Monday, October 31, 2011

the castration complex

I want to take up the castration complex and compare it to Nietzsche's idea of spirit

I think that denial or disavowal has a positive dimension that must be stressed:

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels. If he cannot get over an experience and have done with it, this kind of digestion is as much physiological as is the other – and often in fact a consequence of the other. – With such a conception one can, between ourselves, still be the sternest opponent of all materialism. (Genealogy of Morals)

Perhaps people will not immediately understand what I have said here about a “fundamental will of the spirit”: let me explain. – The commanding element (whatever it is) that is generally called “spirit” wants to dominate itself and its surroundings, and to feel its domination: it wills simplicity out of multiplicity, it is a binding, subduing, domineering, and truly masterful will. Its needs and abilities are the same ones that physiologists have established for everything that lives, grows, and propagates. The power of spirit to appropriate foreign elements manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to disregard or push aside utter inconsistencies: just as it will arbitrarily select certain aspects or outlines of the foreign, of any piece of the “external world,” for stronger emphasis, stress, or falsification in its own interest. Its intention here is to incorporate new “experiences,” to classify new things into old classes, – which is to say: it aims at growth, or, more particularly, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increasing strength. This same will is served by an apparently opposite drive of spirit, a suddenly emerging resolution in favor of ignorance and arbitrary termination, a closing of its windows, an inner nay-saying to something or other, a come-no-closer, a type of defensive state against many knowable things, a contentment with darkness, with closing horizons, a yea-saying and approval of ignorance: all of which are necessary in proportion to the degree of its appropriating force, its “digestive force,” to speak metaphorically – and really, “spirit” resembles a stomach more than anything. The spirit’s occasional will to be deceived belongs here too, perhaps with a playful hunch that things are not one way or the other, that people just accept things as one way or the other, a sense of pleasure in every uncertainty and ambiguity, a joyful self-delight at the arbitrary narrowness and secrecy of a corner, at the all-too-close, the foreground, at things made bigger, smaller, later, better, a self-delight at the sheer caprice in all these expressions of power. Finally, the spirit’s not quite harmless willingness to deceive other spirits and to act a part in front of them belongs here too, that constant stress and strain of a creative, productive, mutable force. What the spirit enjoys here is its multiplicity of masks and its artfulness, and it also enjoys the feeling of security these provide…” (Beyond Good & Evil)

Forgetting is… an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression… to close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, pre-meditation (for our organism is an oligarchy)— that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness. The man in whom this apparatus of repression is damaged and ceases to function properly may be compared (and more than merely compared) with a dyseptic— he cannot “have done” with anything (Genealogy of Morals).

Then in the failure of this denial it seems that we have the movement from "master to slave" and from healthy selfishness to reactive affects.

Reactive affects include spite, revenge, resentment, jealousy...

It seems to me that another sense of social perversion besides spiting the analyst and staying sick would be to have, in spite, made oneself into a failure to wound the parents and their expectations.

I also think that Lacan's formulation of the pervert being provocative in order to bring in the law (i.e. the father separating the child from the mother) is a good example of the masochist's position and what is called 'masochistic complaining'in classic analysis and characterology.

I also think that fears of humiliation or their reversal in practical joker (or trickster archetypes) are salient here. The avoidant personality disorder and the link to being humiliated because of the fantasied lack of a penis seems lacking in Freud's and Lacan's work...

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The phallic-narcissistic and the castration complex

A more schematized presentation of phallic-narcissism, the castration complex, and its relation to the Oedipus complex is here
http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2013/01/movie-interpretation-piano.html

Hand in hand with the castration complex is denial of castration which Freud sees at work in the symbol of the phallic mother which is ubiquitous in perversions (See Outline of Psychoanalysis p. 202-3, Fetishism, and Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense).

Since I've been able to tie Heracles labours to the poly phallic where the third appears as the king or symbolic order in which the individual has a drive to excellence then the phallic-narcissistic stage at which the castration complex occurs should create an ideal that is different. McDougall provides an interesting answer in making the ideal a negative one. Instead of competing for excellence with others the ideal is to be 'not-ordinary'. She writes:

"to be like the others" still signified castration, "to be accepted by the others" was equivalent to losing his identity. He would then be forced to go over to the other side, the side of the brothers—and the fathers. To make such a move would mean the risk of losing all hope of possessing the mother's phallic secret and thus one day possessing the means of totally satisfying her… his feeling of identity would be reduced to nothing. For K. could only find his identity in the eyes of his mother. Only through her could he hope to acquire his manhood. His wish for his father's love and for the right to identify with him and thereby introject an authentic paternal-phallic image was felt to be forbidden by his mother, and had therefore to remain unconscious. His mother remained sole guardian of his narcissistic integrity (McDougall, Anonymous Spectator, p. 298)

In effect, the sexual denial of the pervert for a basic man-woman relationship means that he gets a special pleasure in his perverse act. Socially, the pervert would similarly deny the symbolic order and the need for competition and having a good reputation or symbolic post of power in order to get self-esteem. He draws on a confidence that doesn't come from measuring his ego and when he makes errors or commits misdeeds that don't live up to the ideal image he has of himself he denies or disavows them.

Chasseguet-Smirgel mentions the work of Grunberger who also sees the phallic-narcissistic encounter as a negative one:

In fact the Oedipus complex itself can be viewed as inextricably tied to human immaturity. Béla Grunberger (1957), (1967) has stressed this point. He believes the conflict between Oedipal desire and the child's incapacity to satisfy it to be the basis of the incest taboo, a taboo projected onto the father in order to safeguard the child's narcissism. 'It is not I who cannot, it is he who prevents me.'

