An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  PHOBIA: in which anxiety is projected onto a single class of things (wide-open spaces, say, or little white mice) that are then scrupulously avoided.

  OBSESSION: where talismanic doing, fussing, straightening, and sometimes just plain thinking are used to express frustrated sexual energy; ritual hand-washing is the well-worn example here.

  The reason these are called “transference” neuroses is that the analyst, by roughly re-creating the original childhood conflict and acting as a stand-in for hard-pressed, erratic Mommy and/or Daddy, allows the patient to “transfer” submerged emotions onto him and work through the conflict one more time—this time within the safety and consistency of the analysis.

  The good news: The phobic, the hysteric, or the obsessive can usually regain (after several years of analysis and tens of thousands of dollars) all the energy that was formerly at the service of his neurosis.

  The bad news: These days, there aren’t all that many classic hysterics, phobics, and obsessives around to be cured; seems that sexual liberation pretty much thinned the ranks. However, the era of safe sex (or no sex) may well bring on a resurgence.

  The narcissistic neuroses, with considerable shading (and a little fudging) on the part of the psychoanalytic community, correspond to what we think of as psychoses. These tend to manifest themselves not in terms of a single easy-to-identify symptom but rather a diffuse, fugitive “feeling” and include, traditionally (i.e., according to Freud):

  MELANCHOLIA: severe depression, with or without its manic counterpart in tow.

  DEMENTIA PRAECOX: our schizophrenia, called “praecox,” or premature, because of its typical onset in postadolescence.

  PARANOIA: projection (a defense mechanism we’ll be getting to in the next session) magnified and embellished to the point of delusion, usually of either the somebody’s-out-to-get-me-and-he’s-poisoned-the-tap-water or the I-am-the-Red-Queen-off-with-their-heads sort.

  In all of them, the ego is not merely under siege; it’s long gone. And the chances of recovery are not so hot. The person with the narcissistic neurosis—whose sexual wishes had never developed to the point of being attached to Mommy and/or Daddy; who had instead remained, literally, “stuck on himself”— couldn’t, according to Freud, be reached by the analyst either. It’s true that some analysts, led by a couple of latterday Viennese named Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, shifted the emphasis of their work from Oedipus to Narcissus, from castration anxiety to self-love, and from Victorian-era sexual repression to Me Decade grandiosity, enough so that there’s some hope for the narcissist. But he remains a tough cure.

  Confidential to all you schizophrenics out there (and you know who you are): Hang tough! Granted, you’ve been accused of having regressed to the ultimate narcissism, an infantile state in which everything you see, touch, or hear reads as an extension of you. And, yes, your mind is split between a tiny little normal person with a wee small voice who recalls how nice things used to be and the population of ten randomly selected Bosch canvases plus your entire junior high school. In fact, if our century still admits to madness as something certifiable, you’ve got it. But what can you expect? You’ve lost gray matter the way middle-aged men lose hair. At least no one can accuse you of having repressed anything. You’re living it, baby.

  Footnote for fetishists, devotees of S &M, homosexuals, and perverts of all stripes: No, you are not, according to Freud, neurotics. Perversion, while marked by regression to some soft, unchallenging, essentially self-involved state (or occasionally by one’s never having moved beyond that state at all), does not involve repression, conflict, or the batting around of the ego by the superego and/or the id. You may be perfectly happy. Probably not, though: Most perverts wind up with their share of independently generated neuroses, too. And that’s a little like working double shifts. Or do we mean both sides of the street? We’ll think about it while we’re washing our hands.

  Oh, and we were just kidding about the PMS.

  Eleven Ways to Leave a Mother

  If Hollywood were to make a movie out of the structure of your mind, they wouldn’t be wrong to cast Jim Carrey as the id, Daniel Day-Lewis as the ego, and Alan Rickman as the superego. The id’s always going to leer, mug, and try to get its way. The ego’s always going to come across with the subtlest (simultaneously most restrained and most inventive) acting, only occasionally exuding false nobility and/or martyrdom. And the superego’s always going to register as a bit of a stiff, a sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes despotic outsider.

