| The Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies |
| Conference 2003 Highlights
Keynote Address |
| Touched by Jung
Keynote Address delivered at the 2nd annual Jungian Society Conference, August 2003, Providence, Rhode Island Howard H. Covitz, PhD, NCPsyA, ABPP • Director, Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies • Department of Mathematics, Temple University, • Private Practice, Melrose Park, PA hhcovitz@aol.com
215.635.5368
Perhaps it is so that caricaturists unfairly went
after Freud and Jung and their students for their foibles or that too much
has been made of the split-up between the 56 year old Senex and the 37
year old Puer. Each man penned a letter to the other dated 3 January 1913
in which the suspension of personal correspondence was recommended. In
the years following the breakup, each wrote of how the other was lacking
in understanding. In August of that year (“General aspects of psychoanalysis”),
Jung was busy showing how much of a dream is foolishly missed if only an
infantile sexual orientation is considered (“I was going up a flight of
stairs with my mother and sister. When we reached the top I was told that
my sister was going to have a baby.”) And in January 1914, Freud was writing
the “History” in which he accused Jung of abandoning the sexual cornerstone
of psychoanalysis and of also bringing a “disagreeable” demeanor to the
1913 Munich Congress. This disdain for disagreeableness didn’t prevent
Freud from beginning the section on the Jung-Adler perfidies by citing
Goethe: Mach es kurz!/Am Jungsten Tag ist’s nur ein Furz.
And so has been the subsequent history of the
psychoanalytic movement ... grown men and women, with their backs and backsides
to each other!
Both men, but especially Jung, advocated that
Psychoanalysis not be reified into a rigid framework for interpretation.
Jung recommended that his students bury him deep and Freud admonished his
followers not to take his Papers on Technique as more than the recommendations
they were ... not to get religious about these guidelines. Truth be told,
this recommendation that (lower-case) analysis not become (upper case)
Analysis may run counter to a certain principle in the development of languages
and systems of thinking ... verbs and common nouns not infrequently transmigrate
over time into Proper Nouns and lose parri passu much of their original
meaning by such processes.
Generation after generation of analysts, in fact,
have arisen to do battle, as if there were a gene for ... spittings and
splittings ... passed on from analyst to analysand ... Orthodox expelling
Heterodox who shortly, thereafter, becomes the New Orthodox. (Consider
Roger Williams) Ernest Jones does report that Lou Andreas-Salome was allowed
to move back and forth between various groups (in her case Freud and Adler’s),
but the rules have generally been (unless you were as good-looking as Lou,
the “golden fairy tale princess” - Jones, 1955): choose your sides! you’re
either with us or agin us!
All this is to say: Thank you for making this
evening possible. I’m honored to have been invited as a Freudian to present
to my brother and sister Jungians a bit of what happens when a member of
the Clan Sigmund begins talking up a storm about certain issues similar
to those that Carl raised in the early years when he advocated relinquishing
the centrality and theoretical hegemony of sexuality in analytic theory
and theories of psychoanalytic praxis. And a Freudian more perfidious than
Jung! Jung, at least, maintained, a conventional view of the incest motif
— it was that he didn’t consider it the only archetype worthy of pursuit.
Me, I’ve perhaps gone further into perfidy.
Enough introduction!
I begin with a claim. While in the Natural Sciences,
it is most often assumed that researches are independent of such loosely
defined constructs as value, meaning and notions of good and evil or right
and wrong, in the Psychological and Social Sciences, such theoretical neatness
is an unacceptable luxury. Psychological theories of development, as well
as the nosologies that arise from them, are inextricably intertwined with
views of the healthy polity, of the well individual and even with ethico-religious
and literary images of the good life. We cannot specify a developmental
growth towards wholeness that is independent of the definitions that boundary
these very notions. And we, therefore, can never reasonably hope to conceptualize
any aspect of human development — conscious or unconscious —without attending
to, or at the very least allowing for, the exigencies of social and political
and religious life. Two thirds of a century ago, in a polemic against religion
and theoretical anarchism, Freud (Introductory Lectures XXXV, S.E. 1933a,
p. 158) rhetorically queried: “Does psychoanalysis lead to a certain Weltanschauung?”
Answering this question in the negative, Freud counterpoised empirical
science against illusion and emotion. I disagree with the implicit view
of Science that precipitates from such thought as Freud’s on this matter.
This evening, I review work on a twenty-plus year
old suggestion for an alternative theory of Œdipal development, work that
ultimately failed to permit a reasoned choice between this novel theoretical
model and the classical one and, if time permits, I’ll share some reactions
that this work has elicited.
Before proceeding, though, I would repeat the
words of Freud (1940E: S.E. 23:273): “I find myself for a moment in the
interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be
regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely
new and puzzling.”
Une Saison en Enfer [Never before — not, when a youngster, when I
tried to study Biblical exegesis and not when, as a young man, I tried
to do fundamental Mathematics — have I experienced such a Season in Hell
as I have during the past years when my interest turned to the application
to other contexts of an emended view of the Œdipus complex that I had been
talking-up, even then for more than seventeen years. A confusion overtook
me in this interdisciplinary work that, I am prone to say, chose me. [I
should add that as an arrogant youngster, I would have ascribed a sense
of being chosen by a certain work only to madmen and lunatics; so much
for the hubris of youth.]]
