You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Virtually every theoretical difference from Freudian theory since Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, including Fairbairn, Kohut, and relational psychoanalysis takes as its major point of departure the modification of rejection of one or another of these fundamental Freudian ideas (p. 3).
This long-awaited text by Dr. Eagle is a masterful summation of Freudian concepts, clearly and succinctly presented. For that alone, this book is a valuable compendium to any reading of Freud, as Eagle discerns the warp and weave of Freud's thinking and brings a conceptual clarity while not overlooking the knotty problems that arise theoretically and clinically in applying Freud's ideas.
In the first chapter, Eagle describes how Freud built upon four core principles in his work, and how these principles lay bare the inner logic of Freud's project.
the constancy principle,
the pathogenic effects of the isolation of mental contents,
repression, inner conflict and the dynamic unconscious, and
drive theory (p. 3).
The constancy principle, or the unpleasure (Unlust) principle as it became, is bedrock to Freud both as a way to tie psychological phenomena to biological and physiochemical processes and also to ultimately link the other three foundational principles into one logical structure. This core assumption is vital to Freud's metapsychology, unifying psyche with soma, reducing all phenomena to the dynamic of the building up and discharge of tension.
Given an assumption that mental life is governed by the constancy principle, Freud was able to construct the etiology of hysteria. Beginning with the assumption that all traumatic experiences cause a build up of affect that typically will be directly expressed, with a resulting discharge of tension. In “normal” situations of trauma, then, the affective “load” dissipates over time. In Freud's evocative phrase, the memory of the trauma enters the “great complex of associations” and gradually diminishes in intensity. Think, for example, of what happens whe