliefs in a celestial parent go back for Freud to the early days of Totemism. Fights over scarcity of sexual partners, and wealth, including intergenerational fights, lead eventually to threats of a breakdown in society. At some point the protection of the primal father is missed by the rebels, and prohibitions, especially the prohibition against incest, slowly develops a desire to expand and create relationship choices towards others in a tribe, and to think of cultural solutions to societal breakdown, however superstitious. “Insecurity of life, a danger equal for all, now unifies people in a society that forbids the individual to kill and reserves for itself the right to communally kill anyone who violates the prohibition. This, then, is justice and punishment…So as not to lose the connection with our theme, one must bear in mind that at the start of such a course of events, in early childhood, there is always an identification with the father. This is then rejected, even overcompensated, but in the end reasserts itself.”

Civilization and its Discontents

As expected, religion continued in Freud’s time, and still does so today. For many people it works. Religions also include the results of prayer and meditation. For Freud, prayer and meditation are regressions, though pleasant ones. The purpose of contemplative practice is to reduce the stress that the ego falls under in a pitiless world, and to rest in an oceanic unconscious.  “…The ego is originally all-inclusive, but later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present sense of self is thus only a shrunken residue of a far more comprehensive, indeed all-embracing feeling, which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it. If we may assume that this primary sense of self has survived, to a greater or lesser extent, in the mental life of many people, it would coexist, as a kind of counterpart, with the narrower, more sharply defined sense of self belonging to the years of maturity, and the ideational content appropriate to it would be precisely those notions of limitlessness and oneness with the universe – the very notions used by my friend to elucidate the ‘oceanic’ feeling.”

The problem of course is that the drives are still pressing for satisfaction, and for Freud maturity is to not go back to that oceanic feeling, or to at least not rely on it, but to develop a civilization that can satisfy drives more effectively. People “strive for happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so.” Happiness as Freud sees it in people is to increase pleasurable feelings and to reduce pain. Regardless of what methods people use, there’s always a threat of aggression when people try to correct injustices that naturally occur as people conflict over their pleasures. In the modern world this is precisely the challenge to religion, to be able to find a way to prepare each generation on how to deal with these conflicts. Freud felt that religion was still a regression in that it ill prepares generations for conflict. What happens if one is pious and follows good ethics? In a modern society, that person could easily fall behind creating a moral quandary between doing the right thing and satisfying drives. Freud was worried about too much renunciation leading to psychological, or somatic symptoms.

Freud also criticized parenting as he saw it then. The fight between love and aggression, in societies struggling to satisfy wishes, presents the great difficulty for each new generation, and development for Freud has to go beyond religion, and culture, towards a rational science. “‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all …’ That a modern upbringing conceals from the young person the role that sexuality will play in his life is not the only criticism that must be leveled against it. Another of its sins is that it does not prepare him for the aggression of which he is destined to be the object. To send the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation is like equipping people who are setting out on a polar expedition with summer clothes and maps of the North Italian lakes. This reveals a certain misuse of ethical demands. The severity of these would do little harm if the educators said, ‘This is how people ought to be if they are to be happy and make others happy, but one must reckon with their not being like this.’ Instead, the young person is led to believe that everyone else complies with these ethical precepts and is therefore virtuous. This is the basis of the requirement that he too should become virtuous.”

Last I heard (…He was circling the drain) – Thom Yorke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I03xFqbxUp8

Leading up to WWII, Freud saw that as technology increased our wealth it could also be our destruction. “The fateful question for the human race seems to be whether, and to what extent, the development of its civilization will manage to overcome the disturbance of communal life caused by the human drive for aggression and self-destruction. Perhaps in this context the present age is worthy of special interest. Human beings have made such strides in controlling the forces of nature that, with the help of these forces, they will have no difficulty in exterminating one another, down to the last man. They know this, and it is this knowledge that accounts for much of their present disquiet, unhappiness and anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘heavenly powers’, immortal Eros, will try to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee the outcome?”

