Transcription
Some time ago, I was asked by someone who follows me on YouTube to do a video lecture addressing the distinction between repression on the one hand and dissociation on the other. Um, and then I was talking to a young colleague who was expressing her interest in the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*. And that stimulated me.
I had made many references in previous YouTube lectures to *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*. Um, I was referring to Freud's basic discovery of the fact that we are all divided selves. There's no unitary self. We're all split: conscious versus unconscious, manifest versus latent. Melanie Klein agrees: the paranoid schizoid position and the depressive reparative position. Um, the normal self is a divided self. Uh, and it always occurred to me to, to express this point by saying that, you know, we are all both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
But it had been quite a while since I had read the story. So, um, when she mentioned her interest in it, I, uh, I went and re-read the, the Stevenson novella. And so I want to talk about, uh, all of this tonight. And, and, uh, I'll start, um, by reading, uh, most of the first paragraph of chapter 10 of Stevenson's 1886 novella. Um, 1886. Well, so this leads to the question: Had Freud read *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*? Um, Stevenson and Freud were contemporaries. I don't know the answer, and my vision is not up to researching the question very much.
So if someone out there wants to dig into that question, did Freud know of the novella? Had he perhaps read it? Did it influence him? The internet is full of Freudian analyses of the story. Uh, in ego, superego, Mr. Hyde being the id, Dr. Jekyll, uh, to some extent being both the superego and the ego that tries to mediate. Um, and, and that ultimately comes up with a potion that actually separates them. Uh, so that the tension between them is escaped by becoming entirely Dr. Jekyll for a time, and then swallowing the potion and becoming entirely Mr. Hyde for a time. Um, that element of the story, I'm not particularly interested in.
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Um, but I am interested in the story as addressing this problem of human duality, human division. Um, before launching into that psychological discussion, I think a bit of sociological analysis needs to be applied to the novella because pretty clearly Dr. Jekyll is a kind of upper-middle-class or possibly upper-class Victorian gentleman. Uh, while Mr. Hyde is, um, a kind of representative of the stereotype, uh, that the Victorian upper classes perhaps had about the working classes: rude, violent, oversexed, whatever. So there's this sort of socio-political, uh, tension that is also depicted in the story.
Okay, here's the paragraph from chapter 10.
"And indeed, Dr. Jekyll writes, 'The worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as his maid, the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures, and that when I reached years of reflection and began to look round about me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity. Committed to a profound duplicity. Duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of, but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, aspirations, than any particular degradation of my faults, that made me what I was. And with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and increasingly on that hard law, that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most painful springs of distress. Though so profound a double dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite. Both sides of me were indeed earnest. I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame than when I labored in the eye of the day at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced little that the direction of my scientific studies reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines, and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens. I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man. I saw that of the two natures that concealed in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous were thus bound together in the agonized womb of consciousness. These polar twins should be continuously struggling. How then were they dissociated?'"
Okay, well, we're not concerned with "how then were they dissociated?" That's the science fiction element where Jekyll comes up with this chemical potion that allows him to become thoroughly Jekyll and thoroughly Hyde, and then thoroughly Jekyll again. Um, but here we have this remarkable statement of human duality. Um, you know, the agonized womb of consciousness having to hold these dual contending elements in check, trying to balance them or harmonize them or bear this contradiction. The agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins.
Um, okay, it's, it's, it's, it's a, uh, remarkably interesting statement. He, he says, uh, "Others will follow me. I'm pointing only to a duality. Others will follow me and reveal that we are not just dual, where multiple." And of course, that's the history of psychoanalytic object relations theory. I mean, even with Freud, we don't just have id and superego, we also have ego. So that's three. Uh, and then, of course, we have internalized object relations theory thinker like Fairbairn. We, we have the central ego and the, um, uh, the exciting object and the rejecting object and the libidinal ego and the anti-libidinal ego. And, uh, in Kleinian theory, we have often even a greater multiplicity of internalized objects and internalized self-states. So that prediction on the part of Dr. Jekyll is quite correct.
Okay, okay.
