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Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2

Lectures on Technique

To demystify Psychoanalysis, I want to go into an aside in this series to bring therapy into phenomenological experience. The end point of therapy is to successfully, love, work, and or sublimate in healthy activities and relationships. The impediments to that are in the external environment, with obstacles, but there are internal obstacles to be considered as well. You want to see and feel how your inner world is holding you back. One of the ways to do this is through self-analysis, especially because therapy is expensive, and one is putting a lot of trust into a total stranger with your inner world. Just as they can make you better, they can also gum up the works. A certain amount of ownership and independence is required by the patient, if possible.

Anyone who has any meditation skills will be in a better situation when doing self-analysis. To start things off, there are a few basic practices that will demonstrate to you the level of health and well-being of your consciousness. In all these practices, you can meditate with your eyes open, but preferably you do this on your own, until you get confident with your skill to do this in daily life. The first practice would be to concentrate on the breath from the beginning to the end and see if flow states can be achieved just with continuity of attention. The second practice would be to get on with your life as normal, but include body scans where you scan to detect any needless muscle tightness in the face and body. This will show you a layer of wasted energy, and any muscle relaxation you apply, that still allows you to get on with your life, with not too much or too little effort, is a valuable energy saving. The third practice would be to notice tightness in the sources of your senses, like your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, but to also include the quality of your thinking and the quality of your breath. Technically, most of these functions work automatically without a need for one to tense up muscles with your amygdala. If you wait for your breath to move on it's own, without contraction, tightening, and superfluous control, then even more energy can be saved. Again, you would still be getting on with your life while doing these practices, but you realize that it's possible to over-control sensing functions that already work automatically. Finally, you can focus on thoughts and just notice tension and pain while allowing thoughts to just arise and pass away. Usually just noticing in a non-verbal way the pain associated with problematic auto-thinking is enough for the unconscious to notice that the mind is hurting itself, and in most cases it will learn and relax the tension on its own. Over many months and years, layers of habitual tension will fall away allowing for a new efficiency baseline of well-being and peace.

Adyashanti calls this True Meditation. He asks if the mind is bothered by a thought, and returns to the natural awareness of automatic sensation that works without need of an ego to control it. What is awareness's relationship with what's happening? Instead of having an idea of meditation as a reference, the reference turns to the natural state of being that operates independently of thought. Freedom must include all contents that arise in the mind with intimacy so more thoughts and feelings can be included. It reduces suppression and repression while at the same time allows for more memory-sensations to be countered by the body's natural operation. That natural way of being is already there so there's no need to figure out how awareness is supposed to be. Effortless Effort still requires an effort but it's the last form of effort needed, which is to make a priority to check in with the body. You're checking the automatic awareness and senses, not thoughts or images as a reference. What is awareness's relationship to the thought? Does it stay with it or move away? Use your moment to moment experience, not intellectual references. The effort is to be present. To reorient towards senses requires a little effort. The mind typically is conditioned by parenting and culture to analyze, get carried away, and act, but it requires a little effort to rein it in. The new habit is to prioritize that checking-in. Advanced skill allows you to be with conversations and experiences with sensory interest into the nature of what are sometimes difficult experiences. The prioritization requires a scientific interest to explore manifestation, including difficult manifestations. Reactivity becomes something that is more used when it's appropriate as opposed to a wild and uncontrolled response. The checking-in allows one to compare peace in the senses against stressful reactivity, and forces into consciousness a choice between relaxation or to stay with the reaction, if appropriate.

Adyashanti True Meditation: https://youtu.be/YAE1zaY-ogY?si=8_olVDd3BPmiGMH7

Adyashanti & Loch Kelly - The Journey After Awakening: https://youtu.be/MsVImg6imX8?si=jCvTUTW7PXBju8CB

This last point is important, because Psychoanalysis works similar to meditation in that with understanding how your brain works the structure of the mind reorganizes and learns to stop hurting itself. It's also similar in that the mindfulness in analysis gets people to notice how thoughts feel and how the kind of content in the mind affects the inner world, and therefore your well-being. For example, someone could be living in a lavish beach resort but their stressful job makes their mind into a jail. Some of consciousness in a busy life is under your control, but without enough understanding of what your actions are doing to you, opportunities are lost for well-being. The ultimate goal for therapy is for patients to move into a learning mentality where they can learn from mistakes without being stuck in ruminative preoccupation. On the other hand, what is different from Buddhism would be the feeling aspect. Instead of just looking at the pain, there's also courage to feel the pain and express it until discharge, because the patient understands that emotions can be exhausted, and therefore less problematic over time. The learning mentality then has to look at why the trauma happened and try to avoid the same thing in the future.

The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

Mindfulness: Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html

For many people, meditation is plenty of therapy for them and all they will ever need. For many others, the content of thinking will be emphasized. Psychoanalysis moves beyond certain types of Buddhism and analyzes the problematic content that is interrupting concentration, well-being, and happiness. It looks at rumination, craving, and reactivity to see what can be resolved so that even more energy is saved. After exhaustion, problematic content desists its operation to steal attention away from your activities. This way, if you read about psychoanalysis, which most of the time is about an analyst helping an analysand in just this way, you can understand the therapeutic interpretations and interventions better, and hopefully benefit from it if it applies to your life. A later episode will go more into each personality problem. This one will focus more on stress, depression, and maladaptive coping in the Kleinian tradition.

Melanie Klein did write a lot of abstract theory, but thankfully she left behind many notes and lectures that flesh out the therapeutic process so as to help people notice their painful inner worlds and heal them. Before going into those methods, there also needs to be a disclaimer to define the limits of Psychoanalysis. Many people are debilitated by shame and guilt, sometimes only for only having bad thoughts, but not always. Some have serious misdeeds or crimes that they want to confess. A pathological secret. The reality in the therapeutic world is that there are laws that make mandatory disclosures of serious offenses to law enforcement compulsory for therapists to keep their license. They do have to protect your privacy for anything else, except for those sensitive areas. Many people feel guilty for serious undetected crimes and will not really receive any helpful therapy unless they confess, give themselves up to law enforcement and then start therapy afterwards along with their court sentencing. This is a dicey situation that appears again and again in psychology books where some therapists keep criminal things quiet in old case studies that you know in the modern world, it would not be allowed.

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

For example, there was a famous case study from Carl Jung where he had a depressed patient who may have killed her daughter by allowing her to taste impure water where she ended up dying of typhoid fever. The neglect would have been illegal, but Jung held back the information from authorities. "From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess, and I had learned many of the details of her secret. It was at once apparent that this was a sufficient reason for her depression. Essentially it was a psychogenic disturbance and not a case of schizophrenia. I told her everything I had discovered through the association test. It can easily be imagined how difficult it was for me to do this. To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was never again institutionalized. There were other reasons that caused me to say nothing to my colleagues about this case. I was afraid of their discussing it and possibly raising legal questions. Nothing could be proved against the patient, of course, and yet such a discussion might have had disastrous consequences for her. Fate had punished her enough! It seemed to me more meaningful that she should return to life in order to atone in life for her crime. When she was discharged, she departed bearing her heavy burden. She had to bear this burden. The loss of the child had been frightful for her, and her expiation had already begun with the depression and her confinement to the institution. In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is shattered." Even if someone hasn't committed murder, a patient should be careful about thoughts about wanting to murder someone. There will be questions about whether the analysand has plans to do that as an adult in therapy. Typically this won't be the case when therapy regresses to earlier levels when the patient was a minor and thinking hostile thoughts that weren't acted on. Admitting hatred for someone is safer territory.

What Happens if a Client Confesses to Murder? | Counselor Limits of Confidentiality - Dr. Todd Grande: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85IGJLxkqh4

4 Things NOT to Say to Your Therapist - Kati Morton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H714wnQn2uw

In non-criminal situations, forgiveness and atonement should happen when possible, but in many situations, the offended party will not want to be contacted or the people involved are deceased. What was done in the past cannot be changed and if there are no authority figures involved like the police or courts, patients can't wait to learn lessons from the past, and they will need therapy as soon as possible to focus on what they should do next, or at least decide this for themselves. For example, people who have made a mess of relationships can be helped with therapy as well as innocent victims in other scenarios. Others who took on self-beliefs that are self-destructive, and people with more biologically influenced pathologies will be more welcomed by mental health professionals and mutual sympathy will be easier to develop. But another area where people will likely avoid therapy is when they feel that they are going to be put in a mental health facility. There will be a great desire to avoid being confined outside of the home. This may only delay therapeutic help, until things are so bad that a patient has to leave their home because of a major breakdown.

For those situations that are more accessible to talk therapy, patients and their typical pathological secrets involve some kind of weakness, guilt, shame, victimization, a socially unacceptable lifestyle, or some embarrassing flaw, where a confession will be welcomed by an understanding therapist. For example, Melanie found a common pattern with minors acting out sexually that caused their regular shame. She found that in the Oedipus Complex situation, children would replace the parents they couldn't have access to with other proximate objects. "There is another kind of experience in early childhood which strikes me as typical and exceedingly important. These experiences often follow closely in time upon the observations of coitus and are induced or fostered by the excitations set up thereby. I refer to the sexual relations of little children with one another, between brothers and sisters or playmates, which consist in the most varied acts...They are deeply repressed and have a cathexis of profound feelings of guilt...These feelings are mainly due to the fact that this love-object, chosen under the pressure of the excitation due to the Oedipus conflict, is felt by the child to be a substitute for the father or mother or both. Thus these relations, which seem, so insignificant and which apparently no child under the stimulus of the Oedipus development escapes, take on the character of an Oedipus relation actually realized, and exercise a determining influence upon the formation of the Oedipus complex, the subject's detachment from that complex and upon his later sexual relations. Moreover, an experience of this sort forms an important fixation-point in the development of the super-ego. In consequence of the need for punishment and the repetition-compulsion, these experiences often cause the child to subject himself to sexual traumata. In this connection I would refer you to Abraham (1927), who showed that experiencing sexual traumata is one part of the sexual development of children. The analytic investigation of these experiences, during the analysis of adults as well as of children, to a great extent clears up the Oedipus situation in its connection with early fixations, and is therefore important from the therapeutic point of view." Much of the therapeutic result is for adults to realize that their childhood understanding was limited and under a certain amount of determinism, so their adult self can be free to experiment and make more appropriate object choices and let go of infantile identifications. This includes choosing partners who are not necessarily like their parents or not like past childhood figures related to sexual trauma.

Enigma - Mea Culpa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_OZaZ2dUE4

With material that is comparatively easier to confess, the therapist still has a lot of exploratory work to get at, including the person attempting self-analysis. Emotions that are bothersome and require therapy to disentangle usually involve some events that weren't emotionally processed fully. The mind disassociates and distracts to avoid facing something. Unfortunately that material arises again and again looking for association, understanding, and discharge. Problematic content arises as an internal battle that is too uncomfortable to confront and resolve normally. Therefore, the initial stages of therapy involve more free association sessions, and there is a goal at first to collect the bulk of the material necessary to make therapeutic associations. Jumping to conclusions based on theory fails because the inner world of the patient is ignored and the stress related to unconscious conflicts is left unaddressed. "However much we know about [the mind's] workings, we are also well aware of the fact, which should make us sceptical and modest, that it is extremely difficult to know anything definite about another individual’s personality as a whole. If we come to think of it, how much do we know about those nearest to us: our parents, brothers and sisters and other near relatives, and intimate friends? Have we not been taken by surprise at some of their actions and reactions after having known them for many years? Have we not recognised that we have committed grave errors in our judgement of people we thought we knew perfectly well? And, to go a step farther, however much we have learnt to know about ourselves, have we not at times been taken by surprise at some of our own reactions in unexpected situations?"

Moving in the direction of transference reactivity, Melanie could peel back information from the analysand without needing a lot of rapid interpretations. Just let the harsh judgments against the therapist, symbolic content in free associations, and dreams speak for themselves. "The understanding of the transference situation is our 'Open Sesame' and every time we approach the patient’s mind with it the unconscious opens up to us. But then we have also to bear in mind that we must keep to this way to its very end. What counts in analytic work, in my experience, is the unconscious. Analysis is built on the discovery of the unconscious, and all we have learned about the personality as a whole is due to our understanding of the workings of the unconscious." The farther back the maladaptive projections can be traced, the easier it is for a patient to disidentify with those archaic coping mechanisms and achieve a therapeutic result. "These facts in relation to the transference become fully comprehensible only by studying the nature of early object relations. Here I can only summarise our knowledge by saying that from the beginning both love and hate relate to the same object. The mother, and her breast and milk, is the first loved object but also the first hated object when she causes frustration and therefore both love and fears of retaliation are connected with her. We then split this mother who is both desired and loved, and hated and feared, into two mothers, as it were, a good and a bad. But there is also a strong tendency in the mind to bring the two aspects together again and to modify the bad mother by combining her again to some extent with the good mother and creating a compromise. So we go on all through development and even to some extent through life, dividing and combining again. And we do all this first in relation to our primary objects, the real father and mother; partly in relation to our 'internal objects', our pictures of father, mother etc. in our minds, our imagos."

The pathological mind has distorted visions of others and of oneself, but those distorted thoughts constantly look for relief by venting in the proximate environment. "...There is a strong tendency in the individual to externalise some figures and internalise others, as well as to distribute his love, his feelings of guilt, his restitutive tendencies, on to some people, and his hate, his dislike, his anxiety on to others, and to find different representatives for his imagos in the external world, because a constant relief of pressure can thus be obtained. These mechanisms, which are fundamental for the development of object relations, are also at the bottom of transference phenomena."

Case Studies: The 'Ratman' - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

The environment of a psychoanalytic clinic, and the position of the analyst, make them appear like an authority figure which becomes easy for the analysand to project on. All those pathological predictions, based on past abuse, guilt and shame feelings, can demonstrate their distortions on this stranger and analyst, and because analysts are fallible, a negative transference is on its way. "We start with the present, with the transference situation, and find our way back into the past. Whatever the patient has to say, referring to his actual life, or his history, the transference situation is never far away. After all, we must not forget that the patient speaks to the analyst lying on his couch, in his room, with all the associations belonging to the transference situation. Therefore, he can as little dissociate himself from the relation to the analyst as he can from his phantasies and from his unconscious. This is also shown by the fact that however absorbed the patient may be in his subject matter, he will at once detect the slightest lessening of interest on the part of the analyst."

The relief the patient wants is to be closer to the innocence of a child before feelings of guilt could accrue with mistakes and age. For Klein, this guilt starts earlier than Freud, where the child receives the first failure from parents to provide for a need. The child receives enough sustenance from the mother to love the mother while at the same time hate her for any unreliability. The coping mechanisms develop and repeat and then become coping skills, including maladaptive ones, that are used with later intimate partners and in the workplace. Maladaptive responses then create feelings of guilt and may be felt to be a part of the personality after enough time has passed. We don't only love, but we desire to control and exploit what we love. For Klein, influenced by Abraham, the early frustrations with the breast involve an oral-sadism to control the contents of the breast, to drain and exhaust, and can culminate into eating and destruction attitudes after teething. The therapeutic level would be to see how one exploits others, tries to drain them, and the damage it can cause to relationships. If there's more awareness and enough disidentification, then more adult coping methods can be taken on to prevent new relationships from again giving way to guilt and disappointment. Earlier anal-sadistic desires to remove or destroy what is not wanted, in simple evacuation, or to control feces, to be controlling in life, can give signals as to some of the muscle tension operating in daily life unbeknownst to how archaic the influence is. Even if the desire to control can appear hateful, it's because there is something of value underlying that the person wants to control. Nobody tenses up and controls an environment that is emotionally neutral.

