Going Galt

[moralist]

Too early. The child hasn't yet formulated "what's right?"

Greg

Children are natural born barbarians. Parents have about 15 years to turn the barbarian into a reasonable functional human being.

That's generally true, Bob.

The best parents can do is to be examples of good people themselves.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Too early. The child hasn't yet formulated "what's right?"

Greg

Children are natural born barbarians. Parents have about 15 years to turn the barbarian into a reasonable functional human being.

That's generally true, Bob.

The best parents can do is to be examples of good people themselves.

Greg

Straps and whips. Whips for the teenagers and straps for the younger.

For the boys, not the girls. The girls are little angels.

--Brant

or they duped me

[william.scherk]

It's not commonly that daddy fucked me up. Or that daddy didn't love me. Maybe daddy wasn't there but that's usually not a big deal for abreactive work.

I don't know how you got to this conclusion.

We may each be using the term differently. Abreaction, abreactive therapy was born of Freud, his theories of hysteria and repression. Janet was also a proponent of abreactive therapy, believing that buried trauma led to dissociation. In the more modern age, pentothal abreaction was used post-WWII. Later still, at the very centre of modern recovered memory therapy, abreaction took a few ugly turns. I don't know how familiar you are with any of this historical stuff that has fascinated me for twenty-five years.

Other readers may not even have a sense of the word. Here are a couple of definitions. From the Free Dictionary Online. Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia:

Abreact ab·re·act·ed, ab·re·act·ing, ab·re·acts

To release (repressed emotions) by acting out, as in words, behavior, or the imagination, the situation causing the conflict.

Abreaction (Psychoanalysis) the release and expression of emotional tension associated with repressed ideas by bringing those ideas into consciousness

Abreaction

the expression and emotional discharge of unconscious material (as a repressed idea or emotion) by verbalization especially in the presence of a therapist—compare catharsis

Abreaction Psychoanalysis

1. release of emotional tension achieved through recalling a repressed traumatic experience.

Abreaction (German: Abreagieren) is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses; a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

Abreaction: concept introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1893 to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma can be discharged by talking about it. The release of affect occurred by bringing "a particular moment or problem into focus"... and as such formed the cornerstone of Freud's early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms.

Because of my studies of the memory wars, I am familiar with the extremes in abreactive therapy. Think of a kind of inquisition, where the witch-finder/therapist interrogates the patient to unearth the hidden, repressed traumatic material, to 'process' it with full emotion.

Your experiences with Branden may give you a slightly or wildly different understanding of abreaction from the definitions above. I am curious which state of mind and mood was desirable in the client for the times of abreactive work. I am pretty ignorant of Branden's psychotherapeutic nomenclature and the nitty-gritty of what went on his encounters with clients. It would be informative if you could sketch out abreaction work in the two periods of his career that you note.

didn't think of childhood sexual abuse.

There are lots of possible traumas in a child's life. From my understanding, the most common trauma is neglect, and the most devastating the combination of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Abreactive work in therapy is a complex issue.

Yes. You can shine light on Branden's Objectivish approaches.

I just assumed it being done competently and appropriately, for me a Nathaniel Branden specialty out of an altered state of consciousness. A lot depends on the client.

For "It" we don't yet have details. What happens in his flavours of abreactive work? What are the goals, if not purging emotion, catharsis, release from emotional bondage?

With reference to altered states of consciousness, was it to reverie or hypnotic-like relaxation state, or dissociative state that Branden aided the client? There was quite a procedure invented by the therapist/inquisitors of the RMT craze. It was aided by workbooks and some extremely laborious abreaction. I mean strapped to a table to prevent injury. I mean shot up with truth-serum, or inducted into a hypnotic state, relentlessly interrogated.

I am guessing there was none of that extreme work on Branden's task ladder. And I guess that there was no hypnotic or suggestive process with a 'trauma' memory as the catch of the day, a memory to be relived to discharge the 'pent up' and destructive emotion.

Gosh, it would be great to get into your head and churn out a bit of therapy memoir.

Nathaniel's work post-1968 had little in common with any approach to therapy he used pre-1968 by what I've read, he said and what I experienced. I do have significant criticism of how he worked--I think he had too many clients even for his approach--and out of that, but not for now if not for OL. False memories do not seem to come out of--manufactured out of--an altered state of consciousness but what we may call normal consciousness, for in the former it's too hard to be dishonest and in the latter too easy.

