MYTHS, METAPHORS AND MENTAL WORLDS:  

AN INCORPORATIVE MODEL FOR DESCRIBING EGO DYNAMICS

By

Bill Stroud, Ph. D.
Copyright by Bill Stroud, August, 2001

 Gilbert Ryle1 has shown us that our natural way of viewing the mind (as if it were a ghost in a machine) is supported by a confusion, one arising out of a failure to make distinctions concerning logical types or categories of conceptualizations.  He called it a "category mistake" to talk of mental phenomena as if they were of the same logical type as those processes which underlie them.   Consequently, according to Ryle, we aren't saying anything meaningful when we speak of the mental as if it were some substantial "thing" over and against the activity of neurons and other substrates of subjectivity per se (Descartes notwithstanding). Another example of Ryle's point would be the absurdity of talking about weight and gravity the same way we would talk about wood and dirt.  The latter would entail two categories which warrant distinct and separate descriptions. However, the former is different.  Weight is an aspect of gravity; it is not something separate and categorically distinct. (And neither has real existence like wood and dirt.) For instance, one can remove the dirt from a piece of wood; it would be nonsense, however, to attempt to remove weight from gravity .  Put another way:  Ryle's category mistake is the fallacy of reifying a conceptual representation of an abstraction, i.e,. giving a concept a reality of the same category or logical type as that from which the concept is formed.    

Ryle's clarification of this conceptual confusion poses some interesting questions concerning Freudian theoretical concepts.  What, in the philosophical market, is the real cash value  of Freudian and other psychological constructs which are, as it were, printed on metaphorical paper?  Isn't the Ego (like the mind in Ryle's characterization) simply another  way of talking about a process of awareness?  Consequently, isn't it an illegitimate question to speak of the Ego's "relation" to the Id, to drives, instincts, etc., as if these constructs represent something over and above (or below) the Ego  (which is itself a metaphor)?2

Ryle is not, of course, contending that terms which refer to the theoretical and the subjective (vs. non-subjective "things") are entirely meaningless.  For instance it is certainly meaningful to speak of an object's weight and a person's awareness.  However, it would be nonsense, Ryle would probably say, to attempt to remove from an article its weight, as if its weight were some reality separate and distinct from the object per se. Likewise, wouldn't it be nonsense to Ryle to speak of the unconscious as something operating as some "thing" over and against other "thing" such as the Id ?

As a model, the Unconscious of Freudian thought is analogous to a person, albeit, an inner person, a reflective homunculus-type entity retrojected back into the psyche.  The conceptual model functions somewhat like the god concept of theistic religion,  which posits a "thinking being," albeit one retrojected back prior to the emergence of the physical brain which constitutes the only thing we have as an explanation of what constitutes  "thinking" per se.  (This conceptual contradiction of having an incorporeal being who thinks has been a problem dogging theology for centuries).  

Applying Ryle's category mistake to terms used in dynamic psychology leads to further--and more serious--ramifications of this particular mental trickery.  Having a penchant for metaphorical descriptions of experience, psychologists often reify particular aspects of metaphors and, as a result, create a phantasmagoria of substances whose realities are more linguistic than real in the ordinary sense.  They develop, as it were, second order symbols which could appropriately be called examples of metasymbolization, a metaphorizing of an aspect of metaphor?  For instance, does the Id, that "cauldron of seething excitement" (Freud's metaphor) work as some separate psychic entity housed in a separate place (metametaphor), having a distinct reality with its own political force opposing some other thing called the Ego?

These questions are not confined to Freudian constructs.  The challenge is applicable to all theoretical formulations which put faith in metaphorical promissory notes as if they were epistemological tender for some golden reality lying behind them to back them up on demand.  This analytical scrutiny of linguistic symbolization (models, paradigms, metaphors, etc.), however, specifically strikes at the very heart of  Freud's theoretical constructs, namely, what is known as his metapsychology.  For instance, Freud's earliest model for describing motivation was one which could be aptly called the Bethesdian paradigm.  Like the pool of Bethesda described in the New Testament, the Ego is seen as reacting to the excitation of its psychic waters, with healing coming from the Ego's stepping in to direct such tension of excess  stimulation.3 Conceptually, this model separates out from experience something called an Ego, as if this Ego did not entail within it an emotive aspect which, in psychoanalytic thought, is attributed to a categorically separate dynamic called the Id.  Is it possible that the Ego can work with the Id no more and no less than the mind can work with its logic (as if logic were something separate and distinct from the mental operations per se)? When such linguistic terms are taken as pictures of real and separate entities, doesn't a Wittgensteinean bewitchment follow:  the idea of one entity working as an agent in a casual relation to the other.

The fallacy cited by Ryle makes clear how conceptualization can entrap us into false substantialization; i.e., we often reify abstractions and then let such linguistic formulations lead us into confusion.  We, as it were, can talk of "wiping the grin off our face" but we seldom get fooled into thinking that it is like wiping the writing off a chalk board, as if the face were lying somehow behind the grin as some substantial thing unchanged like the chalk board lies behind the chalk.  We don't substantialize the "grin" as if it were something distinct from the face and not a mere configuration which involves the face in the grinning.

