thoughts by John Auerbach

John Auerbach <000009eba1592f75-dmarc-request@listserv.icors.org>	9:41 AM (13 hours ago)
to PSY-FL

~Psychology Practice in Florida

I am retransmitting the lengthy post below because it appears not to have been transmitted to the listserv.  That is, I can find it in my Sent box but not my Inbox.

On Aug 7, 2020, at 6:51 AM, John Auerbach <auerbachjohn231@yahoo.com> wrote:

I have finally had some time to think through the respective posts of Drs. Friedman and Levy regarding Albert Ellis and humanistic psychology.  I find it fascinating that such very different views of Ellis are proposed.  Mind you, I believe that both Dr. Friedman and Dr. Levy know way more about Ellis than I do, so either of them can correct me any time they want.

But before I get to my thoughts on these contrasting portraits of Ellis, I want to thank Dr. Friedman for his willingness to keep raising the banner high for humanistic psychology, especially in the face of the dismissive assault he describes from purveyors of positive psychology.  My views are relational-intersubjectivist-psychoanalytic, not humanistic, because I am a believer in conflict theory, in that which is difficult or not easily resolvable in human life, even if I also believe that the central conflicts in our lives are more likely to be relational, rather than, in Freud’s theory, sexual, and to involve the basic issue of how we come to understand each other, hence intersubjective.  But I also believe that my view shares, with humanistic psychology, a focus on the primacy of affects and meanings, so I have always recognized a kinship with the founders of that tradition, a kinship about which I will say more in a bit.

For this first moment, however, I am noting that I have trouble squaring Ellis as a humanistic psychologist, presumably interested, like Rogers and Perls, in the primacy of affect, and Ellis the Stoic, even Western  Buddhist, who wants to renounce desire, to subordinate emotions to reason.  Maybe somebody wiser than I can put those two things together, but I cannot.  Dr. Levy’s version of Ellis sounds truer to me, or at least truer to the vision of him that I received, but I must respect that Dr. Friedman knew Ellis personally and knew him as a humanistic psychologist.

And now getting back to my original points, my view is one of skepticism toward views that seek renunciation of desires and emotions.  Although I lost much my adolescent Nietzscheanism when I came to realize that his world really was a world of power only, a world without love in it, and I think that love is just as instinctual a force as power is.  Also, to quote the great theorists Peter and Gordon, I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay in a world without love.  (Actually,  John and Paul wrote that, but I digress . . . . ).   I still am down with Nietzsche in his attack on all those who would despise the body.  And I am still with him when he says that one must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.  And so I turn out to be good with, for example, the first two of the Buddha’s Noble Truths, the two about suffering and desire, but not the third one, about ending suffering through ending desire; the fourth Noble Truth might work for me if the third were amended.  I do not have much firsthand knowledge of Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, but I doubt I would agree.

As for my own intellectual lineage, I started reading 20th century existentialism, then Nietzsche, then Freud, as an adolescent—okay, this was not a normal adolescence, and I had to make sense of the world somehow—because these are views that deal with the difficult, the tragic, the ironic, the conflicted in human life.  Fortunately, an undergraduate education that I share with our listserv moderator (that would be Dr. LaBarbera) taught me the importance of integrating these ideas with a scientific perspective, and my two main graduate school mentors, Joe Masling at SUNY/Buffalo and Sid Blatt at Yale, were psychoanalytic researchers who were interested in how we might test psychoanalytic theories and modify them in terms of evidence, the proper scientific attitude as I see it.  Equally important here is that both of them had been trained clinically by Carl Rogers, and Sid frequently told me that he had never stopped being a Rogerian—that he was interested in seeing things from the patient’s perspective (Sid preferred “patient” over Rogers’s “client”) and helping the patient to capture, in the spirit of Rogers, emotions that were just on the edge of awareness.  

Now on the matter of the relationships between psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and cognitive psychotherapy, I think it is well to remember, first, that the founding generations of both humanistic theory and cognitive theory had significant psychoanalytic lineages.  I will not go into a thorough documentation of this, except to say that many people forget that both Beck and Ellis had been analysts before they each justifiably decided, given the rigidities of the psychoanalytic world of the late 1950s and early 1960s, that there had to be a better way.  Carl Rogers had not been an analyst, but he had been trained by a social worker, Jessica Taft, who herself was a Rankian.  Otto Rank, who had started as one of Freud’s closest disciples, might be considered an attachment theorist  avant la lettre.  Although there are many problems with Rank’s ideas about birth trauma, he developed a theory that the main dynamic in human life involved separation anxiety and the tension between separation (or individuation) and reunion (or connection).  These views of course underlie Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, but it is also not far from here to Rogers’s ideas about self-actualization. And Rank, like Ferenczi, who is also foundational to relational views in psychoanalysis, also focused on the here-and-now emotional transaction in psychotherapy.  That is not so far from Rogers’s clinical perspective either.  A psychoanalytic perspective holds that there is also an unconscious dimension to these things, but a modern relational perspective puts present relational experience in the foreground; it holds that the past is found in the present, that the unconscious (or implicit) is found in the conscious (or explicit), that the depth is found in the surface, and the reincorporation of Rogers into psychoanalysis via Heinz Kohut’s views on empathy and emotion is part of what made this theoretical and clinical evolution possible.  

One more thought as to why I am psychoanalytically and existentially, not humanistically, inclined when it comes to theoretical allegiance.  I think a very good case can be made that existential theory is much more closely aligned with psychoanalytic theory than with humanistic theory.  Superficially, humanistic theory and existential theory resemble each other in that both stress free will and present lived experience.  Classical psychoanalysis, at least Freud’s system, is deterministic and stresses the past and the unconscious.  But consider this:  psychoanalysis and existentialism are both Central European theories with a surprisingly similar emotional outlook, one that stresses conflict and limitation, tragedy and irony, whereas humanistic theory, a largely American project, is much more optimistic in outlook, often sees us as more easily perfectible. Martin Heidegger and Carl Rogers would not be readily confused for each other intellectually, and the French inheritors of Heidegger (e.g.,, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir) share a similar interest in that which is difficult in human experience, just as Freud did.  More important, both Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, and Edmund Husserl, the creator of phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s main teacher, share an important intellectual lineage:  Both of them were students of philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano, and Brentano gives us the theory of philosophical intentionality—the idea that mental states are always directed toward objects.  This idea is manifest in Husserl’s phenomenology, which is about the manifold ways that objects appear to us, and is carried over, existentially, to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world.  This idea is also present in Freud’s understanding that drives (or wishes) always have objects.  Accordingly, the main difference between phenomenology (and hence existentialism) and psychoanalysis is that the former deals with that which appears to us presently and is conscious while the latter deals with what is hidden from us and is therefore unconscious.  But the role of philosophical intentionality in both perspectives is essential.   And both, in proper Central European tradition, valorize lived experience, a term we get from philosopher, historian, psychologist, and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey, even in the face of that which is difficult—e.g., loss, finitude, mortality—in our lives.

I like that Stoicism seems also to be about these themes as well, but I disagree with the Stoic and Buddhist solutions to these problems, however much similarity there is between the Buddhist focus on impermanence, the existential focus on mortality, and the psychoanalytic focus on loss.  I prefer Nietzsche, for all his many flaws, to the Buddha here.  Alternatively, I struggle with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer because I simply do not want to be serene.  Maybe this perspective is adolescent and shallow, maybe I should learn more about acceptance so that I might achieve Enlightenment or Buddhahood, but I think of my views as keeping me young, even into my 60s.

John S. Auerbach, PhD