On a wintry day in 1978, I sat in an audience
listening to a paper titled “On the waning of the œdipus complex” (Loewald,
1979) — a work that I had already examined. As the author read on, I found
myself entering into a quiet reverie, an amplification in the Jungian style,
about the dreams of the more flamboyant of the two biblical Josephs:
And he said to them: “Please, listen up to this
dream which I have dreamt. And behold we were gathering sheaves in the
midst of the field and behold my sheaf stood up and was erect and behold
your sheaves arose and bowed to my sheaf.... And behold I dreamt yet another
dream and behold the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing to me.
(Genesis 37:6-9)
I knew that Zeligs had twenty years earlier looked
upon these dreams from a sexual-potency perspective. It struck me, however,
as curious that Joseph would be so brazen as to present these dreams (the
dream context) and odder still, that his brothers would be willing to consider
a now famous attempted fratricide to solve their frustration with this
irksome adolescent. Amplifying further and fascinating about a similarity
between the geometric structures of these dreams and the productions of
certain types of people suffering from narcissistic personality disorders,
I several years later argued that (Covitz, 1982):
(by) letting go of the content of the dreams ...
and concentrating on the evanescent choreography of its characters, we
see something else. There is a sameness in his mode of relating with each
family member; each plays the same role, each a duplicate of the other.
Beyond this, we note an absence of communication between the dreams’ faceless
dancers. For instance, we may note that the celestial bodies are individually
in orbit about Joseph; each separately relates to Joseph and to no one
else.
Who among us, it occurred to me, would not contemplate
homicide to avoid a redaction of our personhood to the status of being
just another face in a chorus of faceless dancers? Was this part of the
Œdipus?
In the months and years that followed, I came
to believe that Freud in his work on the Œdipus, not unlike the European
seafarers who sought the East by sailing West, had discovered something
else than what he had anticipated and imagined. I recognized an Œdipal
drama ... but its driving dynamic was, perhaps, not the conjoin of sexuality
and parricide. There was a pressing theoretical need to distinguish between
social relationships, on the one hand, and the sum of two or more dyadic
relationships, on the other. Joseph’s dreams did contain representations
of many dyads; but, in the sense that they were duplicates of each other,
they were, after all, the same. I began tracking such Josephean structures
in the relationships described by narcissistic patients for whom a capacity
to see the world from another’s vantage point, to empathize, was missing
or damaged. Without empathy, I reasoned, there is, after all, but one Other!
(inklings of Kazantzakis’ Paul in Last Temptation) Put another way, triadic/social
relationships required a capacity to see the other as subject, to allow
the other to be center of his or her own cosmos.
For the maturing child to enter the Oedipal situation,
it would be necessary for him to have achieved adequate dyadic relations
with each parent. But for him or her to successfully leave these childhood
intaglios and their wish for a Josephean centrality of the Self, a representation
of the relationship that exists between the parents must have developed
in the Psyche and have become embraceable, cherishable. In this sense,
I reasoned that the mastery of the Oedipus Complex brings with it or is
brought by the psychological acceptance, on the part of the child, that
two people can have a relationship independent of the child — a process
first attempted within the family and with the parents. Dissonant to my
Freudian ears was that this had nothing to do with gender or parricide,
having more to do, perhaps, with psychic autonomy and narcissism than with
the once-consonant acceptance of the little boy’s wish to kill his mother’s
bed-mate or mutatis mutandis ... with the little girl.
While most often ignored by empirical researchers,
Freud had indeed introduced three Œdipus complexes. The one bandied about
most often, the Positive complex, charted the toddler’s progress through
stages in which he or she sought to incestuously attach to the hetero-sex
parent and to parricide the same-sex parent. But together with this, Freud
early-on postulated the general existence, and not just in neurotics, of
a Negative complex in which attachment towards the same-sex parent was
sought, together with the violent removal of the hetero-sex parent. And
as if matters needed to be even more confused, Freud claimed that the general
rule was an alternating of these two Simple complexes in a dance-step that
moved back-and-forth between them; this he labeled the complete Œdipal
situation. In all three models, success in leaving this limited mode of
relating was contingent on parental threats which deterred this doomed-to-failure
set of childhood fantasies and behaviors — a contention that is not supported
by research,
In later position papers and a more recent volume,
I outlined the following five-stage developmental process that constituted,
I posited, a soft underbelly to Freud’s Œdipus complexes and lay at the
center of their dynamics:
Stage I A period dominated by a (paranoid-like)
propensity to recoil from the thoughts, desires, or needs of another whether
self-referenced back to the child or not, was seen as the beginning and
narcissistic substrate of this process.
Stage II A more progressed stage in which the
child developed a capacity to recognize the inner stirrings of another
followed, though a refusal remained to recognize another’s inner world
except when the related thoughts were explicitly self-referenced back to
the child.
Stage III A third phase followed during which
the toddler’s capacities to allow for the inner stirrings of another failed
when confronted by another’s thoughts or deeds that related specifically
to a third person.
Stage IV The above potentials might then be consolidated
and faltered only when the child directly witnessed relationships external
to him- or herself (corresponding to Freud’s Primal Scene).
Stage V Finally and in the best of circumstances,
the child might begin to accept at least in certain limited intimate contacts
— and betimes even to cherish— relationships external to him- or herself
and could carve out incipient capacities for empathy, intersubjectivity
and socialized object love, as well as a canonical precipitate of these
functions, that we may associate with an awareness of the needs for social
order and laws.