From the beginning, Freud faced  the challenge of making a connection between brain functions and resultant mental phenomena.  Put in a philosophical context, Freud wanted something which would function for him as did the pineal gland for Descartes (although Descartes never was clear about just how that little gland could stand with one foot in each distinct world).  Freud, like Descartes, kept trying to get from one territory to another, but he just couldn't find the bridge that connected (or separated!) the two.  But if we follow Ryle's approach, we may find that Freud's problem was predicated on a false geography; it was as if he was trying desperately to get to Europe while he was standing in Vienna.  His problem was not one which would be represented by saying, "I just can't get there from here."  The problem was that there was no "there" distinct from the "here" in the first place.  Similarly, our conception of the Ego may be a pseudo problem.  Maybe we are treating the Ego like a psychic grin which can be wiped off, leaving sensations and emotions as something lying behind it untouched and, consequently, distinct from it.  Or to use the other metaphor:  maybe the Ego is standing square in the middle of the territory we have asked it to go visit.

In trying to reconcile Freud's concept of the pleasure principle with a belief in authentic altruism, Wallwork sees Freud's description of the Ego as inclusive of a type of pleasure. Wallwork focuses on those statements of Freud which indicate a  quality model reminiscent of John Stuart Mill's quality distinction vis à vis Bentham's quantitative hedonistic calculus. Wallwork4 cites Freud's acknowledgment that "the accumulation of tension" of sexual foreplay is experienced as pleasure (which according to the agitation reduction model would normally be seen as something to be alleviated).5  This entire apology for a justification of altruism--in contradistinction to a radical hedonism in which all motives are self-centered--evaporates, however,  if one views the Ego and the Id, not as separate psychic entities, but as aspects of a dynamic which is incorporative; i.e, as an emotive dynamic which rises to a new level.  The apparent contradiction goes away without such a defense if we approach the "pleasurable" experience through an incorporative model, one which depicts a synergism of development instead of a mechanism of interaction.  An incorporative model reduces the bifurcation problem into non-existence by recognizing a process by which the Ego actually entails the emotive aspect as part of itself.  Or, to put it in a development sequence, the emotive develops in complexity until its takes on a higher level of operation for dealing with reality.  This growth model suggests emergence and synergism instead of interaction of two distinct entities (Ego and Id) running parallel and shaking hands (or bruising knuckles) along the way.

Freud actually illustrates this incorporation by citing the example of intellectual pleasure (a very strong precursor to self-fulfillment dynamics hailed by subsequent psychologists such as Fromm and Maslow) and the experience of intimacy.  The latter he saw as entailing not only "bodily satisfaction," but a "union" of sensual  enjoyment with "mental" satisfaction.6  This incorporation model actually challenges John Stuart Mill's contrast between quality and quantity of pleasure.  Mill said that he had rather be a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, making a point of recognizing higher qualities of pleasure in his style of utilitarianism.  However, it is doubtful that Mill would actually see a quality of such Socratic pleasure as entailing the renunciation of a quantity of sensational pleasure.  According to the incorporation model, pleasure isn't left behind to whine as an orphan of the Ego; it is carried forward to a more mature form.

Psychologists have been circling their descriptive wagons around this notion of incorporation in many ways.  Silvano Arieti has given a most exhaustive account of the process which I have called the "incorporative model."7   Arieti sees conceptual thought as having developed from a more primitive form.  Sounding more like a student of primitive culture than a psychologist, Arieti speaks of the mind as going through developmental stages, from a "paleological" form to a full-blown conceptual form.  He describes this progression as a movement from distinct sensations to higher levels of mental complexity, with each having the rudiments of cognition present in them.  According to Arieti, protoemotions (tension, appetite, fear, rage and satisfaction) develop from sensations; and although protoemotions have almost an immediate effect, they "presuppose some cognitive work."  They operate in the realm of signs, which Arieti distinguishes from symbols. Arieti sees a further development toward second-order emotions which  entail "cognitive symbolic processes" which  "take the form of images."8  His delineation of the nuances of progression leads him to call the primary process "primary cognition," which can reach another level, "conceptual thinking," which he identifies with the secondary process.9

Arieti seems to see himself as somewhat radical in that his theoretical formulation poses an emerging Ego.  In his paper, "The Double Methodology in the Study of Personality and Its Disorders,"10 Arieti positions his more cognitive analysis over against the ego psychologists who, according to him, have "tried to force their findings within the framework of the libido theory."11  Sounding very Aristotelian, Arieti says that he has "come to consider every psychologic phenomenon, like everything else in nature, under two different aspects:  form and content."12  He candidly states that he has found it more useful to "adopt some conceptions of other authors, like Piaget, Cassirer and Susanne Langer, than those of the Freudian ego-psychologists."13  In a sense, Arieti has out-"neoed" the neo-Freudians!

It is interesting how such incorporative constructs appear in the works of later theorists, but without even a single reference to Arieti's formulations, not even a listing of his publications in their indices.  For instance, Basch makes no reference to Arieti, although he distinguishes a progression of development from affect to  feeling to emotion.14  It should be noted, also, that Basch does not view these distinctions as separate in the sense of being replacements of each other, nor as psychological phenomena running parallel to each other.