Sigmund Freud’s last years

Towards the end of Freud’s life, he came to a more solid conclusion of what his method entailed. Similar to what you notice from the Buddhist mindfulness technique, one instead is working with a therapist to mindfully explore together what impulses, thoughts and defenses are running amok in the mind and to understand them very well. In Freud’s system, the pre-conscious is where the Ego stores knowledge about internal and external experiences. The more one knows about oneself, the less surprising reactions are, and the ego progressively gains control over the psyche. The aim of the method “is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to enlarge its field of perception and to expand its organization so that it can appropriate new pieces of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be.” It’s like a vigilance to catch impulses and to assert the ego again and again to herd reactions back to where the ego has already chosen its goals. It’s important to see that how we talk inside our minds has an energy of judgment that is painful, and habitual defense mechanisms that aren’t needed should be relaxed so that the pleasure principle can act more effectively, and can also be enjoyed without unnecessarily being tainted by overbearing criticism from these imitated, abstract, and distorted voices.

In Freud’s late years, he was very popular amongst aficionados, and reviled by many critics. His fans warned him of the onslaught coming to Austria from Nazi Germany, and of course Freud’s books were amongst other books written by prominent Jewish authors that were burned by Nazis. Freud refused to leave Austria due his familiarity and comfort with Vienna. When his daughter Anna Freud was interrogated by the Gestapo, he had the motivation necessary to make the move to England. There he basked in his glory and began to see many offshoots of his psychoanalysis with younger theorists. In Freud and Beyond, by Stephen Mitchell, he covered those new schools most influenced by Freud: Kleinian, Self-psychology, Ego psychology, Object-Relations, and identity schools.

Sigmund Freud eventually ended his life at the age of 83 in an assisted suicide with morphine administered by Max Schur, to end the suffering of his mouth cancer. He remained atheist to the end, despite many letters attempting to save his soul before it was too late.

No surprises – Radiohead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7374CZQoS2Y

Within his family, his work continued on with his daughter Anna Freud.

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Sigmund Freud left the world during a tumult that many modern people find hard to understand, but is precisely why psychology is so important. This inability to grasp what happened in Europe during the 1st half of the 20th century is precisely why it can come back again and again. Götz Aly of Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, saw the danger in forgetting the precursors to the Holocaust. Not being aware of those precursors dooms future generations to repeat them. “There is no way around the pessimistic conclusion that evil can never be quarantined once and for all in a way that would rule out such horrors. Another event structurally similar to the Holocaust could still occur…[People] should not kid themselves into thinking that the anti-Semites of the past were completely different from who we are today.”

The reason why this is so important to understand can be seen in psychology, or psychoanalysis for that matter. Being inhibited, envious, self-attacking, identifying with an abuser, and destroying others to restore self-esteem, are attitudes that many humans can have. The story doesn’t have to include only the Germans and the Jews. Any society that peddles social projects that look heroic, for the common good, and noble, can be in fact ways to attack success, diminish others, and to scapegoat, and have the potential to be the new authoritarianism that people gather around with, and often unknowingly. People say “I would never be a NAZI!” Yet people forget that hazy cult-like promise of prestige and utopia. “We are demanding justice! Climate Justice! Racial justice! Economic justice! It’s scientific! It’s a public health initiative! We care more than you! We have empathy!” It takes effort to think about consequences of new social experiments.

DNC Panelist: Use Green New Deal To Further The “Destruction” Of Capitalism [Watermelon Communists – Green on the outside but Red on the inside]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6VF0GKltg0

Those caught in what may seem like cutting edge social experimentation may just be deflecting their emotions of inadequacy and embarrassment. Most especially, they are deflecting their envy and schadenfreude by trying to improve their personal situations by joining moralistic social movements. Like in Bandura’s Moral Disengagement, there’s an eerie tendency to hypocrisy that we all are capable of. Moral Disengagement is the ability to make excuses to hurt others by reframing those behaviours in moral standards. The irony seems unavoidable, and the reality of most members of social movements, is that they only partially follow their own rules. Part of the unconscious is trying to thrive in ways that most people find recognizable. People want to feed literally and emotionally, and what they want to feed on is imitated and therefore predictable. When people don’t like rich people, it’s quite possible that secretly they want what rich people have. When people are emotionally hungry, the sadism can be hard to control. As in the prior episode, Sadism has a quality of separating wheat from chaff, but this is dangerous when involving human beings. This abuse becomes easier to fall into when entire groups of people are labeled as a PEST, an OTHER, that interferes with social, and especially individual goals. The reality is that anybody can be an authoritarian, as long as they are capable of ENVY.

