** Charcot (Freud's mentor), Freud, etc. just replaced conventional religion with new forms rooted in exorcism.
Henri F. Ellenberger, Peter Klevius favorite source on psychoanalysis) has been praised (but 'criticized', according to stupid religiously biased Wikipedia) for modeling his picture of the origins of psychiatry in the Enlightenment clash with Demonology — in the triumph of illuminated reason over the blindness of faith. Perhaps 'blindness of faith' is an exageration when keeping in mind that religion has very profane objectives, e.g. sex segregation.
The reason Klevius is self-promoting is (except for no one else daring to do it, and to serve an audience starved on the "real thing") exactly the opposite to why most bloggers (and media) do it. Compare the promotion of ordinary, or even sub-standard products among high quality ones. A reader stumbling over a blog that looks out of the ordinary and says strange (but logical) things, may need some hard facts about the author, who himself is out of the ordinary (although he calls himself "the extremely normal" to emphasize his logic and internal harmony that should attract those who value it). Dear reader. Of some reason word and phrase statistics etc. clearly show you've a positive view on Klevius. However, how do we get more people reading and understanding Klevius? If you support Wikipedia you shouldn't be forgiven for not supporting Klevius and his defense for your Human Rights, right!
Peter Klevius: Relying on my scientific methodology I enter the field of subversion* through the Trojanian pores of diffuse discourse conceptualizations. My pockets are full of "alien" thoughts and well inside, when I am throwing them around, they might reveal internal inconsistencies in the very discourse I am visiting, not sharing. My employer? Negative human rights, of course!
*the potential subversion is already there waiting for revelation via the dynamics that is created by "alien" thoughts. But "alien thoughts" are no threat to a certain discourse if they don't use this particular method.
Charcot and his school considered the ability to be hypnotized as a clinical feature of hysteria. Here Charcot demonstrating hypnosis on a "hysterical" Salpêtrière patient, "Blanche" (Blanche Wittmann), who is supported by Dr. Joseph Babiński (rear). Blanche acted"hysteric" for to prove Charcot's senseless charlatanic fantasies true. It was here Sigmund Freud got his first kick into the unethical and unscientific swamp that he called "psychoanalysis" - an extension of exorcism, now clad in a new language spiced with medical latin words.
Wikipedia's weird description of this monster of charlatanism: Jean-Martin Charcot (/ʃɑːrˈkoʊ/; French: [ʃaʁko]; 29 November 1825 – 16 August 1893) was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology.[1] He is known as "the founder of modern neurology",[2] and his name has been associated with at least 15 medical eponyms, including Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease and Charcot disease (better known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neurone disease, or Lou Gehrig disease).[1] Charcot has been referred to as "the father of French neurology and one of the world's pioneers of neurology".[3] His work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology; modern psychiatry owes much to the work of Charcot and his direct followers.[4] He was the "foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France"[5] and has been called "the Napoléon of the neuroses".
Richard Webster on Charcot's student Sigmund Freud: If Freud’s early patients were, for the most part, not suffering from psychological disturbances at all, and if Freud’s therapeutic technique was founded on the medical errors of Charcot, it might well be asked how it was that he (and Breuer) succeeded in curing so many patients in the remarkable fashion attested to by the early case histories.
Peter Klevius psychosocial Freud timeline
The hysteric birth of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud desperately tried to "scientifically" defend how he treated his wife in a world that already had begun abandoning most of sex segregation in practical life. In fact, what many psychoanalytic feminists now ascribe to the "patriarchy" is often a product of this prolonged "artificial" sex segregation and hence due to Freud's and their own separatist efforts.
Sex segregation is the reactionary "phallus" seen as the "hystericized site of displaced" sexes in a world entering the confusion of modernity.. Feminists & Islamists = guardians of the "feminine".
The lost ghost in the machine and the psychoanalytic chameleon Mr. Nobody
There has been an all time on-going development within biology, genetics, AI research and robot technology, which narrows our view on, not only the difference between animals and humans, but also the gap between what is considered living and dead matter. Not only free will, but also properties and representations/symbols are getting all the more complicated and vanishing as their subjective meaning seems less usable in a new emerging understanding of our invironmental positioning. Although the psychoanalytic movement seems ready to confirm/adapt to this development equally fast as Freud himself changed his ideas to fit into new scientific discoveries (it was a pity he didn't get a chance to hear about Francis Crick) psychoanalysis is forever locked out from this reality. PA is doomed to hang on the back of development just as feminism and middle-class politics, without any clue on the direction (neither on the individual nor the collective/cultural level).
Psychoanalysis has survived just because of its weakest (in fact, absent) link, namely the lack of a border between folk psychology and itself. The diagnosis for psychoanalysis would consequently be borderline.
Sigmund's dream of a biological psychoanalysis was his biggest mistake.
However, for women he suggested "a normal penis several times" to keep hysteria at bay.
This timeline (launched on the web in 2003) is copied from a yet unpublished book: Homo Filius Nullius - the Illegitimate Man by Peter Klevius. It consists of mostly Peter Klevius' own observations but includes other gathered material as well.
An interesting detail in the timeline below is Hollywood's early and strong engagement in psyhoanalysis. My working hypothesis is that it might have something to do with certain characteristics of Hollywood, which in a way, are precursors of Homo Filius Nullius and the social state he (and she - compare Finnish non-gender/sex 'hän') lives in. Attractive people were transported to this particular place where they met with other equally attractive but lonely people. As we all do know, apart from movies Hollywood’s favorite product for the media was divorce. It became cool to divorce because these attractive stars did it at an early time with quite some frequency But for many of these stars it might not have been that cool as it appeared and most likely the introduction of psychoanalytic thinking in Hollywood was an attempt to try to better resolve personal relations on these grounds. Here again we see the same pattern of modernity, sex-segregation and lose attachment treated with the disease itself!
1879-80 Translated one volume of Mill's collected works and didn't like Mill's idea about women's emancipation and equal rights. Actually this was the real starting point for Freud's fanatic and lifelong search/construction of a "scientific" defense for sex segregation (see What is sex segregation? on Peter Klevius web museum www.klevius.info/ - which hasn't been changed for more than a decade) in an unprecedented time of female "gender" breakers..
1881 Sigmund Freud finally gets his delayed medical degree, and a poorly paid job.
1882 Suddenly left his job without getting a new one.
1883 Tried to convince his fiancee that Mill was a moron and that a woman (by nature) belonged to kitchen, nursing room and bed.to such an extent that it "...practically rule out any profession". However, the (deliberate?) development of psychoanalysis into a female profession (many of the female child psychoanalystst were childless including his own daughter Anna Freud), forced him to a pragmatic acceptance of professional (but sex segregated) women while reinforcing his sense that the distinction was still regarded as fundamental..
1884-5 Freud ruins his scientific reputation by presenting too hasty and erroneous conclusions about cocaine.
1885-86 Freud visits his mentor and idol Jean Charcot's lectures on "hysteria" in Paris.
1886 At the end of April, Freud, known as a “practising magnétiseur”, opens his private medical practice in an effort to economically survive after having been laughed down (because of the cocaine mess) by the Viennese scientific society.