Lear does not reference Cassirer nor Arieti, (although he uses Arieti's term, "protoemotions," and contends that they "develop into emotions").15  However, he follows both in contending that the content of the unconscious in "not merely concrete and imagistic; it is only on its way toward being a candidate for a concept."16  Lear's "transformation" dynamic, which seems to follow Arieti, is actually a brilliant use of a language metaphor for clarifying how real therapeutic success of analysis depends on a reframing of earlier appropriation of meaning into a higher conceptualization, one which actually functions somewhat like the dynamic of learning to think in a new language.17

To suggest that we conceptualize the Ego as a dynamic which is not born full grown is not tantamount to depreciating the older substantializing model.  Although the incorporative or emergence model for the Ego moots the point about a bifurcation between libido and the Ego, these constructs have functioned quite well for helping us understand the experiential reality of the Unconscious and its influence on feelings and behavior.  New models don't actually disqualify older models; they simply surpass them in pragmatic value.   

But if we conclude that the new unification model fares better for giving us a conceptual handle on the psychological dynamics underpinning our actual experiences, what exactly constitutes the "better" in such a model?  Or to use William James' pragmatic test: Since a difference that makes no difference is no difference at all, what real difference does the new formulation make?  What newly won perspectives can we lay at its feet as clarification trophies?  If we purport to be more sophisticated by debunking the Freudian psychic Weltanschauung, exactly  how do we re-mythologize it?18 To rename something doesn't necessarily change it.19

For instance, how does the incorporative model serve to clarify the influence of the unconscious dynamics on our feelings and behavior, that orthodox tenet which stands as the very foundation of what is today called dynamic psychology?  The reality of an unscouscious dynamic is certainly not some artifact of a past developmental stage, one which has been surplanted in some evolutionary fashion like fingernails which in some phylogenic past were once claws.  In other  words, the Unconscious does not relate to conscious awareness as our historical childhood relates to our present adulthood, i.e, one which is left behind in a process of development.  It does however, run a parallel if we see our child-past as incorporated into our adult-present?  The Unconscious also is still here; it actively impinges on our current thought and behavior as if it were somehow in the next room, interrupting like an intruding relative who makes our behavior his business.

Facing the reality of unconscious dynamics, therefore, raises many questions concerning the application of the incorporative model to our experience.  How does the new model accommodate the conflict dynamics which are the cornerstone of analytical psychology?  Is repression simply evidence of some strange working of the Ego in an arrested form?  If so, are we not postulating actually two Egos, one which is simply not advanced enough to reach the level of conceptual thought somewhat like Aristotle's view of  woman as really a man in the making that didn't quite make it, i.e., recalcitrant matter.  Is the goal of analysis one which would do away with the Unconscious completely, moving man to a state of pure conceptual cognition, thereby giving us a messianic-like view in which it ultimately reaches a stage in which the unconscious will have no function at all?   This would make all unconscious dynamics merely a vestige of an older stage of human evolution, with conscious awareness and its form of conceptual thought being a Johnny-come-lately mental premium.  If we reject this view, we are left with an incorporative model in which the psyche reaches a specific level in the emergence of the Ego, but not so far as to surplant the unconscious dynamics as it establishes its more cognitive operations.  This development culminates in a level in which the unconscious dynamic is still a part of it, a part which simply seeks peaceful coexistence with the Ego and not a development suicide in service to the Ego.

If the incorporative model improves our understanding of the psyche, it is precisely because it accommodates the synergism of emotion and cognition without  diminishing the reality of a conflict between what we might call a proto-ego,20  with its work being on a pre-conceptual level, and the Ego proper.  Under the developmental model, the conflict is seen as a lack of an integration of two symbolic expressions of experience, one operating on the level of paleologic thought, the other on  the level of conceptual thought which we usually identify with the Aristotelian system.  The conflict is, therefore, a clash between two motive forces, both which have as their singular goal the securing of self-esteem for the self in the sense in which Aristotle spoke of the universal desire for happiness.  However, in the paleologic structure, the primary motive force is the immediate in contradistinction to the secondary motive force which is mediated, i.e., reflective and discursive.

As a problematic dynamic,21 the Unconscious may best be depicted as a paleologic image identification to which the child is emotionally fixated, or at which he recoils in fear--or both as in the Oedipus dynamic--with the result that a later scene or interpersonal relation overlaps some essential aspect of the former object or scene and thus elicits a repeat of the pristine dynamics.  The more rational Ego experiences the impact (match) of the archaic response as truly alien and doesn't apprehend the conflict as having an underlying emotional unity.  This failure to integrate the match is somewhat like Western man's failure to appreciate how people of cosmologically oriented societies felt no contradiction in identifying two separate deities as expressing the same reality; i.e., they had no problem attributing the destruction of a war to their storm god (and not to their god of war) simply because they appreciated the essence of war-destruction in the devastation of the storm.

The failure of the conceptual mode of the Ego to recognize the logic of the archaic Ego is further illustrated by Eric Voegelin's explanation of how the ancients had no problem in switching gods or integrating one god's activity with that of another deity.  Our Western tendency to follow Aristotle's laws of thought makes us tend not to see this dynamic in myths.  In his study of the cosmologically oriented societies, Voegelin pointed out how diverse experiences, which on the surface may not appear to have any resemblance, are often expressed in mythopoeic thought in a unifying way.  According to Voegelin, a characteristic of ancient cultures was a "pluralism in expressing truth, the generous recognition and tolerance extended to  rival symbolizations of the same truth."22  Although rooted in the ground of history, the Unconscious impingement of the past on the present, similarly, is not understood and not appreciated by the more rational mind and, consequently, is experienced as irrational and chaotic.  However, chaos is simply the rational not understood.

