D2: Psych class notes

Abraham Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs

An’ I say, “Aw come on now
You must know about my debutante”
An’ she says, “Your debutante just knows what you need
But I know what you want”
(Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile...")

At the invitation of my friend Jeff Weintraub I will be framing the December 13 Penn FRG discussion of Abraham Maslow's work and its impact on mid-20th century social science. I've enjoyed thinking how a group this diverse and sophisticated will address the history/philosophy of the (social) sciences implications of theories like Maslow's.

My own work in cultural psychology, the result of long residence in Morocco, is a book about adolescence, co-authored with Susan Schaefer Davis. Adolescence in a Moroccan Town helped me understand just how far one could and couldn't get with Personality Theory.

This blog entry will serve as a brief introduction to the topics to be discussed and a link to suggested readings and sources I've consulted.
[Note: comments to this blog are open for the time being, but I may approve only those from FRG members.] 

Background. Maslow was one of several theorists who attempted to develop a coherent approach to theorizing and empirical work on human personality in the decade after WWII. In his case, this involved experimental psychological, ethological, and psychodynamic approaches to human motivation and behavior. Maslow knew and worked with many of the major players in the postwar years, and his hierarchy of needs attracted considerable attention. He is still cited in the context of "holistic" clinical psychology, and his ideas have inspired some significant study of long-term personality devlelopment.

Criticism. General  enthusiasm for grand personality theory in the '50s and '60s and growing  philosophical skepticism about such theorizing in the '60s and '70s are two themes I suggest for discussion. 

Maslow's "clinical" methods are breathtakingly ill-described, and I find myself wishing for a fully-fledged example of the concepts via clinical histories or close reading of fictional charaters, e.g., a  "Rat Man" (Freud, 1909) ruminating about the rock in the road his true love might travel, or a Peyton Loftis (Styron, 1951) on her wedding day. With the bewildering diversity of his list of "self-actualized" people, Maslow (1954) undercuts this reader's readiness to believe the man knows what he's talking about, that he's seen '-actualization.

For a recent review of Maslow's concepts and examples of their application, see Koltko-Rivera (2006). 

My POV. My graduate and professional workwas grounded in Freud and psychodyamic theories, along with some philosophy of science (Meehl, 1973; 1978), and had to do with Morocco, adolescence, and cyberspace. Existing personality and clinical theories are untestable with the means at our disposal, and the existing "empirical literature" barely speaks to the largest of the personality theory terms. OTOH, the desire for personality theories speaking to our own challenges of living persists. Where are the 21st Century Maslows and Freuds? With what sort of human beings will they be trying to cope? 

Suggested Reading for December 13, 2012

• Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Wikipedia entry View
• Maslow (1943)
• Maslow (1954): Chapter 12 download

Sources

Davis, Doug. (2005). Psychology of Adolecence: (Haverforf Psychology 214) hypersyllabus. www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/psych214/p214syl.05b.html

Davis, S.S., & Davis, D.A. (1989). Adolescence in a Moroccan Town: Making Social Sense. Rutgers. (Chapter 2 draft html) Google Books preview

Devereux, George. (1967). From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences. The Hague: Mouton & Co. excerpt

Freud, Sigmund. (1909). Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis.

Koltko-Rivera, Mark E. (2006) Rediscovering the Later Version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Self-Transcendence and Opportunities for Theory, Research, and Unification. Review of General Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 4, 302–317. View

Maslow, Abraham. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-396. Republished as Chapter 3 of Motivation and Personality. View

Maslow, Abraham. (1954). Motivation and Personality. Chapter 12: "Self-actualizing people" Download Maslow chapter 12 [Note: PDF may take a minute to load, and you'll probably have to right-click and rotate clockwise to read on screen.]

Maslow, Abraham. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Wikipedia entry View 

Meehl, P.E.  (1973). Why I do not attend case conferences. In #97 Psychodiagnosis: Selected papers (pp. 225-302). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. View

Meehl, P.E.  (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46, 806-834. View

Styron, William. (1951). Lie down in Darkness.