Enigma - Return To Innocence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk_sAHh9s08

"All feelings of love begin with the libidinal impulses especially the libidinal attachment to the mother (her breast) and from the very beginning of development, hate and aggression are active, as well as the powerful libidinal urges. When the infant is able to perceive and to take in his mother as a whole being, and the libidinal attachment to her breast grown into feelings of love towards her as a person, he becomes prey to the most conflicting feelings. I hold the view that feelings of sorrow, guilt and anxiety are experienced by the infant when he comes to realise to a certain extent that his loved object is the same as the one he hates and has attacked and is going on attacking in his uncontrollable sadism and greed, and that sorrow, guilt and anxiety are part and parcel of the complex relation to objects which we call love...In order to escape from the unbearable burden of sorrow and guilt and anxiety which is being felt in relation to loved and endangered objects, internal and external, the ego tries to turn away and to deflect its love from them, since his sufferings are partly a consequence of his love. One notable way of doing this is by increasing one’s hate and one’s grievances against the objects, that is to say, to reinforce the projection mechanisms. My experience has shown me that we are not in a position to judge either the amount of love or of hate which is present in any person until we have understood the ways in which love can become buried under hate and the reactions which have then again been formed against this hate."

Because there are bodily symptoms related to control, then for Melanie, the Super-ego begins to move beyond a pure parental influence. It's a mixture of parental influences as well as control mechanisms coming from the child to hatefully control what is lovable. "Through better understanding of the structure of the super-ego, we see that its nucleus is formed by images of a very primitive type which are active in the tiny infant’s mind; frightening figures which devour and persecute. But when we went deep enough into the unconscious to discover these, this work also brought to light imagos of contrary kind, helping, gratifying and reassuring figures, which we know under the name of 'good' objects, and which are also active from the beginning of development." This puts to rest any clichés about being a "lover" not a "fighter." If the love is intense enough, one will fight for it at varying levels of ferocity. Eventually, actors in the real world will be labeled as being more or less cooperative, or good or bad objects, often with distorted projections to make some angels and others devils. This includes the therapist. "It has long been known that the analyst can stand for the real father, mother, or other people of the child’s early environment, but that he is also sometimes given the part of the super-ego, and at other times that of the id by the patient." Being forced to play different parts provides an experience of the inner conflict between good and evil felt in the patient.

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Angels and Devils - Echo and the Bunnymen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq8k5zNhyOI

Enigma - Sadeness - Part i: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F9DxYhqmKw

As the analysis continues for weeks, months and years, the analyst will be forced to play many different parts under various levels of control that will provide material for interpretation to understand the patient's inner world. "We see that the analyst may change from one moment to another, from a kindly figure to a dangerous persecutor, from an internal figure to a real person. Looking at the structure of the super-ego in the way I have suggested, we are able to detect in the transference situation very fine distinctions between the roles the analyst is made to take in the patient’s mind, and we can observe the very quick changes from one to another." Which objects are being projected onto the analyst is based on relational profiles coming from descriptions of friends and family of the patient. Without those other people being present, then errors projected onto the analyst can provide clues as to the accuracy of those profiles. Each wrong guess aimed at the therapist provides valuable information for interpretation. "There is so much reality in phantasy and so much phantasy in reality...To what extent reality and phantasy are intermingled is only to be revealed by analysing the transference situation, whereby we are able to discover the past both in its real and in its phantastic aspects."

Like in my review of the consequences of projection in the Fear of Success series, there is an energy waste in projective expectations. Wrong expectations create draining disappointment. The therapeutic result is for emotions and reactivity to react more to real details than just imagined catastrophes, or living in idealized expectations that are guaranteed to disappoint. It has to be seen that important real events provide material for predictions, but those predictions don't often have enough material to predict accurately. Leaving those failures unaddressed leads to bad coping, and with repetition, they turn into "anti-skills" that are maladaptive. The super-ego begins to develop a habit of distorted predictions that assail the ego in its attempt to deal with the real world. "...If we come to understand the phantasies which were confirmed and strengthened by the mother’s unkind behaviour, and the extent to which guilt and anxiety, because of the person’s impulses and phantasies were active in connection with these experiences, then we are able to undo to a greater or lesser extent, the harmful effect of these experiences...Memories of [the mother's] kindness, which had been there as well as her unkindness, come up; and one might even discover that her unkindness had been much exaggerated in the patient’s mind by projection...Another important point to be considered is to what extent the child, wanting punishment and harshness for internal reasons, had influenced his mother’s attitude towards him...I wish now to show that it is often that the effect of analysis is to prove that the terrible mother has not actually been so terrible, or had been much less terrible than the patient imagined, and has also provided trust and kindness which he is grateful for. And in contrast to this, the analysis can also clarify the patient’s image of an idealised mother, and of the denial that went along with this, and show her deficiencies, which had been denied, and the effect these deficiencies had on the child’s mind...The past appears to the patient in a more realistic light."

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html

So, if you idealize people you may tolerate their abuse. If you devalue them, you might eliminate potentially good relationships. If you approach people with splitting you deny many of their real characteristics. This is often how toxic relationships are maintained. The abuser gives you some good things but then expects you to tolerate much worse. If patients can see how they overvalued their parents in the Oedipus Complex, and see how they created an inappropriate relationship template for themselves, then they can now see their role in bad relationships and stop desiring people and things with bad tradeoffs. HG Tudor calls this environmental influence Ever Presence. You can scan your life for people, places, and things that offered some "good times," that made you tolerate some kind of disadvantages, and then use disenchantment to remove overestimation from your life. For people stuck in this kind of repetition, it requires a constant reminder of the consequences of staying in those relationships, juxtaposed to the inferior temptations.

The Sinister Core of Love-Bombing Explained... - Kim Saeed: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4qVr-VVcuXs

7 Preventative Hoovers : Mid Range Narcissist - HG Tudor: https://youtu.be/zNjHn8UBfEQ?si=ZRWNf75uXFYNULpG

Ever Presence - HG Tudor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqsq_Dzo60U

Bullying as Art, Abuse as Craftsmanship - Sam Vaknin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ucwtmsz0c

A successful analysis may take a long time because certain confessions of embarrassing details will take a lot of trust on the part of the patient before they will divulge. Both symbolic and dream material will constantly point at a sore spot in the mind that will require some hovering in the analysis. "...In analysis we should get to know as much as possible about the patient’s life. But our attempts to do so are often frustrated for some length of time by the very fact that the same mechanisms and processes which are underlying the transference phenomena are partly responsible for the patient’s temporarily keeping his actual life from us, whilst enabling him to tell us more of his phantasies...In the process of repression, hate is disconnected from the original object, the love feelings towards the object also become impeded...The analyst must, however, keep well in mind the fact that this withholding of material, phantasies or information about real life, is a sign of marked anxiety and that no analysis can be regarded as well advanced until that anxiety is diminished and the patient can tell about all sides of his mental life...What matters in analysing phantasies, at whatever stages of the analysis it may be, is whether or not the analyst is able to find the links between them and the patient’s experiences in the past and present...The patient’s phantasies appear in the transference situation in such a variety of expressions and through such circuitous routes that it requires a corresponding versatility and imagination on the part of the analyst to follow them...If the various phantastic images get projected on to the analyst and thus become analysed in the transference situation the super-ego will gradually become less severe and at the same time the analyst more real to the patient. What I have said applies equally to the phantastically bad and to the phantastically good imagos."

As these transferences get challenged and compared to reality and distortions are discovered, the patient gradually gets to understand his or her inner world. Catharsis and abreaction isn't all dramatic and epic. It can just be bringing up a real memory and feeling the consequences that happened in reality, so that the feeling is not dissociated and ignored. Seeing how little control one had as a child, the weak coping mechanisms and all the behaviors that developed before adulthood, and especially FEELING the memories, increases the learning, fair judgment, balance and disenchantment with archaic influences. When unfair judgments are relinquished, the loving aspects in the hated objects begin to return and there's a desire for reparation with those objects. They are not split into idealized or demonized objects anymore, and because the mind is imitative, the relaxation of the hatred and the increase of love towards others, including the recovered internal good objects, they can also become a support in the mind for self-love and the ability to love, to cooperate once more. If this doesn't happen then there is "...no internal good figure helping [the patient] to put his objects right." The patient has to see "...how the influence of friendly people goes to build up good imagos and to diminish the anxiety of bad ones, while the influence of frustrating or frightening real objects and situations is apt to increase the predominance of the bad internal objects."

When there's success, patients see the good in the distortedly negative objects and then see the good in the therapist, so a more positive transference returns. "Whenever this happens, a strong relief of anxiety is obtained, since reparative tendencies are such an important means of mastering it. Actually one can often observe in child-analysis that when an interpretation is in process of resolving anxiety, that the child turns from burning and destroying things to a constructive play, and becomes peaceful. Then the child has been projecting his loving feelings on to the object, the analyst, the object by this means becoming good also in his mind, and thus the ego introjects the analyst as a good object." The therapeutic effect is a discontinuation of stressful predictive, ruminating, rehearsing thoughts. One looks for real details to prove predictions instead of just jumping to conclusions and good internal objects provide a support when the environment changes and becomes more hostile. This of course can then be a motivator for the patient to want to look for better environments. Seeing clearly what is realistically good also provides opportunities for healthy imitations.

This opportunity to see the internal mind, so that the patient can see their projections in real time, helps to deflate the need to believe those projections or follow them. Like seeing objects in clouds, fire, or physical patterns, they can be real time proof for a person to see how the inner world is coloring the neutral environment. What are the things that your inner world readily recognizes? This is where Rorschach and ink blot tests got their prominence in the 20th century. What people are able to see in these blots tells much about their inner worlds, especially if there are many tests over a period of time. When patients see the destructiveness of their distorted views and their lack of skills, they can catch their preemptive strikes against others, the potential mistakes, and the certain guilt that will be felt if those projections are acted on. There's a motivation now to discontinue these self-sabotaging distortions. "But I myself was also one of the injured objects. We found, namely, that the teacup, which he had wanted to smash in his despair when he had felt that I was going to give him up, stood for me. When, after my interpretation, the patient realised that something destructive he had actually wanted to do was intended to be done to me, strong anxiety and feelings of guilt came up...This feeling that he expressed with great affect in the analysis was a repetition of his early aggressive impulses against his mother...when he wanted her breast and could not have it. The hate and aggression thus aroused made him feel that she would never come back because he had killed her." Analysts can ask themselves "what is the patient's mind trying to do? What is it trying to satisfy? What are the frustrations? How far back do those frustrations go?" to understand the symbolic content, body language, and transferences.

Because the ego in Freudian analysis is more about the reality principle, it's easy to say that treatment success happens when there is an increase in the ego, but because the super-ego is so powerful, and operates automatically in the mind for most people, therapists are constantly having to work on their patient's super-ego, to reduce the wasted energy that distorted predictions make. It's a bit like the therapist is being the ego for the patient until they can operate their ego independently "...The main purpose of the psychoanalytic process [is] towards a mitigation of the severity of the super-ego. That is to say, we have set going certain alterations in processes of the patient’s mind by means of which his anxiety of his frightening imagos has been reduced and the bad imagos in his mind have become less dangerous. In other words, we have initiated a more benign circle in the patient’s mind. Anxiety and, in turn, aggression, have lessened, constructiveness and feelings of love have come more to the fore, and trust and confidence have increased all round. In this connection I want to stress again that to achieve this aim, which is the essence of psychoanalytic work, we are guided by the principle that we should analyse the transference situation in connection with the exploration of the unconscious by means of the unique instrument of interpretation. I do not believe that there is any other way by which the analyst might try to make himself a more real figure to the patient."

Good interpretations usually bring up real memories that don't conform to the projection. Each real memory rebuilds the realistic object, and as defined above, objects are impressions of real people. "Thus the distorted picture of the object may prevail, while the real picture is more or less buried. This understanding of the object as it really is, is bound to reappear in the transference situation. Moreover, and together with this, a growing insight develops in the patient’s mind of his own mental processes and at the same time of the actual feelings and motives of other people." In a way, the patient has to separate out their self-interest to see the true motives of others, who of course have their own self-interests. If one is obsessed with making people behave and conform, they are truly not accepting their independence. By challenging the accuracy of projections and by showing contrary evidence, love is freed up because love is often sympathetic to people who are not deceptive and are just trying their best, even if they make mistakes from time to time. If there's a chance for emotional reciprocity in the old relationships, there is also a chance at reparation.

To get at these therapeutic results, timing is everything. As material is gathered, there are different levels of anxiety that show that one is closer to the mark and the patient is ready for a resonating interpretation. "The interpretation should be timely, which means, it should be given at the time when the analyst detects signs of latent anxiety. It must be specific, that is, it should be directed to that part of the material which is associated with the greatest amount of latent anxiety and of id-impulse. It must connect with the layer of the mind which has been activated at that precise moment. All of this implies that the interpretation should intervene at a point of urgency in the unconscious material, as it emerges in relation to the transference...Where the point of urgency is will be shown by the multiplicity and repetition, often in varied forms, of representation of the same unconscious content, and in some cases also by the intensity of feeling attached to such representations." Then when people abreact to the painful imagoes enough times, those imagoes become progressively more boring. Because the affect has been vented and exhausted, and the insightful interpretation was sufficiently understood, a learning mentality arises. One learns to react with more accuracy to situations and there's a window of opportunity to improve people skills. This leads to a therapeutic result where that material connected with the anxiety arises less often in day to day consciousness. The analysand has learned from the past and is not stuck in unconscious associations. "An interpretation is an action which definitely establishes connections where they have been broken off for unconscious reasons. I believe that even establishing links between the conscious and the pre-conscious always implies connections with the unconscious as well..."

Interpretations are based on smaller links of material that build up "like a mosaic; one has to put each little piece where it fits into the whole picture. Now we can take that simile as an image of linking. The picture gets fuller and fuller, because we link one situation with another, one piece of material with another; because we go back to material which very early on foreshadowed something which has now become more distinct." The need for so much information and linking is to surround the sore spot of the pathological secret or the most difficult reality the patient cannot face. "This brings us to the whole question of integration and the anxiety that it stirs up. Because a great deal of anxiety is raised at the point of integration, so that we sometimes find the patient going off to withdraw entirely at this point, because he cannot bear to face it, it is too painful, too frightening, and may be unbearable. Or we might find that he moves on to talk about something entirely different. Now how do we link that? We have to listen to what we are being told, even if it seems to move away entirely from what has just been said. The patient may strongly contradict it, or it is projected onto some other person, or onto the analyst. But if we bear in mind that the splitting has happened precisely at the moment of integration, we shall know better how to proceed. We shall understand how the patient may only gradually become able to bear integration." Integration happens when the distorted splitting is made to confront reality and readjust its appraisals, and it points to situations, often of trauma, where the maladaptive coping was used in the past.

If they never get to the anxious sore spot, then the analysis has to continue on until the patient is ready to confess something or describe an experience that is normally too painful to communicate to a complete stranger. The mosaic and links will keep bringing the analyst back to the same territory again and again. The analyst may have to ask "what happened there? When this happened was there something else that happened?" Typically there's some abuse content, or there is a guilt feeling based on a shameful desire, or a hatred of a loved object that causes feelings of guilt, for thinking or expressing that hatred or violence. There could be also one or many experiences of devaluation where an incident, or incidents, reduced the status of the patient in a marked way that annihilated the infantile self-esteem, sending them on the wrong track thus forward.

If there are stronger defenses, like found in difficult personality disorders, those defenses may seem actually offensive to the therapist, and their countertransference can be activated. Again, understanding defense mechanisms is a way to prevent shock or surprise. Both the therapist and the patient can use projective identification, but the difference between how the projective identification is used, has to do with motive. Analysts put themselves into the shoes of patients so as to get to know their inner world better, but at the same time they have to avoid manipulating the patient with cookie-cutter interpretations to force an outcome. The interpretation needs to come out independently from the content of the patient. On the other hand, when patients are severely pathological, the motivation of projective identification is because "...the patient violently wants to put himself into the analyst to get mixed up with him and to put all his depression, aggression, violence and so on, into the analyst. I am sure that is the reason why the analysis of schizophrenics is more tiring, even if one has been able to guard oneself against it." Projective identifications can also influence suggestive people to imitate their mistakes. By doing this they can relieve pressure from shame in their minds by normalizing that shame onto the gullible target.

