Regarding the earlier post it is important to keep in mind that when the child encounters frustration that it will regress to earlier fears. As Klein writes:
The boy fears punishment for his destruction of his mother's body, but, besides this, his fear is of a more general nature, and here we have an analogy to the anxiety associated with the castration-wishes of the girl. He fears that his body will be mutilated and dismembered, and amongst other things castrated. Here we have a direct contribution to the castration-complex. In this early period of development the mother who takes away the child's fæces signifies also a mother who dismembers and castrates him. Not only by means of the anal frustrations which she inflicts does she pave the way for the castration complex: in terms of psychic reality she is also already the castrator. 171 Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict
The vagina dentata is a symbol of such a regression to oral annihilation in regards to sex with the mother.
However, there are many possible points once can have a fixation to and regress to later.Dismemberment is one, death is one, annihilation is one, introjection (understood as actually changing to look like the feared object), degeneration of the frustration causing part of the body, etc.
In addition these points that are regressed to can be externalized onto the object of that stage. So for example, the child's disappointment in love for the mother can cause a regression to feeling like he is dead and that can be externalized onto the mother and be a cause of necrophilia. Similarly, fetishism would be a regression to an anal stage in which possession of 'the beautiful object' is combined with the sexual.
It's a bit awkward to refer to the anal stage since it is as quaint as the Oedipus complex. Even when Klein and others talk about early and late versions of the stage I believe that it is important to use myth and extract the salient interactions and differentiate the stages based upon the epistemological object the child takes and the forms the aggression and sexual take in the body and in externalizations.
For example, the so called earlier anal stage is really the child learning to walk and on its own, as an act of focus, concentration, and power it has its own qualities that deserve our attention.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- repetition
Freud began with repetitions in relation to love relationships.There is the man who repeats the relationship in which he saves a fallen woman, a relationship in which there is an injured third party, etc. (A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud writes:
Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds (p.22).
I've posted before on the myths of Heracles and Perseus and believe that the period of development which these myths cover also generates a few interesting repetition-compulsions.
The basic outlines of the myths are
1. child left alone with the mother (manifest in Perseus, latent in Heracles)
2. instinctual renunciation of sexual impulses and formation of ideal of excellence or gift-giving
3. Heracles performs his labours and Perseus kills Medusa
after these successes it seems like the inevitable failing of the ideal (i.e. it not being enough to be the desire of the mother) is not portrayed but the appearance of the father next shows the ideal failed and the ego split for the emergence of a new relation
the child in the failure of the ideal is left with self-hate or abandonment so the transcription of power to the father (the penis) is to pull oneself out of this depression.
4. There is the entrance of the father who is denigrated in Heracles. He appears as a centaur who tries to rape Heracles' wife. In Perseus there is a great sea serpent protecting Andromeda which Perseus kills.
This time Heracles is manifest but not everything, of course, is spelled out in the myth. The mother puts down the 'name of the father' and grooms the child to be 'special': it is good or belongs among the good in some way and the father is bad or is among the bad.
In Perseus there would be a reversal of roles. The masochist who was abandoned by the mother and who waited for a father who did not come or showed no interest is saved by, must return to, the mother.
In both these instances the penis is taken from the father to create a phallic mother.
Obviously this is still before the important and definite knowledge of sexual difference.
In the Perseus myth after he saves Andromeda and is going to marry her there is a return of her fiance Phineus who Perseus turns to stone with the medusa head. Andromeda being promised to another and the return of her fiance relates the castration of the mother (who had rescued the masochist)and the overcoming of this potentially traumatic event for the masochist.
If we follow the pattern of instinctual renunciation to drive or ideal and then to its failure, then what appears after the failure is self-pity which can be denied and externalized onto the mother. This gives us the situation in which the hysteric (of the subject masochist type) can't end a relationship with the person she had once idealized. She can't make a clean break from him or her because of the ties of pity (which is really her own self-pity; she'd be hurting herself to leave).
The repetition, as shown in the myth, can be enacted from the reverse side and the masochist can find a helpless waif and seek to save her and get her back on her feet at which point she leaves her rescuer and moves on (although the rescuer might lose interest too once the other is more stable or become upset because she doesn't see how hard things are for him- doesn't pity him in a sense).
With Heracles we have the repetition of the narcissist in terms of idealization and debasement. The narcissist idealizes a person, who he believes will make him special and help him find his hidden power but soon sees that this other person has some human frailties and won't form him and pay him the tribute that he deserves (he or she is found to be castrated) and he then turns on them. In the reverse enactment the narcissist seeks, as Freud mentioned above, to find a protege to groom and make special but then is left by the person.
It is the centaur's poison, given to Heracles' wife with the lie that it will help her keep him, that eventually does him in. So, while the myth of Perseus points us to the father entering before Andromeda is saved, the myth of Heracles points to the father's triumph and the failure of the ideal, but with the inferiority of the woman who would need to use magic to hang on to her beloved.
The sense of inferiority after the failure of the ideal (i.e. the mother desire for an adult and not a child) is denied and externalized onto woman as such, once knowledge of sexual difference is attained.
If we take this event as traumatic for the object narcissist we have a repetition-compulsion as detailed in Narcissistic Object Choice in Women by Annie Reich. The narcissist idealizes the other but then when her friends or the authorities in her life don't idealize him too she quickly "falls out of love".
Again, we often find both the narcissistic and masochistic in the same individual and an interesting compromise formation between the two positions. There is also always a social and sexual side and I hope to explore them more later, in relation to Freud's earlier sexual studies on object choice.
Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds (p.22).
I've posted before on the myths of Heracles and Perseus and believe that the period of development which these myths cover also generates a few interesting repetition-compulsions.
The basic outlines of the myths are
1. child left alone with the mother (manifest in Perseus, latent in Heracles)
2. instinctual renunciation of sexual impulses and formation of ideal of excellence or gift-giving
3. Heracles performs his labours and Perseus kills Medusa
after these successes it seems like the inevitable failing of the ideal (i.e. it not being enough to be the desire of the mother) is not portrayed but the appearance of the father next shows the ideal failed and the ego split for the emergence of a new relation
the child in the failure of the ideal is left with self-hate or abandonment so the transcription of power to the father (the penis) is to pull oneself out of this depression.
4. There is the entrance of the father who is denigrated in Heracles. He appears as a centaur who tries to rape Heracles' wife. In Perseus there is a great sea serpent protecting Andromeda which Perseus kills.
This time Heracles is manifest but not everything, of course, is spelled out in the myth. The mother puts down the 'name of the father' and grooms the child to be 'special': it is good or belongs among the good in some way and the father is bad or is among the bad.
In Perseus there would be a reversal of roles. The masochist who was abandoned by the mother and who waited for a father who did not come or showed no interest is saved by, must return to, the mother.
In both these instances the penis is taken from the father to create a phallic mother.
Obviously this is still before the important and definite knowledge of sexual difference.
In the Perseus myth after he saves Andromeda and is going to marry her there is a return of her fiance Phineus who Perseus turns to stone with the medusa head. Andromeda being promised to another and the return of her fiance relates the castration of the mother (who had rescued the masochist)and the overcoming of this potentially traumatic event for the masochist.
If we follow the pattern of instinctual renunciation to drive or ideal and then to its failure, then what appears after the failure is self-pity which can be denied and externalized onto the mother. This gives us the situation in which the hysteric (of the subject masochist type) can't end a relationship with the person she had once idealized. She can't make a clean break from him or her because of the ties of pity (which is really her own self-pity; she'd be hurting herself to leave).
The repetition, as shown in the myth, can be enacted from the reverse side and the masochist can find a helpless waif and seek to save her and get her back on her feet at which point she leaves her rescuer and moves on (although the rescuer might lose interest too once the other is more stable or become upset because she doesn't see how hard things are for him- doesn't pity him in a sense).
With Heracles we have the repetition of the narcissist in terms of idealization and debasement. The narcissist idealizes a person, who he believes will make him special and help him find his hidden power but soon sees that this other person has some human frailties and won't form him and pay him the tribute that he deserves (he or she is found to be castrated) and he then turns on them. In the reverse enactment the narcissist seeks, as Freud mentioned above, to find a protege to groom and make special but then is left by the person.
It is the centaur's poison, given to Heracles' wife with the lie that it will help her keep him, that eventually does him in. So, while the myth of Perseus points us to the father entering before Andromeda is saved, the myth of Heracles points to the father's triumph and the failure of the ideal, but with the inferiority of the woman who would need to use magic to hang on to her beloved.
The sense of inferiority after the failure of the ideal (i.e. the mother desire for an adult and not a child) is denied and externalized onto woman as such, once knowledge of sexual difference is attained.
If we take this event as traumatic for the object narcissist we have a repetition-compulsion as detailed in Narcissistic Object Choice in Women by Annie Reich. The narcissist idealizes the other but then when her friends or the authorities in her life don't idealize him too she quickly "falls out of love".
Again, we often find both the narcissistic and masochistic in the same individual and an interesting compromise formation between the two positions. There is also always a social and sexual side and I hope to explore them more later, in relation to Freud's earlier sexual studies on object choice.
Friday, November 25, 2011
paranoia- narcisstic and masochistic
If my designations between subject and object narcissism and subject and object masochism is more than just a parlor trick then it should have some bearing on psychopathology.
Recently I noticed a difference in paranoia amongst some patients. The first group who act like masochists and are very concerned with love, kindness, and are very sensitive to the lack of love they receive have a narcissistic paranoia. It is narcissistic in that they have great intelligence or beauty and that other people either interfere with their power or implicitly because powerful people are interested in them then they must be powerful.
The other group behaves narcissistically in that they are aloof, think that they are very interesting to others, and interested in talking about important names. Their paranoia involves a sense of feeling deceived by others, feeling that some other person can really know about them and what they have done,and/or there is some lie in their family or perpetuated in their milieu and some mastermind behind it.
Recently I noticed a difference in paranoia amongst some patients. The first group who act like masochists and are very concerned with love, kindness, and are very sensitive to the lack of love they receive have a narcissistic paranoia. It is narcissistic in that they have great intelligence or beauty and that other people either interfere with their power or implicitly because powerful people are interested in them then they must be powerful.
The other group behaves narcissistically in that they are aloof, think that they are very interesting to others, and interested in talking about important names. Their paranoia involves a sense of feeling deceived by others, feeling that some other person can really know about them and what they have done,and/or there is some lie in their family or perpetuated in their milieu and some mastermind behind it.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Psychoanalytic basics- the drive
Note: I've kept the original "instinct" of the translation in the quotations but it is always drive. In the SE when Freud actually used instinct there is a footnote.
update: I'm currently only referring to instances of aggression and affection as drives and the epistemophillic and other ego forms of drives here I now understand to be primitive forms of ego ideals.
Freud’s positions on the drives became more complex and he began to introduce object relations as important for the psyche. The ego ideal for example was the internalization of the parents in On Narcissism and he writes soon after:
It is not our belief that a person's libidinal interests are from the first in opposition to his self-preservative interests; on the contrary, the ego endeavours at every stage to remain in harmony with its sexual organization as it is at the time and to fit itself into it. The succession of the different phases of libidinal development probably follows a prescribed programme. But the possibility cannot be rejected that this course of events can be influenced by the ego, and we may expect equally to find a certain parallelism, a certain correspondence, between the developmental phases of the ego and the libido; indeed a disturbance of that correspondence might provide a pathogenic factor (Freud, p.351-2 –Introductory Lecture XXII)
Freud’s mature position however is not one of instincts or object relations but the two combined in what he calls instinctual renunciation.
Now a case may arise in which the ego abstains from satisfying the instinct in view of external obstacles—namely, if it perceives that the action in question would provoke a serious danger to the ego. An abstention from satisfaction of this kind, the renunciation of an instinct on account of an external hindrance—or, as we say, in obedience to the reality principle—is not pleasurable in any event. The renunciation of the instinct would lead to a lasting tension owing to unpleasure, if it were not possible to reduce the strength of the instinct itself by displacements of energy. Instinctual renunciation can, however, also be imposed for other reasons, which we correctly describe as internal. In the course of an individual's development a portion of the inhibiting forces in the external world are internalized and an agency is constructed in the ego which confronts the rest of the ego in an observing, criticizing and prohibiting sense. We call this new agency the super-ego. Thenceforward the ego, before putting to work the instinctual satisfactions demanded by the id, has to take into account not merely the dangers of the external world but also the objections of the super-ego, and it will have all the more grounds for abstaining from satisfying the instinct. But whereas instinctual renunciation, when it is for external reasons, is only unpleasurable, when it is for internal reasons, in obedience
to the super-ego, it has a different economic effect. In addition to the inevitable unpleasurablc consequences it also brings the ego a yield of pleasure—a substitutive satisfaction, as it were. The ego feels elevated; it is proud of the instinctual renunciation, as though it were a valuable achievement. (Moses and Monotheism, p.116-7)
Instinctual renunciation isn’t simply a matter of a person using his will to renounce his sexual craving. It is as the very beginning of the child’s development of mind. The super-ego is” to great extent, for Freud and Klein after him, “a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id” (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.34). Take Freud’s example of his nephew playing the fort-da game:
The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, emphasis mine, p.15).
To understand this example and put it in its proper context we have to make a few distinctions here:
1. There is a homeostatic self-preservative instinct that makes a person feel hungry, thirsty, etc. according to needs and the health of the organism.
2. There is an aggressive instinct which reacts to having too much psychic tension, but which isn’t itself a drive which has a constant force. Like the self-preservative instinct it shows up based upon another factor (i.e. depletion of nutrients or stimulation from frustration). “Instinct” Freud writes, a “continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 83).
3. In humans there is a displaceable energy in the id that is felt as an excess and comprises a pressure that can either be used in the self-preservative instinct and the motor function to go after food or the aggressive instinct. However, earlier than the genital (or phallic if you’d like) capacity for a sexual- desire for the object there are pre-sexual desires for connection with the object. This energy can also cathext a self-representation in narcissism. Freud early on calls this the sex drive with the assumption that the excess energy in the organism has come from sexuality.
This “sexuality”, since it isn’t yet sexual qua genital (i.e. penis aimed at vagina and vice versa), is excess energy that has an anaclitic relationship with the object representation. This object representation is already there in the womb since analysis has shown womb trauma and the ego differentiating from the id is paired the successive stages of refinement that this representation of the other undergoes. The earlier the trauma the more generalized the transference will be and the more severe the inhibitions in the character will be. For example, the person fearing the end of the world has retreated to an early (classically oral) stage of development in which infant’s dependence on the object representation of the mother means that being left without her is like the whole world being threatening. As the child develops more ego from the id, it will have more of a sense of objects in the world and the transference will be not to the world but say to all people; then from here to idealized people as compared to peers, and then to authority figures (i.e. from abstract to more concrete). We see this movement in mythology when the mother and father show up as the world (mother earth- Gaia and father sky-Uranus) and then leave these cosmic abstractions to have more and more personality: Cronos to Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, to the second generation gods Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Athena, to the mortal heros: Perseus, Heracles, Antigone, Oedipus, Orpheus, etc. The more particular and human the later the stage of development represented [1]. This reflects the development of the ego and the enhanced perceptual consciousness. Parallel to this characterlogical inhibitions of one’s sensations or feelings or desire would be greater the earlier it is. So, for example anhedonia would represent an early trauma and so would general affect block or people who are unable to feel aggression towards any objects. In addition, since the mind is developing, at the earliest stages general inabilities to concentrate would be the earliest traumas, while having a mind for mathematics would come later. So early on it is body (ie. affect, pleasure, or aggression) that is affected or mind (adhd, alexithymia, bad at math, no receptivity to feeling states of others) while at later stages of secondary narcissism it is not the mind but the ‘image’ one wants to have before others and not the body but sexuality which will show the trauma and characterological adaptations.
