Where are you?
Where are the body-psychotherapists who know that it isn't armouring on certain part of the body that lets you know there was trauma at the ocular, oral, anal, phallic phase but the way that it's shaped the body around these areas?
Where are the body-psychotherapists who notice that some people have moon faces from the side with chins that jut out, or who have pointed ears and angular heads like Nosferatu, who have dark circles under and a high forehead like Frankenstein, and so many other sensibilities in the face alone?
Where are you so that we can work through myth and culture together and clean up the mess that depth psychology has been in?
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Character in Reich II, Reich's sociology
Psychic Contact and Vegetative Current:
the sexual coquetry found in hysteria also shows this duality of function. Flirtation is the expression of repressed genital desires, i.e. directed towards the world. At the same time it is a defence against genitality, the expression of an anxious "feeling out" of the object, to determine, as it were, where the genital danger is coming from. This is the only possible explanation for the extensive sexual life of hysterical women suffering from severe genital anxiety 302
Reich is in effect describing the basis of the repetition-compulsion. The genital danger in question is elaborated by other analysts as fear of rape:
The content of hysteria is equivalent to 'I am vulnerable to frustration' stated in many different ways.
The hysteric lives out an invitation to rape and lives in perpetual fear of it.
There is a fusion of orality and vaginality in the hysterical woman.
The hysteric attempts to protect herself from childish impulses and at the same time gratify them. p.264 Kramer, C.H. (1967). Maxwell Gitelson: Analytic Aphorisms
I was unsure for a long time about the validity of this construction but when I looked at Reich's work on anthropology and then at later ethnographies the transition to sex-negative culture does seem to be attached to fears of rape.
Malinowski had opportunity to observe another primitive society that lay south of the Trobriand Islands in the Amphlett chain. This people were very similar to the Trobrianders in race, customs and language, writes Malinowski, but they differed considerably in their social organization; they already manifested a strict sexual morality in regard to premarital intercourse, which they condemned, and they lacked any such institutions as found among the Trobrianders for fostering sex activity; characteristically, the family life was much more privatized. Even though maternal authority still prevailed, a much stronger role for patriarchal influence had emerged, and “this, combined with the sexual repressiveness, establishes a picture of childhood sexuality more similar to our own”. Malinowski states: “In the Trobriands, though I knew scores of natives intimately and had a nodding acquaintance with many more, I could not name a single man or woman who was hysterical or even neurasthenic. Nervous tics, compulsory actions, or obsessive ideas were not to be found.” There were occasional occurrences of cretinism, mental retardation and speech difficulties; also infrequent outbreaks of anger and violence. The natives ascribed all this to black magic… “During my stay in the Amphletts, my first and strongest impression was that this was a community of neurasthenics. Coming from the open, hearty, gay, accessible Trobrianders it was astonishing to find oneself among a community of people distrustful of the newcomer, impatient in work, arrogant in their claims, though easily cowed, and extremely nervous when tackled more energetically. The women ran away as I landed in their villages and kept in hiding the whole of my stay… I at once found a number of people affected with nervousness”. (Sex-Pol, p.127-8)
In Gregor's Anxious Pleasures a similar response is recorded:
Today the Mehinaku recall their first contact with a white man as follows: Everyone was very frightened and fled to the forest leaving only the best bowmen in the village. When the white man came… the young girls covered their bodies with ashes so they would be unattractive and not carried off by the white man… 19 M
Reich was right that there was a sociological difference between matriarchy and patriarchy but was wrong in claiming it was the Oedipus complex. Or, at least he never differentiated between the Oedipus complex as sexual impulses towards the mother vs.
wanting to "marry the mother". For this same reason he didn't conceive of orgastic potency as related to the perversion brought up in the relation to the phallic mother. The difference between the Trobriand Islanders and later patriarchal cultures is that the uncle is represented as the head of the family and the mother doesn't depreciate him as she would the husband who could have caused her disappointment. The phallic mother is the sociological condition that arises in patriarchy but the Oedipus complex as a drive to duty, a superego of guilt, and the following identification with the chief as group leader (from latency) is clearly present with the Trobriand Islanders.
the sexual coquetry found in hysteria also shows this duality of function. Flirtation is the expression of repressed genital desires, i.e. directed towards the world. At the same time it is a defence against genitality, the expression of an anxious "feeling out" of the object, to determine, as it were, where the genital danger is coming from. This is the only possible explanation for the extensive sexual life of hysterical women suffering from severe genital anxiety 302
Reich is in effect describing the basis of the repetition-compulsion. The genital danger in question is elaborated by other analysts as fear of rape:
The content of hysteria is equivalent to 'I am vulnerable to frustration' stated in many different ways.
The hysteric lives out an invitation to rape and lives in perpetual fear of it.
There is a fusion of orality and vaginality in the hysterical woman.
The hysteric attempts to protect herself from childish impulses and at the same time gratify them. p.264 Kramer, C.H. (1967). Maxwell Gitelson: Analytic Aphorisms
I was unsure for a long time about the validity of this construction but when I looked at Reich's work on anthropology and then at later ethnographies the transition to sex-negative culture does seem to be attached to fears of rape.
Malinowski had opportunity to observe another primitive society that lay south of the Trobriand Islands in the Amphlett chain. This people were very similar to the Trobrianders in race, customs and language, writes Malinowski, but they differed considerably in their social organization; they already manifested a strict sexual morality in regard to premarital intercourse, which they condemned, and they lacked any such institutions as found among the Trobrianders for fostering sex activity; characteristically, the family life was much more privatized. Even though maternal authority still prevailed, a much stronger role for patriarchal influence had emerged, and “this, combined with the sexual repressiveness, establishes a picture of childhood sexuality more similar to our own”. Malinowski states: “In the Trobriands, though I knew scores of natives intimately and had a nodding acquaintance with many more, I could not name a single man or woman who was hysterical or even neurasthenic. Nervous tics, compulsory actions, or obsessive ideas were not to be found.” There were occasional occurrences of cretinism, mental retardation and speech difficulties; also infrequent outbreaks of anger and violence. The natives ascribed all this to black magic… “During my stay in the Amphletts, my first and strongest impression was that this was a community of neurasthenics. Coming from the open, hearty, gay, accessible Trobrianders it was astonishing to find oneself among a community of people distrustful of the newcomer, impatient in work, arrogant in their claims, though easily cowed, and extremely nervous when tackled more energetically. The women ran away as I landed in their villages and kept in hiding the whole of my stay… I at once found a number of people affected with nervousness”. (Sex-Pol, p.127-8)
In Gregor's Anxious Pleasures a similar response is recorded:
Today the Mehinaku recall their first contact with a white man as follows: Everyone was very frightened and fled to the forest leaving only the best bowmen in the village. When the white man came… the young girls covered their bodies with ashes so they would be unattractive and not carried off by the white man… 19 M
Reich was right that there was a sociological difference between matriarchy and patriarchy but was wrong in claiming it was the Oedipus complex. Or, at least he never differentiated between the Oedipus complex as sexual impulses towards the mother vs.
wanting to "marry the mother". For this same reason he didn't conceive of orgastic potency as related to the perversion brought up in the relation to the phallic mother. The difference between the Trobriand Islanders and later patriarchal cultures is that the uncle is represented as the head of the family and the mother doesn't depreciate him as she would the husband who could have caused her disappointment. The phallic mother is the sociological condition that arises in patriarchy but the Oedipus complex as a drive to duty, a superego of guilt, and the following identification with the chief as group leader (from latency) is clearly present with the Trobriand Islanders.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
myth-artwork
Hercules kills the Centaur, by Giambologna, 1599. I've come across some beautiful pieces in my research and thought I'd share.
feminine subject- Ixion
This is the myth of Ixion
A son of Phlegyas (Schol. ad Apollon. Rhod. iii. 62; comp. Strab. x. p. 442, who calls him a brother of Phlegyas), or, according to others, a son of Antion by Perimela, of Pasion, or of Ares. (Schol. ad Pind. Pyth. ii. 39; Diod. iv. 69; Hygin. Fab. 62.) According to the common tradition, his mother was Dia, a daughter of Deïoneus. He was king of the Lapithae or Phlegyes, and the father of Peirithous. (Apollod. i. 8. § 2 ; Hygin. Fab. 14.) When Deïoneus demanded of Ixion the bridal gifts he had promised, Deioneus stole some of Ixion's horses in retaliation. Ixion concealed his resentment and invited his father-in-law to a feast at Larissa. When Deioneus arrived, Ixion pushed him into a bed of burning coals and wood. As no one purified Ixion of this treacherous murder, and all the gods were indignant at him, Zeus took pity upon him, purified him, and invited him to his table. But Ixion was ungrateful to his benefactor, and attempted to win the love of Hera. Zeus made a phantom resembling Hera, and by it Ixion became the father of a Centaur, who again having intercourse with Magnesian mares, became the father of the centaurs. (Pind. Pyth. ii. 39, &c. with the Schol. ; Schol. ad Eurip. Phoen. 1185; Lucian, Dial. Deor. 6.) Ixion, as a punishment, was chained by Hermes with his hands and feet to a wheel, which is described as winged or fiery, and said to have rolled perpetually in the air or in the lower world. He is further said to have been scourged, and compelled to exclaim, "Benefactors should be honoured." (Comp. Schol. ad Hom. Od. xxi. 303 ; Hygin. Fab. 33, 62; Serv. ad Virg. Aen. vi. 601, Georg. iii. 38, iv. 484; Schol. Venet. ad Il. i. 266.)