Cluster B types, including Narcissists, can gain a sense of superiority by rattling the therapist. The therapy cannot be derailed and it has to return to the goal of illuminating the inner world of the patient, to the patient, so they can function better with that knowledge. "What motive is projective identification used; that is extremely important. Here we come to the well-known fault of analysts who suddenly become very active on behalf of the patient, because they have become the patient. As you said, they are in his shoes, and there the motivation and the degree of identification is so important. Up to a point I think that this is done to be helpful and to understand the patient, but the question of re-integration is extremely important, to be able to take it back sufficiently to think, 'Now I understand what is going on in the patient' and 'Now I am myself again'...It is not in order to control him that I project myself into him, it is to see what is going on in him, and to be able to understand him. It is not only the degree, it is the motivation which is so important. If it is in order to control him because I am so dissatisfied with him as a person and very much wish to change him and therefore put myself into him, and I’m going to make a nicer person out of him, then I am sure that it has entirely gone wrong." Curiosity instead was a boundary shield for Melanie Klein. "Instead of taking on the state of mind the patient is attempting to create in her, Klein was prepared to say 'No!' to the projection and to continue to observe the patient despite her own disturbance. In her approach to the patient Klein was very influenced by her wish to know, that is, the wish to explore the mind of the patient whatever that mind was like. This is a very important quality for an analyst and although she accepted that it was not always possible, she argued that this kind of narrowing of curiosity to focus on the patient was central to her attitude."

Self-esteem

As described above, Klein found that the therapist's role as a transference object is to be a new role model so that a person with a weak object inner world can slowly develop a new realistically positive object inside that is supportive and a cheerleader for the patient. With poor parenting, that object isn't there and quite likely there are negative objects with poisonous views. Just like Freud's problem with the "Wolf Man," many patients continue to repeat prior scenarios of their lives despite finding some freedom in the analytical space, and these disappointments led Freud to go Beyond The Pleasure Principle, to posit a death drive, where death is seen as the most permanent way to relieve internal struggles, a Nirvana Principle. The pleasure and reality principles were constantly flouted in failed therapies and Freud had to account for the variance. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, the contradiction was defined. "The fact is that when what are clearly unpleasant experiences are repeated, it is hard to see at first glance just what agency of the mind could attain satisfaction by this means. Although these are obviously irresistible forms of behaviour, having that compulsive character which is the mark of all that emanates from the unconscious, it is nonetheless difficult to show anything in them which could be construed—even if it were seen as a compromise—as the fulfilment of a repressed wish."

The Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

In modern therapy circles, this parenting period that gives children the chance to play and learn about themselves, can be a failure by parents for the patient and it leads to "stagnation or lack of growth in counseling work and in life, such as career choices or relationship patterns. [This] can be an indicator that a client’s self-esteem is out of whack. This can be the case both when an individual is overconfident and when they lack confidence and believe they are not good enough...Clients who struggle with low self-esteem may be stuck in patterns that include staying in jobs or relationships that aren’t fulfilling, healthy or a good fit for them. They generally lack the confidence to seek or picture themselves in a better situation. These clients may have internalized the message 'I’m not good enough.' Patterns of accepting and allowing others to treat them poorly can be a sign that a person has low self-esteem, as can behaviors that indicate they don’t trust themselves, such as asking a lot of questions or constantly seeking advice from others. When low self-esteem copresents with depression, it can manifest as listlessness or hopelessness. These clients simply may not know themselves well and struggle to find things that they enjoy or are good at, from hobbies to job skills."

Self-esteem root and branch by Rachel Bar-Yossef-Dadon: https://ct.counseling.org/2022/04/self-esteem-tending-to-the-roots-and-branches/

From the Freudian standpoint, frustrations and stress in life affect the energy flow, or libido, in the patient. "Freud coined the term 'initial narcissism' and 'secondary narcissism'. The concept 'initial narcissism' defines the basic and natural love of any baby and person of himself, which derives from a sense of omnipotence. During one's development, this sense of omnipotence is necessarily damaged due to the frustrations of reality and therefore the child, in normal development, turns his libido and self-love towards others. If there is a problem in the transfer of energy investment from the self to others, then 'secondary narcissism' develops by which the person is preoccupied with himself as a result of not appreciating himself enough and thus being incapable of investing sufficient love and libido in others." That self-preoccupation can dominate in the adult life as seen in Freud's Mourning and Melancholia. Essentially the patient is wasting their energy in this self-preoccupation and now has no energy left for engaging in healthy relationships. "The patient represents his ego to us as worthless and morally despicable; he reproaches and vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with someone so unworthy."

These attitudes make a patient a prime candidate for repetition compulsion, because their ego lacks the love and support to captain the mind and direct it independently. The pain requires addictions to numb them and the entire environment has to be changed or avoided for people to exist in it. Other people can also sense the self-preoccupation, which is a healthy warning signal that the person they are with is hiding their self-esteem issues and being inauthentic. Authentic people are capable of being vulnerable in a variety of situations, and the internal love allows them to tolerate criticism or rejection. Of course, one has to be open about those issues and actively combat them with skill development, to slide into a learning mentality, and away from the self-hatred trap. Self-hatred leads to sadomasochistic reactions that can attack oneself or project and attack others, hence the reason why inauthentic, perfectionist, purity believing types have a dangerous severe super-ego that attacks itself and others: Essentially being out of control. This is also a problem for religions. Unless the religion implants a parental replacement inside of the follower with a loving internal object, it will often resort to an all or nothing splitting tendency to attack oneself and others, regardless of the religious denomination. This is why awareness of this often repeated tendency in culture is so important. A good portion of politics, terrorism, war, class strife, identity strife, etc., is a consequence of self-hatred, a lack of self-acceptance, and it always leads to destruction of cultures if it spreads too far and wide. The difficulty is making sure that the patient can accept themselves as they are, just like an ideal parent, while at the same time have them be convinced that they are capable of learning. Clouds of past shame are distorting if they insist that the patient is incapable of learning. When a learning mentality is adopted it doesn't require that one forgets the past, and when the past can be integrated as a lesson, it increases confidence so that action towards life can begin again. The litmus test would be based on marked changes in behavior with a reduction of self-preoccupation.

Both Freud and Jung believed that one has to make things conscious before one can control those contents. Jung said "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." This means that you can't analyze your dreams as if they are 100% on your side and helpful to you. They will contain the inner world at the current level that it is, and reflect the kind of people that are influencing you in the environment as described above. Only through seeing the causes and effects of life decisions from the past, when you had a childish lack of skill, while allowing the feelings of loss, consequences, damage, and grief over the ruin of your life, then the mind can begin to process and let go of those maladaptive coping mechanisms that are the anti-thesis of learning. With strong defenses to protect against painful affect, this makes the psychoanalytic therapy process a long one that can last into years, depending on the patient. During this time there can be a lot of relapses into repetition.

To understand these complex inner workings involving relapse, it's good to survey psychoanalytic definitions describing how we take in objects and project them out onto others. When people cannot see how they are playing out relationships between their parents inside of themselves, that playing out will happen without it being seen by the subject. For example, Melanie Klein had a bad marriage with a lack of desire for sex with her husband, but she also noticed that her mother was somewhat frigid with her father in autobiographical accounts. That's an example of how both genetics and imitation work together to provide a coping skill level for the child that follows into adulthood if not made conscious. These objects have relationships in the inner world of the patient and they repeat with a sense of trying to figure out the links. In the Little Hans paper, Freud said of recurring material that "in an analysis, a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken."

The mind is full of past understandings of what was alluring, including those things that create internal conflicts related to consequences. Because the short-term mind can get carried away with one or the other, it has trouble assimilating them into a balance. When one is meditating, it's easy to see many opposites appear into consciousness as thoughts arise and pass away. For Freud, the meditative process is altered to make the unconscious conscious through free association so that one should be able to see projection and introjection via "the original pleasure-ego [wanting] to introject into itself everything that is good and [ejecting] from itself everything that is bad." Projection and introjection involve the outer and inner worlds of influence. With Incorporation, one is identifying good, bad, or inbetween objects, almost like the activity of a food tasting. With Internalization, or Introjection, outer relationships between people become internal relationships, including their conflicts and struggles, as well as their successful behaviors. The outer conflicts turn into inner arguments. Identification overlaps many incorporations and introjections, as well as group identifications. In the end, you can identify in whole or in part, with other people. Contradictions and disharmonies about what is actually good or bad from these disparate influences can reside in the Super-ego side by side and conflict with the Ego's attempts to work with reality. You can literally see the pathway on how to be somebody else and take in all those cultural contradictions and disharmonies, starting with sampling and culminating in habit.

Group Psychology - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (3/3): https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

In Klein's method, one has to clear up the inconsistencies in the Super-ego to allow smoother functioning and a therapeutic result. This can be seen by watching the conflicts play out in analysis. "My experience has confirmed my belief that if I construe the dislike at once as anxiety and negative transference feeling and interpret it as such in connection with the material which the child at the same time produces and then trace it back to its original object, the mother, I can at once observe that the anxiety diminishes. This manifests itself in the beginning of a more positive transference and, with it, of more vigorous play..." The importance of tracing internalizations back in time is to see how habitual they have become. Freud said that "…what is called an 'identification'—that is to say, the assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself. Identification has been not unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of another person. It is a very important form of attachment to someone else, probably the very first, and not the same thing as the choice of an object." In reality, the choice of an object later on is helped by understanding the positive and negative repercussions of the imitated behavior of the earliest days. When reminiscences of the past are colored with emotion, one can ask "where did I learn that? Is it harmful in some way? Is it truly my identity, or just an imitation from culture that is now a habit?" When therapists make conscious a patient's maladaptive reactions going back to when they were first used, there's at least a chance now to convince the patient that the allure of the old attachment to parents, and those archaic coping methods, are not worth repeating. Of course, anything discovered that is maladaptive may have an opposite and that can also provide constructive opportunities to develop something new that is unfamiliar. Even the word familiar, has the root word family in it. One can also work backwards from a desirable end point and seek out the realistic supports that make its manifestation possible. If there are behaviors that you are not doing, and neither did your parents, that's an example right there of making something unconscious conscious.

Regardless of the pathology, it comes down to behaviors or actions. When you do good things for yourself again and again it reinforces healthy identifications and builds the good object in the mind. When bad behaviors repeat, then the worst objects develop instead. This is why constructing better inner worlds can be a long process, especially for inner worlds that are more like hell-scapes. Work done by the therapist can be undone by poor choices. For example, a difficult kind of repeating patient would be that of a pedophile. In the 20th century, Emanuel Hammer described their inner worlds with certain patterns showing up for male pedophiles. "One of the most striking findings in all groups is a pervasive fear of heterosexual contact...showing hostility toward the mature female sex object...What causes this fear of the adult female sex-object?...[There are] unconscious castration fears, feelings of tremendous guilt in sexual areas and anticipation of awful punishment. The castration factors also appear as feelings that they are damaged and that they are not complete units within themselves. Their projective protocols are replete with responses reflecting fears and feelings of genital mutilation and injury, phallic impotency and inadequacy...Almost every one of the subjects exhibited, on the basis of psychological examination and/or psychiatric interview: (1) as a reaction to massive Oedipal entanglements, castration fear or feelings and fear of approaching mature females psychosexually; (2) interpersonal inhibitions of schizoid to schizophrenic proportions; (3) weak ego-strength and lack of adequate control of impulses; and (4) concrete orientation and minimal capacity for sublimation..."

In Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Kleinian Tradition, Jean Arundale describes a more modern inner world for this type. There is a "style of communication in perversions—the disturbances in symbolic functioning leading to concrete thinking, omnipotent autistic domination of the object, and excessive use of projective identification—as often underpinning the severe disturbance in object relationships, together with an interference in thinking and reality testing...[There is] inhibited genital sexuality, inadequate identifications, strong defences against depressive anxiety, and a sadomasochistic narcissistic organization. [There is a] use of the sexual object in the perversion as an 'as-if transitional object' directed against anxiety states in an act of reparation to the self, creating an infant self idolized by the mother...Pedophiles experience the wish for love and intimacy as annihilatory; they fear being taken over totally. It is felt to be too dangerous to make the identifications with parental objects, enabling development of the self structure to take place, because of a fear of invasion and possession. The pedophile, fueled by an inordinate degree of castration anxiety, defends against the catastrophe of fusion or possession by narcissistic withdrawal, self-preservative aggression, and the domination and control of objects such that they are given no independent existence. The pedophilic act bestows upon the child self the love that the pedophile was deprived of, without the necessity for a real relationship."

These case studies are full of repetition compulsion and Jean for example had a patient for eight years before the analysis had to break off due to the patient having to move far away. In her case study, the patient came to her after other failed treatments, including penile electroshock therapy. He "became disillusioned with the treatment and lost hope in it as a means of changing his sexual orientation. Up to this point, his sexual outlet was to masturbate on the weekends while smoking cannabis and having fantasies of boys. Incited by the news of a proposal in Holland to lower the age of consent for homosexuals, he began to hint that he was going to return to the active practice of pedophilia." After five years, the patient brought into therapy some of his dreams, providing a deeper glimpse into his inner world. One dream involved "terrifying female figures—monster women with tentacles or snakes for breasts, evil, wild-haired women with a missing arm or leg, waiting for him in a cave or at the end of a tunnel." As the therapy continued, his inner world improved very incrementally. Another dream found the patient "reconstructing a house and building new structures on dilapidated buildings." Later on "he dreamt of a child in prison who was being rescued, clearly his own child self becoming freer and making contact." Towards the termination of the therapy he regressed to older hatreds of adult sexuality. He said that "'sexual feeling between adults is perverse', and he had a dream of his parents having violent, disgusting sexual intercourse, smearing shit." This is the test of long therapy to show the limits of how much can change in an inner world that is so damaged.

In Repetitive and Maladaptive Behavior, by Brad Bowins, the author went back to Freud's death drive and reviewed experiences that other psychoanalysts had with repeating thoughts and behavior. "Freud indicated that there exists a demonic aspect derived from id resistance. He viewed the compulsion to repeat as exemplifying the typical resistance of the unconscious...Negative transference itself can be viewed as a specialized form of repetition compulsion. Clearly, from the therapist’s perspective repetition compulsion represents a path of resistance." Freud's instinct conservatism in the death drive was how it made the tension go down to zero and it aimed to do this in all experiences. To develop new skills, it requires some tension, and in some cases, a lot of tension. People have to tolerate criticism, failure, and they need strength in the inner world to persist in development. The nirvana principle does not like this tension. The comfort zone ironically may include many bad behaviors because there's less tension in repetition in these dark inner worlds than there is in acting in new ways. Skills also have a gradient and what is more exciting to the mind is what seems accessible, like finding low hanging fruit, and following the path of least resistance. The life drive has to harness introjection of part-behaviors, make a good object inside the inner world, and to make familiar what is unfamiliar, which is the Uncanny: the border between what is conscious in our development and what is unconscious and undeveloped, and also scary. Narcissists may work backwards from an ego-ideal, simulate the behaviors, display a pristine pure identity to get attention from others, but in all authenticity, there has to be some enjoyment of the results for a true introjection to take place. Identification has to be excited and interested in those good results for their own sake. Hence such a long process.

The therapist's self-esteem By Bethany Bray: https://www.longdom.org/open-access/therapists-sense-of-low-selfesteem-87240.html

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

For Klein, there are many ways for repetition compulsion to manifest in the lives of patients. One of the common manifestations for many is to return to past relationships that are toxic, and the motivation is often to master and or repair those situations into health, despite the fact that many of these situations cannot be repaired. Regardless, for some there remains a belief that one can find a way. This is even more doomed when the same pathological methods of relating are repeated. "Primitive reparation leads to further damage of the patient’s internal objects, thus creating a situation where any attempt to restore the object leads to new damage, hurt and guilt. This may be one of the mechanisms fueling the repetition compulsion which in its own right can be seen as a desperate and failing reparative attempt." This would apply to any situation when a poor choice is made coinciding with a lack of skill and development. In the the typical situation of the pathological relationship, it involves the Trojan Horse, where people try to repair the relationship by creating new positive projects to share pleasure in, but then returns the fear of abandonment, needs for power and control, and eventually myriad forms of sabotage begin to manifest. Consequences repeat and the inner object world remains the same. The character of repeating bad scenarios also has an element of punishment as well. It's like a challenge that needs mastery or punishment to satisfy the ego's need for vengeance or atonement. "We see here a repetition-compulsion derived from various causes, but influenced very much by the feeling of guilt demanding punishment."