I, thereafter, imagined that I had found literary
support in a leitmotif playing in the Book of Genesis. There, I found a
theme that preached against Narcissism but presented a God oblivious to
the sins of passion most customarily associated with the Œdipus. In 1995.
I committed myself to testing my own and Freud’s model against the weight
of extant experimental studies and offered-up hypotheses that might support
one model or the other ... and I reviewed ... and informally crunched numbers
... and reviewed ... and crunched some more.
In the end, while it may have been facile to note
that support for my so-dubbed Elemental Œdipal was more robust than for
that of the early 1900’s view which was not supportable, in fairness, at
the close of this study, I had to admit that he who begins in a skeptical
Cartesian Dubito, sometimes ends in that selfsame position. In any case,
I had agreed to let the cards fall where they might ... and they did ...
they fell on doubt.
The Gambit
There I was caught between two stools. a model
such as Freud’s, which begins in the monad and the regulated rhythms that
typify biological and sexual patterning, seemed quite reasonable, as did
my more Elemental Model which chose instead to begin inside a view of anthropos,
driven by drives for attachment, as member of clustered polities of mutual
concern and interest. I committed to follow these models to explore where
each might carry me.
The inclination to view the individual as monad
was apparent not only in Freud’s and Jung’s work, but in movements as separate
and diverse as: Coue’s formulaic and semi-hypnotic treatments in the early
decades of last Century; the self-actualization counseling modalities of
its middle years; the focus on enlightenment during the tumultuous sixties
and seventies; Kohut’s Self-Psychology that seemed to take the Psychoanalytic
community by storm during the past thirty years; and in faddish notions
such as Co-dependency that tended to pathologize attachments and dependencies.
In contrast to these, the family therapy and group therapy movements, the
Interpersonalists (Sullivan and Horney, for instance), the Systems folk
(students of von Bertallanffy, Lewin and our home-grown Agazarian), the
Attachment theorists (Bowlby, Ainsworth, Stern, and Stolorow and Atwood,
as but several examples), and the Object Relations theorists had consistently
taken, to varying degrees, the position that the primary aim of development
is resident and understandable in the child’s or the adult’s style of attachment
to his or her world.
All this pointed me to maintain my irksome conjecture
that (1997, p323):
The particular form of the Œdipus complex that
one chooses, may well be dependent on the choice of a particular Weltanschauung,
a particular World View — be it social, political or religious. This View
predetermines, so to speak, the aims of development and, therefore, the
constituents of a sanguine existence. The Œdipus will, for instance, appear
differently depending on whether we accept a Biological, Monadic and Individualistic
view or one in which Psychological Attachment and Intersubjectivity are
seen among the primary goals of such development.
Similarly, the limbs of the World of Psychological
Theories — it thus struck me like a precipitous influenza — were unavoidably
shackled, pinioned by the need to pay tribute to antipodal wishes for separateness
and the equally strong wishes for attachment. These selfsame shackles,
I reasoned, bind the behaviors of the communities in which we live. With
this in mind, I noted similarities in comments made by two very different
shepherds of nations, Dag Hammarskjøld (1957) and Sigmund Freud
(1933):
Do you wish to forfeit even that little to which
your efforts may have entitled you? Only if your endeavors are inspired
by a devotion to duty in which you forget yourself completely, can you
keep your faith in their value. This being so, your endeavor to reach the
goal should have taught you to rejoice when others reach it. (Dag Hammarskjøld
- 1957 in Markings, p. 153, 1964; emphasis added.)
Our mythological theory of instincts makes it
easy for us to find a formula for indirect methods of combating war. If
willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct,...
bring Eros, its antagonist into play against it. Anything that encourages
the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war. These
ties may be of two kinds. In the first place they may be relations resembling
those towards a loved object, though without having a sexual aim. ... ‘Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ This, however, is more easily said
than done. The second kind of emotional tie is by means of identification.
Whatever leads men to share important interests produces this community
of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human society is
to a large extent based on them. (Freud, 1933B, S.E. 22, p. 212; emphasis
added.)
(Briefly look at Jung’s different view from 1935
lectures)
Hammarskjøld claimed that our endeavors
to succeed — tempered by a unity with values and aspirations and a dutiful
spirit to life-tasks — might lead to the possibility of the experience
of vicarious joy in others’ successes; this claim, at first glance, seemed
simplistic and naive, not being able to avoid our experience of the World,
our knowledge of the two to three dozen wars that rage at any given hour,
or the memories associated with our own century of genocides, all of which
speak against the likelihood of such transcendence.
[The rhetoric, chauvinism, and reasoning of nations
did strike me as involving the selfsame mad processes that possess neurotics.
Like an hysteric, one state might utilize its economic infirmities or boundary-weaknesses
as reason enough to subjugate its neighbors. Like a paranoiac-obsessional
neurotic, some theocracy could rationalize incursions into or impose sanctions
upon other states based upon some differing religious perspective. And
like the forthright pervert, and in various and sundry ways not so dissimilar
from his obsessional cousin, a lunatic nation — impelled by some sacred
wish to maintain Narcissistic integrity of its own type — might embark
on a mission of racial purification, subjugating those deemed to be inferior
to some theoretical principle of eugenics — in much the same way that a
fetishist reduces his or her lover to the status of an object. Each, I
imagined, could be placed in one of the five categories outlined for the
novel model of the Œdipus!]