1886-7 Turns to hypnotic suggestion based on the lectures of the pathetic Charcot in Paris.
1888 Freud begins treating Anna von Lieben, known in "Studies in Hysteria" as Caecilie M.
1889 In July, Freud begun using the cathartic method on Anna von Lieben, a wealthy morphine addict he treated twice a day for some three years.
1890-92 The “discovery” of electrical activity in the brain was debated in the Viennese ‘Centralblatt für Physiologie’. Freud and his Viennese colleagues did not know about the original discovery by the British R. Caton from 1875.
1891 Caton sends a letter to Centralblatt in which he describes his findings presented in Britain in 1875 and 1878.
(Peter Klevius is, until disproved, to be considered the first (2001) and only one (so far) to have acknowledged the crucial connection between Freud's emerging psychoanalysis and Caton's discovery). Few researcher even know abt the basic controversy (i.e. that Caton was some 17 years - sic - ahead of the Viennese scholars) underlying Klevius' theory. The implications of Klevius findings abt the Freud/Caton connection, are presented in "Pathological symbiosis", and are entirely described in yet unpublished Homo Filius Nullius.
1891 Freud’s ideas on neuronal transmission were altered because of Waldeyer’s hypothesis that the nervous impulse also had to be discontinuous.
1891 Death of Fleischl von Marxow (Freud’s friend who erroneously thought he was the first who had discovered electrical activity in the brain, and who became a cocaine addict because of Freud).
1891 On Aphasia 1891. London and New York, 1953. Indicates a psychosomatic connection between body and language.
1892 Freud moves (according to Macmillan) from the descriptive level of Charcot’s hysteria to the more sophisticated ideas of Janet (March 11).
1892 Dec. A preliminary report on hysteria. A preliminary report for the 1895 book Studies in Hysteria.
1892 First mentioning on tics.
1893 “…in mental functions something is to be distinguished, a quota of affect or a sum of excitation which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body. This hypothesis, which, incidentally already underlies our theory of ”abreaction” in our ”Preliminary Communication” (1893), can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid explaining a great variety of psychical states”.
1893 Freud, S, On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena. [with J. Breuer] SE 2, 3-17.
1894 - The first written appearance of the word "feminism" as we know it. Two completely different "feminisms" can be exemplified by "feminine" Hubertine Auclert and "non-feminine" Madeleine Pelletier. Also compare the notion of "false feminism" ascribed to competent women competing on male turf.
1894 Freud, S, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. SE 3, 43-61.
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1894 “… a complicated electrical apparatus” (in The Neuro Psychosis of Defence).
The obvious connection between Caton and Freud has to my knowledge not been pointed out before the presentation of this timeline (P. Klevius).
1894 Freud suffers from impotence. Fliess gives him cocaine to cure a sinus infection – Freud got addicted and begun his "self-analysis".
1894 December. Fliess visited Freud and examined Emma Eckstein.
1895 Women's football on the rise (e.g. Nettie Honeyball).
1895 In February Freud asked Fliess to cure Emma Eckstein’s “nasal reflex neurosis” (a hoax diagnose, see above) by unnecessarily removing the middle left concha of her nose. Emma was on the verge of bleeding to death from gauze that carelessly had been left within her nasal cavity. According to Freud Emma was not bleeding because of ruptured veins but because she had, unconsciously, fallen in love with him.
1895 First woman scales Matterhorn (Europe's highest mountain), gets big headlines and becomes notoious in Victoian circles. Did Freud think she actually climbed a penis, and did her (and other women's) strength contributed to the birth of psychoanalysis one year later?
1895 Fliess is peeping on his toddler son’s spontaneous penile erections while looking at his mother. This is then connected to Freud’s “memory” of his desire to copulate with his mother at the age of two.
1895 May. “a consuming passion for psychology” (a “tyrant” as Freud himself describes it in a letter to Fliess).
1895 The first Freudian psychotherapy appeared in 1895, in Freud’s contribution to his and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria. Here Freud gives the concepts of ”resistance” and ”transference” their first definition.
1895 Freud, S, A Project for a Scientific Psychology. SE 1, 283-397.
1895 On July 25, 1895, the secret of the dream "revealed" itself to Freud.
1896 First coins the term "psychoanalysis”. Freud's father dies and Freud starts his self-analysis (according to some interpretations – but see 1894).
1896 Freud, S, The Aetiology of Hysteria.
1897 “I no longer believe in my neurotica” (seduction theory).
1897 University of Vienna for the first time permitted the enrolment of women.
1897 When Anna Freud was two or less Freud “discovered” infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.
1898 Freud, S, Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses.
1898 R v Krafft-Ebing: Psychology of sexual life. Mentions "psychoanalysis" (Krafft-Ebing was positive to Freud because they both shared the view that "sexuality" was world-embracing, and hence "readable" in every aspect of life. He strongly supported Freud's application to his university).
1899 Freud, S, Screen Memories.
1900 S. F. The Interpretation of Dreams published. (written in 1898-1899).
1901 In the autumn of 1901, Freud was faced with a mind far superior than his own. Otto Weininger approached him with an outline for his thesis (not the final book version) Sex and Character. Of course Freud wasn't the man to take it so he rejected the young (21) genius in the most brute way and hence probably contributed to this sensitive youngster´s suicide. Although Weininger based his thoughts erranenously on a speculative male/female "sex-fluid" in every cell (he didn't know abt DNA and therefore couldn't properly asssess the power of heterosexual attraction), his importance as a genius is the internal logic in his construction - a logic that made Wittgenstein choose Otto, but not Sigmund, to his list of a few important thinkers that had impressed him. Also see Klevius analysis of mind and awareness!.
1904 S. F. published Psychopathology of Everyday Life; and ended relationship with Fliess (who accused Freud of plagiarism).
1905 S. F. published Three Essays on Sexuality and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
1907 Freud and Jung meet in Vienna.
1908 First International Psychoanalytical Congress, Salzburg,
Vienna.
1909 S. F. forms International Psychoanalytical Society with Carl Jung as its first president. Comes to US to give a series of lectures at Clark Univ. (invited by G. Stanley Hall).
1911 Adler left Freud.
1914 Jung left Freud.
1914 S. F. "On Narcissism"-- the first mentioning of the ego ideal, which will become the superego.
1915 S. F. delivers introductory lectures at University of Vienna.
1917 S. F. publishes Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
1918-22 S. F. analyzed his daughter Anna Freud and put more emphasis on a mother's role in a daughter's life versus the father's role as being the sole motivator for behavior.
1920 S. F. publishes Beyond the Pleasure Principle; introduces the death instinct.
1920 The first child psychoanalyst, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, publishes “On the Technique of Child Analysis”.
1921 British FA bans women's football by the help of female physicians, who (as experts on the female body and mind) declare the game "unsuitable for women". Several of the doctors involved are now presented as feminists by feminist writers of today. And feminists should know who are feminists, shouldn't they (also see Heroic gender breaking women - and some tiny men)?
1921 S. F. publishes Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; applies social context to psychoanalysis.
1921 Margaret Schönberger (Mahler, 24) had severe stomach pains and attacks that horrified her circle of friends. She was diagnosed with Heirshsprung disease, "a congenital disorder of the colon rectum which is unable to relax and permit the passage of stool. During the surgery severe adhesions were discovered and removed. After the procedure, the problem ended.
