separation theory essay

An Overview of Separation Theory

Why do people develop and rely on psychological defenses that limit their lives.

Posted January 24, 2019

Separation Theory integrates psychoanalytic and existential systems of thought by showing how early interpersonal pain, separation anxiety , and later death anxiety lead to the development of powerful psychological defenses . These defenses attempt to cope with and minimize painful experiences and emotions suffered in one’s developmental years, but later predispose limitations and maladaptation in adult life. The name Separation Theory was derived from the understanding that human life can be conceptualized as a series of successive separation experiences ending in death, the ultimate separation.

Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the importance of unconscious motivation , explains how interpersonal trauma leads to the formation of defenses, identifies conflict and competition within the family system, describes levels of sexual development, and explains how resistance and transference enter into the therapy process. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis fails to deal effectively with death anxiety (the important role that death plays in life) and its impact on the future development of the individual. Existential psychology focuses on the significance of death awareness and dying on the personality , as well as other issues of being, such as autonomy, individuation, transcendent goals etc, but tends to neglect the “down and dirty” psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms , competition and psychosexual development.

In my opinion, neither approach is sufficient in understanding humanity. Both conceptual models—psychodynamic and existential—are central to an understanding of human personality development. Although it developed independently, Separation Theory attempts to synthesize the two systems. A fundamental principle underlying the theory reflects my personal view of people as innocent rather than inherently bad or corrupt. Unlike Freud postulation in his instinct theory, I do not see human beings as innately aggressive or self-destructive; rather, they become outwardly hostile, violent, or harmful to self or others only in response to rejection, fear , emotional pain, and existential angst. No child is born bad or sinful; the psychological defenses that children form early in life are appropriate to actual situations that threaten the emerging self.

The Human Condition

Each individual is born with the potential to exhibit a variety of propensities that are essentially human. The basic qualities of our human heritage that distinguish our species from the other animals are the unique ability to love and feel compassion for oneself and others, the capacity for abstract reasoning and creativity , the capability to set goals and develop strategies to accomplish them, an awareness of existential concerns, the desire to search for meaning and social affiliation, and the potential to experience the sacredness and mystery of life.

Whenever any of these qualities are damaged, we lose a part of ourselves that is most alive and human. Yet these basic human characteristics are fractured or limited to varying degrees in the course of growing up in family constellations that are often less than ideal. The resultant emotional pain and frustration leads to an inward, self-protective attitude and a basic distrust of others. Voice Therapy procedures, the clinical methodology of Separation Theory, expose and challenge negative attitudes, beliefs, and self-limiting defenses and supports the uniqueness of the individual. I place a strong emphasis on differentiation from the early conditioning in the family of origin. The ultimate goal of psychotherapy is to help people overcome their personal limitations and maintain a healthy balance between feeling and rationality, that reflects their basic humanness.

People, unlike other species, are cursed with an awareness of their own mortality. I believe that the tragedy is that their true self consciousness concerning this existential issue contributes to an ultimate irony: Human beings are both brilliant and aberrant, sensitive and savage, exquisitely caring and painfully indifferent, remarkably creative and incredibly destructive to self and others. The capacity to imagine and conceptualize has negative as well as positive consequences because it predisposes anxiety states that culminate in a defensive form of denial .

Feeling and compassion are a significant part of our human heritage; but when we are cut off from our feelings we are desensitized to ourselves and others and are more likely to become self destructive or act out aggression . The unfortunate consequence is that the same defenses that enabled us to survive the emotional pain of childhood and existential despair are not only maladaptive and limit our personal potential for living a full life, but they also inevitably lead to negative behaviors toward others, thereby perpetuating a cycle of destructiveness.

Paradoxically, ideologies and religious beliefs that are a source of spiritual comfort and offer some relief from a sense of aloneness and interpersonal distress, also polarize people against one another. Threatened by individuals or groups with different customs and belief systems, we mistakenly feel that we must overpower or destroy them.

Life Can Be Conceptualized as a Series of Progressive Weaning Experiences

Human existence, or life as we know it, can be conceived of as a succession of separation experiences that make us increasingly aware of the fact of our aloneness and eventual death. The feeling of separateness causes a certain degree of anxiety. How we cope with our fear and the subsequent defenses we utilize determine the course of our emotional lives.

Eventually, children realize that their parents will die, though at first the child somehow feels exempt from this fate. In their desperation to escape the terrifying loss that they see as inevitable, children cling more tenaciously to their parents and the family system. At the same time, their methods of self-soothing and self– parenting themselves are strengthened and become more deeply entrenched.