Like with Freud, Melanie believed that there needed to be a lot of repeating and working through of the oldest material connected with shame for a deeper healing. "I believe that the pressure exerted by the earliest anxiety situations is one of the factors which brings about the repetition compulsion. When persecutory and depressive anxiety and guilt diminish, there is less urge to repeat fundamental experiences over and over again, and therefore early patterns and modes of feelings are maintained with less tenacity. These fundamental changes come about through the consistent analysis of the transference; they are bound up with a deep-reaching revision of the earliest object-relations and are reflected in the patient's current life as well as in the altered attitudes towards the analyst." I also believe that when patients can look at their parents and imagine what they went through in their parenting and all the deficits accrued, there has to be a solace with the understanding that those toxic parents have their own damaged objects and are suffering from the same results in life due to their self-sabotage.

Without the dispelling of the illusion that toxic relationships can be cured with strong love experiences, the temptation pushes the mind to go seeking for these cul-de-sacs of punishment and sabotage. "The impulsion to relieve the fear of internal and external dangers by means of proofs in the external world appears to me to be an essential factor in repetition compulsion. The more neurotic the individual is, the more are these proofs bound up with the need for punishment. The stronger the anxiety of the earliest anxiety-situations and the weaker the hopeful currents of feeling, the less favourable are the conditions with which these counterproofs are bound up. In such cases only severe punishment, or rather unhappy experiences (which are taken as punishment), can replace the dreaded punishment which is anticipated in phantasy." Stanley Rosner in The Self Sabotage Cycle, described how this experience can manifest, which happens especially when people are stuck for options and feel that they can't escape certain relationships, jobs, and cultures. A big part of therapy success happens when patients find better relationships and there are no guarantees that therapists can make in regards to those expectations. At some point the patient has to be able to make good choices for themselves without the need for handholding. It's pathological when "one lives with the fear that the trauma will recur and, therefore, it must be relived in order to gain that illusory sense of mastery and control." For progress to happen, "the intellectual awareness must be translated into changes in feelings, in self-perception, and in behavior for significant restructuring to take place." This is why people can intellectually learn something, but behavior responds to feelings more closely.

This eventually leads the patient to have to develop a certain amount grit and daring to face the wall of anxiety connected with making personal changes in life, and to stick with those changes until they feel familiar and newly comfortable. Betty Joseph explained it in a Kleinian way. "I am suggesting that the anxiety that these patients are struggling against is anxiety associated with dependence; that feelings of dependence and need stimulate intense envy and hatred towards the primary object, and therefore what these patients unconsciously fear is intense ambivalence, guilt, and depression. This they particularly fear since they have an inner conviction that their earliest aggression has reduced their internal object to an extremely perilous or destroyed condition—which they cannot face. Their method of avoiding this depressive anxiety is to avoid the experience of dependence by the use of the splitting, and projective and introjective identification combination of defences. These patients therefore get caught in an insoluble situation; they cannot face ambivalence and guilt and so cannot reach and work through the depressive position; they retreat from it by the use of defences belonging to the paranoid schizoid position, so that they are subsequently faced with manifold persecutions. Their particular method of splitting and fusion with the idealized object protects them from psychosis, but their inability to tolerate ambivalence, conflict, and therefore integration obviates the possibility of normality."

The depressive position comes about here from the feeling of guilt for damaging a good object in the past. The mind goes into a paranoid-schizoid position to see the world as persecutory and therefore it reacts in a schizoid way to stay safe and alone from the dangerous world. Projection happens to make one feel more secure in the world by spreading blame elsewhere, undervaluing people, and by overvaluing role models. People then have trouble advancing because the lack of self-love drains energy that is needed for adventure in relationships and work. The splitting starts at the beginning, with good and bad objects, based on judgments by the infant on the quality of parenting, and then the parents are introjected as proof that one is good or bad in an exaggerated identity. The patient then repeats past behavior, because to venture into the world for growth is to invite new criticism from others, and this can't be tolerated because there is a requirement of self-love to maintain a resilient learning mentality for success. For example, many people have to date scores or even hundreds of people before they find a suitable match for a long-term relationship. That can easily make people retreat into themselves through exhaustion. Difficult divorces, meaningless jobs, and accidents can make people want to run away from the world and from one's emotions, but ultimately, those who are healthy, can feel unpleasant emotions, and keep on with their goals and adjust them where necessary. They don't remain discombobulated for too long before continuing with healthy goals and reality testing. There's an inner core that says to oneself "I love you and believe in you."

An Aspect of the Repetition Compulsion by Betty Joseph: https://pep-web.org/search/document/IJP.040.0213A?page=P0221

Because the sense of self has trouble integrating the good and bad and seeing both a mixture of good and bad in others, there's a difficulty in seeing that mixture in new people. They become exaggeratedly good or bad right off the bat with constant disappointments when reality alternates between good and bad behavior. The Melanie Klein Trust provides a good summary. "Klein considers that both constitutional and environmental factors affect the course of the paranoid-schizoid position. The central constitutional factor is the balance of life and death instincts in the infant. The central environmental factor is the mothering that the infant receives. If development proceeds normally, extreme paranoid anxieties and schizoid defences are largely given up during the early infantile paranoid-schizoid position and during the working through of the depressive position...This 'binary splitting' is essential for healthy development as it enables the infant to take in and hold on to sufficient good experience to provide a central core around which to begin to integrate the contrasting aspects of the self. The establishment of a good internal object is thought by Klein to be a prerequisite for the later working through of the 'depressive position.'" When there isn't enough integration, meaning no core positive self, people end up not knowing their good side and therefore can't make it a core platform for exploring the world. When there are obstacles in the world, people need a platform to return to, to regenerate enough self-love to start again. When that is missing, there's an unrealistic demand for purity of the self, and the shame, mixed with good qualities, can't be accepted for what they are, which are experiences that allow for learning. There's a lack of reality towards human foibles that makes the severe super-ego over active and critical. It leads eventually to relationships that are mainly about mistrust, exploitation, defensiveness, power and control. Healthy relationships can control envy and intimate partners can share and enjoy pleasure together in the pleasure principle, and make common sense adjustments in the real world of obstacles with the reality principle. When choices constantly lead to conflict, it raises the question if the Oedipus Complex is operating again and influencing repetition. In a way, Psychoanalysis is a little like an atheistic version of The Bible. Instead of the Ten Commandments, the Oedipus Complex acts like a heuristic to foretell conflicts related to desires that cannot be shared. The resolution of the Oedipus Complex is to stake a free claim somewhere else, whether it refers to property, relationships, or vocations. To explore and find safe places is to drop the Paranoid-Schizoid position where the world is too dangerous and approach the depressive position. "If the confluence of loved and hated figures can be borne, anxiety begins to centre on the welfare and survival of the other as a whole object, eventually giving rise to remorseful guilt and poignant sadness, linked to the deepening of love. With pining for what has been lost or damaged by hate comes an urge to repair. Ego capacities enlarge and the world is more richly and realistically perceived."

Paranoid-Schizoid Position - Melanie Klein Trust: https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/theory/paranoid-schizoid-position/

Depressive Position - Melanie Klein Trust: https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/theory/depressive-position/

Brad Bowins provides some suggestions for therapists to help patients with the working-through process to prevent intellectual understanding from decoupling from feelings. Feelings and understanding together help a person to let go of the past:

Indicate to the patient how the repetitive behavior is maladaptive in regards to relationships, general functioning, or emotional states. For example, a woman allows men to repeatedly take advantage of her.

Explain to the patient how he or she is not linking distressing feelings arising from a traumatic occurrence to the cognitive components of the trauma.

To optimize motivation indicate that as a general rule conscious processing of fear and other disturbing emotions diminishes the pain, even though in the very short run the pain might seem worse.

Identify the relevant traumatic occurrences. In the case of the woman in the above example, her father failed to look out for her needs and aggressively criticized her as a child.

Clearly identify re-experiencing of the trauma, including thoughts, images, flashbacks, dreams, emotions, somatic sensations, and behavioral re-enactments. For example, the woman repeatedly perceives that she cannot have an impact on men and responds in a very passive way to any violation.

Identify specific avoidance defenses, such as identification with the aggressor or extreme isolation.

Work cautiously with the specific avoidance defenses as opposed to dismantling them right away. Remember that these defenses are a form of self-protection and must be relinquished gradually in a safe setting.

Help the patient clarify adverse trauma-related emotions. The woman in our example feels sad at the losses encountered in her relationship with her father, and is powerless to change a man’s behavior when it impacts negatively on her.

Focus on emotional suffering even though the patient will initially not understand at a feeling level how the pain is linked to the cognitive components of the traumatic experience. The patient might understand intellectually how this makes sense, but it will take time for the understanding to be felt.

Link these adverse emotions to the cognitive components of the traumatic occurrence. The woman needs to see how the treatment by her father left her feeling sad and powerless, and how these feelings contribute both to her perception that she is ineffectual and her passive response to violations.

Explain the grieving process with it’s various components, such as consciously re-experiencing the loss in terms of thoughts and emotions.

Help the patient identify trauma-related losses. In the woman’s case how she lost out on a close supportive relationship with her father.

Encourage the patient to grieve these losses within the safety of the therapeutic environment.

"When the patient has progressed to the common endpoint of grieving—acceptance—the repetitive maladaptive behavior, whether it take the form of re-experiencing or extreme avoidance defenses, should be significantly diminished or ended. Encouraging patients to immediately process disturbing feelings helps prevent a return of any repetitive maladaptive behavior and will make them less vulnerable to future trauma. Emphasize how grieving traumatic losses while somewhat painful in the present greatly diminishes suffering over time."

Rosner explains what patients have to accept as part of the process of developing when one is now an adult and out of the parenting dynamic. "[Successful therapy] means being able to accept oneself as a real human being with assets and liabilities, strengths and weaknesses. It means one must accept that one no longer needs to pursue grandiose goals, to aggrandize oneself at every turn. But it also means not seeing oneself as an impotent and downtrodden victim, either. It means accepting mortality and limitations...It means being able to make choices and to stand by them. It also means recognizing that they may not work out as we might have wished...It means encouraging the process of growing up and growing away, paving the way for feeling and being accountable...This requires a long-term commitment, frequent sessions which are essential to getting to core issues, dealing with well entrenched defenses and working them out. Intensive work of this type is not popular at the present time for many reasons. But it is a step in the direction of the kind of self-examination that is necessary to break such cycles and to help one to become self-determining, and whole, again. It is a necessary step in learning that life is filled with choices and that our choices need not be based upon repeating the same mistakes over and over again."

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

Part of the reason why psychoanalysis was and is so difficult, or even if we are talking about other modalities, is the repetition compulsion. It makes or breaks the therapy. It's the moment of truth. As seen in The 'Wolfman' Pt. 3, the patient goes back out into the pathological world and has to tolerate the same kind of stresses again. It's very easy to regress. Freud found that neurotics don't like reality in anyway shape or form, so the therapist's work is cut out for them as a marketing guru trying to sell reality to patients. That's why analysts want to emphasize feelings connected with intellectual knowledge. A lot of people know right from wrong but they don't do it because of those feelings. This is why analysts focus on creating a positive good object in the mind of the patient to replace the one that never developed with the original caregivers. How it's ideally supposed to work is that an analyst has to clear up mental distortions in the patient so they can assess reality better. Because the analyst is supportive of the patient, and believes in the patient enough to work with them, then the patient begins to believe in themselves. The purpose of focusing on reality is to help the patient's mind assess GOOD and BAD more accurately so they can make feeling choices more accurately, and hopefully with a long-term bent to prevent the addictive short-term brain from acting out. You could say roughly that the short-term brain has to feel the long-term consequences in anticipation, with realistic fervor and zeal, so as to enjoy a more broad and time cognizant reality. Realistic rewards in the real world, coupled with a healed mind, ideally makes a person autonomous to the point that they don't need a therapist and can exchange specialties in the economy with other people. They can learn from mistakes and grow autonomously. This is a huge amount of work if the patient is full of serious cognitive distortions, and on top of the fact that the real world is also full of complexity and that some life circumstances include insurmountable obstacles. Therefore, better environments have to be chosen that allow for people to learn. Totalitarian environments prevent growth into adulthood, and subjects never turn into citizens.

It has to be noted that, modern environments are hardly mastered by these therapists, and many therapists are still patients in much of their compartmentalized lives. In my experience, therapists are also not experts in politics, economics, and business, so many distortions in those arenas have to be cleared up by knowledge and expertise found elsewhere. There is so much work needed after therapy ends, and persistence would be a virtue to help patients find their way in the long-term. The reality is that people are not clairvoyant and they will not know all the steps in any new process or endeavour, so there has to be a tolerance for experimentation, trial, and error, for therapy to be considered a great success.

Because I'm an integrationist, so I love to integrate where possible, I find that meditation practice is a convenient form of self-therapy. Buddhism and Psychoanalysis is like peanut butter and jam for me. Both of them want you to FEEL the libido, or craving, in your body and use the body's awareness and knowledge to manifest change. Somatic knowledge with talking therapy also allows for the patient to make conscious their reactive modes, narrative cul-de-sacs, which include all kinds of tightening and contractions in the body coming from fight or flight responses to control. When you can make those things conscious you can consciously relax your muscles. You can learn how you are doing things to yourself and relax the little destinies. When those old modes are seen to be archaic and cloying, then new ways of being can appear fresh and interesting emotionally.

Regardless, there's always a hunger to see action from the analysand to manifest actual change. Are patients learning new skills? Are they choosing better social networks that are more positive and supporting? Are they reevaluating both undervalued and overvalued people in their lives? Are they finding work that is a good fit? Are healthy intimate relationships struck up? If not, are there healthy sublimations in the direction of hobbies, interests, leisure and pursuits? Some people find this kind of exploration interesting and what makes a real life, but others are pained by the effort. Sometimes action doesn't happen until the illusion of a zero effort life is given up. Even the therapist is putting in mental effort, and possibly introjecting vicarious trauma when walking in the shoes of the patient. As Adyashanti pointed out, there's a little bit of effort in just directing the attention span. So to be able to work somewhere, to make changes, and to learn new skills, there has to be some effort applied, with the knowledge that effort decreases when skills habituate and one enters Flow states. Those who stay stuck wanting an effort free living could be more examples of the death drive. Past generations couldn't survive without making enormous effort from time to time. As coach Heidi Priebe said, "we will never have a day in our life where we have finally wiped our hands clean of all problems, and there's not a single area left in our lives where there is no tension or nothing to resolve, so our absolute best shot at having a life that we actually want to show up to is picking the right types of problems that are aligned with the people we actually are...To have an escapist worldview means to hold tight to the belief that something we could do or figure out in the future will absolve us from pain forever. That's not an option for any of us and it never will be."

You Don't 'Lack Follow Through' - 5 Signs You're Self-Regulating Through Future Fantasies - Heidi Priebe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvHoF0tOsmM

With an object-memory that believes in you, whether that's Jesus or a therapist, the strength of self-belief can then be measured by how persistent it is when there are setbacks. People with a strong self-belief move from self-preoccupation to a ready state much sooner than others caught in low self-esteem. Eventually with all these efforts and changes, just like a sports team stuck in a slump, small wins provide more encouragement and outside confirmation of competence. Small wins can build and provide a memory framework of what works. When there are setbacks, the past can't be changed so only a learning mentality is syntonic with the life-drive and life expansion.

If there's any closure to the therapeutic process it's to understand in the Girardian way that all the objects and situations we want tend to have social elements to them. If we have artistic hobbies, we would really appreciate that others like our work. If people like to party, they want to have a good time with others. If we like team sports, we want to work well with a team, and even better, have an audience if we perform at peak levels. In the end, we want to have some semblance of family that encourages and believes in us, and wants the best for us, while we cheer on for their best and believe in them.

