Pirone on Siggie, Ruppie, and morphic resonance constriction

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   

www.i4sh.com

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