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Jekyll is emphasizing that it's his high ideals that are at the root of the problem. It's not that he harbors such terribly, at least at the beginning, he doesn't harbor such terribly base desires. Um, but he's uncomfortable because he, he's ambitious and he wishes very much to be seen as an upright, uh, honorable, uh, member of that bourgeois Victorian society. And he begins to hide, uh, this, um, uh, this element of himself, which he describes as using the word "gaiety," a pleasure-seeking, pleasure-enjoying part of himself. He, he starts to engage in a kind of, um, defense against that, a kind of hiding of that side of himself, precisely in order to live up to his high upper-bourgeois ideals.
And in his early work, Freud describes defense in very similar terms. Freud thinks that it is the ideal image of the self, the social self, the ideal self, that is at the root of repression of aspects of the self that, uh, are incompatible with the ideal. That's kind of where Freud starts with his discussion of defense, um, as a conflict between an ideal self-image and incompatible impulses, desires, and behavior.
Well, another contemporary of Freud's was Pierre Janet, the French psychiatrist, um, who is famous for his work not on repression, but dissociation. In developing his repression model, Freud was distancing himself intentionally from Janet, and therefore Freud was pushing the repression model as opposed to the dissociation model. Some people have described this as, uh, pushing the idea of a horizontal split in the mind versus a vertical split in the mind. The horizontal: conscious and pre-conscious on top, the barrier of the censorship, repression is pushing down in this horizontal, top-down model. Described dissociation, Morris, what we might think of as a vertical model, keeping separate, uh, uh, incompatible experiences.
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Keeping incompatible perceptions, incompatible emotional states, self-states separate from one another. A kind of compartmentalization of mind. Okay, horizontal regression, compartmentalization of mind. Dissociation in a general sense, we're talking about splitting off parts of the self that make us anxious or guilty. But we kind of have two different conceptions of how this splitting off takes place: a pushing down into the unconscious, or keeping separate in different compartments of the mind that must never meet.
Freud described what he called isolation of affect and isolation of thoughts. Part of the list of defense mechanisms. I've always felt that the idea of isolation of affect should simply be called repression of affect. We bury, we push into the unconscious those affects that we don't want to feel or don't want to know about. Um, the idea of isolation of thoughts, it seems to me, is Freud's term for what others would call dissociation, precisely isolation of thoughts, keeping them in separate compartments that are not allowed to touch. So that's dissociation.
Um, so the, the early Freud seemed to be pushing the horizontal split, the concept of repression, burying, pushing down. But as his work progressed, the later Freud seemed to be moving more towards a dissociation model. In the 1920s, he's talking about the splitting of the ego in the process of defense. He's talking about how in one part of his mind, the little boy knows that girls don't have a penis, but that's an unbearable idea. So in another part of his mind, he insists that girls do have a penis. He both knows that they don't, but he insists that they do. You know, this is a little bit like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Both knowing and not knowing, kind of splitting in the mind, a dissociation.
Later in, in post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
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Um, we, we, we come to the work of Kohut and Kernberg on narcissistic personality disorders. They both describe vertical splitting. They're both, um, addressing this idea of isolation of thoughts, of compartmentalization of mind. And they're saying that in narcissistic personalities, we don't see so much repression as we see this splitting of the ego. Um, and, and what they have in mind is that the narcissistic patient may come to one of his three or four sessions. One day he's raging with anger. The next day he comes, he's calm as a cucumber. He's in a different self-state. And, and the analyst might say, "So, so you're not angry today?" And the patient might say, "What, what, what anger? What are you talking about?" "Well, yesterday you were raging in here." "Was I really?" "Yes." "Don't you remember? You were going on and on about..." "Oh, yeah. I guess, I guess I was. Uh-huh." Well, and he goes on. Okay, he's in a different self-state now. He can barely remember. I mean, we're not describing alters here, as in so-called multiple personality disorder. We're talking about there's a certain unity of consciousness. He does remember that he was angry yesterday. He just doesn't have any connection with that anger today. Um, so it's not a complete splitting off, but it's certainly a partial splitting off. These are different self-states that somehow. So this is the idea of a vertical split, a kind of dissociation.