  Whereas you’re born with your id, seat of the instincts and repository of libido, in full swing, your ego comes together only gradually. Once in place, it has to integrate sensory perceptions, modulate voluntary movements, keep tabs on the instincts that are penned up in the id next door, and provide for their, as well as its own, pleasure, all without ever losing sight of reality. Sometime in the course of childhood, as early as age five or six, the superego takes shape, incorporating the early influences of parents and teachers; thenceforth, on top of everything else, you’re saddled with conscience, morality, and a tendency to come down on yourself at the worst possible moments.

  So the ego is up against the id (which wants to disobey it), the superego (which tries to make it feel bad), and the outside world (which, on some days, is enough to make it feel like drowning itself in the tub). To the extent that it is a strong and healthy ego, it attempts to honor the demands of all three. To do so, even the well-endowed ego makes compromises, adopting special techniques called defense mechanisms, so that, when confronted with certain demands, it doesn’t have to panic, self-destruct, or assume the fetal position. By actively intervening, the ego thereby transforms what it or the world or the superego views as bad into something neutral or better.

  This “armor-plating of character,” as Wilhelm Reich described it, is innocent enough in moderation; it is also virtually inescapable. But when defense mechanisms become too powerful, so encumbering character that it can’t make it down the hall to the bathroom, problems ensue. You’ll get a sense of those problems when you take a look at this rundown of the most celebrated defense mechanisms. The comment on the right reflects how each might be employed by a nine-year-old boy who’s angry at his father and who, natch, feels guilty about feeling angry—not that he’s necessarily in touch with either the anger or the guilt, let alone the defense mechanism.

  1. Repression

  “Hmm? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Whoever represses simply forgets—blissfully (unless, that is, the repressed material resurfaces). Repression may be the most potent defense mechanism of all; certainly it is the best at combatting sexual wishes. Other defense mechanisms, some psychiatrists say, simply do the work it leaves undone.

  2. Regression

  “Goo. Flubba dada?”

  To regress is to revert to an earlier, less threatening stage of psychosexual development; it’s a basic prerequisite for most neuroses and all perversions. It needn’t result in talking baby talk, but it gets you—and your ego—off the hook by taking you back to a time when things were easier, still merely anal, say, and you didn’t have to worry about being castrated by Daddy just because you happened to love Mommy.

  3. Projection

  “Oh, no, I’m not mad at Daddy. Mommy is mad at Daddy.”

  The anger is attributed to someone else; guilt and anxiety thus become unnecessary. Projection doesn’t alter the nature of the feeling: It gets rid of it by pushing it out into the world, to the same degree that repression would bury it. Projection can be dangerous, though; it’s this defense that causes you to hear censuring voices. Those voices are only your superego, of course, but you don’t know that.

  4. Denial

  “You must be crazy. I’m not mad at Daddy.”

  This is the wholesale falsification of reality, and the flip side of repression. Whereas repression severs the ego from internal pressures, denial severs it from those of the outside world. It’s perfectly
normal—desirable, even— in children; in adults (for whom full-scale fantasy lives are no longer practical), denial can indicate advanced mental illness.

  5. Reaction formation

  “Mad at Daddy? I love Daddy! Where is he anyway? I want to sit in his lap.”

  Here you convince yourself that the exact opposite of something awful and unacceptable is, in fact, true, then replay your revised version of it a zillion times a day. A veteran reaction formationer (most often an obsessive-compulsive) becomes excessively solicitous of the person he hates, often instituting elaborate ceremonial acts to keep his true feelings at bay.

  6. Reversal

  “Mad at Daddy? Daddy’s mad at me!”

  This one’s as old as the first conflict between ego and instincts; in fact, it, along with repression, was one of the first defense mechanisms your young ego used. (You used it yourself in first grade: It’s the “You’re dumb” “No, you’re dumb” of the playground.) Like displacement (below), it is usually invoked as a preliminary to more complicated defensive maneuvers.

  7. Displacement

  “Mad at Daddy? I’m mad at Rags. Bad dog!”

