Tag: Psychoanalysis

What is Abreaction?

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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.

What is Narcissistic Neurosis?

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Introduction

Narcissistic neurosis is a term introduced by Sigmund Freud to distinguish the class of neuroses characterised by their lack of object relations and their fixation upon the early stage of libidinal narcissism.

The term is less current in contemporary psychoanalysis, but still a focus for analytic controversy.

Freud considered such neurosis as impervious to psychoanalytic treatment, as opposed to the transference neurosis where an emotional connection to the analyst was by contrast possible.

Freud’s Changing Ideas

Freud originally applied the term “narcissistic neurosis” to a range of disorders, including perversion, depression, and psychosis. In the 1920s, however, he came to single out “illnesses which are based on a conflict between the ego and the super-ego… we would set aside the name of ‘narcissistic psycho-neuroses’ for disorders of that kind” – melancholia being the outstanding example.

About the same time, in the wake of the work of Karl Abraham, he began to modify to a degree his view on the inaccessibility of narcissistic neurosis to analytic treatment. However his late lectures from the thirties confirmed his opinion of the unsuitability of narcissistic and psychotic conditions for treatment “to a greater or less extent”; as did his posthumous ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’.

Later Developments

From the twenties onwards, Freud’s views of the inaccessibility of the narcissistic neuroses to analytic influence had been challenged, first by Melanie Klein, and then by object relations theorists more broadly.

While classical analysts like Robert Waelder would maintain Freud’s delimiting standpoint into the sixties, eventually even within ego psychology challenges to the ‘off-limits’ view of what were increasingly seen as borderline disorders emerged.

Relational psychoanalysis, like Heinz Kohut, would also take a more positive approach to narcissistic neurosis, emphasising the need for a partial or initial participation in the narcissistic illusions.

In retrospect, Freud’s caution may be seen as a result of his unwillingness to work with the negative transference, unlike the post-Kleinians.

What is Transference Neurosis?

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Introduction

Transference neurosis is a term that Sigmund Freud introduced in 1914 to describe a new form of the analysand’s infantile neurosis that develops during the psychoanalytic process.

Based on Dora’s case history, Freud suggested that during therapy the creation of new symptoms stops, but new versions of the patient’s fantasies and impulses are generated. He called these newer versions “transferences” and characterised them as the substitution of the analyst for a person from the patient’s past. According to Freud’s description: “a whole series of psychological experiences are revived not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the analyst at the present moment”. When transference neurosis develops, the relationship with the therapist becomes the most important one for the patient, who directs strong infantile feelings and conflicts towards the therapist, e.g. the patient may react as if the analyst is his/her father.

Refer to Narcissistic Neurosis and Negative Transference.

Basic Characteristics

Transference neurosis can be distinguished from other kinds of transference because:

  1. It is very vivid and it rekindles the infantile neurosis.
  2. It is generated by the feelings of frustration that the analysand inevitably experiences during sessions, since the analyst does not fulfil the analysand’s longings.
  3. In transference neurosis the symptoms are not stable, but they are transformed.
  4. Regression and repetition play a key role in the creation of transference neurosis.
  5. Transference neurosis reveals the particular meanings that the analysand has given to current infantile relationships and events, which generate internal conflicts between wishes and particular defences formed to strive against them. These meanings are united and create several transference patterns.

Resolution

Once transference neurosis has developed, it leads to a form of resistance, called “transference resistance”. At this point, the analysis of the transference becomes difficult since new obstacles arise in therapy, e.g. the analysand may insist on fulfilling the infantile wishes that emerged in transference, or may refuse to acknowledge that the current experience is, in fact, a reproduction of a past experience. However, the successful resolution of transference neurosis through interpretation will lead to the lifting of repression and will enable the Ego to solve the infantile conflicts in new ways. Furthermore, it will allow the analysand to recognize that the current relationship with the analyst is based on repetition of childhood experiences, leading to the detachment of the patient from the analyst.

The replacement of the infantile neurosis by transference neurosis and its resolution through interpretation remains the main focus of the classical psychoanalytic therapy. In other types of therapy, either the transference neurosis does not develop at all, or it does not play a central role in the therapy process. Although it is more likely for transference neurosis to develop in psychoanalysis, where the sessions are more frequent, it may also appear during psychotherapy.