4. Taking the fort-da game as a template the excess id energy is used to form a
primitive or narcissistic object-cathexis, that object cathexis because of fear or because of too much stimulation (as Freud wrote above) is given up and instinctually renounced. It is that renunciation of the object-cathexis which turns into a drive in which there is a constant pressure that aims at an object that is forever lost (i.e. the representation of the mother) and seeks to displace itself on substitute objects (in this case the binary functions of words here-gone, up-down, left-right, etc.) [2]. This will be a life-long pressure on the individual to towards language acquisition (as we’ll see Klein calls it the epistemophillic drive). However, the child who is so driven is also hoping that in satisfying the drive that it will bring it closer to its mother, but the child will necessarily have to be frustrated again. It is here that the child feels aggression towards its mother and that “aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed towards his own ego” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.123). The aggression towards the ego splits it and it is through that splitting that the ego is developed. On one hand the split will mean that there is new way in which perceptual consciousness will function and take the caregiver as an object later, and on the other hand, that a narcissistic or primitive superego will cause anxiety with the failing of the drive.
Every language-speaking individual goes through this stage, dynamically, but economically and genetically it is only with a fixation of aggression (i.e. the child encounters a lot of frustration in relation to mother while driven to attain the ideal of the drive, and this aggression itself becomes over-stimulating and has to be split off to form a fixation). This is where we truly have an aggressive drive, but as long as it’s channeled into the drive created from instinctual renunciation it is serving an ego syntonic goal. It’s only when it is defused from the ideal of the drive that it returns as superego suffering or as goal-less aggression [3].
The importance difference here is that the average person will be driven towards language acquisition (i.e. making further binary distinctions) but the person with the fixation will have it as a major part of their character. However, there is no doubt an adaptational factor in which the pleasure in language is related to anxieties related to interacting in other ways. The “language nerd” who enjoys learning has social deficiencies and awkwardness in sports which show that the cathexis of language is at the cost of the relation to his own body (soma-psyche) or his body in relation to others). The latter also means that the person will have a greater likelihood of losing their ideal if they encounter a lot of frustration later and both internal and external pressures are at work (as opposed to the person without fixation who mostly has to worry about external pressures, though he can also lose the ideal as well).
This is the format which Klein follows. Her early Oedipus complex makes complete sense if we see the father as language itself (jealousy of the mother speaking and giving her attention to others when the child can’t use language yet) [4]. Klein talks about what I’ve been calling the binary of language acquisition ideal as the epistemophillic drive. She writes:
The early connection between the epistemophillic impulse and sadism is very important for the whole of mental development. This instinct, roused by the striving of the Oedipus tendencies, as first mainly concerns itself with the mother’s womb, which is assumed to be the scene of all sexual processes and developments. The child is still dominated by the anal-sadistic libido-position which impels him to wish to appropriate the contents of the womb. He thus begins to be curious about what it contains, what it is like, etc. So the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one another and at the same time with the sense of guilt aroused by the incipient Oedipus conflict. This significant connection ushers in a phase of development in both sexes which is of vital importance, hitherto no sufficiently recognized. It consists of a very early identification with the mother. 169-70 Early Stages of The Oedipus Complex
“the epistemophilic impulse arising and co-existing with sadism [whose object is] is the mother’s body with its phantasied contents” 26 The Importance of Symbol Formation
“Thus what had brought symbol-formation to a standstill was the dread of what would be done to him (particularly by the father’s penis) after he had penetrated into the mother’s body. Moreover, his defences against his destructive impulses proves to be a fundamental impediment to his development. He was absolutely incapable of any act of aggression, and the basis of this incapacity was clearly indicated at a very early period in his refusal to bite up food… the defense against the sadistic impulses directed against the mother’s body and its contents— impulses connected with phantasies of coitus— had resulted in the cessation of fantasies and the stand-still of symbol formation. Dick’s further development had come to grief because he could not bring into phantasy the sadistic relation to the mother’s body. 29-30 The Importance of Symbol Formation
…the deeper insight was the result of an advance in the development of his ego which followed from this particular piece of analysis of his threatening super-ego. For, as we know from our experience with children and with very early cases, analysis of the early stages of super-ego formation promotes the development of the ego by lessening the sadism of the superego and the id. 213 A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition
Freud is talking about drives which are ego syntonic and are aimed at lost objects that will never be recaptured. He captures this best in talking about the drive of perfection:
What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, ‘Presses ever forward unsubdued.’. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal. (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, emphasis mine, p. 42).
Freud never replaced the simple schema of the sex drive resting on the self-preservative drive to form fixations based upon the pleasure of the organ (the eye, mouth, etc.) in a formal and total way (as shown in his later works). Thus we still have a problem of how to conceive of these bodily or organ zones and the pleasure which they ultimately can give.
Firstly, I want to say that if Freud was right about the pleasure of these zones then we should find polymorphisms in animals who similarly must derived their ego qua perceptual-consciousness system out of the id through the same dynamic process of instinctual renunciations and the splitting of the ego. Instead we find that animals don’t have polymorphic pleasure until very late in the evolutionary chain in Bonobos:
Perhaps the bonobo's most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. One female facing another clings with arms and legs to a partner that, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rub their genital swellings laterally together, emitting grins and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experiences. (Laboratory experiments on stump- tailed macaques have demonstrated that women are not the only female primates capable of physiological orgasm.)
Male bonobos, too, may engage in pseudocopulation but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. They also practice so-called penis-fencing, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together.
The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards. De Waal, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’.
In this sense it is clear that the oral and other zones are receiving a displacement upwards from below from the new emerging genital energy which these higher primates have and share with humans and chimps who are closer to humans than to other apes [5] [6]. Additionally, Fenichel and other analysts have noted that later sexuality and aggression is displaced onto the organs or bodily zones once repressed later in life. He writes
Let us begin with the first problem. When looking has become libidinized, so that the aim of the person who looks is not perception but sexual gratification, it differs from the ordinary kind of looking. Libidinal looking often takes the form of a fixed gaze, which may be said to be spastic, just as the act of running, when libidinized, is spastic. (Libidinization has the effect of impairing an ego-function.) (Fenichel, O. (1937). The Scopophilic Instinct and Identification, p.13)
Very often sadistic impulses enter into the instinctual aim of looking: one wishes to destroy something by means of looking at it, or else the act of looking itself has already acquired the significance of a modified form of destruction. Thus, for instance, the compulsion so frequently met with in women to look at the region of a man's genitals is really a modified expression of active castration-tendencies. It seems then that there are two tendencies which always or often determine the goal of the scopophilic instinct: (a) the impulse to injure the object seen, and (b) the desire to share by means of empathy in its experience.
In the sense that organs or body zones are objects of displaced sexualization or aggression there is no need to presume that they initially were pleasure-granting themselves. Fenichel comes across this problem when he writes about how the libidinization of an organ and the restriction of motility in an organ don’t go hand in hand.
It is a well-known fact that when an organ is constantly used for purposes of erotogenic pleasure, it undergoes certain somatic changes. It happens that Freud was speaking of the eyes of persons in whom the scopophilic instinct is specially developed, when he said, 'If an organ which serves two purposes overplays its erotogenic rôle, it is in general to be expected that this will not occur without alterations in its response to stimulation and in innervation', i.e. of the physiological factors in general. From the point of view of research it is probably more useful, when studying myopia, to consider the somatic changes which take place in the eye in consequence of its being used for libidinal purposes than to regard the incapacity to see at a distance as a symbol of castration. We have an additional reason for thinking that we shall discover somatic-neurotic relations when we read further in Freud: 'Neurotic disturbances of vision are related to psychogenic as, in general, are the actual neuroses to the psychoneuroses; psychogenic visual disturbances can hardly occur without neurotic disturbances, though the latter surely can without the former.'(ibid. p.50)
The question is this. We have seen that the constant use of the eye for the libidinal gratification of scopophilic impulses causes it actively to strain in the direction of objects, in order psychically to incorporate them. Is it not possible that this may finally result in a stretching of the eyeball?
We recognize that this is putting the problem very crudely. Of course an exact knowledge of the ways in which such stretching may occur would be necessary to explain why many people in whom the scopophilic instinct is peculiarly strong are not in the least short-sighted. There is no difficulty about the converse fact, namely, that many short-sighted people (often those in whom the symptom is most pronounced) show no sign of a marked scopophilic tendency. There is no reason to suppose that every case of myopia is psychogenic. And, while the stretching of the eyeball may sometimes be due to the attempt to incorporate objects at the bidding of scopophilic impulses, in other cases the origin of the disability is undoubtedly surely somatic. (ibid. p.33-4) Fenichel, O. (1937). The Scopophilic Instinct and Identification
Fenichel can’t have it both ways here, and say that scopophillia has a psychogenic cause while the tense musculature that causes myopia is somehow constitutional. Analysis has shown that poor eyesight, asthma, and other things that have been called consitutional have been amenable to treatment (though by no way is analysis consistent enough to bill oneself as capable of curing such ailments). Rather, this problem between the short-sighted people and the scopophiliacs can be overcome if we follow Freud’s consistent line of thought and dismiss his early model of polymorphus pleasure and its fixation and simply stick to the clinical facts that these organs are libidinized later in life. There is no reason we must assume that these early zones in fact give a sexual gratification overtop of the later displacement of sexuality or aggression to them. What I have in mind is a very simple materialist concern:
In repression, repressed emotions or desires must materially be suppressed (i.e. the child most hold them back) before they can be split off from consciousness. Therefore, instead of the fixation being one of pleasure concerning the sex drive leaning on the self-preservative. It is, as I have shown, an instinctual renunciation concerning a narcissistic object-cathexis and he organ or bodily zone (mouth, anus, etc.) must be suppressed to repress anger or out of fear of the caregiver. It is these suppressing muscles which can leave the eyes, for example, near sighted but not necessarily mean they are libidinized. Scopophillia would come from the repression of later sexuality which is displaced onto the tense muscles which are the remnants of the original suppression.
This dialectical materialist stance (as compared to the idealist stance which ignores the physiological suppression involved in repression and doesn’t take the body to be as dynamic as the psyche) leads us to a place that many analysts are fearful of going. It sets the body, as I’ve shown, in a equal or parallel relation to the mind and makes salient that characterology can also be proposed based upon the body of an individual and that body-psychotherapy as a form of working with repression as it shows up in the body becomes a theoretically justified option. There have been many body-based disciplines (yoga, mindfulness, tai chi, etc.) throughout history and there have been many characterologies which deal with the body (Ayruveda, Kretschmer: schizothymic, cyclothymic, Sheldon and ectomorphs, endomorphs, mesomorphs, on to Wilhelm Reich (and his students Alexander Lowen, Charles Kelly, John Pierrakos etc). and their body-based characterologies.
To some extent, the question of sublimation rests on the muscular constrictions which represent the repression of sensations, feelings, desires. The singer, for example, might have a tense throat which she compensates for by developing an increased ability. Body-psychotherapists note that ballerinas have some of the most rigid bodies even though, through hard work, they make them lithe and weightless at moments. So, sublimation in the most general sense should be considered as the spontaneity and surplus of expression in the pre-oedipal development (in parallel to the excess of sexuality which comes at the later phallic development). In its more particular sense, the musculature constrictions of certain zones as well as the bodily secretions of those zones (urine, saliva, feces, tears, semen, etc.) form the more particular instances of sublimation. The latter, has examples in the person with urethral erotism wanting to be around water (urine), the person with castration anxiety performing circumcisions, the person who works with clay (feces), etc.
1. I think abstract to particular is a good general rule but I also think that the story of Icarus and Deadalus, for example, in that it involves the sun, which is so general and important, means the myth is about an early form of consciousness even though humans and not the earliest gods are in it.
2.Freud is clear that the drive has an object which is not itself
“The object of the scopophillic drive… is not the eye itself; and in sadism the organic source, which is probably the muscular apparatus… points unequivocally at an object other than itself “ (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, p.132).
This object is one sense used to designate the contemporary objects with which the drive satisifies its aim, but Freud also points out that there was an original object that the drive can adhere to very closely and therefore the contemporary objects won’t be so various:
A particularly close attachment of the instinct to its object is distinguished by the term ‘fixation’. This frequently occurs at very early periods of the development of an instinct and puts an end to its mobility through its intense opposition to detachment (ibid. p.123). Thus, for example, in some men’s object-choice there might be an eerie resemblance to their mothers. Again, the key is that the drive is going after a lost object and that no contemporary object will satisfy it completely or forever.
3.And indeed the super-ego, originating as it does from the id, cannot dissociate itself from the regression and defusion of instinct which have taken place there. We cannot be surprised if it becomes harsher, unkinder and more tormenting than where development has been normal. (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, p. 115-6, emphasis mine).
4. Saying the father is language is somewhat misleading in the sense that many animals would have gone through this stage and renounced the object-cathexis to the mother as well. The child’s use of language is based upon labeling a mimetic impression at this stage and it can’t, for example, give definitions of words. When it says ‘doggy’ it doesn’t recognize it as a 4 legged mammal with a tail but perceives it based upon it’s movement pattern. Fenichel writes:
The original mode of seeing cannot be divorced from motility: there is as yet no sharp distinction between perception and ideation seeing is a piece of active behaviour by means of which one enters into the object seen. When we say that seing cannot be divorced from motility, we mean, of course (since the control of the motor function depends on the deep-seated sensibility which directs it) that the visual perception cannot be separated from kinesthetic perception; in seeing our whole body undergoes change… All primitive perception is a taking part in what is perceived (Fenichel, The Scopophillic Instinct and Identification, p.14).
So, it’s more precise to say that children, along with animals, have to deal with the mother’s lack of motility and movement. They have to learn to not move and are frustrated by the mother for her being able to relate in a way that is less frenetic or bodily based than the way they would like to relate.
5. Chimps don’t have the polymorphus perversity that bonobos do but they do have much more sophisticated sexuality than other apes in the sense that males may rape females (i.e. have sex with them with the aim of punishing them for infidelity, as opposed to just having sex with them and ignoring their resistance).
6.Of course, animals can have behaviours which don’t follow the homeostatic pleasure principle and thus show that they can endure trauma and its repetition and have syndromes or “diseases’ in which they over-eat for example. However, if it was not a displacement of a pre-genital energy that started it off in these syndromes then it should be universal in the species and not a syndrome in individual animals.
update: I'm currently only referring to instances of aggression and affection as drives and the epistemophillic and other ego forms of drives here I now understand to be primitive forms of ego ideals.
Freud’s positions on the drives became more complex and he began to introduce object relations as important for the psyche. The ego ideal for example was the internalization of the parents in On Narcissism and he writes soon after:
It is not our belief that a person's libidinal interests are from the first in opposition to his self-preservative interests; on the contrary, the ego endeavours at every stage to remain in harmony with its sexual organization as it is at the time and to fit itself into it. The succession of the different phases of libidinal development probably follows a prescribed programme. But the possibility cannot be rejected that this course of events can be influenced by the ego, and we may expect equally to find a certain parallelism, a certain correspondence, between the developmental phases of the ego and the libido; indeed a disturbance of that correspondence might provide a pathogenic factor (Freud, p.351-2 –Introductory Lecture XXII)
Freud’s mature position however is not one of instincts or object relations but the two combined in what he calls instinctual renunciation.
