DGB Quantum Neo-Psychoanalysis: Early Personal Construct Formation, Transference Psychodynamics, Symptoms, and Personality Theory

November 19th, 21st, 2018,

Updated, new material...Nov. 21st, 2018,

Good day!

In this presentation, I wish to step up my interaction and integration of different elements of Adlerian, Freudian, Object Relations, and cognitive-linguistic-semantic theory with special emphasis on George Kelly's 'Personal Construct Theory'.

In this regard, I am mainly interested in early childhood Personal Construct Formation between the years of 2 years old and 7 years old with its core nuclear cognitive-emotional-behavioral network or matrix of 'obsessive-compulsive impulse-drive complexes'.

These complexes act like a spider web with the spider in the middle, or an octopus with outstretched arms or tentacles -- the complexes reaching outwards but kept together and integrated by the central core. A different analogy might view the central core as being like 'Rome' with 'all roads leading to and from Rome'.

I also wish to define my terms and concepts as best as possible so that I am leaving less readers in the dark as to the clarity of the various meanings of my terms/concepts are. Every term/concept has both a 'range' of meaning and a 'focus' of meaning. It is always dangerous to apply different and/or modified meanings to technical terms/concepts that have a long history of meaning in the history of psychoanalysis -- especially when different theorists modify these terms/concepts from their original Freudian origins just like I do.

On top of all this, Freud modified many of his technical terms/concepts himself over the period of his career -- such as the concept of 'ego' -- so that, all in all, 'referent confusion' can reign supreme even among the most knowledgeable Freudian and Psychoanalytic readers. So, a big 'Caveat Emptor' sign needs to be posted here: Concepts may mean something different than what you think they mean. The old 'one word-one meaning' principle went out the English classroom door -- except for The English teachers with the longest, most stubborn 'hanging on bite' about the same time that antibiotics was invented.

At least, that was about the same time that Alfred Korzybski invented 'General Semantics' and the idea of 'both 'one word-many meanings' as well as a broad spectrum of nuances of meaning' in the 1930s. George Kelly added the idea of words having both a 'range' of meaning and a 'focus' of meaning -- depending on the particular context.

Kelly's fundamental view of personality was that people are like naive scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organized systems of construction, which they use to anticipate events.[8] Personal construct theory explores the individual's map they form by coping with the psychological stresses of their lives.[7] But because people are naive scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation. A system of construction that chronically fails to characterize and/or predict events, and is not appropriately revised to comprehend and predict one's changing social world, is considered to underlie psychopathology (or mental illness.)

-- George Kelly, 1955, 'The Psychology of Personal Constructs'

Let's take a break...

So how do we get from Kelly's Personal Construct Theory to DGB's 'MOLD Theory --The Matrix of Oedipal Lifestyle-Deathstyle Complexes -- and The Psychodynamics of Transference'? Let's start with the concept/theory of 'Deathstyle or Deathpath Complexes which I offer as an alternative to Freud's 'Death Instinct Theory'.

Freud's 'Deathpath Instinct Theory' is indeed a 'deathpath theory' but not in the way that he intended it. It is a deathpath theory in that it leads us nowhere -- it has no clinical or therapeutic value except in the sense that it offers us a 'mythological death instinct theory'. What are you going to do with this theory -- what can you do with this theory -- clinically and therapeutically except to say that a person's 'aggressive behavior and/or tendencies is instinctually driven'. In other words, there is nothing a therapist can do about it because how are you going to change a 'biological instinct'? You might as well be 'swinging at windmills'.

Now, alternatively, if you view aggressive behavior -- at least some forms of 'serial behavior aggression' as an 'epigenetic instinct or impulse-drive', you are saying something very different. What you are saying is that even if a person does have some form of 'biologically driven aggression', the largest part of social aggression is socially learned and, as such, can be socially unlearned, and further to that, the most likely period of the psycho-social development of aggression is during the Oedipal Period of Psychical Development between about the ages of 2 years old and 7. This is the period of time when and where most serial behavior patterns and repetition compulsions are learned. Thus, 'profiling' a person's MOLD Complexes becomes a way for both therapist and client to trace back the roots of his or her serial aggression.

Now, if you become aware of the various synonyms that I have created over the period of numerous essays going back the last year or so, for my regular readers, you may have seen me use these names previously. For those who have not, let me introduce them to you, the first as a mutation-permutation of what I have offered up before. 'OP-LPDP2' stands for 'Oedipal Period-Lifepath-LifeParadigm-Deathpath-DeathParadigm'. I know this sounds like needless verbiage or 'techno-babble' but let me explain its underlying Neo-Hegelian-Neo-Freudian-Ne0-Adlerian paradoxical assumptive foundations.

