Hans - Good response. I've been sitting with it. It points out one of the
unintended consequences of our information age. I'm perpetually ignorant.
I hear a few sentences from Hunter and ponder their meaning in attempt to
integrate this new piece of information into my already over-crowded closet
of a mind. When I scratch the surface, I discover a vast storehouse of
existing knowledge on the topic. Turns out I barely know Freud at all, even
though I grew up with him as one of the 3 icons of my cultural milieu (the
others being Marx and Darwin). I know Jung less, the Tao less and have
never heard of Georg Groddeck.
Still I will push back at you a bit. If I understand the image of the
elephant in the shoebox, you are saying that the realm of the
soul/conscience that reveals itself in constellations is far too vast to be
contained by Freud's narrow conception of the Id. Despite that, the troika
of "I, You, It" appeals to me. I can simply say that Freud's description of
the Id was woefully narrow and incomplete, but it perhaps offers a way of
expressing the view through the lens of Constellations in language others
can comprehend.
Suzi Tucker writes in Messengers of Healing, "In this light, guilt and
innocence are almost the opposite of what comes to mind when the words are
spoken in other context. Innocence is small, allowing one to stay connected
in a specific way. Guilt is big. To become an adult, one must go through
the door of guilt. Implicit is that the door remains open." Those of us
who have experienced many Constellations and read the books grasp her point.
We see the interplay between conscience and the soul, innocence and guilt,
again and again.
However, to the person who has never experienced a Constellation, Tucker's
assertion makes little sense. We are taking the common understanding that
"innocence" is good and "guilt" is bad and turning it on its head. All this
from simply looking at a few random strangers standing and doing nothing.
The model of "I, You, It," can be simply expressed and perhaps even
understood. A person says, "I don't have a drinking problem. I can stop
whenever I want." The inner dialogue says, "You pathetic piece of s**t.
You are going to lose everything if you drink that beer." The It brings the
glass to the lips.
Cognitive and behavioral approaches work to strengthen the "I." The first
step of the 12 steps is to make strong declarative "I" statements and to
then behave consistently with them. Humanistic psychotherapy aims to calm
the ravings of the "You" by vocalizing them in a safe and structured
setting. Classic Freudian psychoanalysis claimed to reach and resolve
neurosis of the "It." The approach has had limited success and is rarely
employed anymore in its full protocol.
Constellations bypass the "I" and the "You" and go straight for the "It." I
accept that our "It" is much vaster and complex than Freud's, closer to what
Jung called "Self" or to the Tao.
The appeal to me is that if I used the term "Soul," I then have to clarify
that I'm not speaking of the Christian soul that goes to heaven, or the
Hindu soul that reincarnates again and again, but to a soul that we do not
have, but that has us. Have I lost you yet? I will soon!
"I, You, It" is simple and matches people's experience of their ordinary
existence. The I says, "I love you." The You is afraid he's too good for
you. The It always falls in love with Mr. Wrong. Constellations can
straighten out the It.
Medical doctors are accustomed to speaking Latin in professional
consultations and in the vernacular. Maybe I'm simply suffering from
macrostereognosis, but it seems to me we need to find more comprehensible
terminology to describe what we do.
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hans D. Gruenn M.D.
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 12:39 AM
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ConstellationTalk] I, You & It - Hunter Beaumont at the
Portland Conference
Dear Dan
Thank you for your thoughts on Hunter Beaumont's Portland talk. Whether you
are "true to Hunter's message and Freud's 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 Freud's 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 Freud's "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 <http://www.drgruenn.com/>
www.i4sh.com
<file:///C:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Hans\Local%20Settings\Application%20D
ata\IM\Runtime\Message\www.i4sh.com>
-------Original Message-------
From: Dan Booth Cohen <mailto:danbcohen@xxxxxxx>
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 Freud's 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 Freud's
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 facilitator's 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 Constellator's donkey path.
Can some of you please verify whether I'm being true to Hunter's message and
Freud's theory? I trust this is a fertile topic for an interesting thread.
Farewell to '05
Dan
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