In parallel to Perseus who had to make a gift to a king as well (bring him the head of the Medusa) Ixion had to provide a gift to Deioneus. In a previous post I mentioned that this gift giving and the mildness of the task (compared to the many labours of Heracles) represents a different sensibility and one which I've identified with the feminine subject or masochist.
Ixion didn't provide the gift and Deioneus stole some of his horses. This theft of the horses brings up the aspect of Hermes as the god of thieves who also later shows up to give his punishment. The theft of horses is important in relation to the last two posts because after the polyphallic the horse or flight is the symbol of the next stage.
Considering the feminine ego ideal of self-effacement ("being nice") it makes sense that aggression would be expressed as a covert activity and not as an open confrontation. This theft (projected onto the king) could show up in kleptomania (social) or the impulse to "steal" sex with the resulting premature ejaculation in the worry of being caught.
Ixion's madness after the deed is something I'll have to compare with other myths at a later time. However, the madness of Orestes was for matricide and the horses are symbols of the post-polyphallic mother. This is either the phallic mother (if the father's name has been denigrated or he is absent) or I'm toying with the idea that it can be the phallic-oedipal (perverse impulses towards the mother in the narcissist instead of love qua duty for her).
For Ixion to be rescued by Zeus in the schema I've prepared it would mean a return to the anal stage. The strongest characterlogical feature of this stage is the negativism and obstinacy against another person's will. So the return to Zeus would represent a reversal of gratitude towards the father. Taking stock of Hermes position as messenger of the gods and what I've called a subject masochist schizoid position the reversal of such would likely be the irreverence in humour that I brought up in the last post. Hermes performing the punishment of Ixion by fixing him to a floating fiery wheel in which bottom and top are continually reversed seems like a very apt metaphor for all discussed in the last post. Having to exclaim 'benefactors should be honoured' also brings to mind Ixion continuing to enact the opposite.
I'm not sure what to make of the centaurs being produced by Ixion and will have to look into the other half man-half beast groups. However, if the horse is a symbol of the mother then it seems likely that it bespeaks a mother identification and the anal and the phallic stages are the two most important stages for this.
The importance of this myth would to be to show that the gift-giving, feeling of gratitude, and the feminine ego ideal are reversed by falling back on an anal fixation. The work of Chasseguet-Smirgel, who tirelessly mentioned the anal component of perversion, would draw support from this. Maybe I can post a few excerpts from her writing soon.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
feminine subject- flight, humour, head-genitals
In a previous post I talked about the eye as a symbol of the vagina and in the last post I mentioned flight as linked to a 'magical' world that would be the masochist's equivalent to the narcissist's cockiness or confidence (self-esteem which is outside of what's conferred onto him in the symbolic order). I also related this to lying and denial.
I've been thinking about flying as a simple reversal of walking. A normal person walks on the ground the opposite would be flying in the air. This would place flying in a larger economy of reversals in the classic sense of 'displacement upwards from below'
With Pinocchio we see the displacement of upwards from below tied to lying. In addition the common clown with his bulbous red nose would represent another reversal. If the object masochist wants to be the cause of delight and to be loved by a subject there seems to be a reversal involved in seeking to gain approval from children rather than adults.
If the eye is a symbol for the vagina then, as other analysts have pointed out, migraines might be genital pain that is also displaced upwards.
In the Sorceress and the Hysteric Clement mentions the medieval festivals in which a king would be chosen from among the mentally ill or an ass would be put on top. This reversal seems to also be an act of irreverence and would be a trend we still find at work today in the humour found in the Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, etc. in which the father is portrayed as an idiot (or the adults foolish) while the children (or even family pets) are intelligent.
There is some important work to be done here in differentiating fixation which would amount to some perversion in someone's character and the acts of irreverence which would come from a perverse structure.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
myth-symbols- polyphallic, horse, flight; lying
There seems to be a consistent structure in myths concerning the phallic stage.
At the polyphallic phase there is Medusa (Perseus), the hydra (Heracles), and the 6 armed Gegeines (Jason).
From the Medusa springs the pegasus which is both horse and has flight. Heracles ends up killing a centaur (half horse) and Jason meets up with the harpies (flight). The pegasus would be a good example of a bisexual compromise formation or fusion.
In a few of my patients I've encountered the fantasy of flight that involved either an adventure with someone to a magical place or it serves to allow someone to do something covert such as fly away at night to someone's window without detection. This is clearly not a superman type of fantasy but it has parallels in Peter Pan and Aladdin.
I think that where the (narcissist will clearly deny the drive for recognition of the symbolic order and manifest his 'cockiness' or being special regardless of his status there the masochist will deny the symbolic order for a supernatural/magical/mystical world.
The centaur which Heracles kills lies to his wife and she believes his blood to be a love potion rather than poison. Similarly there is a lie in regards to the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda and Jason makes a promise to Medea which turns out to be a lie.
I think denial or disavowal is a lie told to the self, but since the mind develops from the interpersonal the lie must first come into existence there and, if you think about it, being able to lie is really an important achievement. Many of the psychotics I've sat with have complained of me reading their minds and told me that they couldn't look into my eyes because it would grant me access to their thoughts.
I think this lie is of great importance and the magical world of the masochist would show up there in the 'tall tale' and maybe have a more active stance in performing magical tricks or illusions. These lies would join up with another masochistic position of the 'white lie' which would be contrasted to the narcissist's lie to impress others...
There is the universal anecdote of the narcissistic person lying about having written a book. At first he claims that he will write a book to others and they begin to ask about its progress. He starts by lying about sketching the plot, then about having written the first chapter, and keeps telling those who ask to see some of it to wait until he finishes more even though he hasn’t even started. With the masochist ‘white lies’ are what come to the fore because they are made so that the other person doesn't feel rejected by them. An example here is a person who lies about liking the sweaters that her friend designs. She finds them to be ugly but doesn’t want to put down her friend’s attempts and this gets her to the point that she begins to receive the sweaters as gifts, and then begins to have to start wearing them in order to keep up the lie that she finds them to beautiful.
At the polyphallic phase there is Medusa (Perseus), the hydra (Heracles), and the 6 armed Gegeines (Jason).
From the Medusa springs the pegasus which is both horse and has flight. Heracles ends up killing a centaur (half horse) and Jason meets up with the harpies (flight). The pegasus would be a good example of a bisexual compromise formation or fusion.
In a few of my patients I've encountered the fantasy of flight that involved either an adventure with someone to a magical place or it serves to allow someone to do something covert such as fly away at night to someone's window without detection. This is clearly not a superman type of fantasy but it has parallels in Peter Pan and Aladdin.
I think that where the (narcissist will clearly deny the drive for recognition of the symbolic order and manifest his 'cockiness' or being special regardless of his status there the masochist will deny the symbolic order for a supernatural/magical/mystical world.
The centaur which Heracles kills lies to his wife and she believes his blood to be a love potion rather than poison. Similarly there is a lie in regards to the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda and Jason makes a promise to Medea which turns out to be a lie.
I think denial or disavowal is a lie told to the self, but since the mind develops from the interpersonal the lie must first come into existence there and, if you think about it, being able to lie is really an important achievement. Many of the psychotics I've sat with have complained of me reading their minds and told me that they couldn't look into my eyes because it would grant me access to their thoughts.
I think this lie is of great importance and the magical world of the masochist would show up there in the 'tall tale' and maybe have a more active stance in performing magical tricks or illusions. These lies would join up with another masochistic position of the 'white lie' which would be contrasted to the narcissist's lie to impress others...
There is the universal anecdote of the narcissistic person lying about having written a book. At first he claims that he will write a book to others and they begin to ask about its progress. He starts by lying about sketching the plot, then about having written the first chapter, and keeps telling those who ask to see some of it to wait until he finishes more even though he hasn’t even started. With the masochist ‘white lies’ are what come to the fore because they are made so that the other person doesn't feel rejected by them. An example here is a person who lies about liking the sweaters that her friend designs. She finds them to be ugly but doesn’t want to put down her friend’s attempts and this gets her to the point that she begins to receive the sweaters as gifts, and then begins to have to start wearing them in order to keep up the lie that she finds them to beautiful.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
the narcissist and masochist- a summary II
Some work with a new patient helped me to make a more symmetrical definition of the four positions.
