Introductory Lectures on Neuropsychoanalysis: Lecture Three Part 4 " How the Mind Functions" Repressed Predictions

REPRESSED PREDICTIONS IN CHILDHOOD REQUIRE NEUROPYSCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT..............We are born with our seven basic emotional needs. They are innate.  Our EGOS on the other hand, have to develop. We are born with a rudimentary EGO but it has to grow and develop as we learn from experience how to deal with our instincts in the real world.   This is the EGO'S task and it is a difficult one. These primary needs are very powerful. They are mammalian.  And they are just as powerful in little children as they are in grown adults.  Freud discovered this in the early 1900's and wrote about it under the heading of Childhood Sexuality.   ........But such is true of all our seven emotional needs.  They are there from the gitgo and they are quite strong. So how de deal with them? How do we not live our childhood lives as do the chimps?

 We exercise EGO Strength. Unfortunately in childhood our EGOS are not very strong.  They are not well developed. They do not get well developed until we are about three years old. This is why we have so many problems as human beings.

We have to deal with these powerful  needs before we are mature enough to do so in a reasonable and reality oriented way. Before we can think and reason and see options and choices, etc. So let's say you are a little girl, about age four, and you wish to be Daddy's Girl  (this is common for little girls of this age.) Wanting to be Daddy's Girl leads you   to try and get some of your seven basic emotional needs met in your relationship with your Father. You might wish your Father was your husband rather than your Mother's. You might imagine that your Mother would go on a long trip and never come back, so you could have your Father exclusively to yourself. I know this sounds like a fantastic notion to us as adults. But remember that is because we adults have well developed and reasonable EGOS.  We can see all the problems in such a childhood solution. But at age four this little girl cannot see any of this.  Her EGO is  immature. She is driven at this stage by her basic emotional needs of LUST, RAGE FEAR, SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, CARE and PLAY. She is driven to get her needs met. To find pleasure and avoid unpleasure. But her EGO knows just enough at this point to know that her Father and Mother may not care for her fantasized solution. And this knowledge gives her even more fear and anxiety. But this is the crux of the matter. Her little EGO cannot solve this unconscious psychic conflict. It cannot work out a viable solution as to how she could get her primal needs met and still maintain a loving relationship with her parents. So her EGO has to come up with the best solution to this unconscious psychic conflict it can under the circumstances. Sometimes this solution ( prediction in neuropsychoanalysis-similar to compromise formation in ego psychology) is a faulty solution (premature prediction.) One that may work temporarily for her as a child but will not work for her as a grown up adult. So now at age 25, when this once four year old girl walks down the aisle at her wedding as a grown woman, she experiences conflicts and anxiety. Is this the right thing to do? Why do I fear my Father will not be pleased with my choice of a husband? Why is my Mother so eager to get me out of the house? She has  not a clue that these questions and feelings come from her unconscious, repressed, prediction from childhood. She just knows she experiences the unpleasant feelings. In this case her prediction had to do with the common experience of childhood known as the Oedipus Complex......I know all of this sounds strange and unbelievable but  we as adults were all once children, and we had to come up with solutions/predictions to our conflictual primal needs that were not always the best. We had to try and deal reasonably with our basic emotional needs before our minds were prepared to do so. And because our predictions we came up with were

not always the best, we suffer in later life. This is the human condition.  As Mark Solms says," It is a natural process," but it can be made worse or better by the environment in which we are raised. But the point is these two parts of our minds--our basic emotional needs (our ID,) and our reasonable/reality oriented self (our EGO), are in conflict and turmoil as children. And we are not old enough or mature enough then to solve these conflicts in a workable, mature manner. In neuropsychoanalytic psychotherapy you learn about these unworkable, unconscious, repressed predictions from childhood, and how they are causing your suffering today.  You also learn how to create better, workable, conscious solutions in your adult life in the here and now (Solms 2020.) Thus you eventually choose healthier predictions on which to live your life. Once this happens again and again, you are ready to consider terminating your treatment.