The small child experiences rejection by those around him, and his archaic logic operates as one which takes the particular as also a universal.  I.e., his response to a situation is not one which he experiences as one possible response among many, but as one which representative a singular type.  For example, the response of the child is not "That's how he/she is," but "That's how people are."  It is not, "This is an option for me," but "This is what I must always do."  However, at this point there develops what this author has called the historical missing link in the dynamic which relates the Unconscious to certain types of conditioning, namely, an emotive response of defense by the archaic part of the Ego.  This response is like a decision, a quasi cognitive-like dynamic of the Unconscious, i.e., emotions operating with a modicum of cognitive assessment which we commonly reserve for rational thought.23

This emotive "decision" is the glue that holds together the elements of a patterned response.  It is not, however, automatic. The existential aspect of a personal stance of perspective functions as a process of interpretation on the emotional level (which we might appropriately call the work of the archaic Ego).  Or, as the author has so many times expressed this dynamic:  the child sometimes gets messages which were not sent, forming a Gestalt which is grounded in his own disposition, making "facts" which are nothing more than personally distorted perceptions.  He formulates a meaning from his experience and, from the phenomenological level at least, his perception is incorrigible.

 It is important to remember, therefore, that the archaic level operates--as does the Ego proper--with what I have called perceptual integrity.24   And if I understand Lear's thesis about the efficacy of analysis, he recognizes the "truth" of both the archaic and the rational levels of formulations when he contends that successful analysis entails a transformation of meaning by the analysand which integrates the two levels of superficial contradiction.

The incorporative model, whereby emotions are given a modicum of rationality, also accommodates another aspect of emotional conditioning.  The child becomes emotionally fixated, as it were, not only to an emotional attitude of evaluation of the other players in his life; he gets emotionally tied to what he found as relative relief from rejection.  His behavioral strategy becomes strategic by virtue of the fact that it is experienced as working for him, i.e., at least from the phenomenological standpoint.  Essential to its success as a defensive strategy is the perception that the defensive stance works in the sense that it is experienced as pragmatically successful.25  And just as the "other" player is generalized ("that's how others are"), the particular strategy is generalized also.  ("This is what I must always do to survive.")

When the child is more mature and has the ability to build conceptions which recognize a measure of diversity in the stance of others (rather than an essentialism of identification), he may still follow his universalization and apply his strategy to another as he did to his particular childhood "other." This reaction becomes a repetition of the primal scene in which paleologic successfully did its work. This is the emotional rationale behind the dynamic of transference.  The repetition which we find in the transference dynamic has this basic rationale.  The repetition compulsion, therefore, is not, as Freud would have us believe, a dynamic which bypass the pleasure principle.  It is the false logic of concluding that what worked (a relative pleasure) then will work again now.  For instance, the cycles of self-defeating behavior which we find in codependent partners represent complementary transferences between them.  The repetitions constitute a regression to a primitive strategy developed at the more primitive level:  One survives by playing out a needy strategy (Poor Me Jane); the other by a complementary strategy of taking care of another's needs (Me Tarzan, Deliverer from Crocodiles!).

Arieti's analysis of the dynamics of phobias can be seen as operating along these lines. According to Arieti, the phobic object triggers a reaction by virtue of its valence as representing some aspect of an earlier experience.  For example, someone who has been treated like a dog may find himself having a fear of dogs even though his empirical experience with actual dogs has never been a problem.  In phobias, therefore, the transference system is reversed; one experiences in a particular object or situation some singular essence, merely an aspect of the object which acts as a sign which has emotional identity with an earlier interpersonal scene.  On the archaic level of the Unconscious, two dissimilar things are identified by the commonality of certain shared aspects and one functions simply as the "symbol" of the other.

Calling the former dynamic paleologic is significant because it presupposes that when the rational mind (conceptual thought) views the primary process as irrational, it is simply failing to see how archaic thought links images which have a common emotional content (the dynamic of association) somewhat like Aristotelian thought absorbs two separate particulars (hammer and saw) under a singular general rubric (tool).  In other words, the chaos of the primary process is simply the rational not understood by the conscious mind.  It is not the irrational in the sense of the illogical.  And it is here that we get help from the genius of Ernest Cassirer.  Cassirer's study of mythopoeic thought and the development of language in relation to metaphor underlies much of what Arieti has done in distinguishing sensation from protoemotion and conceptual thought.

Ironically, the new incorporative model of the ego appears to function as a bridge integrating two distinctive schools of psychology.  When language analysis pulls back the sheets of confusion, it may find both, psychoanalysts and the proponents of Gestalt psychology, lying in the same theoretical bed.  For instance, Lear goes to great lengths to show how authentic therapeutic success of analysis is not simply finding a full-blown unconscious wish and making it conscious.  He sees the content of the wish as itself undergoing a development.  Lear even sees the work of analytic interpretation as more than simply a translation of the primary process  into a secondary process explication; he contends that the "analytic interpretation helps to direct and complete a process of mental development."26   Consequently, Lear's description of what happens in analytic work which does not bring success (even though the unconscious was made conscious) indicates that he sees such failure as an arrest of a process which was pushing toward a fuller expression.  This dynamic is closely akin to "closure," something tantamount to a drive to finish "unfinished business," terms which have become the hallmark of the Gestalt therapist description of a lack of integration.