Now a case may arise in which the ego abstains from satisfying the instinct in view of external obstacles—namely, if it perceives that the action in question would provoke a serious danger to the ego. An abstention from satisfaction of this kind, the renunciation of an instinct on account of an external hindrance—or, as we say, in obedience to the reality principle—is not pleasurable in any event. The renunciation of the instinct would lead to a lasting tension owing to unpleasure, if it were not possible to reduce the strength of the instinct itself by displacements of energy. Instinctual renunciation can, however, also be imposed for other reasons, which we correctly describe as internal. In the course of an individual's development a portion of the inhibiting forces in the external world are internalized and an agency is constructed in the ego which confronts the rest of the ego in an observing, criticizing and prohibiting sense. We call this new agency the super-ego. Thenceforward the ego, before putting to work the instinctual satisfactions demanded by the id, has to take into account not merely the dangers of the external world but also the objections of the super-ego, and it will have all the more grounds for abstaining from satisfying the instinct. But whereas instinctual renunciation, when it is for external reasons, is only unpleasurable, when it is for internal reasons, in obedience
to the super-ego, it has a different economic effect. In addition to the inevitable unpleasurablc consequences it also brings the ego a yield of pleasure—a substitutive satisfaction, as it were. The ego feels elevated; it is proud of the instinctual renunciation, as though it were a valuable achievement. (Moses and Monotheism, p.116-7)
Instinctual renunciation isn’t simply a matter of a person using his will to renounce his sexual craving. It is as the very beginning of the child’s development of mind. The super-ego is” to great extent, for Freud and Klein after him, “a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id” (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.34). Take Freud’s example of his nephew playing the fort-da game:
The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, emphasis mine, p.15).
To understand this example and put it in its proper context we have to make a few distinctions here:
1. There is a homeostatic self-preservative instinct that makes a person feel hungry, thirsty, etc. according to needs and the health of the organism.
2. There is an aggressive instinct which reacts to having too much psychic tension, but which isn’t itself a drive which has a constant force. Like the self-preservative instinct it shows up based upon another factor (i.e. depletion of nutrients or stimulation from frustration). “Instinct” Freud writes, a “continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 83).
3. In humans there is a displaceable energy in the id that is felt as an excess and comprises a pressure that can either be used in the self-preservative instinct and the motor function to go after food or the aggressive instinct. However, earlier than the genital (or phallic if you’d like) capacity for a sexual- desire for the object there are pre-sexual desires for connection with the object. This energy can also cathext a self-representation in narcissism. Freud early on calls this the sex drive with the assumption that the excess energy in the organism has come from sexuality.
This “sexuality”, since it isn’t yet sexual qua genital (i.e. penis aimed at vagina and vice versa), is excess energy that has an anaclitic relationship with the object representation. This object representation is already there in the womb since analysis has shown womb trauma and the ego differentiating from the id is paired the successive stages of refinement that this representation of the other undergoes. The earlier the trauma the more generalized the transference will be and the more severe the inhibitions in the character will be. For example, the person fearing the end of the world has retreated to an early (classically oral) stage of development in which infant’s dependence on the object representation of the mother means that being left without her is like the whole world being threatening. As the child develops more ego from the id, it will have more of a sense of objects in the world and the transference will be not to the world but say to all people; then from here to idealized people as compared to peers, and then to authority figures (i.e. from abstract to more concrete). We see this movement in mythology when the mother and father show up as the world (mother earth- Gaia and father sky-Uranus) and then leave these cosmic abstractions to have more and more personality: Cronos to Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, to the second generation gods Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Athena, to the mortal heros: Perseus, Heracles, Antigone, Oedipus, Orpheus, etc. The more particular and human the later the stage of development represented [1]. This reflects the development of the ego and the enhanced perceptual consciousness. Parallel to this characterlogical inhibitions of one’s sensations or feelings or desire would be greater the earlier it is. So, for example anhedonia would represent an early trauma and so would general affect block or people who are unable to feel aggression towards any objects. In addition, since the mind is developing, at the earliest stages general inabilities to concentrate would be the earliest traumas, while having a mind for mathematics would come later. So early on it is body (ie. affect, pleasure, or aggression) that is affected or mind (adhd, alexithymia, bad at math, no receptivity to feeling states of others) while at later stages of secondary narcissism it is not the mind but the ‘image’ one wants to have before others and not the body but sexuality which will show the trauma and characterological adaptations.
4. Taking the fort-da game as a template the excess id energy is used to form a
primitive or narcissistic object-cathexis, that object cathexis because of fear or because of too much stimulation (as Freud wrote above) is given up and instinctually renounced. It is that renunciation of the object-cathexis which turns into a drive in which there is a constant pressure that aims at an object that is forever lost (i.e. the representation of the mother) and seeks to displace itself on substitute objects (in this case the binary functions of words here-gone, up-down, left-right, etc.) [2]. This will be a life-long pressure on the individual to towards language acquisition (as we’ll see Klein calls it the epistemophillic drive). However, the child who is so driven is also hoping that in satisfying the drive that it will bring it closer to its mother, but the child will necessarily have to be frustrated again. It is here that the child feels aggression towards its mother and that “aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed towards his own ego” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.123). The aggression towards the ego splits it and it is through that splitting that the ego is developed. On one hand the split will mean that there is new way in which perceptual consciousness will function and take the caregiver as an object later, and on the other hand, that a narcissistic or primitive superego will cause anxiety with the failing of the drive.
Every language-speaking individual goes through this stage, dynamically, but economically and genetically it is only with a fixation of aggression (i.e. the child encounters a lot of frustration in relation to mother while driven to attain the ideal of the drive, and this aggression itself becomes over-stimulating and has to be split off to form a fixation). This is where we truly have an aggressive drive, but as long as it’s channeled into the drive created from instinctual renunciation it is serving an ego syntonic goal. It’s only when it is defused from the ideal of the drive that it returns as superego suffering or as goal-less aggression [3].
The importance difference here is that the average person will be driven towards language acquisition (i.e. making further binary distinctions) but the person with the fixation will have it as a major part of their character. However, there is no doubt an adaptational factor in which the pleasure in language is related to anxieties related to interacting in other ways. The “language nerd” who enjoys learning has social deficiencies and awkwardness in sports which show that the cathexis of language is at the cost of the relation to his own body (soma-psyche) or his body in relation to others). The latter also means that the person will have a greater likelihood of losing their ideal if they encounter a lot of frustration later and both internal and external pressures are at work (as opposed to the person without fixation who mostly has to worry about external pressures, though he can also lose the ideal as well).
This is the format which Klein follows. Her early Oedipus complex makes complete sense if we see the father as language itself (jealousy of the mother speaking and giving her attention to others when the child can’t use language yet) [4]. Klein talks about what I’ve been calling the binary of language acquisition ideal as the epistemophillic drive. She writes:
The early connection between the epistemophillic impulse and sadism is very important for the whole of mental development. This instinct, roused by the striving of the Oedipus tendencies, as first mainly concerns itself with the mother’s womb, which is assumed to be the scene of all sexual processes and developments. The child is still dominated by the anal-sadistic libido-position which impels him to wish to appropriate the contents of the womb. He thus begins to be curious about what it contains, what it is like, etc. So the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one another and at the same time with the sense of guilt aroused by the incipient Oedipus conflict. This significant connection ushers in a phase of development in both sexes which is of vital importance, hitherto no sufficiently recognized. It consists of a very early identification with the mother. 169-70 Early Stages of The Oedipus Complex
“the epistemophilic impulse arising and co-existing with sadism [whose object is] is the mother’s body with its phantasied contents” 26 The Importance of Symbol Formation
“Thus what had brought symbol-formation to a standstill was the dread of what would be done to him (particularly by the father’s penis) after he had penetrated into the mother’s body. Moreover, his defences against his destructive impulses proves to be a fundamental impediment to his development. He was absolutely incapable of any act of aggression, and the basis of this incapacity was clearly indicated at a very early period in his refusal to bite up food… the defense against the sadistic impulses directed against the mother’s body and its contents— impulses connected with phantasies of coitus— had resulted in the cessation of fantasies and the stand-still of symbol formation. Dick’s further development had come to grief because he could not bring into phantasy the sadistic relation to the mother’s body. 29-30 The Importance of Symbol Formation
…the deeper insight was the result of an advance in the development of his ego which followed from this particular piece of analysis of his threatening super-ego. For, as we know from our experience with children and with very early cases, analysis of the early stages of super-ego formation promotes the development of the ego by lessening the sadism of the superego and the id. 213 A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition
Freud is talking about drives which are ego syntonic and are aimed at lost objects that will never be recaptured. He captures this best in talking about the drive of perfection:
What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, ‘Presses ever forward unsubdued.’. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal. (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, emphasis mine, p. 42).
Freud never replaced the simple schema of the sex drive resting on the self-preservative drive to form fixations based upon the pleasure of the organ (the eye, mouth, etc.) in a formal and total way (as shown in his later works). Thus we still have a problem of how to conceive of these bodily or organ zones and the pleasure which they ultimately can give.
Firstly, I want to say that if Freud was right about the pleasure of these zones then we should find polymorphisms in animals who similarly must derived their ego qua perceptual-consciousness system out of the id through the same dynamic process of instinctual renunciations and the splitting of the ego. Instead we find that animals don’t have polymorphic pleasure until very late in the evolutionary chain in Bonobos:
Perhaps the bonobo's most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. One female facing another clings with arms and legs to a partner that, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rub their genital swellings laterally together, emitting grins and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experiences. (Laboratory experiments on stump- tailed macaques have demonstrated that women are not the only female primates capable of physiological orgasm.)
Male bonobos, too, may engage in pseudocopulation but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. They also practice so-called penis-fencing, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together.
The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards. De Waal, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’.
In this sense it is clear that the oral and other zones are receiving a displacement upwards from below from the new emerging genital energy which these higher primates have and share with humans and chimps who are closer to humans than to other apes [5] [6]. Additionally, Fenichel and other analysts have noted that later sexuality and aggression is displaced onto the organs or bodily zones once repressed later in life. He writes
Let us begin with the first problem. When looking has become libidinized, so that the aim of the person who looks is not perception but sexual gratification, it differs from the ordinary kind of looking. Libidinal looking often takes the form of a fixed gaze, which may be said to be spastic, just as the act of running, when libidinized, is spastic. (Libidinization has the effect of impairing an ego-function.) (Fenichel, O. (1937). The Scopophilic Instinct and Identification, p.13)
Very often sadistic impulses enter into the instinctual aim of looking: one wishes to destroy something by means of looking at it, or else the act of looking itself has already acquired the significance of a modified form of destruction. Thus, for instance, the compulsion so frequently met with in women to look at the region of a man's genitals is really a modified expression of active castration-tendencies. It seems then that there are two tendencies which always or often determine the goal of the scopophilic instinct: (a) the impulse to injure the object seen, and (b) the desire to share by means of empathy in its experience.
In the sense that organs or body zones are objects of displaced sexualization or aggression there is no need to presume that they initially were pleasure-granting themselves. Fenichel comes across this problem when he writes about how the libidinization of an organ and the restriction of motility in an organ don’t go hand in hand.
It is a well-known fact that when an organ is constantly used for purposes of erotogenic pleasure, it undergoes certain somatic changes. It happens that Freud was speaking of the eyes of persons in whom the scopophilic instinct is specially developed, when he said, 'If an organ which serves two purposes overplays its erotogenic rôle, it is in general to be expected that this will not occur without alterations in its response to stimulation and in innervation', i.e. of the physiological factors in general. From the point of view of research it is probably more useful, when studying myopia, to consider the somatic changes which take place in the eye in consequence of its being used for libidinal purposes than to regard the incapacity to see at a distance as a symbol of castration. We have an additional reason for thinking that we shall discover somatic-neurotic relations when we read further in Freud: 'Neurotic disturbances of vision are related to psychogenic as, in general, are the actual neuroses to the psychoneuroses; psychogenic visual disturbances can hardly occur without neurotic disturbances, though the latter surely can without the former.'(ibid. p.50)
The question is this. We have seen that the constant use of the eye for the libidinal gratification of scopophilic impulses causes it actively to strain in the direction of objects, in order psychically to incorporate them. Is it not possible that this may finally result in a stretching of the eyeball?
We recognize that this is putting the problem very crudely. Of course an exact knowledge of the ways in which such stretching may occur would be necessary to explain why many people in whom the scopophilic instinct is peculiarly strong are not in the least short-sighted. There is no difficulty about the converse fact, namely, that many short-sighted people (often those in whom the symptom is most pronounced) show no sign of a marked scopophilic tendency. There is no reason to suppose that every case of myopia is psychogenic. And, while the stretching of the eyeball may sometimes be due to the attempt to incorporate objects at the bidding of scopophilic impulses, in other cases the origin of the disability is undoubtedly surely somatic. (ibid. p.33-4) Fenichel, O. (1937). The Scopophilic Instinct and Identification
Fenichel can’t have it both ways here, and say that scopophillia has a psychogenic cause while the tense musculature that causes myopia is somehow constitutional. Analysis has shown that poor eyesight, asthma, and other things that have been called consitutional have been amenable to treatment (though by no way is analysis consistent enough to bill oneself as capable of curing such ailments). Rather, this problem between the short-sighted people and the scopophiliacs can be overcome if we follow Freud’s consistent line of thought and dismiss his early model of polymorphus pleasure and its fixation and simply stick to the clinical facts that these organs are libidinized later in life. There is no reason we must assume that these early zones in fact give a sexual gratification overtop of the later displacement of sexuality or aggression to them. What I have in mind is a very simple materialist concern:
In repression, repressed emotions or desires must materially be suppressed (i.e. the child most hold them back) before they can be split off from consciousness. Therefore, instead of the fixation being one of pleasure concerning the sex drive leaning on the self-preservative. It is, as I have shown, an instinctual renunciation concerning a narcissistic object-cathexis and he organ or bodily zone (mouth, anus, etc.) must be suppressed to repress anger or out of fear of the caregiver. It is these suppressing muscles which can leave the eyes, for example, near sighted but not necessarily mean they are libidinized. Scopophillia would come from the repression of later sexuality which is displaced onto the tense muscles which are the remnants of the original suppression.
This dialectical materialist stance (as compared to the idealist stance which ignores the physiological suppression involved in repression and doesn’t take the body to be as dynamic as the psyche) leads us to a place that many analysts are fearful of going. It sets the body, as I’ve shown, in a equal or parallel relation to the mind and makes salient that characterology can also be proposed based upon the body of an individual and that body-psychotherapy as a form of working with repression as it shows up in the body becomes a theoretically justified option. There have been many body-based disciplines (yoga, mindfulness, tai chi, etc.) throughout history and there have been many characterologies which deal with the body (Ayruveda, Kretschmer: schizothymic, cyclothymic, Sheldon and ectomorphs, endomorphs, mesomorphs, on to Wilhelm Reich (and his students Alexander Lowen, Charles Kelly, John Pierrakos etc). and their body-based characterologies.
To some extent, the question of sublimation rests on the muscular constrictions which represent the repression of sensations, feelings, desires. The singer, for example, might have a tense throat which she compensates for by developing an increased ability. Body-psychotherapists note that ballerinas have some of the most rigid bodies even though, through hard work, they make them lithe and weightless at moments. So, sublimation in the most general sense should be considered as the spontaneity and surplus of expression in the pre-oedipal development (in parallel to the excess of sexuality which comes at the later phallic development). In its more particular sense, the musculature constrictions of certain zones as well as the bodily secretions of those zones (urine, saliva, feces, tears, semen, etc.) form the more particular instances of sublimation. The latter, has examples in the person with urethral erotism wanting to be around water (urine), the person with castration anxiety performing circumcisions, the person who works with clay (feces), etc.
1. I think abstract to particular is a good general rule but I also think that the story of Icarus and Deadalus, for example, in that it involves the sun, which is so general and important, means the myth is about an early form of consciousness even though humans and not the earliest gods are in it.
2.Freud is clear that the drive has an object which is not itself
“The object of the scopophillic drive… is not the eye itself; and in sadism the organic source, which is probably the muscular apparatus… points unequivocally at an object other than itself “ (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, p.132).
This object is one sense used to designate the contemporary objects with which the drive satisifies its aim, but Freud also points out that there was an original object that the drive can adhere to very closely and therefore the contemporary objects won’t be so various:
A particularly close attachment of the instinct to its object is distinguished by the term ‘fixation’. This frequently occurs at very early periods of the development of an instinct and puts an end to its mobility through its intense opposition to detachment (ibid. p.123). Thus, for example, in some men’s object-choice there might be an eerie resemblance to their mothers. Again, the key is that the drive is going after a lost object and that no contemporary object will satisfy it completely or forever.