Grunberger writes:

The anti-Semite's profound satisfaction flows from the fact that his ego is in perfect harmony with his ego-ideal. Having made his projection onto the Jew, he has found his Manichaean paradise: all that is bad is thereafter on one side—the side of the Jew—and all that is good on the other side where he himself is. The photo carries the proof. The ego-ideal is narcissistic, and the satisfaction is that of perfect narcissistic integrity recovered through the projection on to the Jew (Grunberger, The anti-semite and the Oedipus Complex, p. 382).

We should contrast this racism, as the cultural externalization of the conscience (not the moral one but the self-honesty related to self-worth) with the previous representation of the castrating woman at the polyphallic stage.

Burgner in the Phallic-Narcissistic Phase draws attention to how the individual feels themselves to be above ordinary people. She writes:

Margareta, for example, a nursery school child not in treatment, occasioned much discussion among the staff as to her status in phallic-narcissistic and oedipal development. She was a pretty, dainty, beautifully dressed child, who appeared feminine and self-satisfied. She knew well how to make an entrance and become the center of attention, and soon became known as "the little princess." She had an apparently flirtatious relationship with her father, which was occasionally extended to male observers in the nursery school. When she began nursery school at age 3, it seemed reasonable to suppose that she was entering the oedipal phase. But during her two years in the nursery school it became increasingly apparent that her relationships were superficial; she approached adults briefly in order to be admired, and retreated again once this aim had been achieved. If at times she became more involved, it was only to reveal clearly (at home as well as in school) the obstinate behavior more appropriate to the relationships of a toddler in the anal phase. Throughout the two years she remained aloof from the other children, never making any lasting friendship…. The superficiality and lack of development in Margareta's relationships eventually led the staff to conclude that her feminine exhibitionism was not a sign of true oedipal development… 176

While as adults these patients were often able to have heterosexual intercourse (thus indicating the relative intactness of their drive development), their relationships to their objects were frequently characterized by interactions on a phallic-narcissistic level; for example, an inability to achieve a reciprocal relationship in which the object's real qualities and characteristics are recognized and valued, and in which the needs and demands of the object are accepted; a tendency to use the object solely as a source of admiration or condemnation, as a substitute for internalized approval or sanctions; an emphasis on exhibitionistic and voyeuristic behavior in relation to the object; an incessantly phallic-competitive interaction with the object. Indeed, we were struck, as we examined the level of object relationships of these patients, how many of them could also be described as hysterical characters, and we would further suggest that in the hysteric the phallic-narcissistic level rather than the oedipal one is the nodal point of the regressive behavior. Much of what is often described as oral-demanding behavior in hysterics is perhaps better understood as a manifestation of phallic-narcissistic demands for admiration and narcissistic supplies from the object. 178

All this terminology is confusing but I'd rather keep with the existing terms then begin to invent all new terms...

Saturday, October 29, 2011

ego ideal- excellence and gift-giving

In the myths of Perseus and Heracles we have a symmetry in the child being alone with the mother and then being indebted to a King.

Perseus was cast, alone with his mother, into a wooden chest and then taken in by the king Polydectes.

He had to defend his mother against the king's lust but then the king had a banquet in which he was required to give a gift and the King asked for Medusa's head

What if we read the lust of the king as Perseus' own lust for his mother and this instinctual renunciation turning into the ego ideal of gift-giving. I've taken the word from Nietzsche's Zarathustra and think it's applicable to both the subject and object forms of masochism (i.e. giving oneself in love or devotion and in wanting to be loved causing joy or getting approval from others is still making a gift of oneself).

There might be an issue of whether this is an oedipal arrangement and not a projection but I'm reading the giant serpent he saves Andromeda from as the paternal phallus.

Fearful for his future but unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods by killing Zeus's offspring and his own daughter, Acrisius cast the two into the sea in a wooden chest. Danaë's fearful prayer made while afloat in the darkness has been expressed by the poet Simonides of Ceos. Mother and child washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by the fisherman Dictys ("fishing net"), who raised the boy to manhood. The brother of Dictys was Polydectes ("he who receives/welcomes many"), the king of the island.

After some time, Polydectes fell in love with Danaë, so Perseus, who knew that Polydectes had grim intentions, constantly protected his mother from him. Polydectes desired to remove Perseus from the island so he could have Danaë, and therefore hatched a plot to send him away in disgrace. Polydectes held a large banquet where each guest was expected to bring a gift. Polydectes requested that the guests bring horses, under the pretense that he was collecting contributions for the hand of Hippodamia, "tamer of horses". The fisherman's protégé had no horse to give, so he asked Polydectes to name the gift, for he would not refuse it. Polydectes held Perseus to his rash promise, demanding the head of the only mortal Gorgon.

With the story of Heracles, he is in effect left alone with the mother of his children, Megara, after he kills them. Then after this as reparation he must serve king Eurystheus for 10 labours (2 more are added). In some versions Heracles kills his wife along with the children but this would contradict the later:

Megara to Iolaus 1

After the LABOURS, Heracles 1 came back to Thebes and gave his wife Megara to Iolaus 1 (which means that the death of Megara mentioned in (8) was perhaps an exaggerated rumour). Some say that Heracles 1 divorced her on the ground that he had lost the children he had by her (whom he had himself killed). Iolaus 1 and Megara had a daughter Leipephilene, who was as beautiful as the Olympian goddesses, or so they say.

After Heracles had completed his labours a centaur tried to rape his new wife and he kills him. This I take to be the father or entry of the paternal phallus which is denigrated and consequently split.