The trick is to take a stigmatized symbol and change into a heroic or benign one. It seems like a simple trick, but these tricks work for many people. Peter Hitchens, a recovered communist himself, explained his view on the gullibility of people. “I think the great bulk of people are incredibly easily misled…It takes some nerve not to run with the crowd…I do not run with crowds, but most people do and they are happier that way.”

Peter Hitchens | The Authoritarian Left never rests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbfKBXpHNUU

For example, people can talk about the environment, but as people become activists, how much unconscious self-interest is buried underneath? Once people gain power, they have access to more consumption, and naturally economic data shows that as people make more money, they spend more money. To separate consumptive self-interest from any social movement is next to impossible. What most people are doing, whether they will admit it or not, is trying to narrow the gap between themselves and envied Others.

Karma Police – Radiohead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbCOAPR33ME

A creepy modern example came from leaked Seattle government documents on “white culture.” It was full of personality characteristics that could exist in any culture, but in particular the envy stands out. Signs of envy are when good qualities are criticized. Can you imagine food safety without perfectionism and objectivity? What are companies like without meritocracy? Many of the other items on the list could be forms of projection where people are complaining about traits they have themselves. Eg. Power-grabbing! Most people have experienced defensiveness, emotional avoidance, and a sense of urgency. This is completely human and cannot only be attributed to white people. Can you imagine ambulances and emergency rooms without a sense of urgency? The overwhelming fear in these documents is a fear of accountability that’s often required of highly complex and responsible jobs. These jobs can pay very well, but not everyone can handle them. Of course in a free society people should put effort into finding the right jobs for their skill set. If people want to complain that life is getting too complex, then it would be easier to just state it plainly and come up with solutions that directly answer the question instead of coming up with a chimera of “white culture,” which anyone with any knowledge of cultures, travel, languages, and ethnicity, would find way too simplistic. But I guess that’s the problem. People are forcing simplicity onto complex problems, and that is the greatest sign that they would be even more incompetent if they gained power.

 

Leaked Seattle Gov’t Documents Allege Justice System Is Built From ‘White Supremacist Culture’ – Daily Caller: https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/25/leaked-seattle-documents-justice-system-white-supremacy/

In the early part of the 20th century, the Jews in Europe provided examples of people being self-made, and naturally, social mobility is the visible marker that onlookers measure their own self-esteem, and use to elevate their terror at the prospect being left behind. Because these feelings are unconscious, though very powerful, envy is too embarrassing to admit. Embarrassing feelings always have to be displaced, or reframed to maintain comfort. The reframing can also provide creative excuses that make it easier for people to satisfy their schadenfreude and resentment. Aly quoted one of the few perceptive critics who predicted the Holocaust, Siegfried Lichtenstaedter. “If Jews as a group were perceived as being ‘disproportionately happier’ than other groups, Lichtenstaedter wrote, ‘why shouldn’t this give rise to jealousy and resentment, worries and concerns about one’s own future, just as is all too often the case between individuals?” In Forecasting the Holocaust, Lichtenstaedter was quoted as predicting that the Nazis “will beat the 600,000 Jews in Germany and the 200,000 Jews in Austria to death, steal their belongings and give those possessions to Aryans.”

The problem of course with being a Cassandra that people don’t want to listen to, is when they finally get around to your prediction, it’s too late. “Furnished with a law degree, Lichtenstaedter was a Jewish gay man working as a high-ranking public servant while producing three substantial essays, books and brochures…Since Lichtenstaedter remained unmarried, he frequented several restaurants and local pubs where he ‘gauged the Germans’ shifting attitudes toward Jews.’ By May 1931, Lichtenstaedter noted that Germans were increasingly being seduced by Nazi propaganda, falling for their stupidity [Verblödung]. At the same time, he harshly criticized his fellow Jews who still believed in assimilation…While foreseeing what was going to happen, Lichtenstaedter himself was taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp and murdered on the 6th of December 1942. On his Jewish ID [Judenkarte], it says that he departed to Theresienstadt. Hideously, the Nazis used the word abreisen which means ‘going on a trip’, a ‘holiday.'” Lichtenstaedter even predicted Hitler’s annex of Austria only 2 years too late. The obvious way that Siegfried was able to predict so much was because he read Nazi publications and refused to look away. If people are willing to look at political opponents, the clues are right there to follow in their communications with each other.