3.And indeed the super-ego, originating as it does from the id, cannot dissociate itself from the regression and defusion of instinct which have taken place there. We cannot be surprised if it becomes harsher, unkinder and more tormenting than where development has been normal. (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, p. 115-6, emphasis mine).
4. Saying the father is language is somewhat misleading in the sense that many animals would have gone through this stage and renounced the object-cathexis to the mother as well. The child’s use of language is based upon labeling a mimetic impression at this stage and it can’t, for example, give definitions of words. When it says ‘doggy’ it doesn’t recognize it as a 4 legged mammal with a tail but perceives it based upon it’s movement pattern. Fenichel writes:
The original mode of seeing cannot be divorced from motility: there is as yet no sharp distinction between perception and ideation seeing is a piece of active behaviour by means of which one enters into the object seen. When we say that seing cannot be divorced from motility, we mean, of course (since the control of the motor function depends on the deep-seated sensibility which directs it) that the visual perception cannot be separated from kinesthetic perception; in seeing our whole body undergoes change… All primitive perception is a taking part in what is perceived (Fenichel, The Scopophillic Instinct and Identification, p.14).
So, it’s more precise to say that children, along with animals, have to deal with the mother’s lack of motility and movement. They have to learn to not move and are frustrated by the mother for her being able to relate in a way that is less frenetic or bodily based than the way they would like to relate.
5. Chimps don’t have the polymorphus perversity that bonobos do but they do have much more sophisticated sexuality than other apes in the sense that males may rape females (i.e. have sex with them with the aim of punishing them for infidelity, as opposed to just having sex with them and ignoring their resistance).
6.Of course, animals can have behaviours which don’t follow the homeostatic pleasure principle and thus show that they can endure trauma and its repetition and have syndromes or “diseases’ in which they over-eat for example. However, if it was not a displacement of a pre-genital energy that started it off in these syndromes then it should be universal in the species and not a syndrome in individual animals.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
the masochist and epistemology
I had posted earlier that I thought that the pain of the masochist is in some sense the pain of not being able to idealize the other, it is a reduction of the other. I then likened the masochist to the liberal trend in contemporary politics (liberals used to be much different in the past). I'll write a bit more on this sometime but I came across this quotation and I thought I'd share it and 2 related ones.
Nietzsche
But let us suppose, with some leniency, that it was proved that faith makes blessed (not merely desired, not merely promised by the somewhat suspicious mouth of a priest): would blessedness—or, more technically speaking, pleasure-ever be a proof of truth? This is so far from the case that it almost furnishes a counter proof; in any event, the greatest suspicion of a “truth” should arise when feelings of pleasure enter the discussion of the question “What is true?” The proof of “pleasure” is a proof of “pleasure”—nothing else: how in all the world could it be established that true judgments should give greater delight than false ones and, according to a pre-established harmony, should necessarily be followed by agreeable feelings? The experience of all severe, of all profoundly inclined, spirits teaches the opposite. At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything, to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one’s heart, that one despises “beautiful sentiments,” that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies. (Anti- 50)
the strength of spirit might be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ he would be able to stand— more clearly, to what degree it would need to be watered down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, and falsified BGE 39, WTP 1041, EH V 3
Hegel
Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. (Phen-32)
Nietzsche
But let us suppose, with some leniency, that it was proved that faith makes blessed (not merely desired, not merely promised by the somewhat suspicious mouth of a priest): would blessedness—or, more technically speaking, pleasure-ever be a proof of truth? This is so far from the case that it almost furnishes a counter proof; in any event, the greatest suspicion of a “truth” should arise when feelings of pleasure enter the discussion of the question “What is true?” The proof of “pleasure” is a proof of “pleasure”—nothing else: how in all the world could it be established that true judgments should give greater delight than false ones and, according to a pre-established harmony, should necessarily be followed by agreeable feelings? The experience of all severe, of all profoundly inclined, spirits teaches the opposite. At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything, to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one’s heart, that one despises “beautiful sentiments,” that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies. (Anti- 50)
the strength of spirit might be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ he would be able to stand— more clearly, to what degree it would need to be watered down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, and falsified BGE 39, WTP 1041, EH V 3
Hegel
Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. (Phen-32)
Thursday, November 17, 2011
feminine subject- 2 subject masochists in love
love wants to spare the person to whom it dedicates itself every feeling of being other, and consequently it is full of dissimulation and pretense of similarity, it is constantly deceiving and feigning a sameness which in reality does not exist. And this happens so instinctively that women in love deny this dissimulation and continual tender deceit and boldly assert that love makes the same (that is to say, that it performs a miracle!). – This process is simple when one party lets himself be loved and does not find it necessary to dissimulate but leave that to the other, loving party; but there is no more confused or impenetrable spectacle than that which arises when both parties are passionately in love with one another and both consequently abandon themselves and want to the same as one another... Nietzsche Dawn-211
On another note, I hope the use of feminine subject to stand for both the subject masochist and object masochist is not confusing.
On another note, I hope the use of feminine subject to stand for both the subject masochist and object masochist is not confusing.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Nietzsche and Reich
I came to psychoanalysis from philosophy, but psychoanalysis is the heir of philosophy so long as one considers Nietzsche and Marx as the last philosophers/first psychologist and sociologist.
I believe the only thing of value I really have is an instinct for what Reich calls self-regulation (genital character) or Nietzsche calls being a master (as opposed to slave).
Following this instinct (although never being able to access it for myself) I've been able to stay with what is important.
Reich writes:
The basically different attitude toward the world, toward people, toward one's own experiences which characterizes the genital character, is simple and matter-of-course. It is immediately self-evident, even to people who are structurally far different. It is a secret ideal of everyone, and is always the same even though given various names. Nobody would deny the desirability of the capacity to love, or of sexual potency... Nevertheless, no other part of my theory has endangered my work and existence as much as the contention that self-regulation is possible, that it does exist naturally, and that it might conceivably become universal. Function of the Orgasm, p.158-9
And tell me that Nietzsche isn't talking about the same thing.
to have to fight the instincts— that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct (TI, p.479)
Carved from wood that is hard, gentle, and fragrant… he enjoys the taste of what is wholesome for him; his pleasure in anything ceases when the bounds of the wholesome are crossed wtp, p. 520 [1003]
The most spiritual men feel the stimulus and charm of sensuous things in a way that other men— those with ‘fleshy hearts’— cannot possibly imagine and ought not to imagine: they are sensualists in the best faith. Because they accord the senses a more fundamental value… the strength and power of the senses— this is the essential thing in a well-constituted and complete man: the splendid ‘animal’ must be given first— what could any ‘humanization’ matter otherwise! Wtp, p.537-8 [1045]
The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy, and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; – if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless 157 (daybreak)
a well-turned-out human being, a ‘happy one,’ must perform certain actions and shrinks instinctively from other actions; he carries the order, which he represents physiologically, into his relations with other human beings and things. In a formula; his virtue is the effect of his happiness (TI, p.493)
“[The noble] as rounded men replete with energy and therefore necessarily active, that happiness should not be sundered from action- being active was with them a necessarily a part of happiness... all very much the opposite of ‘happiness’ at the level of the impotent, the oppressed, and those in whom poisonous and inimical feelings are festering, with whom it appears as essentially narcotic, drug, rest, peace, ‘sabbath,’ slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively” GM 475
“The emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man- how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses- he ‘deserves’ all three... this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct. What will he call this dominating instinct, supposing he feels the need to give it a name? The answer is beyond doubt: this sovereign man calls it his conscience” GM 496
“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long- that is the sign of the strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget... here alone genuine ‘love on one’s ‘enemies’ is possible- supposing it to be possible at all on earth” GM 475
I believe the only thing of value I really have is an instinct for what Reich calls self-regulation (genital character) or Nietzsche calls being a master (as opposed to slave).
Following this instinct (although never being able to access it for myself) I've been able to stay with what is important.
Reich writes:
The basically different attitude toward the world, toward people, toward one's own experiences which characterizes the genital character, is simple and matter-of-course. It is immediately self-evident, even to people who are structurally far different. It is a secret ideal of everyone, and is always the same even though given various names. Nobody would deny the desirability of the capacity to love, or of sexual potency... Nevertheless, no other part of my theory has endangered my work and existence as much as the contention that self-regulation is possible, that it does exist naturally, and that it might conceivably become universal. Function of the Orgasm, p.158-9
And tell me that Nietzsche isn't talking about the same thing.
to have to fight the instincts— that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct (TI, p.479)
Carved from wood that is hard, gentle, and fragrant… he enjoys the taste of what is wholesome for him; his pleasure in anything ceases when the bounds of the wholesome are crossed wtp, p. 520 [1003]
The most spiritual men feel the stimulus and charm of sensuous things in a way that other men— those with ‘fleshy hearts’— cannot possibly imagine and ought not to imagine: they are sensualists in the best faith. Because they accord the senses a more fundamental value… the strength and power of the senses— this is the essential thing in a well-constituted and complete man: the splendid ‘animal’ must be given first— what could any ‘humanization’ matter otherwise! Wtp, p.537-8 [1045]
The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy, and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; – if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless 157 (daybreak)
a well-turned-out human being, a ‘happy one,’ must perform certain actions and shrinks instinctively from other actions; he carries the order, which he represents physiologically, into his relations with other human beings and things. In a formula; his virtue is the effect of his happiness (TI, p.493)
“[The noble] as rounded men replete with energy and therefore necessarily active, that happiness should not be sundered from action- being active was with them a necessarily a part of happiness... all very much the opposite of ‘happiness’ at the level of the impotent, the oppressed, and those in whom poisonous and inimical feelings are festering, with whom it appears as essentially narcotic, drug, rest, peace, ‘sabbath,’ slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively” GM 475
“The emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man- how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses- he ‘deserves’ all three... this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct. What will he call this dominating instinct, supposing he feels the need to give it a name? The answer is beyond doubt: this sovereign man calls it his conscience” GM 496
“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long- that is the sign of the strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget... here alone genuine ‘love on one’s ‘enemies’ is possible- supposing it to be possible at all on earth” GM 475
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
psychoanalysis is dead
I was thinking about the last post and how Nietzsche's "God is dead" is meant in the opposite way. Nietzsche meant that no longer can the highest minds believe in God and make knowledge serve him as a basic postulate. However, "the rabble" have continued to believe in God or flatter themselves for being agnostic and "educated". Psychoanalysis is dead means that it is dead to the people but that the highest minds see it as a challenge, a temptation, as something heroic.
Monday, November 14, 2011
psychoanalysis is dead
There's no use in trying to fight for the re-acceptance of psychoanalysis in the universities. In the same way, no communist party could ever gain popularity now. If psychoanalysis and Marxism will do anything it is because they will create a new social order. It will exist within the current social order, secretly, while everyone else is distracted by reality. Reality conceived of course, by the entertainment they passively watch after they return from jobs they don't like.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
the narcissist and masochist- a summary
In Freud's middle period he elaborates the coordinates for two major poles in the personality which subsequent analysts have taken up as the basis for masculine and feminine subjectivity in his designation of narcissistic and object libido:
“We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of being in love, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis; while we have the opposite condition in the paranoic's phantasy (or self-perception) of the ‘end of the world’ (On Narcissism, p.76).
Freud’s use of the paranoiac as an example of narcissism illustrates how his delusional conspiracies show him to be the interest of powerful people or groups, like the CIA and the pope and therefore powerful himself. The key to narcissism is the uniqueness of self. Whether we call it narcissistic libido or phallic jouissance the defense of paranoia shows that ‘the will’ is attached to expressing one’s uniqueness and one isn’t free to not will. If one tries to get rid of ‘the will’ it will return in the form of paranoid attacks. The uniqueness of the narcissist is tied to domination, control, and power. In contrast, object-cathexis is synonymous with the masochistic or feminine pole of the personality. Uniqueness belongs to the Other and devotion, self-sacrifice, and gratitude are words that describe the relation of the masochist. In On Narcissism Freud claims that it is usually men that have a true object cathexis. However, many analysts have disagreed with him and see it as the strength of the feminine. For example, Edith Jacobson writes “In fact, extreme idealization of women, which Freud considers a characteristically masculine attitude, can in my experience be observed more frequently in men who have strong, unconscious female identifications”. (The Self and the Object World, p.120).
Karen Horney also ties masochistic object cathexis and uniqueness being in the Other with a general trend of self-effacement. She writes:
there are taboos on all that is presumptuous, selfish, and aggressive… [and they] constitute a crippling check on the person’s narcissism, his capacity for fighting and for defending himself, [and] his self-interest— on anything that might accrue to his growth or his self-esteem (Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, p.219).
In a simple way all of this can be captured by saying that the masochist feels he or she must be “nice”. To be nice means that one shouldn’t put others out and in fact should share with them and make them comfortable and happy if possible. One shouldn’t use vulgar language, one shouldn’t draw attention to any achievement, and one shouldn’t make claims upon others. I don’t think that object-cathexis and self-effacement must go together but I understand them as masochistic features. Similarly, narcissism and ‘blame’ seem to go together. In an interesting article Bela Grunberger relates racism to the narcissistic ego ideal which would seem to put it on par with the masochistic ego ideal of self-effacement:
The anti-Semite's profound satisfaction flows from the fact that his ego is in perfect harmony with his ego-ideal. Having made his projection onto the Jew, he has found his Manichaean paradise: all that is bad is thereafter on one side—the side of the Jew—and all that is good on the other side where he himself is. The photo carries the proof. The ego-ideal is narcissistic, and the satisfaction is that of perfect narcissistic integrity recovered through the projection on to the Jew (Grunberger, The anti-semite and the Oedipus Complex, p. 382).
The masochist seems to be taking something away from the Other with her enjoyment while the narcissist feels that someone is enjoying more than his share. The narcissist who isn’t realizing his ideal of power or dominance seems to dwell on those who have got something that they don’t deserve or those who are taking away what the narcissist deserves. A further way to conceptualize these two poles comes from the basic political stance of liberal and conservative. The liberal feels that people are basically good and deserve help while the conservative feels they are basically bad and don’t deserve help. The liberal is careful not to offend any minority groups while the conservative often demonizes some of them.
Freud goes further and complicates the narcissistic and masochistic positions by adding an object position to the already elaborated subject position of will and love. In the narcissistic position he writes:
The sexual ideal may enter into an interesting auxiliary relation to the ego ideal. It may be used for substitutive satisfaction where narcissistic satisfaction encounters real hindrances. In that case a person will love in conformity with the narcissistic type of object-choice, will love what he once was and no longer is, or else what possesses the excellences which he never had at all. The formula parallel to the one there stated runs thus: what possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved. (On Narcissism, p.101).
The narcissistic object position means that one seeks to find a narcissistic subject who is successful, has power, or is dominant and by possessing them one becomes more valuable. Lacan elaborates on this to say that the object narcissist wants to be the cause of desire of the subject narcissist:
[Regarding] woman… in her stature as an object offered up to desire… we should not be surprised that the narcissism of desire immediately latches onto the narcissism of the ego that is its prototype (Ecrits, p. 617).
By causing desire in the man a woman can control him. Furthermore, it is also common to say that someone can be narcissistic about their appearance or beauty and be very active in trying to appear fashionable and “hot”. Similarly, one can be masochistic subject in sacrificing one’s own growth and development for assisting the other in expressing his uniqueness, or by seeking to be liked by others or having their approval. Freud points to the object position of the masochist when he writes:
loving—being loved, corresponds exactly to the transformation from activity to passivity.… according as the object or the subject is replaced by an extraneous one, what results is the active aim of loving or the passive one of being loved—the latter remaining near to narcissism. (Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, p.133)
Freud says that being loved is “near to narcissism” but again one must pay attention to the phenomenology. Just because a person talks a lot and seems to draw a lot of attention it doesn’t mean that they are establishing their power or dominance. Rather, as the object narcissist wants to be the cause of desire in the subject, the object masochist wants to the cause of interest, delight, or fascination in the subject. Here qualities like charm, endearment, exuberance, or spiritual and depth are in order.