Lectures on Technique by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138940109/

Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237659/

Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946 - 1963 (2nd Edition) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237758/

The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Jane E. Milton, Penelope Garvey, Cyril Couve, Deborah Steiner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415592598/

The Language of Psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328139/

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections - Carl Jung: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679723950/

Hammer, E.F., Glueck, B.C. Psychodynamic patterns in sex offenders: A four-factor theory. Psych Quar 31, 325–345 (1957).

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Kleinian Tradition by Stanley Ruszczynski Sue Johnson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855751750/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#child psychology #countertransference #depressive position #Ego #Identification #internalization #incorporation #introjection #melanie klein #object relations #paranoid-schizoid position #projection #psychoanalysis #self esteem #sigmund freud #splitting #superego #transference #technique

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Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 4

Richard

Because Melanie Klein's method of psychoanalysis is full of insight, but not altogether systematic, she felt it would be good to provide a case study example to show how interpretations could affect children and change their style of play and show some therapeutic value. Her case study was of a child named Richard who was 10 years old. His symptoms ranged from hypochondria, depression, and avoidance, because the second world war had instilled fears into him about air-raids and bombs, and he also had a fear of other children and an inability to control his anger. He didn't get along with most people except for adult women where "he tried to impress them by his conversational gifts and to ingratiate himself in a rather precocious way." Breastfeeding when he was young only lasted weeks and was unsatisfactory. He was delicate and suffered from colds and illnesses. The mother "worried about any illness in Richard, and her attitude had some effect on his hypochondriacal fears. There was no doubt that Richard was rather a disappointment to her and that, although she tried not to show it, she preferred the elder brother, who had been a great success at school and had never caused her any worry. Though Richard was devoted to her, he was an extremely difficult child to live with; he had no hobbies to occupy him, was overanxious and over-affectionate towards his mother and, since he could not bear to be away from her, clung to her in a persistent and exhausting way; his hypochondriacal fears related to her health as well as his own." The father also left the raising of Richard predominantly to the mother. The older brother was friendly, but they had very little in common.

Melanie treated Richard in a playroom in Pitlochry, Scotland, and then moved him to a Welsh village in the countryside that was away from much of the bombing in WWII. "In my interpretations I tried, as always, to avoid (as I would with adults as well as with children) introducing any similes, metaphors, or quotations to illustrate my point. In practice, even when reminding a patient of former material, I never use technical terms...I make a point of using whenever possible the words that the patient has used, and I find that this has the effect both of diminishing resistance and of bringing fully back into his mind the material I am referring to. With Richard I had to introduce in the course of the analysis certain terms which were unknown to him, such as 'genital', 'potent', 'sexual relations', or 'sexual intercourse'. From one point onwards Richard referred to the analysis as 'the work.'"

In this work, the interpretations Melanie provided, had the goal of illuminating the transference, which is how a reaction from an earlier relationship is being used to predict the behaviors of others. This brings to mind the dichotomy of reality vs. distortion and Klein aimed at getting the transference mistakes traced back as far as possible to their origin. In Richard's case, it was back to the earliest time that it happened: A fear that daddy was doing something bad to mummy at night. At the age of ten Richard knew that "babies grew inside [his mother], that she had little eggs there and Daddy put some kind of fluid into her which made them grow." Probably to be more general about children at this time in the 20th century, they were more aware of the attention that their desired parent received, and they were more fearful of the aggression that they might experience in response to competition for that attention. Being in the Oedipus Complex is like being a third wheel. Good and bad experiences lead to a worldview and then get transferred onto other authority figures, who are also fought over for attention by others, and these expectations manifest as more predictions of behavior or rehearsals on how to respond to those powerful people. Our worldview gets shaped by these experiences, especially if they repeat, and then we go into different environments and experience conflict when we act on these outdated expectations, like using a hammer and thinking everything is a nail.

Case Studies: 'Little Hans' - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu93b-case-studies-little-hans-sigmund-freud.html

In this case, Richard was transferring the good behavior of parents onto world leaders, like Churchill, and the bad behavior onto Hitler, because this was 1941. There were also projections where Richard was aware of his own aggression and therefore would worry about retaliation if he acted on his violent urges. The playacting of roles often happens when there is a desire to wield the power of authority figures as a way to avoid helplessness, and then an identity with an aggressor can arise. Children also apply a splitting of "good" and "bad" characteristics onto themselves, leading to feelings of guilt, avoidance of guilt, manic defenses, and in some cases, attempts to pass off the guilt onto others. In these cases, the splitting has yet to be integrated so that people can be seen to be more realistically as a mix between good and bad, and to also accept that one has the capability of being both good or bad, depending on the situational pressures. There's also an envy at play when competitors who were considered bad before are forgiven after displaying good behavior for a period time. Forgiveness is hard to fathom when the onlooker is stuck in splitting. Splitting judgments are typically perceived as forever judgments.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v435lsq-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-2.html

The reason why the sexuality is so emphasized in such a blunt way by Melanie, has to do with the feelings children have related to the sexuality. Since many children have little understanding of biological sexuality at this age and time in the past, their early sexual theories, like children being born out of the anus, and penises dislodging and remaining in the vagina, etc., should really describe more the jealousy children have towards the amorous attention that parents give each other. The biological reality of sex, and the propriety of incest taboos, can be realistically described so as to get the young child to effectively start looking for better object choices than their parents, but of course these kinds of jealousies can reappear anytime there is a new fight over scarce partners and attention. There can also be projections that shift blame when loved objects are perceived to be the cause of the desire, like it was their fault for being desirable, like a returning of love being perceived as an entitlement.

Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html

Richard's fears, related to conflicts with others, also connected to his desires and manifested in dreams and play scenarios. Melanie interpreted "Richard's concern about the disruption in his family if his desires to have Mummy all to himself were to be satisfied...[which caused] the strength of his feelings of persecution: he had said he felt surrounded by hundreds and thousands of enemies, and quite powerless." It's hard for adults, let alone children, to desire objects that are free when desires are mainly mimetic. If you have to imitate to learn what desires exist in the world, you'll likely bump into inappropriate objects that cannot be shared and suffer the consequences of envy, resentment, oppression, and repression.

What can be unconscious is the symbolism in dreams related to these conflicts, as well as a gradual understanding of boundaries and ownership to move more towards better object choices. Boundaries for oneself also allow one to be helpful towards others in protecting their boundaries, and ideally there is reciprocity if these are good family or friend situations. An ideal end result of therapy is for patients to pursue their interests and desires with others while at the same time making object-choices that are free from rivalry. This is why the Oedipus Complex is like an atheistic version of the Ten Commandments.

Crossing those boundaries leads to castration fears related to any prohibitions and threats of punishment coming from parents or other authority figures. When there is acceptance of how inappropriate a relationship a child has for one parent or another, that acceptance can lead to reparation and a desire to choose a different object. Positive social attention that is suffused with a clear conscience can then be added to the child's overall well-being and happiness. Social savoring was connected to emotional feeding for Melanie Klein, going all the way back to breastfeeding. Psychoanalysis is successful when wrong object choices are abandoned and replaced with more peaceful non-conflictual ones. To really be in reality is to realize that judging actual behaviors is the only way to see clearly the real mix of good and bad in a person and it allows one to notice development in a person and as well to notice any compartmentalization or hypocrisy. The granular detail allows people to notice if there's enough good in a person to negotiate with and still remain in their lives.

Any relief the child experiences from this kind of analysis then can turn into a positive transference towards the helpful analyst. One can also see this play out in pride towards nations and attribution of parental behaviors to others of the same nationality, or culture. National feeling is connected with shared values of a citizenry. Emotions demonstrated in therapy by the analysand, or drawing exhibits for example, like those of Richard, can be linked to inner conflicts, or inner peace, depending on the progression of the treatment. Peaceful drawings, for example, are about good relationships and sharing pleasure in a way that demonstrates social problem solving. The child improves as they see the good in themselves, and are better able to see the good in others, so new relationship negotiations can start. Eventually the child, or adult in analysis, can now connect the good in all the people in his or her life as well as the good helpful objects inside him or herself. This increases the belief that there is good in the world and it relaxes the feelings of idealization, devaluation, mercilessness, and persecution.

The idealization, or over-valuation also increases when the good in another is felt to be lost, and devaluation when there are punishments and defenses erected against the pain of that loss. A realistic appraisal of good and bad behavior reduces the idealization and devaluation so that distortion decreases. When envy and jealousy decrease, so does the distortion even further. Also if one feels there is good in oneself, losses of goodness in others leaves one not empty but with good enough self-esteem to find new relationship arrangements. One grieves, but continues to believe in love enough to pursue other relationships. The ego can now assert itself in negotiation, because now there are good aspects in people that one can see is worth connecting to, and the super-ego has already quieted down the alarm, rehearsals, and catastrophizing. By finding commonality with enemies, a compassion can arise when those formerly "bad objects" are found to be damaged. For Melanie, this is a sign of the life instinct increasing in power. The life instinct leads to negotiation, reparation, development, building, and creating. Contrary to Freud's idea of the Nirvana Principle and the death drive, Melanie construed the death drive as being more related to stress, internal conflict and fragmentation.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

Children can't choose who their parents are, so they have to imitate the good aspects of their parents, if there are enough of them, and then do the same with others in the community to fill out what is missing. It's about developing skills to trade good with good; to have faith and trust that good can be reciprocated by others. This can be seen in businesses that have to have faith in their suppliers and customers. In intimate relationships, the faith is based on the belief that there are enough good behaviors in the person to make emotional-social exchanges with them in the long-term.

In conflicts over scarcity of love and attention, patients can regress into further splitting and distortion. Fear heightens the labels of good and bad, which is fine if labeled accurately for real behaviors, and especially if those behaviors haven't been deterred as of yet. Habitual aggression and frustration are reasonable in dangerous environments, but are distorted and inappropriate in peaceful environments. The world is full of opposites and childhood strategies need to change and adapt if there is to be any growth. The reason why so many interpretations lead back to the parents, is because the parents are modeling their level of skill and the child's sampling is limited by that environment. You can only imitate what is accessible to you.

Fears that inhibit

For Melanie, the analysis doesn't start with immediate attempts at play, but a simple exploration of what is bothering the analysand. She started the conversation with Richard by saying "I know why you are here..." allowing him to explain his predicament, which was a fear of other boys on the street and going out by himself, and it was why he hated school. He was also cognizant of the war and very angry about Hitler's invasion of Poland. There was a starting acknowledgement that Hitler was bad to Austrians, while he was also an Austrian, as well as Melanie. She had a world map in the playroom that allowed Richard to roam over and make freely associated judgments against the Axis or towards any perceived betrayal by Allies.

Melanie asked about Richard's worries over his mother when he couldn't think of anything else that bothered him at that moment. He was worried about his mother's health, which was sometimes bad, and he felt "lonely and deserted" before going to bed. He would have nightmares of a tramp coming in the middle of the night to kidnap his mother, which made Richard attempt to save her by scalding the invader with hot water from a boiling pot. Melanie already at this time started with her interpretations, and in this case she made a link between Hitler's behavior to others and this tramp. She then brought up the possibility that he might be afraid of what his parents were doing in the bedroom with their genitals. As he looked perplexed she found out that he didn't have words for going to the bathroom at this time in his childhood, which she had to introduce with rudimentary vocabulary like "big job" and "little job." He then told her his theories about sexuality as described above. Melanie eventually introduced the words "sexual relations" and "sexual intercourse" for what he described.

She also interpreted that, even though he felt that his dad was nice to his mom, that the reason why he didn't remember his father in the nightmares as a candidate to protect his mother, was in fact that he had more ambivalent thoughts about him than he led on. This "Hitler-tramp" was standing in the place of Richard's father. He was impressed with the interpretation and appeared to have accepted it. When Richard could see his dad in the daytime he had confirmation of his good behavior, but when he couldn't see him at night, theories would arise and transferences involving Hitler, plus nearby bombings that shook and broke windows, it was now possible for him to believe that terrible things were happening to his mom. This was a form of splitting for Melanie to make his father bad, especially at night. Melanie was looking for confirmation in Richard's attitude that the interpretations were affecting his behavior. He did reject some interpretations, but Melanie focused on his attitude at the end of the first session as being "friendly and satisfied." Already Melanie could see a displacement made by Richard to prevent the father from having a bad reputation in his eyes. By saying that his father was good in the daytime, he could accept that he must be all good, but at night, he could get relief from guilt by blaming the tramp instead for taking attention away from his mother.

Unnecessary guilt

Richard's later worries about planet collisions and countries at war were interpreted as transferences coming from object constellations in his mind in place of the family. In more concrete terms he felt jealous of the attention his brother got from his mother, but he didn't feel that it was inappropriate for the mother to behave in this way, because his brother wasn't entirely undeserving. In regards to Richard's references to Ribbentrop's lies, that Britain was the aggressor in WWII, Melanie interpreted that as being about how Richard worried that his envy or jealousy would make him out to also be an aggressor. Fears of retaliation repeat again and again in this case study. Hatred instead for Hitler or the "tramp" felt better because it didn't have the ambivalent feelings connected with hating his blameless father. When there are roles in the family that Richard didn't like, he could create new relations to get what he needed. In this case it was his spaniel dog Bobby. Melanie interpreted the love he gave for Bobby as a way to be in Mummy's place, and the love the dog returned was the love he wanted from Mummy.

The complexity that Melanie went through in this case study exemplifies the malleability of transference. In case studies like this one, there is usually a trauma of some kind, like his Mummy went through, when she was run over by a car, and there's now an effortful rumination to reenact the trauma in different scenarios to prevent those things from happening in the future. Rehearsals are distorted when they are too omnipotent and put to much onus on the dreamer who has little control over circumstances. These transferences include the level of skill and imagination that the child has at the time, which can increase the distortion with a child's predictable ignorance. Children sometimes feel helpless to prevent accidents and misfortune and take the blame upon themselves with this type of magical thinking. There was an example that Melanie interpreted with a link between Richard's beloved Granny dying as well as an older dog before Bobby that had to be put down. There's was a sense of guilt that those two events were connected and traced back to Richard. His mistrust of himself also appeared in transference towards Melanie with a worry that something bad could also happen to her through his own fault.

Projection

One of the challenges for readers of psychoanalytic case studies is that analysts appear to over-interpret everything. Readers require enough openness to realize that this is a 10 year old child that is being analyzed. Even adults who have unconscious memories from the past, that past is archaic in logic as well. From the point of view of Melanie, Richard's worries about Britain vs. the Germans can be translated as being about the marital bed. For an adult to make these connections it would be moronic, but not for an adolescent or child. From the point of view of a young child's small world, the news of the day can be a transference playground where current family worries can be projected on. Children are not likely to make accurate projections like that of a retired general analyzing military maneuvers, though adults are sometimes happy to use terms like "Mother Earth", "Motherland", "Fatherland", etc. It's clear that interpretations by a child can be more or less realistic at a surface level, but the motivations behind the surface usually involve deep fears and catastrophizing about what might happen if personal and embarrassing material is revealed. It's much easier to process shameful thoughts using the news of the day, or by watching topical movies, or playing with toys, so that the thinking process can be explored through fiction to avoid blaming or shaming that comes from airing dirty linen in public.

The unconscious usually includes more superstitious material than found in conscious thinking, and so guilt and blame may appear in the mind of a child as something that may lead to instant punishment or death, for example, which Melanie thought was representative of omnipotent thinking. By transferring unpleasant thoughts to a weaker object, like a toy, or a pet, they can be disguised. For example, Richard identified himself with his dog Bobby, because Bobby liked to takeover the vacant armchair that was his Daddy's favorite and leave little room for him when he returned and wanted to sit down again. For Melanie, this was an example of projective identification, which is an ability to put oneself in the shoes of another to resonate with others and their personal wishes, or to overlap one's wishes against the will of another, in another omnipotent thought process. How that kind of projection can betray one's intentions is if it is based on knowledge that "it takes one to know one." Again, there are many kinds of projections, but that is the one that mystifies people because of the jarring hypocrisy.