Heracles takes Deianira as his wife. Travelling to Tiryns, a centaur, Nessus, offers to help Deianira across a fast flowing river while Heracles swims it. However, Nessus is true to the archetype of the mischievous centaur and tries to steal Deianira away while Heracles is still in the water. Angry, Heracles shoots him with his arrows dipped in the poisonous blood of the Lernaean Hydra. Thinking of revenge, Nessus gives Deianira his blood-soaked tunic before he dies, telling her it will "excite the love of her husband".[38]

Several years later, rumor tells Deianira that she has a rival for the love of Heracles. Deianira, remembering Nessus' words, gives Heracles the bloodstained shirt. Lichas, the herald, delivers the shirt to Heracles. However, it is still covered in the Hydra's blood from Heracles' arrows, and this poisons him, tearing his skin and exposing his bones. Before he dies, Heracles throws Lichas into the sea, thinking he was the one who poisoned him (according to several versions, Lichas turns to stone, becoming a rock standing in the sea, named for him). Heracles then uproots several trees and builds a funeral pyre, which Poeas, father of Philoctetes, lights. As his body burns, only his immortal side is left. Through Zeus' apotheosis, Heracles rises to Olympus as he dies.

So, with Perseus we have the instinctual renunciation of the genital impulses towards the mother for loving-being the object of the subject who loves.

and with Heracles we have the instinctual renunciation of the genital impulses towards the mother for excellence- being the object of the subject with excellence.

This leads us to the phallic-narcissistic which is something clearly separate from the poly-phallic since the paternal phallus comes after the gift-giving and ideal of excellence.

mother complex

Freud is clearest about the "ego ideal" when he talks about it in relation to the narcissistic object choice:


The sexual ideal may enter into an interesting auxiliary relation to the ego ideal. It may be used for substitutive satisfaction where narcissistic satisfaction encounters real hindrances. In that case a person will love in conformity with the narcissistic type of object-choice, will love what he once was and no longer is, or else what possesses the excellences which he never had at all (cf. (c) [p. 90]). The formula parallel to the one there stated runs thus: what possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved. This expedient is of special importance for the neurotic, who, on account of his excessive object-cathexes, is impoverished in his ego and is incapable of fulfilling his ego ideal. He then seeks a way back to narcissism from his prodigal expenditure of libido upon objects, by choosing a sexual ideal after the narcissistic type which possesses the excellences to which he cannot attain. This is the cure by love, which he generally prefers to cure by analysis. (Freud, On Narcissism, p.101)

It is a drive to excellence. However, I believe that we must take excellence to be a standard that is evaluated by the symbolic order: through reputation and/or based upon the judgments of those who one considers an authority figure. The authority figure would be based through the symbolic order as well. The person has a position of symbolic repute. This means a higher degree or credentials, more money, or more prestigious clubs or organizations he belongs to.

In regards to the ideal of excellence there are myths that clearly link it with the woman as castrator.

You have Samson and Delilah in which Samson's strength is sapped from Delilah cutting his hair. I have called this a mother complex because the long hair which is symbolic of Samson's power is a maternal symbol and it's not a male figure but a female one who takes away his potency. One can also recall J. Edgar Hoover and other men in positions of power who were cross dressers to see that the mother provides the imago of power.

If I'm right the castrating woman of the mother complex should be differentiated from the phallic woman (who will be related to the castration complex). Freud offers the term 'mother complex' in relation to jealous rivalry with siblings that gives another etiology for homosexuality:


Observation has directed my attention to several cases in which during early childhood impulses of jealousy, derived from the mother-complex and of very great intensity, arose against rivals, usually older brothers. This jealousy led to an exceedingly hostile and aggressive attitude towards these brothers which might sometimes reach the pitch of actual death-wishes, but which could not maintain themselves in the face of the subject's further development. Under the influences of upbringing—and certainly not uninfluenced also by their own continuing powerlessness—these impulses yielded to repression and underwent a transformation, so that the rivals of the earlier period became the first homosexual love-objects (Freud, ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms’ , p. 231).


While Freud focusses on the rivalry with others, Horney references the 'dread of the vagina' in relation to the 'castrating mother'/vagina dentata.

Tentatively we have in order

1. the urethral stage
2. the polyphallic stage (the mother complex)
3. The phallic-narcissistic stage (the castration complex)
Oedipus complex
4. the genital stage (the father complex, Oedipus complex)

I have the oedipus complex referenced twice because the first time is related to sexual impulses towards the mother and the second is related to feelings of love towards the parent/sibling. As I'll show, Freud oscillates back and forth between both.

Friday, October 28, 2011

castration complex vs Oedipus complex vs. father complex

As everyone knows psychoanalysis fell from grace because in the hands of active-masculine psychiatrists, who always had to be the master, everything became about the Oedipus complex.

In my work to understand I've been able to find some clear delineation of several stages around the Oedipus complex in Freud's work, although he still seems guilty of using the terms that distinguish them indiscriminately. I'll try to share the relevant passages in the next few posts and hopefully find the time to talk about them soon. The first is the father complex in latency as the true stage of the full internalization of the superego:

It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgment which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing. As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. Social feelings rest on identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego ideal.

Religion, morality, and a social sense—the chief elements in the higher side of man—were originally one and the same thing. According to the hypothesis which I put forward in Totem and Taboo they were acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex: religion and moral restraint through the process of mastering the Oedipus complex itself, and social feeling through the necessity for overcoming the rivalry that then remained between the members of the younger generation. (The Ego and The Id, p.37)

Here what is important is that the 'father complex' is tied to an ideal of obeying' injunctions and prohibitions'. This has to be differentiated from the ideal of excellence, the phallic ego ideal, that Freud ties to castration complex that precedes the Oedipus complex. [In later posts I distinguish between the proto-phallic ego ideal with its castration into language and the phallic-narcissistic or phallic-deutero ego ideal with the mother giving the child a phallic image].