In sum:
Narcissism:
Subject- the will Object- cause of desire with the 3rd term of ‘blame’ or jealousy
Masochism:
Subject- love Object- cause of delight with the 3rd term of ‘self-effacement’
It should be kept in mind that everyone is dynamically bisexual and it’s always a matter of emphasis on one side or another when one is economically called narcissistic or masochistic. Infantile fixations provide the foundation for one’s characterlogical or economic functioning but latter identifications with one’s parents or the values of one’s culture will also influence the outlets of pleasure and power.
In order to flesh out these two positions of narcissistic ego libido and masochistic object libido with their subject and object positions I have found it valuable to use the second generation gods in Greek mythology. I will add the further division between schizoid and neurotic in so far as schizoid represents a tendency to be more attached to the mind and have a metaphysical bent and where neurotic emphasizes a tendency to be more embodied and concerned with property. The schizoid is closer to the abstractions of math, the representations of art, or is preoccupied with things of another world, while the neurotic has more group identifications (i.e. being American, a Christian, etc.), sentimentalism concerning the family and children, or the equation of self-worth with money, recognition in groups, and family.
In narcissism we have
subject
neurotic: Ares the physically strong and competitive god of war who is most often portrayed as a man in the prime of his life. He seeks glory in conquest and his excellence is clearly in battle but today it might be better to look at the businessman who goes to the gym.
schizoid: Hephaestus the God of metalworking and stone masonry which shows intellectual dominance as opposed to the physical dominance of Ares and whose body is crippled. His excellence is in his inventions and his trade and today it might be better to look at innovation in technology rather than carpentry.
object
neurotic: Aphrodite the Goddess of beauty and sexual desire. She is described as physically beautiful, sensuous, and seductive.
schizoid: Athena the Goddess of handicrafts and wisdom which shows that her interest is in secondary finery (beautiful adornments) as opposed to the physical embodiment of sexuality represented by Aphrodite. Additionally, with the focus on the mind Athena would stand back and observe desire between people, as compared to Aphrodite who lives it out, thus giving us a motivation for wisdom. This wisdom would be put to good use not just in unmasking potential rivals in love relationships but also in understanding the psychology of the enemy your state is at war with, and so I think Athena’s other facet, as the goddess of war, makes sense.
In masochism we have
subject
neurotic: Artemis the goddess of childbirth and the hunt whose interests in this masculine occupation represents an identification with a man. Her status as virgin would indicate that she loved her father, imitated him, and has remain devoted to him ever since. Freud writes: “Analysis very often shows that a little girl, after she has had to relinquish her father as a love-object, will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify herself with her father (that is, with the object which has been lost), instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition—whatever that may consist in—is strong enough” (The Ego and the Id, p.32).
schizoid: Hermes the messenger god of cunning wiles whose devotion is shown to an ideology or group as opposed to the identification with an individual illustrated in Artemis. He is also the psychopomp who delivers souls to Hades and this might bespeak a general kindness to people over top of any group allegiance.
object
neurotic: Dionysus the god of wine, parties, and festivals who in his merriment illustrates himself to be the cause of joy and love in others. I think most people know the outgoing social type who tells stories and makes jokes and though he talks a lot it isn't about how great he is (i.e. is narcissistic). For a man we might not say he's endearing and exuberant but spontaneous and fun would cover both sexes. What I want to capture is that Dionysus, in one facet, could be seen as a ‘people person’ in the archetype of the story-telling drunkard, even though other facets of his personality are very dark.
schizoid: Apollo or the god of music, healing, prophecies, and poetry who illustrates a more esoteric ability to gain the approval of others and touch something deeper in them than the Dionysian approach of merriment. Here we have someone who wants to guess your astrological sign or read your palm or write you a song to gain your approval or love. Mediated through ideas or art the Appollonian seeks to touch something in your core. In contrast to Athena, and her wisdom through reasoning things out, Apollo is intuition and energies.
These gods, of course, are over-determined and in this interpretation certain parts of their character are emphasized over others but this should help to illustrate the schema. I also think it is a strength of my interpretation that Hermes, Dionysus, and Apollo are mostly represented as beardless youths as opposed to Ares and Hephaestus who are represented as men.
“We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of being in love, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis; while we have the opposite condition in the paranoic's phantasy (or self-perception) of the ‘end of the world’ (On Narcissism, p.76).
Freud’s use of the paranoiac as an example of narcissism illustrates how his delusional conspiracies show him to be the interest of powerful people or groups, like the CIA and the pope and therefore powerful himself. The key to narcissism is the uniqueness of self. Whether we call it narcissistic libido or phallic jouissance the defense of paranoia shows that ‘the will’ is attached to expressing one’s uniqueness and one isn’t free to not will. If one tries to get rid of ‘the will’ it will return in the form of paranoid attacks. The uniqueness of the narcissist is tied to domination, control, and power. In contrast, object-cathexis is synonymous with the masochistic or feminine pole of the personality. Uniqueness belongs to the Other and devotion, self-sacrifice, and gratitude are words that describe the relation of the masochist. In On Narcissism Freud claims that it is usually men that have a true object cathexis. However, many analysts have disagreed with him and see it as the strength of the feminine. For example, Edith Jacobson writes “In fact, extreme idealization of women, which Freud considers a characteristically masculine attitude, can in my experience be observed more frequently in men who have strong, unconscious female identifications”. (The Self and the Object World, p.120).
Karen Horney also ties masochistic object cathexis and uniqueness being in the Other with a general trend of self-effacement. She writes:
there are taboos on all that is presumptuous, selfish, and aggressive… [and they] constitute a crippling check on the person’s narcissism, his capacity for fighting and for defending himself, [and] his self-interest— on anything that might accrue to his growth or his self-esteem (Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, p.219).
In a simple way all of this can be captured by saying that the masochist feels he or she must be “nice”. To be nice means that one shouldn’t put others out and in fact should share with them and make them comfortable and happy if possible. One shouldn’t use vulgar language, one shouldn’t draw attention to any achievement, and one shouldn’t make claims upon others. I don’t think that object-cathexis and self-effacement must go together but I understand them as masochistic features. Similarly, narcissism and ‘blame’ seem to go together. In an interesting article Bela Grunberger relates racism to the narcissistic ego ideal which would seem to put it on par with the masochistic ego ideal of self-effacement:
The anti-Semite's profound satisfaction flows from the fact that his ego is in perfect harmony with his ego-ideal. Having made his projection onto the Jew, he has found his Manichaean paradise: all that is bad is thereafter on one side—the side of the Jew—and all that is good on the other side where he himself is. The photo carries the proof. The ego-ideal is narcissistic, and the satisfaction is that of perfect narcissistic integrity recovered through the projection on to the Jew (Grunberger, The anti-semite and the Oedipus Complex, p. 382).
The masochist seems to be taking something away from the Other with her enjoyment while the narcissist feels that someone is enjoying more than his share. The narcissist who isn’t realizing his ideal of power or dominance seems to dwell on those who have got something that they don’t deserve or those who are taking away what the narcissist deserves. A further way to conceptualize these two poles comes from the basic political stance of liberal and conservative. The liberal feels that people are basically good and deserve help while the conservative feels they are basically bad and don’t deserve help. The liberal is careful not to offend any minority groups while the conservative often demonizes some of them.
Freud goes further and complicates the narcissistic and masochistic positions by adding an object position to the already elaborated subject position of will and love. In the narcissistic position he writes:
The sexual ideal may enter into an interesting auxiliary relation to the ego ideal. It may be used for substitutive satisfaction where narcissistic satisfaction encounters real hindrances. In that case a person will love in conformity with the narcissistic type of object-choice, will love what he once was and no longer is, or else what possesses the excellences which he never had at all. The formula parallel to the one there stated runs thus: what possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved. (On Narcissism, p.101).
The narcissistic object position means that one seeks to find a narcissistic subject who is successful, has power, or is dominant and by possessing them one becomes more valuable. Lacan elaborates on this to say that the object narcissist wants to be the cause of desire of the subject narcissist:
[Regarding] woman… in her stature as an object offered up to desire… we should not be surprised that the narcissism of desire immediately latches onto the narcissism of the ego that is its prototype (Ecrits, p. 617).
By causing desire in the man a woman can control him. Furthermore, it is also common to say that someone can be narcissistic about their appearance or beauty and be very active in trying to appear fashionable and “hot”. Similarly, one can be masochistic subject in sacrificing one’s own growth and development for assisting the other in expressing his uniqueness, or by seeking to be liked by others or having their approval. Freud points to the object position of the masochist when he writes:
loving—being loved, corresponds exactly to the transformation from activity to passivity.… according as the object or the subject is replaced by an extraneous one, what results is the active aim of loving or the passive one of being loved—the latter remaining near to narcissism. (Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, p.133)
Freud says that being loved is “near to narcissism” but again one must pay attention to the phenomenology. Just because a person talks a lot and seems to draw a lot of attention it doesn’t mean that they are establishing their power or dominance. Rather, as the object narcissist wants to be the cause of desire in the subject, the object masochist wants to the cause of interest, delight, or fascination in the subject. Here qualities like charm, endearment, exuberance, or spiritual and depth are in order.
In sum:
Narcissism:
Subject- the will Object- cause of desire with the 3rd term of ‘blame’ or jealousy
Masochism:
Subject- love Object- cause of delight with the 3rd term of ‘self-effacement’
It should be kept in mind that everyone is dynamically bisexual and it’s always a matter of emphasis on one side or another when one is economically called narcissistic or masochistic. Infantile fixations provide the foundation for one’s characterlogical or economic functioning but latter identifications with one’s parents or the values of one’s culture will also influence the outlets of pleasure and power.
In order to flesh out these two positions of narcissistic ego libido and masochistic object libido with their subject and object positions I have found it valuable to use the second generation gods in Greek mythology. I will add the further division between schizoid and neurotic in so far as schizoid represents a tendency to be more attached to the mind and have a metaphysical bent and where neurotic emphasizes a tendency to be more embodied and concerned with property. The schizoid is closer to the abstractions of math, the representations of art, or is preoccupied with things of another world, while the neurotic has more group identifications (i.e. being American, a Christian, etc.), sentimentalism concerning the family and children, or the equation of self-worth with money, recognition in groups, and family.
In narcissism we have
subject
neurotic: Ares the physically strong and competitive god of war who is most often portrayed as a man in the prime of his life. He seeks glory in conquest and his excellence is clearly in battle but today it might be better to look at the businessman who goes to the gym.
schizoid: Hephaestus the God of metalworking and stone masonry which shows intellectual dominance as opposed to the physical dominance of Ares and whose body is crippled. His excellence is in his inventions and his trade and today it might be better to look at innovation in technology rather than carpentry.
object
neurotic: Aphrodite the Goddess of beauty and sexual desire. She is described as physically beautiful, sensuous, and seductive.
schizoid: Athena the Goddess of handicrafts and wisdom which shows that her interest is in secondary finery (beautiful adornments) as opposed to the physical embodiment of sexuality represented by Aphrodite. Additionally, with the focus on the mind Athena would stand back and observe desire between people, as compared to Aphrodite who lives it out, thus giving us a motivation for wisdom. This wisdom would be put to good use not just in unmasking potential rivals in love relationships but also in understanding the psychology of the enemy your state is at war with, and so I think Athena’s other facet, as the goddess of war, makes sense.
In masochism we have
subject
neurotic: Artemis the goddess of childbirth and the hunt whose interests in this masculine occupation represents an identification with a man. Her status as virgin would indicate that she loved her father, imitated him, and has remain devoted to him ever since. Freud writes: “Analysis very often shows that a little girl, after she has had to relinquish her father as a love-object, will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify herself with her father (that is, with the object which has been lost), instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition—whatever that may consist in—is strong enough” (The Ego and the Id, p.32).
schizoid: Hermes the messenger god of cunning wiles whose devotion is shown to an ideology or group as opposed to the identification with an individual illustrated in Artemis. He is also the psychopomp who delivers souls to Hades and this might bespeak a general kindness to people over top of any group allegiance.
object
neurotic: Dionysus the god of wine, parties, and festivals who in his merriment illustrates himself to be the cause of joy and love in others. I think most people know the outgoing social type who tells stories and makes jokes and though he talks a lot it isn't about how great he is (i.e. is narcissistic). For a man we might not say he's endearing and exuberant but spontaneous and fun would cover both sexes. What I want to capture is that Dionysus, in one facet, could be seen as a ‘people person’ in the archetype of the story-telling drunkard, even though other facets of his personality are very dark.
schizoid: Apollo or the god of music, healing, prophecies, and poetry who illustrates a more esoteric ability to gain the approval of others and touch something deeper in them than the Dionysian approach of merriment. Here we have someone who wants to guess your astrological sign or read your palm or write you a song to gain your approval or love. Mediated through ideas or art the Appollonian seeks to touch something in your core. In contrast to Athena, and her wisdom through reasoning things out, Apollo is intuition and energies.
These gods, of course, are over-determined and in this interpretation certain parts of their character are emphasized over others but this should help to illustrate the schema. I also think it is a strength of my interpretation that Hermes, Dionysus, and Apollo are mostly represented as beardless youths as opposed to Ares and Hephaestus who are represented as men.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Reich's masochist
Reich, like Klein, may be wrong on some major theoretical points but look how masterful he is in noting the pre-oedipal influences on the patient's behavior. He turns what Kleinians discuss as very involved phantasies into something simple and observable.
Here's some of what he writes on the masochist in Character Analysis
Genetically and historically, a deep disappointment in love lies behind the [masochist’s] provocation. The masochist is especially fond of provoking those objects through whom he suffered a disappointment. Originally, these objects were intensely loved, and either an actual disappointment was experienced or the love demanded by the child was not sufficiently satisfied. 243
His complaints showed the following stratification with respect to their meaning, corresponding to the genesis of his masochism: “You see how miserable I am— love me!” “You don’t love me enough— you are mean to me!” “You have to love me, I will force you to love me. If you don’t love me, I’ll make you angry!” The masochistic passion for torment, the complaints, the provocation, and the suffering can, in terms of their meaning… be explained on the basis of the fantasized or actual non-fulfillment of a quantitatively inordinate demand for love… and the predisposition to anxiety (or danger of loss of love)… the former is not antithetical to the predisposition to anxiety as a source of masochistic reaction, for again it is typical of the masochistic character to check the threat of anxiety by demanding love. Just as the complaining represents a disguised demand for love and the provocation, a desperate attempt to force love, the total formation of the masochistic character represents an abortive attempt to rid oneself of anxiety and unpleasure… the feeling of suffering corresponds to a concrete fact, namely the continually high-pitched inner excitement and predisposition to anxiety. We shall understand the situation better when we compare it with the affect-block of the compulsive neurotic character. Here the binding of anxiety has been carried out with complete success, with the forfeiture of psychic mobility. But the inner tension is completely consumed by a well-functioning character apparatus. There is no restlessness. 245-6
We have thus far spoken of the inordinate demand for love on the part of the masochistic character. Now we have to add that this demand for love is based on a fear of being left alone that was intensely experienced in very early childhood. The masochistic character cannot endure being alone any more than he can endure the possibility of losing a love relationship. The fact that masochistic characters so often are lonely is ascribable to the success of a secondary mechanism embodied in the attitude “See how unhappy, alone, and deserted I am”. Once, while discussing his relationship to his mother, our patient exclaimed in great excitement: “To be left alone is to be dead— my life is cut off!” 246
Here's some of what he writes on the masochist in Character Analysis
Genetically and historically, a deep disappointment in love lies behind the [masochist’s] provocation. The masochist is especially fond of provoking those objects through whom he suffered a disappointment. Originally, these objects were intensely loved, and either an actual disappointment was experienced or the love demanded by the child was not sufficiently satisfied. 243
His complaints showed the following stratification with respect to their meaning, corresponding to the genesis of his masochism: “You see how miserable I am— love me!” “You don’t love me enough— you are mean to me!” “You have to love me, I will force you to love me. If you don’t love me, I’ll make you angry!” The masochistic passion for torment, the complaints, the provocation, and the suffering can, in terms of their meaning… be explained on the basis of the fantasized or actual non-fulfillment of a quantitatively inordinate demand for love… and the predisposition to anxiety (or danger of loss of love)… the former is not antithetical to the predisposition to anxiety as a source of masochistic reaction, for again it is typical of the masochistic character to check the threat of anxiety by demanding love. Just as the complaining represents a disguised demand for love and the provocation, a desperate attempt to force love, the total formation of the masochistic character represents an abortive attempt to rid oneself of anxiety and unpleasure… the feeling of suffering corresponds to a concrete fact, namely the continually high-pitched inner excitement and predisposition to anxiety. We shall understand the situation better when we compare it with the affect-block of the compulsive neurotic character. Here the binding of anxiety has been carried out with complete success, with the forfeiture of psychic mobility. But the inner tension is completely consumed by a well-functioning character apparatus. There is no restlessness. 245-6
We have thus far spoken of the inordinate demand for love on the part of the masochistic character. Now we have to add that this demand for love is based on a fear of being left alone that was intensely experienced in very early childhood. The masochistic character cannot endure being alone any more than he can endure the possibility of losing a love relationship. The fact that masochistic characters so often are lonely is ascribable to the success of a secondary mechanism embodied in the attitude “See how unhappy, alone, and deserted I am”. Once, while discussing his relationship to his mother, our patient exclaimed in great excitement: “To be left alone is to be dead— my life is cut off!” 246
Thursday, November 10, 2011
envy vs. jealousy
I don't know how it is in other languages (I'd be interested to hear about it) but in English there is often a use of jealousy in both the sexual relationship (i.e. I'm jealous that my girlfriend is still talking with her ex-boyfriend) and the social one (i.e. I'm jealous of the new car my friend bought).