1922 Anna Freud became a member of the International Psychoanalytic Congress.
1922 Margaret Schönberger (Mahler) age 25, arrived to Vienna and was taken care of by the "expert on delinquency" August Aichhorn.
1923 A long series of operations on Freud’s jaw to remove cancer. Anna felt she had to stay with him because, not only had he been borrowing money from friends, but also he was now ill.
1923 S. F. Publishes The Ego and the Id; a final structural theory.
1923 Anna Freud, while taking care of the neighbors’ children: "I think sometimes that I want, not only to make them healthy, but also, at the same time, to have them, or at least have something of them, for myself”
1923 Sigmund Freud:"Our symbiosis with an American family, whose children my daughter is bringing up analytically with a firm hand, is growing continually stronger"
1923 Klein M. The development of a child. Int. J. Psychoanal., 4:419.
1923 Presented structural model of id, ego, & superego (at age 67).
1924 Hermine Hug-Hellmuth publishes “New Ways to the Understanding Youth”.
1924 On 9 September Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was found strangled (by the boy she had analysed) on her couch. 2.400.000 Kronen were stolen from her underwear. According to a brief entry by Siegfred Bernfeld in International Journal of Psychoanalysis Hermine expressed a desire in a will a few days before she was murdered that no account of her life and work should appear in psychoanalytic publications!
1924 S. F. allegedly turns down an offer of $100,000 by Samuel Goldwyn to cooperate in making movies of famous love stories.
1924 Klein M. The role of school in the libidinal development of the child. Int. J. Psychoanal., 5:312-331.
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1925 Anna Freud began getting heavily involved with Child Psychoanalysis.
1926 Infant analysis., Int. J. Psychoanal., 7:31-63.
1926 Publishes Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.
1926 Helene Deutsch began analyzing Margaret Schönberger (Mahler). After 14 months of cancellations she said Margaret was "unanalyzable".
1927 Symposium about the Freud/Klein controversy, arranged by Jones.
1927 August Aichhorn (who had a “personal relationship” with her) became Margaret Schönberger’s training analyst.
1927 Anna Freud, Eva Rosenfeld and Dorothy Burlingham organized a school for local children, later, Hampsted War Nursery research.
1927 Anna Freud’s first book entitled Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis. It was a collection of all her lectures, and a direct attack at Melanie Klein's theories.
1927 S. F. publishes The Future of an Illusion; debunks religion on rational, scientific grounds.
1933 Margaret Schönberger (Mahler) was finally accepted as an analyst.
1934-6 (?) Rolf (who strangled Hermine Hug Hellmuth 1924) was released and started chasing the psychoanalytic movement and especially Helene Deutch). Deutch’s husband hired two protectors and Rolf eventually disappeared).
1942 M. Mahler: Pseudoimbecility: a Magic Cap of Invisibility.
1944 M. Mahler: Tics and Impulsions in Children: A Study of Motility.
1947 "The Hampstead Clinic is sometimes spoken of as Anna Freud's extended family, and that is how it often felt, with all the ambivalence such a statement implies," one of her staff wrote
1949 Margaret Mahler gives the first hint of her coming theory about symbiosis in a footnote in ‘Clinical studies in benign and malignant cases of childhood psychosis – schizophrenia-like”, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol 19, s 297, fotnot.
1949 Therese Benedek published what was perhaps the first use of the concept of ‘symbiosis’ to characterize the early mother-infant unit.
1951 John Bowlby: Maternal Care and Mental Health," published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1952. ). It stimulated future studies of infant-mother bonding and the effects of early separation.
1955 Mahler and Gosliner presents an idea about human symbiosis and separation/individuation, that launches the research project “The natural history of symbiotic child psychosis” at Masters Children’s Center in New York.
1957 Bowlby's first formal statement of Attachment Theory, ‘The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother’was read to the British Psychoanalytic Society. The paper was controversial. Donald Winnicott: "It was certainly a difficult paper to appreciate without giving away everything that has been fought for by Freud". Anna Freud: "Dr Bowlby is too valuable a person to get lost to psychoanalysis".
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1957 The revelation of the deeds of “the real Psycho”, Ed Gein. Although he suffered and was diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia, the popular “psycho”-analytic “diagnosis” about a too close attachment with his mother is the one that still labels him. When Ed appeared in the psychoanalytic circles and popular culture (which are almost the same as has been noted above, i.e. that psychoanalysis far from being radical can thank its success precisely because it is reactionary) he fulfilled every possible expectation.
1950-64 When Leo Rangell arrived in Los Angeles in 1946, he felt that psychoanalysis seemed ideal. Psychoanalysis was then, according to Rangell, 'as golden as the Southern California sun'. The treatment of the war neuroses together with the arrival of the European analysts who had fled Hitler advanced psychoanalysis, attracting much professional and popular interest. While LAPSI had become almost paralyzed in the late 1940s, the period following the split became for some a 'golden age' for psychoanalysis'. Both societies expanded and graduates quickly developed full analytic practices. Mel Mandel who began training at LAPSI in 1952 recalled that the animosity between the societies 'was as thick as a heavy fog'. Still, within LAPSI the 1950s provided some 'periods of quiescence'.
By the early 1960s, the 'golden age' was over.
1957-61 In 1947, Ernst Simmel appointed Greenson as a training analyst. After the split Greenson became president of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society (1951-53) and Dean of Education (1957-61). He was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA Medical School.
1959 Mahler et al’s follow up study with normal children and their mothers.
1959 Psycho, book by Robert Bloch (compared to the movie a more incestuous relationship between a 41 year old man and his mother).
1960 Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock (about a young man that killed his mother). Based on Robert Bloch’s novel but influenced by the screen player Joseph Stefano and the information he got from his psychoanalysts (compare the LAPSI controversy among US psychoanalysts at the time). The movie can be interpreted as a mix of Kleinian and Mahlerian thoughts on the mother/son-relationship. "He used to ask me about my analysis. Many of the things I supplied for Norman's background were not in the book because I was learning in analysis why boys killed their mothers. I would tell Hitch all these things. I told him I felt I could have killed my mother at a certain point in my life, and it was sort of a miracle that I hadn't done that. He thought all that was very interesting."
1963-65 A follow up study to the follow up study was granted and launched for M. Mahler et al. This study is presented in The psychological birth of the human infant (see below).
1968 Ralph (Romi) Greenson was closely connected to Anna Freud and her group in London. His Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis in Beverly Hills provided an important source of funds for Anna Freud's work in London as well as for Albert Solnit's New Haven group around the journal, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. The fund financed Anna Freud's purchase of Freud's London home and half of the Hampstead Clinic's 1968 budget shortfall of $60,000. The chief wealthy donor for this Foundation was one of Greenson's patients, Lita Annenberg Hazen.
Freudian chock waves also reached Sweden.
1970; nr 14 Socialstyrelsens Råd och anvisningar (Advises and Direktions from the Social Boyard) 1970 no 14 Åtgärder mot misshandel av barn (tar även upp psykiskt skadlig behandling). Measures against child abuse (including psychological abuse).
