Übertragung V (Quotational Interlude)

We take a break from our analytic thriller, to offer some background on the term that supplies its title.

In psychoanalysis, the notion of  Übertragung/transference was to enjoy a remarkable floraison, to the point that many passages using the term (examples quoted below) are baffling to any but a connoisseur.  But its origins were literal enough, its use not restricted to the analytic situation. Thus, from the first edition of Die Traumdeutung, Freud anent his youthful crush on Hannibal:

Ich meine, daß ich diese Schwärmerei für den karthagischen General  noch ein Stück weiter in meine Kindheit zurück verfolgen kann, so daß es sich auch hier nur um die Übertragung einer bereits gebildeten Affektrelation  auf einen neuen Träger handeln dürfte.

*

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*

Later, in the relation between analyst and analysand,  Freud believed he regularly discovered a transference of a special sort:  an unconscious projection, by the analysand, of prototypes -- likewise unconscious, and infantile in origin -- onto the analyst himself.   And the oddity -- no, the paradox -- is that, instead of going straight for the patient’s traumata and complexes and what-all, the transference being a mere distraction,  in time the analyst’s focus came to be primarily on analyzing the actual transference relation -- a sort of meta-illness.  As one orthodox practitioner put it:

It is now all but axiomatic that the transference is the indispensable driving power of the analytic process.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961).

~

An early appreciation, from one outside the inner circle:

Such ‘negative’ transference seems to be often an artificial product of analysis, an artefact.  (Not always, for many subjects are inevitably hostile.)  One is tempted, indeed, to ask whether an investigator who encounters ‘negative’ transference  might not be well advised to retire from the world for a time  and to pracise a little auto-psychoanalysis.

-- Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (?1897-?1910), vol. III, part 2, p. 204

The passage is characteristic of the author’s common sense, leavened by wit.   His observation, though that of an analytic outsider, yet hit the mark, as witness this parallel passage in the classic mainstream-orthodox text (held in reverence by Janet Malcolm, but itself  spectacularly devoid of any hint of humor) of Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), p. 54:

Superfluously remote and depriving attitudes [on the part of the analyst] tend to promote an artifact element in the transference neurosis …

Except as regards the spelling of artefact, these authors are here basically in agreement.

~

With time, the term became increasingly numinous and portentous:

The transference  and the transference neurosis … are at the very center of our concept of the analytic process.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961).

“The motives of student organizations are nothing if not transferential.”

“The kids getting together against the parents.”

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 63

Though he considers the office unimportant, he says he would have felt terrible if he had lost out.  “It took on a transferential meaning for me.”

-- psychoanlyst “Aaron “, quoted in Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 106

“It’s a defense maneuver that many analysts adopt, when  all of a sudden  they find themselves caught within the emotional field of the patient’s instincts, when they feel the full impact of the transference   beating down on them like hail.”

-- psychoanlyst “Aaron “, quoted in Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 149

As with any precise technical term, transference is subject to a somewhat loose or relaxed use as jargon:

We must guard against rationalizing that aspect of our group countertransference  which idealizes the over-obedient patient.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), p. 66

Since an infantile fixation of a group mind is here most implausible, this can mean no more than déformation professionelle.

[A suivre ici.]

Die Traumdeutung (still further updated)

Träume sind Schäume.

-- old folk-saying

I am currently combing slowly through Freud’s groundbreaking work of 1899, Die Traumdeutung -- “La clef des songes” --  “The Interpretation of Dreams”.  Meanwhile, this page can serve as a scratch-space for matters oneiric.

Don’t worry -- I won’t be pinning your ears back with my own dreams, which are mostly boring or annoying or both.

[Pronunciation of Die Traumdeutung:  dee  TROWM-doy-toong.  Traum is cognate with English dream;  deutung has no cognate in modern English, but is prehistorically related to the German word for 'German', deutsch.]

~ (I) ~

In our essay on Eliminative Materialism, we made fun of Edward Wilson’s celebration of the neuroscientists’ would-be physicalist-reductionist supersession of Freudian semantic-based oneirology.   It was not much beyond the level of “The red chemical makes you dream of flying, the blue chemical makes you dream of penguins” -- or rather, it did not even rise to the level of such an actual correlation, but basically said simply, “Since we know in advance that everything reduces to chemicals, dreams do too” -- an exercise precisely as enlightening as droning on about the chemistry of paper and ink, in an attempt to explain Paradise Lost;  or to announce, after painstaking statistical analysis, that that work turns out to be exhaustively composed of just twenty-six  --> Basic Building Blocks (shades of the nucleotide code!), in what scientists are calling an “alphabet”.