On This Day … 05 February

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People (Deaths)

  • 1937 – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russian-German psychoanalyst and author (b. 1861).

Lou Andreas-Salome

Lou Andreas-Salomé (born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé, Russian: Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 to 05 February 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-travelled author, narrator, and essayist from a Russian-German family.

Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

What is Transference?

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Introduction

Transference (German: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the feelings a person had about their parents, as one example, are unconsciously redirected or transferred to the present situation.

It usually concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. At times, this transference can be considered inappropriate. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment.

Occurrence

It is common for people to transfer feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational entanglements). Another example of transference would be a person mistrusting somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance, or being overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.

In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.

Only in a personally or socially harmful context can transference be described as a pathological issue. A modern, social-cognitive perspective on transference explains how it can occur in everyday life. When people meet a new person who reminds them of someone else, they unconsciously infer that the new person has traits similar to the person previously known. This perspective has generated a wealth of research that illuminated how people tend to repeat relationship patterns from the past in the present.

High-profile serial killers often transfer unresolved rage toward previous love or hate-objects onto “surrogates”, or individuals resembling or otherwise calling to mind the original object of that hate. It is believed in the instance of Ted Bundy, he repeatedly killed brunette women who reminded him of a previous girlfriend with whom he had become infatuated, but who had ended the relationship, leaving Bundy rejected and pathologically rageful (Bundy, however, denied this as a motivating factor in his crimes). This notwithstanding, Bundy’s behaviour could be considered pathological insofar as he may have had narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder. If so, normal transference mechanisms cannot be held causative of his homicidal behaviour.

Sigmund Freud held that transference plays a large role in male homosexuality. In The Ego and the Id, he claimed that eroticism between males can be an outcome of a “[psychically] non-economic” hostility, which is unconsciously subverted into love and sexual attraction.

Transference and Counter-Transference during Psychotherapy

In a therapy context, transference refers to redirection of a patient’s feelings for a significant person to the therapist. Transference is often manifested as an erotic attraction towards a therapist, but can be seen in many other forms such as rage, hatred, mistrust, parentification, extreme dependence, or even placing the therapist in a god-like or guru status. When Freud initially encountered transference in his therapy with patients, he thought he was encountering patient resistance, as he recognised the phenomenon when a patient refused to participate in a session of free association. But what he learned was that the analysis of the transference was actually the work that needed to be done: “the transference, which, whether affectionate or hostile, seemed in every case to constitute the greatest threat to the treatment, becomes its best tool”. The focus in psychodynamic psychotherapy is, in large part, the therapist and patient recognising the transference relationship and exploring the relationship’s meaning. Since the transference between patient and therapist happens on an unconscious level, psychodynamic therapists who are largely concerned with a patient’s unconscious material use the transference to reveal unresolved conflicts patients have with childhood figures.

Countertransference is defined as redirection of a therapist’s feelings toward a patient, or more generally, as a therapist’s emotional entanglement with a patient. A therapist’s attunement to their own countertransference is nearly as critical as understanding the transference. Not only does this help therapists regulate their emotions in the therapeutic relationship, but it also gives therapists valuable insight into what patients are attempting to elicit in them. For example, a therapist who is sexually attracted to a patient must understand the countertransference aspect (if any) of the attraction, and look at how the patient might be eliciting this attraction. Once any countertransference aspect has been identified, the therapist can ask the patient what his or her feelings are toward the therapist, and can explore how those feelings relate to unconscious motivations, desires, or fears.

Another contrasting perspective on transference and countertransference is offered in classical Adlerian psychotherapy. Rather than using the patient’s transference strategically in therapy, the positive or negative transference is diplomatically pointed out and explained as an obstacle to cooperation and improvement. For the therapist, any signs of countertransference would suggest that his or her own personal training analysis needs to be continued to overcome these tendencies. Andrea Celenza noted in 2010 that “the use of the analyst’s countertransference remains a point of controversy”.

On This Day … 17 January

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People (Births)

  • 1881 – Harry Price, English psychologist and author (d. 1948).
  • 1887 – Ola Raknes, Norwegian psychoanalyst and philologist (d. 1975).
  • 1945 – Anne Cutler, Australian psychologist and academic.

