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psychogram #27

26/1/2016

 
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An interpretation of Freud

22/1/2016

 
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​Long considered a sexist dinosaur with a cocaine habit and some bizarre ideas—does anyone believe that little boys literally fear castration, want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers?—Sigmund Freud is enjoying something of a renaissance.

As Oliver Burkeman recently outlined, the therapy Freud invented, psychoanalysis, is at last gaining some much-needed empirical support, while at the same time the default treatment on offer in the U.K., quick fix, symptom-focussed cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), is increasingly looking like some sort of snake oil.

CBT appeals to our common sense. But common sense isn't as common as we'd like to believe.

Freud’s revelation was that we are not necessarily always logical, rational beings making optimal choices as we navigate through life’s vagaries, that we are in fact to a large extent strangers to ourselves.

A few years ago, a relative had a terrible holiday in Italy. On returning home, in retaliation, she boycotted her favourite local Italian restaurant and has not been back since. This marvelously illogical yet so very human protest is typical of how inventive and fluid our psychology can be.

Unlike my relative’s very deliberate restaurant boycott, however, Freud argued that much of what we do operates “under the hood,” out of awareness. Our conscious, stated desires can be different from or even completely opposed to our unconscious ones. We might say we want to give up smoking, or find a partner, or start (or finish) a big project, or do something bold and courageous, but somehow we find ways to ensure it doesn’t happen. We make mistakes, and we vow never to be so foolish again, but then we find ourselves doing the exact same thing. Over and over. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Britney Spears called it “
Oops, I did it again.”

According to Freud, our unconscious motivations generally can be traced back to our formative years. We learned how to be in the world as children, and decades later this blueprint remains. Sometimes it’s as if we were insisting on still using a crutch long after our broken leg has healed. The blueprint includes an imperative to repress disturbing ideas, thoughts, emotions, events, memories and conflicts from long ago. But they are not so easily silenced—they retain some kind of energetic charge which can find all manner of expressions, sublimations, projections and other creative outlets.

One of Freud’s patients, five-year-old “Little Hans,” had an intense fear of horses—Freud said they represented his father. “Rat Man” had an obsessive, intrusive fear of torture involving rats and bottoms which Freud linked to early experiences of discipline and sexuality. “Dora” had a suicidal breakdown after being propositioned by a family friend because, claimed Freud, she was repressing a lesbian attraction for the man’s wife. Freud’s most notorious cases are summarized here.

Freud argued that neurotic symptoms, when unmasked, usually make some kind of sense. They have an intent, a meaning; they exist to resolve something or defend us from pain, guilt or shame. Merely removing the symptom without addressing the cause—the CBT approach—might just lead to another symptom.

And anyway, a symptom is not so easily removed. Since it serves a purpose, writes Freud, a patient will “make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.”
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Freud defined his invention of psychoanalysis as “the science of unconscious mental processes.” The power of the unconscious is his greatest legacy.

Darwin told us about ourselves as members of the animal kingdom. Marx told us about ourselves as members of society. Freud told us about ourselves as individuals.
​The battle within
A cornerstone of Freudian psychology is his 1923 structural model of the human psyche. The idea—which wasn't original: Plato proposed the same thing two millennia earlier—is that we have three parts to our interior system of government, which Freud called the id, ego and super-ego. The selfish, erogenous, childlike id seeks gratification. The autocratic finger-wagging super-ego by contrast is a sanctimonious, guilt-inducing presence, forever hectoring you about what you should be doing. Mediating in between is the harried, democratic ego, trying to keep everyone happy. It’s like having Caligula, the Pope and Bill Clinton sitting around the negotiating table. On different days, some voices are louder than others. Freud likened the internal conflict between the three constituents to a legendary 5th century battle between Attila and the Romans and the Visigoths.

The battle is as old as the hills and most people—and families, cultures, countries—generally have a default setting, either on the side of the super-ego, favouring restraint, prudence, safety and being “good,” or on the side of the id, living their lives with more freedom, spontaneity, creativity, passion and throwing caution to the wind. Many clients belong in the former category, paralysed by a brutally harsh inner self-critic. The more you try to please the super-ego by doing the “right” thing, the more demanding and punitive it can become. The super-ego usually has its origin with parents, but also can come from teachers, bosses, governments and religions. Freud writes that it “rages against the ego with merciless violence.” That violence can be the cause of much psychological and somatic distress.