Freud introduced loving and being loved as an opposition that I've put under the rubric of masochism (see the first post for the explanation) and he also differentiated narcissism from narcissistic object choice. However, the latter seems to better to explain homosexual object choice and doesn't capture the relation that seems key 1.
In being loved the individual wants to cause delight in the other and experience his or her approval and feel special (be more loveable than others).
In narcissism I think the binary of conquer and be conquered is the best way to capture what's at stake. To 'be conquered' explains the narcissistic behaviour of the woman who doesn't answer phone calls, who makes the man have to work hard to spend time with her, and who wants to be the cause of his desire 2. This patient seems to have had the bad luck of attracting a man's attention but in setting an obstacle course for him to prove his desire in claiming her, the man would give up. Such a woman has narcissism about her value as an object to a subject. In some cases this value might be so high that no man is a worthy conqueror and I think this describes the situation of the taboo of virginity in Freud in which the woman's aggression is feared and an elder or someone of high or special status is called to deflower her.
1. I've had the luck to see a homosexual patient briefly and he was very candid in the requirement of his love object resembling him as much as possible in both appearance and intellect. Freud writes that object choice
(1) According to the narcissistic type [is]:
(a) what he himself is (i.e. himself),
(b) what he himself was,
(c) what he himself would like to be,
(d) someone who was once part of himself. (On Narcissism, p.90)
Maybe C could be the basis for the object narcissist but doing so doesn't capture the interaction between the subject and object that I'm drawing attention to.
2. In Lacanian terms jouissance might be more apt here. One patient's girlfriend forbade him to look pornography because he couldn't find her attractive if he watched the "skinny sluts" there.
This is an addition to the post
http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2011/11/narcissist-and-masochist-summary.html
Freud introduced loving and being loved as an opposition that I've put under the rubric of masochism (see the first post for the explanation) and he also differentiated narcissism from narcissistic object choice. However, the latter seems to better to explain homosexual object choice and doesn't capture the relation that seems key 1.
In being loved the individual wants to cause delight in the other and experience his or her approval and feel special (be more loveable than others).
In narcissism I think the binary of conquer and be conquered is the best way to capture what's at stake. To 'be conquered' explains the narcissistic behaviour of the woman who doesn't answer phone calls, who makes the man have to work hard to spend time with her, and who wants to be the cause of his desire 2. This patient seems to have had the bad luck of attracting a man's attention but in setting an obstacle course for him to prove his desire in claiming her, the man would give up. Such a woman has narcissism about her value as an object to a subject. In some cases this value might be so high that no man is a worthy conqueror and I think this describes the situation of the taboo of virginity in Freud in which the woman's aggression is feared and an elder or someone of high or special status is called to deflower her.
1. I've had the luck to see a homosexual patient briefly and he was very candid in the requirement of his love object resembling him as much as possible in both appearance and intellect. Freud writes that object choice
(1) According to the narcissistic type [is]:
(a) what he himself is (i.e. himself),
(b) what he himself was,
(c) what he himself would like to be,
(d) someone who was once part of himself. (On Narcissism, p.90)
Maybe C could be the basis for the object narcissist but doing so doesn't capture the interaction between the subject and object that I'm drawing attention to.
2. In Lacanian terms jouissance might be more apt here. One patient's girlfriend forbade him to look pornography because he couldn't find her attractive if he watched the "skinny sluts" there.
This is an addition to the post
http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2011/11/narcissist-and-masochist-summary.html
Reich, marriage, and future bisexuality II
One of my fans ;) told me that it could be a real possibility that Iran or some other country would provide a real threat and that we just had a war with Iraq. I want to assure her that the Iraq war was not a real war (as Baudrillard and others have pointed out). The casualties were really only on one side and the US's withdrawal has shown that there was no intention to 'conquer' in the sense that would make it a war. Instead, Iraq has important contracts with U.S. companies to clean up and to form new business models, the Middle East region has Al Jazeera linking it together instead of news coming from smaller units, and it will maintain the appearance of cultural self-governance. The last statement refers to the idea that business interests and not the interests of a dictator nor religious groups will consolidate power.
The Nazis had conquest in mind and would have brought their religion, values, and aesthetics to the conquered. It may be possible for another country to launch a bomb at the U.S. and it is quite possible that it will lose it's economic dominance but the idea of another country conquering the US is absurd.
My reader also asked me to say more about love in marriage as a radical proposition. I think it is clear that love has been the motivating force in marriage for a very short time and that arranged marriages and informal use of marriage for group bonds has been dominant throughout history. From the psychoanalytic view point love, as a drive or ideal to recapture the lost object (the mother), will naturally find new objects when the current beloved can no longer be idealized. Love and idealization can stay as long as the beloved continues to grow and can renew that transference. The fantasy of eternity which I drew attention to is a pre-oedipal one (i.e. Persephone and Hades) and only shows up in individuals with schizoid fixations. I don't see people getting married out of strength and wanting to grow with each other. I see individuals getting married out of ease, desperation, inertia, etc. They usually have already repressed their ideals before they turn to marriage and are in need of meaning or security.
In addition, the representation of the cultural Other, as necessarily mediated by language, is also related to feminist notions of woman as the Other sex and censure of psychic bisexuality for mere anatomical distinction. Narcissism, in definition, is self-love and in what was presented in a previous post on the father complex as 'duty' can also be stand in for love when a man feels part of his duty is to be a protector of the Other/"weaker" sex.
Reich's Listen Little Man is a very good romp through this terrain.
The Nazis had conquest in mind and would have brought their religion, values, and aesthetics to the conquered. It may be possible for another country to launch a bomb at the U.S. and it is quite possible that it will lose it's economic dominance but the idea of another country conquering the US is absurd.
My reader also asked me to say more about love in marriage as a radical proposition. I think it is clear that love has been the motivating force in marriage for a very short time and that arranged marriages and informal use of marriage for group bonds has been dominant throughout history. From the psychoanalytic view point love, as a drive or ideal to recapture the lost object (the mother), will naturally find new objects when the current beloved can no longer be idealized. Love and idealization can stay as long as the beloved continues to grow and can renew that transference. The fantasy of eternity which I drew attention to is a pre-oedipal one (i.e. Persephone and Hades) and only shows up in individuals with schizoid fixations. I don't see people getting married out of strength and wanting to grow with each other. I see individuals getting married out of ease, desperation, inertia, etc. They usually have already repressed their ideals before they turn to marriage and are in need of meaning or security.
In addition, the representation of the cultural Other, as necessarily mediated by language, is also related to feminist notions of woman as the Other sex and censure of psychic bisexuality for mere anatomical distinction. Narcissism, in definition, is self-love and in what was presented in a previous post on the father complex as 'duty' can also be stand in for love when a man feels part of his duty is to be a protector of the Other/"weaker" sex.
Reich's Listen Little Man is a very good romp through this terrain.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Reich, marriage, and future bisexuality
Reich, echoing Marx, sought the riddle of communism in the act of overturning the family. There have been many radical ideas about the government raising the children, parents sharing responsibility, etc. but I don't think either thinker meant something so radical. I think that just being in a marriage with someone you love, or who makes you happy, is a radical proposition in itself...
What are we to say about the woman who chooses not to go to university or work and chooses to be a housewife, and over top of that, chooses to be a housewife in a marriage without love? In an age in which more than 50% get divorced and women have full access to education and the workforce aren't we dealing with something neurotic when such a woman chooses to be in a loveless (maybe sexless, with love being understood as dependency and compliancy is more precise) marriage? In such a relationship don't we find early fantasies relating to "loving someone forever or for eternity" which have trumped later fantasies of independence and sexuality?
Isn't the future dependent on woman to give up that fantasy and to seek to develop her narcissistic side?
And, when the conservative talks of 'China rising' and lives, like the housewife, in the early 20th century isn't there another fantasy to be overcome? Hasn't capitalism linked all economies, mixed the populations, and taken racism from public discourse so that the readiness for a war or distrust of the cultural Other is no longer real?
Men too will have to give up their fantasy and their belief in language as if a cultural group, because they share a name, must mean that each individual has the same feelings. Also the belief that because an individual uses language that there must be an I that exists who is self-caused (causa sui) or is modeled from perfection as opposed to an I who exists from a lack before others.
By the very nature of this progression it will have to be women who will be active in it and men who will learn to be passive. However, coming from a place of masochism it won't be the rule of women but 'high noon' and establishing a center between the two poles.
And all this is the most beautiful picture of the current situation which doesn't even touch how much the current culture feeds into fear, demand for security, the pettiness and meanness that our culture gratifies, and the vast majority of sick people who don't have either of these ideals in marriage.
What are we to say about the woman who chooses not to go to university or work and chooses to be a housewife, and over top of that, chooses to be a housewife in a marriage without love? In an age in which more than 50% get divorced and women have full access to education and the workforce aren't we dealing with something neurotic when such a woman chooses to be in a loveless (maybe sexless, with love being understood as dependency and compliancy is more precise) marriage? In such a relationship don't we find early fantasies relating to "loving someone forever or for eternity" which have trumped later fantasies of independence and sexuality?
