The dynamics of psychic energy flow (or economy of psychic energy) became upside-down because Freud was socially semi-forced to carter the abusers and others who wanted to keep the status quo who were willfully ignorant and morally cowardly. Thus, he purposefully made the theoretical ‘error’ of putting the cart before the horse, as Fairbairn puts it.
“The conception of fundamental erotogenic zones constitutes an unsatisfactory basis for any theory of libidinal development because it is based upon a failure to recognize that the function of libidinal pleasure is essentially to provide a sign-post to the object. According to the conception of erotogenic zones the object is regarded as a sign-post to libidinal pleasure; and the cart is thus placed before the horse. Such a reversal of the real position must be attributed to the fact that, in the earlier stages of psychoanalytical thought, the paramount importance of the object-relationship had not yet been sufficiently realized.” (33)
Fairbairn, R. (1994). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Routledge.
“It must always be borne in mind, however, that it is not the libidinal attitude which determines the object-relationship, but the object-relationship which determines the libidinal attitude.” (34)
Fairbairn, R. (1994). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Routledge.
However, that is not to say that all of Freud’s psychological concepts are invalid. Freud also introduced very basic concepts of psychology that are very insightful. It was an obvious fact that Freud was an insightful person about the human psyche. In “Animals Teach Us: Life, Love and Values, with Jeffrey Masson,” (note to the previous reference) Masson said that a lot of what Freud said still resonates today and one particular thing stuck with him: “A man can be in love with a woman for many years and not knowing until years later.” No other animal is capable of that kind of self-deception. When a dog feels love, they feel love intensely and purely – they never lie about their love. When the cat is angry, you know he/she is angry.
Speaking of emotion in animal, just 30 years ago, it was an absurd thing to say in the scientific community that animals had the same/similar emotion as human. Evolutionary all the organs and functions in our body have continuity from animal to human, yet scientists thought that there is no such thing exist in animals? Any pet owners would know that this is not true.
In the interview of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, “Continuity of Emotions, from Animals to Humans”, he said that there is hypocrisy in animal experimentation in that if animals are so different from us, why do we test drug to see the effect on animal in lieu of human?
Sadly, this is hypocrisy seems to be the least of problem in modern human experiment. What I mean by that is, most of experiment on animals do not lead to betterment of humanity. In 2019, PETA praised 2020 Trump administration budget for cutting NIH (National Institute of Health) budget. Because 90% of all animal studies fail to lead to any treatment in human beings and 95% of tested safe on animal fail on human. Yet, NIH National Institute of Health is spending 50% of its budget, 15 billion dollars to universities that are not helping human.
Universities love it because they are cheap, plentiful, easy to write papers about what happens to animals without any worry about lawsuit from human subjects. They also want all of these funds as open secret. It’s a great way to make money other than actually helping people. Such experiment involve starving animal, electro-shock, drowning animals, separating infant animal babies from mothers, etc.
Now Trump is out and Bidden is in, so NIH funding has been not only restored, but increased. 19 billion dollars are now spent on such animal experiment (not that Trump is all pro-animal-rights. He de-funded vast area of wildlife preserve – birds’ sanctuary). White Coat Waste Project found out that a lab in Tunisia infected beagles and made insects to eat them alive. This was funded by Tony Fauci’s NIH $375,000 grant to the lab. Washington Post defended this experiment. NIH buys thousands of dogs and is subject to such varieties of experiment. PETA stated that all NIH directors need to go. These experiments don’t have any real scientific purposes. They just do these kinds of things in order to spend money.
This is also why when buying a product with labels like ‘animal testing free’ is important.
These ‘animal testing’ of commercial products such as cleaners, shampoos, detergents include spraying chemicals to live rabbits’ eyes and such other animals just to see what kind of ‘symptom’ these animals get. Even with known chemicals, if there is a new product with a new ingredient combination, such an experiment is justified.
However, to start with, it is completely unnecessary to put known harmful chemicals into cleaning products. All known harmless substance combinations of acid, basic, surfactants, essential oils and such can make detergents, cleaners, soaps, shampoos, etc. Why is such a cruel experiment is necessary just to put newer ingredients in these products? So they can make it better? Isn’t it already good enough? Besides, it has proven that all-natural cleaning products are as good as or out-performed other cleaners which includes harmful chemicals, so why bother?
There is something to point out here. That is, even though the treatment of animal of human (including livestock) may not seem related, it is related with Fairbairnian psychology. However, this will make more sense with the explanation of the Motivational Triad (regarding this concept, please refer to my 2022 Humanistic Psychology Conference paper). I mentioned this because I will come back to this later.
