DGB Quantum Neo-Psychoanalysis (QNP): A Short Summary of Where We Stand Today

November 3rd, 5th, 2018,

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

-- Albert Einstein

E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End (Forster, 1910) is famously ‘Only connect…’ It’s this principle which informs Spinoza’s Ethics. For Spinoza God is “All-That-There-Is”. God is “immanent”; God is within everything. God is the forces which produce all of us and what connect us. This idea has profound implications for our conceptions of knowledge; it means that we have to see knowledge ultimately as “one” as “whole” because knowledge is God. (Spinoza, 1994a, p. 9 P.13)

Author: @wonderfrancis

Francis Gilbert is a Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, teaching on the PGCE Secondary English programme. He also teaches the Creative Writing module on the MA in Children’s Literature, which is run by Maggie Pitfield and Professor Michael Rosen. Previously, he worked for a quarter of a century in various English state schools teaching English and Media Studies to 11-18 year olds. He has, at times, moonlighted as a journalist, novelist and social commentator. He is the author of ‘Teacher On The Run’, ‘Yob Nation’, ‘Parent Power’, ‘Working The System -- How To Get The Very Best State Education for Your Child’, and a novel about school, ‘The Last Day Of Term’. His first book, ‘I'm A Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here’ was a big hit, becoming a bestseller and being serialised on Radio 4. .com) which has published his study guides as well as a number of books by other authors, including Roger Titcombe’s ‘Learning Matters’ and anthology of creative writing 'The Gold Room'. He is the co-founder, with Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar, of The Local Schools website, www.francisgilbert.co.uk. View all posts by @wonderfrancis

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@wonderfrancis

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May 30, 2017

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1.3 Everything is Connected, B. Chapter 1: God's Learning

E. M. Forster, Howard's End, journey into joy, Only Connect

Good day!

I am a big fan of Spinoza, as were Einstein and Schelling and Hegel a little more indirectly. Schelling was more of a 'romantic dialectic philosopher' than Hegel who was more tof what I would call a 'rational, dialectic philosopher. Hegel made 'the dialectic' famous but but both Schelling and Kant were dialectic philosophers before Hegel and inspired Hegel's greatest work, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind' (1807).

All -- or at least most -- of my essays can be directly or indirectly tied to Hegel's 'PoS' as well as Sigmund Freud's Complete Works (Strachey's Standard Edition). Adler's work and Fritz Perls' work (Gestalt Therapy) come close behind which is how I came up with the name 'GAP' Psychology -- 'GAP' standing for 'Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalysis'. 'DGB' as well as being the initials of my name came to stand for 'Dialectic-GAP-Bridging' (Ideas, Negotiations, Conflict-Resolutions, etc.)

I view myself as a 'frontier man' meaning that I love to 'theorize' at the outer edges, boundaries, borders of what we might call 'orthodox, dominant establishment knowledge'. If we add the work of Jacques Derrida in here (a student of Hegel's), 'the deconstructionist', then we can make the distinction between 'dominant theories' and 'shadow theories' playing off in opposition/bipolarity with/against each other which also takes us into the psychology of Jung and Perls and the idea of 'great energy being created by the tension (and integration) of opposite polarities in a 'polar spectrum'.

When there is a 'failure to dialectically communicate', we have what might be called 'truncated, unilateral knowledge' that is -- or becomes -- 'homeostatically out of balance'. That is what happened to psychoanalysis when, between 1896 and 1900, Freud 'failed to properly negotiate and integrate the bipolarity between 'Reality' Psychoanalysis (memory and trauma theory) and 'Fantasy' Psychoanalysis (wish fulfillment, impulse-drive psychoanalysis, Oedipal Theory, libido theory, biological instinct theory, etc.,)

So there is the potential for great 'psychoanalytic evolutionary gain' to be had by what Freud, psychoanalysis as a whole, and even Masson failed to do -- which was to integrate ALL of psychoanalysis, not just exasperate an 'either/or', 'black or white' war of rhetoric and theory -- which if you believe Hegel and his 'dialectic-historical deteministic philosophy' -- will eventually, over time, start to be 'synthesized' by 'integrative theorists', It may take a lot of time but eventually 'integrative truth' will prevail because, in the philosophy of Spinoza, 'Everything is connected and in the philosophy of Hegel, 'Everything is dialectically connected' which is another way of saying that everything is 'homeostatically connected' which means that everything and everyone 'owns a portion of truth' and that truth -- ideally speaking -- in the end comes back to 'homeostatic balance' or 'equilibrium' -- 'the balance of nature'.

So this is what I most enjoy doing -- specifically -- 'turning alleged 'unilateral truths and/or at least 'theories of truth' and turning them into better, more productive, integrative dialectic theories of 'truth' that aim to get to all 'the different pieces of the pie of truth' -- 'quantum truth' if you will.

Now, I say all of this as a preface to what I want to do, and where I want to take you -- next. Here is the last part of my preface. I say what I am about to say now, not as an intended reflection of the 'quality of my thinking' -- only time and the social judgment of 'academia', 'scholars', and the like will maybe have a say on that account. Until then, I am just a 'grain of sand' or a 'drop of water in the ocean' relative to my ability as a theorist. But in terms of 'style of thinking', I like to borrow little bits and pieces from all the great thinkers who I have read and been influenced by over the period of my lifetime. This includes both Breuer and Freud -- and my very serious aim to try to 'bridge the gap' between them -- Breuer, the very well-grounded rational-empiricist and scientist, and Freud, the imaginative, often shocking, provocative 'very loose associating' -- my Gestalt teacher, Jorge Rosner used to call this 'woo woo thinking' -- theorist'.