1972 Barnbyn Skå starts treating families in accordance with a psychoanalytic "understanding". A main focus is laid on parent’s “lack of understanding their children".
1973 Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, by Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud and Albert J. Solnit (financially contributed to Anna Freud’s Hampstead Clinic).
1975 The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (M. Mahler et al).
1976 The UKÄ-report 1975:24 officially introduces psychoanalysis (psychotherapy and psycho-social work) in the state financed social work in Sweden.
1978 As a result of the official means now available because of the UKÄ report, a psychoanalytic research group, including Sven Hessle, is put together at Barnbyn SKÅ.
1979 Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child (see Alice Miller's genosuicide)
1979/80:1 Government Bill introduces LVU, the new child protection act. Main features include the suppression of the word “compulsory”, as well as the removal of the punishing aspect of measures directed towards children and youth.
1980 Alice Miller: Det självutplånande barnet in Swedish (Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst)
1980 The Shining (movie about domestic violence by the father).
1981 Alice Miller: Prisoners of Childhood.
1981 Socialstyrelsens Allmänna råd (General advices from The Social Board) 1981:2 LVU warns for “destructive bonds” between parent and children, and the necessity of compulsory care because of these ties.
1983 Alice Miller: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence.
1984 The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (M. Mahler et al) is published in Swedish.
1986 Sven Hessle introduces “symbiotic rejection ”, a concept he later (2001) seems to be less convinced about.
1987 BRIS (a society connected to Anna Freud) contributes to the preparatory works for a revision of LVU by stating that "symbiosis is the most fundamental of dangers facing a child and thus should be used as a criterion for separating children from their parents".
1989/90:28 Government Bill proposing the new revised LVU including “pathological symbiosis”.
1991-03-01 The revised LVU (SFS Act No: 1990:52) including “Pathological symbiosis” as a legal criterion to take the child into state "care".
For a detailed scientific analysis of the stealthy introduction of "pathological symbiosis" in the Swedish child protection act read Klevius thesis: "Pathological Symbiosis" in LVU
- Relevance, and Sex Segregated Emergence.
Peter Klevius comparison of early female child psychoanalysts (in Pathological Symbiosis, 2004:46).
3.3 Symbiosis in psychoanalytic epistemology
S. Freud never seems to have used the term “symbiosis” to refer to phenomenon associated with psychoanalytic concepts of development (T. M. Horner 1985) in the sense presented here. Sandor Ferenczi, who was the psychoanalytic thinker that, from M. Mahler’s teenage and on, together with A. Aichhorn was the most influential on her development, contributed to this topic already in 1913 by asserting omnipotence as embedded in an original undifferentiated state (ibid.). In the 1920’s Jean Piaget, who focused his research in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology on how knowledge grows, referred to the non-differentiation of self and others in the child’s developmental process (Piaget 1929). Freud’s follower, Otto Rank, used separation-individuation and symbiotic modes of functioning to deal with the “trauma of birth” part of his central thesis in Truth and Reality, published in 1929 (1968). In Escape from Freedom Erich Fromm[53] presents the idea of symbiosis connected to his social psychoanalysis (1941). His description of separation-individuation is, according to T. M. Horner, essentially the same as that later presented by M. Mahler. In 1949 M. Mahler gives the first hint of her evolving theory about symbiosis in a footnote in ‘Clinical studies in benign and malignant cases of childhood psychosis – schizophrenia-like’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Vol 19, p 297, footnotes. The same year, 1949, Therese Benedek published what was perhaps the first use of the concept of ‘symbiosis’ to characterize the early mother-infant unit (1949). This is one year after the “invention” of the “schizophrenogenic mother” (also in a footnote, see footnote 54 below). In 1975 M. Mahler et al published the main work The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant.
A precursor to the idea of symbiotic relationship between mother and child is clearly visible in A. Aichhorn’s method of creating dependency in children and youth (1936). Furthermore most of A. Freud and M. Mahler’s contributions to child psychoanalysis were presented during the period of sexual counter-revolution between the 1930’s and the 1960’s. According to L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester the mid-twentieth century was a special time of emphasis rather on a proper motherhood instead of a penis envy transformed to competition with males (1992:458).
3.4 The emergence of “pathological symbiosis”
3.4.1 Early child psychoanalysts
The history of child psychoanalysis begins with Sigmund Freud’s case[54] of the five-year-old “Little Hans”, published in 1909. However, treatment of delinquent children and youth by the means of psychoanalysis got a bad start for the first female child psychoanalyst, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, who also was an important influential of Anna Freud. H. Hug-Hellmuth´s analysis/treatment of her first child client, ”Rolf”, seems to have miserably failed. The boy got a bad history of foster homes and boarding schools and eventually killed and robbed his analyst[55] the same year, 1924, when her ‘New Ways to the Understanding of Youth’ was published (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester 1992:196-203). More than three decades later Margaret Mahler presents her view on how a too close, “symbiotic” attachment between parent and child causes pathology and delinquency.
3.4.2 “Black Devil” [56] mothering the “frail child”[57]
According to R. Webster, her father entrusted Anna Freud with the “frail child” of the psychoanalytic movement. She then guarded it with all the jealousy and all the fierceness of a mother protecting her own child (1995:402). “From the beginning Anna did not form a close bond with her mother” (J. Bumb 2002) and Freud’s analysis of his daughter was aimed to support her to develop the right “femininity” thus helping her getting married in an appropriate way (R. Webster 1995:409-418). S. Freud’s emphasise on the pre-Oedipal stages in 1918-1922 may be related to this. Anna stated, “I wanted beautiful clothing and a number of children but I considered myself to be too shabby and inconspicuous” (J. Bumb 2002). The family referred to her and her sister as the “beauty and the brains”. According to Anna she never wrote much on female issues within psychoanalysis because she felt that she identified with male case studies. She was then sent, together with her grandmother, to Sicily and other parts of Italy to improve her health[58] – probably depression and anorexia – (J. Bumb 2002) and to make her more “joyful” and “marriageable” (Webster 1995:407-409). “According to Freud’s own theories his analysis of his daughter was an attempt to resolve her problems with her sexuality. Psychoanalytic theory suggested that Anna had become fixated at an essentially infantile stage, and that she had simultaneously identified with the father who had supposedly been the object of her first sexual desires”[59] (ibid. 415).
A. Freud’s special mix of career and psychological motherhood begun in 1923 when she cared and analysed the children of Freud’s neighbours who lived in the same house. She vicariously tried to be a mother for them (from Young-Bruehl[60] 1994, in J. Bumb 2002). “…I have this dependency, this wanting to have something, even leaving my profession aside, in every nook and cranny of my life." According to S. Freud "our symbiosis with an American family, whose children my daughter is bringing up analytically with a firm hand, is growing continually stronger" (Dyer, 1983 in J. Bumb 2002). In Anna Freud: A Biography, E. Young-Bruehl states: “She remained a ‘vestal’ – to use the apt word Marie Bonaparte later chose to signal both Anna Freud’s virginity and her role as the chief keeper of her father’s person and his science, psychoanalysis.” ( in J. Bumb 2002).