While I found myself in agreement with Freud that
man’s narcissistic aggressions may never be subdued, still, I wondered
about his addendum to his letter to Einstein (above), in which he avers
that there is a psychical antagonism to war that arises from the progressive
evolution of culture and civilization — to each of which he ascribed pacifistic
inclinations.
I tentatively concluded, then, that Love, Pacifism,
and Recognition of Similarity might serve as proof against the Biological
selfishness that moves us to engage in Wars. This was offered in spite
of the unavoidable recognition that the more selfish inclinations move
many members of our species in other directions and toward bellicosity.
As in the tensions that I thought I had found between the self- and other-directed
polarities in development, I came to imagine each of us confronting a Schismatic
World. This schism, I averred, was quite comparable to the dichotomous
view of Man qua Selfish Biological Monad versus that of Man qua Socialized
and Intersubjective Being. And not being shy, I had (Covitz, 1997, Chapter
6) suggested a great deal more, as I entertained a discussion of law and
civilization.
[There, I had argued that the acceptance and practice
of laws was different than the acceptance of a rationally-based code of
behavior. While the latter deferred not a great deal to the needs of others
but made sense, the former focused on the needs of others but frequently
made little sense. Socrates’ willingness to go to his death made little
sense unless examined from the potential impact on his Society that an
absconding from the face of the Law might entail; only with this in mind,
might nobility be ascribed to his suicide or, perhaps, to any other deed
perpetrated in the name of some Code of Law.]
I, in the end, reasoned that: it was in the very
act of accepting and allowing for the relationship of others, first of
all with parents, that a sense of right and wrong might canonically come
into being. I suggested, furthermore, that das uber-ich or Conscience or,
may we even call it, the Social-Agency was birthed from three (sometimes
conflicting) potentialities:
• the capacity to accept an-other’s subjectivity
and relationships, which tempered Narcissism and opened the youngster to
a world of considerations surrounding the subjectivity of an-other;
• the resulting capacity to internalize the relationship
between the others; and
• the ability to internalize each parent’s relationship
to the child, whereby each parent’s gifts and abuse might be transmitted
to his or her progeny.
[I did worry about the conflicts that might result
from such an amalgamated Superego that was fabricated from both Narcissistic
components and others that seemed wedded to the image of mankind in attachment
to others — yet, this is where I was led!]
As this process in me unfolded, I came to recast,
as well, my understanding of the curative factors in psychoanalytic treatment.
No more was it specifically either where Unconscious was let there be Conscious
or where Es-It-Id was let there be Ich-I-Ego! or a matter of discovering
the treasure within! Instead, I saw the treatment process as one in which
two protagonists — one locked into relating unwittingly on the basis of
their relational history and another equally locked into both relational
history and theoretical specificity — came to slowly abandon these self-referenced
pinions and to work to cherish each others’ inner worlds and to accept
each other as unique others, as subjects, each in their own right. And
no less, I add en passant, did my vision of children, in-law children,
grandchildren, spouse and parents and my relationships to them alter as
my view restricted itself to this lens.
??This directed me to a first attempt at posing
a central question: How shall a choice of adherence to Freud’s Symbolic
model or, instead, to an Elemental model for Œdipal development impart
any difference to my thinking about the larger World in which I live or
to one in which I might hope to live?
I was, that is, involved in the pursuit of an
immodest enquiry, one of great scale and broad scope. I was interested
in whether my new view might address broader scapes. I accepted as a given
that our notions of health are both expressed in and expressed by certain
types of cultures and civilizations, that we, thereafter, value and promote;
notions of health and of cultural values were now inseparable in my mind.
[I demonstrate this with several detours that
have preoccupied my thinking. Consider, first, a theocracy of the type
that may have existed at the time of the Inquisitions. Health, one might
assume, was correlated in that society with inter alia two matters: adherence
to a certain code of religious practice and membership in a specified community.
Outliers to either of these requirements were, presumably, thought of as
ill or criminal and, as documented in the Maleus Maleficarum, were treated
by the soul-doctors of their time, the Inquisitors. I note another similar
example. Robert Coles (1963), early in his career, reported finding himself
in the disquieting position of being asked to treat certain purportedly
ill white children in the American South whose neurosis, according to the
parents who brought them for treatment, was, pointedly, their failure to
hate or deprecate their black friends. And lest there be any doubt, such
children and their distant kin, e.g., Spaniards who may have sheltered
perfidious infidels, Germans who protected Jews, Homosexuals and Gypsies
in the Third Reich — all these may be deemed ill in the certain restricted
sense of their having failed to adjust to their environment.]
?[Notions of health and illness, in fact, do alter
in relatively brief periods of time and across imaginary, international
borders. Consider our shift in thinking that either once or now has tended
to confound fervor with fanaticism, depending, that is, on our judgements
concerning these matters. Fervor may well be connected with health and
character while fanaticism is associated with madness. In recent years,
we have witnessed those who considered a religious leader to be a madman
for sentencing a blasphemous author to die for his purported heterodoxies.
But who is credibly mad? There was a time when the dissemination of Bibles,
no blasphemy, just the dissemination of sacred texts, was punishable by
a justifiable death. And there are many, still, who might consider perfidious
attitudes toward one’s country or religion, even those neutered of overt
action, as capital crimes. Are those who perpetrate or recommend these
punishments men of fervor or are they insane? Are fanatics, patriots, and
war heroes well? Ethics change and so, apparently, do attitudes towards
health, as one moves in time and place.]
