Dear Dan
Thank you for your thoughts on Hunter Beaumonts Portland talk. Whether you
are true to Hunters message and Freuds theory is not for me to say, but
here are some of my recollections and thoughts.
Hunter talked about the fact that constellations often are not an end all
and that people who did many constellations, still are searching and
suffering and lack a sense of belonging. Constellations can help us to
understand life better, but do not necessarily reveal the true nature of
reality. He went on to talk about the Self and how it was conceptualized
in the West, starting, in good German tradition, with the Greeks, then
moving on to Freud and Jung. Through the constellation experience we come to
realize that the old models are incomplete: the self is not isolated, it
includes our ancestors; the slaves a family once owned; the people that were
exterminated so that we could live. Hunter mentioned the 200.000 people the
US killed in the 20th century, and that they are part of us. His point was
that the Self is a living system imbedded in a larger context. He concluded
that constellations in their best form go beyond looking for solutions. They
allow us to reveal a deeper, sacred and fear inducing aspect of reality,
where we come in contact with our collective suffering and find out what it
means to be a human being.
Dan, I personally think that Freuds psychoanalysis, no matter how you
translate Ego, Superego and Id, does not provide a good model with which we
can understand constellation work and trying to do so only causes endless
confusion. How does the elephant get into the shoebox? Constellations have
very little to do with the it or id, at least not how Freud meant it. He
saw the id as repository of mostly unconscious sexual and aggressive drives.
It was the father of psychoanalytically oriented psychosomatic medicine,
Georg Groddeck, from whom Freud borrowed the name das Es (the Id).
Groddeck, influence by Eastern mysticism, saw the Id as the big force that
moves us all, essentially the great Tao. Constellations have obviously
something to do with that. But Freud, being the rationalist that he was and
suspicious of anything spiritual, reduced the Tao to a lower chakra affair.
In Freuds Id we find no trans-generational loyalties, no systemic
conscience, no orders of love, no reconciliation of opposites, no universal
love and certainly no spirit and soul. Just steam!
Wishing you all a lot of it
Hans Gruenn
www.drgruenn.com
www.i4sh.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Dan Booth Cohen
Date: 12/29/05 14:14:30
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] I, You & It - Hunter Beaumont at the Portland
Conference
Hunter Beaumont gave a plenary talk at the Portland conference. A portion
of his talk discussed Freuds model of human consciousness in terms that
were astonishing in their simplicity. Perhaps one of our CT members took
notes and can reconstruct his message more accurately and completely than I
will here working from memory.
Hunter said that when English-language editors were translating Freud they
debated whether to translate his German, Ich, Sie, & Es into English, as
I, You, and It or the Latin, Ego, Superego, Id. In choosing the latter
medical standard, they cloaked the meaning in technical terms. In Freuds
conception, the I is the part of the mind that makes I statements; the
You is the persistent internal dialogue that speaks to us in the second
person, and the It is the internal driver that acts of its own will and
volition. I explained this at dinner to a friend in front of a glass of
beer: The I says out loud, My drinking is under control. I will not
drink that beer. The You is the interior voice that berates or tempts.
The It is the non-cognitive impulse to bring the glass to the lips.
If I understand this correctly, it moves Freudian theory from the
ungraspable every man wants to f**k his mother and every woman wishes she
had a penis into a much more accessible and coherent framework.
From the frame of I, You, It, we could propose that Talk Therapy seeks to
calm the You by giving it an external listener and gradually tame the It
In Constellations, we side-step the You entirely and go straight for
the It. There we find the influences of trans-generational loyalties,
systemic conscience, orders of love, etc. The facilitators function is to
create a space of silence and stillness where the client can achieve a
momentary insight into the secret urges of the It, together with an image
of the It, You and I in some emergent state of balance.
If I am interpreting this correctly, it goes a long way to explain why our
approach is challenged to find allies among mainstream psychotherapists.
While we are both seeking to heal disturbances in the It, our pathways are
incompatible. One path reaches the It through the I-and-You, while the
other uses silence and stillness as a by-pass road. This is not to say that
we stand in opposition to the mainstream approach, only that we are carving
our own road, which expressly by-passes theirs. An industry that has paved
a veritable 6-lane superhighway based on the Talking Cure is understandably
loath to endorse the Constellators donkey path.
Can some of you please verify whether Im being true to Hunters message and
Freuds theory? I trust this is a fertile topic for an interesting thread.
Farewell to 05
Dan
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