In addition to a strong wish for motherhood, and a strategy to create dependent children in the analysis (compare A. Aichhorn above and below), knowing what is best for the child seems to have been the main characteristic of A. Freud’s child psychoanalytic approach, all of which is embedded in a rigidly sex-segregated discourse. Half a century since the first analysis of the Burlingham children A. Freud co-authored Beyond the Best Interest of the Child, mentioned above as the main source for the “children’s need” approach, which also became the view of the Swedish legislator. We are here warned for the “confusion” of “insufficient” sexual identities: “The sexual identities of the parents may be insufficiently resolved so as to create confusion in the child about his own sexual identity.” (A. Goldstein et al 1973:15).
Anna Freud showed a visceral antipathy against Melanie Klein, the foremost child psychoanalyst of the time. According to Alix Strachey, Anna hated M. Klein, the “ultra-sexual Semiramis waiting to be pounced on”, simply on personal grounds (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester 1992:289) thus supporting a more personal view on the work of A. Freud and its motives as a whole. A. Freud’s influence in the field of child psychoanalysis grew rapidly and “the Hampstead Clinic is sometimes spoken of as Anna Freud's extended family, and that is how it often felt, with all the ambivalence such a statement implies,” one of her staff wrote (J. Bumb 2002).
According to Anna Freud drives play a major role in the psychological development of a child and a teenager (1994). The force of the sexual instinct can be regarded as the energy underlying sexual urges i.e. the “libidinal energy” of the child, meaning the energy of the child’s sexual activities. In the same manner “aggressive energy” underlies the aggressive urges of the child. The flow of this energy, says A. Freud, we have to try to observe in the child if we want to have any chance to guide and influence it (A. Freud 1992:69). She then outlines the child’s fight against its family ties:
On the line from Biological Unity with the Mother to the Adolescent Revolt[61] against parental influence, we expect the normal child to negotiate a large number of libidinal and aggressive substations such as: the symbiotic, autistic, separation-individuation phases (Mahler); the part-object (M. Klein), need-fulfilling, analytic relationship; the stage of object constancy; anal-sadistic ambivalence; the triangular phallic-oedipal relationship; the latency extension of ties to peers, teachers, the community, and impersonal ideals; pre- adolescent regressions; adolescent struggle against infantile ties and search for objects outside the family (1982:63).
Early stages of infantile sexuality, not the puberty, are crucial due to the normal or abnormal development of the child as well as for its capacity to love (A. Freud 1994:116-117). But reversed, this statement would imply that puberty, not early stages of infantile sexuality, should be the crucial, measurable variable, revealing deviance. Thus, instead of focusing on uncertain and quantitatively, immeasurable mystical[62], sexual traits from early childhood – deformed by the hypothetical repression/unconsciousness hypothesis – there may be alternative hypotheses better in accordance with measurable deviance. One can, for example, reverse the separation-individuation thesis of M. Mahler, hence narrowing an attachment approach. According to this, deviance and delinquency are negatively correlated to attachment between parent and child. But contrary to this, A. Freud expects the normal child to develop from the biological unity with the mother to a defense against parental influence. A. Freud’s own personal situation is reflected when she states that:
…parents’ feelings for their children arise from the depth of their inner lives and are based on procreation and pregnancy, on the emotional dependence of the child, and on the unquestioned proprietary rights of the parents. None of these feelings, however, have any significance for the professional. I cannot help seeing it as our task to arouse this type of interest (deeper dependency on their side, or deeper bonds from the side of the adult) in all the people who work with children. Not love, for which there is no real basis, but an insatiable curiosity to learn more about the problems of child development seems to me the appropriate bond which ties the professional workers to the child in their care, irrespective of the fact whether work is located in school, in the hospital, in a social agency, or in the child therapist’s office (1982:298-299).
Although Anna Freud emphasized a limited love approach she does not seem to have considered the balance between the subjective, human and the professional[63]. Moreover, an important, but perhaps also misleading, key to A. Freud’s understanding and interpretation of children lies in “the parent’s bedroom”:
I and my co-workers could demonstrate to them how often their playrooms became stages where sexual and aggressive scenes in the parental bedroom were acted out by the children, and that understanding of this nonverbal communication offered a key to the children’s confusions, distresses, anxieties, unruliness, and uncooperativeness, i.e., to behavior problems which remained inexplicable otherwise (1982:309-310).
Although Beyond the Best Interest of The Child served as an influential guide for those who argued for the removal of the child from their parents, she also strongly emphasized, according to L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester, a child’s need for “unbroken continuity of affectionate and stimulating relationships” (1992:304). In fact, her contribution seems to have rested in a worry about children in temporary foster placement. This aspect of A. Freud’s later thinking seems not to be reflected in the preparatory works of the revised LVU.
3.4.3 An un-analyzable, “sticky libido” “disturbed by motherhood”
Psychological symbiosis is a key concept intimately connected to M. Mahler’s work. Consider, says P. Stepansky, its widespread usage: “To the extent that when mental health workers and psychologically astute laymen characterize relationships of extreme dependency as ‘symbiotic relationships’, and speak of the chronic needs of such people for support and reassurance as ‘symbiotic needs’, they operate within a Mahlerian paradigm.” (P. Stepansky 1988:xvii). M. Mahler took her inspiration directly from Anna Freud, in theory as well as in observational techniques, which she extended to the use of film cameras. But who was M. Mahler?
Expectations on a girl’s development to a woman in a rigidly dichotomized gender world were extremely pronounced in A. Freud and M. Mahler’s upbringing. “Growing up for Margaret was not a happy time, she had a very low self-esteem and was jealous of the praises that Suzanne received from their mother.” (L. Woolf 2002). Margaret obviously did not fulfil the gender expectations of her time, and in an extension she seems to have internalised her childhood experiences in her evaluation of motherhood:
Margaret once overheard her mother say to Suzanne “I have brought you into this world, I suckle you, I love you, I adore you, I live only for you, you are my whole life.” Margaret’s heart being shattered, replied, “And I, I was born to my father.” Margaret later believed that the way her mother treated her was the reason she grew such an interest in paediatrics and psychoanalysis (L. Woolf 2002).
A. Freud and M. Mahler had similar relations to their fathers who supported a “tomboyish” profile while they were young and later on pushed them back into the “womanhood” and “femininity” of the 19th Century. The clash between out-dated femininity and modern intellectuality seems to have severely affected M. Mahler:
Margaret's father supported her and watched while Margaret excelled in Math and Science. Margaret felt she needed to make up where she was lacking, and gave up her feminine self-esteem for an intellectual self-esteem. Crying one day to her father because none of the boys noticed her he replied, “You don't need a man, you are man enough for yourself.” After realizing she would not be a successful sculptor, she decided to enrol in Medical school in January of 1917. Margaret’s father was so proud she was successful in gaining admission. Though he encouraged her to stay away from anything too masculine and to study ophthalmology, because it was “dainty” (L. Woolf).