Educated types try to use envy instead of jealousy here but I always think that the common use has something powerful in it. Some dictionaries capture it when they point to
Envy denotes a longing to possess something awarded to or achieved by another: to feel envy when a friend inherits a fortune. Jealousy, on the other hand, denotes a feeling of resentment that another has gained something that one more rightfully deserves: to feel jealousy when a coworker receives a promotion (dictionary.com)
I think that envy is thus shown to be an earlier development than jealousy which requires a reference to one's status. In this way I think envy is linked to a pre-moral sense of wanting to deprive others of the object or pleasure that they experience and one lacks.
I think that there is often pride or shamelessness associated with jealousy so that one is jealous but keeps it hidden or 'hates on' the person shamelessly.
I did a quick search and saw a philosophical explanation. They are always great because the words are driven out of their senses and some neat logical distinction is attempted without any sense for development of mind:
1.2 Envy vs. Jealousy
Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another's vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person's real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person's affections); and the envious person's locus of concern is the rival. Hence, even if the good that the rival has is the affection of another person, there is a difference between envy and jealousy.[3] Roughly, for the jealous person the rival is fungible and the beloved is not fungible. So he would be equally bothered if the beloved were consorting with someone else, and would not be bothered if the rival were. Whereas in envy it is the other way around. Because envy is centrally focused on competition with the rival, the subject might well be equally bothered if the rival were consorting with a different (appealing) person, but would not be bothered if the ‘good’ had gone to someone else (with whom the subject was not in competition). Whatever the ordinary meaning of the terms ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy,’ these considerations demonstrate that these two distinct syndromes need to be distinguished.(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Educated types try to use envy instead of jealousy here but I always think that the common use has something powerful in it. Some dictionaries capture it when they point to
Envy denotes a longing to possess something awarded to or achieved by another: to feel envy when a friend inherits a fortune. Jealousy, on the other hand, denotes a feeling of resentment that another has gained something that one more rightfully deserves: to feel jealousy when a coworker receives a promotion (dictionary.com)
I think that envy is thus shown to be an earlier development than jealousy which requires a reference to one's status. In this way I think envy is linked to a pre-moral sense of wanting to deprive others of the object or pleasure that they experience and one lacks.
I think that there is often pride or shamelessness associated with jealousy so that one is jealous but keeps it hidden or 'hates on' the person shamelessly.
I did a quick search and saw a philosophical explanation. They are always great because the words are driven out of their senses and some neat logical distinction is attempted without any sense for development of mind:
1.2 Envy vs. Jealousy
Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another's vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person's real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person's affections); and the envious person's locus of concern is the rival. Hence, even if the good that the rival has is the affection of another person, there is a difference between envy and jealousy.[3] Roughly, for the jealous person the rival is fungible and the beloved is not fungible. So he would be equally bothered if the beloved were consorting with someone else, and would not be bothered if the rival were. Whereas in envy it is the other way around. Because envy is centrally focused on competition with the rival, the subject might well be equally bothered if the rival were consorting with a different (appealing) person, but would not be bothered if the ‘good’ had gone to someone else (with whom the subject was not in competition). Whatever the ordinary meaning of the terms ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy,’ these considerations demonstrate that these two distinct syndromes need to be distinguished.(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
psychoanalytic basics- paranoia and melancholia
At the phallic-oedipal phase of development I have been showing that what is created is a maternal phallus that opposes the father's phallus. The narcissist has a secret phallus by which he opposes the ego ideal of excellence or recognition and can deny his lack of success in the symbolic order. Paranoia shows that at some point if he tries to get rid of that ideal (attacks the internal father) that it returns in the form of the father trying to persecute him.
Analogously, with the ego ideal of devotion or gift-giving when the masochist attacks the inner father in disappointment in love she ends up having to turn accusations towards the father on to the self in melancholia.
In this way the paranoid pervert or psychotic will often function on the masochistic side and be concerned with love and devotion while the melancholic will function on the narcissistic side and in her self-reviling narcissistically put herself forward and bring attention to her worthlessness to everyone.
I will talk about the masochist's phallic-oedipal ego ideal soon in another post.
"In summing up the characteristics of paranoia, one should stress especially the fact that the delusion is concentrated around the ego. The patient tends to experience his delusion not autistically, but in contact with the outside world, during the course of which contact he frequently forms many ideas of reference. A large part of his personality remains intact, a state of mind from which one may assume also arises the tendency to furnish intellectual proofs for the correctness of his ideas. As a rule, the delusion has the same content as the already existing character anomaly, and thus it may appear to the observer as if the delusion develops as a mere intensification of such an anomaly. As a result of this relation, the course of the illness changes frequently and seems to oscillate between the extremes of the character anomaly, on the one hand, and the pronounced delusion, on the other."
I concluded that the ego strives insofar as possible to maintain its ties with reality in order not to be drawn further into the psychosis. It is true that the ego is powerless to prevent the development of a delusion, but at least in this way the ego succeeds in shaping the delusion according to the pattern of a defense mechanism. This last feature is probably responsible for the fact that paranoia seems to a certain degree receptive to psychotherapy, in which respect paranoia distinguishes itself favorably from schizophrenia. Katan, M. (1969). A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Diagnosis of Paranoia p.341-2
To avoid misunderstanding, I want to make a distinction between depression and melancholia. As long as reality thinking is maintained, I prefer to speak of the various depressive states as depressions. When delusions of self-guilt enter the picture, I speak of melancholia. In cases of melancholia, only a part of the personality is psychotic; all other possible phases of depression are simultaneously present.
....
Next, we may conclude that in melancholia, too, a total regression of a part of the personality takes place to the undifferentiated state. The ego wards off the aggression toward the object, whereupon the aggression appears in the tension between superego and ego. The aggression is aroused because the ego feels narcissistically wounded. I want to stress that in melancholia, on a higher level of development, the self-accusations are unable to cope with the conflict. As a result, deeper levels of development are affected. Furthermore, in the final stages of the regressive process, the ego is not successful in mastering the internalized conflict. This means that the ego is unable to prevent the hostility, which is turned inward, from finally leading to self-destruction. At this point, the ego can no longer prevent the regressive process from taking the final step toward the undifferentiated state. The conflict caused by the aggression is now decathected. The attempt at restitution recathects the conflict between superego and ego, with resulting delusional self-accusations. Thus, in my opinion, a strong similarity exists between the development of melancholia and that of jealousy paranoia. ibid. 339-40
For the ego, when it becomes fully identified with the object, does not abandon its early defence-mechanisms … [T]he annihilation and expulsion of the object … initiate the depressive position. If this be so it confirms my concept of the genetic connection between paranoia and melancholia. (Klein, a contribution to the psychogenesis of manic depressive states, p. 265).
I'll have to post more on Klein in the future. One can still agree with her judgment of form while disagreeing entirely with her assessment of development and lack of phenomenological differentiation.
Analogously, with the ego ideal of devotion or gift-giving when the masochist attacks the inner father in disappointment in love she ends up having to turn accusations towards the father on to the self in melancholia.
In this way the paranoid pervert or psychotic will often function on the masochistic side and be concerned with love and devotion while the melancholic will function on the narcissistic side and in her self-reviling narcissistically put herself forward and bring attention to her worthlessness to everyone.
I will talk about the masochist's phallic-oedipal ego ideal soon in another post.
"In summing up the characteristics of paranoia, one should stress especially the fact that the delusion is concentrated around the ego. The patient tends to experience his delusion not autistically, but in contact with the outside world, during the course of which contact he frequently forms many ideas of reference. A large part of his personality remains intact, a state of mind from which one may assume also arises the tendency to furnish intellectual proofs for the correctness of his ideas. As a rule, the delusion has the same content as the already existing character anomaly, and thus it may appear to the observer as if the delusion develops as a mere intensification of such an anomaly. As a result of this relation, the course of the illness changes frequently and seems to oscillate between the extremes of the character anomaly, on the one hand, and the pronounced delusion, on the other."
I concluded that the ego strives insofar as possible to maintain its ties with reality in order not to be drawn further into the psychosis. It is true that the ego is powerless to prevent the development of a delusion, but at least in this way the ego succeeds in shaping the delusion according to the pattern of a defense mechanism. This last feature is probably responsible for the fact that paranoia seems to a certain degree receptive to psychotherapy, in which respect paranoia distinguishes itself favorably from schizophrenia. Katan, M. (1969). A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Diagnosis of Paranoia p.341-2
To avoid misunderstanding, I want to make a distinction between depression and melancholia. As long as reality thinking is maintained, I prefer to speak of the various depressive states as depressions. When delusions of self-guilt enter the picture, I speak of melancholia. In cases of melancholia, only a part of the personality is psychotic; all other possible phases of depression are simultaneously present.
....
Next, we may conclude that in melancholia, too, a total regression of a part of the personality takes place to the undifferentiated state. The ego wards off the aggression toward the object, whereupon the aggression appears in the tension between superego and ego. The aggression is aroused because the ego feels narcissistically wounded. I want to stress that in melancholia, on a higher level of development, the self-accusations are unable to cope with the conflict. As a result, deeper levels of development are affected. Furthermore, in the final stages of the regressive process, the ego is not successful in mastering the internalized conflict. This means that the ego is unable to prevent the hostility, which is turned inward, from finally leading to self-destruction. At this point, the ego can no longer prevent the regressive process from taking the final step toward the undifferentiated state. The conflict caused by the aggression is now decathected. The attempt at restitution recathects the conflict between superego and ego, with resulting delusional self-accusations. Thus, in my opinion, a strong similarity exists between the development of melancholia and that of jealousy paranoia. ibid. 339-40
For the ego, when it becomes fully identified with the object, does not abandon its early defence-mechanisms … [T]he annihilation and expulsion of the object … initiate the depressive position. If this be so it confirms my concept of the genetic connection between paranoia and melancholia. (Klein, a contribution to the psychogenesis of manic depressive states, p. 265).
I'll have to post more on Klein in the future. One can still agree with her judgment of form while disagreeing entirely with her assessment of development and lack of phenomenological differentiation.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
feminine subject
Hysteria is, in my view, by far the most frequent neurosis of the extraverted type. . . A constant tendency to make himself interesting and produce an impression is a basic feature of the hysteric. The corollary of this is his proverbial suggestibility, his proneness to another person's influence. Another unmistakable sign of the extraverted hysteric is his effusiveness, which occasionally carries him into the realm of fantasy, so that he is accused of the "hysterical lie."[Jung, "General Description of the Types," CW 6, par. 566.]
It seems to me this 'be interesting' on Jung's part is the same as 'be loved' on Freud's part and clearly would make the person the centre of attention without his power, his dominance, or his will or beauty being at the core.
It also seems key to me that the masochism involved in the masochistic or feminine subject doesn't pertain to any real self-hate. As Freud pointed out with the melancholic, there is a shamelessness in her self-revilings and the self-accusations are really accusations about the other. Rather the masochism is related to the pain caused by the reduction of the idealization of the Other. To acknowledge truths about the world and have to see it as less magical, and people as less good, and parents as limited and ignorant is painful.
It seems to me this 'be interesting' on Jung's part is the same as 'be loved' on Freud's part and clearly would make the person the centre of attention without his power, his dominance, or his will or beauty being at the core.
It also seems key to me that the masochism involved in the masochistic or feminine subject doesn't pertain to any real self-hate. As Freud pointed out with the melancholic, there is a shamelessness in her self-revilings and the self-accusations are really accusations about the other. Rather the masochism is related to the pain caused by the reduction of the idealization of the Other. To acknowledge truths about the world and have to see it as less magical, and people as less good, and parents as limited and ignorant is painful.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- the mystics and the mechanists
Psychoanalysis is the only science of the mind that has begun to plot this development of mind, isolate the trauma that causes fixations at different levels of development, and show how these fixations produce dreams, myth, and other cultural products as well as symptoms and character. All other forms of psychology, psychopharmacology, evolutionary biology, and semiotic narrative studies which ignore psychoanalysis have an essentially pre 19th century philosophical view on human nature. They cannot explain the transition from animal to human or rely on appeal to a metaphysical element in contrast to the dialectical materialism of the 19th century, which gives real material causes for the mind’s development in the renunciation of instincts. These models fall into two main categories based upon the subjective and objective. In the former there are mystics who appeal to an absolute human freedom through the subjective experience of rational intentionality and conscience. In the former case the intentionalists can’t give satisfactory answers on the appearance of reason in a child nor its departure through mental illness or death. In the latter case, the spiritualists talk about an eternal moral order in the subjective experience of the conscience. However, they do so as if different religions, moral orders, and revelations didn’t exist from culture to culture.
The objective position is seen in the mechanists who are concerned with causes in relation to humans belonging to a certain genus or culture. Among them, the physicalists speak of humans as if they were animals and rely on evolutionary principles to the exclusion of culture. The narrativists acknowledge culture, its propagation of roles and stereotypes, and the uniqueness of cultural difference, but do so as if culture had always existed without basis in the body, or the preverbal animal.
These opponents of psychoanalysis have made valuable criticisms of its dogmatic use, but crucial omissions of their positions— their ahistorical nature or lack of subjective engagement with culture and its symbols- makes them unfit for analyzing culture. Psychoanalysis represents the only way to take the descriptive phenomena each group posits (will, conscience, self-narrative, instinct) and plot how they arise dynamically.
Wilhelm Reich coined and criticized the lack of dialectical thinking in the mechanists and mystics (See Ether, God and Devil). They ignore the multiplicity of transferences, drives, and instincts which comprise the individual or ignore the consciousness which we have of some of drives that have a teleological nature.
The objective position is seen in the mechanists who are concerned with causes in relation to humans belonging to a certain genus or culture. Among them, the physicalists speak of humans as if they were animals and rely on evolutionary principles to the exclusion of culture. The narrativists acknowledge culture, its propagation of roles and stereotypes, and the uniqueness of cultural difference, but do so as if culture had always existed without basis in the body, or the preverbal animal.