With projections that reveal one's hypocrisy, there is often a lack of reflection because the mind can only take in so many thoughts at once, and because it unconsciously knows familiar strategies, it projects them, and predicts the behaviors of others with that knowledge, while the mind is too overloaded to reflect on one's own identical behavior. A positive transference is about identifying a person being cooperative and a negative transference the opposite. If one is desperate enough, one can accept any means necessary to achieve a goal, because the end justifies the means, and if an enemy is blocking one's goals, it's easy to judge with a double standard. We are more sympathetic towards our goals, especially when people, objects, or situations, cannot be shared. Cooperative people appear all good, because the ends justify the means again, and conflicting people are all bad, for the same reason, and that's why standards are not fair until adjudication is administered by a fair body or court. I think the panic, and the importance of whatever goal is chosen, leads to blindness of this hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is also likely when a undesirable behavior is so common that many people are equally guilty. Also, if I know right from wrong, and demand good behavior from others, this knowledge may not be strong enough compared to my resistant bad habits. Like a doctor who smokes, the ideal behavior is simply a goal for society at this point. It hasn't been acted on yet.

Another reason why projection may be used is that it can be a defense mechanism. One can feel not like the odd man out when one's bad behavior is seen in others. By not being the only one, there's a chance that others are doing the same bad behavior, and maybe there is a chance they can take all the blame, or they can be allies in the future if the analysand has a desire for the bad behavior to continue. If there's a policing function that one wants to avoid, having a great many others who do the same behavior makes the policing action untenable. They would have to arrest everyone. For example, if everyone else is speeding, and getting what they want, which is to get some place faster, then if I'm caught speeding, my predictable excuse would be that it's human to speed. Why should they get away without a speeding ticket and not me? One could also avoid this problem by speeding, but put the spotlight on others by not speeding as much as the lead car. Let them get all the policing attention.

Goals are also blinding. If my goal is to eat a lot at the expense of someone else, I can't feel the cravings of another person, only my own. Conversely, if someone else acts just as greedy and eats portions that I crave, I can't easily empathize with another who has the exact same cravings as me. People can't taste their own medicine when it comes to their own goals. You would literally have to imagine yourself in your opponent's shoes and manufacture a simulated craving with the internal imagery to balance out this bias. That takes an extra leap of energy and cognitive load to process what others may be thinking. It is inevitable that many people will avoid this kind of reflection. Before one accuses others, it may be wise to make sure that one is not doing the same behavior.

With accurate interpretations from an analyst, anxiety usually increases along with denial in the analysand, until it evaporates with acceptance. That acceptance ideally moves the patient onto problem-solving thoughts to aim goals in better directions. Later on in the analysis of Richard, Melanie found that the working out of thoughts that he had about himself and others eventually came to a partial solution by entertaining the idea of his dog also having a family. She interpreted this as an early thought for Richard to also start a family of his own so he could be independent and be free of the guilt arising from the Oedipus Complex.

Another way Melanie found to detect Richard's fixation on his parents was in the form of humor. When having fun with friends and snow sledges another kid crashed into an adult couple and Richard laughed. Melanie interpreted that as an Oedipus wish fulfillment against his parents and a displacement on these strangers. Much like displacement on toys, or consumable entertainment, these wishes could be secretly enjoyed at the expense of these strangers. When children, or even adults are in a situation where other people are obstacles to one's goals, the mind is unconsciously trying to find a way of removing them to feel relief. Movies in particular love to exploit object relations by setting up good and evil splitting, and satisfy audiences when the representatives of complete evil are destroyed. More refined forms of storytelling involve making characters complex, nuanced, and mixed with both good and bad aspects. When one is frustrated with life it's very easy to turn to fiction stories or movies to find vicarious relief. This process can be more simply imagined by seeing oneself as a protagonist and people who are obstacles as antagonists. Others can more or less be cooperative allies or enemy confederates. You can then add complexity to the mental layout by looking at the analysand's roleplaying and behavior. These play scenarios can also demonstrate object-memories with higher or lower power differentials in the analysand's environment. Splitting at first denotes the stress experienced with these people as obstacles but relief happens when there is enough good found in people that can cooperate with the good in the analysand.

Richard at the time was processing Melanie's interpretations of Churchill being the "Good Daddy" and Hitler representing the "Bad Daddy." As a healthy adult, there are ways of working with good aspects of a person while navigating their bad side, especially when new goals are chosen to free up conflicts of interest. Instead for 10 year old Richard, it was more likely that he had thoughts about his mom's accident and how his inappropriate wishes towards his parents magically caused this serious accident. Interpretations that clear up magical thinking and guilt, in these kinds of situations, can be done by reminding the analysand that these were thoughts that were never acted upon. When that kind of rumination ceases, the analyst should be looking for signs of relief, renewed vigor in the playroom, and a more positive transference. Sometimes anxiety remains, because the interpretation is still being denied for a period of time. At this time in the analysis, Richard was showing some of that kind of anxiety, but a positive transference to Melanie still remained. Positive transferences can last a long time as long as the analysand has found some gains to build on early in the analysis.

Interpretation anxiety

In the fourth session, Richard seemed resistant to some of the interpretations and started asking Melanie about her life, family, friends, and their vocations. Melanie did give some candid answers, including about her husband who passed away, but she felt that it was best not to do this and it often left her with regret when she did. In this example, Melanie saw some jealousy appear about the good things in her life which attracted an envious transference originally directed at his own family. It was the same jealousy that he had when others got more attention than he did. This was a link for Melanie on how patients have epistemophilia, a pleasure to know, which connected with his uncertainty about Melanie's trustworthiness. This also appeared when he looked at the world map and talked about his uncertainty towards Melanie's Austria, and also Russia. Without new experiences, the mind has to ask questions about other people's experiences to try to improve predictions, otherwise people regress and predict based on their own experiences with family and culture. When dealing with authority figures, both children and adults also want to know about the authority figure so they can make their own judgments as to whether they should be taken seriously or not. The only positivity connected with the jealousy is that the patient believes the authority figure has enough status to be taken seriously. The danger of that positivity comes from patients becoming dependent on authority figures. The jealousy in this case continued with Richard and extended to another patient of Melanie's he knew about who was older than him. Being young he felt left behind and ashamed that he was being treated in a lowly playroom instead of in an adult analysis room. It connected to his need to have positive regard in competition with others. These kind of comparisons can also motivate patients with shame towards a reaction formation to imitate authority figures, to try to use them as a role model, to attain power, and attract that very same positive regard.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v3vru21-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-1.html

Richard's uncomfortableness predictably increased when Melanie explained sex education topics to him and interpreted his deeper intentions. These interpretations were making him want to leave some of the sessions early, but he stayed respectfully until the end every time. Melanie felt at this time that there was a sexual transference beginning. Again, any inappropriate desires could fuel more guilt and worries about punishment. These same fears of a punishing tramp-daddy towards his desire for his mom were now transferred towards Melanie. He felt that consummation of his wishes could lead to retaliation from his father or brother. The fears then would go spiraling towards catastrophizing that in the end he wouldn't be taken care of or protected by anyone. His fear of enemies extended towards doctors, especially when he could recount some details of his traumatic circumcision. Being helpless towards the doctor was like being helpless towards the father. A castration anxiety. Complaining about his hatred for operations, dentists, and ether, Melanie could see Richard was beginning to feel relief through his venting and his experience of comfort that a sympathetic person was listening with interest.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v4l5hvn-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-3.html

Positive transference

His relief led to an increased positive transference towards Melanie by the next session. It was easier for him now to talk about his castration anxiety, which was a symbol of his need to be competent to be worthy of his mother and Melanie. At this time, Richard was beginning to integrate good and bad aspects in people little by little. When looking at pictures and the brown clock, Melanie associated his dislike of the color brown with feces, and his hatred of other children stood for his dad, in the sense that they were just more suitors competing for his mother. Part of the reason for so many interpretations, is the assumption that everyone lies, especially about shameful wishes. This reality means that interpretations have to go beyond protests to the contrary from the analysand. It still leaves open that the analyst can be wrong part of the time. The tell on how right or wrong an interpretation is, is if the child is able to find relief after an interpretation. This usually has a pattern of discomfort and embarrassment before acceptance and relief.

Case Studies: The 'Ratman' - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

Beyond news stories about countries and their involvement in WWII, Melanie's world map became a Rorschach example, where shapes of countries could be good or bad based on how they conformed to past good or bad experiences in Richard's life. The oscillation between positive and negative for Melanie has a manic-depressive bent, where negative topics appear depressing, but then positive things, like his looking forward to a visit to London, would provide a manic escape. Dwelling on guilt, negativity, or shame over aspects of oneself fuels a desire for escape into novelty or addiction. These are also patterns that many therapists feel is a signal to the missing aspects of one's life that one is running away from. While in this positive mood Richard was starting to move physically closer to Melanie and asked to put his feet on the bar of her chair, which Melanie of course found inappropriate. He realized this and began talking about what he liked and disliked in Melanie's room which she interpreted as displaced feelings about her. He continued with more epistemophilia, wanting to know about Melanie's other patients and how he compared to them, but he understood why she professionally couldn't reveal their details. The danger of positive transferences with analysts is that any irregularity on the part of the analyst can be construed as a possible abandonment, like when Melanie forgot to bring her key one day and had to go back home to get it.

Unconscious controlling

Dreams are another avenue for analysis and can reveal deep worries about potentially unpleasant life changes, like worries about his mother having a rival baby. At this time, Richard showed some early signs of the depressive position where he began to feel sorry for France, despite some of their abandonment towards the allies. He could see that they may have had not much choice in the matter. Melanie then interpreted that this reduction of splitting was also applying to his family. He was also starting to see more of his darker side in an example of projection where Richard hated a girl with protruding teeth that Melanie felt reminded him of his desire to bite. The hatred of oneself, for maybe having characteristics that one hasn't gotten a handle on yet, is defended against by outwardly displacing those characteristics towards others. Knowing what is dangerous about yourself makes you afraid that others can be dangerous in the same way. Melanie interpreted Richard's mother's womb as being displaced onto the playroom. He wanted to control the womb and it's rivals like he wanted to control his play environment. Slowly he began to associate the lovely countryside when he was out in the garden as the good side of his mother and there was a reduction of fear towards the possibility of rival babies. Hinted in here of the depressive position is that one can look at people less like a rivalry and find something positive about allowing for others the chance to develop their potential, because one can enjoy those potentials and successes like enjoying a nice day. A nice day can be shared as well, and if one can find a new relationship situation for oneself, there's no need to engage in rivalry. In this early stage, Melanie worried that this was still a manic defense in that this positivity was treated as an escape rather than a full acceptance. There is always a need in people to find usefulness in others to make alliances and it takes time to accept the aspects of people that are less cooperative. It takes time to accept the independence of others.

Melanie's interpretations of Richard's thinking eventually explored the possibility of his getting what he wanted from his mom without hurting her, and since his daddy and potential rival babies would be in the way, she might get hurt in the process of his emotional feeding. Melanie made a link with his thoughts of how Hitler could be removed without having to attack Germany. These kinds of thoughts lead to an understanding of inappropriateness in relationships and nudge the child closer and closer to wanting an object choice free of conflict. He also accepted that Germanic peoples included good things like Mozart. Just like there is sometimes good weather, life is not without opportunities for good combinations.

Art therapy

As talking and exploring the playroom was becoming boring, Richard became more interested in drawing. The first drawing included U-boats and names. Again, you have to imagine you are a child and know very little about how war is conducted and are projecting your life onto these objects. Melanie noticed a split in the ego where Richard and his older fellow analysand John were identified as the German U-boats, and his family were the English, represented by the Truant and Sunfish, but with an understanding that outside of his play he was not really against his parents. Melanie felt that John stood for Richard's brother Paul. He also showed his liking for U 72, because 2 is an even number, and for example, when pretending to hunt rabbits he could not know how one could share an odd number of 7 rabbits between 2 people. Melanie felt that was Richard wanting to share equally with John to avoid conflict. Melanie also felt that John was treated as an ally of Richard's against her because they were both in analysis together. U 102 was an object Richard also wanted to identify with and Melanie pointed out how much bigger he wished to be than his parents, the Truant and Sunfish. Wanting to be bigger was a result of his need to master his fear of counter-attacks. This also mirrored his desire to usurp is father's place.

Of course the way to track how the transferences are working is through feelings. How people predictably become labeled as obstacles is through frustration with them, and anticipation of an obstacle is often enough to cause those feelings to arise. They then can meld with any new faces and situations that are in the current environment, regardless of accuracy. Distortions are found when those 0bject-relations display much better behavior than the transference predicts. It's like remembering tactics and scenarios for further use with new situations, whether those tactics or strategies are helpful or maladaptive. Melanie pointed out that Salmon and U 6 were more representations of Richard and John. The anxiety and tension appeared when he didn't know who would attack first. Richard also pointed out that the periscope from Sunfish was inside Truant, and this represented sexual relations between the parents. Melanie elaborated how Richard was viewing himself as an enemy U boat and it also represented his fear of the damage he could do to his mom and how his wish for an inappropriate relationship, or any inappropriate relationship, could lead to conflict and retaliation. This also included his desire to neatly share the rabbits, which were represented by the parents that were shot, divided, and devoured. John, as his brother Paul, was only a sometime ally, because he only sometimes helped Richard against his nurse, who was also projected onto Melanie.

In Drawing 2, Richard was U 10, which was penetrated by both his parents' periscopes from Truant, and this time Salmon. He was also afraid of the damage he could do to his parents by being larger and dominating above them so he offset that by demonstrating how a swastika could be easily changed to a union jack, showing a reparative desire to change his U boat attitude towards his parents.

In Drawing 3, Richard wanted to add color and make a "lovely ship." This time he wanted the underwater to have nothing to do with the upper part. The fish was his mom and the starfish a baby, which was interested in the plants. Melanie felt that the ship was a corrected form of the parents with two smoke funnels representing their genitals. He hadn't seen a girls genital so chose to make her funnel thinner. Melanie interpreted Richard as the starfish and the plant was his mother's breast. When he wanted what he wanted and the parents prevented him, his identity flipped to the U boat that was dangerous to the ship. This was extrapolated to John as well, and directed against the special attention he got from Melanie. She saw that the analysis was treated as a form of emotional feeding for Richard. The greed, jealousy, and aggression were underwater because they were best left unconscious to avoid shame and embarrassment. His conscious mind was wanting harmony demonstrated by the lovely ship. Richard accepted Melanie's interpretation of a deeper unconscious and expressed relief.

When Richard was asked by Melanie if she could keep the drawings, he allowed it because he could return and see pictures when he wanted. Melanie's interpretations further confirmed to her that Richard's roleplaying was internalizing external relationships, making an inner world for him. Strategies found in external relationships could be incorporated (sampling), introjected (preferences), and identified with, (a habit of relating). A lot of a person's identity can be soaked up by the environment based on seeing the emotional feeding of others and wanting the same things they want. This led to competition with others to dominate the feeding objects, symbolized by the breast, but could include any objects that provide pleasure. Outer conflicts then could turn into inner conflicts when the superego conscience absorbs the external prohibitions. In the earliest stages of life, it's about dominating the breast as well as the mother who shows independence by controlling the availability of it. Splitting arises when the good and bad aspects of the mother are difficult to predict. Paranoia arises when the breast is deemed to be unreliable, and reparative feelings manifest when an imperfect mother is deemed to be mostly trustworthy, and patience grows in the baby.

Slow integration

In this session, Richard was sad because he was worried that his drawings would be seen by his mother and he magically associated her current sickness with his drawings, and this was especially true because she got indigestion from bad salmon. Richard wanted to make a new copy of the drawing for his mother, because he didn't want to begin favoring Melanie over his mother, like with his past experiences with his nurse. The drawing ended up being different where the fish represented the parents warding off the torpedo. The second U boat was Paul. Richard readily defended that his torpedo was not going directly to the ship. The two funnels in the new picture were now equal, as if to make the parents more aligned and respectful of each other. The red color of the funnels was representative of their injuries, and they also represented the two canaries he had at home that were going bald. Richard mentioned that his father was also going bald, but he said he liked him and liked the fact that his father was exempt from the war conscription. To Melanie, the picture represented repression from his parents trying to prevent harm and Richard's suppression, who also wanted to prevent himself from being harmful.