Harry Price

Harry Price (17 January 1881 to 29 March 1948) was a British psychic researcher and author, who gained public prominence for his investigations into psychical phenomena and his exposing fraudulent spiritualist mediums.

He is best known for his well-publicised investigation of the purportedly haunted Borley Rectory in Essex, England.

Ola Raknes

Ola Raknes (17 January 1887 to 28 January 1975) was a Norwegian psychologist, philologist and non-fiction writer.

Born in Bergen, Norway, he was internationally known as a psychoanalyst in the Reichian tradition. He has been described as someone who spent his entire life working with the conveying of ideas through many languages and between different epistemological systems of reference, science and religion (Dannevig, 1975). For large portions of his life he was actively contributing to the public discourse in Norway. He has also been credited for his contributions to strengthening and enriching the Nynorsk language and its use in the public sphere.

Raknes was known as a thorough philologist and a controversial therapist. Internationally he was known as one of Wilhelm Reich’s closest students and defenders.

Anne Cutler

(Elizabeth) Anne Cutler (born 1945 in Melbourne) FRS, FBA, FASSA is a Research Professor at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University and Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.

After studying languages and psychology in Melbourne, Berlin and Bonn, Anne Cutler embraced psycholinguistics when it emerged as an independent field, going on to complete her PhD in the discipline at the University of Texas at Austin.

What is Identification (Psychology)?

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Introduction

Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other provides.

It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified. The roots of the concept can be found in Freud‘s writings. The three most prominent concepts of identification as described by Freud are:

  • Primary identification;
  • Narcissistic (secondary) identification; and
  • Partial (secondary) identification.

While “in the psychoanalytic literature there is agreement that the core meaning of identification is simple – to be like or to become like another”, it has also been adjudged ‘”the most perplexing clinical/theoretical area” in psychoanalysis’.

Freud

Freud first raised the matter of identification (German: Identifizierung) in 1897, in connection with the illness or death of one’s parents, and the response “to punish oneself in a hysterical fashion…with the same states [of illness] that they have had. The identification which occurs here is, as we can see, nothing other than a mode of thinking”. The question was taken up again psychoanalytically “in Ferenczi’s article, ‘Introjection and Transference’, dating from 1909”, but it was in the decade between “On Narcissism” (1914) and “The Ego and the Id” (1923) that Freud made his most detailed and intensive study of the concept.

Freud distinguished three main kinds of identification. “First, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie…and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality which is shared with some other person”.

Primary Identification

Primary identification is the original and primitive form of emotional attachment to something or someone prior to any relations with other persons or objects: “an individual’s first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory…with the parents”. This means that when a baby is born he is not capable of making a distinction between himself and important others. The baby has an emotional attachment with his parents and experiences his parents as a part of himself. “The breast is part of me, I am the breast”.

During this process of identification children adopt unconsciously the characteristics of their parents and begin to associate themselves with and copy the behaviour of their parents. Freud remarked that identification should be distinguished from imitation, which is a voluntary and conscious act. Because of this process of emotional attachment a child will develop a super ego that has similarities to the moral values and guidelines by which the parents live their lives. By this process children become a great deal like their parents and this facilitates learning to live in the world and culture to which they are born.

“By and large, psychoanalysts grant the importance and centrality of primary identification, even though…the concept varies ‘according to each author and his ideas, its meaning in consequence being far from precise’ (Etchegoyen 1985)”.

Narcissistic (Secondary) Identification

Narcissistic identification is the form of identification following abandonment or loss of an object. This experience of loss starts at a very young age. An example: wearing the clothes or jewellery of a deceased loved one. In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud, having “shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice”, argued that the experience of loss sets in motion a regressive process that “served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object”. In “The Ego and the Id”, he went on to maintain that “this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character'”.

Lacan, in his theory of the Imaginary, would develop the latter point into his view of “the ego is constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications” – part of his opposition to any concept of an “autonomous” and conflict-free ego.