The father complex can be paired up with the obsessive-compulsive’s famous transference:

almost every description of this personality type will refer to the fact that the [compulsive is] often quite submissive to authority on the one and hand and correspondingly authoritarian with those under their control or those perceived to be beneath them in status. Their reliability, conscientiousness, obedience to rules, etc., may be viewed as characteristics of their subservience to authority. Their stubbornness, obstinacy, and defiance may be viewed as permissible rebellion against such authority, particularly where it is righteous (Johnson, Character Styles, p.276).

As another characterologist puts it, the identity theme in the compulsive is “a sense of pride in one’s intellect and moral fiber” and a sense of owed recognition and approval from others because of their masterful self-control (Josephs, Character and Self Experience, p.142).

Here it isn't the anal obsessionality that is important in the compulsive character but clearly the father complex in which the superego's internalization means that the compulsive's 'moral perfection' becomes a source of narcissism and the ego has developed to a stage in which group identities and the injunctions and prohibitions of them are now pathways along which desire can now flow. The compulsive may want to be smartest and have the ideal of excellence but it is paired with also being the model employee, model citizen, and the tyrannical adoption of shoulds and oughts related to being "adult"

After differentiating the other ideals in the other complexes I'll explore the complex's symbols and myths to talk about the genetic factor in the child's upbringing.

This post is updated

http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2012/05/psychoanalytic-basics-transference-and.html


Thursday, October 27, 2011

everything my work is building toward

Then, following the catastrophic discovery of otherness, comes the equally traumatic discovery of the difference between the sexes.

McDougall, J. (2000). Sexuality and the Neosexual


I think this statement can be related to Freud's work in two basic ways

The first:

Whatever the character's later capacity for resisting the influences of abandoned object-cathexes may turn out to be, the effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego ideal; for behind it there lies hidden an individual's first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory. (Freud, The Ego and The Id p. 31).

I think that it's the confrontation with otherness which makes us identify with the father in the capacity of symbol formation

The second:

In that phase of children's libidinal development which is characterized by the normal Oedipus complex we find that they are tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite sex, while their relation to the other parent is predominantly hostile. In the case of boys the explanation is simple. A boy's mother was his first love-object; she remains so, and, as his feelings for her become more passionate and he understands more of the relation between father and mother, the former inevitably appears as a rival. With little girls it is otherwise. For them, too, the mother was the first love-object…. I have begun by stating the two facts which have struck me as new: first, that the great dependence on the father in women merely takes over the heritage of an equally great attachment to the mother and, secondly, that this earlier phase lasts longer than we should have anticipated (Freud, Female Sexuality, p.281, 283).


In both the case of the encounter with otherness and difference between the sexes I believe the child is reacting against the primary caregiver (i.e. the mother) and the father is a negative creation (since children from single mother's don't necessarily have children with mental illness, or as Lacan puts it, the father is normative and not natural).

Two important splits in the psyche occur in these two moments and they would correspond to what Lacan wants to call the ideal ego and the ego ideal.

I think that the encounter with othersness is the early oedipus complex of Melanie Klein's work.

back to work...

myth- Hephaestus- early roots

The Anal Body Ego

Memories from the second year of life, obtained in the analysis of two and three year old children, reveal that a child under two years of age frequently experiences his own falling as being thrown down, being expelled from his mother's arms and picked up again (Kestenberg, Development of the Young Child as Expressed through Bodily Movements, p.756-7)

Compare this to:

Hephaestus was born weak and crippled. Displeased by the sight of her son, Hera threw Hephaestus from Mount Olympus, and he fell for a whole day before landing in the sea. Nymphs rescued him and took him to Lemnos, where the people of the island cared for him. But other versions say Zeus threw him from Mount Olympus after Hephaestus had sided with his mother in a quarrel. This legend says that Hephaestus fell for nine days and nine nights, and he landed on the island of Lemnos. It was on Lemnos where he built his palace and his forges under a volcano.

Then compare this to:

The inveterate enemy of the Olympian gods is described in detail by Hesiod as a vast grisly monster with a hundred serpent heads "with dark flickering tongues" flashing fire from their eyes and a din of voices and a hundred serpents legs, a feature shared by many primal monsters of Greek myth that extend in serpentine or scaly coils from the waist down. The titanic struggle created earthquakes and tsunamis.Once conquered by Zeus' thunderbolts, Typhon was cast into Tartarus, the common destiny of many such archaic adversaries, or he was confined beneath Mount Aetna (Pindar, Pythian Ode 1.19–20; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 370), where "his bed scratches and goads the whole length of his back stretched out against it", or in other volcanic regions, where he is the cause of eruptions. Typhon is thus the chthonic figuration of volcanic forces, as Hephaestus (Roman Vulcan) is their "civilized" Olympian manifestation.

This equivalency will be important for my next big post on how an ego ideal takes its primary fixation point from aggression in regards to masculine subjectivity.

"Typhon –hamstrung, sank to his knees in despair… for miles the whole great earth was enkindled by the blast of heavenly wind"

Notice that Typhon is hamstrung and that a heavenly wind is emitted from him.