Aly’s description of what envy does to people helps to remove that sense of strangeness of the Nazi period. In a lot of ways it reminds me of modern White Supremacist groups and Communists. They appear proud, special, and they expect we should take them seriously, but if one is sensitive enough to notice, there’s an insecurity and emptiness there. “Envy dissolves social cohesion. It destroys trust, creates aggression, promotes suspicion over proof, and leads people to bolster their sense of self-worth by denigrating others. Those who achieve success, especially if they are also outsiders, are invariably subjected to sidelong glances, malicious rumor, and libel. At the same time, as enviers know only too well, jealous people gradually poison themselves, becoming ever more dissatisfied and bitter. Thus they tend to conceal their shameful, base resentment of others behind supposedly more sophisticated arguments – for example, those of racist theory. Enviers brand those more intelligent than they are as clever but not profound. Upset by others’ success, they dismiss those they envy as immoral, egotistical, and despicable, while they themselves pose as respectable moral authorities. They pass off their own failure as modesty of ambition while accusing those they dislike of always pushing to get ahead…The envier doesn’t necessarily seek to emulate the object of his envy; indeed, often he very vocally refuses to do so. As Immanuel Kant observed, the envious instead devote their energy to ‘destroying the happiness of others.’ The envier feels deep satisfaction and enjoys expressing his scorn and schadenfreude whenever others lose their advantages. Do those envied deserve assistance or even pity? No, answers the envier. They always thought they knew better.”

The inner core of insecurity can also move from the individual to national identifications. “What are the sources of envy? They include weakness, timidity, lack of self-confidence, self-perceived inferiority, and excessive ambition.” Aly quoted Julius Fröbel who was a supporter of German unification, that failed to materialize in 1848-49. “The German is always at pains to emphasize how German he is…The German spirit, so to speak, always stands in front of a mirror admiring itself, and even if it has looked itself over a hundred times and become convinced of its perfection, it still harbors a secret doubt, which is the hidden core of vanity.” Aly also matches with Susan Fiske in looking at a big source of envy, which is the fear of competition and rejection. In Psychoanalysis this would be a narcissistic wounding, or castration.

Naturally, when there are wounds, the mind looks for a cure, or a place to vent frustration. “The Belgian social psychologist Hendrik de Man, who lived in Frankfurt and himself had an ambiguous relationship with Nazism, described the exaggerated nationalism of Hitler’s followers to a ‘discrimination complex,…a psychological release valve for feelings of social inferiority,…and a compensatory mechanism par excellence for a threatened collective sense of self-worth.’ When Hitler came to power, political philosopher Erich Voegelin asked how it could be that ‘a minority so tiny as to be virtually invisible’ – Jews represented only 1 percent of the total population – could attract such hatred. Voegelin found the answer in ‘a feeling of inferiority on the part of Germans.'”

Girardian Primers:

Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

The Origin of Envy & Narcissism – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html

Stalking: World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html

Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

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

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html

The Neo-Freudian René Girard in particular influenced many to take Freud’s love triangle to include any desires for anything scarce, including positions of respect, power and savouring. Redekop and Ryba in René Girard and creative reconciliation, describe this need to narrow the gap between rivals. “Inherent in mimetic [imitative] games, is a sense of justice – if the other person can have a certain Object, then I should have a right to the same thing. In the case of lateral violence directed to one’s peers within an oppressed community, it becomes, ‘If the other person (Model) is getting (Object), and I am not getting ahead (Object deprivation), I will make certain that the other person will be brought down (deprived of Object).'” I would also add some meditative detail in that when people observe a Model savouring an Object or situation, their imitative abilities are already feeding in wishes and fantasies. These wishes and fantasies are loaded with pressure and clinging to imitate. That pressure and clinging is the beginning of entitlement, a need for equality and fairness, but also a relief from hankering. This means it can work fast and unconsciously on people, like a hunger pang. As we know with the unconscious, it can motivate behaviour before more aware parts of the mind can assess the possible damage of such actions.

Now German readers, if they’re still here, may be feeling that they don’t identify with these descriptions and are tired of narratives of Germans and Jews. But I say it’s important to study because it was well documented, and it helps to understand motivations wherever there are humans. A later example, which didn’t involve Germans and Jews directly, was in Rwanda. Though as I continued reading, it does indirectly involve Germans, so bare with me!