The incorporative model turns out to be only as true as it is valuable.  Being a model, it does not tell us something new any more than saying something in French (which has already been said in English) gives us additional information.  It may not be appropriate even to say of two such linguistic formulations that one is better than the other.  Fresh metaphors may help us clarify what probably will always be experiences of two separate worlds, the objective and the subjective.  We probably will never be successful in bridging the two in a seamless philosophical fashion any more than we can get the length of a room in Fahrenheit.  Our failure to do so is not simply a category mistake; in some ways it is the impact of conflicting categories of  experience.  We are aware of a difference between our feelings (emotions) in contradistinction to our conclusions (cognition).  On the other hand, we also are aware that how things feel pushes us to conclusions in a way which often gets expressed as "It feel as if that means . . ."  The weight of such experience breaks the backbone of our words.  However, somehow we feel that we are sneaking up on the edge of this distinction with each Vaihingerean "as if" formulation.  We must continue to spin tales, use metaphors and formulate myths to express experiential truth, simply hoping that we are making clear what we know on a level which is essentially inexplicable.

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION BETWEEN DR. BILL STROUD AND DR. DAVID SHAVER, CERTIFIED JUNGIAN ANALYST; CERTIFIED PSYCHOANALYST

(Dr. David Shaver is a personal friend of Dr. Bill Stroud.  He studied philosophy under the Dr. Stroud at Arkansas State University.  Dr. Shaver and Dr. Stroud correspond almost daily and discuss philosophical and psychological implication of various contributions being made to the two fields.  For a more comprehensive introduction to Dr. Shaver and his work, writings and psychoanalytical work, see his website:  www.drdavidshaver.com )The following comments are responses to notations made by Dr. David Shaver, who, upon request of Dr. Stroud, reviewed the early manuscript of the article presented above.  Dr. Shaver's queries are given in abbreviated form; Dr. Stroud's comments in response are given in full.)

Page 2, Paragraph 1.
Shaver:  ". . . you seem to be making the point that the naturally occurring dissociative states of the psyche are solely linguistically descriptive. . ."

Stroud:  I was trying to describe what I see, in psychological constructs, as an example of what Ryle called "the category mistake."  I should not have said "solely linguistic."  That was a bad choice of words.  What I meant was that references to terms like Ego, Id, etc. are not of the same logical type as "substances" which we refer to in time and space categories.

For instance, you can't do surgery and remove my libido. This does not mean that such constructs have no reality reference at all ("merely linguistic").  The problem comes when we speak of one of these as if it were "in existence" in the ordinary sense of 'existence,' and give it a status categorically separate from another such "entity."  We can abstract aspects of an experience and give these aspects separate terminological existence.  However, this does not mean that lying behind each term is some separate entity somewhat like two dots on a map stand for two separate cities.  To use another example:  I think it's patent confusion born of linguistic muddle to say that "my fear is a product of my emotions"; i.e., as if emotion is one entity totally separate from another entity called "fear."  In reference to terms like Ego and Id, this possibly causes us to linguistically "purify" Ego to the extent that it denotes no emotive aspect within it at all.  I'm not sure that we can have thinking and feeling as exclusive experiential phenomena except on paper where we separate the two with to distinct words.

Page 2, Paragraph 2
Shaver:  " . . . you seem to be equating the ego with the conscious mind and the id with the unconscious. . ."

Stroud:  I'm not aware of intending here anything that would represent the ego as equivalent (or essentially confined) to consciousness, with the id as equivalent to the unconscious.  As I understand it, the ego does some guarding against the irruption of the id and, consequently becomes a dynamic of repression.  I also assume that not remembering dreams is a fallout of such unconscious ego dynamics.  I am certainly aware that when I am asleep with the TV is on, I am immediately awakened when someone calls out my name.  Some darn thing was listening and discriminating like a silent watch dog!

My point about the "Bethesdean paradigm" was that our linguistic description seems to lead us into a bifurcation which has its roots in a map-model view of language; i.e., just because we can express ourselves with separate categories (words) such as "feeling" and "thinking" does not necessarily picture accurately categorically separate experiential phenomena such as thinking as separate from feeling in the same way that apples are separate from oranges.  To step on the bottom of my foot doesn't make the bottom something separate from my foot.  Maybe the ego is not actually something totally separate from the id except phenomenologically, i.e., the terms function to throw light on how we experience ourselves.  (This does not take away from the value of these constructs in "explaining" the work of the psyche.)

Page 2, Paragraph 4.
Shaver:  " . . . you seem to be making a case for equating mind-functioning with the neurology of the brain. . . Psychoanalysis is not a metaphor for neurological firing."

Stroud: I should have made clearer that this paragraph has as its focus the earlier stance of Freud.  (I did say "from the beginning.")  I am aware that what has been called "The Project" was abandoned by Freud.  However, as I recall, Ellenberg seems to take the position that Freud  just got tired of coming to a dead end on the reduction thesis rather than abandoning it in theory per se.  I see Freud's "theoretical progression" on this to be completely different from his other "revisions" such as his new view about "actual neurosis."  In the latter, I understand that he moved from the actual "ball-aching" repercussion of sexual frustration to the mere idea of such content.  

My problem on this issue is not "reducing psychoanalysis to a metaphor of neurological firing."   I readily grant that psychological phenomena may need more than neurons as its reduction target base; however, if you take away the entire human physiology, I'm not sure it is meaningful to speak of a psyche remaining.  For instance, thinking may not be "located" in the brain or reduced to any mere configuration of its structures.  However, if every aspect (component) of the human physiology is extracted from what we mean by "human," I'm not sure it is meaningful to talk about a psyche remaining any more than taking away all light would leave you room to talk about any remaining "sight."  Ryle's discussion of "category mistake" was actually meant to show that what you set forth as a distinction is rooted in a linguistic confusion, seeing the psyche as having a reality within the same logical type as the brain.  The color of an apple is not equivalent to the apple;  however, the color does not survive the eating of the apple (Please don't push this to the john stage and say that it still has some color!)