"From the waist down he was a tangle of hissing vipers, he had majestic wings, and shaggy hair covered his body"

Here we see an upper vs. lower body split and this would indicate that the legs have chronic tension from the repression of anger involved. From this we get such phrases as 'hopping mad'.

feminine subject

I wanted to show that good analysts have made use of Freud's love vs. being loved distinction. You see it in Character Analysis:

"you see, this is one of the causes of your neurosis" by which I meant his childish behaviour, his demand to be loved and cared for. As if the patient had known the true cause of his neurosis, he connected this... with his repressed masturbation anxiety. The masturbation idea was again associated with the incest idea 105

"his desire to be a child who is loved by everyone-- at the same time realizing that he himself neither wanted to love nor was able to love" 113

This whole case study is filled with words like feminine devotion and illustrates the patient coming to discover his own masculinity as "brave, open, honest, proud" 112

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

feminine subject

Watching Tarkovsky's The Mirror or reading some of Rilke's poems has been deepened for me lately by appreciating some of my own nostalgia for the house of my parents. To feel like I could be in the basement or some other room and be exploring books or just lying around without having to worry at all about providing for myself or making a name can grant very intense moments of bliss. I feel like what we see in Tarkovsky is often moments of him capturing the feeling of security with caregivers present or waiting at home and the intense connectedness that allows for someone to have with the ray of sunlight, the sheen on the hardwood floor, the shadows throughout the house, the trees and bits of nature that take human forms as they twist towards the sky, and this isn't to mention the smells and touch which can bring you back.

How much of the joy in being a parent is to re-create these sights, sounds, smells, as well as the games and activities that one has nostalgia for?

And, to say exchange a penis for a baby in Freudian terms sounds so ugly that I understand why psychoanalysis has lacked a champion from amongst the feminine subjects.

Eros vs. Thanatos and the ego ideal/superego

The ego ideal, or the superego, as it is more popularly known, is the central cause of neurosis in psychoanalytic theory. “It is precisely in neurotics” Freud writes, “that we find the highest differences of potential between the development of their ego ideal and the amount of sublimation of their primitive libidinal instincts... the formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression“(On Narcissism, p.95). The ego ideal is born of ‘primary narcissism’ which is a state in which the child “was his own ideal (On Narcissism, p.94). This primary narcissism offers satisfaction to the child without the child having to do anything to deserve happiness. Primary narcissism is exchanged for an ego ideal and it is by living up to the ego ideal that the ego gets to recover some of this happiness. Freud writes:

Let us reflect that the ego now enters into the relation of an object to the ego ideal which has been developed out of it, and that all the interplay between an external object and the ego as a whole, with which our study of the neuroses has made us acquainted, may possibly be repeated upon this new scene of action within the ego... Each of the mental differentiations that we have become acquainted with represents a fresh aggravation of the difficulties of mental functioning, increases its instability, and may become the starting-point for its breakdown, that is, for the onset of a disease… But the ego ideal comprises the sum of all the limitations in which the ego has to acquiesce, and for that reason the abrogation of the ideal would necessarily be a magnificent festival for the ego, which might then once again feel satisfied with itself… There is always a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. And the sense of guilt (as well as the sense of inferiority) can also be understood as an expression of tension between the ego and the ego ideal (Group Psychology, 130-1, emphasis mine).

Different individuals will have different ideals that they have acquiesced to and in this sense their happiness will be different. This means that the type of ego ideal will be of central importance for different character types. In a passage from Civilization and Its Discontents Freud gives an example of three different types:

Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. All kinds of different factors will operate to direct his choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can expect to get from the external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of it, and, finally, how much strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his wishes. In this, his psychical constitution will play a decisive part, irrespectively of the external circumstances. The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships to other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes; the man of action will never give up the external world on which he can try out his strength. As regards the second of these types, the nature of his talents and the amount of instinctual sublimation open to him will decide where he shall locate his interests. Any choice that is pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate. Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration. Its success is never certain, for that depends on the convergence of many factors, perhaps on none more than on the capacity of the psychical constitution to adapt its function to the environment and then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure. A person who is born with a specially unfavourable instinctual constitution, and who has not properly undergone the transformation and rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensable for later achievements, will find it hard to obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if he is faced with tasks of some difficulty. As a last technique of living, which will at least bring him substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness—a flight which he usually accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees his pursuit of happiness come to nothing in later years can still find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication; or he can embark on the desperate attempt at rebellion seen in a psychosis. (Civilization, p.83-4)

By establishing different types of people with different types of ideals in life it is possible to understand Freud’s very general use of eros. One person may have eros in relation to finding love, another may find it in working towards glory or success, another may have an ideal to be the most beautiful/have the best taste, (etc.). In drawing attention to the ‘flight’ from the difficulties involved in having a high ego ideal Freud holds a position similar to Alfred Adler who similarly claims that all neurosis is from a lack of courage. From the flight from one’s ideals to the feelings of guilt, inferiority, self-pity (etc.). I take the liberty of using ego ideal to refer to the striving itself. I'll use phobos or fear to refer to both to the feeling of being unable to reach one's ideals and the next step of trying to give up one's ideal or attacking the internalized parental image upon which it is based. I’ll use the superego to refer to the punitive or judging aspect once the parental imago is abandoned. In this sense the superego would be synonymous with the death drive that is directed at the individual in relation to self-attacks that aren't based upon "natural" prohibitions of conscience [1]. Freud writes:

If we turn to melancholia first, we find that the excessively strong super-ego which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in the person concerned. Following our view of sadism, we should say that the destructive component had entrenched itself in the super-ego and turned against the ego. What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death…(Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 53, emphasis mine).

The melancholic who was jilted by her lover wishes to attack the lover and the parental image upon which the ideal is based. However, she isn't free to give up the ideal without losing a constitutive part of her psyche and she must introject the parental imago and attack herself as she'd like to attack it[2].

In summary: We have a state of primary narcissism in which the child is simply his own ideal without being called to do anything to experience self-esteem. Then this primary narcissism is exchanged for an ego ideal. There are several ego ideals that correspond to different goals that limit the narcissism experienced by an individual. When the ego fears that it won’t be able to fulfill an ego ideal it experiences inferiority, guilt, etc. depending on the ideal. When the individual out of aggression and/or fear tries to give up on striving for the ideal then the aggression or libido powering the ego ideal defuses and attacks the individual as in melancholia or in paranoia.