 

"Irma" and "Aliquis": Two Freudian fictions

I have been invited to give two guest lectures to a seminar in relational psychoanalysis being given by Dr. David Mark {David: I'll link whatever you like here}. The first was last night. I arrived late, wet, and harried and got said about half what I had intended. I did suggest that I was easy to find by googling, but I'd like to provide a convenient set of links to my online Freudiana: drafts of published papers, primary sources for classes, lecture notes, and recorded classes.

• Doug Davis online curriculum vita
• course page for Haverford college "Foundations of Personality," Spring, 2004: Irma link, aliquis link, video clip with David Suchet as Freud discussing Emma with Fliess
• Doug's January, 2003, lectures on the Irma dream in the aliquis episode
• a transcript of Doug's faculty research talk, "Writing Freud," at Haverford in November, 1990
• Davis, D.A. (1994). A   theory for the 90s: Freud's seduction theory in historical context. Psychoanalytic   Review, 81, 627-640.
• Freud-Fliess letters. (excerpts: do not quote or reproduce).

If there is evidence of interest in this resource, I'd be glad to respond to questions and to provide additional material here.

"Against the Day"

I'm in a Haverford College Humanities Center group discussing Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" and I suggested at our first meeting that I would create a blog resource for us. Here's step one.

It's been harder than I had expected to get a blog front end setup for thinking about Pynchon, probably because of my anticipation of this latest novel as a way to review and think about my own near 40 year fascination with the man. That's a little weighty for a single blog entry, so let's start with a thought or two about the reading we will be discussing tomorrow: "Iceland Spar" to page 260.

I'd like to come back to the question of whether we can find useful analogies in music or other arts to the way Pynchon animates the many sections of this book. Jazz? Mahler? Raga? Milhoun?

Pynchon (hopefully) trolls the too-strange-for-fiction “Chums of Chance” by us readers regularly for the effect they'll have on our understanding of other parts of the plot. Their Russian counterparts (the “Tovarishchi Slutchainyi”) tweak them with a worldly knowingness about war and betrayal, Russian style. The Chumbs seem to be early in the process of figuring out something about their own missions.

Wittily, [Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.] allows the Chums of Chance to figure in the novel, subtextually, as storybook characters, dime-novel heroes in the kind of fiction that boys relished in series at the turn of the century. ("The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama" and "The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates," etc.) The comic is always subverting the earnest and profound in "Against the Day." The narrative may be erudite (remember your quadratic equations?) and reportorial, but it is also richly allusive and imaginative. It has the same kind of Hieronymus Bosch quality that we remember from "V.," "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Gravity's Rainbow."
Alexander Theroux. Wall Street Journal, Nov 24, 2006 (Proquest copy)

I.G.L.O.O. On rereading the section for tomorrow's meeting (pages 118 - 260, in "Iceland Spar") I am particularly struck by the whispered-of destruction of New York City in the wrathful feeding frenzy of the primordial being extracted from the ice by the good ship Étienne-Louis Malus. Our  2007 New York -- the refracted image with which we are familiar -- is prospering again, and the uncanniness of ground zero does not seem to bother the millions of city-dwellers who pass it every day.

Pynchon's account of the return southward of the accursed ship calls up at this early point in the novel expectations of Lovecraftian horror. The dark pre-history of the world has been re-awakened by modern science, and now we'll pay for our arrogance.

Then something terrible has happened to New York, and we wonder if we’ve napped through it. Much of the city was apparently destroyed by fire after its population was driven mad with fear. What's left muddles along, run by a new class of folks, but now it's the kind of New York Bogart suggested to the Germans in "Casablanca" they not invade, with an added kink.

To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when "he" was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissibly, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of "her" beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, "he" remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men's clothing.
(p. 154)

... and I can hear Richard Nixon hollering, "What?"

Ways of approaching this bird. Since our discussion at the first meeting of the difficulties posed by this large novel's many and bifurcating plots I've thought more about my "epigenetic" analogy, based on the old Erik Erikson neo-Freudian ego psychology I used to teach. The image I had was of a boy of various ages scribbling down on a menu card a note for a joke or a plot line for a story or a bit of word-play around a popular tune. These cards get stored in a box and periodically extracted, added to, amended, and re-indexed (cf. Dubya's speechwriter). Those pertaining to the several main plot lines are dealt out to the reader with some concern for keeping us aware that there are characters on the other quadrants of the rotating stage, and there may be times when we think we understand a particular jump from, say, Traverses to Vibes. Mostly, we just get settled on one group of characters when we’re yanked into the parallel universe of another plot line.