Isn't the future dependent on woman to give up that fantasy and to seek to develop her narcissistic side?
And, when the conservative talks of 'China rising' and lives, like the housewife, in the early 20th century isn't there another fantasy to be overcome? Hasn't capitalism linked all economies, mixed the populations, and taken racism from public discourse so that the readiness for a war or distrust of the cultural Other is no longer real?
Men too will have to give up their fantasy and their belief in language as if a cultural group, because they share a name, must mean that each individual has the same feelings. Also the belief that because an individual uses language that there must be an I that exists who is self-caused (causa sui) or is modeled from perfection as opposed to an I who exists from a lack before others.
By the very nature of this progression it will have to be women who will be active in it and men who will learn to be passive. However, coming from a place of masochism it won't be the rule of women but 'high noon' and establishing a center between the two poles.
And all this is the most beautiful picture of the current situation which doesn't even touch how much the current culture feeds into fear, demand for security, the pettiness and meanness that our culture gratifies, and the vast majority of sick people who don't have either of these ideals in marriage.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Character in Reich
There are a few early articles that show how Reich first conceived of character. From there Psychic Contact and the Vegetative Current adds another dimension in which impulse is paired with fear and gives us the basis for understanding repetition-compulsion. In his early view:
Characterological Mastery of the Oedipus Complex
Popular thought classifies human beings as hard or yielding, proud or meek, cool or warm, aloof or hot-blooded. Psycho-analysis of these different types of character can prove that they are all only different forms of armouring of the ego against the dangers of the external world and against the repressed instinctual demands of the id. The excessive politeness of one hides the same anxiety as functions through the harsh and sometimes brutal behaviour of another. Only their differing histories have determined that the one discharges, or tries to discharge, his anxiety in this way and the other in that. When the clinical psycho-analyst speaks of passive-feminine, paranoid-aggressive, obsessional-neurotic, hysterical, genital-narcissistic and other characters he has laid hold, through this nomenclature, of different reaction-types, in a somewhat rough scheme. What is needed now, however, is both to grasp the common nature of all character-formation as such, and also to give some account of the fundamental conditions which lead to such typical differentiations. 453-4
By this insight into a portion of human development we are enabled to answer a question which Freud once raised: in what form does the repressed persist?—as duplicate copy, as memory-trace, or otherwise? We can now conclude, with all due caution, that those parts of infantile experience which are not elaborated characterologically are retained as memory-traces carrying an affective cathexis, whilst those which suffered the fate of characterological transformation persist as present modes of behaviour. Obscure as the process may still be, this 'persistence as function' cannot be doubted, for analytical therapy is able to resolve such characterological functions again into their original constituents. We are not concerned with raising something submerged, as, say, in hysterical amnesia, but with a process which might perhaps be compared with the recovery of a chemical element from a compound. Moreover, we now understand more clearly why it is not possible to clear up the Oedipus conflict in many severe cases of character-neurosis merely by analysis of content. The conflict no longer exists at all as a present fact, and can only be recovered by analytic decomposition of the formal modes of reaction. This naturally extends our therapeutic possibilities. 465
The decisive part is played in the end by the natural impulses to genital pleasure and social activity which the character-neurosis had hindered only from unfolding. The technical process consists in this, that after a part of the characterological behaviour has been understood, it is isolated, presented to the patient and continually objectified. Since the patient, whilst conscious indeed of his neurotic symptoms, knows nothing of his neurotic mode of reaction, the latter must be objectified before it can be analysed. By this means the patient is enabled to take up the same attitude to his neurotic character trait as to the symptom which torments him subjectively. Character analysis, consisting essentially of this isolation, objectification and interpretation of character, does not take place at the end of the analysis, as a sort of completion, nor as an accompaniment in such cases as shew a specially marked character neurosis, but is indicated in every case, for the following reasons. First, there is no neurosis which is not erected upon a neurotic character; it is not a matter of differentiation between neuroses expressed in symptoms and neuroses expressed in character—we can only distinguish between neuroses of character with and without neurotic symptoms. Secondly, as long as the characterological armour remains intact, it obstructs the therapeutic effectiveness of our analytical interpretations. It is more than an analogy when we say that the interpretations rebound from the character and evaporate, if this itself is not first opened up so as to provide access to the trends protected and warded off by it. In the third place, our argument has already shewn that the most important infantile conflict situations have been transformed into characterological reactions and are therefore not understandable without analysis of attitudes. Finally, systematic analysis of character facilitates direct access to the central infantile conflict. 466-7
Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood:
The 'lord' phantasy had begun in his fourth year. He had realized the necessity for self-control somewhat later, from fear of his father. To this was added a very important motive for the control of his aggressive impulses, that of a counter-identification with his father. The latter used constantly to quarrel with his mother and make an uproar, and the boy set before himself the ideal of being not like his father, but the exact opposite, corresponding to the phantasy: 'If I were my mother's husband, I would treat her quite differently; I would be kind and control my annoyance at her deficiencies.' This counter-identification was thus completely under the influence of his Oedipus complex—love of his mother and hate of his father.
Dreaminess and self-constraint concealing active sadistic phantasies characterized him as a boy, and represented the 'lord' phantasy. At puberty he made an intense homosexual object-choice in the person of a teacher, which ended in an identification. This teacher was, moreover, the very essence of a lord, dignified, calm, self-restrained, faultlessly dressed. This identification began with imitation of his clothes. Other identifications ensued, and at about fourteen years of age his character, as we had it to deal with in analysis, was fully formed. It was no longer a mere 'lord phantasy'; he was a 'lord' in his actual behaviour. 223-4
A considerable amount of castration anxiety was included in this display of dignified behaviour. The history of the connection between the two things indicated an end-product of a childish phobia, concerning which little has hitherto been known. Between the ages of about three to six years the patient suffered from a very intense phobia of mice. As to the content of this phobia, it suffices to say that it constituted a working-out of his feminine attitude to his father as a regressive reaction to his castration anxiety. Connected with this was a typical masturbation anxiety. Now as the boy's 'lord' phantasy developed into 'lordly' behaviour, so his phobia decreased. Later there only remained a trace of anxiety just before he went to bed. During analysis, with the resolution of his 'lordly' behaviour, there arose again, and moreover with emotion, his phobia of mice and his castration anxiety. It was thus evident that a part of the libido involved in his childish phobia, or alternatively, the anxiety, had been transferred to and elaborated in his characterological behaviour. 225
Particularly noticeable in a narcissistic, masochistic hypochondriac [1] were his loud, excited and emotional complaints concerning the severe treatment he had received from his father. As regards its content, one might summarize all that he brought out during months of treatment in the words: 'See what I have suffered through my father; he has ruined me and made me unfit for life'. Very thorough work had been done on his infantile conflicts with his father during a year and a half's analysis with a colleague of mine, before he came to me, and in spite of this there had been hardly any alteration in his attitude or his symptom.
Finally a characteristic of his behaviour in analysis struck me. His movements were languid, his mouth drooped as if tired. His speech, scarcely describable in writing, was monotonous and gloomy. When I had guessed the significance of this note in his voice, all was at once clear to me: he speaks as if he were in torment, as if he were dying. I learned moreover that in certain other situations outside analysis he would also sink into this unconsciously posed lethargy. His speaking in this way also meant: 'See what my father has done to me, how he torments me, he has ruined me and made me unfit for life'. His attitude was a severe reproach.
The effect of my interpretation of his 'dying', reproachful and complaining manner of speaking was astonishing [2]. It seemed as if, with the loosening of this last formal foothold of his relation to his father, all the earlier interpretations of analytical material began also to be effective. It was permissible to draw the conclusion that so long as the unconscious significance of his manner of speech was not recognized, a large part of his father-complex remained emotionally bound up in it, and the material relating to it which had been disclosed was, in spite of being made conscious, not sufficiently invested with emotion to be of therapeutic value.
It is thus evident that a single unconscious, infantile process may be recorded and expressed in duplicate: in what the individual says and does, and in the way in which he speaks and acts. It is sufficiently interesting to be recorded that the analysis of the 'what' leaves the 'how' untouched, in spite of the unity of matter and form; that this 'how' proves to be the hiding-place of similar psychical material as has apparently already been resolved or made conscious in the 'what'; and that finally the analysis of the 'how' is of particular efficacy in releasing the associated affects. This is owing to the grievous disturbance of narcissistic equilibrium involved in the analysis and interpretation of characterological attitudes. 229-30
[1] notice that Reich here says narcissistic and masochistic character and sees character as specific types of armouring that an individual may have.
[2] sounding as if he was dying would be a regression to a pre-oedipal impression of one's own death but this regression is clearly linked to the conflict with the father and would therefore have a "wish" dimension that could be analyzed as well. Reich was certainly a genius of the non-verbal but anyone who has read his use of dream-work will find him greatly wanting there.