The most you could say about their efforts is that they at least are opening a door to possible physiochemical groundings of oneiric events (without explaining the latter in detail -- indeed, without getting anywhere near the pyschosemantics of the thing), in a way unanticipated by Freud, benighted as he was  back in the bad old days of metaphysical speculation.  Only, it turns out he was perfectly aware of such maneuvers, which had already fashionably flourished in his day (with vacuous results) -- indeed, he went so far as to speculate (perhaps humorously) that someday, someday, such blandly-blankly chemical underpinnings might explain everything (compare his remarks quoted here) -- yet remained, after an extensive review of that and kindred literatures (dutiful reviewal of which takes up the painful first one hundred pages of his tome), unimpressed.

Let him tell it:

Vorläufig  wollen wir uns über die Überschätzung der nicht aus dem Seelenleben stammenden Reize  zur Traumbildung  nicht verwundern.  Nicht nur  daß diese  allein leicht aufzufinden  und selbst durchs Experiment zu bestätigen sind;  es entspricht auch die somatische Auffassung der Traumentstehung durchwegs  der  heute in der Psychiatrie herrschenden Denkrichtung.

-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1899)

Nor was this an amateur’s or outsider’s assessment:  Freud had been trained as a physician, not as a philosopher, so he knew whereof he spoke.  And it is to his moral credit that, so far from lording it over non-doctors in physiological matters (as doctors  even today  are wont to do), he not only upheld the independent integrity of psychical productions as such (as does anyone with any sense, when it comes to literature or mathematics), but laid aside his own training-advantage in the debate as to how the newly-developing field of psychoanalysis should go forth, staunchly upholding, in the face of oppostion, the validity of “lay analysis”.

He goes on:

Die Herrschaft des Gehirns  über den Organismus  wird zwar nachdrücklich betont,  aber alles, was eine Unabhängigkeit des Seelenlebens  von nachweisbaren organischen Veränderungen  oder eine Spontaneität in dessen Äußerungen erweisen könnte, schreckt den Psychiater heute so, als ob dessen Anerkennung die Zeiten der Naturphilosophie  und des metaphysischen Seelen Seelenwesens wiederbringen müßte.

You needn’t change a word of that, to apply it to the intellectual ambience in the laboratories of today.   -- He ends with an epigram:  “Das Mißtrauen des Psychiaters  hat die Psyche gleichsam unter Kuratel gesetzt.”

*

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in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

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*

The Positivist conception of dreams, whether that of the 19^th or the 21^st century, is basically “it was just something you ate” (chemicals!).   Freud’s take was initially seen as demeaning, depicting us in the grip of the (scarcely salonfähig) Unconscious.  (It sounds even scarier in German, if you pronounce it Uunbewuussten.)  But that theory at least is semantic all the way down, in keeping with our humanity.  Compare the humanity of his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholy”, treating of the manic-depressive, vs. the pop-a-pill present age, treating (while not treating of) the lately-rechristened “bipolar”.

~

For our own remarkable experiments in the dream-laboratory, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/appendix-to-appendix-on-oneiric.html

 ~ (II) ~

I happened upon a file of my recorded dreams from 1982, bracketing the time when our first child was born.    I shall not bore you (nor bore myself) with telling any one of them;  but certain generalizations might be worth noting.

(1)  As I read them now, three decades later, very few of them ring any sort of memory-bell, or even hold an particular interest:  it was not like biting down on the madeleine.   But the culprit is not simply the passage of so many years:  many of my diary entries from that time (and even earlier) elicit an appreciative chuckle, or a pang.

(2)  These dreams, as recorded in writing, now offer a blind alley to interpretation, evoking no associations or insights.  Yet the accounts are each accompanied with a commentary written the morning after the dream, and these are  in some cases  quite fact-packed, surprising, and insightful.  But they are heavily dependent on the day-remnants, memory of which (these being in themselves mostly trivial) has long since evaporated.

(3)  In no instance do they carry any evident Jungian numinosity -- no portents of the future (which they have had thirty full years to let come to fruition)  -- no useable ideas.  So maybe I’m just a shallow guy;  yet I don’t think so:  the depth goes into my poems and books;  the dreams are orphans.

~ (III) ~

Though movies sometimes try to blur the distinction with their soft-focus “dream sequences”,  real dreams are quite different from fiction, and even from fantasy.  To take a typical example at random (reported by Jonathan Towers, and reprinted in Io, vol. viii, 1971):

I had a nightmare last night, I woke up hysterically crying … It was that Aunt Et had a new husband who was sort of in between a kid and a man, and using the man part, his role as husband, to put me down.  … The dream was all about animals, this chicken that had to be born itself to have chicks, had to create a white round very cellulose shell around itself, but then to be born, she also had to go through the Smelly Cat’s body and be ejected out the anus, which was a process I really empathized with … watching the bulge in the cat’s stomache and then moaning with pain and then relief at the ejection of the chicken …

The OTT latter part could in principle be depicted (its look, though not its meaning) in the wacky-surreal style of early cartooning (“Minnie the Moocher”, “Betty Boop”), in which the lines between rational creature  and beast  and inanimate (in those cartoons, nothing is inanimate) are repeatedly and gleefully transgressed.   Or, you might hallucinate the thing (I once had something very like the extravagant early animations, after several days in the hospital lying on an ice-blanket with a raging fever).   But the first statement, so po-facedly retailed, “in between a kid and a man, and using the man part”, is visually undepictable.