Already in her teens M. Mahler developed a “deep adolescent friendship” with her high school classmate Alice Balint, another famous theorist of the mother-infant relationship. M. Mahler ended up as a paediatrician on a well-baby clinic in Vienna after having finished her medical and psychoanalytic training (M. J. Buhle 1998:246-248). Her early professional career became strongly influenced by sex segregation and a demand to fulfill her femininity, and especially her “motherhood”:
von Pirquet’s appreciation of my research skills did little to mitigate his absolute horror at the prospect of having any woman in a position of authority. Thus, when I later requested a promotion from ”apprentice” {Hilfärztin) to ”assistant” paediatrician, he replied, ”I will never have a woman as an assistant. You are very smart, and I like you very much, but if one is a woman, and especially if one looks like you, one should marry and have children.” The remark about the desirability of a woman who ”looked like me”, marrying instead of pursuing a profession, was repeated on more than one occasion. I recall, as well, von Pirquet’s comment the first day I donned glasses at the clinic. Inspecting me carefully, he remarked: “Do me a favour. Put those glasses in your pocket,” by which he conveyed the clear meaning that he couldn’t stand them on my face! This disparaging estimation notwithstanding, I idealized von Pirquet and regressed to the point of being well nigh ”in love” with him. (M. Mahler 1988:45).
August Aichhorn, M. Mahler’s tutor and most powerful influential on her “formative years”, was “a mysterious man who lived a strange and charmed life with close connections to the underworld[64] of Vienna” (M. Mahler 1988:51-54). He analyzed her when the therapy with Helene Deutsch miserably failed (see below). According to P. Stepansky, A. Aichhorn also had a “personal relationship” with M. Mahler who was in her early twenties back then. These topics were obviously still too difficult to face when M. Mahler, at the age of 87, was preparing her autobiography (1988:xxxiv). But regarding symbiosis A. Aichhorn’s concept “dependency relationship” was especially important for M. Mahler:
Aichhorn used dependency relationship to ”show” that the child had chosen his delinquent life-style on the basis of past frustrations, abuse, or misunderstandings, but that this life-style was not appropriate to current circumstances. “He was a master at drawing the unconscious motivation out of a child’s recital of circumstance and happenstance and then confronting the child with the underlying reason for his delinquency… These counselling strategies ushered in the second stage of treatment in which Aichhorn undertook to make the
child, in his own words, ”as neurotic as he can be made” in order to render him analysable (M. Mahler 1988:51-53).
According to S. Freud the essence of the analytic profession is feminine and the psychoanalyst “a woman in love” (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester 1992:189). But psychoanalytically formalized sex and sex segregation also seem to have been troublesome components in the lives of female psychoanalysts struggling under a variety of assumed, but irreconcilable femininities and professional expectations. How sex segregation was experienced back then is perhaps best illustrated by Helene Deutsch in Psychology of Women: “She passively awaits fecundation: her life is fully active and rooted in reality only when she becomes a mother. …This speculation, which is based on my own experience, can perhaps be confirmed by a more objective observation: no human being has great a sense of reality as a mother.” According to H. Deutsch “the most miserable feminine type in existence” is a woman who is “disturbed by motherhood” and who “protects herself from the development of feminine qualities” (1944:140-142). H. Deutsch’s emphasise on motherhood has its modern child psychoanalytic counterpart in Daniel N. Stern’s[65] “motherhood constellation” (1995). This stays in sharp contrast with the striking lack of motherhood in pre-historic records (R. Tannahill 1992:36-37).
Because of the above it seems less surprising that M. Mahler’s career within the psychoanalytic movement was initiated by a painful clash with H. Deutsch, who, encouraged by Ferenczi, became her first training analyst. However, after 14 months of constant cancellations H. Deutsch insisted that M. Mahler was “un-analysable” (L. Woolf 2002). According to H. Deutsch, M. Mahler-Schoenberger[66] had a “sticky libido” (M. Mahler 1988:60). Although they apparently did not cope well with each other they also shared some similarities. H. Deutsch’s main “love affair” throughout her life was her father, whereas her mother’s role mainly seems to have been to watch guard Helene’s “femininity” thus causing an early rebellion (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester 1992:307-328). But unlike M. Mahler and A. Freud, H. Deutsch seems to have emphasized the fulfilment of femininity through real motherhood.
The fact that M.Mahler’s major works are published after her menopause may be considered when evaluating the background of the concept of ”pathological symbiosis” and its connection to her interpretation of “motherhood” and “femininity”. “Margaret loved working with children’s clinical studies on childhood psychosis, it was her passion. She loved the way the children gave her all of their attention and enjoyed working with her as well” (L. Woolf 2002). Her own description is revealing:
Paediatrics, I should perhaps explain, represented a compromise of sorts: it would enable me to be what my father was, while simultaneously accommodating my desire perhaps my outstanding “feminine” trait to work with children. At the time, the desire to become a baby doctor, and thereupon to be a practicing physician like my father coexisted with the equity strong desire to become a psychoanalyst like Ferenczi, the warm father figure I had encountered in the Kovacs household (M. Mahler 1988:23-24).
Like most psychoanalysts, M. Mahler’s theoretical method relays on the use of “normal development” as a reference for the abnormal. In a fast changing world such an approach does not, neither however, necessarily takes enough into account an all time ongoing change in human behaviour nor does it allow for historical flexibility in human societies. Hence the “normal” may in fact rather be interpreted as traces of the past, and as such of limited value in assessing the development of contemporary children. On top of this comes the fact that the scientific basis for M. Mahler’s research seems weak. It is difficult to explain, say M. Mahler et al, how the self-object-representations of the symbiotic phase develop into a self-representation (1984:244). The results follow from a complicated process of conclusions based on rules that are not clearly established. This is especially true for psychoanalytic research (ibid. 272). An additional problem is hinted at when M. Mahler et al, “half-way through the examination”, decided not to include those children (25 percent) who did not fit into the categories created by the team (ibid. 282). A. Freud taught us, say M. Mahler et al, that children’s playing with their mothers from the age of seven months is not the result of altruistic behaviour[67]. We think the purpose is to discriminate the child’s view on its body from that of the object (M. Mahler et al 1984:245). Briefly, says M. Mahler, “one could summarize my hypothesis as follows: whereas in primary autism there is a de-animated frozen wall between the subject and the human object, in symbiotic psychosis, on the other hand, there is fusion, melting, and lack of differentiation between the self and the no self” (1979:5). This view constituted a considerable brake to traditional psychoanalysis and places the parent in the position of being potentially accused for treating the child in a deviant way. M. Mahler describes the theoretical introduction of the parent (mother) in the realm of the child’s “mental apparatus”:
The whole idea of the mother-infant dual unity, for example, originates in their (Ferenczi[68], Herman, Bak, Benedek) theoretical and clinical perspectives. This developmental viewpoint did not gain expression in the German or Viennese psychoanalytic literature of the time. It is not even found in the later work of Anna Freud. At her Hampstead Clinic, the mother-child pairing was surely recognized, but the child was evaluated separately. “Leave the mother in the waiting room; she is tired,” the Hampstead analysts would say. Anna Freud and her collaborators were concerned almost exclusively with the intra-psychic, which they believed to be the only proper domain of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the intra- psychic is the main thing, but as I have undertaken to show over a lifetime of research and writing, the intra-psychic only evolves out of the differentiation from the individually undifferentiated matrix of mother and child. At the Hampstead Clinic during the 1930’s and forties the clinic analysts had to take great pains to differentiate their position from that of both Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott. It was Winnicott it will be recalled, who claimed that there is no such thing as a baby without a mother (M. Mahler 1988:16).