Characterological Mastery of the Oedipus Complex
Popular thought classifies human beings as hard or yielding, proud or meek, cool or warm, aloof or hot-blooded. Psycho-analysis of these different types of character can prove that they are all only different forms of armouring of the ego against the dangers of the external world and against the repressed instinctual demands of the id. The excessive politeness of one hides the same anxiety as functions through the harsh and sometimes brutal behaviour of another. Only their differing histories have determined that the one discharges, or tries to discharge, his anxiety in this way and the other in that. When the clinical psycho-analyst speaks of passive-feminine, paranoid-aggressive, obsessional-neurotic, hysterical, genital-narcissistic and other characters he has laid hold, through this nomenclature, of different reaction-types, in a somewhat rough scheme. What is needed now, however, is both to grasp the common nature of all character-formation as such, and also to give some account of the fundamental conditions which lead to such typical differentiations. 453-4
By this insight into a portion of human development we are enabled to answer a question which Freud once raised: in what form does the repressed persist?—as duplicate copy, as memory-trace, or otherwise? We can now conclude, with all due caution, that those parts of infantile experience which are not elaborated characterologically are retained as memory-traces carrying an affective cathexis, whilst those which suffered the fate of characterological transformation persist as present modes of behaviour. Obscure as the process may still be, this 'persistence as function' cannot be doubted, for analytical therapy is able to resolve such characterological functions again into their original constituents. We are not concerned with raising something submerged, as, say, in hysterical amnesia, but with a process which might perhaps be compared with the recovery of a chemical element from a compound. Moreover, we now understand more clearly why it is not possible to clear up the Oedipus conflict in many severe cases of character-neurosis merely by analysis of content. The conflict no longer exists at all as a present fact, and can only be recovered by analytic decomposition of the formal modes of reaction. This naturally extends our therapeutic possibilities. 465
The decisive part is played in the end by the natural impulses to genital pleasure and social activity which the character-neurosis had hindered only from unfolding. The technical process consists in this, that after a part of the characterological behaviour has been understood, it is isolated, presented to the patient and continually objectified. Since the patient, whilst conscious indeed of his neurotic symptoms, knows nothing of his neurotic mode of reaction, the latter must be objectified before it can be analysed. By this means the patient is enabled to take up the same attitude to his neurotic character trait as to the symptom which torments him subjectively. Character analysis, consisting essentially of this isolation, objectification and interpretation of character, does not take place at the end of the analysis, as a sort of completion, nor as an accompaniment in such cases as shew a specially marked character neurosis, but is indicated in every case, for the following reasons. First, there is no neurosis which is not erected upon a neurotic character; it is not a matter of differentiation between neuroses expressed in symptoms and neuroses expressed in character—we can only distinguish between neuroses of character with and without neurotic symptoms. Secondly, as long as the characterological armour remains intact, it obstructs the therapeutic effectiveness of our analytical interpretations. It is more than an analogy when we say that the interpretations rebound from the character and evaporate, if this itself is not first opened up so as to provide access to the trends protected and warded off by it. In the third place, our argument has already shewn that the most important infantile conflict situations have been transformed into characterological reactions and are therefore not understandable without analysis of attitudes. Finally, systematic analysis of character facilitates direct access to the central infantile conflict. 466-7
Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood:
The 'lord' phantasy had begun in his fourth year. He had realized the necessity for self-control somewhat later, from fear of his father. To this was added a very important motive for the control of his aggressive impulses, that of a counter-identification with his father. The latter used constantly to quarrel with his mother and make an uproar, and the boy set before himself the ideal of being not like his father, but the exact opposite, corresponding to the phantasy: 'If I were my mother's husband, I would treat her quite differently; I would be kind and control my annoyance at her deficiencies.' This counter-identification was thus completely under the influence of his Oedipus complex—love of his mother and hate of his father.
Dreaminess and self-constraint concealing active sadistic phantasies characterized him as a boy, and represented the 'lord' phantasy. At puberty he made an intense homosexual object-choice in the person of a teacher, which ended in an identification. This teacher was, moreover, the very essence of a lord, dignified, calm, self-restrained, faultlessly dressed. This identification began with imitation of his clothes. Other identifications ensued, and at about fourteen years of age his character, as we had it to deal with in analysis, was fully formed. It was no longer a mere 'lord phantasy'; he was a 'lord' in his actual behaviour. 223-4
A considerable amount of castration anxiety was included in this display of dignified behaviour. The history of the connection between the two things indicated an end-product of a childish phobia, concerning which little has hitherto been known. Between the ages of about three to six years the patient suffered from a very intense phobia of mice. As to the content of this phobia, it suffices to say that it constituted a working-out of his feminine attitude to his father as a regressive reaction to his castration anxiety. Connected with this was a typical masturbation anxiety. Now as the boy's 'lord' phantasy developed into 'lordly' behaviour, so his phobia decreased. Later there only remained a trace of anxiety just before he went to bed. During analysis, with the resolution of his 'lordly' behaviour, there arose again, and moreover with emotion, his phobia of mice and his castration anxiety. It was thus evident that a part of the libido involved in his childish phobia, or alternatively, the anxiety, had been transferred to and elaborated in his characterological behaviour. 225
Particularly noticeable in a narcissistic, masochistic hypochondriac [1] were his loud, excited and emotional complaints concerning the severe treatment he had received from his father. As regards its content, one might summarize all that he brought out during months of treatment in the words: 'See what I have suffered through my father; he has ruined me and made me unfit for life'. Very thorough work had been done on his infantile conflicts with his father during a year and a half's analysis with a colleague of mine, before he came to me, and in spite of this there had been hardly any alteration in his attitude or his symptom.
Finally a characteristic of his behaviour in analysis struck me. His movements were languid, his mouth drooped as if tired. His speech, scarcely describable in writing, was monotonous and gloomy. When I had guessed the significance of this note in his voice, all was at once clear to me: he speaks as if he were in torment, as if he were dying. I learned moreover that in certain other situations outside analysis he would also sink into this unconsciously posed lethargy. His speaking in this way also meant: 'See what my father has done to me, how he torments me, he has ruined me and made me unfit for life'. His attitude was a severe reproach.
The effect of my interpretation of his 'dying', reproachful and complaining manner of speaking was astonishing [2]. It seemed as if, with the loosening of this last formal foothold of his relation to his father, all the earlier interpretations of analytical material began also to be effective. It was permissible to draw the conclusion that so long as the unconscious significance of his manner of speech was not recognized, a large part of his father-complex remained emotionally bound up in it, and the material relating to it which had been disclosed was, in spite of being made conscious, not sufficiently invested with emotion to be of therapeutic value.
It is thus evident that a single unconscious, infantile process may be recorded and expressed in duplicate: in what the individual says and does, and in the way in which he speaks and acts. It is sufficiently interesting to be recorded that the analysis of the 'what' leaves the 'how' untouched, in spite of the unity of matter and form; that this 'how' proves to be the hiding-place of similar psychical material as has apparently already been resolved or made conscious in the 'what'; and that finally the analysis of the 'how' is of particular efficacy in releasing the associated affects. This is owing to the grievous disturbance of narcissistic equilibrium involved in the analysis and interpretation of characterological attitudes. 229-30
[1] notice that Reich here says narcissistic and masochistic character and sees character as specific types of armouring that an individual may have.
[2] sounding as if he was dying would be a regression to a pre-oedipal impression of one's own death but this regression is clearly linked to the conflict with the father and would therefore have a "wish" dimension that could be analyzed as well. Reich was certainly a genius of the non-verbal but anyone who has read his use of dream-work will find him greatly wanting there.
Frances Tustin
I mentioned in the previous post I'd reference some of Tustin's work. I can't find the piece that mentions explicitly the pre-symbol and maybe pre-image epistemological status of her work with autistic kids but some of the passages below show how her work is positioned in regards to Klein:
In their papers on Symbolism, Hanna Segal (1957) and Marion Milner (1955) do not subscribe to Jones' (1916) view that symbolism is a bar to progress, rather they incline to Melanie Klein's (1930) proposition that 'symbolism is the basis of all talents'. As Milner says, to use the term 'symbolism' in this latter sense brings it into line with the way it is used in epistemology, aesthetics and the philosophy of science.
The development of the symbolizing capacity is dependent on the subject's ability to tolerate separateness from the outside world. When we first see them, psychogenic autistic children do not differentiate between subject or object to any extent, nor between what is internal and what is external. They are in such a state of undifferentiation from the world around them that they are often thought to be deaf, or even blind, since some of them try to walk through objects as if they cannot see. Such children live in a shadowy world of diminished consciousness in which conscious and unconscious are barely differentiated. It is a very different world from ours. To empathize with it is very difficult. This muted consciousness is to avoid the agony of consciousness they suffered when, in an insufficiently differentiated and integrated state, they discovered that the sensation-giving 'button' was not a part of their mouth.
