It seems intuitively correct to you. It seems completely wrong to me and every relationship seems distinct. How do we test it? Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption discusses how people are often very different in and outside the home, which makes sense to me from an evolutionary perspective. It doesn’t make sense we’d have one template that would apply across relationships. Similarities across relationships can more plausibly be explained by the fact that one remains the same person with the same traits.
That this idea sounds plausible to people doesn’t strike me as powerful evidence, since we know that psychobabble can influence them in all kinds of ways.
Seems plausible that there's is a lingering frame that creates the shape of downstream responses. Obviously we aren't traumatized animals or whatever, but a dog that's been hit will react to people as if they are a threat until someone is able to nurture it back to a point where it can be less wary. Humans probably run a more complex version of the same software
"...every relationship seems distinct...It doesn’t make sense we’d have one template that would apply across relationships."
First, it seem like a disingenuous read of what Mr. Hanson wrote. There easily could be more than one 'template' derived from numerous traumatic relationships. I would estimate a total set of 'templates' for the average person to be below 10. Of the many hundreds of people I've met and worked with, most seem extremely unsophisticated in this regard.
My experience ranges across a diverse cross-section of people including children, adults, all races, most religions, military, civilian, immigrant, refugee, online, in-person, etc. in my capacity as a military member, teacher, social worker, traveler, consultant, retailer, touring musician and all around social person--particularly in my capacity as an instructor in an anti-recidivism program and dis-advantaged youth program manager.
The ability to apply more than one or a few interpersonal templates is an indication of high-status elitism and an is an uncommon trait. Most people sort other people into one of a few buckets and do not have a breadth of personalities they can associate with.
Even though I lean hard on Harris’ Nurture Assumption, I don’t know of data that speaks to Robin’s focus on early relationships imprinting a certain structure on expectations and behavior displayed subsequently
Freud is a dead end for this, since he’s literary, roundly refuted empirically on any of his falsifiable claims, and inclined to explain neuroses in terms of his model of id/ego/superego. Each of those modules has all kinds of crazy motives that are hardwired rather than learned (penis envy, death wish, etc)
I can’t generate a randomized clinical experiment that could disentangle the contribution of environment to style of relating. Separated at birth twins does bound just how much the learned relationship style can contribute to life outcomes, but there’s so many degrees of freedom for learning how to love, that it could be as malleable as one’s native language or family religion
I recently read Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences. In that essay he famously introduces the death drive and relates it to the evolutionary theory that death was a late evolutionary adaptation. I am trying to understand the possible reasons why death would be evolutionarily adaptive but must admit I am struggling.
From a gene’s point of view it is essential that an organism carrying it reproduce, increasing its number of carriers. So organisms will be optimized for reproduction. True, from the gene’s perspective it would be better that these organisms live forever. But there is a trade-off between optimization for longevity and optimization for reproduction. The latter is more important, so the former must be sacrificed. Organisms will have features that shorten their lifespans, because these features also make them much better reproducers.
I think the reference may be Weismann (1892). I think he also claims that sex was a relatively late adaptation and that perhaps death evolved at a similar time. Could it be that after sex evolutionary adaptation becomes much more rapid and a given gene might perform better if the individuals die such that offspring with new variations of other genes are not competing against older individuals with the same gene?
what do you suppose is salvageable from Freud? I mean, opposed to just reading someone who didn't pretend to be empirically minded, e.g. Nietzsche?
I doubt that there's even one first tier experimental psychology department in the US that expects their grad students to read any Freud. The reason for jettisoning his books is that nothing he said has been both testable & validated
In my view, Freud bridges biology and psychology, he would have made a great neuroscientist really. Freud is of value in understanding relationships due to his identification of the drive toward restoring equilibrium (pleasure). As I see it, all pursuits, espesially romantic love, are underpinned by this biological purpose.
Pulling your hand away from a hot stove or feeding your hunger is regulated by homeostasis. The Freudian psyche id, ego and superego, are the abstractions of homeostasis.