Later, children realize that they cannot sustain their own lives. At this point, the world that they originally believed to be permanent is virtually turned upside down. The manner in which they attempt to defend themselves from the frightening awareness that all people, and even they to, must die, has a profound effect on their lives.

When confronted with an awareness of death, children must either feel the inherent anxiety and painful emotions or attempt to disconnect to a certain extent from investing emotionally in life. This is the core conflict for each individual: whether to stay feeling and develop compassion for one’s self and others or to resort to an inward, self-protective lifestyle where relationships with people play a less significant role. The greater the pain and frustration a child faced before his or her full realization of death, the more likely it is that the child will choose the defensive alternative.

People can choose to either defend themselves by cutting off painful emotional experiences or they can choose to remain vulnerable to pain and move toward fulfilling their human potential. Separation Theory points out the contrast between living with fantasy and illusion and living a more feelingful, goal-directed life. The extent to which people live out fantasies of connection, they largely relate to themselves as objects and treat themselves the way their parent or primary caretaker treated them. At each moment in time, one is either capitulating to negative aspects of one’s internal programming or moving toward individuation.

Basic Concepts in Separation Theory

The Fantasy Bond – The Primary Defense

The child compensates for emotional trauma, separation experiences and existential angst by forming a fantasy bond or imaginary connection with his/her parent or primary caretaker. This fantasy process relieves stress and can become progressively more addictive. The degree to which children continue to rely on this illusory connection is proportional to the amount of pain, frustration and anxiety they experienced in growing up. On a subconscious level, the fantasy bond also provides a modicum of relief from fears of death and helps maintain an illusion of immortality. There are four important dynamics related to maintaining the fantasy bond: (1) idealization of one’s parents, (2) internalization of parents’ negative attitudes, (3) projection of parents’ traits on to others, and (4) identifying with and manifesting parents’ negative personality traits.

The fantasy bond necessarily involves a certain amount of distortion of reality; therefore, the more one relies on this form of fantasy gratification, the more one is limited in coping with the real world. If this defensive fantasy world becomes extreme, a person’s ability to function effectively becomes seriously compromised.

The voice is a well-integrated pattern of negative thoughts that supports the fantasy bond and is at the core of an individual’s maladaptive behavior. It is not an actual hallucination, but rather, an identifiable system of critical and destructive thoughts. It is an overlay on the personality that is not natural or harmonious, but learned or imposed from without. It represents the internalization of critical, rejecting, hostile and traumatic attitudes that the child experienced.

The voice can be thought of as a secondary defense that supports the fantasy bond. Voices range in intensity from minor self-criticisms to major self-attacks and foster self-soothing habit patterns, isolation, and a self-destructive lifestyle. Voice attacks are directed toward others as well as toward oneself. Both types of voices — those that belittle the self and those that attack other people — predispose alienation.

Voice Therapy, a cognitive, behavioral methodology, brings these internalized thought processes to the surface, with accompanying affect, enabling clients to confront alien components of the personality. I developed these techniques for the purpose of helping people access and identify the contents of this largely unconscious thought process. When clients learn to express their self-critical thoughts in the second person format, powerful emotions are aroused and previously suppressed thoughts, feelings, and memories come to light. The amount of self-hatred and anger toward self that emerges during these sessions indicate the depth and pervasiveness of this self-destructive process.

After identifying the content of their destructive thoughts, clients learn to distinguish these antagonistic attitudes from a more realistic view of themselves. They become more objective and, more importantly, begin to understand and develop insight into the source of their self-attacks.

Faced with primal pain in our personal development, compounded by existential angst, people develop and rely on psychological defenses that offer a modicum of comfort but also predispose varying degrees of maladaptation. To a certain extent, we each depend on fantasy processes and live with a covertly destructive point of view that has a profoundly negative effect on our personality and overall adjustment in life. Unfortunately, we are largely unaware of being divided or set against ourselves. We are only partially conscious that we possess a hostile, self-denying, and self-attacking aspect of our personalities and continue to be restricted and controlled by its influences.

In Voice Therapy, when individuals expose their negative thoughts or voices, release the accompanying affect, and gain insight into their sources, they gradually modify their behavior, improve their adjustment and move toward satisfying their goals. The process involves breaking away from restrictive defenses and maladaptive responses and moving toward independence and autonomy.