As we have seen, their reaction to this traumatizing awareness had been to use parts of their body, and later, outside objects experienced as bodily parts, to generate hard object-like sensations and soft shape-like sensations. These kept them trapped in a state of undifferentiation from outside objects. Thus, such children are not sufficiently integrated and differentiated to be able to use one thing to represent another thing. This means that the toys we provide for these a-symbolic autistic children, will not at first be meaningful to them in terms of communication and fantasies. They will only be meaningful in terms of the sensations they can produce by holding them either tightly or loosely. At first, basic sensation-giving materials such as sand, water, clay and plasticine or playdough are likely to be used much more by autistic children than are toys.
In more normal infants, missing and longing for the suckling mother stimulates the use of substitutes, such as sucking the thumb, the fingers, the fist or a rubber comforter. These temporary substitutes for the breast (or bottle experienced in terms of the inbuilt gestalt of a breast), enable the baby to wait until the suckling mother comes. I call these normal objects, 'autosensuous objects', in contradistinction to 'autistic objects' which are pathological. Normal autosensuous objects are sucked, whereas pathological autistic objects are clutched, or may be sucked compulsively in a clutching sort of way. The child may also stick himself to hard objects so that they seem to be a part of his body. These hard autistic objects, which do not have to come through space, as do normal autosensuous objects such as the finger or the thumb, replace the breast and block out awareness of the nurturing mother. The trouble with these patients is that they have supplanted the mother, and in the transference, they try to supplant the therapist. We must not allow this.
Tustin, F. (1988). Psychotherapy with Children who Cannot Play. p. 98
Melanie Klein's findings had come from schizophrenic-type children. I have come to realize that - at least in the early days of work with autistic children - these insights are not relevant to them. The only autistic child Mrs Klein treated was a child she called Dick, whom she wrote about in 1930 (Klein, 1930). This was thirteen years before Leo Kanner's seminal paper (Kanner, 1943). Although Mrs Klein realized that Dick was different from the other children she had worked with, and although with great perspicacity she anticipated many of Kanner's findings, after much agonizing she settled for a diagnosis of dementia praecox, as schizophrenia was then called.
Mrs Klein's concepts of projective identification and splitting are particularly relevant to schizophrenic-type children. Such children have developed relationships, although they are distorted ones. However, a significant feature of autistic children's psychopathology is that they do not relate to people. In treatment, one finds that they have not even developed the first basic primary relationship to the mother, or, if they have done so, it has broken down in a disastrous way. So, while Mrs Klein's theories are relevant to children who have developed relationships, they are not, at first, applicable to autistic children, who do not relate to people. Concepts such as encapsulation, imitative fusion, autistic objects and autistic shapes, as defences against the ‘black hole’ of nonrelationship, are more descriptive of the autistic child's reactions.
Let me now tell you about the shock I had when I first realized that Melanie Klein's insights did not seem to apply to the early stages of work with autistic children. This will illustrate how I came to develop my present views on the possible origins of psychogenic autism.
Tustin, F. (1988). The ‘black hole’: a significant element in autism. p. 38-9
I'm currently writing on the connection of Klein's stages of development to early myth and, as you've seen in previous posts, clarifying the connection of the Oedipus complex to later myth. In my estimation Tustin in right and Klein basically gives us theoretical formations from Cronos and the separation of the world parents and hints at an earlier oral stage in her early work. And, in her later work she merely just takes these stages and moves them earlier on the time line of infant development instead of discovering earlier stages. It very much seems to me that Tustin did for Klein what Klein did for Freud.
In their papers on Symbolism, Hanna Segal (1957) and Marion Milner (1955) do not subscribe to Jones' (1916) view that symbolism is a bar to progress, rather they incline to Melanie Klein's (1930) proposition that 'symbolism is the basis of all talents'. As Milner says, to use the term 'symbolism' in this latter sense brings it into line with the way it is used in epistemology, aesthetics and the philosophy of science.
The development of the symbolizing capacity is dependent on the subject's ability to tolerate separateness from the outside world. When we first see them, psychogenic autistic children do not differentiate between subject or object to any extent, nor between what is internal and what is external. They are in such a state of undifferentiation from the world around them that they are often thought to be deaf, or even blind, since some of them try to walk through objects as if they cannot see. Such children live in a shadowy world of diminished consciousness in which conscious and unconscious are barely differentiated. It is a very different world from ours. To empathize with it is very difficult. This muted consciousness is to avoid the agony of consciousness they suffered when, in an insufficiently differentiated and integrated state, they discovered that the sensation-giving 'button' was not a part of their mouth.
As we have seen, their reaction to this traumatizing awareness had been to use parts of their body, and later, outside objects experienced as bodily parts, to generate hard object-like sensations and soft shape-like sensations. These kept them trapped in a state of undifferentiation from outside objects. Thus, such children are not sufficiently integrated and differentiated to be able to use one thing to represent another thing. This means that the toys we provide for these a-symbolic autistic children, will not at first be meaningful to them in terms of communication and fantasies. They will only be meaningful in terms of the sensations they can produce by holding them either tightly or loosely. At first, basic sensation-giving materials such as sand, water, clay and plasticine or playdough are likely to be used much more by autistic children than are toys.
In more normal infants, missing and longing for the suckling mother stimulates the use of substitutes, such as sucking the thumb, the fingers, the fist or a rubber comforter. These temporary substitutes for the breast (or bottle experienced in terms of the inbuilt gestalt of a breast), enable the baby to wait until the suckling mother comes. I call these normal objects, 'autosensuous objects', in contradistinction to 'autistic objects' which are pathological. Normal autosensuous objects are sucked, whereas pathological autistic objects are clutched, or may be sucked compulsively in a clutching sort of way. The child may also stick himself to hard objects so that they seem to be a part of his body. These hard autistic objects, which do not have to come through space, as do normal autosensuous objects such as the finger or the thumb, replace the breast and block out awareness of the nurturing mother. The trouble with these patients is that they have supplanted the mother, and in the transference, they try to supplant the therapist. We must not allow this.
Tustin, F. (1988). Psychotherapy with Children who Cannot Play. p. 98
Melanie Klein's findings had come from schizophrenic-type children. I have come to realize that - at least in the early days of work with autistic children - these insights are not relevant to them. The only autistic child Mrs Klein treated was a child she called Dick, whom she wrote about in 1930 (Klein, 1930). This was thirteen years before Leo Kanner's seminal paper (Kanner, 1943). Although Mrs Klein realized that Dick was different from the other children she had worked with, and although with great perspicacity she anticipated many of Kanner's findings, after much agonizing she settled for a diagnosis of dementia praecox, as schizophrenia was then called.
Mrs Klein's concepts of projective identification and splitting are particularly relevant to schizophrenic-type children. Such children have developed relationships, although they are distorted ones. However, a significant feature of autistic children's psychopathology is that they do not relate to people. In treatment, one finds that they have not even developed the first basic primary relationship to the mother, or, if they have done so, it has broken down in a disastrous way. So, while Mrs Klein's theories are relevant to children who have developed relationships, they are not, at first, applicable to autistic children, who do not relate to people. Concepts such as encapsulation, imitative fusion, autistic objects and autistic shapes, as defences against the ‘black hole’ of nonrelationship, are more descriptive of the autistic child's reactions.
Let me now tell you about the shock I had when I first realized that Melanie Klein's insights did not seem to apply to the early stages of work with autistic children. This will illustrate how I came to develop my present views on the possible origins of psychogenic autism.
Tustin, F. (1988). The ‘black hole’: a significant element in autism. p. 38-9
I'm currently writing on the connection of Klein's stages of development to early myth and, as you've seen in previous posts, clarifying the connection of the Oedipus complex to later myth. In my estimation Tustin in right and Klein basically gives us theoretical formations from Cronos and the separation of the world parents and hints at an earlier oral stage in her early work. And, in her later work she merely just takes these stages and moves them earlier on the time line of infant development instead of discovering earlier stages. It very much seems to me that Tustin did for Klein what Klein did for Freud.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Selene (the moon) and Eos (the Dawn)
Doesn't the analyst's ears prick up when he comes across a nice parallel like this one?
Hyperion had 3 children Eos, Selene, and Helius
Selene fell in love with handsome shepherd Endymion. He was seduced while he slept in his cave and Selene had 50 daughters with him. At Selene’s request Zeus allowed Endymion to pick his fate and he chose to sleep forever and never grow old
Eos loved Trojan prince Tithonus “Eos, poor foolish lady, neglected to ask that her lover might never be subject to aging… no more could he lift his bones to totter, decrepit and feeble. At last the goddess agreed on this as the plan she must follow: she closed him up in his room, and locked up the glorious portal. Inside, his piping old voice droned endlessly. Gone is the vigor he used to enjoy, and the use of his limbs once handsome and supple” Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (218-238).