Freud's drives result from biological disequilibrium, disregulation. (Think adhd as unmet need). Disequilibrium (need, desire) being excitations of the soma (body), sensory information, that the nervous system signals in the brain, (in the psyche by the Freudian id). These drives then interrelate with neural networks of cultural, moral, customary, preferences and prohibitions (the superego). The ego is our supposed mediating reason .
The joke on us (and our furture relations) is, that the ego (we) are not fundamentally serving the superego, or cognitive content we aquire in modern life, good politics or self help books, but serves biology, still! Our conceptions are biologically underpinned, in that they aim to restore the experience of a nonlinguistic, physiological, equilibrium.
Equilibrium may seem a simple concept, but as I see it, is the crucial element to understand for any proceeding intelligence.
Freud's pleasure is unfortunately read to mean superficial sexual satisfaction, and his 'pleasure' naively interpreted as a hedonism of sorts. But really Freud's pleasure is a recurring restoration of a biological equilibrium, and his mental faculty, is the abstracted contents that assist this process.
Maturity is learning/knowing how to restore this 'pleasure', perpetually everyday, in what is a very, very complex world.
The death drive is due to the modern day decrease in the experience of equilibrium. The individual biological system comes to disbelieve it (think suicide). I say this for Raph Shirley, as I see it, the death drive is not aggressive, like anger, who still believes in love, but is destructive in that it seeks to end all stimuli, due to having no somatic knowledge that any excitation will ever be truly neutralized (satisfied).
In my view, the relating person is either able to lead themselves and the other to equilibrium, or must still learn that disequilibrium does not imply hopelessness, but does signal a pressing need for resortation, and learning how to restore equilibrium is essential.
The 'son' is only angry at the 'father' (who stands between him and the mother) due to a fear of losing equilibrium, what we call love, and Freud calls pleasure. Anger and hate are underpinned biologically and reflect both an individual's negative proximity to 'pleasure' and a mispatterned conceptualisation regarding it.
Freud is of value because he provides psychological conceptualisations for what neuroscience appears to be finding. Psychology is one thing. But without it being underpinned by neuroscience remains elusive.
Freud's theory gives us the reason why meditation, somatic work, and understanding the embodied processes in conceptualisation is making the impact in people's lives as it does.
Humans, as patterns, express individual relations to equilibrium. Love relationships are evidence of an individual's knowledge of love (equilibrium). We only know (experience) what we know (have experienced).
I recommend restoring equilibrium, and building strong, reliable, pathways back there.
A dog who chases a tennis ball today will presumably chase a tennis ball again tomorrow. Is it modeling its behavior with the second tennis ball after its relationship to the first tennis ball? Or is the constant factor simply that the dog has a genetic predisposition to chase balls?
This theory may have practical value, but I think it is overly complicated. All of your relationships resemble each other because the common factor is you.
That is the most-obvious answer, which leads me to predict that Robin already considered and rejected it. We'd need more specifics about what happened on that show to know why.
Freud is an excellent example of why categorizing people as "good" and "bad" is dangerous.
Before Freud, people were barely conscious of the unconscious. There wasn't even a word for it in any language AFAIK. Freud had great power to study cases and recognize things no one else saw. But his methodology was to use anecdotes and rational thought rather than data and experiment, which led him to over-estimate how precisely he could discover what was happening in his patients' minds. So his work was good *and* bad.
His influence was similarly dichotomous. He made us aware of the power of the unconscious. Unfortunately, by the time this messages filtered down to the masses, it had been co-opted for the modernist agenda to destroy modernity by convincing people that the modern world, without God, was a disaster in which no one knew anything anymore. I would say his work was used for harm much more than for good, but that was a historical accident, not his fault.
“. . . the couples themselves see this theory as accessible and relevant to them.” When they act on their acceptance of this theory, do their lives improve? That is, does the therapy *work*?
And would some other therapy work just as well—perhaps just getting them to see a recurring unfortunate pattern in their relationships, and giving them mental exercises that would help them behave differently when they see the bad pattern looming, without offering any theory about the underlying cause of the pattern?