Separation Theory offers no escape from existential pain or the inevitable vicissitudes of life; however, it describes how people can choose a life of courage and integrity in which feeling, and self-awareness are genuinely valued. We could appreciate the existential dilemma without resorting to false resolutions, deadening painkillers and other defense mechanisms. We can lead an honest, feelingful existence that would do justice to our real selves and to those people close to us. The awareness of our finite existence can make life and living all the more precious and offers a real potential to achieve personal freedom and a life of meaning and compassion.

Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. , is the author of The Fantasy Bond , Voice Therapy , Compassionate Child Rearing and many other books and articles.

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Separating Power

Essays on the Founding Period

Gerhard Casper

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ISBN 9780674801400

Publication date: 04/25/1997

The separation of powers along functional lines--legislative, executive, and judicial--has been a core concept of American constitutionalism ever since the Revolution. As noted constitutional law scholar Gerhard Casper points out in this collection of essays, barren assertions of the importance of keeping the powers separate do not capture the complexity of the task when it is seen as separating power flowing from a single source--the people. Popular sovereignty did not underlie earlier versions of the separation of powers doctrine.

Casper vividly illustrates some of the challenges faced by Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Gallatin, Jefferson, and many others in Congress and the executive branch as they guided the young nation, setting precedents for future generations. He discusses areas such as congressional-executive relations, foreign affairs, appropriations, and the Judiciary Act of 1789 from the separation of powers vantage point.

The picture of our government's formative years that emerges here, of a rich and overlapping understanding of responsibilities and authority, runs counter to rigid, syllogistic views. Separating Power gives us a clear portrait of the issues of separation of power in the founding period, as well as suggesting that in modern times we should be reluctant to tie separation of powers notions to their own procrustean bed.

Many constitutional scholars believe that if they could only pierce the fog created by the Constitution's wonderful obscurity and our own historical distance, the thoughts of men like Jefferson and Madison could help resolve current political controversies. But in Separating Power , Gerhard Casper advances the unsettling opinion that we must face questions about the separation of powers without the Founding Fathers' help: they cannot guide us because they themselves were hopelessly confused...[The Founding Fathers] sought to cooperate rather than to engage in jealous turf battles. So even if they left us with no cohesive separation-of-powers doctrine, as this fine book makes clear, perhaps the Founding Fathers' spirit of compromise could teach us how we should approach our own political problems. —Douglas A. Sylva, New York Times Book Review

Mr. Casper reexamines the question of constitutional rigidity. He concludes, and provides powerful historical evidence supporting his point, that there is, in fact, a great deal of flexibility within checks and balances. —Jason Bertsch, Washington Times

In Separating Power , Gerhard Casper gives a brief, brisk but authoritative account of the origins of what we now take for granted as a principle of American society: the separation of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government...What makes Separating Power so refreshing is Casper's insistence on the sheer newness of the problem in 1789. Throughout the five linked essays that make up the book, he keeps reminding us that everything the Washington administration did was being done for the first time...It is certainly bracing to revisit, via Casper's lucid scholarship, these superb politicians at work, inventing the government we now feel compelled to reinvent. —Michael Stern, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

Originalists taught that constitutional law must return to founding understandings as a guide to current interpretive questions about the meaning and scope of the constitution. What they didn't teach was how little such an inquiry would yield. Casper's beautiful and rich account of founding ideas about separating powers reveals just how little the framers had finally worked out, and how much our modern understanding differs from what they did work out. This book, in its simple and elegant directness, is a compelling account of the struggles and complexity that confronted the founding generation as they erected a constituting regime of separated powers. It will undermine arguments that imagine that the framers gave us a structure already worked out. If one thought constitutional law should be about returning to the answers the framers left us, this book shows unavoidably that there were few answers, if any, that the framers meant to leave. —Lawrence Lessig, University of Chicago Law School

• Gerhard Casper is President of the American Academy in Berlin and President Emeritus of Stanford University.

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• Harvard University Press

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• DOI: 10.2307/1342286
• Corpus ID: 140373607

The New Separation of Powers

• B. Ackerman
• Published 2000
• Political Science, Law
• Harvard Law Review

318 Citations

The newest-oldest separation of powers, liberal freedom, the separation of powers, and the administrative state, governing democracy outside the law: india's election commission and the challenge of accountability, provisions, practices and performances of constitutional review in democratizing east asia, does institutional design make a difference, the functioning of parliamentary libraries and the principle of the separation of powers, the power of the supreme people’s court, from conflict to coordination: perspectives on the study of executive-legislative relations, comparative positive political theory and empirics, the making of constitutional democracy: from creation to application of law, 5 references, democratic legitimacy and the administrative character of supranationalism: the example of the european community, constitutional interpretation: text, values, and processes@@@democracy and distrust: a theory of judicial review., related papers.