How might we, I then wondered, attempt to evaluate
health or illness? We could choose Freud’s dictum for emotional well-being,
namely the capacity of the monadic self to reap satisfaction from Love
and Work ... or Jung’s notion of Individuation and the treasure within.
In examining, for instance, one whom most would consider a lunatic, Adolph
Hitler, we might explore the man’s biographies and breathe a sigh of diagnostic
relief in realizing that he was not satisfied with his station in life,
was sexually a coprophile, and, likely, was incapable of more conventional
sexual gratification and as one who never fully individuated. Thereafter,
we could justifiably code him according to this or that diagnostic disorder.
We might find it disheartening, however, to consider that other mass-murderers
have been deemed sane by criminal courts and their appointed experts —
at least, sane enough to be executed. And many fanatical politico-religious
leaders who have led their devotees to war may well pass muster in psychological
and psychiatric evaluations based on such paradaigms as Freud’s or Jung’s.
From the perspective of the Elemental Œdipal, however, wherein health is
to be measured by the capacity for accepting and valuing the inner world
of another, there is preciously little doubt concerning the illness of
such folk.
[I have travelled far afield of specific interests,
but, perchance, I can now return. Freud’s model for Œdipal development,
sitting squarely as it does in the midst of the individual’s psychology
and his or her capacity to balance the requirements of civilization with
the need for instinctual gratification, would attribute healthful benefits
to a society in which gratification of the individual’s press for individuation
and instinctual needs are permitted within certain reasonable guidelines.]
The model that I have designated the Elemental
Œdipal, however, would require a societal norm centered on a primus inter
pares view of others. Those who cannot accept or refuse to accept and value
the inner stirrings and relationships of others in such a society would
comprise its population of psychologically ill individuals, considered,
that is, from this most idiosyncratic perspective.
Consider, with me, America and much of the West
in these early years of the Twenty First Century. Our civilization highly
cherishes the rights of individuals and appears to share certain specific
attributes with theories of libidinal expression and their opposition to
Civilization. Some of the slogans of this culture — privacy, free enterprise,
market economy, etc. — are representative of the wish for these individualistic
rights. I am/was not intent on advocating against this type of society.
Rather, I wished to emphasize the muted tones of another voice which the
Elemental Œdipal expresses. Among the tensions that are manifest in our
society is that which pits those who petition for and emphasize individual
rights against those who advocate for, what might be called, according
to the dominant religion of this culture, Christian Charity. Here, two
World Views — difficult to precisely demarcate — come to our attention.
One may be said to promote a notion of health based in the individual’s
capacity to successfully garner what he or she can from their communities
(like Hermes the Trickster), i.e., to love and to work. In this system,
illness might well be measured by the failure to glean succor from the
world. The opposing view discovers health, even spiritual health, within
one’s relationships and, specifically, in the capacity to accept and, possibly,
even promote another’s harvest as one is tending to one’s own fields (Dag
Hammarskjøld). Bringing to mind the debates in the Houses of contemporary
Western Governments, we note that these two paradigms often find no comfortable
resolution. Perchance, in the end, it is through such tensions that balances
are maintained while permitting dissonant voices to offer-up their respective
resonances!
[I shall move towards closing this section with
a personal descriptive anecdote, leading up to brief comments concerning
the sense of choseness of groups — still another application of the superordinate
paradigm that has infected my thinking. The described exchange may more
effectively than words point toward a specific lacuna in certain types
of social interaction and to those questions related to health and illness
that I shall, alas, not solve. Some years ago, I arrived early at a seminar
housed in a religious college. It was early morning, I had time to spare,
and was feeling a familiar morning-elation that usually lasts until the
early afternoon and that, in middle age, I’ve come to appreciate. I greeted
a man and a woman standing before a display. They asked if I were a student
or faculty member at the College. I responded to each question: “No, I’m
here for a meeting.” They immediately thereafter asked whether I knew any
Jews. Feeling this morning ebullience, I responded — in a friendly, if
facetious fashion — that I had been sleeping with two such people for thirty
years, referring to my wife and to myself. I quickly explained my little
witticism that I had thought might cut through the tension between a missionary
and his designated savage-pagan prey. I was wrong! ]
[The conversation continued with my new-found
friends noting that they should like, as missionaries to the Jews, to assist
me in avoiding soul-rot and eternal damnation. While thanking them as best
I could, I wondered whether they had ever considered a first-among-equals
view that might permit them to leave another sentient human being in his
or her own relationship to his or her own God and world. The gentleman
took the lead and proceeded to explain: “Let me give you a medical metaphor.
Suppose I had discovered a cure for AIDS and knew that you had AIDS. What
shall I do?” I was immediately reminded of a moment (now more than thirty
years ago) when a colleague’s mother-in-law had queried: “Just how does
it feel to be a Christ killer?” My fine missionary had compared my having
been born Jewish to having AIDS and saw himself as being in a position
to redeem me from the pains and consequences of eternal perdition; and
my colleague’s mother-in-law, years before, appeared to possess little
interest in whether I had atoned for my two thousand year old sin-by-proxy
or not. Furthermore, neither apparently could imagine how such comments
might affect me. There are moments in life, in any case, when even the
verbose among us should pause and measure their words. I thanked him for
his kind thoughts and went to my meeting musing on the situation. It is,
let me add, somewhat ironic that I was but footsteps away from a meeting
whose topic was multicultural psychology. Such are the ironies of life!]