These opponents of psychoanalysis have made valuable criticisms of its dogmatic use, but crucial omissions of their positions— their ahistorical nature or lack of subjective engagement with culture and its symbols- makes them unfit for analyzing culture. Psychoanalysis represents the only way to take the descriptive phenomena each group posits (will, conscience, self-narrative, instinct) and plot how they arise dynamically.
Wilhelm Reich coined and criticized the lack of dialectical thinking in the mechanists and mystics (See Ether, God and Devil). They ignore the multiplicity of transferences, drives, and instincts which comprise the individual or ignore the consciousness which we have of some of drives that have a teleological nature.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Science as the Father or the Third
I was reminded this morning on my walk home that culturally science occupies the position of the father. I was smoking a cigarette and a mother passing by me on the sidewalk made a face and held her child away as if I was emitting smoke for some black magic spell that would cripple her child.
It's interesting that culturally so much resentment and righteousness has been channeled into things like being green and caring about basic health issues. Having lived in a smaller city in Russia I was struck by how much superstition exists there as well as the ability of men and old women to tell young girls that they aren't dressed appropriately.
This linkage of the socially acceptable from sex and superstition to environmentalism and health is a major achievement... for those with eyes to see it.
Science still hasn't been fully accepted in any culture if we take science to include psychoanalysis and not accept any appeals to religious authority. This means that we can psychoanalyze the place of science within a culture and see that it occupies an Oedipal relation. In our culture, for example, we have fundamentalists who would like to fully renounce science and break off into little groups in which they teach religion and creationism like their families taught it to them. There are also scientists like Dawkins and writers like Hitchens that fully attack religion and become mechanistic atheists who don't see either how religion has influenced the development of culture in important ways or it's value as the projections of the unconscious.
In this relation the fundamentalists are like Sade and the mechanists are like Kant. However rather than being sexually perverse the groups are being socially perverse.
Just as the narcissistic pervert exalts himself over the importance of a group identity in the symbolic order, the fundamentalists exalt religion over science. And, just as the compulsive looks contemptuously on the perverse and free-spirited with his moral righteousness so does the atheist-mechanist look upon the religious and the dialectician who wants to study religion for the sake of psychology and sociology.
It's interesting that culturally so much resentment and righteousness has been channeled into things like being green and caring about basic health issues. Having lived in a smaller city in Russia I was struck by how much superstition exists there as well as the ability of men and old women to tell young girls that they aren't dressed appropriately.
This linkage of the socially acceptable from sex and superstition to environmentalism and health is a major achievement... for those with eyes to see it.
Science still hasn't been fully accepted in any culture if we take science to include psychoanalysis and not accept any appeals to religious authority. This means that we can psychoanalyze the place of science within a culture and see that it occupies an Oedipal relation. In our culture, for example, we have fundamentalists who would like to fully renounce science and break off into little groups in which they teach religion and creationism like their families taught it to them. There are also scientists like Dawkins and writers like Hitchens that fully attack religion and become mechanistic atheists who don't see either how religion has influenced the development of culture in important ways or it's value as the projections of the unconscious.
In this relation the fundamentalists are like Sade and the mechanists are like Kant. However rather than being sexually perverse the groups are being socially perverse.
Just as the narcissistic pervert exalts himself over the importance of a group identity in the symbolic order, the fundamentalists exalt religion over science. And, just as the compulsive looks contemptuously on the perverse and free-spirited with his moral righteousness so does the atheist-mechanist look upon the religious and the dialectician who wants to study religion for the sake of psychology and sociology.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- the sex drive
The reign of the sexual instinct and "perversions" already appear in the animal kingdom:
Perhaps the bonobo's most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. One female facing another clings with arms and legs to a partner that, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rub their genital swellings laterally together, emitting grins and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experiences. (Laboratory experiments on stump- tailed macaques have demonstrated that women are not the only female primates capable of physiological orgasm.)
Male bonobos, too, may engage in pseudocopulation but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. They also practice so-called penis-fencing, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together.
The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards. De Waal, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’
So, if we oppose Freud's simple model of sexual pleasure leaning on the self-preservative instinct and instead talk about how genital pleasure can activate or be displaced onto other parts of the body then we have new questions of how the 'organs' or parts are sources that can be chosen.
Furthermore, as Fenichel noted, these parts can also be activated by aggressive energy:
Let us begin with the first problem. When looking has become libidinized, so that the aim of the person who looks is not perception but sexual gratification, it differs from the ordinary kind of looking. Libidinal looking often takes the form of a fixed gaze, which may be said to be spastic, just as the act of running, when libidinized, is spastic. (Libidinization has the effect of impairing an ego-function.) (13)
Very often sadistic impulses enter into the instinctual aim of looking: one wishes to destroy something by means of looking at it, or else the act of looking itself has already acquired the significance of a modified form of destruction. Thus, for instance, the compulsion so frequently met with in women to look at the region of a man's genitals is really a modified expression of active castration-tendencies. It seems then that there are two tendencies which always or often determine the goal of the scopophilic instinct: (a) the impulse to injure the object seen, and (b) the desire to share by means of empathy in its experience. (11)
It is a well-known fact that when an organ is constantly used for purposes of erotogenic pleasure, it undergoes certain somatic changes.48 It happens that Freud was speaking of the eyes of persons in whom the scopophilic instinct is specially developed, when he said, 'If an organ which serves two purposes overplays its erotogenic rôle, it is in general to be expected that this will not occur without alterations in its response to stimulation and in innervation', i.e. of the physiological factors in general. From the point of view of research it is probably more useful, when studying myopia, to consider the somatic changes which take place in the eye in consequence of its being used for libidinal purposes than to regard the incapacity to see at a distance as a symbol of castration. We have an additional reason for thinking that we shall discover somatic-neurotic relations when we read further in Freud: 'Neurotic disturbances of vision are related to psychogenic as, in general, are the actual neuroses to the psychoneuroses; psychogenic visual disturbances can hardly occur without neurotic disturbances, though the latter surely can without the former.'50
What has ophthalmic medicine to say on the subject of myopia? We are told that it is caused by an elongation of the axis of the eyeball. This elongation is attributed partly to the external muscles of the eye and partly to general vegetative changes which alter the contour of the eyeball itself. It would seem, then, that incapacity to see distant objects has no psychic significance but is the involuntary, mechanical sequel to processes which either affect the external optic muscles or take place within the eyeballs. But what causes these processes? At all events the vegetative nervous system plays a decisive part in them, and the functioning of that system is, apart from various somatic factors, psychically determined. The question is this. We have seen that the constant use of the eye for the libidinal gratification of scopophilic impulses causes it actively to strain in the direction of objects, in order psychically to incorporate them. Is it not possible that this may finally result in a stretching of the eyeball?
We recognize that this is putting the problem very crudely. Of course an exact knowledge of the ways in which such stretching may occur would be necessary to explain why many people in whom the scopophilic instinct is peculiarly strong are not in the least short-sighted. There is no difficulty about the converse fact, namely, that many short-sighted people (often those in whom the symptom is most pronounced) show no sign of a marked scopophilic tendency. There is no reason to suppose that every case of myopia is psychogenic. And, while the stretching of the eyeball may sometimes be due to the attempt to incorporate objects at the bidding of scopophilic impulses, in other cases the origin of the disability is undoubtedly surely somatic. (33-4)
Fenichel, O. (1937). The Scopophilic Instinct and Identification
I'll have to post more on this in the future, but Wilhelm Reich was the only fully materialist psychoanalyst and made the simple point that repression will never occur without suppression. The desires or emotions held back are felt, or have what he calls organ sensations, in that we aren't just angry but feel our 'blood begin to boil' we feel like we want to hit out, we feel a knot in our stomach in worrying about punishment, we feel aroused, etc. So, Reich would pair up a pattern of rigid muscles that are involved in holding back these feelings and which, in their rigidity, could receive the aggressive and sexual displacements of which Fenichel writes.
Perhaps the bonobo's most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. One female facing another clings with arms and legs to a partner that, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rub their genital swellings laterally together, emitting grins and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experiences. (Laboratory experiments on stump- tailed macaques have demonstrated that women are not the only female primates capable of physiological orgasm.)
Male bonobos, too, may engage in pseudocopulation but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. They also practice so-called penis-fencing, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together.
The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards. De Waal, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’
So, if we oppose Freud's simple model of sexual pleasure leaning on the self-preservative instinct and instead talk about how genital pleasure can activate or be displaced onto other parts of the body then we have new questions of how the 'organs' or parts are sources that can be chosen.
Furthermore, as Fenichel noted, these parts can also be activated by aggressive energy:
Let us begin with the first problem. When looking has become libidinized, so that the aim of the person who looks is not perception but sexual gratification, it differs from the ordinary kind of looking. Libidinal looking often takes the form of a fixed gaze, which may be said to be spastic, just as the act of running, when libidinized, is spastic. (Libidinization has the effect of impairing an ego-function.) (13)
Very often sadistic impulses enter into the instinctual aim of looking: one wishes to destroy something by means of looking at it, or else the act of looking itself has already acquired the significance of a modified form of destruction. Thus, for instance, the compulsion so frequently met with in women to look at the region of a man's genitals is really a modified expression of active castration-tendencies. It seems then that there are two tendencies which always or often determine the goal of the scopophilic instinct: (a) the impulse to injure the object seen, and (b) the desire to share by means of empathy in its experience. (11)
It is a well-known fact that when an organ is constantly used for purposes of erotogenic pleasure, it undergoes certain somatic changes.48 It happens that Freud was speaking of the eyes of persons in whom the scopophilic instinct is specially developed, when he said, 'If an organ which serves two purposes overplays its erotogenic rôle, it is in general to be expected that this will not occur without alterations in its response to stimulation and in innervation', i.e. of the physiological factors in general. From the point of view of research it is probably more useful, when studying myopia, to consider the somatic changes which take place in the eye in consequence of its being used for libidinal purposes than to regard the incapacity to see at a distance as a symbol of castration. We have an additional reason for thinking that we shall discover somatic-neurotic relations when we read further in Freud: 'Neurotic disturbances of vision are related to psychogenic as, in general, are the actual neuroses to the psychoneuroses; psychogenic visual disturbances can hardly occur without neurotic disturbances, though the latter surely can without the former.'50
What has ophthalmic medicine to say on the subject of myopia? We are told that it is caused by an elongation of the axis of the eyeball. This elongation is attributed partly to the external muscles of the eye and partly to general vegetative changes which alter the contour of the eyeball itself. It would seem, then, that incapacity to see distant objects has no psychic significance but is the involuntary, mechanical sequel to processes which either affect the external optic muscles or take place within the eyeballs. But what causes these processes? At all events the vegetative nervous system plays a decisive part in them, and the functioning of that system is, apart from various somatic factors, psychically determined. The question is this. We have seen that the constant use of the eye for the libidinal gratification of scopophilic impulses causes it actively to strain in the direction of objects, in order psychically to incorporate them. Is it not possible that this may finally result in a stretching of the eyeball?
We recognize that this is putting the problem very crudely. Of course an exact knowledge of the ways in which such stretching may occur would be necessary to explain why many people in whom the scopophilic instinct is peculiarly strong are not in the least short-sighted. There is no difficulty about the converse fact, namely, that many short-sighted people (often those in whom the symptom is most pronounced) show no sign of a marked scopophilic tendency. There is no reason to suppose that every case of myopia is psychogenic. And, while the stretching of the eyeball may sometimes be due to the attempt to incorporate objects at the bidding of scopophilic impulses, in other cases the origin of the disability is undoubtedly surely somatic. (33-4)
Fenichel, O. (1937). The Scopophilic Instinct and Identification
I'll have to post more on this in the future, but Wilhelm Reich was the only fully materialist psychoanalyst and made the simple point that repression will never occur without suppression. The desires or emotions held back are felt, or have what he calls organ sensations, in that we aren't just angry but feel our 'blood begin to boil' we feel like we want to hit out, we feel a knot in our stomach in worrying about punishment, we feel aroused, etc. So, Reich would pair up a pattern of rigid muscles that are involved in holding back these feelings and which, in their rigidity, could receive the aggressive and sexual displacements of which Fenichel writes.
Friday, November 4, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- the sex drive
Freud's opinions on the sex drive merely leaning or having an anaclitic relation to the self-preservative instincts became more subtle over time:
It is not our belief that a person's libidinal interests are from the first in opposition to his self-preservative interests; on the contrary, the ego endeavours at every stage to remain in harmony with its sexual organization as it is at the time and to fit itself into it. The succession of the different phases of libidinal development probably follows a prescribed programme. But the possibility cannot be rejected that this course of events can be influenced by the ego, and we may expect equally to find a certain parallelism, a certain correspondence, between the developmental phases of the ego and the libido; indeed a disturbance of that correspondence might provide a pathogenic factor (Freud, p.351-2 –Introductory Lecture XXII)
The question soon became, after Freud, where jouissance was important and where the ego was important in the stages. Fairbairn writes:
Further consideration of Abraham's modification of the libido theory raises the question whether the anal are not in a sense an artefact; and the same question arises in the case of the ‘phallic phase’. Abraham's phases were, of course, intended to represent not only stages in libidinal organization, but also stages in the development of object-love. Nevertheless, it is not without significance that the nomenclature employed to describe the various phases is based upon the nature of the libidinal aim, and not upon the nature of the object. Thus, instead of speaking of ‘breast’ phases, Abraham speaks of ‘oral’ phases; and, instead of speaking of ‘faeces’ phases, he speaks of anal phases. It is when we substitute ‘faeces phase’ for anal that the limitation in Abraham's scheme of libidinal development is seen to declare itself; for, whilst the breast and the genital organs are natural and biological objects of libido, fæces certainly is not. On the contrary it is only a symbolic object. It is only, so to speak, the clay out of which a model of the object is moulded. (Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, p. 30-1)
The oral and phallic phases, in containing two different types of jouissance, seem to represent Freud's opposition between the ego ideal and sublimation:
The formation of an ego ideal is often confused with the Previous sublimation of instinct, to the detriment of our understanding of the facts. A man who has exchanged his narcissism for homage to a high ego ideal has not necessarily on that account succeeded in sublimating his libidinal instincts. It is true that the ego
ideal demands such sublimation, but it cannot enforce it; sublimation remains a special process which may be prompted by the ideal but the execution of which is entirely independent of any such prompting. It is precisely in neurotics that we find the highest differences of potential between the development of their ego ideal and the amount of sublimation of their primitive libidinal instincts... (Freud, On Narcissism, p. 94-5).
As much as a person may have ambitions or a drive to excellence or the desire to give gifts there is a more basic and primitive process in them by which they much be inspired and that excess at the heart of systematizing or fantasy would be in some way related to the oral libido while the later differentiation of the ego that allows for ideals is related to the phallic.
Fairbairn, more simply and more deeply than Lacan captures the vast implications of this discovery:
The process of differentiation of the object derives particular significance from the fact that infantile dependence is characterized not only by identification, but also by an oral attitude of incorporation. In virtue of this fact the object with which the individual is identified becomes equivalent to an incorporated object, or, to put the matter in a more arresting fashion, the object in which the individual is incorporated
is incorporated in the individual. This strange psychological anomaly may well prove the key to many metaphysical puzzles. Be that as it may, however, it is common to find in dreams a remarkable equivalence between being inside an object and having the object inside. I had a patient, for example, who had a dream about being in a tower; and his associations left no room for doubt that this theme represented for him not only an identification with his mother, but also the incorporation of his mother's breast—and, incidentally, his father's penis.
Such then being the situation, the task of differentiating the object tends to resolve itself into a problem of expelling an incorporated object, i.e. to become a problem of expelling contents. Herein lies much of the rationale of Abraham's anal phases’; and it is in this direction that we must look for much of the significance of the anal techniques which play such an important part during the transition stage. It is important here as elsewhere to ensure that the cart is not placed before the horse, and to recognize that it is not a case of the individual being preoccupied with the disposal of contents at this stage because he is anal, but of his being anal because he is preoccupied at this stage with the disposal of contents. (ibid. 42-3)
I'm not content with these general positions and plan to use myth along with zoological findings to explicate them further but, as far as I can tell, no one has really done work to explicate these the differentiation of the other-the language use of the child as a praxis- and the bodily zones to which they relate.