It is not exclusive. So-called false memories are not "manufactured" in a singular process (see the work of Elizabeth Loftus on false memory). If the focus of therapy is to 'recover' presumably repressed (not merely forgotten) trauma, a multiplicity of suggestive therapeutics can aid in such recall. In the cases I know from the legal arena, the worst, an altered state of consciousness was a necessary but not sufficient part of the 'memory' recovery. At the very least, a partial hypnotic reverie was aided ('go to a safe place in your mind'). Added to this machinery were expectation effects, suggestibility, fantasy-proneness, and so on -- all adding up to iatrogenic effects.

As I said, I guess Branden did at best help clients achieve a form of reverie, and did not at all coach them along to remember 'trauma' I will have to read up on the rapist Lonnie Leonard to see if he did abreactive work. Did you ever encounter him, Brant?

If you are doing sentence completions one after the other it's hard to lie. There is a problem, however, with lies you told yourself previously that you've come to believe so the abreactive work can turn that up too.

Interesting. I cannot quite picture this process.

Edited May 9, 2015 by william.scherk

[Brant Gaede]

It's not commonly that daddy fucked me up. Or that daddy didn't love me. Maybe daddy wasn't there but that's usually not a big deal for abreactive work.

I don't know how you got to this conclusion.

We may each be using the term differently. Abreaction, abreactive therapy was born of Freud, his theories of hysteria and repression. Janet was also a proponent of abreactive therapy, believing that buried trauma led to dissociation. In the more modern age, pentothal abreaction was used post-WWII. Later still, at the very centre of modern recovered memory therapy, abreaction took a few ugly turns. I don't know how familiar you are with any of this historical stuff that has fascinated me for twenty-five years.

Other readers may not even have a sense of the word. Here are a couple of definitions. From the Free Dictionary Online. Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia:

Abreact ab·re·act·ed, ab·re·act·ing, ab·re·acts

To release (repressed emotions) by acting out, as in words, behavior, or the imagination, the situation causing the conflict.

Abreaction (Psychoanalysis) the release and expression of emotional tension associated with repressed ideas by bringing those ideas into consciousness

Abreaction

the expression and emotional discharge of unconscious material (as a repressed idea or emotion) by verbalization especially in the presence of a therapist—compare catharsis

Abreaction Psychoanalysis

1. release of emotional tension achieved through recalling a repressed traumatic experience.

Abreaction (German: Abreagieren) is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses; a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

Abreaction: concept introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1893 to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma can be discharged by talking about it. The release of affect occurred by bringing "a particular moment or problem into focus"... and as such formed the cornerstone of Freud's early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms.

Because of my studies of the memory wars, I am familiar with the extremes in abreactive therapy. Think of a kind of inquisition, where the witch-finder/therapist interrogates the patient to unearth the hidden, repressed traumatic material, to 'process' it with full emotion.

Your experiences with Branden may give you a slightly or wildly different understanding of abreaction from the definitions above. I am curious which state of mind and mood was desirable in the client for the times of abreactive work. I am pretty ignorant of Branden's psychotherapeutic nomenclature and the nitty-gritty of what went on his encounters with clients. It would be informative if you could sketch out abreaction work in the two periods of his career that you note.

didn't think of childhood sexual abuse.

There are lots of possible traumas in a child's life. From my understanding, the most common trauma is neglect, and the most devastating the combination of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Abreactive work in therapy is a complex issue.

Yes. You can shine light on Branden's Objectivish approaches.

I just assumed it being done competently and appropriately, for me a Nathaniel Branden specialty out of an altered state of consciousness. A lot depends on the client.

For "It" we don't yet have details. What happens in his flavours of abreactive work? What are the goals, if not purging emotion, catharsis, release from emotional bondage?

With reference to altered states of consciousness, was it to reverie or hypnotic-like relaxation state, or dissociative state that Branden aided the client? There was quite a procedure invented by the therapist/inquisitors of the RMT craze. It was aided by workbooks and some extremely laborious abreaction. I mean strapped to a table to prevent injury. I mean shot up with truth-serum, or inducted into a hypnotic state.

I am guessing there was none of that extreme work on state of consciousness in Branden's task ladder. And I guess that there was no hypnotic or suggestive process with a 'trauma' memory as the catch of the day, a memory to be relived to discharge the 'pent up' and destructive emotion.

Gosh, it would be great to get into your head and churn out a bit of therapy memoir.