My problem is not with understanding Freud, I think.  My problem is with the world of metaphysicians who retroject something like Spirit or Logos back onto reality before mentation was evolved as a conjunction of various aspects of reality (the emergence theory of the mind).  I chide you mystics for having more knowledge than I can seem to glean from the other side of the epistemological box of sensory data.

I'm using Ryle's clarification (category mistake) to show that Freud's original frustration (pre-ego psychology?) has much of its roots, not in the inability to find a connection"  between mind and body, but in his "bewitchment of language" whereby he assumes there are two separate "things" which need to be reconciled in "interaction."  As for not having to be an MD to do psychoanalysis?  Well, I don't have to be an electrical engineer to turn on a flashlight.  But I do know that if I don't have a battery at all, I don't expect to be able to talk about "this little light of mine."

Page 4, full paragraph 2.
Shaver:  "you seem to say that real therapeutic success depends upon higher conceptualizations. . .insight does not (indeed mostly does not) produce real change . . ."

Stroud:  I don't see anything in the area of your citation which would cause you to infer that I suppose that therapeutic success is contingent on "insight."  I am aware that it has become a truism that the analysand can uncover tons of archeological data (even trauma) and not experience real therapeutic change; i.e., that simply recalling and even narrating early psychological trauma (even the pristine bases of the later transference) can merely leave one more informed but no less neurotic.  With all of this I am familiar and agree.  

If I have understood Lear on this point, he is addressing an "insight" which connects the transference dynamic to early experiences in an experiential depth which "clicks" for the person in a sense which he (the analysand) appropriates a resolution (closure?) beyond mere cognitive acknowledgment.  I humorously call this fallacy you cite the phenomenon of "insight mania," which too often turns some people into seminar junkies (they want to know more and more and more about themselves and, consequently, dedicate their lives to writing omphalosean notes to themselves), yet resolve nothing along the lines of integration and individualization.

Page 5, footnote 20.
Shaver:  "I am not aware that any psychoanalytic psychology takes this perspective [that the unconscious has always been viewed as not simply working willy nilly, but as directed toward some resolution]
Stroud:  My reference to the unconscious as "not working willy nilly," but directed toward some resolution, etc., is my way of saying what I understand many others to have said, namely, that symptoms are telling us something (see McLaughlin's The Ego and Its Defense); as if these symptoms were acting as a symbolic language, i.e., cryptic, symbolic expressions.  Furthermore, images in dreams don't appear like lotto balls randomly falling out of a psychic hopper; they have meaning, are not willy nilly, i.e., not  "just happenings."  Isn't this the very basis of dream analysis according to Jung, that dreams are a guide, not just a drunken subconscious sailor babbling about nonsensically?

Page 6, footnote 21.
Shaver:  "This is in error [the question:  will analytical psychologists ever step up to the plate and acknowledge that many unconscious dynamics may not be problematic at all]."

Stroud:  Indeed, I may have overstated here the disposition of psychoanalysis concerning its goal .  This may be my gullibility as regards a popular perception of its goal of bringing the unconscious to a conscious state.  I know that we have discussed the fact that much of the unconscious is creative per se (e.g., Arieti's "creativity theory of 'tertiary' mode of cognitive operations);  but isn't this generally viewed as a hidden helper whom we'd like to invite into the open to be free of such subtle and cryptic methods of talking to us? What about Edinger's strong insistence that consciousness is to be expanded, that "the purpose of human life is the creation of consciousness"? (The Creation of Consciousness, p. 57).  How is consciousness "created" if it is not the emergence of more consciousness through a reduction of the unconscious?  Isn't the idea of "a new myth for the modern world" basically an almost messianic-type progression of the expansion of God as equivalent to the expansion of consciousness?

As for Freud and the positive role of defense mechanisms (which you seem to be citing)-isn't this seen as positive only relative to its alternative, a dramatic impingement on the ego?  Doesn't analysis take over here (trying to bring the unconscious to consciousness) to offer a third alternative better than the former two?

Page 6, first full paragraph.
Shaver:  " . . . you state that the unconscious may best be depicted as a paleologic image identification - I have no idea what that means."

Stroud:  Bad phraseology on my part.  The intention was not "unconscious" per se but specific content situations within the unconscious.  I am here playing with the idea of Cassirer and Arieti concerning an aspect of cognition which is even present in the primary process itself; i.e., that even in more primitive forms of primary process, there is some configuration going on which appropriates some meaning to even this level of experience.  I am hypothesizing that a small child (possibly even pre-verbal) might (in specific object relations) get "emotionally bonded" to a situation; and later-outside of awareness-this "situation-Gestalt" might be played out again (transference dynamic), an "overlap of the primal scene" . By the way, this repetition and acting out in the transference, therefore, would be a "repetition" of a primal scene which, I suggest, was much, much earlier than the more orthodox view of the Oedipus dynamic (which I understand is rooted in about year two and later?)