I'm pretty sure Freud is the wrong guy to go to for this. This idea sounds much more modern than anything I've read of his. Not that I'm an expert, and I do appreciate some of his ideas- but I've never seen this expressed in any way.
Noting that I watched a similar amount of the show. I did find the relationships and interactions realistic (as did my wife who is a psychiatrist) and done well, which is a lot of why we watched, but I came away thinking that the therapist was not especially good at her job, and handled several of the cases rather poorly (I don't remember enough details to go into them here but figured I would put down the marker, I think the actress did a fine job portraying a not-so-great therapist).
You could just start reading Freud, or, you could read Frederick Crews Freud The Making of an Illusion first, then read Freud. They would be two very different experiences.
Or Carl Jung. Freud is fine if you ignore the preoccupation with sex. Civilization and its Discontents is still current. But page for page Jung will be a better source of these kinds of insights.
You might also find Bowen Theory interesting to explore a bit.
Freud has his upside and has had a revival. I guess I started being interested via Freud. I think some fifty or so years later he was right about some of the essential ideas of personality development but most of his particulars on complexes/dreams have not stood the test of time. But because of Freud the advancement in our understanding of the human personality advanced immensely.
So I think reading Freud is useful for both what he was correct about and what he was not.
As a psychologist who has provided psychotherapy for over 30 years, my response is that certainly we are all impacted by our past and we replay some of the relationship dynamics in our history. However, it is always more complicated since there are so many other variables that influence us also. The interplay between genetics and all of the experiences we have had in our lives makes psychotherapy challenging with any individual; and it is even more challenging with couples. So my opinion is that addressing one’s history of relationships is clearly appropriate in couples therapy, but it is not sufficient for positive change. In fact many cognitive-behavioral therapists would claim the successes in therapy generally come from concrete planned changes in a client’s behaviors and cognitions rather than simply trying to understand the past as repetition compulsions. It’s interesting to look at therapy sessions and identify when clients begin the process of choosing to look at their relationships and lives in more adaptive ways. This happens in both psychodynamic therapies as well as cognitive-behavioral therapies. It may actually be that the positive changes in therapy are more related to the helpfulness of a good rapport with a therapist than the actual techniques utilized. In the past , I enjoyed reviewing the psychotherapy effectiveness research, but I’ll admit it always comes down to how good the therapeutic alliance is between therapist and client as well as a competent therapist encouraging helpful strategies that are somewhat matched to the individual or couple.
I am socially awkward and had taken to online dating to find my mate and also to test various theories. Sometimes I kept track of them and sometimes not. I did a more accurate tracking when testing a theory.
After a particularly bizarre dating experience, I was confused why someone so generally affable as my self would be passed over by my date who seemed to have a track record of dating "abusive assholes". So I decided to test the theory and over a few months asked my meet-and-greets about their exs. The result was surprising, I would copy the behaviors exhibited by the exs that were self-described by my dates as the cause of the breakup. Then I would act like that.
Oddly enough it got me more dates and an occasional stalker. It seemed, at the time, that the things we hate are also, often, those we crave.
I think the focus here is a little wrong in being on the trauma instead of the process.
I suspect that people get their sense of "normal" behavior in relationships from watching their parents, and to a much lesser extent families very close to them, as children, and absorb a huge amount of implicit knowledge and expectations thereby. Then when they enter relationships themselves they tend to reenact those behaviors, both the good and the bad, and as a result they tend to get similar results to what their parents did. Similar behaviors, similar results.
They might learn and change their behaviors through experience, but their default will be the tacit understanding they developed while young, and without a lot of time examining their beliefs (most of which they just assume are universal) they will tend to repeat the same behaviors over and over.
So it isn't the trauma they are reenacting because it is trauma, it is just the same rote, default behaviors and expectations they have absorbed and never fully payed attention to.
It seems intuitively correct to you. It seems completely wrong to me and every relationship seems distinct. How do we test it? Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption discusses how people are often very different in and outside the home, which makes sense to me from an evolutionary perspective. It doesn’t make sense we’d have one template that would apply across relationships. Similarities across relationships can more plausibly be explained by the fact that one remains the same person with the same traits.