It is not our belief that a person's libidinal interests are from the first in opposition to his self-preservative interests; on the contrary, the ego endeavours at every stage to remain in harmony with its sexual organization as it is at the time and to fit itself into it. The succession of the different phases of libidinal development probably follows a prescribed programme. But the possibility cannot be rejected that this course of events can be influenced by the ego, and we may expect equally to find a certain parallelism, a certain correspondence, between the developmental phases of the ego and the libido; indeed a disturbance of that correspondence might provide a pathogenic factor (Freud, p.351-2 –Introductory Lecture XXII)
The question soon became, after Freud, where jouissance was important and where the ego was important in the stages. Fairbairn writes:
Further consideration of Abraham's modification of the libido theory raises the question whether the anal are not in a sense an artefact; and the same question arises in the case of the ‘phallic phase’. Abraham's phases were, of course, intended to represent not only stages in libidinal organization, but also stages in the development of object-love. Nevertheless, it is not without significance that the nomenclature employed to describe the various phases is based upon the nature of the libidinal aim, and not upon the nature of the object. Thus, instead of speaking of ‘breast’ phases, Abraham speaks of ‘oral’ phases; and, instead of speaking of ‘faeces’ phases, he speaks of anal phases. It is when we substitute ‘faeces phase’ for anal that the limitation in Abraham's scheme of libidinal development is seen to declare itself; for, whilst the breast and the genital organs are natural and biological objects of libido, fæces certainly is not. On the contrary it is only a symbolic object. It is only, so to speak, the clay out of which a model of the object is moulded. (Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, p. 30-1)
The oral and phallic phases, in containing two different types of jouissance, seem to represent Freud's opposition between the ego ideal and sublimation:
The formation of an ego ideal is often confused with the Previous sublimation of instinct, to the detriment of our understanding of the facts. A man who has exchanged his narcissism for homage to a high ego ideal has not necessarily on that account succeeded in sublimating his libidinal instincts. It is true that the ego
ideal demands such sublimation, but it cannot enforce it; sublimation remains a special process which may be prompted by the ideal but the execution of which is entirely independent of any such prompting. It is precisely in neurotics that we find the highest differences of potential between the development of their ego ideal and the amount of sublimation of their primitive libidinal instincts... (Freud, On Narcissism, p. 94-5).
As much as a person may have ambitions or a drive to excellence or the desire to give gifts there is a more basic and primitive process in them by which they much be inspired and that excess at the heart of systematizing or fantasy would be in some way related to the oral libido while the later differentiation of the ego that allows for ideals is related to the phallic.
Fairbairn, more simply and more deeply than Lacan captures the vast implications of this discovery:
The process of differentiation of the object derives particular significance from the fact that infantile dependence is characterized not only by identification, but also by an oral attitude of incorporation. In virtue of this fact the object with which the individual is identified becomes equivalent to an incorporated object, or, to put the matter in a more arresting fashion, the object in which the individual is incorporated
is incorporated in the individual. This strange psychological anomaly may well prove the key to many metaphysical puzzles. Be that as it may, however, it is common to find in dreams a remarkable equivalence between being inside an object and having the object inside. I had a patient, for example, who had a dream about being in a tower; and his associations left no room for doubt that this theme represented for him not only an identification with his mother, but also the incorporation of his mother's breast—and, incidentally, his father's penis.
Such then being the situation, the task of differentiating the object tends to resolve itself into a problem of expelling an incorporated object, i.e. to become a problem of expelling contents. Herein lies much of the rationale of Abraham's anal phases’; and it is in this direction that we must look for much of the significance of the anal techniques which play such an important part during the transition stage. It is important here as elsewhere to ensure that the cart is not placed before the horse, and to recognize that it is not a case of the individual being preoccupied with the disposal of contents at this stage because he is anal, but of his being anal because he is preoccupied at this stage with the disposal of contents. (ibid. 42-3)
I'm not content with these general positions and plan to use myth along with zoological findings to explicate them further but, as far as I can tell, no one has really done work to explicate these the differentiation of the other-the language use of the child as a praxis- and the bodily zones to which they relate.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- the sex drive and natural heterosexuality
Freud starts from the naturalistic ground that sexuality in all other animals with the exception of higher mammals and humans, who can take non-genital objects, have their sexuality instinctively pointed towards genital intercourse. This means that the question of sexual orientation is not just one of being gay vs. straight but rather of having heterosexual intercourse vs. kissing, oral sex, petting, etc. which are ‘perversions’ no less than homosexuality. Freud writes:
The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct—a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger. But even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions’. For there are certain intermediate relations to the sexual object, such as touching and looking at it, which lie on the road towards copulation and are recognized as being preliminary sexual aims. On the one hand these activities are themselves accompanied by pleasure, and on the other hand they intensify the excitation, which should persist until the final sexual aim is attained. Moreover, the kiss, one particular contact of this kind, between the mucous membrane of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones), in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract. (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexulaity, p.149-50).
Freud uses psychosexual fixations to account for how the ‘pleasure’ that normally belongs only to the desire of the male for female genitalia and vice versa to arise. As the sex drive leans on the self-preservative instinct the child will inevitably encounter frustration when deprived of its object and when the psychic tension reaches a quantitative level that threatens the entire apparatus there is a primal repression [1]. It later becomes possible that the sexuality which would normally express itself in the genitals cathects one or more of these fixations. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who kisses gets ‘pleasure’ from it, no more than saying that everyone who sings the national anthem must have feelings of patriotism for their country. Some people kiss and some people sing because they want to be seen as ‘normal’, believe that this is what the other person wants of them, do so out of imitation of role models, etc. Analogously, we can discern the real, full belly laugh from laughter which is polite, nervous, self-conscious, or compulsive in some other way. Different cultures will have different erogenous zones that they promote and others that they see to be taboo and individuals within a culture will differ in what gives them pleasure if they experience any at all (some will be anhedonic). In the end Freud sees perversions (i.e. foreplay) as normal so long as it subsumed under genital sex [2].
[1]. Primal repression is “fixation[:]… one instinct or instinctual component fails to accompany the rest along the anticipated normal development path… then behaves in relation to the system of the unconscious, like one that is repressed” (Freud, Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia, p. 67).
[2]. In Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness Freud writes that perversion “degrades the relationship of love between two human beings from a serious matter to a convenient game, attended by no risk and no spiritual participation” (Freud, Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, p. 200). However, there is a difference between perversionS and perversion in which conscious fantasies of having sex with another, of hurting the woman with one’s penis, of being raped, of having intercourse to be ‘naughty’, mean that a person uses another or ‘fucks’ them. Fantasied genitality, as with homosexuals who still have a ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ and therefore a feminine and masculine relation, would constitute what is important in love and not the actual heterosexual intercourse.
The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct—a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger. But even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions’. For there are certain intermediate relations to the sexual object, such as touching and looking at it, which lie on the road towards copulation and are recognized as being preliminary sexual aims. On the one hand these activities are themselves accompanied by pleasure, and on the other hand they intensify the excitation, which should persist until the final sexual aim is attained. Moreover, the kiss, one particular contact of this kind, between the mucous membrane of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones), in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract. (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexulaity, p.149-50).
Freud uses psychosexual fixations to account for how the ‘pleasure’ that normally belongs only to the desire of the male for female genitalia and vice versa to arise. As the sex drive leans on the self-preservative instinct the child will inevitably encounter frustration when deprived of its object and when the psychic tension reaches a quantitative level that threatens the entire apparatus there is a primal repression [1]. It later becomes possible that the sexuality which would normally express itself in the genitals cathects one or more of these fixations. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who kisses gets ‘pleasure’ from it, no more than saying that everyone who sings the national anthem must have feelings of patriotism for their country. Some people kiss and some people sing because they want to be seen as ‘normal’, believe that this is what the other person wants of them, do so out of imitation of role models, etc. Analogously, we can discern the real, full belly laugh from laughter which is polite, nervous, self-conscious, or compulsive in some other way. Different cultures will have different erogenous zones that they promote and others that they see to be taboo and individuals within a culture will differ in what gives them pleasure if they experience any at all (some will be anhedonic). In the end Freud sees perversions (i.e. foreplay) as normal so long as it subsumed under genital sex [2].
[1]. Primal repression is “fixation[:]… one instinct or instinctual component fails to accompany the rest along the anticipated normal development path… then behaves in relation to the system of the unconscious, like one that is repressed” (Freud, Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia, p. 67).
[2]. In Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness Freud writes that perversion “degrades the relationship of love between two human beings from a serious matter to a convenient game, attended by no risk and no spiritual participation” (Freud, Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, p. 200). However, there is a difference between perversionS and perversion in which conscious fantasies of having sex with another, of hurting the woman with one’s penis, of being raped, of having intercourse to be ‘naughty’, mean that a person uses another or ‘fucks’ them. Fantasied genitality, as with homosexuals who still have a ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ and therefore a feminine and masculine relation, would constitute what is important in love and not the actual heterosexual intercourse.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
The feminine subject
The male gods which I identified as feminine subjects are also portrayed as feminine physically or at least as not-men (i.e. youths, beardless, and pretty)
The earliest cult images of Dionysus show a mature male, bearded and robed. He holds a fennel staff, tipped with a pine-cone and known as a thyrsus. Later images show him as a beardless, sensuous, naked or half-naked youth: the literature describes him as womanly or "man-womanish".
Apollo is the ideal of the kouros (a beardless, athletic youth)
During Archaic Greece he was usually depicted as a mature man, bearded, dressed as a traveler, herald, or pastor. During Classical and Hellenistic Greece he is usually depicted young and nude, with athleticism, as befits the god of speech and of the gymnastics, or a robe, a formula is set predominantly through the centuries.
The earliest cult images of Dionysus show a mature male, bearded and robed. He holds a fennel staff, tipped with a pine-cone and known as a thyrsus. Later images show him as a beardless, sensuous, naked or half-naked youth: the literature describes him as womanly or "man-womanish".
Apollo is the ideal of the kouros (a beardless, athletic youth)
During Archaic Greece he was usually depicted as a mature man, bearded, dressed as a traveler, herald, or pastor. During Classical and Hellenistic Greece he is usually depicted young and nude, with athleticism, as befits the god of speech and of the gymnastics, or a robe, a formula is set predominantly through the centuries.
feminine subject
And in our quiet hour
I feel I see everything
And am in love with the hook
Upon which everyone hangs
....
And I do hate to fold
Right here, at the top of my game
When I've been trying with my whole heart and soul
To stay right here, in the right lane
But it can make you feel over and old
Lord, you know it's a shame
When I only want for you to pull over and hold me
Till I can't remember my own name
These are two of my favourite moments from the song.
Joanna Newsom- Good Intentions paving company
The opening sometimes strikes me as too frolicking but I've come to appreciate it as taking her out of a sound that could have been 70s and dated, but at 3:27 the song becomes blessed
I thought I'd also share some passages from Horney that really get to the heart of the matter.
The obtaining of satisfaction by submersion in misery is an expression of the general principle of finding satisfaction by losing the self in something greater, by dissolving the individuality, by getting rid of the self with its doubts, conflicts, pains, limitations and isolation. This is what Nietzsche has called liberation from the principium individuationis. It is what he means by the “Dionysian” tendency and he considers it one of the most basic strivings in human beings, as opposed to what he calls the Apollonian tendency, which works toward an active molding and mastering of life. Ruth Benedict speaks of Dionysian trends in referring to attempts to induce ecstatic experience, and has pointed out how widespread these tendencies are among the various cultures, and how manifold their expressions… the means of producing ecstatic states were music, uniform rhythm of flutes, raving dances at night, intoxicating drinks, sexual abandon, all working up to a seething excitement and ecstasy (the term ecstasy means littering being beside outside or beside oneself). All over the world there are customs and cults following the same principle: in groups abandonment in festivals and religious ecstasy, and in individuals, oblivion in drugs. 270-1
By dissolving the self in something greater, by becoming part of a greater entity, the individual overcomes to a certain extent his limitations; as it is expressed in the Upanishad, “By vanishing to nothing we become part of the creative principle of the universe.” This seems to be the great consolation and gratification which religion has to offer human beings; by losing themselves they can become one with God or nature. The same satisfaction can be achieved by devotion to a great cause; by surrendering the self to a cause we feel at one with a greater whole. 273
There is scarcely any neurosis in which the tendency to get rid of the self does not appear in a direct form. It may appear in fantasies of leaving home and becoming a derelict or of losing one’s identity; in an identification with a person one is reading about; in a feeling, as one patient put it, of being forlorn amid the darkness and the waves. The tendency is present in a wish to be hypnotized, in an inclination toward mysticism, in feelings of unreality, in an inordinate need for sleep, in the lure of sickness, insanity, death. And as I have mentioned before, in masochistic fantasies the common denominator is a feeling of being putty in the master’s hand, of being devoid of all will, of all power, of being absolutely subjected to another’s domination. 274
Horney, Neurotic Personality of Our Time
I feel I see everything
And am in love with the hook
Upon which everyone hangs
....
And I do hate to fold
Right here, at the top of my game
When I've been trying with my whole heart and soul
To stay right here, in the right lane
But it can make you feel over and old
Lord, you know it's a shame
When I only want for you to pull over and hold me
Till I can't remember my own name
These are two of my favourite moments from the song.
Joanna Newsom- Good Intentions paving company
The opening sometimes strikes me as too frolicking but I've come to appreciate it as taking her out of a sound that could have been 70s and dated, but at 3:27 the song becomes blessed
I thought I'd also share some passages from Horney that really get to the heart of the matter.
The obtaining of satisfaction by submersion in misery is an expression of the general principle of finding satisfaction by losing the self in something greater, by dissolving the individuality, by getting rid of the self with its doubts, conflicts, pains, limitations and isolation. This is what Nietzsche has called liberation from the principium individuationis. It is what he means by the “Dionysian” tendency and he considers it one of the most basic strivings in human beings, as opposed to what he calls the Apollonian tendency, which works toward an active molding and mastering of life. Ruth Benedict speaks of Dionysian trends in referring to attempts to induce ecstatic experience, and has pointed out how widespread these tendencies are among the various cultures, and how manifold their expressions… the means of producing ecstatic states were music, uniform rhythm of flutes, raving dances at night, intoxicating drinks, sexual abandon, all working up to a seething excitement and ecstasy (the term ecstasy means littering being beside outside or beside oneself). All over the world there are customs and cults following the same principle: in groups abandonment in festivals and religious ecstasy, and in individuals, oblivion in drugs. 270-1
By dissolving the self in something greater, by becoming part of a greater entity, the individual overcomes to a certain extent his limitations; as it is expressed in the Upanishad, “By vanishing to nothing we become part of the creative principle of the universe.” This seems to be the great consolation and gratification which religion has to offer human beings; by losing themselves they can become one with God or nature. The same satisfaction can be achieved by devotion to a great cause; by surrendering the self to a cause we feel at one with a greater whole. 273
There is scarcely any neurosis in which the tendency to get rid of the self does not appear in a direct form. It may appear in fantasies of leaving home and becoming a derelict or of losing one’s identity; in an identification with a person one is reading about; in a feeling, as one patient put it, of being forlorn amid the darkness and the waves. The tendency is present in a wish to be hypnotized, in an inclination toward mysticism, in feelings of unreality, in an inordinate need for sleep, in the lure of sickness, insanity, death. And as I have mentioned before, in masochistic fantasies the common denominator is a feeling of being putty in the master’s hand, of being devoid of all will, of all power, of being absolutely subjected to another’s domination. 274
Horney, Neurotic Personality of Our Time
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