Emotions add spice to life that would make life without them directly akin to the person who can not experience pain. How long would a person persist if there were no awareness of fear? What becomes of the feeling of beauty, of the esthetic experience, of love, of hurt, of revenge, even to bring it home, of humor and laughter.

Life without emotions would be, to steal the phrase, certainly "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes, 1660/1998; cf. Wollheim, 1999).

C. Enemy

There are two old experiments in psychology which bear reporting here. The first concerns what came to be called "the approach-approach" problem. If an animal is placed directly in the middle between two equally desirable food sources, the result is that the animal stands in the middle until it dies of starvation. To choose either desirable food source is to avoid the other equally desirable food source; the end result is the inability to make a decision and the paralysis of action unto death.

The other is called "the conditioned fear paradigm." Here an animal is placed in a situation that is unpleasant (e.g. it is hungry but the food source is a short distance away). To escape the unpleasant situation the animal has to travel over a pathway that produces pain (usually an electrical shock to the paws). After a few repetitions of this experiment, the pain-production potential is disconnected (i.e. there can be no further painful paw shocks). The result is that the animal never learns that it can no longer be hurt. Having learned that the pathway to food produces pain, it never tries the now harmless pathway again. It, too, starves in the sight of food.

Emotions, like love or laughter, enrich life — they are the flavoring that makes life palatable — they also constrict, inhibit, indeed even prohibit that life such that they lead to death in anorexia or the suicide of hopelessness or pain. Emotion is present in the human and, indeed, Damasio (1994) has presented cogent data and argument to say that we could not function in the world without them. But emotion is not just self-pity (weeping), anger, and fear. Emotion includes desire, a concern about the outcome of our actions, pride, and about 550 other issues. A theory of therapy which views itself as only dealing with emotions — and moreover with only a very few of them — is a priori labeling itself as marginal. It is not without reason that Reichian practitioners are almost non-existent.

Is it simplistic to say that our goal is to increase the joy and reduce the pain? Perhaps so; but then why would one ever undertake this path of self-study if that hope were not present and the goal reachable? Reich gave us the gift of a method, it is up to us to employ and amplify that method to reach the goal most sought.

II. Theoretical Section

First I will address the role of the superego and the ego ideal. While, as I indicated above in a footnote (footnote 37 on page 348), Freud's has come under scathing but highly erudite criticism in the last 25 years, still these metaphorical terms are conceptually useful.

Next I will return to a discussion of character. I have previously defined the concept of character (in Chapter one), but here I will explore the concept in greater depth. My objective is to communicate the extent to whi ch character permeates everything about you.

Next there will be the first of a two-part discussion of defenses. Part one will be here in the theoretical section and part two will be in the techniques section.

Body-based psychotherapy, to be charitable, has been extremely derelict in attempting to base the whole of its rationale on the single defense mechanism of repression. If, as seems more likely all the time, the scholarship on the concept of repression shows the concept of repression to be mistaken, then the whole rationale, as previously put forth, for body-based psychotherapy will be undone along with the concept of repression. It is indeed unfortunate that so fine a technique as body-based psychotherapy should be made to rest on so slim a foundation as the theory of repression.

I will then turn to the most important of the 41 defenses other than repression. By most important I mean the ones that are most significant both from the point of view of character and from the point of view of being commonly in use. These are the ones that I will, in turn in the techniques section, focus on in presenting techniques. At the end of the chapter, for reference, I will present two tables that list all the defense mechanisms and their approximate age of appearance.

Footnote 40. See: Crews, 1998, 2006; Ellenberger, 1970; Erwin, 1996; Esterson, 1993; Grunbaum, 1984; Macmillan, 1997; Webster, 1995. "First, I want to point out that, despite over sixty years of research involving numerous approaches by many thoughtful and clever investigators, at the present time there is no controlled laboratory evidence supporting the concept of repression. It is interesting to note that even most of the proponents of repression agree with that conclusion." (Holmes, 1998, p. 161; cf. Singer, 1990).

A. The Superego And The Ego Ideal

1. Description Of The Superego And The Ego Ideal

While both the superego and the ego ideal, as we will see, are major problems in the human being, our first task is to distinguish between the two and to locate both relative to the ego.

The superego is our internal policeman. It decides right or wrong, do it or don't do it, permitted or not permitted. It is the superego that produces feelings of shame and guilt. It is the superego that inhibits and prevents; it makes us obey the rules, both legal and social. The superego stops us.