This gives us the dialectic of

Eros (ego ideal) to Phobos (fear)

Thanatos (superego)

An individual may try dealing with phobos and not living up to an ideal by enacting ego defenses. Instead of feeling inferiority one can identify with the parental imago. For example one can behave like the internalized object of the father at the phallic-oedipal stage by being arrogant or superior to others. Additionally, aggression towards self in inferiority can be directed outward towards a racist object in which the Oedipal father is represented as a group that seeks obscene pleasures and is trying to obtain them unfairly (obscene sexual pleasure in African Americans wanting to rape white women or Jews controlling everything by cleverly taking advantage of others, etc.)[3]. However, this ego ideal model only explains drive theory through the anal, urethral, phallic, phallic-oedipal, and oedipal stages in which there is an ego that can form an ego ideal. Previous to this we’d have something which should be called an id ideal and related not to secondary narcissism but primary narcissism. Here such ideals would be based upon basic things like feeling safe in the world and the superego would be related to feeling like the world will end or that one doesn't deserved to exist. In the Economic Problem of Masochism Freud draws attention to this pre-self-representation form of the superego.

“Erotogenic masochism accompanies the libido through all its developmental phases and derives from them its changing psychical coatings. The fear of being eaten up by the totem animal (the father) originates from the primitive oral organization; the wish to be beaten by the father comes from the sadistic-anal phase which follows it; castration, although it is later disavowed, enters into the content of masochistic phantasies as a precipitate of the phallic stage or organization; and from the final genital organization there arise, of course, the situations of being copulated with and of giving birth, which are characteristic of femaleness…” (164-5)

Melanie Klein takes her investigations up from this point but still retains the ego and superego language even though the ego, again, as self-representation and secondary narcissism, still hasn’t formed.

It seems to me that people with early- schizoid (birth, ocular, oral, mimetic stage, primal scene) trauma who form id ideals are people who are more prone to having their basic transferences of safety and connection to the world shattered[4]. However, even a person who didn’t have to form id ideals from inherited dispositions or bad mothering still make the same transference out into the world and if they experience rape, war, or some other severe event they too can have their destructive drive defuse from their ideal and experience psychotic processes.

[1] Lacan echos this and talks of the superego as an “obscene, ferocious Figure” and "a senseless, destructive, purely oppressive, almost always anti-legal morality" (Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.256; Seminar I, p. 102).

[2] To understand this process Fairbairn spells out the logic in his statement “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil” (Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, p. 66-7). Since the transference to the father is an ego transference involving the functioning of the symbolic aspect of reality, the frustrations induced by the father–substitute would make part of reality seem hostile towards one. The melancholic, takes on the blame (perverts inner reality) and then attacks herself in order to save her outer reality. Paranoia is a parallel maneuver that sacrifices outside reality through projection as inside reality is sacrificed with the melancholic.  Katan, among others, has noted the structural similarity of paranoia and melancholia: “We observe that the pictures of paranoia and melancholia correspond with each other in many respects. In both, the ego is the scene of action. In both, various layers of the same content are overlapping… (Katan, A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Diagnosis of Paranoia, p. 339-40). This has caused me to reassess Melanie Klein’s persecutory anxiety and depressive anxiety to not be related to developmental stages but rather to see them as positions in the sense of mental bisexuality (active-masculine and passive-feminine).
[3] The anti-Semite's profound satisfaction flows from the fact that his ego is in perfect harmony with his ego-ideal. Having made his projection onto the Jew, he has found his Manichaean paradise: all that is bad is thereafter on one side—the side of the Jew—and all that is good on the other side where he himself is. The photo carries the proof. The ego-ideal is narcissistic, and the satisfaction is that of perfect narcissistic integrity recovered through the projection on to the Jew (Grunberger, The anti-semite and the Oedipus Complex, p. 382).

[4] At the same time forming id ideals is what gives a painter, for example, his sense for form and colour, or gives another type of schizoid his sense of being at home with mathematics. The Id ideal can result in many potential gifts just as the later ego ideals can result in the drive to have the fame or recognition that can be a good thing too. See Fairbairn on schizoid individuals and their disposition to cultural achievements in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality


When the connotation of the term ‘schizoid’ is extended through an enlargement of our conception of schizoid phenomena in the manner indicated, the denotation of the term inevitably undergoes a corresponding extension; and the resulting schizoid group is then seen to become a very comprehensive one. It is found, for example, to include a high percentage of fanatics, agitators, criminals, revolutionaries, and other disruptive elements in every community. Schizoid characteristics, usually in a less pronounced form, are also common among members of the intelligentsia. Thus the disdain of the highbrow for the bourgeoisie and the scorn of the esoteric artist for the philistine may be regarded as minor manifestations of a schizoid nature. It is further to be noted that intellectual pursuits as such, whether literary, artistic, scientific, or otherwise, appear to exercise a special attraction for individuals possessing schizoid characteristics to one degree or another. Where scientific pursuits are concerned, the attraction would appear to depend upon the schizoid individual's attitude of detachment no less than upon his overvaluation of the thought-processes; for these are both characteristics which readily lend themselves to capitalization within the field of science. The obsessional appeal of science, based as this is upon the presence of a compulsive need for orderly arrangement and meticulous accuracy, has, of course, long been recognized; but the schizoid appeal is no less definite and demands at least equal recognition. Finally the statement may be hazarded that a number of outstanding historical figures lend themselves to the interpretation that they were either schizoid personalities or schizoid characters; and indeed it would appear as if it were often such who leave a mark upon the page of history. (p.6)

An updated version of this is here

http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2012/05/economics-of-libido-pt-1.html