The authors describe this very feeling of resentment and unfairness with the history of the Hutus and the Tutsis. “In the late 1800s, German explorers came upon the Tutsi kingdom of what is now Rwanda and Burundi. Seeing the efficient organization and administration of the kingdom in which a Tutsi king and elite governed a mixture of Tutsis, Hutus, and Twa peoples, the Germans declared the Tutsis to be Aryans with black skins. In the 1900s, Christian religious educators favored the Tutsis, giving only them the education needed to be leaders within society. Proverbs within the culture systematically made the point that Tutsis were superior. Tutsis received satisfiers for their identity needs: recognition as historically superior; connectedness through solidarity with colonial masters who were now the Belgians; security through the resources and status that flowed to them; power to take action, lead, and make things happen; meaning through a worldview that legitimated their place in society. All of these satisfiers became Objects of mimetic desire on the part of Hutus. It is easy to see that with this desire for the Objects was an ontological [Being] desire to be like the Tutsis – to be Tutsi.”

“In the 1950s, a Hutu power movement took hold within the country, and when the Belgians left the country, the majority Hutus took political control, which they held onto until 1994. Through the years there were periodic massacres of Tutsis. The education system was used to demonize Tutsis and the elite structure was taken over by Hutus. All of this can be seen as a protracted attempt to acquire the Object – to have the recognition, power, position, superiority, and control that Tutsis had previously had. However, there was always a nagging sense that at an ontological level, Hutus never became Tutsis, that Tutsis just might be superior, might have something more that was unattainable. In other words, the Tutsis were an Obstacle to obtaining full ontological parity.”

“New factors were introduced in 1994 that threatened the ontological goals of the Hutus. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) made up of expatriate Tutsis in Uganda had been making incursions into Rwanda. For them, the Object of mimetic desire was control of and status within Rwanda, which had been denied them for nearly fifty years. The Arusha Accords negotiated between the RPF and the Hutu Government of Rwanda had called for power sharing between Hutus and Tutsis. This represented a profound ontological threat to the Hutus. If they believed unconsciously that Tutsis were superior, while explicitly proclaiming their own superiority, then there was a fear that the Tutsis might again become dominant. From a realist perspective, the goods that were in the hands of the Hutu elite, would have to be shared. The solution that emerged for the Hutus was to exterminate all of the Tutsis. If the Tutsis were all gone, they would have overcome their ontological Obstacle. Driven by a Hutu elite who used the radio to all for the elimination of ‘cockroaches’ (code for ‘Tutsis’), the Hutu population reacted with widespread violence, using the thousands of machetes ordered for the occasion to hack to death their Tutsi neighbors while the international community stood by impotently. Over 800,000 were killed. Eventually the RPF attacked and defeated the Hutu government, establishing a Uganda-Tutsi dominated government led by President Paul Kagame. In the process, Tutsis mimetically engaged in revenge killing, putting 80,000 Hutus to death.”

Rwanda radio – Hotel Rwanda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qx7JMpOI

“Many identity groups, if not most, have their own bloody histories. The ‘Chosen Trauma’ of one group becomes the basis for ‘righting the injustice’ and mimetically perpetrating violence against former oppressors resulting in a ‘Chosen Glory,’ for the first group and a ‘Chosen Trauma,’ for the second. In each of these stories, elements of the histories of Hutus and Tutsis can be seen, always with a significant role for mimetic desire, rivalries and violence.”

I would continue to add to this narrative some elements of projection. Why people often tell on themselves with projection is partly because envy and imitation are intertwined. If one side is considered hostile, then they can be labeled as deserving hostility. Then with moral disengagement, those who feel oppressed can now start to oppress without cognizance of the similarities. The reason people aren’t aware of their hypocrisy is partially that they are so certain that the other side is all evil, and their side is justified. This way you can enjoy vengeance with a double-standard. It’s like tunnel vision. Eventually each side is so compromised morally that no one can really be pure, but one can feel that one is pure when one identifies with the struggle of one group over another.

René Girard described this conflict as a conflict of sameness. As people imitate each other’s Being, there is a conflict because the sameness can’t always be shared. As people become more the same, get caught up in social climbing, apply for the same jobs as everyone else, try to live in the same countries that everyone wants to live in, try to live in the same gentrified neighborhoods, the sense of Otherness increases in each person as they all become obstacles to each other. Sameness in objectivity and Otherness in subjectivity. For Girard, the cure is to realize that all possession leads to emptiness, because it’s really about the thrill of the chase and the sadism of conflict. When you remove role-models from objects, the objects often lose their luster, or at least they remain only in their practical qualities. This can be a blessing in disguise if one is capable of enjoying what is undervalued.