Richard's play continued to be a mixture between good and bad, but his jealousy was waning and he was becoming more happy for his parents for loving each other. Sexuality was still dangerous to him, as exemplified in Drawing 5, but his gratefulness for Melanie's interpretations overlaid a mother transference onto her. He went back to color in Drawing 6 where the Nelson was installed with portholes, which represented babies, as well as the many starfish. The octopus represented his dad's genital being removed from his mother and the many babies were a result of her feeling better. Both the analysis was being felt as a feeding as well as the portholes allowing access to the mother. The "blazing fury" of the starfishes was Richard's desire to replace the father so he could begin to feed on his mother. The swastika and union jack were melding together in the picture as well as in his super-ego.

In Drawing 7, Richard was the attacking boat above, and Paul was the bad ally below in the snoring boat, because as Richard pointed out, Paul snored. The mother was protecting the father against Richard and so he was depressed because his mother was betraying him for his father, so a reparation couldn't be attempted. Richard also described the sharp points on the starfish as teeth. During this time, Richard was still worried about kids in the neighborhood and started relaying dreams he had. One time he was dreaming about a German kid who he yelled at. He also frightened away the Japanese Matsuoka who appeared friendly at first but then turned into an enemy. He also imagined himself as an armored car that the Germans chased out of Berlin, but they eventually ran away when he spit fire at them. These dreams happened at the time when his family abandoned him for a short period of time.

As the sessions continued on, Richard was beginning to differentiate Melanie from his mother. She felt that keeping a good object copy of herself in his mind would be helpful because objects could endure when the analyst was not around. If an influence is helpful, then it means the object in the mind will also be helpful. The analyst is in the position of being helpful in that they help the analysand understand their own unconscious. Even if there is some discomfort there, a learning mentality can arise because the conscious mind can accept the limitations of the unconscious and a lack of control over one's unconsciousness reduces blame for mistakes. It's less about being pure and more about acceptance, learning, and hope. "It is in fact striking that very painful interpretations could have the effect of reviving hope and making the patient feel more alive. My explanation for this would be that bringing a very deep anxiety nearer to consciousness, in itself produces relief. But I also believe that the very fact that the analysis gets into contact with deep-lying unconscious anxieties gives the patient a feeling of being understood and therefore revives hope. I have often met in adult patients the strong desire to have been analysed as a child. This was not only because of the obvious advantages of child analysis, but in retrospect the deep longing for having one’s unconscious understood had come to the fore. Very understanding and sympathetic parents—and that can also apply to other people—are in contact with the child’s unconscious, but there is still a difference between this and the understanding of the unconscious implied in psycho-analysis."

Because both the internal environment and external have to work together for a therapeutic result, there are times when the external is easier to understand and vice versa. For example, when there was a fear of a German invasion of England, Richard felt that it was easier to fight Hitler externally. This could also be a source of scapegoating, when internal difficulties can only find relief in the external. External confirmations could also be a little obsessive for Richard. He often needed confirmation of his mother's whereabouts to prove her safety when internal representations of her were more in danger.

Denial can also happen when internal objects are preserved and made to spread goodness to feel better internally, even if the external world is not actually getting better. Of course, if the external world gets better, a lot of the internal world can too, if relationship problems are permanently resolved. For Melanie, all the perceived external relationships also included what could be deciphered of other people's intentions, and their inner objects, so that identity is like a strong vacuum cleaner that leaves little left to mystery in the external world. "In my view the processes of internalization and projective identification are complementary and operate from the beginning of post-natal life; they vitally determine object-relations. The mother can be felt to be taken in with all her internalized objects; the subject, too, which has entered another person, may be felt to take with him his objects (and his relations with them). The further exploration of the vicissitudes of internalized object-relations, which are at every step bound up with projective processes, should—in my view—throw much light on the development of the personality and of object-relations." The mind doesn't only take in oneself as a subject and keep others as Others, but it can also change roles with any of the personalities absorbed. In psychoanalysis, these are relationships based on emotional feeding goals and power differentials. Projective identification allows one to walk in the shoes of others and then imitate their internal nodal relationships.

Richard in his newer drawings was representing himself as a starfish and the color coding of his external influences, the conflicting goals, and their hungry intentions. The colors of the German and British flags were incorporated in the starfish. "...The black people were horrid and nasty. The light blue and the red were very nice people and were the ones the smaller countries did not mind having there...He said that the nasty black was Paul, the light blue was Mummy, the purple was the maid (Bessie) and the cook. The very small area of heliotrope blue in the centre was himself, and the red was Daddy. Suddenly he said, 'And the whole is a greedy starfish full of big teeth.'" It was a territorial battle inside him like the world map. "'This is me, and you will see what a large part of the empire I get.' Then he coloured some sections light blue, and while doing so he looked up at Mrs K. and said, 'I feel happy.' A moment later, having finished the blue sections, he said, 'Can you see how Mummy has spread herself. She has got much more of the empire.' While filling in some sections with purple, he said, 'Paul is nice, he is helping me.' He had left a few sections near the centre blank and now filled them in with black, saying that Daddy was squeezed in, surrounded by Paul, Mummy, and Richard." As internal objects became enemies or switched to allies, the colors could change as well as the level of internal help or internal sabotage could increase or decrease his well-being. Helpful objects ultimately are trustworthy and rely on those external objects to be role models of trustworthiness; to have helpful behaviors that can be imitated. The colors began to solidify the identities inside him. "From these sessions onwards, black referred to the father, light blue for his mother and Mrs. K., and red for himself." Part of the reason for domination of one color or another was how it communicated the internal cooperation or competition happening inside Richard. It also meant that he was either taking in a lot of influence from a helpful role model or he was feeling surrounded and persecuted.

"...He was also happy because the light blue—the good Mummy—and Mrs K., who had recently been wearing a light-blue cardigan, was felt to spread over the empire. The empire...represented himself swallowing everybody: he would get more and more of the good Mummy into himself, because she was spread over the empire, but she would not resent this if she were the good Mummy who would wish to be inside him and protect him there against the bad father and against his own greed and hatred." Good internal objects need to be trustworthy and cooperative. So in this case the mother became the light-blue cooperative and hopeful part of himself. Wanting cooperation externally is also like wanting cooperation inside the mind with the objects working together in the mind. Ideally, there is a relief and a saving of energy when the internal and external worlds are working together. For Richard, he was worried about his hatred and anger towards obstacles and how that didn't preserve the internal mother inside him. Therapy helped him to release the anxiety so the could touch that hope for future experiences of happiness. Those future forms of happiness would be connecting the good inside him and negotiate with the good in others; to not resort to aggression or avoidance when the independence of others was uncooperative. "...He also hoped to keep the helpful light-blue Mummy who was to protect him against the bad parents and the bad part of himself."

Reparation

By this time Richard was becoming more aware of his jealousy and temper and began asking Melanie for help, because he didn't know what to do about it. Yet this was a sign of improvement because it was evidence of his desire for reparation. At least he knew that reparation had the potential to relieve his anxiety. Expectations of endless cooperation are always doomed to failure, and the skills that people can develop to negotiate with the independence of others requires empathy and motivation for reparation. "I pointed out that the infant’s desire for an inexhaustible and ever-present breast—to which I had often referred in the past—has another and very important element besides the wish for food: the breast should do away with or control the infant’s destructive impulses and in this way protect the infant’s good object as well as safeguard him against persecutory anxieties. This actually means that the baby even at a very early stage experiences the need for a protective and helpful super-ego." So when the children get what they want, their anger is expected to go down, but as they get older, the parent's need for the child to unburden them by being more self-sufficient has to develop so that there is more reciprocity between parents and children. In fact, Richard's mother reported back that he was still aggressive, but more friendly, less tense, and easier to get on with. Richard was realizing that to get what he wanted, others also want to get some of what they wanted as well. Symbolically, you want the family at the dinner table to all have their own plate. It's important to be honest about desires, no matter how greedy, but it's equally important to be honest about consequences when dealing with the independence and well-being of others. Desires can include a sense of peace when they compliment well with the desires of others.

Suo Gan ( Lullaby ) - Lyrics - Anthony Way and St. Paul's Cathedral Choir: https://youtu.be/FB63gJkBE3c?si=XqJ3HAnj340vUisj

Melanie felt that he was beginning to internalize an attitude that could be taken out of therapy and applied to object choices outside of the family. "Mrs K. interpreted, referring to the empire drawing, that this meant that he had the good light-blue Mummy inside himself, and that she would help him to put his genital right. Then he could give her babies, revive her, and protect her against the bad Hitler Daddy...His greatest wish was to keep Mummy light-blue and good, and reliable." That kind of cooperation with others furthers the sense of potency, and conversely persecutory anxieties lead to impotence. This happens when the external or internal objects begin to show contempt, betrayal or rejection. "He didn't want the wicked brute-mother united with the Hitler-father and deserting him." Melanie also liked to layer complex interpretations that acknowledged that she understood the layers of pressure Richard was under. Each color harbored a potential ambivalence in that they could cooperate or disappoint at any time. The child then has to realize that they should not to be compared with adults because there are a lot of skills yet to be developed before they can handle the layered relationship pressures that adults are expected to carry. Looking forward to developing new skills provides hope. "If the hope to grow up enters, the feeling of impotence in comparison to adults diminishes, which alleviates anxiety and feelings of being inferior and useless."

Accepting his need to grow up was also a way for him to accept imperfection in himself and others. "...A person can be good without being perfect. This would imply that he himself could be dirty to some extent and yet useful, helpful, and valuable. Greater tolerance towards others was bound up with greater tolerance towards himself and therefore a diminution of guilt." These feelings create more opportunities for relationships, but envy and jealousy is the worst when all opportunities appear to be locked up and inaccessible for all time. "One fundamental element in paranoid jealousy in my view is that the strongest jealousy refers to the internalized father who, even after his actual death, might still be felt to be permanently inside the mother and would influence her against the son." The child has to grow up with the belief that it can rekindle beautiful and loving experiences and not feel that it will just be taken away or that they are not worthy of those experiences. "The fact that he so strongly expressed his desire to have the good breast forever was an essential indication underlying this change. The hope that the breast is uninjured and can be kept relatively safely as an internal object I found to be a pre-condition for dealing more successfully with destructive impulses and ensuing anxiety."

Some of this search elsewhere for object-love appeared with his desire for a bus conductress, who also was relieved of the pressure to be perfect. "Mrs K. interpreted that he liked her, although she was not altogether 'light blue' like the 'good' Mummy...Richard repeated that she was very pretty and added, with amusement, no, she was not 'light blue', she was 'dark blue'. Her uniform was actually dark blue...Then he added that he knew what Mrs K. meant about her not being altogether 'light blue'. It meant that she was not quite good and not quite bad...He said repeatedly that she was very pretty and that he enjoyed looking at her."

The light-blue connected with his love of blue skies, but he also began to accept imperfections so that other weather patterns could be tolerated. "Richard had begun to like clouds, whereas formerly he had only liked a cloudless sky. I attach particular significance to the fact that his idealization—the light-blue Mummy, the cloudless sky—had diminished and that he was more able to recognize both in his mother and in nature features which were not only pleasant." Despite the improvements, the analysis would have to end at some point and there was still a little worry about Richard not processing his splitting enough yet and still being dependent on Melanie or his mother. "He was always looking out for protective women and, as mentioned before, he always managed to find them. No doubt the fear of injuring his mother and me, which he had experienced strongly during this session, increased his need for a friendly woman—the good conductress."

Ego strength

Despite the inevitable idealization of his mother, Melanie felt it was an important part of the process to begin creating stability in the nascent mind of a child. "The good breast as the core of the ego I take to be a fundamental precondition for ego development. Richard had always maintained his belief in the light-blue Mummy. The idealized mother co-existed with the persecutory and suspect one. Nevertheless, idealization was based on a feeling of having internalized the good primal object to some extent, and this was the mainstay of all his anxieties. In the present stage of the analysis, Richard's capacity to integrate the ego and to synthesize the contrasting aspects of his objects had clearly increased and he had become more able, in phantasy, to improve the bad objects and to revive and re-create the dead ones; this, in turn, linked with hate mitigated by love. In the dream, Richard could also bring the two parents together in a harmonious way."

In a dream about an island, Richard could experience this internal object stability creating a strength in him to explore the dark uncertain world. "He said the island was on a river. On the bank of the river the sky was quite black, the trees were black, there was sand which was sand-coloured, but the people were also black. There were all sorts of creatures, birds, animals, scorpions, all black; and all of them, people and creatures, were quite still. It was terrifying...Richard said the island was not quite black, but the water and sky around were. There was a patch of green on the island and the sky over the island showed a little blue. The stillness was terrible. Suddenly Richard called out, 'Ahoy there,' and at that moment everybody and everything became alive. He had broken a spell. They must have been enchanted. People began to sing; the scorpions and other creatures jumped back into the water, everybody was overjoyed, everything turned light, the sky became all blue." Richard's details that conform to the patch of blue and green was a symbol of his belief that he could connect the good in himself with others. If he could achieve that, the world would be more open to him. "Mrs K. referred to the dream in the previous session and pointed out that the patch of green on the island and the bit of blue sky meant that he kept some of the good Mummy and the good breast inside him alive. She reminded him of the empire drawings, with the light blue in the centre, and that he had once said that the light blue was spreading and gaining more countries in the empire, which stood for his inside and Mummy’s. Such hopes were the reason why the dream had made him so happy."

Towards the final sessions, Richard was naturally feeling some anxiety and there were more searches for symbols that represented what could be kept inside him and nurture his growth when the analysis was to end. "Richard had during the last few minutes played with Mrs K.'s umbrella, which he had opened. He made it spin round and said he liked it. Then he used it as a parachute with which he was supposed to float down. He looked at the trademark and stated with satisfaction that it was British made. Then, again holding it open, he turned round and round with it and said that he was dizzy, he did not know where it was taking him. He also said over and over again that 'the whole world is turning round'. Then he let the umbrella drop gently; he once more said it was a parachute and that he was not sure whether it would go down the right way. He told Mrs K. that he had completely wrecked Mummy’s best umbrella when he used it as a parachute on a windy day. She had been 'speechless with rage'...

Mrs K. interpreted the umbrella as her breast; that it was British made meant it was a good breast, and that Mummy’s breast was good too. She referred to his doubts about what Mrs K. contained—a good or a bad Mr K. [Melanie's deceased husband]. The open umbrella stood for the breast, but the stick in it stood for Mr K.'s genital. Richard did not know whether he could trust this breast when he took it in because it was mixed with Mr K.'s genital, just as in his mind his parents and their genitals were mixed inside him. The question where the umbrella would take him expressed his uncertainty whether they were controlling him inside or not. The world which was turning round was the whole world he had taken into himself when he took in the breast—or rather Mummy mixed with Daddy, and her children, and all she contained. He felt the internalized powerful Daddy penis—the secret weapon—as something which made him powerful if he used it against an external enemy. But it became dangerous if it attacked and controlled him internally. Nevertheless, he trusted Mummy and Daddy—the umbrella—more than previously, both as external people and inside him. That was also why he now treated Mrs K.'s umbrella more carefully than he had formerly treated Mummy’s...During the present session, Richard had hardly paid any attention to people on the road. He was deeply concentrated on an internal situation and in that respect he felt more secure than formerly. This more secure internal situation included a stronger belief in the good protective breast, expressed by the parachute which would help him in an emergency. Although it soon appeared that the good breast was mixed in his mind with the penis, nevertheless it seemed more reliable than on former occasions. His distrust of Mr K.'s genital inside Mrs K., and of Daddy’s genital inside Mummy, persisted, but it was less strong because he had more faith in the goodness of the father. More recently Richard had become able to direct his aggressiveness more consistently against the bad, the Hitler-father, and to unite with the good mother and help her to defend herself. Instead of quickly turning his aggression against the breast when anxiety came up, he could in a relatively more stable way maintain his trust in the breast and in the mother, and face the fight with the father. (This change in attitude was the result of his aggression being canalized in a more 'ego-syntonic' way.) This increased belief in the good internal mother, and the good internal father, had arisen gradually. In the previous session the depression about being left by Mrs K., and the fear of loneliness reviving his early fears of being deserted by his parents, were expressed much more strongly than in the present session. At the same time, in the previous session, too, he had shown a stronger belief in both parents and their good relation, as was indicated, for instance, in the drawing in which they were sitting together in the bus. The change from stronger depression in the previous session to greater security in the present one was also due to a manic element in his mood. He used the stronger belief in the good internal Mrs K. and mother, and the good father, to ward off the fear of parting and his depression."