If we can roughly place Zeus as the mimetic (walking)/anal phase and Cronos appears before in relation to the oral swallowing of children and the separation of inside and outside in the separation of the world parents I'd like to suggest that Selene and Eos as children of Hyperion, who was older than Cronos, might stand in for a pre-Cronos level of development. This would be an earlier ocular phase and the parallel we see is one of scotomization, or some form of shutting out the rest of the world, with Endymion sleeping and the reverse of this, to be too present in the world (babbling on), with Tithonus.
I remember Frances Tustin has made some remarks about a sense of self being lost in trauma in what she conceives of as a pre-Kleinian, pre-image (representation), pre-paranoid-schizoid position. I'll see if I can track it down.
Hyperion had 3 children Eos, Selene, and Helius
Selene fell in love with handsome shepherd Endymion. He was seduced while he slept in his cave and Selene had 50 daughters with him. At Selene’s request Zeus allowed Endymion to pick his fate and he chose to sleep forever and never grow old
Eos loved Trojan prince Tithonus “Eos, poor foolish lady, neglected to ask that her lover might never be subject to aging… no more could he lift his bones to totter, decrepit and feeble. At last the goddess agreed on this as the plan she must follow: she closed him up in his room, and locked up the glorious portal. Inside, his piping old voice droned endlessly. Gone is the vigor he used to enjoy, and the use of his limbs once handsome and supple” Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (218-238).
If we can roughly place Zeus as the mimetic (walking)/anal phase and Cronos appears before in relation to the oral swallowing of children and the separation of inside and outside in the separation of the world parents I'd like to suggest that Selene and Eos as children of Hyperion, who was older than Cronos, might stand in for a pre-Cronos level of development. This would be an earlier ocular phase and the parallel we see is one of scotomization, or some form of shutting out the rest of the world, with Endymion sleeping and the reverse of this, to be too present in the world (babbling on), with Tithonus.
I remember Frances Tustin has made some remarks about a sense of self being lost in trauma in what she conceives of as a pre-Kleinian, pre-image (representation), pre-paranoid-schizoid position. I'll see if I can track it down.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
oral character
Michael Samsel has a site on Reich's characterology that is a good summary of what Reich's students have turned characterology into.
http://reichandlowentherapy.org/
I've especially enjoyed a post on "orality" (there's a link to his blog) in which he talks about how fixation will show up in the present:
* A hurry to get things done quickly because the actual doing is not pleasureable or secure and the outcome always feels uncertain
* A physical fear of falling which also translates into a fear of failing
* A sense of being hurried to do things before one is ready (sometimes consciously denied)
* A lack of discrimination about how things are done, just getting something done seems paramount. Comments from others about how something is done seem unfair and cruel.
* A belief in a sense of effort and a disbelief in a sense of ease. If something is found effortful, may give up or may continue, but will not look for an easier way.
* Often learns the ‘shell’ of a movement, but not the ‘guts.’
* A tendency to pretend one knows how to do things, and a difficulty asking how to do things, because it seems one should just know.
* Body sensation including emotion is not trusted as a guide
* A reluctance to try truly new things develops, often with a compensatory habit of taking on a lot of variations of things done well.
* A sense that the demands of life are unjust impositions.
I believe that such complicated ideas as the demands of life being unjust, a tendency to pretend one knows how to do things, etc. would be related to later development and this is an example of anthropomorphising a child that is still developmentally much less than a house pet.
However, the idea of learning the "shell" of a movement but not the "guts" and the lack of pleasure (anhedonia) are simple enough that they could be imputed to the simple subject of this time period.
I still need more clinical experience to be confident of the way I've parsed out the stages but, I would say that the oral would be a sexual stage while learning to walk is a stage jouissance or will. I see development going back and forth between libido (feminine or masochistic development) and aggression (masculine or narcissistic) development.
There would be aggressive development from 2d to 3d vision which is referenced in myth with the one-eyed cyclops and then the oral supplies of skin erotism and then to aggression in walking. These focal points would also have transition stages around them, so again, ocular, oral, anal, phallic are not enough to encompass all the phases but they still might prove useful in the general sense that these 4 stages might each have their version of the phallus or power with the other stages surrounding them being more mechanical and less dynamic... For example, Tustin talks about autism as a perverse solution in early development and I think that the big stages that involve the phallus (retroactively signified, of course) are more dynamic... This formulation is not satisfactory but will have to do for now.
I'd like to suggest at this point, however, that Nietzsche with his aphorisms is a good example of this general oral attitude of going in quick and not wanting to do the work of systematizing. I've also noticed the quick, pleasure-less eating in myself and while I initially began practicing yoga and thought I had picked things up pretty quickly I've come to realize more and more that many of my postures lack the "guts".
I also think that my writing style is just to get the ideas out in their bare bones and not with much flesh (style). I think I'm still writing more for the Other than with a sense of power or personal triumph- still hoping to be rescued by someone who can affirm me rather than bothering to affirm myself.
I think that other analysts make the mistake of talking about the oral stage with the mother being god-like and might read omnipotence in this approach of oral character but I think Freud is clear that a sense of God or perfection must arise with self-consciousness (see 'On Narcissism'). This is when the 'gaze' is a true sense of being watched when alone, so that one can feel that 'God' will see one touching oneself or doing something 'bad' even when no one is around which involves much more development in the subject.
http://reichandlowentherapy.org/
I've especially enjoyed a post on "orality" (there's a link to his blog) in which he talks about how fixation will show up in the present:
* A hurry to get things done quickly because the actual doing is not pleasureable or secure and the outcome always feels uncertain
* A physical fear of falling which also translates into a fear of failing
* A sense of being hurried to do things before one is ready (sometimes consciously denied)
* A lack of discrimination about how things are done, just getting something done seems paramount. Comments from others about how something is done seem unfair and cruel.
* A belief in a sense of effort and a disbelief in a sense of ease. If something is found effortful, may give up or may continue, but will not look for an easier way.
* Often learns the ‘shell’ of a movement, but not the ‘guts.’
* A tendency to pretend one knows how to do things, and a difficulty asking how to do things, because it seems one should just know.
* Body sensation including emotion is not trusted as a guide
* A reluctance to try truly new things develops, often with a compensatory habit of taking on a lot of variations of things done well.
* A sense that the demands of life are unjust impositions.
I believe that such complicated ideas as the demands of life being unjust, a tendency to pretend one knows how to do things, etc. would be related to later development and this is an example of anthropomorphising a child that is still developmentally much less than a house pet.
However, the idea of learning the "shell" of a movement but not the "guts" and the lack of pleasure (anhedonia) are simple enough that they could be imputed to the simple subject of this time period.
I still need more clinical experience to be confident of the way I've parsed out the stages but, I would say that the oral would be a sexual stage while learning to walk is a stage jouissance or will. I see development going back and forth between libido (feminine or masochistic development) and aggression (masculine or narcissistic) development.
There would be aggressive development from 2d to 3d vision which is referenced in myth with the one-eyed cyclops and then the oral supplies of skin erotism and then to aggression in walking. These focal points would also have transition stages around them, so again, ocular, oral, anal, phallic are not enough to encompass all the phases but they still might prove useful in the general sense that these 4 stages might each have their version of the phallus or power with the other stages surrounding them being more mechanical and less dynamic... For example, Tustin talks about autism as a perverse solution in early development and I think that the big stages that involve the phallus (retroactively signified, of course) are more dynamic... This formulation is not satisfactory but will have to do for now.
I'd like to suggest at this point, however, that Nietzsche with his aphorisms is a good example of this general oral attitude of going in quick and not wanting to do the work of systematizing. I've also noticed the quick, pleasure-less eating in myself and while I initially began practicing yoga and thought I had picked things up pretty quickly I've come to realize more and more that many of my postures lack the "guts".
I also think that my writing style is just to get the ideas out in their bare bones and not with much flesh (style). I think I'm still writing more for the Other than with a sense of power or personal triumph- still hoping to be rescued by someone who can affirm me rather than bothering to affirm myself.
I think that other analysts make the mistake of talking about the oral stage with the mother being god-like and might read omnipotence in this approach of oral character but I think Freud is clear that a sense of God or perfection must arise with self-consciousness (see 'On Narcissism'). This is when the 'gaze' is a true sense of being watched when alone, so that one can feel that 'God' will see one touching oneself or doing something 'bad' even when no one is around which involves much more development in the subject.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
myth- Apollo- early roots
Most of what I'm taking here is from theoi.com which is an excellent myth resource
Apollo
The god of prophecy. Apollo exercised this power in his numerous oracles, and especially in that of Delphi. (Dict. of Ant. s. v. Oraculum) The source of all his prophetic powers was Zeus himself (Apollodorus states, that Apollo received the mantikê from Pan), and Apollo is accordingly called "the prophet of his father Zeus." (Aeschyl. Eum. 19).
Zeus was not swallowed by Cronos but exchanged for a stone put in swaddling clothes which was later spit out to become the stone at the oracle at Delphi. Apollo later defeated a serpent that guarded Delphi and took control of it.