The term dissociation is used in contemporary psychoanalysis far more than the term repression. An analyst who uses the word repression is indicating that he's a kind of old-fashioned, probably fairly classical Freudian, or at least an ego psychologist. Because, you know, relational psychoanalysts, self-psychologists, intersubjectivity theorists, revisionist psychoanalysts, they, they don't talk much about repression at all. They talk a whole lot about dissociation. And they also talk about trauma. And of course, in the literature, trauma and dissociation are very much linked. Traumatized, abused child, um, while she is being abused, she somehow kind of leaves her body and goes somewhere else. She checks out. She goes into the wallpaper or somewhere. Um, I, I, that's a kind of depersonalization, which kind of leaves her body. Professional, uh, sex workers, hookers, do this. You know, her customer, that John, thinks he's getting her body, and maybe he is, but she's not in it anymore. She dissociates from the experience. That's kind of a conscious, professionalized use of dissociation.
But this not being in your body. Um, I have a patient who was quite depersonalized, and she would go out and she would run for miles, and she'd come home, and she'd step out of her running shoes, which were full of blood, and she wasn't aware she was in any pain at all. She really wasn't there. Um, okay, so this kind of thing seems to fit the dissociation idea, um, more than it does the repression idea. Um, so vertical split rather than horizontal split. Freud himself seemed to be moving in that direction.
Melanie Klein, of course, talks about the splitting of the all-good from the all-bad, the all-good object from the all-bad object, and the all-good self from the all-bad self, and these things mustn't be allowed to touch. Um, uh, you have to keep the bad breast separated from the good breast, or the good breast might be destroyed by the bad breast. You have to keep the all-bad self separated from the all-good self, otherwise the good self may be destroyed by the bad self. And here we have echoes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll, the upright, good self, um, is in danger of being destroyed by Mr. Hyde, the all-bad self. They need to be kept apart. In the story, of course, he comes up with a chemical potion designed to, uh, to separate them, to dissociate them.
So, cleaning and splitting. Good object has to be kept at a distance from the bad object. The good self at a distance from the bad self. We have idealization versus devaluation. So this keeping apart seems to fit the idea of dissociation. But keeping things apart also fits the idea of repression. I, I'm trying to think that I am entirely loving towards a particular object, but I have to get rid of the part of me that is hating. So I repress my hate, and then, of course, as Freud discovers, we always get this disguised return of the repressed in symptoms, slips. My repressed anger leaks out. So both dissociation and repression are attempts to keep things apart.
Okay, this, this idea of dissociation.
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In the 1970s and 80s, went very far. We had this whole idea of multiple personality disorder. First, the three phases of E, and then Sybil with her 18 personalities. And that turned out to be a con job on the part of both the psychiatrist who treated her and the journalists who wrote up that as the best-selling book, Sybil. But there came to be in the 70s, 80s, there came to be a whole industry in psychiatry and psychology around so-called multiple personality disorder. In Baltimore, you had two hospitals on opposite sides of the street. Um, in one of those hospitals, they were running essentially a dissociative identity disorder factory. Therapists all believed in dissociative identity, and they would ask to speak to an alter. And across the street at Johns Hopkins, the chief of psychiatry said, "Any therapist, social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, whatever, who asks to speak to an alter is fired." Because on that side of the street, the idea DID was seen as an iatrogenic disorder, a physician-induced disorder. The therapist's belief in the ideology of multiple personality disorder was influencing patients to play their part, to bring these dissociated states.
Um, sometime later, there were a lot of lawsuits. Patients who'd spent years in treatment with therapists who specialized in dissociative identity disorder were suing their therapists for physician-induced, um, pathology. You know, I myself have never believed in multiple personality disorder. I've never encountered it. I have colleagues who I otherwise respect who would stand up in meetings and talk about this stuff, and they would get very angry when I would say, "Listen, psychoanalysis is about analyzing metaphors, not joining them. Patient is lost in the metaphor that there's more than one of him, and, um, you guys are encouraging this and taking it seriously and pretending it's real. I mean, do you do that with all psychotic patients? Do you buy into their delusions? Do you validate their delusions? Here are these people coming in with the idea that they're multiple, and you're validating it. I mean, if you have an addict who's snorting cocaine, do you, do you join him in the session and snort a bit yourself? Uh, what the hell are you doing? We're supposed to be analysts."