Partial (Secondary) Identification

Partial identification is based on the perception of a special quality of another person. This quality or ideal is often represented in a “leader figure” who is identified with. For example: the young boy identifies with the strong muscles of an older neighbour boy. Next to identification with the leader, people identify with others because they feel they have something in common. For example: a group of people who like the same music. This mechanism plays an important role in the formation of groups. It contributes to the development of character and the ego is formed by identification with a group (group norms). Partial identification promotes the social life of persons who will be able to identify with one another through this common bond to one another, instead of considering someone as a rival.

Partial Identification and Empathy

Freud went on to indicate the way “a path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life”. Otto Fenichel would go on to emphasize how “trial identifications for the purposes of empathy play a basic part in normal object relationships. They can be studied especially in analyzing the psychoanalyst’s ways of working”. Object relations theory would subsequently highlight the use of “trial identification with the patient in the session” as part of the growing technique of analysing from the countertransference.

Anna Freud and Identification with the Aggressor

In her classic book The Ego and the Mechanism of Defence, Anna Freud introduced “two original defence mechanisms…both of which have become classics of ego psychology“, the one being altruistic surrender, the other identification with the aggressor. Anna Freud pointed out that identification with parental values was a normal part of the development of the superego; but that “if the child introjects both rebuke and punishment and then regularly projects this same punishment on another, ‘then he is arrested at an intermediate stage in the development of the superego'”.

The concept was also taken up in object relations theory, which particularly explored “how a patient sometimes places the analyst in the role of victim whilst the patient acts out an identification with the aggressor” in the analytic situation.

With the Analyst

Mainstream analytic thought broadly agrees that interpretation took effect “by utilizing positive transference and transitory identifications with the analyst”. More controversial, however, was the concept of “the terminal identification” at the close of analysis, where “that with which the patient identifies is their strong ego…[or] identification with the analyst’s superego”.

Lacan took strong exception to “any analysis that one teaches as having to be terminated by identification with the analyst…There is a beyond to this identification…this crossing of the plane of identification”. Most Lacanians have subsequently echoed his distrust of “the view of psychoanalysis that relies on identification with the analyst as a central curative factor”. How far the same criticism applies, however, to those who see as a positive therapeutic result “the development of a self-analytic attitude…[built on] identification with and internalization of the analyst’s analytic attitude” is not perhaps quite clear.

Marion Milner has argued that “terminal identification” can be most acute in those analysands who go on to become therapists themselves: “by the mere fact of becoming analysts we have succeeded in bypassing an experience which our patients have to go through. We have chosen to identify with our analyst’s profession and to act out that identification”.

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Thinking

Much has been written on identification since Freud. Identification has been seen both as a normal developmental mechanism and as a mechanism of defence. Many types of identification have been described by other psychoanalysts, including counter-identification (Fliess, 1953), pseudoidentification (Eidelberg, 1938), concordant and complementary identifications (Racker, 1957), and adhesive identification (Bick, 1968): “the work of Bick and others on adhesive identification, exploring the concept of the ‘psychic skin'”.

On This Day … 25 December

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People (Births)

  • 1875 – Francis Aveling, Canadian psychologist and priest (d. 1941).

People (Deaths)

  • 1925 – Karl Abraham, German psychoanalyst and author (b. 1877).

Francis Aveling

Francis Arthur Powell Aveling MC ComC (25 December 1875 to 06 March 1941) was a Canadian psychologist and Catholic priest. He married Ethel Dancy of Steyning, Sussex in 1925.

Life

Francis Aveling was born at St. Catharines, Ontario 25 December 1875. He went to Bishop Ridley College in Ontario and McGill University before studying at Keble College at the University of Oxford, England. Aveling was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Luke Rivington in 1896 and entered the Pontificio Collegio Canadese in Rome. There he earned his doctor of divinity degree. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1899, and served as a curate in Tottenham, before becoming first rector of Westminster Cathedral Choir School. He was also a chaplain at the Cathedral, and to St. Wilfrid’s Convent, Chelsea.

In 1910, Aveling obtained a doctor of philosophy degree at the age of 35 from the University of Louvain (his advisor was Albert Michotte), and in 1912 he was recipient of a doctor of science degree from the University of London, and received the Carpenter Medal following his work On the Consciousness of the Universal and the Individual: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of the Thought Process. Subsequently, Aveling received his doctor of letters degree from the University of London.