While the superego inhibits, the ego ideal compels. While the superego says what we can't do, the ego ideal says what we must do. It does not say we must do in the sense of obey (for that is the job of the superego), but what we must do in the sense of achieve or obtain to. While the superego gives us shame and guilt (if we disobey its rules), the ego ideal gives us "a sense of failure," and/ or defeat, and/or futility (if we don't live up to its demands).

2. The Structural Theory And The Superego

When Freud came, late in his writings, to posit the id, the ego, and the superego his theory was termed "the structural theory." This was as opposed to his earlier topographic and economic theories (Yankelovich & Barrett, 1971). Each of his three metaphorical entities — id, ego, and superego — was a structure that developed in a specific manner, for specific reasons, to fulfill specific functions. Our interest here lies with the ego and its place in the scheme of things.

We need to understand the ego in this theoretical formulation because it is the ego which will, in the end, be our friend and savior.

As Freud postulated the system, the ego was that part of the psychic structure that (1) dealt with reality and (2) served as mediator between the id and the superego. The id said "I want it", the superego said "you can't have it", and the ego looked to reality and to those two demands and tried to find a way out of the dilemma, a compromise formation (you will find compromise formation listed among the defenses at the end of this chapter). It also fell to the ego to find ways, if possible, to satisfy the demands of the ego ideal. The structural place of the ego ideal relative to the superego was as a part of it, with a demand function instead of a prohibition function.

As Freud formulated the system, the ego was not only a mediator between competing demands, it was also continually in a state of conflict between those demands. It fell to Hartman (1939/1958) to point out that not all ego functions were conflicted. There was also a "conflict-free" sphere of the ego. That conflict-free sphere of the ego is our ally in this attempt to counteract the war of the structures that wages within each of us.

Returning to the superego, the theorist Roy Schafer (1976, pp. 283-4) writes of the superego as:

In its individual rather than social aspect, one thinks that it is oneself who is doing the scolding or punishing, perhaps unconsciously. Metapsychologically, we call this individual aspect by the name Freud gave it, the superego, and we say it is an intrapsychic agency. But by resorting to this language, we no longer say (what is perfectly adequate to the occasion) that sometimes one judges one's own actions in an irrational, infantile, severely moralistic, or punitive manner, and especially that one does so even unbeknown to oneself, that is, unconsciously; we say instead that it is one's superego that (or who) judges one's ego (or one's self) in these ways. Thereby we set up superego as a personified entity of another sort: a so-called psychic structure that sets standards, prohibits, judges, and punishes cruelly just as the parents of one's childhood once did or, with the help of exaggeration, seemed to do or seemed ready to do. The obsessional neurotic is our best example in this connection.

Footnote 41. The ego ideal has grown in importance with the writing of Heniz Kohut on narcissism wherein it is termed, variously, the idealized parent imago or the idealized self-object.

Similarly, Moore & Fine (1990, p. 189) speak of the superego thusly:

One of three hypothetical systems of the tripartite (structural) model, the superego sets up and maintains an intricate system of ideals and values, prohibitions and commands (the conscience); it observes and evaluates the self, compares it with the ideal, and either criticizes, reproaches, and punishes, leading to a variety of painful affects, or praises and rewards, thereby raising self esteem. Freud introduced the term Uber-Ich (superego) in 1923, used it synonymously with his earlier term Ich-Ideal (ego ideal), and described it as a step (Stufe) or differentiation within the ego. He viewed it as largely unconscious, reflecting the clinical observation that in many patients self-criticism and conscience were as much outside of awareness as the drives: "not only what is lowest but also what is highest in the ego can be unconscious.

I think we have covered this enough, at least from the classical Freudian point of view. But there are two other theorists I want to introduce into this witch's brew. First Edmund Bergler (1949, 1960, 1961) and then Karen Horney (1950).

B. Psychic Masochism, The Contribution Of Edmund Bergler

Edmund Bergler is a much under-appreciated theorist. Yes, he had his nutty side; but then what theorist does not have a nutty side? I'll skip the nutty and get right to the pecan pie.

Footnote 42. In the original German, Freud used the terms das Ich (the I) and das Selbst (the self) seemingly interchangeably. When Strachey in 'The Standard Edition' translated Freud into English, the single term Ego was used for both das Ich and das Selbst. I have deliberately in this book avoided the issue of the Self as it is still a term lacking of any generally accepted definition (Kirchner & David, 2003; Kohut, 1977).

There are two concepts of Bergler's that I think add greatly to this discussion of the superego and the ego ideal. The two concepts are: (1) psychic masochism and (2) injustice collecting.