Therapy is about shining a light on these and other haunted caverns of the unconscious, understanding them, accepting them—making the unconscious conscious or, as Freud put it, “where id was, there ego shall be.” To be enlightened is perhaps to have no fears, illusions or deceptions about one’s propensity for darkness.
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Case vignettes*
• After a lifetime of short-term relationships with troubled men, Karen is lonely and desperately wants to settle down. She has a social life, she does various evening classes, she has joined a dating site. “But there are no good men out there,” she complains. Her checklist of criteria that must be fulfilled is so long that she has effectively ensured it will never happen. She is thus spared the pain of rejection. In therapy we learn that Karen’s father left the family when she was 10 and was barely spoken of again.

• Dave lives under a blanket of depression. He collects evidence everywhere for his worthlessness. Every chance remark, askance glance or unsuccessful outcome is added to the rap sheet and presented as evidence that there’s no point. He is thus relieved of having to take responsibility for his life and the possibility of real failure is averted. Dave initially dismisses the fact the he was born into an acrimonious divorce—which he feels was his fault—as irrelevant “ancient history.”

• Jessica is a workaholic with no time for relationships. She has risen to the top of two professions and is considering starting a third. She has a history of unexplained physical complaints and finally sought out therapy when one morning, on her way to work, she inexplicably burst into tears. She came to realize how as a teenager, after her father had died, she had become “the man of the house,” helping her depressed, bereaved mother, looking after her younger siblings, getting a part-time job to make ends meet. She held the family together; now she lives alone.

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*These are fictionalized, representative stories; names and details have been changed

PictureFreud's facial expressions run the gamut from utter foreboding to grim disdain.
Therapy today
Freud’s influence was far-reaching and profound. But he was a flawed character. You get the feeling he started to believe in his own myth. Patients often had to fit into his theories rather than the other way round. Any dissent might be met by indignant harrumphing or an ended friendship. He was capable of exploiting his position as a white male authority figure for personal ends. His work was sometimes more to do with furthering the legend of Sigmund Freud than with healing.

Some of his ideas and speculative musings have great metaphorical and symbolic value, yet he invited ridicule by insisting on speaking in absolutes and the rigid certainties of hard science. He was somewhat obsessional, detached, and ironically perhaps not so much of a people person, once writing, “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience, most of them are trash.” The best they could hope for was “common unhappiness.” In photographs, his facial expressions run the gamut from utter foreboding to grim disdain.

Freud claimed psychoanalysis worked. He would identify unconscious motivations and unhelpful patterns, explain them to the grateful patient and, thus fortified, the patient would make better choices going forward. Except that very often they didn’t.

Today’s therapists who work at any depth will, like Freud, want to uncover your blueprint, your patterns, your unconscious processes. They might explore your childhood, interpret significant memories, analyse your dreams, which for Freud were the “royal road” to the unconscious. But they know that, while self-knowledge is helpful, it only takes a client so far. Lasting change and healing comes from the heart as well as the head, through acceptance, support and love. Research shows it is the therapeutic relationship itself which heals.

Good therapists are not inflated with their own importance, nor blinded by their own certainties. They treat clients ethically, not just because there are codes of ethics to abide by, but because ethical therapy is inherently good therapy. Above all, they are fully engaged with the client, noticing what is happening between them, and always working in partnership with them, in their best interests, rather than lording over them as they lie on the couch, prostrate and exposed (whether as a client or a therapist, I prefer to sit chair to chair and eye to eye). A good therapist cares.

It’s not enough to know and be known. To thrive in this life it helps, too, to love and be loved.

psychogram #26

19/1/2016

 
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psychogram #25

12/1/2016

 
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psychogram #24

5/1/2016

 
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Happy new year?

1/1/2016

 
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“Happy new year!”
Oh yeah? Is that a statement of fact, because a cursory glance at the news headlines, or the struggles in the lives of those nearest and dearest to us, would suggest otherwise.
Or perhaps it’s a command. Happy people are so much easier to deal with. Governments love the idea of happiness, because if they can inveigle the electorate into believing they’re happy—in a “musn’t grumble”/”we’re all in this together” kind of way—people are less likely to notice if they’re victims of a deeply unfair social order (and less likely to vote for the opposition). “Happy” can look a lot like “placid,” “compliant” or “easy to control.” Easier for governments to paste over the distress they cause with smiley-face PR rather than creating the best conditions for happiness such as an egalitarian, truly democratic society with high levels of social capital and low levels of inequality.
What’s that you say? “Happy new year” is neither a fact nor a command, but merely a simple wish—a hope from a friend who cares that tomorrow will be better than yesterday?
Ah OK, I get it now. You want me, you and everyone to be happier in 2016, yes? Who doesn’t want to be happier? And that modest goal is certainly achievable. The happiness industry is there to serve your needs. It will all too happily (!) offer you antidepressants, cognitive behavioural therapy, workshops, lectures, self-help books, positive-thinking homilies, and endless research studies into what makes us happy.