Career

Aveling taught at University College, London from 1912 as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor), under the leadership of Charles Spearman, until the First World War. During that war he served in France as a chaplain in the British Army, after which he returned to the University of London. In 1922, he transferred to King’s College, London where he was promoted to reader (associate professor), and later to professor of psychology. He was an extern examiner in philosophy at the National University of Ireland; and a lecturer in pedagogical methods for the London County Council.

Aveling authored several books. He was the doctoral advisor of Raymond Cattell From 1926 until 1929, Aveling was also a president of the British Psychological Society. Aveling was a member of the Council of the International Congresses, of the Aristotelian Society, of the council and advisory board of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, of the council of the British Institute of Philosophical Studies and of the Child Guidance Council.

He was a contributor to the Dublin Review, The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Catholic World, The nineteenth Century, The Journal of Psychology, and the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

Karl Abraham

Karl Abraham (03 May 1877 to 25 December 1925) was an influential German psychoanalyst, and a collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who called him his ‘best pupil’.

Abraham was born in Bremen, Germany. His parents were Nathan Abraham, a Jewish religion teacher (1842-1915), and his wife (and cousin) Ida (1847-1929). His studies in medicine enabled him to take a position at the Burghölzli Swiss Mental Hospital, where Eugen Bleuler practiced. The setting of this hospital initially introduced him to the psychoanalysis of Carl Gustav Jung.

In 1907, he had his first contact with Sigmund Freud, with whom he developed a lifetime relationship. Returning to Germany, he founded the Berliner Society of Psychoanalysis in 1910. He was the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1914 to 1918 and again in 1925.

Karl Abraham collaborated with Freud on the understanding of manic-depressive illness, leading to Freud’s paper on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in 1917. He was the analyst of Melanie Klein during the years 1924-1925, and of a number of other British psychoanalysts, including Edward Glover and Alix Strachey. He was a mentor for an influential group of German analysts, including Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, and Franz Alexander.

Karl Abraham studied the role of infant sexuality in character development and mental illness and, like Freud, suggested that if psychosexual development is fixated at some point, mental disorders will likely emerge. He described the personality traits and psychopathology that result from the oral and anal stages of development (1921).

Abraham observed his only daughter, Hilda, reporting on her reaction to enemas and infantile masturbation by her brother. He asked that secrets be shared with him but he was careful to respect her privacy and some reports were not published until after Hilda’s death. Hilda was later to become a psychoanalyst.

In the oral stage of development, the first relationships children have with objects (caretakers) determine their subsequent relationship to reality. Oral satisfaction can result in self-assurance and optimism, whereas oral fixation can lead to pessimism and depression. Moreover, a person with an oral fixation will present a disinclination to take care of him/herself and will require others to look after him/her. This may be expressed through extreme passivity (corresponding to the oral benign suckling substage) or through a highly active oral-sadistic behaviour (corresponding to the later sadistic biting substage).

In the anal stage, when the training in cleanliness starts too early, conflicts may result between a conscious attitude of obedience and an unconscious desire for resistance. This can lead to traits such as frugality, orderliness and obstinacy, as well as to obsessional neurosis as a result of anal fixation (Abraham, 1921). In addition, Abraham based his understanding of manic-depressive illness on the study of the painter Segantini: an actual event of loss is not itself sufficient to bring the psychological disturbance involved in melancholic depression. This disturbance is linked with disappointing incidents of early childhood; in the case of men always with the mother (Abraham, 1911). This concept of the prooedipal “bad” mother was a new development in contrast to Freud’s oedipal mother and paved the way for the theories of Melanie Klein (May-Tolzmann, 1997).

Another important contribution is his work “A short study of the Development of the Libido”, where he elaborated on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and demonstrated the vicissitudes of normal and pathological object relations and reactions to object loss.

Moreover, Abraham investigated child sexual trauma and, like Freud, proposed that sexual abuse was common among psychotic and neurotic patients. Furthermore, he argued (1907) that dementia praecox is associated with child sexual trauma, based on the relationship between hysteria and child sexual trauma demonstrated by Freud.