 

 Pynchon-esque sex

February 23, 2007: At least three of Pynchon's novels -- V., Gravity's Rainbow, and Against the Day -- feature moments of kinky sex. Women are dressed in fetish attire, tied up, at least imaginatively abused. Men watch these erotic scenarios and sometimes participate by playing one or another classic sadomasochistic role. In Against the Day we have:

• Lake Traverse taken orally and anally by Deuce and Sloat, respectively

• Yashmeen Halfcourt taking and taken in a variety of dominance-submissions scenarios, both lesbian and "straight"

• Dally Rideout's richly explored dalliances with outre settings and the performance of erotic roles

At Wednesday's session, I brought up Tristan Taormino, Pynchon's niece (brother's child), erotic perforformance artist and New Age sex writer/speaker. She has a website, and Justin Hall attended her 30th birthday party in May, 2001. Her book Down and Dirty Sex Secrets was reviewed by Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Resources

• "Against the Day" Wikipedia entry
• "Against the Day" wiki
• "The Chumps of Choice" blog
• "Research Methods for Professional Writers" blog
• Amazon's "Against the Day" page
• Reviews of "Against the Day," aggregated at the AtD wiki
• google blog search on "Against the Day" (2/7/2007: 12:10: d2's 16-hour-old posting is hit #2
• James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima
• Lovecraft, H.P. The Call of Cthulhu
• Ynglingasaga Wikipedia entry
• Tristan Taormino Wikipedia entry

From HyperSyllabus to wiki-world in 10 short years

Here at Haverford the "Professional Activities Report" (PAF) is a required annual ritual in which the permanent faculty report their new publications, summarize their teaching and community service, and are invited to engage every few years in a "reflective assessment" of scholarly and pedagogical goals and achievements. Looking for something else, I found a piece of mine from a few years back ...

April 10, 1995

8:28 AM: Heres how the PAF turned out:

IV. REFLECTIVE ASSESSMENT

I'd like to self-nominate for the Lindback Prize for innovation in teaching, based primarily on my two HyperSyllabi. These are better experienced than talked about (I'd happily install Netscape on the Mac of anyone who wants a test drive). What I've attempted --and begun to achieve -- here is not only an efficient way of presenting lecture notes and collecting student commentary during a course. It's a potentially revolutionary change in the extent to which students can enter the syllabus and explore the implications of each topic covered and hinted by the formal material in any depth they choose and by a variety of means. Let me elaborate a little on this.

I've been convinced for years that new information technology would revolutionize learning once it changed teaching, and I've used email, course newsgroups, and the sharing of networked information as steps in the direction of freeing the teacher-student interaction from the scheduled classroom and the (essential, important) vagaries of verbal exchange. These have been fairly conventional adjustments to word-processiing, data-analysis, and local network resources of a sort now used by many of my colleagues -- and they have helped. Now I'm engaged in something more fundamental.

The two on-line course projects I've undertaken this term are just the beginning of the reworking of traditional pedagogy I think inevitable. With constant personal access to the whole range of public data, assigned reading, on-line discussion groups, and personal notes it becomes possible for teacher and students to collaborate on the creation of a shared resource each can use in a unique manner. The key concept is hypertextuality: each topic in the HyperSyllabus is a link to a more fully elaborated set of professorial notes, background material, and suggested additional reading -- and each of these is in turn linkable to more text resources, searchable databases, and hypermedia in the world at large. Each student will explore and master the major linked material, but each will leave a different set of footprints across the Web in so doing, and each will contribute something potentially valuable to the resources the rest of the students use. The HyperSyllabus is a moving target, something some students find quite unsettling, as they discover that the file they printed on Monday has expanded and acquired pointers to other files by Wednesday. A successful HyperSyllabus will always tempt the client to be distracted by questions about the background or sequelae of the specific class topic, and to find Web resources to check a hunch or develop a deeper understanding.