Continue with Fairbairn Psychology:
“The outstanding feature of infantile dependence is its unconditional character. The infant is completely dependent upon his object not only for his existence and well-being, but also for the satisfaction of his psychological needs…. We also notice that, whereas in the case of the adult the object relationship has a considerable spread, in the case of the infant it tends to be focused on a single object. The loss of an object is thus very much more devastating in the case of an infant. If a mature individual loses an object, however important, he still has some objects remaining…. The infant on the other hand has no choice. He has no alternative but to accept or reject his object—an alternative which is liable to present itself to him as a choice between life and death.” (47)
Fairbairn, R. (1994). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Routledge.
“The essential striving of the child is not for pleasure but for contact. He needs the other. If the other is available for gratifying, pleasurable exchange, then the child will enter pleasurable activities. If the parent offers only painful, unfulfilling contacts, the child does not abandon the parent to search for more pleasurable opportunities. The child needs the parent so he integrates his relations with him on a suffering masochistic basis…. The emptier the real exchange, the greater his devotion to the promising yet depriving features of his parents which he has internalized and seeks within. In addition he preserves his childhood terror that if he disengages himself from these internal objects, he will find himself totally alone.” (173)
Greenberg, J. R., and S. A. Mitchell. (1983). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
[ Definition of Substitutive Satisfactions (this has deep relation to the Motivational Triad which I will come back to it later) ]
“Frustration of his desire to be loved as a person and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience; and it is this trauma above all that creates fixations in the various forms of infantile sexuality to which a child is driven to resort in an attempt to compensate by substitutive satisfactions for the failure of his emotional relationships with his outer objects.” (39)
Fairbairn, R. (1994). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Routledge.
[ How Early Trauma Affects Adults Later (I will come back to this in relation to Evolutionary Psychology)]
“Fairbairn’s theory is a psychic metaphor built on complex relationships between three hypothetical self-in-relation-to-object pairs of ego structures that build up gradually in the internal world from the child’s actual memories (enhanced by fantasy) in relation to his objects. These relational pairs (each ego relates exclusively to a single part-object) are organized, first and foremost, to protect the child from experiencing abandonment as one pair of structures hides the hurt and abuse that child has experienced from his conscious, central ego, and the second pair creates an illusory sense of attachment to his objects. These internalized structures become a powerful force that distorts new external object relationships in ways that match the active and vibrant relationships in the internal world, thus causing painful repetition compulsions, particularly involving self-defeating relationships that could not easily be explained by Freud’s pleasure principle.” (32-33)
Celani, D. P. (2010). Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting. Columbia University Press.
“Once these objects are firmly installed in the individual’s inner world, then the individual’s perception of reality is filtered through these sub-selves or part-object identifications, and all the world becomes a stage on which to act out or reenact these powerful internal object relationships. These traumatic events, though too powerful to dismiss, are simultaneously too disruptive to remain in one’s consciousness, and so they are “packaged” into separate sub-structures (a view of the self in relation to a toxic aspect of the object) and dissociated, so that the child’s essential dependency on his objects can continue:” (34)
Celani, D. P. (2010). Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting. Columbia University Press.
“Perhaps the most broadly characteristic feature of all psychopathology is its self-defeating quality. Pain, suffering, and defeat are structured into the patient’s life and experienced again and again. This feature characterizes psychopathology across the entire continuum; from the neurotic character who chooses unresponsive or sadistic love objects again and again, or behaves toward them to ensure their lack of response or sadism, to the depressive who seems to suffer the deprivations of early mothering over and over again, to the schizophrenic whose primitive childhood terrors haunt his adult life.” (172)
Greenberg, J. R., and S. A. Mitchell. (1983). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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References:
Celani, D. P. (2010). Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting. Columbia University Press.
Fairbairn, R. (1994). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Routledge.
Graham, C. [Fox News] (2019 Apr 12) PETA Discusses NIH Waste on Fox News. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuXQ7A10faw
Graham, C. [Fox News] (2021 Oct 27) PETA Executive Calls for Dr. Fauci’s Resignation. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-igXDyuNkI
Greenberg, J. R., and S. A. Mitchell. (1983). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rule-could-kill-billions-birds-former-wildlife-chief-don-ashe-migratory-bird-treaty-act/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/5/donald-trump-weakens-100-year-old-us-bird-protection-law