Abraham (1920) also showed interest in cultural issues. He analysed various myths suggesting their relation to dreams (1909) and wrote an interpretation of the spiritual activities of the Egyptian monotheistic Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1912).

Abraham died prematurely on 25 December 1925, from complications of a lung infection and may have suffered from lung cancer.

What is True Self and False Self?

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Introduction

True self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and false self (also known as fake self, idealised self, superficial self and pseudo self) are psychological concepts, originally introduced into psychoanalysis in 1960 by Donald Winnicott.

Winnicott used true self to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self. The false self, by contrast, Winnicott saw as a defensive façade, which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, behind a mere appearance of being real.

The concepts are often used in connection with narcissism.

Characteristics

Winnicott saw the true self as rooted from early infancy in the experience of being alive, including blood pumping and lungs breathing – what Winnicott called simply being. Out of this, the baby creates the experience of a sense of reality, a sense that life is worth living. The baby’s spontaneous, nonverbal gestures derive from that instinctual sense, and if responded to by the parents, become the basis for the continuing development of the true self.

However, when what Winnicott was careful to describe as good enough parenting – i.e., not necessarily perfect – was not in place, the infant’s spontaneity was in danger of being encroached on by the need for compliance with the parents’ wishes/expectations. The result for Winnicott could be the creation of what he called the false self, where “Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being”. The danger he saw was that “through this false self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real”, while, in fact, merely concealing a barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming façade.

The danger was particularly acute where the baby had to provide attunement for the mother/parents, rather than vice versa, building up a sort of dissociated recognition of the object on an impersonal, not personal and spontaneous basis. But while such a pathological false self stifled the spontaneous gestures of the true self in favour of a lifeless imitation, Winnicott nevertheless considered it of vital importance in preventing something worse: the annihilating experience of the exploitation of the hidden true self itself.

Precursors

There was much in psychoanalytic theory on which Winnicott could draw for his concept of the false self. Helene Deutsch had described the “as if” personalities, with their pseudo relationships substituting for real ones. Winnicott’s analyst, Joan Riviere, had explored the concept of the narcissist’s masquerade – superficial assent concealing a subtle hidden struggle for control. Freud’s own late theory of the ego as the product of identifications came close to viewing it only as a false self; while Winnicott’s true/false distinction has also been compared to Michael Balint’s “basic fault” and to Ronald Fairbairn’s notion of the “compromised ego”.

Erich Fromm, in his book The Fear of Freedom distinguished between original self and pseudo self – the inauthenticality of the latter being a way to escape the loneliness of freedom; while much earlier the existentialist like Kierkegaard had claimed that “to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair” – the despair of choosing “to be another than himself”.

Karen Horney, in her 1950 book, Neurosis and Human Growth, based her idea of “true self” and “false self” through the view of self-improvement, interpreting it as real self and ideal self, with the real self being what one currently is and the ideal self being what one could become.

Later Developments

The second half of the twentieth century has seen Winnicott’s ideas extended and applied in a variety of contexts, both in psychoanalysis and beyond.

Kohut

Heinz Kohut extended Winnicott’s work in his investigation of narcissism, seeing narcissists as evolving a defensive armour around their damaged inner selves. He considered it less pathological to identify with the damaged remnants of the self, than to achieve coherence through identification with an external personality at the cost of one’s own autonomous creativity.

Lowen

Alexander Lowen identified narcissists as having a true and a false, or superficial, self. The false self rests on the surface, as the self presented to the world. It stands in contrast to the true self, which resides behind the façade or image. This true self is the feeling self, but for the narcissist the feeling self must be hidden and denied. Since the superficial self represents submission and conformity, the inner or true self is rebellious and angry. This underlying rebellion and anger can never be fully suppressed since it is an expression of the life force in that person. But because of the denial, it cannot be expressed directly. Instead it shows up in the narcissist’s acting out. And it can become a perverse force.

Masterson

James F. Masterson argued that all the personality disorders crucially involve the conflict between a person’s two selves: the false self, which the very young child constructs to please the mother, and the true self. The psychotherapy of personality disorders is an attempt to put people back in touch with their real selves.

