In my work, I synthesize insights from every school of psychology. I am not an adherent of any specific school or system. I borrow from everyone. I'm eclectic.
I believe everyone throughout the history of psychology, now almost 200 years, everyone involved has had pertinent insights. Of course, some of them more than others and some of them were on the fringe as far as I'm concerned.
Psychoanalytic movement has had a share of charlatans, con artists, and notchops and among the upper levels, upper layers.
And outstanding among these was Sigmund Freud, who was a narcissist, a bit of a corner artist, and a lot of a charlatan. He was also an unmitigated genius who provided us with dozens of amazing insights into the human mind.
Same applies to Jung, who was a nutjob, a wacko, if I ever came across one and yet was able to provide nuggets of truth and insight so we should never ever discard the baby with a bath water with a bath with a bathroom and with the apartment as many have been doing in psychology departments throughout the world.
Freud was fully cognizant of the shared fantasy, although he never used the phrase, Sander did in 1989.
But Freud's relationship with Martha Bernays, his fianc, later long-suffering wife, his relationship with her was the first thoroughly documented case of a shared fantasy. Almost 1,600 letters have survived, in which the intricate back and forth ideal idealization, devaluation, coercion and subtlety were documented to the minutest details.
So the first shared fantasy also belonged to the father of the psychoanalytic movement.
In 1933, Freud has written, Even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child and in acting as a mother to her husband.
That's a very juvenile, infantile even, adolescent perception of the relationship between men and women. It's also conservative because this was the end of the 19th century, and that part is understandable.
But to cast your loved one as a mother that's utterly immature.
Freud wrote to his fiancé that their ideal happiness couldn't last for long because dangerous rivals soon appear.
And who are these rivals? Other men maybe?
No way. According to Freud, the rivals to the good relationship between a husband and a wife are, and I'm quoting, household chores and nursery. In other words, the appearance of children.
The husband should have the unmitigated and undivided attention of his wife.
And when this attention is doled out, when this attention is redirected at household chores, and even much worse, at newcomers into the family, new children, newborns, then the husband feels deprived of his new mother.
That is Freud.
He wrote to his fiancé from the outset that she would be expected to serve his needs, manage his domestic existence, and honor his decisions in all other matters.
So in his letters to his fiancé, there are five volumes of them, by the way, three have been published, another two are to be published, or another one, I think four have been published.
Anyhow, in his letters, he diminishes her. He uses diminutives that instrumentalize her and infantilize her. He regresses her time and again in thousands of letters.
He addresses her in a way that renders her a servant, a child typical of the shared fantasy.
His message was that his darling girl was to live only for him exercising never individual will.
Ernest Jones wrote, Ernest Jones was a biographer of Sigmund Freud and a very integrated admirer, so his biography is far from objective.
But even Ernest Jones wrote that Freud was insisting on nothing less than, and I'm quoting, complete identification, complete identification with himself, his opinions, his feelings and his intentions.
Martha was not really his unless he could perceive his stamp on her, unless he could brand her or stamp her.
And again, the relationship must be quiet perfect. The slightest blur was not to be tolerated.
At times it seemed as if his goal was fusion rather than union, says Ernst Jones.
I think all of you would agree that these are the sentiments and the internal processes over an arch narcissist, not to say a rank narcissist.
And indeed, other unsavory details in Freud's biography provide strong indications that Freud was a malignant narcissist, albeit not a sadist, but definitely a psychopath and a narcissist.
Now, does that mean we should ignore and discard everything he taught us?
Of course not. Absolutely not.
As I said, the man was a genius and we should wade through dozens of volumes of his writing and thinking, we should wade through them because there are pearls and diamonds everywhere.
And we should do the same with all other thinkers in the history of psychology because no one has the monopoly of the truth and no one should be discarded because of who they are, perhaps because of what they say but never because of who they are. That is known as a fallacy called ad hominem.
Freud was an unsavory to a large degree obnoxious character in my view but his contributions would stand forever and one day there will be a revival of interest in his work and at that time I think it would be incorporated into a new model or a new paradigm of neuroscience.