My first research interests were to empirically validate psychoanalytic theory. When my experimental studies did not bear out the retroflected hostility model of psychoanalysis, I tried to reconcile the discrepant finding.
I latched onto a simple minded formulation: Dreams represent patients' images of themselves and their experiences. A patient would see himself in a dream as defective, diseased, or deserted because this was his prevailing self image at this particular time.
This dream image was continuous (not discontinuous as Freudian theory would stipulate) with the patient's conscious view of himself that he reported in my psychotherapy with him.
Thus I reformulated patient's neurosis in terms of a cognitive model.
- Depression was an expression of the patient's negative view of himself, his future, and his experience (the negative cognitive triad).
- Anxiety represented a fear of an unpleasant future event.
- Phobias were a specific fear of a bad occurrence in a particular situation or set of circumstances (for example, speaking in public.)
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder encapsulated a fear of some bad event which would happen unless the patient would take preventive action.
My formulation of the cognitive model actually coincided with my reexamination of psychoanalytic theory of the 1950's.
The cognitive model and the therapy derived from it offered a simpler,
more parsimonious way of organizing and understanding the clinical data.
In addition they were testable, and teachable.
Contrast this with the theory and therapy of Psychoanalysis. The motivational model which seemed to be at the center of psychoanalytic theory required a complex infrastructure to explain the phenomena of psychiatric disorders as well as normal behavior.
Why did people get depressed? Obviously they would not consciously wish to be depressed nor would they consciously utilize certain mechanisms to make themselves depressed.
According to the motivational model, therefore, some unconscious processes would need to be invoked. Freud latched onto the notion of unconscious hostility. This actually fitted the bill but only if you interposed certain defense mechanisms between the unconscious hostility and the conscious experience of depression.
According to the theory, this hostility was often towards a loved one - even one who had died. The hostility that was stirred up was unacceptable: presto it was turned against the self.
This notion of retroflected hostility does account for suicidal wishes, self-criticalness, and violation of the norms of social and personal behavior, including withdrawl, anhedonia, and self-punishment and the biological needs such as appetite, sex, and sleeping.
However the cognitive model could account for these phenomena in a simpler way, involved identification of conscious processes, and could be tested by the patient in therapy. The more I examined psychoanalysis, the more it struck me as a closed system.
Thus, the wish fulfillment notion of dreams would explain that if a parent dreams of the death of a child it is because the parents wished it. Cognitive theory would propose that it represents a fear of the child dying.
The virtue of being able to explain everything was also a trap. Since psychoanalytic theory could be accommodated to explain almost any phenomenon, it could not be falsified. It was possible to tweak the model in order to come up with a different explanation if one formulation did not test out. There was such a richness and diversity of potential explanations that something could be extracted to explain unexpected findings.
Psychoanalysis also struck me as a closed system in so far as it did not pay much attention to the external world. The Oedipus complex, for example, as representative of the notion of psychic determinism, determined the individual's responses to his/her parents and consequently, to other figures later in life.
The notion of hostility was also a basic psychic form of energy that would build up over time and then would find expression interpersonally as criticism or attack and on a societal level as violence or war.
Psychoanalysis also was a closed system and so far as therapy was considered, if a patient did not accept an interpretation, it was due to the patient's resistance. This in turn was explained by the doctrine of repression. An interpretation that is on the mark would stir up unconscious forces and thus force the patient to repress the unconscious impulses and oppose acceptance of such interpretations.
Similarly, if a patient could not remember a particular event such as the primal scene, some childhood recollection would be reconstructed as a screen memory.
When I reviewed the entire metapsychology, structural, and energetic models of psychoanalysis, I felt that it was overly elaborate and overly abstract and had little evidence to support it.
Another disconcerting feature was that when I presented the same material to supervising analysts, they drew on the same body of theory but came up with totally different explanations of the material that I presented. This was one more example of the overly comprehensive nature of the theory from which numerous diverse explanations could be drawn to explain the same phenomenon.