This is the basis of my skepticism about the "repetition compulsion" being kicked back into some mysterious realm of pre-history and not being applicable to the "pleasure principle."  Yes, of course this puts it into the realm of learning; but this just might be the rudiments of conditioning in its earliest formation, a part of an unconscious rationale of inductive generalizations about experience.  As I indicated, the more rational (conceptual formulation) later will see this as a dynamic which leads to destructive, stupid-looking repetitions of  behavior, which makes absolutely no sense (what I often cite as the dynamic being played out in codependency, etc.).

Page 6, last paragraph.
Shaver:  ". . . you talk about the archaic ego. . . If you are referring to the unconscious, then to apply a term such as archaic ego is erroneous."

Stroud:  My response immediately above (concerning the pre-verbal appropriation of meaning) concerning an early ego function is basically what I mean by an archaic ego.  I am taking this from Cassirer, Langer, and Arieti.  This is a counterpart (on the more rational side) to what proto-emotions are to emotion per se according to Arieti and Basch.  Basically, primitive cultures appropriated a match among  experiences, and this received expression in an overlap of their mythical personages (the reference to Voegelin).  I see this as a forerunner of our logical constructions of conceptual thought.  According to Cassirer (mainly citing Userner's idea of "momentary gods", the primitive mind moved toward generalizations in personifying activities (I for years have called this an "appropriation of a common essence among diverse experiences"; i.e., finding fertility in agriculture, in sheep, in humans, the primitive personalized/personified this appropriation of sameness and expressed it as the presence of a goddess (of fertility, our abstraction-their mythical personage); consequently, mythical themes function as a quasi-logistical formulation of identify, an inclusion dynamic which is later formulated into the system of our logical constructs!)

Page 7, second paragraph.
Shaver:  "I do not understand this paragraph whatsoever."  

Stroud:  This paragraph is my (probably abortive) attempt to explain what I see as the emotional factor in conditioning.  It is also an attempt to explain how I see an existential factor in conditioning; i.e., that conditioning can occur in the earliest period of a child, and not just by the simple post hoc ergo hoc associative factor.  A child may get rocked and nurtured, but only when he has a fever or has some illness.  His emotional response (with a rationale dynamic of meaning also involved) to this is his particular  way of configurating (Gestalt factor) this total complex of experience.  The result:  he only feels safe later when he is in some situation of weakness or malady.  Monozygotic twins are walking near the edge of the porch.  The mother shouts, "Be careful."  One gets the message (whether more emotion or reason is involved in "getting the message" I don't know!):  "she loves me."  The other gets the message:  "You think I'm dumb or something?"  This basically says: "We sometimes get messages which were never sent!"

Page 7, third paragraph.
Shaver:  " . . . perceptual integrity . . .is clearly outside the parameters of psychoanalytic thought."

Stroud:  What I have immediately described above in the case of drawing conclusions according to a particular stance within a situation is being referenced here.  If a child feels he is hated even though an act toward him was an expression of love, his stance toward his conclusion is one of "perceptual integrity."  This term I have for years used to show that you cannot get someone to change his mind by bribery, that one's stance toward his belief is one of unimpeachable integrity; he may lie to get some reward, but one believes what he believes at the moment and cannot simply recant at will  (Ha! Not even will james!  James' "will to believe" is a confusion.  I may wish I didn't believe something which I believe, but willing doesn't have anything to do with what I believe.)  How can we judge another for what he believes.  One may change his mind, but this will be because he has "seen differently" at some juncture; i.e., now the impact of new evidence is active.  It is interesting, isn't it, that one doesn't decide to change his mind.  By God, he just does it!  I have written on this in my manuscript on psychology and philosophy of religion, explaining that it makes absolutely no sense to say that someone "ought to believe so and so."  

Gerald Edelstien in his book Trauma, Trance, and Transformation:  A Clinical Guide to Hypnotherapy, discusses the importance of  "redefining" the goal of a part of the personality which has gotten a particular perspective.  (He does a creative takeoff of "ego state" psychology (Federn and Berne) by having the client relive configurations of  ego states.  (He takes the definition of Watkins on ego state:  "consists of those behaviors, perceptions and experiences which are bound together by some common principles and separated by a boundary from other such states". p. 70.)  The major poinithin uncovering a perspective which the client has taken, he goes to great lengths to compliment the person on how this was a strategy which made sense at the time (perceptual integrity!).  He then allows them to accept the early perspective (even is it was pure hatred of another) because it certainly made sense given the way things appeared to the patient at that particular juncture.  Accepting the situation-stance of perception has also been developed under the positive things said about "the little professor" in Transactional theory.

Page 8, first full paragraph.
Stroud:  See above.  If I may be so bold.  I don't fail to see the distinction.  I don't recognize the distinction!  I simply push the reinforcement back further than you do, even to the level of preverbal periods.  Consequently, I see child as often having a "perspective of salvation" , i.e., strategies which the child takes as "rewarding" in that he feels like he has to do this to survive.  If I take the perspective that I won't be loved unless I'm sick, I'll maneuver my ass into bad situations (trauma) so I can get what I "perceive" is what I need to survive; therefore, I pervert the bad experiences into something which I must have (this perverts the bad into something good-hence, back to the pleasure principle albeit a perverted form of it!)

Shaver:  ". . . you again fail to differentiate between reinforcement theory and repetition compulsion."