Even with these positive changes, Richard was still increasingly acting more desperate. He was trying to make friends with the conductress as a replacement for losing Mrs. K. "Richard’s mood during this session was on the whole much like that of the Ninetieth Session, with much unhappiness and tension. His increased desire to be cuddled showed repeatedly in his touching Mrs K., and he dropped things so as to be able to touch her legs when picking them up." He was also for the first time referring to his Daddy with light-blue as a replacement for Melanie. "Mrs K. interpreted that if he could not have the good breast, he now wanted to take in the good penis of the father...Richard played a good deal with the clock during this session. He caressed it, handled it, opened and closed it, wound it, and was deeply engrossed in these activities. When he set the alarm, he said: 'Mrs K. is broadcasting to the world. She is saying, 'I shall give the right kind of peace to everybody.' Then he added a little shyly, 'And Richard is a very nice boy, I like him...'"

Follow up

Melanie did do some follow up to determine the results of the short therapy and she based it on how behavior changed in Richard. If resources are unlimited, analysis theoretically could go on for years depending on how much unintegrated material remains. For Richard, "the result of [his] analysis was, as I expected, only a partial one, but it had in fact an influence on his further development. He was able to go to school for a time; later on he was taught privately and eventually went successfully through a University Course. His relation to his contemporaries improved and his dependence on his mother diminished. He has developed scientific interests and there are some real possibilities of a career for him. I have seen him on several occasions since the end of the war, but there has been no chance so far of continuing his analysis."

Luckily, Phyllis Grosskurth in her biography of Melanie Klein, caught up with Richard and provided some insights into his longer term results. At first she didn't know if she had found the right person, but he remembered the bus conductress. She described him as a "man in his fifties, well educated and in comfortable circumstances, he had no idea that he was the subject of a book or that he had been discussed in so many learned articles and lectures. Quite simply, his life does not touch the analytic world at any point. He travels widely, usually to remote places covered most of the year in snow, under which lie extinct volcanoes."

He began recalling his memories of Melanie. "I remember her as short, dumpy, with big floppy feet. I hope it's not out of context to tell you an anecdote about that subject. My aunt said to my mother that Melanie had bad feet. My mother, I hasten to add the least anti-Semitic of people, made the sardonic comment in reply, 'Well, if you had been walking in the wilderness for forty years, you would have bad feet too.' Melanie had a rather loose lower lip, I can remember that. It always seemed to hang a bit, and her mouth never seemed to be closed. She had a strong accent. She was always sympathetic."

Richard recalled that he was sent to therapy because he had "a certain amount of aggressiveness...I think I’m still a fairly aggressive kind of person." He was afraid that other children "would hurt me, or hit me. That’s what I feared. The odd thing is, they never did hurt or hit me...I was always frightened of being hit." When looking back at himself he recalled that "I think I was a pretty appalling sort of kid. I'd cuff his ear if I could get hold of him...I always had quite a temper. I think I'm still somewhat like this. I flew into a panic several days ago at the office about something very trivial. Tiny things do rattle me. That's my nature. I've always been very impatient."

Richard continued to suffer from depression and returned to Melanie when he was 16 years old. "I had the feeling that she was brushing me off, in a very polite sort of way. She wasn’t prepared to do anything for me. Perhaps that was my feeling about it, but it was the feeling I had at the time. Looking back on the episode, I suppose she was getting to be an old and tired woman, and didn't wish to become involved." Despite leaving the toys and drawings behind "he still has in his possession the maps prominent in the Narrative; and he showed me how he had effaced the border of Russia because the lines of advance and retreat changed frequently. He is still deeply interested in international affairs, and is greatly concerned about the prospect of a nuclear holocaust." Phyllis stirred up the remaining transference in him with a copy she brought of Melanie's book "which he had never seen before. He gazed at the photograph of Melanie Klein on the back cover. 'Dear old Melanie,' he murmured. Then he suddenly put the photograph to his lips and kissed it affectionately."

A year later Phyllis asked him about his impressions of the book. Certain memories stood out more than others. "Fears were reawakened: an imbecile on a tricycle who made animal-like noises, and the occasion on which he heard of the invasion of Russia while in his parents' bedroom about a month before his father’s heart attack. Reading through the book, he believes that the circumcision performed on him in his parents' bedroom had a profound effect upon him. He was terrified of ether, and felt deceived because his mother had failed to prepare him for this horrifying experience. He also clearly remembers finding his father lying on the bathroom floor, tea dribbling from his mouth. 'I can see it now.'" He still had a "'tremendous passion' for landscape." There still was a change in him after his sessions with Melanie. "He was not really unhappy, he believes, but becoming the 'sociable solitary,' never lonely, which is how he describes himself. Incidentally, his passion for red has altered to a preference for blue and orange." Even more dramatically, he said of the child version of himself that "the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony more perfectly than any words I could use sums up the complete truth of my feelings at that time."

Even when Richard had to move on from the therapy, an important contact for Melanie was his mother who kept her abreast of the situation, especially since the analysis had to end prematurely. "Klein encouraged these letters to a degree, and on two occasions sent her questionnaires to fill out about Richard's progress. At first the mother was filled with gratitude for Richard’s improvement, but soon a querulous note begins to intrude, she hints that Klein hadn’t got to the root of his real problems (e.g., the effects of the circumcision), and asserts defiantly that what the boy needs is a 'disciplined life...' His mother continued to find him deceitful, lazy, disobedient, irritable, and at times violently aggressive, especially to animals. Moreover, his fear of other boys had been reactivated. Nevertheless, she conceded that she did not think Klein’s efforts had been 'entirely wasted' because the boy had begun to gain insight into himself." Melanie found the increased aggressiveness as not entirely a bad sign, and continually emphasized the need for a longer analysis. She also insisted on the value of believing in the good aspects of her son; to be a good object for the son to introject. "I can only say one thing: as long as you maintain your belief in him, in his gifts and good qualities, which are present alongside the obvious flaws, this will be a great support to him and as I know has been until now the greatest support...I am quite sure that though this [aggressiveness] might perhaps be unpleasant for his environment it is kind of a safety valve in him, and in itself a good sign, if only one could have followed up all this through further analytic work." In some ways, the mother had to begin seeing her son without so much splitting and integrate her image of him more. "By January 1942 Richard's mother began to accept that she must cope with the situation day by day and not expect instant solutions. She was beginning to see her son as a whole person in his own right, and not the 'normal' image she had wanted to impose upon him."

The "Hitler Father"

The fallout of WWII led to a lot of soul searching for Germans and Austrians in particular, and the obsession with Hitler and identification became a worry that filtered into psychoanalytic sessions. What do you do if you love your father, but he was a NAZI in the past? Like with Martin Heidegger, he admitted that he made a stupid move and then moved more towards a psychology that was critical of Friedrich Nietzsche, who defined the ideal of the self-overcoming man, the Übermensch. For Heidegger, and other former NAZIS, this was part and parcel of the neurosis found in people who struggled with their real limitations and repeatedly failed to improve themselves. It's one thing to have an ego-ideal, but it's quite another to put in the work to self-overcome. Yet there is a great desire in people to feel successful and well loved by the community. This is a universal pressure that exists outside of the context of WWII. Because outward success is not something easily achievable for many people, it can be a source of narcissistic wounding for long periods of time where the ego-reality is so far away from the ego-ideal, that internal conflict becomes indefinitely maintained. The mind can attack itself with sadomasochism, and as René Girard pointed out, via Freud, and so much so that the need to vent goes outwards towards sadism against a scapegoat. This most often happens when self-preoccupation, rumination, self-loathing and masochism becomes too exhausting to endure, or suicide is rejected as an option by the subject.

Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html

Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

The False Self - Various Authors: https://rumble.com/v1gth6h-the-false-self-various-authors-narcissism-2-of-4.html

Götz Aly, of Why the Germans, Why the Jews?, equated this to envy. "What are the sources of envy? They include weakness, timidity, lack of self-confidence, self-perceived inferiority, and [conversely an] excessive ambition." He also noticed a fear of personal freedom, because freedom doesn't guarantee success like an entitlement does. "The mortal sin of envy—together with a belief in collective happiness, modern science, and specific techniques of political rule—is what made the systematic mass murder of European Jews possible. There is no way around the pessimistic conclusion that evil can never be quarantined once and for all in a way that would rule out such horrors. Another event structurally similar to the Holocaust could still occur. Those who want to reduce the danger of its happening should work to understand the complex human preconditions of the Holocaust. And they should not kid themselves into thinking that the anti-Semites of the past were completely different from who we are today."

Matching with social psychology, Aly points repeatedly to successful competition, and a regressed section of the population who sometimes cannot keep up, or at least they feel that they can't keep up. There's a double edged sword here, because there are victims and there are people who are disadvantaged and exploited, but alongside that there are people who put more effort than others. This is how these attitudes can harden in any culture and it's not exclusively about those two cultures. It can happen anywhere. Aly provided an example from the 19th century on how certain ambitious types of behavior can trigger others. "No matter what experts saw as the root cause of Jews’ educational advantage, non-Jews sensed the difference and reacted with displeasure. In 1880, liberal Reichstag deputy Ludwig Bamberger noted Jews’ 'unusual thirst for learning' and 'obvious haste' to catch up on what had long been forbidden to them and concluded: 'It is certain that the revival of hateful behavior toward them is closely connected to these things.'" This points to ambitious people who are willing to make the "haste" and work to develop themselves. In any human hierarchy, social mobility is a source of panic and it's common in organizational behavior for entrenched interests to play politics against any potential role reversals, even if it's done legitimately by being outworked or through demonstrations of skill. There's also a difference between someone who loves their job, feels well-being while taking on challenges, versus the more common situation where jobs are a means to an end, and therefore a complete and total grind. When a worker is listless, or what people call today a "quiet quitter," it is more likely they will feel envy and resentment towards someone who is loving their workday, being chipper, and making progress. Conversely, history shows situations where the workplace is a monopolistic master and slave situation where the worker is to be paid as little as possible, leading more justifiable conclusions that one cannot change one's lot without political revolution. These two forces of envy and shame operate in the world of abundance and scarcity, and both abundance and scarcity are often confused with each other, because they are subjective and are based on comparison with a target group. It excludes any wisdom or appreciation for improvements over time, or a healthy comparison with one's past self. It makes one take a second look at one's own ambition and how it may affect others. As you try to improve your lot in an environment where other people can watch your every move, it's clear why rivalries follow ambition like a shadow. The lines blur as mutual claims and grievances arise with the onset of ambition. Obstacles to one's ambition can trigger again the Oedipus Complex, but now transferred to a new authority figure that is in the way. This desire for vengeance potentially extends to the entire adult world, including projections towards political leaders who are an obstacle to one's personal ambitions. Entire ethnic groups that are ascendant can also appear to be a threat.

Once a person with a grievance exacts a revenge, or even just imagines a revenge, towards someone who is blameless, a Kleinian guilt can arise. "How do I feel about myself when I want to hurt an innocent person?" If you have a loved family member who became a NAZI, for example, how does that label tarnish the family name? How does one live with that kind of family history as a pathological secret? Can one love a parent while at the same time accept that they were morally reprehensible? Chasseguet-Smirgel was categorical. "What is one to do with a Nazi father? Apparently, the only solution is to reject him. If you speak of the need to integrate your identifications with that father, you are immediately treated as a Nazi yourself. But in the absence of identification, where there is only counter-identification, there can be no genuine choice between acceptance and rejection, and sublimation becomes totally impossible. In order to become a human being in the full sense of the term, we have to be able to discover, confront and own the Hitler in us, otherwise the repressed will return and the disavowed will come back in various guises." I think this is a good example of how one could turn into the monster one hates unconsciously if the pattern of grievance and vengeance is not seen to be universal. Though I think too much splitting remains in the example, because one could like legitimate skills from a parent while having totally different political attitudes. Even further, no child can choose their parents. If they were a parent that raised you with love before the war started, you wouldn't discount all of that, because one thing doesn't connect with another. As Klein pointed out, the super-ego can have conflicting and compartmentalized personalities that are unintegrated. I think my view has less contradiction because in psychoanalysis, whether you symbolize targets of hatred as a "Hitler-Daddy," Satanic, a descendent of a slave-holder, or just treat them as all-bad in the transference, you are probably still stuck in splitting, unless they were 100% all bad in actuality. The danger of judging a person who is 90% bad and 10% good, is that you might detect those very same 10% good behaviors in others and do a 100% negative transference on that blameless behavior. It's how conflicts can escalate from small disagreements and misunderstandings. Carl Jung also talked about this as well when people disliked different personality types that he categorized. For example, many people who are into emotion cannot identify with someone who is mostly about cold logic, and vice versa. People can also overuse their best aspects and skills with a detrimental result in the environment, for example, a NAZI who was good at engineering, but morally bankrupt in their personal goals on how they were going to use those skills. Engineering skills can build residential housing, and there's nothing that says that those skills must only be used for concentration camps. Ultimately, the real danger is when a patient has no good objects in the mind, or core positive memories, which leaves the therapy in the difficult situation of starting from scratch to create a first time good object in an older child or an adult. A dark inner world will find any reason to setup a dyad of grievance and vengeance. This is why any institutions, including ones that are aiming at peace and happiness, could easily harbor individuals with this mentality. All institutions, governmental, corporate, or even smaller groups of people, have ego conflicts as each individual jockeys up the success and responsibility ladder. Institutions start off usually very well, but then they gradually become hypocritical, corrupt and have to be dismantled, moved, and rebuilt again and again. It's a problem that has never been solved, only mitigated and reformed. Revolutions and reforms endlessly circle around.

Simple Minds - Waterfront: https://youtu.be/vxXfu-Kbtbc?si=E91lAJcTY9KAcxai

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again: https://youtu.be/UDfAdHBtK_Q?si=_94vpM6ON10w8U1H

For Melanie, if the internal problems aren't seen clearly and resolved, a manic attitude may appear in the external world as a form of escape from oneself. "...A process by which anxieties connecting with the unknown and dangerous internal situations may be alleviated when a definite external-danger situation becomes operative. As is well known, this can be carried to extremes, and the mechanism of seeking external dangers in order to relieve internal ones, is characteristic of a manic attitude." In mild situations, children may want to escape their internal conflict by playing with toys, or adults may watch movies or TV programs to get away. In more extreme situations, people escape into dangerous political associations, or cults, in an effort to scapegoat others to solve the internal conflict. This manifests especially when a Fatherland or Motherland is identified with a leader, along with projections of idealism from the populace, leading to denials of wrong-doing, with wrong-doing usually being thrown into a psychological shadow and then supported by gaslighting. Wrong-doing piles up, along with internal shame and conflict, leading to the need for more addictive manic pursuits to numb internal pain externally. The way to avoid developing an inner Hitler requires a realistic assessment of oneself and ones capabilities. The past is the past and it cannot be perfected anymore. One can only learn and move on by building new positive experiences repeatedly.

Narrative of a Child Analysis by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780029184509/

The Kleinian Development - Donald Meltzer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855756786/

Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work by Phyllis Grosskurth: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781568214450/

Essential Readings from the Melanie Klein Archives - Jane Milton: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367337902/

Why the Germans, Why the Jews by Götz Aly: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781250062642/

Laubender, C. Empires of mind: postcolonial cartographies of 'The Empire' in Melanie Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 26, 323–344 (2021).

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#psychoanalysis #object relations #oedipus complex #melanie klein

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