For those who can’t see, a lot of the envy is knowing that another person is enjoying something, and it’s not going to be shared with you. The greed partially is about making sure that all known forms of savouring are owned by oneself, and one can rest assured nobody has a surprising angle. One’s status is safe and confirmed. Then when a new angle is discovered, the stamped to imitate starts again. So there’s boredom in possession, but urgency in poverty. It’s like the wild cat chasing the moving object, and the sweet spot is in the chase to acquire lines of possibility, or to investigate mysteries. There has to be movement. Complete knowledge is static and boring, and lacking fresh projects to chase is depressing.

Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, describes that feeling of emptiness, anticipation and greed when the main character in a café, is struck by boredom towards married life. The boredom then is cast aside by envy of Parisian women going about their day towards lines of possibility that are inaccessible to him through barriers of natural time and resources. One cannot be everywhere at the same time. “I also feel my life passing by as other lives unfold along paths parallel to mine, and it frustrates me not to be a part of them, not to have stopped these women for a moment in their hurried rush to some unknown job or unknown pleasure, and I dream. I dream that actually I possess them all.” Yet does he really want to possess them all? Earlier in that sequence he says, “what makes the streets of Paris so fascinating is the constant yet fleeting presence of women whom I’m almost certain never to see again. It’s enough that they’re there, indifferent, conscious of their charm, happy to test its effect on me, as I test mine on them…I feel their seductive power without giving in to it.” So there’s a fear of giving into the seduction because it may turn into boredom or disappointment. The chasing in the mind continues to thread one thought after another and one chase after another to maintain the high of intensity. Even death becomes a concept to chase after or run away from, yet the body just does it on its own. There’s nothing the ego has to do. The same goes with appreciation. The perception is able to recognize what is interesting and beautiful, and the ego doesn’t need to do anything to appreciate except to get out of the way. Relaxing the predatory ego is a must if peace is to be found.

The Tourist – Radiohead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OzU1jdjSZA

This emptiness of modern life shows the value of psychology in that the unconscious can take good things, like a good marriage, and completely wreck them. It can take a successful society, and periodically tear it down. The civilization and its discontents are always struggling to achieve endless meaning, in work or relationships, or to stumble on deep and long-lasting peace, or at least to find enough entertainment to distract us from our mortality. When it periodically fails, often with economic downturns, many people can only find surrogate meaning in violence. Self-destruction, and or destruction of others.

When talking about the controversy over Freud’s Death Drive theory, Otto Kernberg reminds us why it can’t be so easily cast aside. “The importance of this controversy relates directly to the social and cultural problems of the twentieth century and the beginning of this new century. The fundamentalist regimes of the last century were unprecedented in their primitive and brutal aggression, both systematic and daily. The tens of millions killed in the name of German National Socialism and Marxist communism are beginning to be replicated under new banners in this century. But no society, no country is free from the history of senseless, wholesale massacre of imagined or real enemies. The relative ubiquity of these phenomena throughout the history of civilization cannot be ignored. The question of the existence of the death drive as part of the core of human psychology is, unfortunately, a practical and not merely a theoretical problem.”

Freud on Freud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj2JFI4BsRQ

The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3qk4e7d

Mourning and Melancholia – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781905888061/

Freud, S (1931). On Femininity: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855757011/

Splitting of the Ego and the processes of defense – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855757554/

Deceit, Desire, & the Novel – René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801818301/

Psychoanalytic Diagnosis – Nancy McWilliams: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781462543694/

Freud and Beyond – Stephen A. Mitchell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465098811/

Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393328615/

Thomas Klikauer (2020) Forecasting the Holocaust and destruction: on Volks-spirit and hatred of Jews, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 19:2, 262-264

Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780141184050/

René Girard and Creative Reconciliation – Thomas Ryba: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780739169001/

The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud – Ernest Jones: Paperback: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780140206616/

Moral Disengagement – Albert Bandura: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781464160059/

Why the Germans, Why the Jews by Götz Aly: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781250062642/

Eric Rohmer – Six moral tales: https://amzn.to/3402wPE

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