That this idea sounds plausible to people doesn’t strike me as powerful evidence, since we know that psychobabble can influence them in all kinds of ways.
Relations could be unique and also greatly correlated with prior relations. You'd have to watch the show to judge the strength of the correlations.
Seems plausible that there's is a lingering frame that creates the shape of downstream responses. Obviously we aren't traumatized animals or whatever, but a dog that's been hit will react to people as if they are a threat until someone is able to nurture it back to a point where it can be less wary. Humans probably run a more complex version of the same software
"...every relationship seems distinct...It doesn’t make sense we’d have one template that would apply across relationships."
First, it seem like a disingenuous read of what Mr. Hanson wrote. There easily could be more than one 'template' derived from numerous traumatic relationships. I would estimate a total set of 'templates' for the average person to be below 10. Of the many hundreds of people I've met and worked with, most seem extremely unsophisticated in this regard.
My experience ranges across a diverse cross-section of people including children, adults, all races, most religions, military, civilian, immigrant, refugee, online, in-person, etc. in my capacity as a military member, teacher, social worker, traveler, consultant, retailer, touring musician and all around social person--particularly in my capacity as an instructor in an anti-recidivism program and dis-advantaged youth program manager.
The ability to apply more than one or a few interpersonal templates is an indication of high-status elitism and an is an uncommon trait. Most people sort other people into one of a few buckets and do not have a breadth of personalities they can associate with.
Even though I lean hard on Harris’ Nurture Assumption, I don’t know of data that speaks to Robin’s focus on early relationships imprinting a certain structure on expectations and behavior displayed subsequently
Freud is a dead end for this, since he’s literary, roundly refuted empirically on any of his falsifiable claims, and inclined to explain neuroses in terms of his model of id/ego/superego. Each of those modules has all kinds of crazy motives that are hardwired rather than learned (penis envy, death wish, etc)
I can’t generate a randomized clinical experiment that could disentangle the contribution of environment to style of relating. Separated at birth twins does bound just how much the learned relationship style can contribute to life outcomes, but there’s so many degrees of freedom for learning how to love, that it could be as malleable as one’s native language or family religion
I recently read Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences. In that essay he famously introduces the death drive and relates it to the evolutionary theory that death was a late evolutionary adaptation. I am trying to understand the possible reasons why death would be evolutionarily adaptive but must admit I am struggling.
From a gene’s point of view it is essential that an organism carrying it reproduce, increasing its number of carriers. So organisms will be optimized for reproduction. True, from the gene’s perspective it would be better that these organisms live forever. But there is a trade-off between optimization for longevity and optimization for reproduction. The latter is more important, so the former must be sacrificed. Organisms will have features that shorten their lifespans, because these features also make them much better reproducers.
I think the reference may be Weismann (1892). I think he also claims that sex was a relatively late adaptation and that perhaps death evolved at a similar time. Could it be that after sex evolutionary adaptation becomes much more rapid and a given gene might perform better if the individuals die such that offspring with new variations of other genes are not competing against older individuals with the same gene?
Yes, read Freud
what do you suppose is salvageable from Freud? I mean, opposed to just reading someone who didn't pretend to be empirically minded, e.g. Nietzsche?
I doubt that there's even one first tier experimental psychology department in the US that expects their grad students to read any Freud. The reason for jettisoning his books is that nothing he said has been both testable & validated
In my view, Freud bridges biology and psychology, he would have made a great neuroscientist really. Freud is of value in understanding relationships due to his identification of the drive toward restoring equilibrium (pleasure). As I see it, all pursuits, espesially romantic love, are underpinned by this biological purpose.
Pulling your hand away from a hot stove or feeding your hunger is regulated by homeostasis. The Freudian psyche id, ego and superego, are the abstractions of homeostasis.
Freud's drives result from biological disequilibrium, disregulation. (Think adhd as unmet need). Disequilibrium (need, desire) being excitations of the soma (body), sensory information, that the nervous system signals in the brain, (in the psyche by the Freudian id). These drives then interrelate with neural networks of cultural, moral, customary, preferences and prohibitions (the superego). The ego is our supposed mediating reason .