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

masculine vs. feminine subjectivity or psychic bisexuality

Continuing the previous post, the contrast between narcissism and masochism or will, dominance, or power vs. love, devotion, or gift-giving can be further divided between active and passive:

The second of these three antitheses, loving—being loved, corresponds exactly to the transformation from activity to passivity and may be traced to an underlying situation in the same way as in the case of the scopophillic instinct. This situation is that of loving oneself, which we regard as the characteristic feature of narcissism. Then, according as the object or the subject is replaced by an extraneous one, what results is the active aim of loving or the passive one of being loved—the latter remaining near to narcissism. (instinct and their vicissitudes, p.133)

So we have devotion on one hand contrasted with being the object of other people's love or approval

Lacan notes how the same thing is at work in narcissism and how the masculine will becomes passive in being the object of the subject's (the person with power, will, dominance) desire. He writes of Dora

the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man's object of desire (Ecrits, Presentation on Transference, p.181)

In a sketch we can see these 4 positions taken up by the second generation gods in Greek mythology with the further division between body and mind in which the latter indicates a schizoid tendency to be more cathected to the mind and have more basic anxiety in the body.

In narcissism we have


subject: body: Ares the physically strong and competitive god of war
mind: Hephaestus the God of metalworking and stone masonry which shows intellectual dominance as opposed to the physical dominance of Ares. And, whose body is crippled.

object: body: Aphrodite the Goddess of beauty and sexual desire
mind: Athena the Goddess of handicrafts and wisdom which shows that her interest is in secondary finery as opposed to the physical embodiment of sexuality as seen in Aphrodite. Additionally, with the focus on the mind and the understanding of desire between people, as compared to Aphrodite who lives it out, you have the motivation for wisdom. This wisdom would be put to good use not just in unmasking potential rivals in love relationships but also in understanding the psychology of the enemy your state is at war with, and so I think Athena extends to the Goddess of war.

In masochism we have

subject: body: Artemis the goddess of childbirth and the hunt whose interests in the masculine occupation represents her identification with the man or beloved
mind: Hermes the messenger god of cunning wiles whose devotion is shown to an ideology or group as opposed to the identification with an individual illustrated in Artemis. He is also the psychopomp who delivers souls to Hades and this might bespeak a devotion to people over top of any group identification but this would bring in further fixation points; I just mention it to draw attention to Hermes helping others.

object: body: Dionysus the god of wine, parties, and festivals who in his merriment illustrates himself to be the cause of joy and love in others. I think most people know the outgoing social type who tells stories and makes jokes and though he talks a lot it isn't about how great he is (i.e. is narcissistic) but he's either endearing, exuberant, spontaneous, or fun. He's a 'people person' and Dionysus, in one facet, seems to manifest the archetype of the story-telling drunkard.
mind: Apollo or the god of music, healing, prophecies, and poetry who illustrates a more esoteric ability to gain the approval of others and touch something deeper in them than the Dionysian approach of merriment. Here we have someone who wants to know your birthday and tell you about your astrological sign or gain your approval or love through her song or some other way that touches your core. In contrast to Athena, and her wisdom through reasoning things out, Apollo is intuition and energies.

These gods, of course, are overdetermined and in this interpretation certain parts of their character are emphasized over others but this should help to illustrate the schema. I'll hopefully be able to cover other parts of their character in a future post. For example in Zeus's battle with Typhon Hermes shows up to help him retrieve the muscles which were taken from his hands and feet which illustrates Hermes having earlier anal fixations. Hermes also shows up in the myth of Perseus and we can take a look at that myth to develop some more of the phallic fixation.

Monday, October 24, 2011

masculine vs. feminine subjectivity or psychic bisexuality

In Freud's middle period were are given the coordinates for a masculine vs. feminine subjectivity in his ego or narcissism vs. object or masochistic libido construction:


“We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of being in love, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis; while we have the opposite condition in the paranoic's phantasy (or self-perception) of the ‘end of the world’ (On narcissism, p.76)

Freud, in what could be called his phallo-centrism said that men are the ones with a true anaclitic object choice while women have a narcissistic object choice but analysts after corrected him.

Jacobson writes:

In fact, extreme idealization of women, which Freud considers a characteristically masculine attitude, can in my experience be observed more frequently in men who have strong, unconscious female identifications.
Jacobson, The self and the object world, p.120

Nydes writes:


In such a formulation, the word love is not defined in an ideal sense, but is equated rather with interest, attention, sympathy, pity, concern, and endless variations and combinations of what are generally construed to be the rights of one who is dependent. It involves apparent submission to the love object. The word 'power', too, does not reflect constructive mastery or achievement so much as it implies, in this sense, power to enforce submission from others.

Nydes, Schreber, Parricide, and Paranoid-Masochism, p.210


Karen Horney too found that the narcissism found in the man was opposed by a masochistic quality in the majority of women. She writes that in this self-effacing position:

there are taboos on all that is presumptuous, selfish, and aggressive… [and they] constitute a crippling check on the person’s narcissism, his capacity for fighting and for defending himself, [and] his self-interest— on anything that might accrue to his growth or his self-esteem (Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, p.219).

Informed by the work of these early pioneers Edith Jacobson in the impressive work The Self and the Object World solidified the importance of Freud’s middle period to say that “narcissistic or masochistic sexual or social behaviour” form two poles in the personality. She writes that both “document clearly enough the tendency to withdraw object cathexis and make their own person the object either of love, admiration and libidinous gratification, or of hate, depreciation and destruction. (Self and the Object World, p.77). In other words, a narcissist can begin to isolate from personal relationships because he doesn’t receive the admiration he wants from others or falls out with them because of venomous rivalries and a masochist can isolate because she feels unworthy of love or that she has to help everyone with their problems and can’t say no.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

psychoanalytic basics- transference

What is called transference in the emotional sense is really just the analyst experiencing the character of the patient:

"The decisive part of the work is achieved by creating in the patient's relation to the doctor—in the 'transference'—new editions of the old conflicts; in these the patient would like to behave in the same way as he did in the past, while we, by summoning every available mental force [in the patient], compel him to come to a fresh decision. Thus the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another" (Introductory Lectures, p. 454).