Take, for example, the second lecture in Psychology 109g last January. The printed syllabus entry would look like this:

W Jan. 18 The Freudian Slip: Exoriare aliquis ex ossibus nostris (Gay, xiii-xxix, 117-126)

The topic is what Freud called "faulty actions" as an illustration of the central Freudian insight that most information processing in the psyche occurs outside awareness, and the illustration is his interpretation of the forgetting of the Latin aliquis by a traveling companion at the turn of the century. By the time the students have had their first-lecture introduction to the Web and have made it through the introductory paragraph of the HyperSyllabus using a browser they know that the two underlined items are hyperlinks, in this case to my files freud.slip.html and aliquis.html on the same networked server. Clicking these underlined terms (it's a lot more fun to do than to describe) gets them to a brief definition of Freudian slips and an irreverent cartoon of Freud in his first slip (I want this link to be recalled) and to a translation of the Latin in the second. The translation is accompanied by my brief commentary, the full text of the passage in which Dido curses the departing Aeneas ("Let someone arise from my bones as an avenger!"), a suggested contrasting passage illustrating the deductive methods of London's greatest consulting detective (and a link to the full text of "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"), and a mention of the possibility that the student might be curious about the Aeneid as a whole. The underlining indicates that clicking there (you could be doing it now if this PAF were a Web page, or you could copy and paste the Aeneid's Uniform Resource Locator
[URL, viz. http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.html]
to your own Netscape at this point. On returning from a bit of Virgil, the student finds another link. Three weeks later the student will discover in reading In a Different Voice that Carol Gilligan (like Freud) has read the Aeneid, and that she has interesting things to say about Freud's choice of this particular example. Indeed, the possibility that Freud may have made up the traveling companion who tried to express his anger at anti-Semitism by quoting Virgil -- and that it was Freud who was worried about a lady friend's pregnancy (a-liquis, missed period) -- has already been addressed by another link, to an unpublished paper of mine (from a paper session Gilligan chaired several years ago at APA) titled Abortion and Its Discontents, in which Freud’s preoccupation with fertility issues at this phase of his theorizing is discussed in detail. The truly diligent student could embark on a mini-career following recent Freud scholarship on the master's self-(de)construction in his theorizing. The average student gets a wealth of information in a handy form, and each can communicate with me via email or with the class via the newsgroup just by clicking a button in the HyperSyllabus.

I was interviewed yesterday about my experience over the past few years with College "Teaching With Technology" grants. I seem on reading this to have got the promise of the early Web about right, a decade ago.

"Al-Musharaka" meets Psych 214

I've just made the following post to the Rabat American School Moodle (registration required):

By George (a fictional character from American folk wisdom), I think we've got it! I used last Thursday's class (link to the April moment in Psychology 214b) to

• provide background for hearing Mahmoud Darwish's "Rita and the Rifle" (as performed by Marcel Khalife) in the history of the Palestine/Israel conflict and the Lebanese Civil War
• wonder out loud with professor friends born out of the US whether Americans have a "sense of the tragic"
• set the stage for understanding Nass El Ghiwane's "Sabra and Chatila" in terms of Moroccan politics 20 years ago, and now
• reflect on the innocence of the Eisenhower, early Kennedy, Simon and Garfunkel years, and the tiresome politics of the 60s
• report the welcome Americans receive in Morocco since 9/11
• ask rhetorically how 9/11 affected our media
• play Ani Difranco's "Self Evident"
• wonder out loud whether it's 1955, or 1965, or 1968, here on the Main Line, in terms of the political future immediately ahead for my students
• cite Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning"

As our class ended, Gar Green's began, and it's podcast from RAS (download MP3). Tomorrow, with a little luck, we'll continue our discussion with Gar's class's in mind; and then I'll call on Skype and introduce us to them.

Now, where can we take this? How about some accounts of our responses to the music we like, podcast from Haverford and Rabat? Lots of you have iPods and other MP3 recorders, right? What about asking some old folks like your parents what they were thinking, as they listed to Khalife/Darwish or Ghiwane in their youth?

Oh, and what do you want to know about the stuff we're listening to at Haverford, and how it relates to youthful American politics? Could we, like, interview each other on Skype, and podcast that?

Oh, and do listen to بين ريتا وعيوني . . بندقيه

Show parent | Edit | Split | Delete | Reply 

Erotica and the Internet

I've been busy with my LiveJournal blog in connection with my writing seminar. This posting from earlier today (and private on my LJ) is one to which I'd welcome comment by whoever reads this blog. I've been interested in these questions for some time.