Stroud:  See above.  If I may be so bold.  I don't fail to see the distinction.  I don't recognize the distinction!  I simply push the reinforcement back further than you do, even to the level of preverbal periods.  Consequently, I see child as often having a "perspective of salvation" , i.e., strategies which the child takes as "rewarding" in that he feels like he has to do this to survive.  If I take the perspective that I won't be loved unless I'm sick, I'll maneuver my ass into bad situations (trauma) so I can get what I "perceive" is what I need to survive; therefore, I pervert the bad experiences into something which I must have (this perverts the bad into something good-hence, back to the pleasure principle albeit a perverted form of it!)  --Bill

   1. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind. London:  Hutchinson Library, 1949.  Return to text.

2. The Ego is a metaphor in the sense that all descriptions of subjectivity are dependent on models taken from the objective world.  However, I prefer to speak of metaphorical descriptions of subjectivity as models.  Some metaphors entail a description of one objective thing by reference to some aspect of another objective thing.  "The man is a bear in the morning when he first wakes up" is grounded in two objective referenda, a man and a bear.  However, "he was filled with joy" entails a description of a subjective state by the use of an objective analog.  Having only one objective referendum is what I call a model.  I find this distinction not an insignificant point in emphasizing the pragmatic truth-not a scientific one-of our descriptions of subjective experiences. Return to text.

3. See Ellenberger's masterful review of Freud's postulation of neuronal mechanics lying behind his "sums of excitation."  Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious:  The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry.  New York:  Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1970, p. 478.
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4. Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics.  New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1991, p. 126.
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5. Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics, p. 129. Return to text.

6 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, translated and edited by James Strachery et al., 24 vols. , 12 [1915]:169, cited by Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics, p. 131.  Return to text.

7. See Chapter 23, "Cognition and Feeling," pp. 314-323, in Silvano Arieti, On Schizophrenia, Phobias, Depression, Psychotherapy and the Farther Shores of Psychiatry.  New York Brunner/Mazel, Publishers, 1978.) Return to text.

8.   Arieti, On Schizophrenia, p. 316 f. Return to text.

9.   Arieti, On Schizophrenia, pp. 332 f. Return to text.

10. Arieti, On Schizophrenia, pp. 430-444. Return to text.

11. Arieti, On Schizophrenia, p. 440.  Return to text.

12. Arieti, On Schizophrenia, p. 440. Return to text.

13. Arieti, On Schizophrenia, p. 440. Return to text.

14. Michael Franz Basch, Understanding Psychotherapy:  The Science Behind the Art.  New York:   Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1988, p. 78. Return to text.

15. Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature:  A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.  New York:  Farrar,Straus, & Giroux, 1990, p.112.  Return to text.

16. Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature, p. 106. Return to text.

17. An examination of the role of language as a metaphor in Lear's formulation of how analysis is efficacious has been presented in my unpublished work, "Language as a Metaphor:  Translation as a Model for Understanding Lear's Analysis of Freud's Concepts," 1996. Return to text.

18.  To claim a scientific knowledge of psychic "events" as if we could "demythologize" rather than "remythologize" psychic phenomena-in the sense of giving descriptive propositional statements-is an abuse of language and a misconception of epistemology. Return to text.

19. This is not literally true of all linguistic formulations.  On certain levels language does not simply stand for something we have thought; certain developments of language are best described, not as signs and symbols of our thinking, but thinking with our signs and symbols, i.e., often a word becomes essentially a thought formation instead of a thought representation.  Language, like ritual, can be a formulation of meaning as presenting realities in contradistinction to representing them. The author is indebted to the works of Ernest Cassirer and Suzanne Langer for clarifying this important distinction. Return to text.
 
20. Since the unconscious has always been viewed by analytical psychology as not working simply willy nilly, but as directed toward some resolution which has at least a modicum of a rationale, any objection to calling it a stage of the developing Ego becomes merely a verbal dispute.  Return to text.

21. I'm not sure analytical psychologists have or will ever step up to the plate and acknowledge that many unconscious dynamics may not be problematic at all, i.e., that some unconscious dynamics aren't in need of being made conscious any more than every experience of beauty needs to be explained. Return to text.

22. Eric Voegelin, Order and History.  Volume one:  Israel and Revelation.  Louisiana State University Press, 1956, p. 7. Return to text.

23. To understand the ability of the unconscious to make decisions, simply recall the time you sat down on the toilet seat with the lid up.  The instant your rear end descends one-half inch below the level which it normally does, you are "reminded" (whatever that means!) by some unconscious dynamic which was making a comparison/contrast, and then you react even without conscious deliberation.  It is an exercise of futility to try to determine whether such "learning" is an example of a stimulus/response dynamic vs. a process which entails a rationale/conclusion dynamic.
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24. Years ago I started using the term, "perceptual integrity" for that punctilious act of perception in which at a specific moment one takes a stance toward somethng as either credible or incredible, what lately, I understand, is being called the incorrigible aspect of cognition. Return to text.

25. Here lies the rudiments of masochism:  the ability to gestalt a negative (rejection and abuse) as something positive. (Negative attention is viewed as better than absolute rejection.)
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26. Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature, p. 114. Return to text.
Bill Stroud, of Richwood, Texas, has an extensive background in three areas: theology, philosophy and psychology (B.D, Th.D., Ph.D). Although semi-retired, he is active as a speaker, free-lance writer and a workshop presenter for educational and service agencies.  He is currently in training in the theory and methodology of remote viewing under the tutelage of Lyn Buchanan of Alamogordo, NM.  Address comments to drstroud@comcast.net