The joke on us (and our furture relations) is, that the ego (we) are not fundamentally serving the superego, or cognitive content we aquire in modern life, good politics or self help books, but serves biology, still! Our conceptions are biologically underpinned, in that they aim to restore the experience of a nonlinguistic, physiological, equilibrium.
Equilibrium may seem a simple concept, but as I see it, is the crucial element to understand for any proceeding intelligence.
Freud's pleasure is unfortunately read to mean superficial sexual satisfaction, and his 'pleasure' naively interpreted as a hedonism of sorts. But really Freud's pleasure is a recurring restoration of a biological equilibrium, and his mental faculty, is the abstracted contents that assist this process.
Maturity is learning/knowing how to restore this 'pleasure', perpetually everyday, in what is a very, very complex world.
The death drive is due to the modern day decrease in the experience of equilibrium. The individual biological system comes to disbelieve it (think suicide). I say this for Raph Shirley, as I see it, the death drive is not aggressive, like anger, who still believes in love, but is destructive in that it seeks to end all stimuli, due to having no somatic knowledge that any excitation will ever be truly neutralized (satisfied).
In my view, the relating person is either able to lead themselves and the other to equilibrium, or must still learn that disequilibrium does not imply hopelessness, but does signal a pressing need for resortation, and learning how to restore equilibrium is essential.
The 'son' is only angry at the 'father' (who stands between him and the mother) due to a fear of losing equilibrium, what we call love, and Freud calls pleasure. Anger and hate are underpinned biologically and reflect both an individual's negative proximity to 'pleasure' and a mispatterned conceptualisation regarding it.
Freud is of value because he provides psychological conceptualisations for what neuroscience appears to be finding. Psychology is one thing. But without it being underpinned by neuroscience remains elusive.
Freud's theory gives us the reason why meditation, somatic work, and understanding the embodied processes in conceptualisation is making the impact in people's lives as it does.
Humans, as patterns, express individual relations to equilibrium. Love relationships are evidence of an individual's knowledge of love (equilibrium). We only know (experience) what we know (have experienced).
I recommend restoring equilibrium, and building strong, reliable, pathways back there.
I desperately want him to.
A dog who chases a tennis ball today will presumably chase a tennis ball again tomorrow. Is it modeling its behavior with the second tennis ball after its relationship to the first tennis ball? Or is the constant factor simply that the dog has a genetic predisposition to chase balls?
This theory may have practical value, but I think it is overly complicated. All of your relationships resemble each other because the common factor is you.
That is the most-obvious answer, which leads me to predict that Robin already considered and rejected it. We'd need more specifics about what happened on that show to know why.
Freud is an excellent example of why categorizing people as "good" and "bad" is dangerous.
Before Freud, people were barely conscious of the unconscious. There wasn't even a word for it in any language AFAIK. Freud had great power to study cases and recognize things no one else saw. But his methodology was to use anecdotes and rational thought rather than data and experiment, which led him to over-estimate how precisely he could discover what was happening in his patients' minds. So his work was good *and* bad.
His influence was similarly dichotomous. He made us aware of the power of the unconscious. Unfortunately, by the time this messages filtered down to the masses, it had been co-opted for the modernist agenda to destroy modernity by convincing people that the modern world, without God, was a disaster in which no one knew anything anymore. I would say his work was used for harm much more than for good, but that was a historical accident, not his fault.
“. . . the couples themselves see this theory as accessible and relevant to them.” When they act on their acceptance of this theory, do their lives improve? That is, does the therapy *work*?
And would some other therapy work just as well—perhaps just getting them to see a recurring unfortunate pattern in their relationships, and giving them mental exercises that would help them behave differently when they see the bad pattern looming, without offering any theory about the underlying cause of the pattern?
Yes, this therapy seems to work, better than chance at least.
I'm pretty sure Freud is the wrong guy to go to for this. This idea sounds much more modern than anything I've read of his. Not that I'm an expert, and I do appreciate some of his ideas- but I've never seen this expressed in any way.