It's no secret that much of the information that whizzes about the Net is titillating to someone. I suspect much of the common activity of older children and young adults on-line has to do with sexy pictures and words. This seems a daunting kind of fiction to write in our public setting, but you may want to satisfy your curiosity about what erotic fiction is being published daily in cyberspace, as you think about how fiction is changing in an AIM world. You might start with the FAQ and the dated archive page at alt.sex.stories.moderated. Caveat lector! I would be interested in hearing from those of you who do browse this literature how you think the availability and the particular content of Net erotica is changing personality and social behavior. Freud thought the flavor of our adult sensual lives was set in the first several years of life. He had (IMHO) no real theory of personality change in adolescence and adulthood. He did think that having to work to find a "love object," a partner to our desire, made us grow up and helps keep us sane, as we repeatedly shape our wishes to what the real world will provide. What if our fantasies could be fulfilled, at little cost to us and none to anyone else? What would happen to our notions of morality? To our interest in and skill at maintaining our culture?

See: Davis, D.A. (1997). A glossary of Freudian terminology. Freud, S. (1933). The Structure of the Unconscious. From New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933], translated from the German by W. J. H. Sprott, New York, 1933, pp. 104-5, 105-7, 108-12.

Me, Myself, and I

I make a point of telling my Intro Psych students that Freud's special interest in masturbation, and his ambivalent and quite personal thinking about it, are one of the reasons we still read him. I've just suggested to my Psych of Adolescence students that Moroccan youth 20 years ago in a rural town were more ashamed to talk about masturbation than were their American counterparts. I explain some of the biographical connotations of Freud's thinking and writing in the late 1890s, and I suggest a historical critique in terms of Victorian mores, but I do not develop this. In the latest New York Review of Books I've found a fine summary of the history of masturbation as a theological and social concern in 18th century Euope:

Greenblatt, Stephen. Me, Myself, and I. The New York Review of Books. Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004.

The key to understanding early modern Europe's sudden preoccupation in the 18th century with the supposed dangers of solitary sexual gratification appears to be its very privacy and embeddedness in un-monitorable fantasy. "Modern masturbation," therefore, "was the creature of the Enlightenment."

There were, Laqueur suggests, three reasons why the Enlightenment concluded that masturbation was perverse and unnatural. First, while all other forms of sexuality were reassuringly social, masturbation—even when it was done in a group or taught by wicked servants to children—seemed in its climactic moments deeply, irremediably private. Second, the masturbatory sexual encounter was not with a real, flesh-and-blood person but with a phantasm. And third, unlike other appetites, the addictive urge to masturbate could not be sated or moderated. "Every man, woman, and child suddenly seemed to have access to the boundless excesses of gratification that had once been the privilege of Roman emperors."
Privacy, fantasy, insatiability: each of these constitutive features of the act that the Enlightenment taught itself to fear and loathe is, Laqueur argues, a constitutive feature of the Enlightenment itself. Tissot and his colleagues had identified the shadow side of their own world: its interest in the private life of the individual, its cherishing of the imagination, its embrace of a seemingly limitless economy of production and consumption. Hammering away at the social, political, and religious structures that had traditionally defined human existence, the eighteenth century proudly brought forth a shining model of moral autonomy and market economy—only to discover that this model was subject to a destructive aberration.

Which brings us to Freud:

Joyce's marvelous parody, published in 1922, was written from the other side of a great cultural divide. For, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the whole preoccupation— the anxiety, the culture of surveillance, the threat of death and insanity —began to wane. The shift was by no means sudden or decisive, and traces of the older attitudes obviously persist not only in schoolboy legends and many zany, often painful family dramas but also in the nervous laughter that attends the whole topic. Still, the full nightmare world of medicalized fear and punishment came to an end. Laqueur tells this second part of the story far more briskly: he attributes the change largely to the work of Freud and liberal sexology, though he also acknowledges how complex and ambivalent many of the key figures actually were. Freud came to abandon his conventional early views about the ill effects of masturbation and posited instead the radical idea of the universality of infant masturbation. What had been an aberration became a constitutive part of the human condition. Nevertheless the founder of psychoanalysis constructed his whole theory of civilization around the suppression of what he called the "perverse elements of sexual excitement," beginning with autoeroticism. In this highly influential account, masturbation, as Laqueur puts it, "became a part of ontogenesis: we pass through masturbation, we build on it, as we become sexual adults."