(It actually suggests the sort of oscillation that occurs in quantum-mechanics:   now it’s an electron, now it’s a muon …  Quantum mechanics is as weird as dreams.)

~ (IV) ~

Nun dämmert mir aber  ein neuer Sachverhalt.  Die Zärtlichkeit des Traumes  gehört nicht zum latenten Inhalt, zun den Gedanken hinter dem Traume;  sie steht im Gegensatz zu diesem Inhalt …

-- S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, IV.

Dream-interpretation, like literary criticism (or intelligence analysis), has its inevitable part of subjectivity;  yet here, we feel dismay.   If, a given dream feature  failing to prove analytically fruitful, we may equally replace it with its opposite,  then truly, there are no rules.

This recalls the 18^th-century quip against the then-unscientific pastime of etymology, as being one “in which consonants matter little, and vowels  not at all.”    The poster-boy for such woolly lack of methodology is

lucus a non lucendo

lit. ‘It is called a grove because it doesn’t shine’ (or, freely: ‘… because it doesn’t grieve’)  which actually was itself a satire, not a genuinely proposed etymology.

Freud’s gambit was abetted by his reliance upon then-fashionable erroneous theories of primitive language, according to which there was once no negative particle, and a word might mean equally a given thing  and its opposite  --  he had read Abel’s Der Gegensinn der Urworte (1884) ).  The latter thesis has been maintained (sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest) with respect to early Arabic, summarized in the chestnut:  “In Arabic, any given word can mean: (1) a given thing; (2) the opposite of that; (3) something obscene; and (4) something about a camel.”  I have addressed (and refuted) that assertion, in the chapter “Enantiosemantics” in The Semantics of Form in Arabic.

And yet and yet … That connection of lucus with lucere [the latter from lux ‘light’) is not nearly as absurd as generally made out:  in fact, the suggestion of such a connection is correct.

To point the apparent absurdity, the Latin word lucus in that phrase  is often translated ‘dark grove’ (that is what you’ll find online).  But it doesn’t mean ‘dark grove’:  it denotes ‘a clearing (in the woods)’.  And here the present of lux  is plain.  Indeed, it becomes explicit in the German word Lichtung ‘clearing’, compare Licht (light).
And thus, perhaps there is more wisdom in Freud's gambit than is apparent.

~ (V) ~

Freud offers several dreams  which, on the surface, are irksome, but which (so he argues) are  at a deeper level,  wish-fulfillments -- the core characteristic of dreams, in his system.

Now:

 I once dreamt (many decades ago) that, just by thinking, I could make objects move. -- I awoke in terror.

That is a dream which , on the surface, might seem a wish-fulfillment -- that of omnipotence:  Yet it is a nightmare.  It illustrates the horror of “the Omnipotence of Wishes”.

This telekinesis dream is  the flip side (seemingly opposite, but from the same record -- cf. duality) of the brain-in-a-vat scenario.  In the one, you can do everything; in the other, you can do nothing:  but none of it has meaning, and it comes to the same thing.

-->

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

~ (VI) ~

The eminent British sexologist (and period eccentric) Havelock Ellis  worked contemporaneously with Freud, and plowed many of the same fields.  Their relations were cordial, but intellectually superficial:  neither seems deeply to have influenced the thought of the other.

In part two of volume three of his immense undertaking, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis offers a chapter “The Synthesis of Dreams:  A study of a series of one hundred dreams”.  He opens with a nod to Die Traumdeutung (which “marks an epoch”), then proceeds to an extended exercise which fundamentally borrows nothing from the Freudian program and contributes nothing to it.  Ellis’ approach he calls dream-synthesis, as against Freud’s dream-analysis;  and comments that the relation of the former to the latter is like that of geography to geology.   To that, a Freudian would probably assent, merely noting that, of the latter two, only Geology belongs to the natural sciences.

*

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weiterblättern möchten,

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*

Mathsex (updated for the holiday season)

We have previously had occasion to note the useful and informative Blogspot stats, which, by listing the search-phrases that brought surfers to this site, give a glimpse into the minds of our audience.  Recent examples (copied and pasted exactly as originally written -- some of them are rather odd):

www.quotes on truth and beauty combined

two schools of poetry are what

quousque tandem, catilina, abutemini patienzia nostra?

(that last one seems to segue into an Italian aria).