M. Mahler’s method in practical use is described in a paper from 1977 concerning the assessment of narcissistic and borderline personalities in the boy Sy. Two main characteristics in the assessment are recognizable: 1) strong structural expectations and b) “biologism” (constitution) as an alternative explanation when negative expectations are not fulfilled. At first Sy is assembled into the theoretical framework:
Sy’s sub phase developmental history was characterized by prolongation up to his twentieth month of the nocturnal “child-lover-at-the-breast” symbiosis. This, without more than a nominal experiencing of the practicing and rapprochement sub phases of separation-individuation, was overlapped by and continued as a bizarrely frank oedipal relation with his mother and later with his father (M. Mahler1979:201).
In the next step, Sy’s mother is accused for causing borderline in her son:
From the time he weaned himself and walked, Sy was treated by the mother as her “man,” with reciprocal behaviour on his part. It is a demonstration in statu nascendi and step by step of what Kernberg (1967) describes as the genetic-dynamic analysis of the borderline personality’s oedipus complex. He says: “What is characteristic of the borderline personality organization… is a specific condensation between pregenital and genital conflicts, and a premature development of oedipal conflicts …” (p. 678 in M. Mahler1979:201-202).
However, because of “lack of space”, all the failures of Sy’s poor ego function cannot be elaborated. One example is given, though:
We could follow, in the second part of Sy’s third as well as in his fourth, fifth, and sixth years, the vicissitudes of the failure of the ego’s function of normal repression. There were many instances of this failure, but for lack of space we cannot elaborate on them. An example might suffice: Sy remembered minute details about the Centre, which the other children had completely repressed. These details were syncretically retained by his ego’s pathological memory function (SPI:11 in M. Mahler 1979:201-202).
There are no hints given, except of this fairly poor one, due to the disastrous powers assumed to reside in Sy. M. Mahler and her research team, however, are deeply concerned: “Sy’s intra-psychic conflicts can be only guessed at, of course, and we would like to get Sy into analysis, but both parents are opposed to it” (M. Mahler1979:201-202). Quite contrary to M. Mahler’s prediction it all seemed to get a happy end – except for the teachers’ un-explained irritation with the family:
Follow-up home and school interviews of Sy in his eleventh year described him as faring much better than we would have predicted. His academic achievement in an honors class in a local public school is excellent and he is fairly popular with his classmates. The teachers, however, could not suppress their irritation with Sy and his family (M. Mahler1979:201-202)..
The explanation to this incomprehensible success M. Mahler finds in Sy’s biological constitution:
We believe that the positive qualities that saved Sy from psychosis were his excellent endowment, for example, the way in which he made up for his slow locomotor development by becoming extremely proficient in gymnastics (his favourite activity was acrobatics) (M. Mahler 1979:201-202).
A similar reference to biological factors, however, is completely absent in the case of “another girl” who, during the last couple of days before she arrived at the Centre, had been unable to pass her stool. According to M. Mahler et al, the 29-month-old girl’s behaviour was extraordinary because she liked to play with water in the children’s playroom, and the most plausible explanation to this was a “compulsion”. When she sat on the toilet the “observer” reported that she looked worried and asked not to let the mother in. The “observer” asked her to tell more about it[69]. Then, we are informed, through the “observer”, that the girl said: “Mother hurts me” (this happened during the most intense “the battered child”-debate). But when the pain increased the girl asked for her mother, who then read a book for her until she was released and happy. According to M. Mahler et al, the stool was passed when the girl saw a picture of a foul and shortly after she had pointed to a picture in the book saying: “Dad has a pig in his belly”. This has to be explained as the result of a poor mother relation. Later the girl did very well at school and her social development was good (1984:99-103). This case is of special interest because of its close resemblance with the private life of M. Mahler herself. As noted above, she suffered from a poor connection to her mother and in 1921 she had severe stomach pains and attacks that horrified her circle of friends. She was diagnosed with Heirshsprung’s disease, a congenital disorder that makes one unable to relax and permit the passage of stool. After medical treatment the problem ended. Considering the psychoanalytic interest in anal problems the connections above may not be surprising.
3.4.4 Main characteristics of pioneering child psychoanalysts
M. Mahler, who was childless[70], intellectually relied on S. Freud and his childless daughter Anna. She made her contributions to child psychoanalysis after her menopause and mainly in the especially sex-segregated period from the 1940´s to the 1960´s[71]. A comparison reveals that the similarities between A. Freud and M. Mahler stay in sharp contrast to the view represented by Melanie Klein, the mother of three and a female child psychoanalyst of the less sex-segregated 1920’s. M. Klein was considered a dissident in the psychoanalytic movement because of her early insertion of the Oedipus complex and her suggestion of a primary femininity phase for both sexes (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester 1992:451-452). Having in mind that M. Mahler’s “pathological symbiosis” concerns mothers, and that “motherhood” is intimately connected to “femininity”, two opposite views on mother/child relations emerge. Whereas the Kleinian view emphasizes the child’s destructive and even violent tendencies towards the mother, the view of A. Freud/M. Mahler recognizes the mother as the main source of pathology.
M. Klein compared free associations with the play of a child and, like S. Freud himself, analysed her own children (Webster 1995:431-432). But in contrast to the view that small children have a weak and unformed superego, she considered the superego of a young child as monstrous, because of early – even before birth – persecutory experiences and fantasies. The superego, hence, should not be strengthened, as A. Freud advocated, but rather be modified to help its integration (L. Woolf 2002). Thus M. Klein’s mother appears to be a resource rather than a threat. Where M. Mahler is searching for a possible “parasitic parent”, M. Klein sees “good enough mothers”. Whereas M. Mahler emphasizes the victimization of the child who has not been properly released from the mother, M. Klein’s approach includes an inherent “badness” in the child in accordance with S. Freud’s own theories. In M. Mahler’s theory the idyllic Eden in the form of the mother/child-symbiosis has to be broken up for the survival of the child, whereas M. Klein’s children already from the beginning were basically paranoid. And whereas S. Freud introduced the super-ego at the age of five, M. Klein inserts it at the age of five month (M. Klein et al 1995:29-35). M. Klein, contrary to A. Freud and M. Mahler, remembered her childhood as mostly serene and happy. She was tremendously impressed and stimulated by her father's intellectual achievements and he was always ready to answer her many questions. M. Klein had a good relation to her mother. Opposite A. Freud and M. Mahler she did not cope well with S. Ferenczi[72] (H. Segal 2003).
In contrast to M. Klein, but in accordance with M. Mahler, A. Freud traces the threats against the child’s healthy development to its mother. The emerging picture is a sensitive, vulnerable being, incapable of adaptation to certain of its mother’s behaviour. Unexplained symptoms are interpreted as psychological:
So far as they (the earliest disorders) have no purely organic cause, they can be traced to interaction of inborn modes of functioning with the mother’s handling of these given potentialities, i.e., her more or less skilful or insensitive, well- or ill-timed response to the infants needs; or they can be traced to the infants high sensitivity to the mother’s emotional states, her anxieties, her moods, her predilections, and her avoidances. Un-pleasure or distress due to either cause can find discharge only in two manners: either through crying, or by way of physical pathways within the somatic areas mentioned above” (A. Freud 1982:19).