  The emotion is transferred from a dangerous object, who can retaliate, to a safe one, who can’t. As with reversal, it’s usually a first step: The ego, having gone this far, will probably give things at least one more twist— regression, say, or reaction formation. Otherwise, you might figure out how you really felt.

  8. Isolation

  “Yes, I guess I’m mad at Daddy. It would be fun to shoot him and watch him die. May I have some more milk and cookies, please?”

  Recognition minus affect: You don’t bother to deny, repress, or reshape the traumatic emotion, you just disconnect from it. You can talk about it without feeling a thing.

  9. Intellectualization

  “Well, yes, I am mad at Daddy. I’m probably wishing him dead so that I can have Mommy all to myself, which, of course, is quite normal at my age.”

  Isolation for smart people. In this one, also known as “rationalization,” you overthink the problem in order to avoid making contact with the emotion or anxiety behind it.

  10. Undoing

  “Uh-oh, I’m very mad at Daddy. I’d better go line up all my teddy bears so they’re exactly even with the squares on my rug.”

  Here, an action is meant to expiate an emotion, or an earlier action, that the ego can’t bear to deal with. Undoing can involve actually canceling something out (for instance, shopping yourself bankrupt, then returning everything you’ve bought) or magically doing so, through a compulsive (and apparently unrelated) ritual.

  11. Sublimation

  “Mad at Daddy? Excuse me, I really must get this finger painting finished.”

  Of all the mechanisms of defense, the only truly desirable one. By the time it’s acquired, the superego’s well in place, channeling the libido into some useful endeavor, transforming the instinctually gratifying into the socially useful. Artists are alleged to be the biggest sublimaters around, expressing in paint, clay, or guitar riffs what the rest of us take out on our stomach linings. Freud said it best, of course:

  [The artist] opens out to others the way back to the comfort and consolation of their own unconscious sources of pleasure, and so reaps their gratitude and admiration; then he has won—through his phantasy—what before he could only win in phantasy; honour, power, and the love of women.

  Return with Us Now to a

  Quiet Side Street

  in a Working-Class Neighborhood in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna, Where, in a Darkened Second-Floor Room, a Man with a White Beard (and a Nosebleed) Beckons You to Lie Down on a Horsehair Sofa. And Please, Feel Free to Say Whatever Comes into Your Mind … FREUD AND HIS FOLLOWERS

  Freud, like the philosophers who preceded him and the psychoanalysts—and, for that matter, the physicists—who followed, struggled to formulate a system for solving the mysteries of the soul. What he came up with: a therapeutic procedure that would, he hoped, help recover those dark, submerged parts of man’s being that force him into a lifetime of repetitive action and ritual discontent. For Freud, this procedure called for the patient (henceforth known as the analysand) to lie on the couch for fifty-five minutes and relate anything that came to mind, no matter how silly, shameful, or self-incriminating. If the treatment was often, literally, nightmarish for the analysand, it was no day at the beach for the analyst, either. As Freud warned, “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

  He didn’t. Nor, presumably, did five of his most prominent disciples. All of whom undergo, on the following pages, short-term treatment with contributor Barbara Waxenberg, Ph.D. SIGMUND FREUD (HIMSELF)

  In the beginning there was Freud—or as he is universally labeled, Freud himself, with the pronoun wired inextricably to the noun. Not to refer to him this way immediately reveals you to be a parvenu on the psychoanalytic scene. To establish your credentials among the cognoscenti, you must, whenever some arcane metapsychological point is discussed, ask whether the speaker is referring to the early writings (1895–1900) or to the middle phase (roughly 1900–1910); that is, to theories which Freud himself (see how it’s done?) revised in his later papers. It also adds a bit of heft to throw in such remarks as “Yes, but in ‘On Narcissism’ or in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable,’ Freud himself said …”