[But returning to questions surrounding health
and illness, I don’t know whether this man had sexual problems, whether
he loved his wife and two children, or whether he gleaned satisfaction
from his work. He did seem to be a strapping forty year old, looked healthy
and spoke well and kindly of his family and may, indeed, have been interested
in saving my soul. However, from my own very idiosyncratic perspective,
the one I’ve advocated in my work, I have little doubt but that this man
failed to successfully resolve the Œdipus as I know it.]
I maintain minimal doubt in my belief that both
the society in which we live and the one in which we matured suffer from
some trenchant Narcissistic illness — although, calling it an illness bares
my biases in this matter. Truth be told, I looked and could discover no
religions and no groups that did not consider themselves chosen or special.
What clan could exist and not consider itself the special and chosen one
of its Totem or God? Perhaps, in various and sundry ways, however, it is
possible to revel in one’s choseness and, simultaneously, to appreciate
that others consider what is their’s equally special. It was and is my
position that this transcendence is the primary task of the collection
of crises that comprise the Œdipus complex and socialization processes
that may be called by other names.
Let me dally, just briefly, on the matter of a
feeling of choseness, as it might be manifest in religious groups or even
competing theoretical groups (e.g., warring psychoanalytic tribes), echoes
of the stages of development that were earlier postulated to exist on the
path from Narcissism to Socialized Object Love may be heard. It would seem
that at least four levels of group Narcissism are discernible. The first
and, possibly, most prevalent in history sees the existence of the other
as an intolerable danger and openly seeks the out-group’s destruction.
The other is accorded no subjectivity at all and any thoughts to the contrary
by a member of the in-group are, more or less, interpreted as traitorous
and the equivalent of seeking membership in the hated group.
A second level is describable by its war-cries:
convert or die! The out-group is permitted existence if and only if it
gives up its uniqueness and its identity and joins the in-group. The Crusaders
— those who marched on the Turks and sundry other infidels, giving them
the choice to accept Christendom or die — were markedly different than
the Nazis who, under no circumstances, could allow Gypsies, homosexuals,
or Jews to enter the Aryan kingdom of heaven — conversion just wouldn’t
cut it in Nazi Germany! It is not clear where to place the House Unamerican
Activities Committee of America’s midcentury but, assuredly, many hate-mongering
groups function on the earlier of these two levels.
The third posited stage represents a far more
civil manifestation of this sense of choseness. Members of such groups
vitiate the value of another’s prayers, political affiliations or psycho-theoretical
models while paying lip-service to the out-group’s right to indulge their
silliness. With this type of functioning, we see varying degrees of effort
expended in order to achieve the in-group’s perspective. My fine missionary
friend, one may presume, functioned in this manner. In our brief discussion,
he noted that I was undoubtedly chosen but that it was equally certain
that I was misguided; having only my best interest at heart, he expressed
his love for me and bemoaned the misfortunes that would befall me in the
Next World.
The fourth and most progressed type of group Narcissism
entails the adoption of a primus inter pares view of the other. Flamboyant
Joseph’s difficulty was not that he placed himself at the center of the
Cosmos but rather that he failed to recognize that his father, mother,
eleven brothers and the sister he never deemed to mention — each, individually,
viewed themselves as resident in the center of their own cosmological system.
This, I confidently add, is quite a reach in itself. Groups that progress
beyond the Josephean mode of relating I associate with this fourth stage.
I suspect there are those who imagine that anthropos
is capable of transcending even this fourth state and achieving a thoroughly
achauvinistic state of being; (Freud and Jung were not and I am not to
be counted, however, in the ranks of such thinkers.
An Interdisciplinary Puzzlement
[Travellers in the ethereal world of symbols,
it is generally assumed, are bound by but several requirements that may
be spelled out in a few brief sentences. By way of this, we may imagine
a mathematical argument to be configured in the form of a triangle on whose
base are arrayed collections of grouped-together premises and at whose
top vertex is a conclusion; intermediate to these and on lines parallel
to the base are other groups of premises or intermediate conclusions. Arrows
point from each and every cluster on every line, beginning with the base,
to another cluster on a line at or nearer the conclusion. The Locality
Principle of Formal Logic requires only that we satisfy two general requirements:
first, that our premises, those on the base of our triangle, are correct,
i.e., consensually-acceptable and, secondly, that the arrows in such an
argument may be shown to represent the derivability of the pointed-to cluster
from the pointed-from cluster of statements under specified rules of argumentation.
The resulting demonstration is, generally speaking, deemed aesthetically
pleasing, theoretically economic or even elegant if it enlists the fewest
number of premises and the fewest possible number of these parallel lines
of the argument’s intermediate stages before arriving at the sought-after
conclusion.]
Good thinking is not so facile for those who seek
to distinguish, in the softer sciences, between rigor, impressionistic
presentation, and rhymeless poesy. Our language is not the language of
Mathematics or the Laboratory Sciences and appears to unavoidably lead
us to the use of words with multiple and, betimes, contradictory meanings.