Freud's puzzled fascination with feminine eroticism fits Laqueur's thesis (as summarized by Greenblatt) quite nicely. Now, I need a class in which to try to explain Freud's place in the history described by Laqueur. Perhaps I can try to sketch the rural Moroccan adolescent male’s attitude toward his own and a female partner’s sexuality, comparing and contrasting my picture with Freud’s…

Anna Freud

I found myself wanting to talk about my unfinished work on Anna's realtionship to her father. In addition to my draft materials, I found a recording (internal Haverford access) of comments to a class in the early 1990s. I've suggested as an essay topic for the Psych 105g Blackboard that they consider Anna Freud in light of Gilligan's writings, and I've prompted them with Anna's adolescent fantasy:

Anna was the sixth and last of the children born to Martha and Sigmund Freud. She was born late in 1895, the year of Freud and Breuer published Studies on Hysteria, the year Wilhelm Fliess operated on Emma Eckstein. Her conception seems to have resulted from a failure either of her parents’ contraceptive technique or their resolve to employ it; and she took form along with Freud’s hermeneutic in the summer of the “Irma” dream. Her childish speech is quoted by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he describes her expressing her longing for strawberries. She admired and envied her two older sisters, Mathilde and Sophie, lacking the former’s feminine home-craft and the latter’s beauty. She seems to have been a serious girl, but she remembered her father's characterization of her as his "Little blackamoor." In early adolescence she developed a severe psychopathology, consisting of sado-masochistic fantasies accompanied by compulsive masturbation, an eating disorder, and depression. Her father treated her at several points in her adolescence, and initiated regular psychoanalytic sessions in the fall of 1918, when she was approaching 23. She and her father reconstructed her fantsies in three phases, from the masturbatory beating fantasies of puberty to the 'nice stories' of her mid-teens and finally the poetry and romantic fiction she composed as a young adult. As both youth and adult, Anna found herself ugly, clumsy, dumm, especially when the adolescent “nice stories,” with their tortured, princely, self-sacrificing youth, would intrude on her sublimated analytic work and entice her back to the body’s demands, and she would give in to sado-machochistic fantasy, and to lust. In her own analysis of the beating fantasies, presented as her candidacy paper to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1922, Anna tells her "nice story" fantasy as follows, referring to herself in the third person as befits a case history:

The material she used in this story was as follows: A medieval knight has been engaged in a long feud with a number of nobles who are in league against him. In the course of a battle a fifteen-year-old noble youth (i.e., the age of the daydreamer) is captured by the knight's henchmen. He is taken to the knight's castle where he is held prisoner for a long time. Finally, he is released. Instead of spinning out and continuing the tale (as in a novel published in installments), the girl made use of the plot as a sort of outer frame for her daydream. Into this frame she inserted a variety of minor and major episodes, each a completed tale that was entirely independent of the others, and formed exactly like a real novel, containing an introduction, the development of a plot which leads to heightened tension and ultimately to a climax. In this she did not feel bound to workout a logical sequence of events. Depending on her mood she could revert to an earlier or later-occurring phase of the tale, or interpose a new situation between two already completed and contemporaneous scenes-until finally the frame of her stories was in danger of being shattered by the abundance of scenes and situations accommodated within it. In this daydream, which was the simplest of them all, there were only two figures that were really important; all the others can be disregarded as incidental and subordinate by-players. One of these main figures is the noble youth whom the daydreamer has endowed with all possible good and attractive characteristics; the other one is the knight of the castle who is depicted as sinister and violent. The opposition between the two is further intensified by the addition of several incidents from their past family histories -- so that the whole setting is one of apparently irreconcilable antagonism between one who is strong and mighty and another who is weak and in the power of the former. A great introductory scene describes their first meeting during which the knight threatens to put the prisoner on the rack to force him to betray his secrets. The youth’s conviction of his helplessness is thereby confirmed and his dread of the knight awakened. These two elements are the basis of all subsequent situations. For example, the knight in fact threatens the youth and makes ready to torture him, but at the last moment the knight desists. He nearly kills the youth through the long imprisonment, but just before it is too late the knight has him nursed back to health. As soon as the prisoner has recovered the knight threatens him again, but faced by the youth's fortitude the knight spares him again. And every time the knight is just about to inflict great harm, he grants the youth one favor after another. (Freud, A., 1922)