Noting that I watched a similar amount of the show. I did find the relationships and interactions realistic (as did my wife who is a psychiatrist) and done well, which is a lot of why we watched, but I came away thinking that the therapist was not especially good at her job, and handled several of the cases rather poorly (I don't remember enough details to go into them here but figured I would put down the marker, I think the actress did a fine job portraying a not-so-great therapist).
She's a real therapist, not an actress.
Maybe because your wife is a psychiatrist you judged the therapist in the show relative to her.
You could just start reading Freud, or, you could read Frederick Crews Freud The Making of an Illusion first, then read Freud. They would be two very different experiences.
If your substack devolves into psychobabble, I'm going to unsubscribe. I prefer even incomprehensible physics posts to that.
I hope your wife has an opinion on all this. The only thing worse than psychobabble is only one spouse being interested in it.
Finally, I can't believe you've never been exposed to this idea before.
Exposed to claim is different from seeing relevant evidence.
Or Carl Jung. Freud is fine if you ignore the preoccupation with sex. Civilization and its Discontents is still current. But page for page Jung will be a better source of these kinds of insights.
You might also find Bowen Theory interesting to explore a bit.
Freud has his upside and has had a revival. I guess I started being interested via Freud. I think some fifty or so years later he was right about some of the essential ideas of personality development but most of his particulars on complexes/dreams have not stood the test of time. But because of Freud the advancement in our understanding of the human personality advanced immensely.
So I think reading Freud is useful for both what he was correct about and what he was not.
As a psychologist who has provided psychotherapy for over 30 years, my response is that certainly we are all impacted by our past and we replay some of the relationship dynamics in our history. However, it is always more complicated since there are so many other variables that influence us also. The interplay between genetics and all of the experiences we have had in our lives makes psychotherapy challenging with any individual; and it is even more challenging with couples. So my opinion is that addressing one’s history of relationships is clearly appropriate in couples therapy, but it is not sufficient for positive change. In fact many cognitive-behavioral therapists would claim the successes in therapy generally come from concrete planned changes in a client’s behaviors and cognitions rather than simply trying to understand the past as repetition compulsions. It’s interesting to look at therapy sessions and identify when clients begin the process of choosing to look at their relationships and lives in more adaptive ways. This happens in both psychodynamic therapies as well as cognitive-behavioral therapies. It may actually be that the positive changes in therapy are more related to the helpfulness of a good rapport with a therapist than the actual techniques utilized. In the past , I enjoyed reviewing the psychotherapy effectiveness research, but I’ll admit it always comes down to how good the therapeutic alliance is between therapist and client as well as a competent therapist encouraging helpful strategies that are somewhat matched to the individual or couple.
I am socially awkward and had taken to online dating to find my mate and also to test various theories. Sometimes I kept track of them and sometimes not. I did a more accurate tracking when testing a theory.
After a particularly bizarre dating experience, I was confused why someone so generally affable as my self would be passed over by my date who seemed to have a track record of dating "abusive assholes". So I decided to test the theory and over a few months asked my meet-and-greets about their exs. The result was surprising, I would copy the behaviors exhibited by the exs that were self-described by my dates as the cause of the breakup. Then I would act like that.
Oddly enough it got me more dates and an occasional stalker. It seemed, at the time, that the things we hate are also, often, those we crave.
You should read the road less traveled if you haven't.
I think the focus here is a little wrong in being on the trauma instead of the process.
I suspect that people get their sense of "normal" behavior in relationships from watching their parents, and to a much lesser extent families very close to them, as children, and absorb a huge amount of implicit knowledge and expectations thereby. Then when they enter relationships themselves they tend to reenact those behaviors, both the good and the bad, and as a result they tend to get similar results to what their parents did. Similar behaviors, similar results.
They might learn and change their behaviors through experience, but their default will be the tacit understanding they developed while young, and without a lot of time examining their beliefs (most of which they just assume are universal) they will tend to repeat the same behaviors over and over.
So it isn't the trauma they are reenacting because it is trauma, it is just the same rote, default behaviors and expectations they have absorbed and never fully payed attention to.