Or at least I thought that the quote -- or 'semi-quote' -- I was about to give you was Hegelian. Certainly, it carries the essential makeup of Hegelian Dialectic philosophy in the classic Hegelian formula (with roots going back to Kant): 1. thesis; 2. anti-thesis; 3. synthesis. However, I have read that Hegel never actually stated this formula either although his 'dialectic logic' is based on it.

So, further to the paragraph above, I have been carrying around this quote -- or 'semi-quote' -- in my head for years now that I attributed to Hegel and figured that it could probably be found somewhere in the depths of his classic work, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind)'. But once again I have been foiled. If Hegel said it, I can't find it. I can find two quotes close to it but the closest quotes come from Marx and other philosopher-theorists 'barking up a similar tree'.

Here is what I thought I had -- its exact origins unknown.

'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.'

Marx wrote that, 'Capitalism carries the seeds to its own self-destruction.' (But so too do socialism and communism -- especially the latter as we saw them self-destruct in China and Russia.)

I have even read in different contexts that: 1. 'Democracies carry the seeds of their own self-destruction; and 2. 'Utopias -- by their very nature -- carry the seeds of their own self-destruction.

Here are the closest quotes I can find from Hegel regarding 'dialectic logic':

'Absolute substance ... is the unity of the different self-related and self-existent self-consciousnesses in the perfect freedom and independence of their opposition as component elements of that substance...' (Hegel, 1807, 'The Phenomenology of Spirit');

Dialectic is here understood in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative. -- Hegel, The Science of Logic (1812)

We call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously. ) -- Hegel, The Science of Logic (1812)

Everything is inherently contradictory. -- Hegel, The Science of Logic (1813)

Last one...

That the whole form of the method is a triplicity, is merely the superficial external side of the mode of cognition; but to have demonstrated even this must also be regarded as an infinite merit of the Kantian philosophy. -- Hegel, The Science of Logic (1816)

So let us return to the main 'semi-quote of unknown origin': 'Every theory carries the seeds of its own self-destruction.

Using this dialectic logic as the basic of our reasoning, Freud's trauma theory had to eventually 'self-destruct' as too did his seduction theory, his Oedipal theory, and his fantasy theory...Every theory with a 'limit attached to it' or 'a box put around it' -- has to eventually fail when it reaches its 'outer limits of functional usefulness and convenience'. And its 'bipolar opposite theory' has to pick up its preceding opposite theory at the point -- the boundary line -- at which the first theory starts to fail.

The best theory you are going to get is a 'multibipolar' or 'quantum' theory where the multiple and diverse polar opposites of a theory all converge and conflate towards the middle of a theory -- its nuclear bipolar core' -- from the outer boundaries of the theory that each bipolar segment of the theory best represents with functional usefulness and convenience.

Now, if everything I have written so far has substance and value -- 'quantum value', then the key concept-theory that I am advancing in DGB Quantum Neo-Psychoanalysis -- our 'MOLD -- Matrix of Lifestyle-Deathstyle -- Complexes with its synonymous name: 'OP-LP2-DP2' -- or simply LPDP2 for short reflects this contradiction -- indeed, this inherent hypocrisy -- in a series of core nuclear conflicts in our primarily socially learned 'set of personal constructs'-- our 'Life-Paradigm' as developed primarily in our 'Oedipal Period of Psychological Development'.

Alfred Adler called this 'life-paradigm' our 'lifestyle', and as much as Adler was not a 'paradoxical thinker', he did note that our 'greatest character assets were also likely to be our greatest character liabilities'.

Translated, our 'Lifestyle converges into our Deathstyle; and our LifePath converges into our Deathpath. Our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness.

And the first and most important characteristic that attracts us to our lover -- is also likely to be the same characteristic that eventually destroys and terminates the relationship.

In short, any relationship -- particularly our relationship with our lover -- is likely to carry both an 'epigenetic life instinct' and an 'epigenetic death instinct'.

Marriage therapy -- within this system of 'dialectic therapy' -- becomes a matter of 'learning each others' system of personal constructs -- their MOLD Complexes or LP2-DP2, their etiology in early childhood learning, their respective strengths and weaknesses, getting each partner to think, feel, and behave outside of his or her 'Life-Paradigm-Box' -- to experiment with new 'abreactions' and 'communications' that 'metabolize the energize of a relationship better', and -- as is often done in different types of therapies -- 'reverse roles' to increase empathy, understanding, and acceptance skills -- skills that are essential to the long term life of any long-lasting relationship.

There is more to this than has been expounded on here. We still need to develop a full-blooded theory of transference etiology and symptom manifestation. But we have covered a lot tonight.

I bid you goodnight.

David Gordon Bain