This would make them very angry, of course. Um, the tide turned against those people. Some of the leading people who were around the Journal of Dissociative Identities, or they were kind of kicked out of town. They lost their credibility in the field of psychiatry. Psychiatry turned against them. They were way out on a limb, and the limb got sawed off, and a lot of them got sued, and a lot of them got very embarrassed and tried to hide or bury that chapter of their professional lives. When they were caught up in all of this, all the way in some cases to affirming the idea of satanic sexual abuse of children, and we know where that all went.
Um, okay, but here, here we are again. Um, uh, but certainly most folks who talk about dissociation don't carry it to that extreme, necessarily. Sometimes dissociation is seen as something as mild as a kind of attentional defense. They're kind of not paying attention, are kind of looking away from a certain kind of not wanting to see. So I'm, something's going on, and I'm not wanting to see. I'm looking away.
Sometimes it can go quite a bit further than that and result in states like depersonalization and derealization, where I feel like I'm a little bit out of my body. And derealization, I can feel that people are not looking quite real to me. They're looking a little bit like robots, and maybe the buildings aren't looking entirely real. They're looking like Hollywood sets. Usually, in my experience, patients who experience those states of dissociation are simultaneously engaged in intense repression of affect, because of course, it's affect that makes us feel real and makes the world look real and feel real to us.
I recall a woman patient who learned that her husband had been having an affair for a long time behind her back. She was driving home along a route that she'd been familiar driving for years, and suddenly she got all confused, and she couldn't really tell whether she was headed north, south, east, or west. She had to pull the car over, and she had to sit there for 10 or 15 minutes. The people on the street looked like robots. The buildings looked like Hollywood sets. Why? She was sitting on a volcano of rage that she did not want to feel, did not want to know about. She was repressing it, and that repression is what gave rise to the dissociation, which gave rise to the depersonalization and derealization.
Um, so look, it's, it's very hard to distinguish between the repression model and the dissociation model. A lot of people these days seem to talk about these things as if they're clearly different phenomena. I don't think they are so different. They're different ways of splitting things off that we can't bear to deal with.
Some people try to distinguish repression from dissociation on the grounds that in the case of repression, there is a much more symbolized narrative, a whole narrative, a whole storyline that has to be repressed and buried. Whereas in dissociation, we have milder forms of looking away, not paying attention to. That may be, um, a more or less fruitful way of trying to get at the distinction. When you have a whole storyline, a whole narrative, um, that you have to get rid of, perhaps we talk about that splitting off as repression. And maybe we reserve the term dissociation for more fragmentary and momentary acts of withdrawing attention.
Um, so the divide itself. We're all divided selves. We all use repression. We all use dissociation. We keep things apart. This can range from mild hypocrisy. Take the example of a person who prides himself on being a liberal, anti-racist, anti-discrimination, and yet he belongs to a club which, it turns out, discriminates. If he keeps these phenomena in two different parts of his mind, he can carry on thinking of himself as anti-discrimination, and he can continue belonging to that club. But if he allows the compartmentalization to break down and these two things to come together, then something's got to give. He now realizes that he's in contradiction, and he's either going to have to give up on seeing himself as anti-discrimination, or he's going to have to resign from that club, one or the other.
Freud understood this, that it is, it is experiencing conflict that motivates growth and change. Um, if we defend ourselves thoroughly against conflict, um, we lose that drive to change that comes from recognizing the conflict and feeling a need to resolve it in one way or another. So dissociation can involve that kind of, um, hypocrisy, being a two-faced person requires keeping things apart. But it can go further to the point where, uh, someone is leading a double life. They got two different dramas going on. And of course, that's what, uh, that's what Stevenson is describing in the novella.
Okay, I don't think I've clarified very much. I probably just muddied the field a little further. Um, but, you know, some clarification is actually false clarification. It's better to face the fact that we're in a bit of a muddle.