And then (* sigh *)  there are the badboys of the searchstring community.  Recent examples:

porno azawad

big boob bloopers

and, strangest of all,

mathsex

-- or perhaps it was “sexmath”, I don’t recall;  anyhow written solid, as one word.

Now, we pay very little attention to sex on this site, save in the context of evolution, or in relation to the sacramental conception of marriage, as revealed by the Holy Mother Church.   And the area of interesting intersection between sexuality and mathematics is surely of measure zero -- at least from our own Platonistic perspective, sub specie which, the truths of mathematics are as independent of mere gender  as they are of species, or of time:  truths that are as true for boys as for girls, nay, for people as for paramecia:  for that indeed is what makes math interesting.

Conceivably, what our surfer had in mind, was rather “math porn”.   For we do, not infrequently, allude to degraded popularisations of physics, philosophy, etc., under the rubrics “physics porn”, “philosophy porn”, etc.;  here the term is purely metaphorical, much the way, in the academic community, “sexy” came to mean “a topic likely to attract lots of students, and to win government grants”. 

Yet, oddly, there seems to be no such thing as “math porn” -- math discussed in a popular-populist, smoke-and-mirrors way.   Treatments of the subject for a lay audience tend to be  at worst disappointing, at best  absolutely outstanding, such as the best-selling books by John Allen Paulos or Martin Gardner, or the non-bestselling but even better books by G.H. Hardy, Jacques Hadamard,  Ian Stewart, Morris Kline, or Davis & Hersh.   On the rare occasions when the general-audience press notices some mathematical accomplishment, as (justifiedly)  the proof, not long ago, of the long-outstanding “Fermat’s Last Theorem”, the account is straightforward:  naturally giving no insight into the logic or structure of the accomplishment, for that would be far too difficult, but telling the readers what they need to know, with no fuss about it.   For there to be anything like “math porn”, on a level with the unending and shallow sensationalistic treatment of (say) the Higgs Boson in physics, you would need instead  to have periodic tub-thumping reports of purported proofs (“sightings” of possible proofs, or musings about rumored future proofs), followed by back-to-the-drawing-board retractions, together with a heavy focus on personalities, rivalries, and dish (“Andrew Wiles reveals his private fantasies”).   Oh plus the topic would have to be renamed so as to be headline-ready (just as the Higgs Boringon was dubbed the “God particle”) -- say, “The Erection Theorem” or “The Clitoris Conjecture”.  

In sum, for all you “mathsex” stringsearchers out there:  Sorry,  folks, there’s no There there.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

For a spot of sex  minus the math

(you must be 56 or older)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TWpcZGE_q4

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

~

Appendix.

Nevertheless, not wishing to disappoint our massive international fanbase, we do here offer, for the benefit of the worldwide erotomathematical community,  the following sexological Addition Tables (let us dub them “Justice’s Calculations”):

Augend plus Addend            Result

man + woman                        Holy Matrimony

man + man                             (does not compute)

[Update three minutes later]
Omigosh, this just in:  someone got here by searching on

   porno chemestri

Nothing to see here, folks!  Keep moving!

[Update a little later]
Alright -- okay -- somebody's messing with me.  First
  

    cultiver pornosu 
and now

      pinguinus porno

 by someone logging from Rumania.

KEITH IS THAT YOU?!?
KNOCK IT OFF !!!!!

[Update to the update:  Our learned friend proved entirely innocent of this escapade;  the real culprit has never been found.]

~

As mentioned,  no question of sex sheds any light whatever   upon the transcendent and human-independent content of mathematics, any more than do questions of economics or zoology.   But the practice of mathematics, like anything else (stamp-collecting or what have you) may be glanced at in the context of that multivariate, multifoliate syncrescence known as sexuality.  Here the great English sexologist Havelock Ellis, raised in the Victorian era  and writing in the Edwardian, reports on the results of many an attempt to curb randiness:

Mental exercise … has sometimes been advocated as a method of calming sexual excitement. … Mathematical occupations … have been advocated … as aide to sexual hygiene.

“I have tried mechanical mental work,” a lady writes, “such as solving arithmetical or algebraic problems, but it does no good;  in fact  it seems only to increase the excitement.”

-- Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (?1897-?1910), vol. IV, p. 208

(Rather an arresting image, that:  our scholarly maiden diligently working through problems in Noetherian rings, and becoming increasingly tumescent ...)

Let us note, though, that only “mechanical” exercises are here shown to fail: arithmetic, not in the sense of Number Theory, but of long division; algebra, not in the sense of Galois or of André Weil, but of those unpleasant little sentences with x’s in them, relating to draining bathtubs which (against all reason) are simultaneously being replenished from the tap.  These can only cause the mind to wander -- Reason to abandon her throne -- as the Old Adam or the Ancient Eve  reclaim their birthright, and attention descends  beneath the waistband.