Apart from the fact that the above seems more like a simple and quite obvious qualitative evaluation of different methods of parenting wrapped into the mystique of something[73] “discharged through somatic pathways”, a comparison with the view of M. Klein is striking. M. Klein believed that in the play young children “ceaselessly imagined how they might fellate or castrate their fathers, defile or attack their mother’s breast, or imaging or recalling their parents copulating (R. Webster 1995:431-432). But according to A. Freud: “Where a mother, for whatever reason, is unable to give adequate comfort to her infant, this may have a lasting effect on this individual’s own capacity to cope with even normal amounts of un-pleasure, pain, and anxiety, i.e., on his frustration tolerance.” (1982:21). Furthermore, although kinship and other family ties may be the more important the older the child gets because of a widening and more complex life-sphere and a corresponding need of a closer and more sophisticated attachment A. Freud’s following statement reveals a quite limited picture of “the parental task” seemingly utterly devoid of thoughts on continuity, especially over generations:
With the blood tie wholly ignored at this age, he recognizes as his parents the adults who fulfil the parental task in the psychological sense, i.e., who serve his growth by day-to-day interchange of continuous care, affection, and stimulating involvement. As the law stands today children can be forced away from psychological parents, to whom they are deeply attached and under whose guardianship they prosper, and with continuity broken, be made to adapt to biological parents with whom no ties are in existence. It is alleged by some people that return to the biological family is truly in the “best interest” of the child, who thereby will be spared an identity crisis in adolescence. The truth is that in adolescence most children undergo what may be called a crisis of identity when they have the difficult task to grow beyond the parents of their childhood… (A. Freud 1982:302-305).
In conclusion the above reveals a pronounced hostility between childless female child psychoanalysts and female psychoanalyst who had children of their own (A. Freud vs. M. Klein and M. Mahler vs. H. Deutsch). Main characteristics of female child psychoanalysts, as reported above, dichotomised for and against the parent (mother):
From Peter Klevius comparison of early female child psychoanalysts (in Pathological Symbiosis, 2004:46).
Alice Miller´s psychoanalytic genosuicide
The secular trend against religion in its most primordial sense (religare = tie back, ancestor worship) is perhaps best exemplified through the writings of Alice Miller. Although the notion of "the child itself" seems philosophically unintelligible, it reveals the myths and inconsistencies of what is believed to be the modern individual. Alice Miller's inner desperate longing for parenthood lost in modernity.
Lack of deep (not superficial) and lasting attachment (family, kin and friendship ties) is, together with cultural/political segregation (sex, race, etnicity etc), the social cancer of today. In this respect A. Miller's family hatred/jealousy constitutes a weapon directed against the very core of human society, i.e. it's the most lethal and massive form of genosuicide and the basis for the new human being Homo Filius Nullius!
In psychoanalysis a person tells a story she did not know about and the psychoanalyst is a person who lets her be "such as she is right now" says Alice Miller (1980:74), one of the most ardent, psychoanalytic proponents for connecting personal difficulties at adult age, on parental deviance. "My patients", she continues, lack a "genuine emotional understanding" for the course of their own childhood, and they express "complete unsuspecting" for "the real needs of their own". Miller refers to the works of M. Mahler, D. Winnicott and H. Kohut (A. Miller 1980:12-13).
Little is available from general resources as to Alice Miller's personal circumstances and she is known for not revealing her private life. But she writes: "I was a stranger to everybody in my family. Today, I know for sure that I was unwanted, rejected from the conception on, never loved, emotionally completely neglected, and used for the needs of others. But above all I was lied to, I grew up with a perfect hypocrisy. My parents, both absolutely unconscious of their true feelings, pretended to love me very much, and I believed this (because I so much needed this illusion) for more than 40 years of my life until I started to suspect the truth hidden behind their pretensions, hidden probably to them too. Suspecting is not yet as much as knowing for sure but it was the start. It took me 20 years more to get rid of my denial because I was so alone with the knowledge of my body and my dreams, and a wall of denial surrounded me wherever I opened my mouth. Writing and painting were the only ways to continue with my search without being offended and "punished" for being the troublemaker"[1] (Miller 2001).
According to Alice Miller, "any person who abuses his children has himself been severely traumatized in his childhood in some form or another. This statement applies without exception since it is absolutely impossible for someone who has grown up in an environment of honesty, respect, and affection ever to feel driven to torment a weaker person in such a way as to inflict lifelong damage. He has learned very early on that it is right and proper to provide the small, helpless creature with protection and guidance; this knowledge, stored at that early age in his mind and body, will remain effective for the rest of his life" (A. Miller 1990:190).
Parenting seems an almost impossible task when looked upon through the writings of Alice Miller. Furthermore she does not serve us with more precise advices about the alternatives. Only generalized expressions, such as "seeing the child", are given. Instead Alice Miller asks herself if we ever are going to conceive the extent of the loneliness and abandonment that we have been exposed to as a child. The "very huge number" of people suffering from narcissistic disorders "very often" have had "discerning", "ambitious" and "supporting" parents. Often they have received praise for their talents and achievements. According to Miller, almost all of the individuals attending her for analysis have become dry already during their first year (sic). They tell her that their parents have been empathetic and they have no compassion for the child they were themselves (A. Miller 1980:12-13).
According to Miller there is an "original narcissistic need" in the child to be "as it is". "As it is" has to be understood as M. Mahler's[2] notion that the infant's inner sensations constitute the core of the self. These sensations "seem" to remain the point of crystallization on which the sense of identity is built (1980:14). But, says Miller, if the patient through the analysis, "consciously" has experienced? how he has been "manipulated" in his childhood by his parents and which "wishes for retribution" this has created in him, then he is going to be less manipulative himself (ibid).
This is, concludes Alice Miller, based on my own experiences (A. Miller 1980:103). She gives an example of how remaining "Oedipal pain" can be delegated to the child through parenting. One day she walked behind a young and "tall of stature" (sic) parental couple and their whining two-year-old son. Alice Miller, contrary to the parents, understood that the boy wanted an ice cream stick of his own instead of licking the tip of those of his parents. Why, asks Miller, did not the parents understand the boy and why did not they give half of their ice cream to him? It could only be explained if we look upon the parents as children who now have got a weaker individual on whom they can feel powerful (1980:63-65).
However, an alternative view, as out-lined above, could interpret this as "psychic energy" of Sigmund Freud, that talks through a disappointed adult in search for a suitable explanation that could help her clarify her own life.
But the final question remains: Why do so many assign Miller with such an important role and how do we get back on the old tracks again without fundamentalist degeneracy?
[1] Alice Miller was obviously not a child when she discovered the ?child? in herself. But the question is whether that child would have recognized itself? If not, unrecognizable parts would then belong entirely and only to the already grown up Alice Miller!
[2] In M. Mahler 1972:17.
by Peter Klevius 2003
Shortly after Alice Miller's death her son Martin Miller stated that he had been beaten by his authoritarian father during his childhood - in the presence of his mother. Miller first tried to defend herself by saying she intervened, but later admitted that she did not intervene.
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