Symington

Neville Symington developed Winnicott’s contrast between true and false self to cover the sources of personal action, contrasting an autonomous and a discordant source of action – the latter drawn from the internalisation of external influences and pressures. Thus for example parental dreams of self-glorification by way of their child’s achievements can be internalised as an alien discordant source of action. Symington stressed however the intentional element in the individual’s abandoning the autonomous self in favour of a false self or narcissistic mask – something he considered Winnicott to have overlooked.

Vaknin

As part of what has been described as a personal mission to raise the profile of the condition, psychology professor (and self-confessed narcissist) Sam Vaknin has highlighted the role of the false self in narcissism. The false self replaces the narcissist’s true self and is intended to shield him from hurt and narcissistic injury by self-imputing omnipotence. The narcissist pretends that his false self is real and demands that others affirm this confabulation, meanwhile keeping his real imperfect true self under wraps.

For Vaknin, the false self is by far more important to the narcissist than his dilapidated, dysfunctional true self; and he does not subscribe to the view that the true self can be resuscitated through therapy.

Miller

Alice Miller cautiously warns that a child/patient may not have any formed true self, waiting behind the false self façade; and that as a result freeing the true self is not as simple as the Winnicottian image of the butterfly emerging from its cocoon. If a true self can be developed, however, she considered that the empty grandiosity of the false self could give way to a new sense of autonomous vitality.

Orbach (False Bodies)

Susie Orbach saw the false self as an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects – of the full potential of the self – producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself. Orbach went on to extend Winnicott’s account of how environmental failure can lead to an inner splitting of mind and body, so as to cover the idea of the false body – falsified sense of one’s own body. Orbach saw the female false body in particular as built upon identifications with others, at the cost of an inner sense of authenticity and reliability. Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of therapy could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings in the patient.

Jungian Persona

Jungians have explored the overlap between Carl Jung’s concept of the persona and Winnicott’s false self; but, while noting similarities, consider that only the most rigidly defensive persona approximates to the pathological status of the false self.

Stern’s Tripartite Self

Daniel Stern considered Winnicott’s sense of “going on being” as constitutive of the core, pre-verbal self. He also explored how language could be used to reinforce a false sense of self, leaving the true self linguistically opaque and disavowed. He ended, however, by proposing a three-fold division of social, private, and of disavowed self.

Criticisms

Neville Symington criticised Winnicott for failing to integrate his false self insight with the theory of ego and id. Similarly, continental analysts like Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have made use of true/false self as a clinical distinction, while having reservations about its theoretical status.

The philosopher Michel Foucault took issue more broadly with the concept of a true self on the anti-essentialist grounds that the self was a construct – something one had to evolve through a process of subjectification, an aesthetics of self-formation, not something simply waiting to be uncovered: “we have to create ourselves as a work of art”.

Literary Examples

  • Wuthering Heights has been interpreted in terms of the true self’s struggle to break through the conventional overlay.
  • In the novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the heroine saw her outward personality as a mere ghost of a Semblance, behind which her true self hid ever more completely.
  • Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been interpreted in terms of the conflict of the true and false selves.

What is Scopophilia?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia (Ancient Greek: σκοπέω skopeō, “look to”, “to examine” + φῐλῐ́ᾱ philíā, “the tendency towards”) is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person.

In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia describes the sexual pleasure that a person derives from looking at prurient objects of eroticism, such as pornography, the nude body, and fetishes, as a substitute for actual participation in a sexual relationship.

Refer to Scopophobia.

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud used the term scopophilia to describe, analyse, and explain the concept of Schaulust, the pleasure in looking, a curiosity which he considered a partial-instinct innate to the childhood process of forming a personality; and that such a pleasure-instinct might be sublimated, either into Aesthetics, looking at objets d’art or sublimated into an obsessional neurosis “a burning and tormenting curiosity to see the female body”, which afflicted the Rat Man patient of the psychoanalyst Freud. From that initial interpretation of Schaulust arose the psycho-medical belief that the inhibition of the scopic drive might lead to actual, physical illness, such as physiologic disturbances of vision and eyesight. In contrast to Freud’s interpretation of the scopic drive, other psychoanalytic theories proposed that the practices of scopophilia might lead to madness – either insanity or a mental disorder – which is the scopophilic person’s retreat from the concrete world of reality into an abstract world of fantasy.