So I aim to split the difference here between Breuer and Freud. Breuer -- with Anna O's. help -- created what I will call 'abreactive' (cathartic) psychoanalysis, whereas Freud, more or less left both abreactive and 'reality-trauma' behind him (although not entirely) to create what I will call 'Interpretive (often highly interpretive) Classical (Fantasy) Psychoanalysis.

Now, remarkably, even as history will continue to view Freud as one of the most provocative, revolutionary thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century, today Freud is mainly 'panned and banned' by most academically taught 'scientifically focused psychologists', and Breuer does not get enough credit for creating the type of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis that is prevalent today -- i.e., 'trauma-based' as opposed to 'fantasy based', with a significant emphasis on 'emotional intelligence' and 'emotional cathecting' (emotional abreaction/catharsis) as opposed to simply 'rational insight interpreting' -- especially of a highly abstract, 'loosely associated', 'woo woo land' -- type of thinking. Especially relative to the over-use and abuse of the idea of 'repressed memories' to the point of being interpreted by the therapist when the client still doesn't remember the memory. This is quite different than an 'emotionally surfacing memory that brings a high degree of emotional volatility with it coming from the client, not the therapist (catharsis).

Now here is where we start to move into new, unorthodox territory. As a 'loose, unorthodox' theorist, I do things that other theorists won't do such as take what Freud wrote in 1920 (Beyond The Pleasure Principle), 1923, (The Ego and The Id), and 1938 ('Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defense'; and 'Outline of Psychoanalysis') and 'introject these works and their main concepts back into the history of early psychoanalysis and such papers as 'The Neuro-Psychosis of Defense' (1894) and 'Studies in Hysteria' (1895). If Freud had 'dialectically integrated' his and Breuer's 'Reality' Psychoanalysis with his later 'Fantasy' Psychoanalysis, he would have done the same as opposed to largely rejecting the former, and unilaterally believing (reductionistically and 'anal-retentively') in the latter.

Returning to 1923, I never liked how Freud defined and described 'the id' as a 'reservoir containing the life and death instincts'. To this idea, I prefer to use the term 'id vaults' whereas alternatively, I define and describe the id as 'a primal, highly emotionally charged, often unconscious pre-cortex based ego in the heart of the limbic region of the brain and mainly associated with the activity of the 'amygdala' in tandem with the surrounding 'hippocampus' and 'temporal lobes' as well as other identifiable organs in this particular region of the brain. In this regard, I view Daniel Goleman's 1995 book, 'Emotional Intelligence' and the idea of 'amygdala hijackings' (based on the lower profile work of John Mayer and Peter Salovey), with the greatest of intrigue relative to creating a very high profile, bridge between neurology and psychoanalysis -- particularly, Freud's often panned 'id psychology'.

Sometimes we have to go back to the past to learn in the present and in the future. People are not generally prone to doing that.

There is a lot to be learned from reading the first three volumes of Freud's Complete Works. I would recommend this for any medical student. And even Breuer's theoretical essay in 'Studies in Hysteria' still holds value today.

Freud was too quick to reject -- or at least minimize the importance of -- what may have been the best work of his career in tandem with Breuer. The emphasis back then was on energy metabolism, the completion of the energy cycle, and abreaction, abreaction, abreaction...Emotional abreaction was emphasized (catharsis), and Breuer and Anna O. can be credited with being the co-creators of what might be called 'Abreactive' Psychoanalysis (or 'Pre'-Freudian Psychoanalysis).

The emphasis was on tracing a 'hysterical symptom' back to a particular 'repressed' (or 'dissociated') memory -- we are going back as far as 1882 here -- and then 'fully re-live the memory -- including its full emotional content -- in the here-and-now'. Gestalt Therapy does the same thing today. Freud walked away from this 'emotionally cathecting' brand of 'abreactive psychoanalysis' and opted for a more 'interpretive-cognitive-type of analysis' -- not to mention his turning away from reality theory, trauma theory, memory theory, and seduction theory in his 'wish' to pursue 'wish-fulfillment, fantasy theory' which became known as 'Classical' Psychoanalysis with its primary focus on 'libido theory' (child and adult manifestations of 'wish-fulfillment sexuality'). Then it was on to 'biological instinct' theory and 'instincts' or I prefer to say, 'impulse-drives' -- 'id' being a nice acronym for impulse drives.

All of this was important work -- in a less extreme, reductionist, unilateral extreme -- and still is, if you take the full context of ALL 24 volumes of Freud -- and discount his 'self-rejected' theories which Masson in particular believe were his best theories.

I prefer a 'wholistic, all encompassing, integrative view of Freud's work -- and even add significant parts of the work of other prominent theorists who both worked with Freud, and after him.

In particular, I have opted for developing a significant expansion of Freud's controversial 'Oedipus Complex' which combines Adlerian, Jungian, Object Relations, Bionian, Cognitive-Emotional-Behavioral, and Humanistic-Existential elements to this greatly expanded conceptual representation of Freud's Oedipus Complex. Adler's 'Lifestyle Theory' and 'Theory of Interpreting Conscious Early Memories' as well as his 'Masculine (and Feminine) Protest' theories which developed into his 'inferiority-superiority striving' theory.

My work in transference -- not close to being fully developed yet -- extends mainly out of my work on 'The Template and Network of Expanded Oedipal Period (Memory-Relationship-Defense-and Fantasy) Complexes.

And that is approximately where DGB Neo-Freudian, Neo-Psychoanalysis (NFNP) stands today at this point in time. Much more work to do!

But that is good for today.

Thank you to all my readers for being with me.

David Gordon Bain