The struggles the analysand might have with the analyst qua authority he could have with his boss at work or his academic adviser. The sexual attraction the analysand might have for the analyst is the same she could have for a co-worker who listens sympathetically to her problems at their lunch break.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

psychoanalytic basics- transference

In psychoanalysis there is a conception of the individual as having basic transferences towards the world by which there are guarantees of safety or promises of future satisfaction.

Before the analysand comes into the office there is a transference at work in which he or she believes the analyst will have knowledge of them. This is a basic social trust that people who go to university are learning something valuable or important and exists for many people who don't study psychology. I believe it shows up in an even more primitive way as Lacan would talk about in regards to 'the subject supposed to know' and Descartes requiring God to guarantee knowledge, but my social trust example should suffice.

At a more basic level there is a transference to the world involving physical safety which someone might lose and a feeling of terror or panic may begin to crop up.

These transferences exist in every individual, they are present in the mind dynamically, and because of this any person could become psychotic (or more correctly, use a psychotic defense to avoid the anxiety of a broken down transference) if they receive continuous stress and frustration. I'm thinking here of being subject to torture or some other extreme situation.

When Freud talks about this situation there is the idea that one might have a fixation, providing an economic factor, in which there is an internal pressure for a person to use a part of the mind and therefore have a part of the mind which is more likely to break or have the transference fail. However, he also recognizes, as I've pointed out, that neurosis can occur without this economic element being present


He writes:


When we have nothing else at our disposal for explaining a neurosis but hereditary and constitutional dispositions, we are naturally tempted to say that it was not acquired but developed.

But in this connection two points must be stressed. Firstly, the genesis of a neurosis invariably goes back to very early impressions in childhood (1). Secondly, it is true that there are cases which are distinguished as being ‘traumatic’ because their effects go back unmistakably to one or more powerful impressions in these early times—impressions which have escaped being dealt with normally, so that one is inclined to judge that if they had not occurred the neurosis would not have come about either. It would be enough for our purposes if we were obliged to restrict the analogy we are in search of to these traumatic cases. But the gap between the two groups [of cases] appears not to be unbridgeable. It is quite possible to unite the two aetiological determinants under a single conception; it is merely a question of how one defines ‘traumatic’. If we may assume that the experience acquires its traumatic character only as a result of a quantitative factor—that is to say, that in every case it is an excess in demand that is responsible for an experience evoking unusual pathological reactions—then we can easily arrive at the expedient of saying that something acts as a trauma in the case of one constitution but in the case of another would have no such effect. In this way we reach the concept of a sliding ‘complemental series’ as it is called in which two factors converge in fulfilling an aetiological requirement (2). A less of one factor is balanced by a more of the other; as a rule both factors operate together and it is only at the two ends of the series that there can be any question of a simple motive being at work. After mentioning this, we can disregard the distinction between traumatic and non-traumatic aetiologies as irrelevant to the analogy we are in search of (Moses and Monotheism, p.73).

(1) This therefore makes it nonsensical to say that one is practicing psycho-analysis if one excludes from examination and consideration precisely these earliest periods—as happens in some quarters.

(2) I take the opportunity here of warning you against taking sides in a quite unnecessary dispute. In scientific matters people are very fond of selecting one portion of the truth, putting it in the place of the whole and of then disputing the rest, which is no less true, in favour of this one portion. In just this way a number of schools of opinion have already split off from the psycho-analytic movement, some of which recognize the egoistic instincts while disavowing the sexual ones, and others attribute importance to the influence of the real tasks of life while overlooking the individual's past1—and others besides. Now here we have a similar occasion for pointing a contrast and starting a controversy. Are neuroses exogenous or endogenous illnesses? Are they the inevitable result of a particular constitution or the product of certain detrimental (traumatic) experiences in life? More particularly, are they brought about by fixation of the libido (and the other features of the sexual constitution) or by the pressure of frustration? This dilemma seems to me no more sensible on the whole than another that I might put to you: does a baby come about through being begotten by its father or conceived by its mother? Both determinants are equally indispensable, as you will justly reply. In the matter of the causation of the neuroses the relation, if not precisely the same, is very similar. As regards their causation, instances of neurotic illness fall into a series within which the two factors—sexual constitution and experience, or, if you prefer it, fixation of the libido and frustration—are represented in such a manner that if there is more of the one there is less of the other. At one end of the series are the extreme cases of which you could say with conviction: these people, in consequence of the singular development of their libido, would have fallen ill in any case, whatever they had experienced and however carefully their lives had been sheltered. At the other end there are the cases, as to which, on the contrary, you would have had to judge that they would certainly have escaped falling ill if their lives had not brought them into this or that situation. In the cases lying within the series a greater or lesser amount of predisposition in the sexual constitution is combined with a lesser or greater amount of detrimental experience in their lives. Their sexual constitution would not have led them into a neurosis if they had not had these experiences, and these experiences would not have had a traumatic effect on them if their libido had been otherwise disposed. In this series I can perhaps allow a certain preponderance in significance to the predisposing factors; but even that admission depends on how far you choose to extend the frontiers of neurotic illness.

I propose, Gentlemen, that we should name a series of this kind a ‘complemental series’, and I forewarn you that we shall have occasion to construct others of the same kind. (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, lecture XXII p.346-7).