The theoretic bases of scopophilia were developed by the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel, in special reference to the process and stages of psychological identification. That in developing a personal identity, “a child, who is looking for libidinous purposes … wants to look at an object in order [for it] to ‘feel along with him’.” That the impersonal interaction of scopophilia (between the looker and the looked-at) sometimes replaced personal interactions in the psychological life of a person who is socially anxious, and seeks to avoid feelings of guilt.

Lacan’s conceptual development of the gaze linked the pleasure of scopophilia to the person’s apprehension of the Other (person) who is not the Self; that is: “The gaze is this object lost, and suddenly re-found, in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the Other.” The practice of scopophilia is how a person’s desire is captured by the imaginary representation of the Other. Theories alternative to Lacan’s interpretations of scopophilia and the gaze proposed that a child’s discovery of genital difference, and the accompanying anxiety about not knowing the difference of the Other sex, is the experience that subsequently impels the child’s scopic drive to fulfil the desire to look and to look at.

Literary Examples

  • The Satyricon (The Book of Satyr-like Adventures, AD 1st c.), by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, presents the scopophilic description of a priestess of Priapus as the woman who was “the first to put an inquisitive eye to a crack she had naughtily opened, and spy on their play with prurient eagerness.”
  • Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing (2003), by Ian McCormick, shows that transgressive sexuality is composed of the inter-relationships between the public and the private spheres and between the open and the secret aspects of a person’s life.
    • The example is Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), in which the protagonist Fanny Hill gives her scoptophilic observations of two sodomites, which include descriptions of the furnishings and the décor of the room in which they are copulating: ” .. . at length I observed a paper patch of the same colour as the wainscot, which I took to conceal some flaw; but then it was so high that I was obliged to stand upon a chair to reach it, which I did, as soft as possible, and, with a point of a bodkin, soon pierced it, and opened myself espial room sufficient. And now, applying my eye close, I commanded the room perfectly, and could see my two young sparks romping and pulling one another about, entirely, to my imagination, in frolic and innocent play.”

Race

Critical race theorists, such as bell hooks, in “Eating Each Other” (2006),[15] Shannon Winnubst in “Is the Mirror Racist?: Interrogating the Space of Whiteness” (2006), and David Marriott in “Bordering On: The Black Penis” (1996), present and describe scopophilia and the scopic drive as the psychological and social mechanisms that realise the practices of Other-ing a person to exclude them from society. (c.f. scopophobia) That the social practice of scopophilia is meant to definitively fix the appearance and the identity of the Other (person) who is not the Self, by way of the gaze that objectifies and dehumanises a person as “not I” and thus “not one of us.” In that philosophic vein, the practices of cultural scopophilia restrict the number and type of visible representations of “outsiders” people in a society.

Cinema

In Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the protagonist Norman Bates is a voyeur whose motel rooms feature peepholes. In the course of the story, the motel manager Norman spies upon the anti-heroine as she undresses in her ostensibly private room. In Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell, Scopophilia is mentioned as a psychological affliction of the protagonist, Mark Lewis. As narrative cinema, Peeping Tom is a deliberate exercise in voyeurism for the protagonist and for the spectator, which demonstrates how readily the protagonist and the spectator are mentally willing and morally capable of watching atrocities (torture, mutilation, death) that should not be gazed upon as narrative movies. The mentally ill protagonist acted as he acted consequent to severe mental mistreatment in boyhood, by his film-maker father; the paternal abuse mentally malformed Mark into a reclusive, introverted man comfortable with torturing and killing people.

In the 1970s, parting from Lacan’s propositions, psychoanalysts of the cinema used the term scopophilia to identify and to describe the aesthetic and emotional pleasures (often pathological), and other unconscious mental processes that occur in the minds spectators gazing at a film. Yet voyeurism and the male gaze are psychological practices basic to the spectators’ emotional experience of viewing mainstream, commercial cinema; notably, the male gaze is fully presented, described, and explained, and contrasted with the female gaze, in the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), by Laura Mulvey. Subsequent scholars have challenged Mulvey’s influential reading of scopophilia as a “gross reduction of the erotic and the aesthetic to the politics of representation.”