  It was in the early period that Freud made some of his most revolutionary contributions: the nature of the unconscious, the mechanisms of repression and resistance, the phenomenon of transference, the significance of dreams (“the royal road to the unconscious,” as he put it), and the method of free association. He also developed his seduction theory, the belief that neuroses stemmed from actual sexual assaults on young children, a theory he later abandoned in favor of the belief that such traumas were not real events, but fantasies that stemmed from unconscious wishes. This recasting of seduction, exploitation, and betrayal from an external event to an internal conflict-laden desire was to color Freud’s sense of what psychoanalysis was all about; henceforth, he would emphasize the idea of intrapsychic forces over the individual and his environment. This was to remain the dominant bias of psychoanalysis until it was challenged by Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi in 1925 and, much more vehemently, by Harry Stack Sullivan a decade later. It tied psychoanalysis to an instinctual-drive theory, rooted in biology and based on sequential phases of infant sexuality. It also laid the groundwork for viewing the Oedipal conflict as a universal experience, pivotal in human development.

  The word “metapsychology” has been defined as a psychological theory that cannot be verified or disproved by observation or reasoning. Which is to say, its verifiableness can be eternally argued. The further removed from consensus the theory is, the more easily it remains enshrined in the hearts of its followers. So it is with Freud’s instinctual-drive theory. For Freud, the instinctual drive acts as a constant and inescapable force that creates a state of tension that one works at reducing. Although man (and woman, but Freud was notoriously puzzled about what, exactly, women want) is regulated by the pleasure principle, “pleasure” is more or less defined as the absence of excitation. So much for fun and games in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Instincts have a source of excitation within the body, an aim (the removal of excitation), and an object (the means by which the satisfaction of the aim is achieved). In the Freudian model, this object need not be a person, although everyone would probably agree that if the desired “object” turns out to be a statue or a French poodle, one is wasting one’s time and libidinal energies or losing one’s marbles.

  In tracing the stages of human development, Freud postulated that erotic feeling is first experienced in the mouth, the newborn’s primary source of pleasure; later shifts to the anus, where enjoyment is derived from the retention and expulsion of feces; and ultimately, at about age three or four, to the genitals,
in the so called phallic stage. Under normal conditions, interest in these organs progresses in orderly sequence. Fixation occurs when, as a result of trauma or constitution, libido is bound at a particular developmental stage so that some portion of it never advances beyond this point. When the person gets into trouble later on in life, he is likely to regress to the point of fixation. Adult patterns of behavior take shape according to the way each erotic phase is negotiated. For example, possessiveness, meticulousness, orderliness, and retentiveness are viewed as anal traits, while passivity and helplessness or sadism and exploitation are seen as oral ones.

  The phallic period coincides with that of the Oedipus complex, which is central in the Freudian theory of neurotic development and which begins to develop at about age three, when little girls and boys decide that marrying the parent of the opposite sex and killing off the parent of the same one is a neat idea. This is often quite flattering to Mommy or Daddy, who is probably having a hard time with bulges, hair loss, and his spouse and who could do with a bit of stroking. But it can be a bit wearing on the parent rival. “When is Daddy going to die?” goes down poorly with morning coffee. The family romance begins to wear thin at about age five or six when the boy, fearing castration by his father (a bit of talion revenge), turns away from Mom, identifies with Dad, and goes back to watching television instead of primal scenes for the years of the so called latency period, during which sexual interest is in abeyance. The fate of the girl is more complex since she’s got nothing to lose, ostensibly because Mommy’s already done away with her fancy equipment. And now Mommy has Daddy and Daddy’s penis and everything and it’s not fair! But eventually she identifies with mother, accepts the feminine role (i.e., her castration and penis envy), adopts a Cabbage Patch doll, and represses her incestuous wishes. Ho hum.

  According to Freud, the bases for psychological disorder are laid down between ages one and six and all later learning is an elaboration of early conflict. In structural terms, conflicts exist among id impulses (those unconscious reservoirs of sexual and aggressive impulses constantly seeking discharge), ego defenses (which ward off the direct discharge of the impulse and its access to consciousness), and superego restrictions (the stern conscience which embodies parental and cultural standards). The embattled ego must mediate between the primitive forces of the id and the censoring, guilt-inducing power of the superego. In psychoneuroses, the ego becomes progressively less able to effect satisfactory compromises and is eventually overwhelmed. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to increase the relative strength of the ego so that it can effectively deal with pressures from above and below and with external reality.