Nathaniel's work post-1968 had little in common with any approach to therapy he used pre-1968 by what I've read, he said and what I experienced. I do have significant criticism of how he worked--I think he had too many clients even for his approach--and out of that, but not for now if not for OL. False memories do not seem to come out of--manufactured out of--an altered state of consciousness but what we may call normal consciousness, for in the former it's too hard to be dishonest and in the latter too easy.

It is not exclusive. So-called false memories are not "manufactured" in a singular process (see the work of Elizabeth Loftus on false memory). If the focus of therapy is to 'recover' presumably repressed (not merely forgotten) trauma, a multiplicity of suggestive therapeutics can aid in such recall. In the cases I know from the legal arena, the worst, an altered state of consciousness was a necessary but not sufficient part of the 'memory' recovery. At the very least, a partial hypnotic reverie was aided ('go to a safe place in your mind'). Added to this machinery were expectation effects, suggestibility, fantasy-proneness, and so on -- all adding up to iatrogenic effects.

As I said, I guess Branden did at best help clients achieve a form of reverie, and did not at all coach them along to remember 'trauma' I will have to read up on the rapist Lonnie Leonard to see if he did abreactive work. Did you ever encounter him, Brant?

If you are doing sentence completions one after the other it's hard to lie. There is a problem, however, with lies you told yourself previously that you've come to believe so the abreactive work can turn that up too.

Interesting. I cannot quite picture this process.

I only understand abreaction as a result of getting right at a client's problem using (1) sentence completion which first results in an altered state of consciousness, (2) hypnoses or self-hypnoses which does the same and gestalt therapeutic techniques employed by my acting teacher for the primary purpose of acting using "the method." That particular teacher went on to be a psychiatrist. Branden, I think this is accurate to say, used psycho-therapy to achieve a kind of gestalt result not so much to explain to the client reasons for any client complaint. He typically would say you know what I do not and when you want to and are able you'll tell me. He once did ask me what I had learned after one session. I said, stumbling to find the right words, "That a little cowardice can go a long way in fucking you up." He just sat there at the head of a circle with about 25 clients with his eyes closed nodding his head.

You can know perfectly the nature of your psychological state and why and it won't make a damn bit of difference except to get you to a therapist, maybe. The altered state of consciousness let's you back into past events, real or even not so real but they are part of you, in a mind-body way so the whole organism goes along for the trip. This can be dangerous if the therapist cannot competently guide you in and out--bring you back. The altered state of consciousness approach not used means in the context of what I went through in 1976 I might have just as well written Ann Landers for advice or read a self-help book.

Branden at the end of his working life embraced force-field therapy techniques I cannot comment on as they are outside any experience of mine, but I have never been satisfied with any explanations from others including Branden when he was still posting on his Yahoo Group thread. (You can go read it now as an archive but it would take a lot of work to specifically root him out for he didn't post all that much and less at much length.)

Yes, Branden greatly benefited me although I cannot testify for anyone else. I still think of myself as his ideal kind of client. For one thing, I really wanted to work and did. After my first session he said, "You had an awfully good beginning." My problems were serious as to my life but psychologically light. I would have outgrown a lot of them but not as cleanly as I have consequently. Branden did not work with deeply disturbed people. Those need to go one on one just for starters.

Branden's approach was not "Objectivish." If it ever was it was before 1968. That I have no personal experience with. For Objectivish you need to throw in moralizing.

As for me in therapy, to continue: One client started talking about someone who had died who was important to her. It upset me. After she was done I mentioned this to Nathaniel. He asked if I wanted to work on it. I said yes but I was afraid of attacking this woman. He said he was confidant I wouldn't do that. I instantly understood what he meant. I said, "Okay! Okay!"--took a deep breath while closing my eyes, opened them and said, "I am in a hospital room. My step-mother is dying of cancer . . . ." I went on to describe everything in the most concrete, tactile, detailed way I could. When I was done it felt like massive amounts of electricity were pouring out of my hands and fingers. This was purely self-hypnosis into an altered state of consciousness to a Gestaltian result which is hard to explain further in terms of consequences beyond I had repressed or suppressed a lot of trauma now released. I think she had died about eight months before. Note that all Branden did was assure me I would not attack that woman but I had to tell him that could be a problem. He didn't have to do anything else except keep his mouth shut and give me space.

more later

[jtucek]

Francisco, many thanks again, The Market for Liberty is ingenious. I love how they thought out the private national defense contractors and insurance agencies. In their view, in a free market, it would be chiefly large corporations who'd purchase "national defense insurance" passing the premium costs onto their products, so everyone buying those products would participate, avoiding the free-rider problem.