[“The congruence between the construct validity of a concept and that of
its operational measure” (Sarnoff, 1971, p. 104) is thereby weakened bringing
with it a host of doubts concerning our results.] This being the case,
we, perhaps, cannot expect from the finished product any more than adherence
to the form of the arguments and/or demonstrations that we find in the
more rigorous sciences. Laboring under the stress of an equivocal language,
researchers in Psychology are, nonetheless, prone to cite the works of
others as if these represented consensually acceptable premises. In the
end, such proofs may not be substantively different than the ones offered
by a blustering five year old boy in invoking the power of his very big
father during some kindergarten dispute. While the citations of these behavioral
thinkers situate the work in an historically progressive framework, a number
of liabilities are present. In the first place, citations from respected
authors carry with them the imprimatur of authority, relics of the transferences
first discussed by Spielrein, Jung and Ferenczi, and may lead the reader
to accept these as the equivalents of the consensually validated premises
in other sciences. Secondly, since such citations are phrased, as they
may often be, in an equivocal language, their meaning may be difficult
to discern, interpret or evaluate. And finally, unlike works in Mathematics
and the Laboratory Sciences, psychological studies most often cannot directly
measure the variables which they intend to examine; rather, they typically
choose other measurable variables or indicators that are presumed to represent
or operationalize the elusive ones the researcher seeks to understand.
We may, therefore, often have no druthers in the Psychological Sciences
but to settle, in the end, on either the choosing between many still-incomplete
ways of thinking or on a pasting-together of a number of incomplete and,
betimes, contradictory formulations.
I have, thus far this evening, presented a resume
of a tour, representing a gambit that has preoccupied me for these many
years — moving me, as it did, from a quiet reverie about an Old Testament
character through clinical thoughts, notions for a developmental paradigm,
excursions in the land of theoretical tensions to which I have but been
able — in these comments — to allude, and from there on to posits about
group narcissism and even to musings about the insanities of the larger
political and religious groups to which we belong. Still, nearing the end
of my journey, I am left with disbelief surrounding what I had once imagined
to be the structure of the argument that comprised these works and am stuck
with a multiplicity of queries that relate to how I now conceptualize my
process.
This Saison en enfer was, as I now imagine it,
a rekindled one and not a madness that appeared is from not is ... something
from nothing! My initial sense was that this process began while listening,
or rather while not listening, to Hans Loewald discuss his “On the waning
of the œdipus complex” (1979). It had felt as if my mnemic banks precipitously
birthed both the pictoral images of Joseph’s two dreams and a geometric
tool which struck me with the homology of these dreams’ structures, that
is, with the image of a singular subject at the hub of his indistinguishable
others. Jung, in his early lectures, and Emma Jung in her three letter
to Freud already discussed the contingency of our psychological models,
though it is patently clear that future generations were inclined to rest
on the shoulders of Giants.
Reflecting back, then, I had attempted to assimilate these thoughts about Joseph and his narcissistic dreams with what I had previously believed to be at the center of Freud’s Œdipus complex. Finding something discordant in this comparison, I, instead, came to accommodate what I previously thought to be my own thinking to accept what I now imagined was a new idea for me. A novel model for the Œdipus coalesced, based in a developmental continuum that moved from a Bio-Narcissistic self-referenced phase through one in which a primus inter pares view of oneself and one’s others might be born and might, in turn, promote the skills necessary for membership in Polities of Mutual Concern and Interest. Struggling with the many corollaries that seemed to canonically spin off from this thinking, I was pleased as I realized that Freud had himself entertained certain similar ideas that were manifest in the theoretical tension between his Simple and his Complete Œdipal situations. I was pleased, furthermore, as I succeeded in finding a literary leitmotif garnered from a study of what I perceived to be a preaching against Narcissism in the Book of Genesis. And, thus even further emboldened by my successes, I applied this thinking to describe an array of different Narcissistic phases in small groups and even in larger political and/or nationalistic settings. I pause, prior to continuing on to close this
communication, with a commentary on a certain hubris that I see in my work
and other works similar to it. As the previous writings unfolded and as
my thinking about this revised Œdipus complex evolved, moving as it did
through many venues, I was particularly pleased by the appearance of a
singular superordinate principle that was operational in each of these
frameworks — as if I had discovered some great truth of the Cosmos!
[I remember studying, some thirty five years ago,
the writings — he titled them Ultra-Intuitionism — of the Soviet dissident,
A.S. Yesinin Volpen. He had brought these with him from his years in Russian
Gulags and state hospitals where the ideas were worked through. In that
work, the productive Topologist of the 1950’s had not only denied Mathematical
Induction, but the Locality Principle of Logic, as well. He reasoned that
it was not sufficient proof of a conclusion that the premises of a Mathematical
argument and the arrows, its logical impliers, be verifiable. The proof,
as a whole he said, needed a Soul, something that bound it together into
a unity. Throughout my processes, in the past twenty years,]
I patted myself on the back, telling myself that
there was, after all, a Center (Soul) that grew out of my thinking in the
guise of a unifying paradigm that conceptualized health — of the individual
and of the polity — in the progressive capacity to embrace the Other as
a Subject in his or her own right. I enjoyed those thoughts even if now
I must deny the direction of the sequence within which they unfolded.
Let me be direct about this: I have come to question
the correct ordering of my work and lean toward believing that, in fact,
on that Wintery day that now appears as part of my youth, I had long-before
subliminally embraced that organizing principle and that my studies, since
that day, have all been contingent on that unverifiable paradigm. I have
come, that is, to believe — and I have come here today to fascinate out
loud before you, an audience of fellow sojourners — that thinkers, Scientists,
in spite of their Niemann-Pearson Null Hypotheses and their attempts to
remain unbiased, begin their works with a subliminally defined context
bounded by some equally less-than-conscious unifying superordinate principle
that logically contains their works. And finally, I have come to believe
that readers and students have a Right to Know — perhaps, not the very
personal origins of such principles but at least — the structure and essential
ingredients of those principles that gird the author’s presented works.
