Tag: Edward Bibring

Who was Edward Bibring?

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Introduction

Edward Bibring (1894–1959) was an Austrian American psychoanalyst. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Czernowitz until the First World War.

After his military service he went to study medicine at the University of Vienna, and later was accepted for training by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, in which he became an associate member from 1925, and then a full member in 1927. He was closely associated with Sigmund Freud. He was an co-editor of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse for a brief period. In 1921 he married his fellow analyst Grete L. Bibring, and in 1941 the pair emigrated to the US.

Writings

His publishing’s focused on scientific contributions to the theory of psychoanalytic therapy, the study of depression, and the history of psychoanalysis.

Bibring’s early writings included studies of the instincts, and of the repetition compulsion. He also wrote a pair of articles on paranoia in schizophrenia, including a case study of a woman who believed herself to be persecuted by someone called “Behind”, a figure onto whom she had projected aspects of her own rear.

Ernest Jones reported with approval Bibring’s measured disagreement with Freud’s concept of the death drive:

“Instincts of life and death are not psychologically perceptible as such; they are biological instincts whose existence is required by hypothesis alone…[&] ought only to be adduced in a theoretical context and not in discussion of a clinical or empirical nature”.

While struggling with writer’s block in the States, Bibring did publish a 1954 article on the role of abreaction in what he called “emotional reliving” – a theme later developed by Vamik Volkan in his re-grief therapy.

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What is Abreaction?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Abreaction (German: Abreagieren) is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses – a type of catharsis.

Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

Psychoanalytic Origins

The concept of abreaction may have actually been initially formulated by Freud’s mentor, Josef Breuer; but it was in their joint work of 1895, Studies on Hysteria, that it was first made public to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma can be discharged by talking about it. The release of strangulated affect by bringing a particular moment or problem into conscious focus, and thereby abreacting the stifled emotion attached to it, formed the cornerstone of Freud’s early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms. For instance, they believed that pent-up emotions associated with trauma can be discharged by talking about it. Freud and Breur, however, did not treat the spontaneous emotional reliving of traumatic event as curative. They instead described abreaction as the full emotional and motoric response to a traumatic event necessary in adequately relieving a person of being repetitively and unpredictably assailed by the trauma’s original and unmitigated emotional intensity. Although the element of surprise is not compatible with Freud’s approach to therapy, other theorists consider that, in abreaction, it is an important part of analytic technique.

Early in his career, psychoanalyst Carl Jung expressed interest in abreaction, or what he referred to as trauma theory, but later decided it had limitations in treatment of neurosis. Jung said:

Though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all.

Later Developments

Mainstream psychoanalysis tended over time (with Freud) to downplay the role of abreaction, in favour of the working through of the emotions revealed through such acting-out of the past. However, Otto Rank explored abreaction of birth trauma as a central part of his revision of Freudian theory; while Edward Bibring revived the notion of abreaction as emotional reliving, a theme subsequently taken up by Vamik Volkan in his re-grief therapy.

Abreaction Therapies

In Scientology, Dianetics is a form of abreaction that science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard borrowed from the United States Navy when he spent three months in a San Diego hospital in 1943 with the complaints of an ulcer and malaria. Hubbard later wrote, in his autobiography My Philosophy, that he had observed abreactive therapy in the hospital, though in later life he claimed to have made the discovery on his own after being wounded in battle and given up as untreatable.