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The Separation of Powers Doctrine: An Overview of its Rationale and Application

June 23, 1999 RL30249

As delineated in the Constitution, the separation of powers doctrine represents the belief that government consists of three basic and distinct functions, each of which must be exercised by a different branch of government, so as to avoid the arbitrary exercise of power by any single ruling body. This concept was directly espoused in the writings of Montesquieu, who declared that "when the executive and the legislature are united in a single person or in a single body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically." (1) The Framers of the Constitution shared this view, with James Madison stating that "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." (2) To alleviate the dangers inherent in centralized power, the Constitution establishes three separate branches of government, the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary. Through this structure, the Framers sought to create an efficient governmental system which would limit the power vested in any one branch. Realizing that mere textual separation would be insufficient to guard against aggrandizement by the respective branches, however, a system of checks and balances was developed, by which the three arms of government could resist against encroachment. Through this system, the various branches of government share certain interdependent characteristics which enable efficient governance, while other functions are staunchly protected, so as to prevent the accumulation of excessive power by any single branch. 1. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 157 (Anne M. Cohler et al. eds., 1989). 2. The Federalist Papers, No. 48, at 301 (J. Madison) (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

First Amendment :

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause decisions embody, to varying degrees, two views of the Establishment Clause that have been described as “separationist” and “accommodationist.” 1 Footnote See, e.g. , Steven G. Gey , Reconciling the Supreme Court’s Four Establishment Clauses , 8 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 725 , 725 (2006) ; Ira C. Lupu , The Lingering Death of Separationism , 62 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 230 , 232 (1994) . These two views reflect an inherent tension between the two Religion Clauses. 2 Footnote See Everson v. Bd. of Educ., 330 U.S. 1, 16 (1947) . The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from providing some types of support to religion, requiring some separation between church and state, while the Free Exercise Clause prohibits the government from excluding religious individuals “from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation” because of their faith, allowing and even requiring some accommodation of religion. 3 Footnote Id. ; see also Amdt1.2.7 Relationship Between Religion Clauses and Free Speech Clause.

The separationist view is embodied by Thomas Jefferson’s statement that the First Amendment created “a wall of separation between church and State.” 4 Footnote See Everson , 330 U.S. at 16 (quoting Letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Ass’n (Jan. 1, 1802), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-36-02-0152-0006 (internal quotation marks omitted)). Thus, in Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, the Supreme Court said that this wall “must be kept high and impregnable.” 5 Footnote Id. at 18 . It went on:

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa . 6 Footnote Id. at 15–16 .

The “separation” of church and state is intended not only to protect the government from religious influence, but also to protect religious exercise by preventing the government from intervening in religious affairs. 7 Footnote See, e.g. , Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421, 431 (1962) .

Just five years after Everson , though, in Zorach v. Clauson , the Court confirmed that the government could sometimes accommodate private religious practices without violating Everson 's wall. 8 Footnote Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 314 (1952) . It held that “no constitutional requirement . . . makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion.” 9 Footnote Id. In 1971, in Lemon v. Kurtzman , the Supreme Court said that “far from being a ‘wall,’” the line separating church from state “is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.” 10 Footnote Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 614 (1971) . And in a dissenting opinion in 1985, then-Associate Justice Rehnquist argued that “[t]here is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in Everson .” 11 Footnote Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 92, 106 (1985) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).

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5 Farewell to ‘Legal Positivism’: The Separation Thesis Unravelling

• Published: June 1999
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H. L. A Hart complained about the ambiguity of legal positivism, and proposed a definition that refers to particular explications of the concept of law, to certain theories of legal interpretation, to particular views on the moral problem of a duty to obey the law, and to a sceptical position with regard to the meta-ethical issue of the possibility of moral knowledge. It is said to be restricted to the Thesis of Separation — the contention that there is no necessary connection between law and morals. In this chapter, the Separation Thesis is discussed even further, and has three shortcomings identified: first, that it has been vacillating between object-level contentions about moral qualities of the law; that the precise logical relation between both levels has never been properly accounted for; and that the question of necessary relations between morality and law hinges crucially on the presupposition that the very concept of law itself does not unravel into different sets of convenient stipulations from different epistemological angles, each of which renders the question of such necessary relations trivial. The Separation Thesis is also identified as having two versions: the Fallibility Law and the Neutrality Law.

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