I leave you, then, with certain queries that still
annoy me — and a singular suggestion.
• In interdisciplinary work — and analysis is
unavoidably interdisciplinary — is there value in the application of a
singular superordinate Weltanschauung, Binding Paradigm or Soul to a variety
of inquiries or disciplinary venues?
• If we answer yes to the above query, are we
doing more than disguising a Narcissistic sense that our particular world
view, our own Weltanschauung, has universal applicability? That is, might
it be that such an endeavor is little else than a defensive belief in the
applicability of our own model to a world that, beyond such fantasied moments,
is most often out of our control and beyond our beck and call?
• Can we not, I wonder, be humbly satisfied with
the acceptance that any given Weltanschauung is but a first among equals
whose primary status may precipitate solely from the identity of its proponent,
i.e., from the fact that it is ours?
• And, if this be the case, can we not accept
the fact that our models — those that seek to represent reality by reducing
the number of actual variables so that extant tools and methods may be
applied to understanding ineffable reality (das ding!) — are not even constrained
to avoid mutual contradiction without one or the other being falsified?
Here I am, then — now after twenty five years
of pursuing the application of a singular paradigm to the variety of disciplines
in most of which I remain uncredentialed — prepared to accept that while
I was moved to this process of seeking out a consonance of Weltanschauungen
in all these venues, I may well have done little more than fitting what
I had already believed into the appearance of a scientific mode of thinking.
What to say? Humility is the last guest to arrive at a party! With this
in mind, I recommend that similarly-minded thinkers prespecify, when they
can, the guiding paradigms that they bring with them and that they consider
to be Sacred. I have come to think of this as a prespecification model
for interdisciplinary inquiry.
I have attempted to demonstrate, tonight, how
sundry theoretical madnesses played out in my search for a model of socialization
that I could embrace in my life and in my practice.
I thank you for your listening.
Appendix: Results of An Informal Meta-Analysis
An examination under the light of extant empirical
studies of this new model with both Freud’s Simple and his Complete Œdipal
models was undertaken (Covitz, 1997). Multiple predictions were proffered
that, if correct, would have seemed to support the revised model; they
were:
Prediction I.a. The child is anticipated to demonstrate heightened closeness to its primary nurturer independent of that nurturer’s gender. Prediction I.b. A balanced distribution of both warm and hostile feelings towards both parents is anticipated during the years associated with Œdipal development. Prediction II.a. It is anticipated that it has not been not possible, empirically, to determine whether the sexual productions of this period are overlays on the tender attachments or vice-versa. Prediction II.b. It is anticipated that emotional closeness functions as proof against incestuous attachments. Prediction III. A correlation between Narcissism and psychopathy is anticipated. Prediction IV.a. As was the case with warm and hostile feelings, a balanced distribution of identifications with each parent is anticipated. Prediction IV.b. It is, furthermore, anticipated that there is an identifiable propensity to identify particularly with each parent in matters surrounding relational styles. Prediction V. It is anticipated that it is precisely the loving and intersubjective stances of the parents that are most likely to move children of both sexes out of their Œdipal dilemmas. Prediction VI. It is anticipated that studies will demonstrate evidence of certain Œdipal traits in periods of time bracketing those that are conventionally associated with Œdipal development. Prediction VII. No greater degree of conflict is associated with females as compared to males concerning gender identity. Prediction VIII.a. A correlation is anticipated between conflictual Œdipal periods and later difficulties with intimacy. Prediction VIII.b. A correlation is anticipated between conflictual Œdipal periods and later relational difficulties. Prediction VIII.c. No turning away of sexual interest
is anticipated during the period following the Œdipus.
The following table presents the conclusions from the previous work (Covitz, 1997) based on an examination of empirical studies as they related to the listed hypotheses. E refers to the Elemental Œdipal revision recommended (Covitz, 1997). S refers to Freud’s Positive (Symbolic) Œdipus complex and C refers to Freud’s bi-modal Complete Œdipus complex with its shifts from Positive to Negative complexes. No. Prediction Supported E S C (how?) I.A
* Variable VI was not, for the time being, amenable
to experimental study.
• Selected Bibliography • Covitz, H. (1988). Joseph and his narcissistic dreams: the primacy of the Œdipal dilemma. In proceedings of the conference: Memorial Lectures in Honor of Harold Feldman’s XYZ of Psychoanalysis. 16 April 1988, Philadelphia: Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. _____ (1992). Fate, choice, and retribution in Freud’s psychoanalysis. In E. Garcia (Ed.) Understanding Freud: The Man and His Ideas. New York: NYU Press. _____ (1997). Œdipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (1897-1997). Bern/Vienna/New York: Peter Lang Freud, S. (1953-1974). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 1-24 (J. Strachey, Ed.). London:Hogarth. (Abbreviated below as S.E., followed by volume:page and listings in vol 24). _____ (1933B). Why war? S.E. 22:197-224. Hammarskjøld, D. (May 25, 1957). In Markings, p. 153. New York: Knopf. Kramer, H. & Sprenger, J. (1486). Maleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans. M. Summers. New York: Dover 1971. Loewald, H. (1979). The waning of the Œdipus complex.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 27(4), pp. 751-775.
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