She then works out the psychosexual twists of her story in classic Oedipal fashion:

In the first phase the person who beats also was the father; however, the child who was being beaten was not the fantasying child but other children, brothers or sisters, i.e., rivals for the father's love. In this first phase, therefore, the child claimed all the love for himself and left all the punishment and castigation to the others. With the repression of the oedipal strivings and the dawning sense of guilt, the punishment is subsequently turned back on the child himself. At the same time, however, as a consequence of regression from the genital to the pregenital anal-sadistic organization, the beating situation could still be used as an expression of a love situation.

This was the age 14-15 successor to the "nice stories" of childhood (age 7-9), themselves reactive transformations of the original wishes that the father might beat one's siblings. The resolution of these tendecies in the final phase is a nice story, indeed:

The sublimation of sensual love into tender friendship is of course greatly facilitated by the fact that already in the early stages of the beating fantasy the girl abandoned the difference of the sexes and is invariably represented as a boy.

Thus equipped, Anna Freud entered the profession of psychoanalysis she would inherit from her father. From the self-conscious and self-critical teenager sent off to visit the English relatives, she was able to become the dedicated companion of several women and surrogate mother to other women's children. She remained devoted to her father thoughout his lifetime, and to a strict-constructionist expression of his theories throughout hers.

My Blog, Myself

I've proposed to Haverford's Educational Policy Committee that I offer a first-year writing-intensive course in Fall, 2004, about blogs. Here's the draft description:

A review of self-expression on the Internet, with special attention to weblogs produced in adolescence and adulthood. Students and the instructor will form a friends group using LiveJournal or similar software to construct mutually-linked individual weblogs and will use these to share personal experiences, to annotate and discuss course readings, and to practice more and less structured writing about the psychology of such biographical discourse. Discussions will focus on existing biographical materials avaliable on the Net, on discussions of these by psychologists, and on our own experience of reflecting on each other's writing.

The reading list will grow and link from:

Davis, D. (1994-95). Erotic Computing. Webster's Weekly.

Davis, D. (2003). Milennial Teaching. Academe.

McNeill. (2002). Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks. Biography.

Turkle, Sherry. (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Zuern. (2002). Online Lives. Biography.
TomD points to evidence that the writing-teaching community is now interested in classroom blogs:

There is a pretty vigorous group of rhetoric/composition scholars who have been exploring the intersections of emerging technology and writing (and teaching writing) for the past 20 years or so.

I've lots to learn, as I try to pay off on the speculations of a decade ago.

__________________________________________________________

Here's the Fall, 2004, course web page for Haverford College WPR 115A

Psychology 105g: "Irma"

Monday, 1/21/04
Today I teach “Irma.” What are the main points?
•“There is no spoon.” The dream has no physical existence in any way that we can prove or use, and it must be approached primarily with interpretive skills, skills more humanistic and literary than scientific and neuro-biological
•At the semantic level, the “Irma” dream is about the tensions between personal and professional life.
•Considered cinematically, the images draw the viewer from a large social scene (the formal birthday party) to a series of tête-à–tête conversations – interrupted by images of the body: mouth, nose, chest.
•Two verbal images ("If you've got pains ...," "It's no matter, dysentery ...") intrude on the visual flow of the dream, and both are revealing, having to do respectively with reproach and malpractice.
•Freud’s associations and cogitations about the dream form a running commentary on it, and the summary of this commentary –cast in academic language – is the dream’s interpretation.
•A convincing portrayal of both the dream and its commentary, leaving the interpretation implicit, would read more like Nabokov’s Ada than James’s Psychology, to say nothing of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
•Your main job in Psychology is to master the straight-forward, flat-footed JPSP syle, even as you learn to read James and to delight in Nabokov.
See my extended notes on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
Part 2