What makes us happy?
• Harvard psychiatrist and Zen priest Robert Waldinger recently revealed the fruits of a 75-year study: It is close relationships—with an emphasis on quality rather than quantity, including a good marriage—that make for a happy life.
• A recent large longitudinal study in Scotland suggests that men who haven’t made progress in their careers by the age of 27 will be less happy than those who have, although rather obviously it’s perhaps less the job that that’s making them happy than the circumstances that helped them to land it: a good childhood, good education, good opportunities, a good environment.
• Being playful, mindful, forgiving and compassionate—and getting the basics right like diet, exercise and sleep—these are all good daily, tried-and-tested practices for happiness, as is cultivating a stance of gratitude.
For “positive psychology” evangelists like dog-torturer turned U.S. Army dark arts coach Martin Seligman, happiness is simply a choice. It is possible willfully to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, to filter out anything unseemly from your senses, to engineer a state of blissful ignorance.

More to life than happiness
But is happiness really what we’re after? However much we might pretend otherwise, human existence is generally more like a Greek tragedy than a Richard Curtis movie, and the sooner we accept that, the better off we'll be.
There is darkness in the world. There is darkness, too, within. 
In the book “Going Sane,” Adam Phillips argues that in striving for what he calls “superficial sanity”—a sanitized kind of happiness based on conformity—we cover up our essential, vital, passionate, creative, true selves and feel dead inside. As Winnicott put it: “We are poor indeed if we are only sane.” The influential British therapist said he started out “sane” but through analysis and self-analysis was able to reclaim some measure of “insanity.”
Sanitized “sanity” requires a severance of the connection with our true self and the things that make us distinct: our philosophy, passion, desires, play, creativity, quirks and eccentricities. Writes Phillips: “Sanity of a kind is recruited, is all too easily recruitable, as part of modern armoury. What is being pursued when sanity is pursued, what is done in the name of sanity, can be a self-blinding.” This kind of sanity diminishes us. Such“sane” shiny happy people can be somewhat comic, ever-compliant and rather boring to be around. In an old cartoon in The New Yorker, one happy couple leans forward at a dinner party and tells the other happy couple: “Did we ever tell you about the time we had an overdue library book?”
 
3 steps for 2016
1. If your rational, sensible self wants to make some new year’s resolutions, let it. But you know it’s going to be a rough ride, right? Your unconscious selves, those mischievous gremlins in the machine that like chocolate and Netflix and loathe exercise and hard work, will sabotage you at every opportunity. Why don’t new year’s resolutions stick? Because on some level, we don’t want them to. So maybe it’s time to call a team meeting of all the disparate players on your struggling football team and make sure all the voices get heard. Ask yourself what you really want. A good integrative/existential therapist can help; start your search here (or contact me).
2. Widen the circle. Abraham Maslow said we’re either stepping forward into growth, or stepping backward into safety. Sometimes we really do need to make ourselves safe, to marshall our defences, to find ways of soothing ourselves, to retreat beneath our own, unique version of some metaphorical comfort blanket. But from this secure base, now and again we need to a few things that to another person might be nothing but to us feel like giant symbolic risks. Try something new, make more social connections, have some new experiences. Put yourself in situations where you feel a little out of your depth, dumb, or afraid.
3. Get in touch with your own madness rather than disowning it. There’s more to life than just pursuing happiness. There's more to you than the highly-edited, socially acceptable version. Listen to your heart's desires, however odd and unfashionable they may seem to others. A worthy goal might be to embrace all aspects of your self, and accept and honour the full range of human experience. To live more authentically, more meaningfully, more fully rather than attempting to adhere to some imagined approved standards of a happy life.
 
Here’s to a mad, sad, bad, glad new year!

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“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

“I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.”
—Carl Rogers
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    John Barton is a counsellor, psychotherapist, blogger and writer with a private practice in Marylebone, Central London. To contact, click here.

DR JOHN BARTON IS A PSYCHOTHERAPIST, BLOGGER AND WRITER WITH A PRIVATE PRACTICE IN MARYLEBONE, CENTRAL LONDON
© 2023 JOHN BARTON