1st Edition

Ego Damage and Repair Toward a Psychodynamic Neurology

By J. Allan Hobson Copyright 2014
    220 Pages
    by Routledge

    220 Pages
    by Routledge

    As a psychiatric trainee at Harvard in the early 1960s, Dr Allan Hobson was taught commitment to psychoanalytic theory that was already suspect and is now almost entirely obsolete. Via a series of clinical case reports, the author first apologizes for the arrogant ignorance that he adopted from his teachers and then replaces Freudian doctrine with a scientific alternative called Psychodynamic Neurology. The new approach is solidly grounded in sleep and dream science and restores hypnosis to its rightful place in the therapeutic armamentarium. A central precept of Ego Damage and Repair is that the self and its subjective experience (including symptoms) are natural accompaniments of spontaneous and prenatal brain activation that persists throughout life as REM sleep dreaming. Far from being the nonsense theory that psychoanalytic opponents mock, Psychodynamic Neurology views the unconscious as a hyper-meaningful set of predictions about the world that constitutes a virtual reality model which is continuously updated by personal experience. To showcase the changes in psychotherapeutic practice that are recommended, the self treatment of Dr Glen Just is described in detail.

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORINTRODUCTIONPART I The power of suggestion Hypnosis-yes or no? The double-bind hypothesis of schizophrenia Individual therapy case vignettes Derrick Sutter: Did I kill him? Sarah Sage: Did I maim her? William Hitchens: Did I do more than play baseball with him? Francine Poppy: Did I keep more than her pain alive? Rosella Campobello: Did I teach her to eat? Yveline Cloche: Did I really help her avenge her husband? John Cabot: Did I help him get a job? Sybil Newhouse: Did I save her from unnecessary plastic surgery? Melvin Blinder: Did I help him to get a checkbook? Gordon Golden: Was he as sick as his history? Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Dr. Black Knight: Did his stone wall crumble? Soren Tooks: Did he ever get a real job? Zack Seidler: Does he now hug his father? Jane Hudson: Is her art enough for her? Gerald Green: Has he now lost all his fingers? Max Truman: Can he now pet his cats? Edward George: Does he teach the law of behavior? Xavier Theodorus: Can he now go over the bridge? Sylvia Gates: Is she able to stop shaking? Eliana Gergius: Does she still see her mother's face? Dr. Irvin Yalom: Did science help him see straight? General considerations and conclusions: group or individual therapy?PART II The brain basis of normal and abnormal ego states Introduction Chemical intervention and the brain Aminergic neuronal systems Sleep and dreaming Containing dreaming in REM The heart of the brain The emotional brain Aminergic-cholinergic balance The muddy notion of stress Ego suicide Restoring autonomic balance the easy way Working full time The joyous effects of amine reuptake blockade Epilepsy and neuronal excitability Narcolepsy and REM sleep behavior disorder Anger management Lucid dreaming Flying dreams The ego and the frontal lobesPART III Psychodynamic neurology: sample cases Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) Martin Hoskins OCD and protoconsciousness Treatment results as they bear on causal models in OCD Depression Lieta Siciliano Anorexia nervosa Chiara Perugino Hypochondriasis Luciano Ferri Anorexia revisitedPART IV Self-reliance and psychotherapy Can you be your own psychotherapist? The self-treatment of Glen Just Out-of-body experiences Dream plot control Post traumatic stress disorder Glen Just's flying dreams Dream emotion Ego development Lucid dreaming Self-hypnosis Energetics Religion Sex Astral travel Communing with nature Psychosis The interpretation of dreaming The universality of dream science Waking dreaming The ghost Psychopathology and the temporal lobe Self-reliance and the frontal lobePART V Ego repair: what every psychotherapist should know Philosophical considerations Brain-mind science Self-creation The importance of subjective data Personal history Childhood trauma The traumatic criticism of children The maternal bond revisited Keeping a journal Insight State stabilization Concluding remarks APPENDIX I: Glen Just's altered states timelineAPPENDIX II: Glen Just's new self-observation experimentsGENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHYREFERENCESINDEX

    Biography

    J Allan Hobson