Coles R., The_Secular

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where: in the movies and in the universities, and in the
theater, and in public forums and discussions, much
more so on this side of the Atlantic than was ever the
case in Europe. I would remember wistfully my words
about Vienna where I thought we were becoming
ingrown. Now, we were all over the place includ-
ing the churches and synagogues!
Such a development had to do, ironically, with faith,
though the object of faith, in the churches and syna-
gogues Erikson had mentioned, wasn t God and His
judgments, Christ and His teachings, or a received spir-
itual tradition as it has become a sacred and cherished
set of beliefs, rituals: a dogma held high, called upon
daily in the course of a life. Rather, the faith was (is)
that of a secular mind as it has developed over the cen-
turies, and especially in this past one: the faith we have
in science; the rise of the social sciences, and their sense
of entitlement with respect to the credibility extended
them, the expectations entertained of them all of that
being evidence of the faith we have in ourselves, in our
ability to know ourselves, gain control of things (within
and outside ourselves) through such knowledge. And
increasingly these recent years, these last ones of a cen-
tury, a millennium, it is a faith in the capacity of the
human brain (the organ that has investigated success-
fully all other organs) to explore itself, understand it-
self fully, gain operating (clinical) control over its vul-
nerabilities, aberrancies.
There are, clearly, important consequences to such
a shift in human knowledge and, correspondingly,
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WHERE WE STAND: 2000
human allegiance. The Ego of the famous psychoana-
lytic triad has an increasing authority. In his more
hopeful moments (some would say naive ones, some
would say impossibly proud ones) Freud dared say,
Where the Id was, there shall the Ego be an earnest
doctor s clinical dream, but maybe an exaggerated one
that reflected (in the spirit of those two well-known
concepts, transference and countertransference) the
shared desire of patients and their doctors: the desire to
have more control over desire. Eventually, Freud dared
prophesy, the Id, once possessed of such hidden power,
will yield increasingly to our biological scrutiny: psy-
choanalytic investigation a prelude to the biochemical
and neurophysiological kind.
With all of the above happening, the third agency of
the psychoanalytic paradigm, the Superego, has en-
dured a shift in its overall strength, and in its relation-
ship to the other two members of this psychological rul-
ing junta: a diminished hold over the mind, an erosion
in its capacity to shape the Ego s activity, bear down on
that of the Id. It is the Superego, naturally, that has al-
ways linked us with persuasive strength, if not a decided
vehemence, to the world beyond the home, the world
of churches and synagogues and mosques, and, too,
of culture in all its manifestations: the printed word,
and painted canvas, and, these days, the photographs,
the movies and videos and television programs of our
heavily visual culture. Perhaps among individual psy-
choanalysts and their analysands, Freud s dictum held
even in the early years of this century an Ego increas-
ingly enhanced, fortified, braced by insight may well
have significantly laid low the Id. But among people
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CHAPTER III
influenced culturally rather than clinically by psycho-
analysis, the most immediate consequence was that of
an altered Superego, as Anna Freud once said (as did
Erik H. Erikson, many times).
For Miss Freud, at the end of her life, such a course
of events was both ironic and unwelcome: Our first
patients [who came to see Freud and his followers in
Vienna and, later, Berlin, Budapest] were men and
women who were the victims of self-accusation, among
other things. They were men and women in whom the
Superego was highly developed, to say the least over-
developed. They suffered from the judgments they had
learned to hand down on themselves for crimes they
had come to believe they had committed: the Superego
at work! (I am simplifying, but not all that much!) Over
the decades, I have seen the clinical picture change
our patients are less and less overwhelmed by the power
of the Superego in their mental life. They have been
brought up differently [a contrast with what was once
the manner of rearing children]: they have been re-
assured and complimented, and given so many things, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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