The swaddling of the stone is a clear reference to the skin of the child and in psychoanalysis we know of skin erotism and what would be important in ego development (ego in the sense of the subject in Lacanian terms) as the differentiation of inside and outside.
This connection to the skin is also seen in the myth of Marysyas:
MARSYAS was a Phrygian Satyr who first composed tunes for the flute. He obtained his instrument from Athena, who had invented the device but discarded it in her displeasure over the bloating effect on the cheeks. Later, in hubristic pride over the new-found music, Marsyas dared challenge the god Apollon to a contest. The Satyr inevitably lost, when, in the second round, the god demanded they play their instruments upsidedown--a feat ill-suited to the flute. As punishment for his presumption, Apollon had Marsyas tied to a tree and flayed him alive. The rustic gods in their pity then transformed him into a mountain stream.
In addition there is a connection of Apollo to Helius:
These characteristics of Apollo necessarily appear in a peculiar light, if we adopt the view which was almost universal among the later poets, mythographers, and philesophers, and according to which Apollo was identical with Helios, or the Sun. In Homer and for some centuries after his time Apollo and Helios are perfectiy distinet. The question which here presents itself, is, whether the idea of the identity of the two divinities was the original and primitive one, and was only revival in later times, or whether it was the result of later speculations and of foreign, chiefly Egyptian, influence.
Helius seems to be a forerunner of Zeus as the ruler of the sky, but as a titan he is still earlier than Zeus. This suggests that Zeus comes into his own in the titanomachy and the battles against Typhon which places his importance at the "anal" stage:
Typhon hamstrung, sank to his knees in despair… for miles the whole great earth was enkindled by the blast of heavenly wind
From the waist down he was a tangle of hissing vipers, he had majestic wings, and shaggy hair covered his body
The references to the heavenly wind and the lower body being vipers point to the muscular tensions involved in the lower body in the anal stage. Typhon being buried under a mountain point to obssesionalism and the schizoid traits manifested in Hephaestus. Typhon is thus the chthonic figuration of volcanic forces, as Hephaestus (Roman Vulcan) is their "civilized" Olympian manifestation. Dwarves are also represented as dwelling in mountains and caring only for the treasures they mine there in a similar parallel.
If Hephaestus is the Olympian version of the schizoid and the epistemophillic drive of binaries (up down, left right, etc.) then Helios betrays a pre-verbal, pre-walking, epistemological relation to the world.
Apollo's gift of prophecy seems to relate to an instinctual renunciation in the period before he boundaries of the skin are in place. The failure of the drive or ideal would mean that the skin boundary comes into prominence where otherwise "the gaze" of Apollo could somehow have a connection with others in an early energetic sense. I hesitate to talk of prophecy being a real ability but I respect the idea as a metaphor for a pre-verbal epistemological power. The connection between twins in which one knows across great distances that something has befallen the other is something that I haven't ruled out. There seems to be an interesting triangulation in that people are paired across distances by the triangulation of the sun (of Helius). At the least there is certainly the necessity that for music to communicate feeling/moods the boundaries between inside and outside must be broken.
Apollo
The god of prophecy. Apollo exercised this power in his numerous oracles, and especially in that of Delphi. (Dict. of Ant. s. v. Oraculum) The source of all his prophetic powers was Zeus himself (Apollodorus states, that Apollo received the mantikê from Pan), and Apollo is accordingly called "the prophet of his father Zeus." (Aeschyl. Eum. 19).
Zeus was not swallowed by Cronos but exchanged for a stone put in swaddling clothes which was later spit out to become the stone at the oracle at Delphi. Apollo later defeated a serpent that guarded Delphi and took control of it.
The swaddling of the stone is a clear reference to the skin of the child and in psychoanalysis we know of skin erotism and what would be important in ego development (ego in the sense of the subject in Lacanian terms) as the differentiation of inside and outside.
This connection to the skin is also seen in the myth of Marysyas:
MARSYAS was a Phrygian Satyr who first composed tunes for the flute. He obtained his instrument from Athena, who had invented the device but discarded it in her displeasure over the bloating effect on the cheeks. Later, in hubristic pride over the new-found music, Marsyas dared challenge the god Apollon to a contest. The Satyr inevitably lost, when, in the second round, the god demanded they play their instruments upsidedown--a feat ill-suited to the flute. As punishment for his presumption, Apollon had Marsyas tied to a tree and flayed him alive. The rustic gods in their pity then transformed him into a mountain stream.
In addition there is a connection of Apollo to Helius:
These characteristics of Apollo necessarily appear in a peculiar light, if we adopt the view which was almost universal among the later poets, mythographers, and philesophers, and according to which Apollo was identical with Helios, or the Sun. In Homer and for some centuries after his time Apollo and Helios are perfectiy distinet. The question which here presents itself, is, whether the idea of the identity of the two divinities was the original and primitive one, and was only revival in later times, or whether it was the result of later speculations and of foreign, chiefly Egyptian, influence.
Helius seems to be a forerunner of Zeus as the ruler of the sky, but as a titan he is still earlier than Zeus. This suggests that Zeus comes into his own in the titanomachy and the battles against Typhon which places his importance at the "anal" stage:
Typhon hamstrung, sank to his knees in despair… for miles the whole great earth was enkindled by the blast of heavenly wind
From the waist down he was a tangle of hissing vipers, he had majestic wings, and shaggy hair covered his body
The references to the heavenly wind and the lower body being vipers point to the muscular tensions involved in the lower body in the anal stage. Typhon being buried under a mountain point to obssesionalism and the schizoid traits manifested in Hephaestus. Typhon is thus the chthonic figuration of volcanic forces, as Hephaestus (Roman Vulcan) is their "civilized" Olympian manifestation. Dwarves are also represented as dwelling in mountains and caring only for the treasures they mine there in a similar parallel.
If Hephaestus is the Olympian version of the schizoid and the epistemophillic drive of binaries (up down, left right, etc.) then Helios betrays a pre-verbal, pre-walking, epistemological relation to the world.
Apollo's gift of prophecy seems to relate to an instinctual renunciation in the period before he boundaries of the skin are in place. The failure of the drive or ideal would mean that the skin boundary comes into prominence where otherwise "the gaze" of Apollo could somehow have a connection with others in an early energetic sense. I hesitate to talk of prophecy being a real ability but I respect the idea as a metaphor for a pre-verbal epistemological power. The connection between twins in which one knows across great distances that something has befallen the other is something that I haven't ruled out. There seems to be an interesting triangulation in that people are paired across distances by the triangulation of the sun (of Helius). At the least there is certainly the necessity that for music to communicate feeling/moods the boundaries between inside and outside must be broken.
Friday, December 9, 2011
psychoanaltyic basics- perversion
I recently read through Kristeva's Stabat Mater and the idea of art as perversion that was suggested there was inspiring. It made me want to draw a parallel to the basics of sexual perversion. She writes:
“Many civilizations have subsumed femininity under the Maternal, but Christianity in its own way developed this tendency to the full, the question is whether his was simply an appropriation of the maternal by men and therefore, according to our working hypothesis, just a fantasy hiding the primary narcissism from view, or was it perhaps also the mechanism of enigmatic sublimation? “ 135
-I understand primary narcissism to be a matter of oceanic oneness or at least a non-verbal communication/connection with the world. Kristeva puts forward the interesting idea here that the male returns to this connection by sublimating in art (Davinci) but it would no longer be a real connection, as it was with the sorceress and those with “mystical schizoid” fixations, but a mediated one. It’s interesting to think that Kristeva is linking art to perversion in a way. Just as the phallic-Oedipal produces sexuality that re-cathects old trauma (it takes the skin- in being spanked, it takes the anal autistic objet- in the fetish, it takes mutilation of the body, asphyxiation, etc… ) art in this sense could be an attempt to work through all the early traumas in a social, as opposed to sexual, sense. I think this is clearly the case with horror writers and science fiction writers who re-create the paranoid schizoid world of Klein with its terror and monsters. But, with Davicini’s pictures of the maternal it seems that it's not just fixations of fear and pain that can be revisited but also fixations of affection, longing and idealization. Kristeva relates this to perversion herself when she mentions that:
“no one is spared [“love is an unfurling of anguish at the very moment when the identity of thought and the living body breaks down”]. Except perhaps the saint or the mystic, or the writer who, by force of language, can still manage nothing more than to demolish the fiction of the mother-as-love’s-mainstay and to identify with love as it really is: a fire of tongues, an escape from representation. For the few who practice it, then, modern art is not a realization of maternal love— a veil over death, assuming death’s very place and knowing that it does? A sublimated celebration of incest…145
Nothing is more precise in designating perversion as the absence of love (it’s heartlessness and use of the other as object) as incest with the mother. The lack of spiritualization of sex (by not acknowledging the father possesses the mother and acknowledging his claim by the exercise of courtly love in which dedications, poems, and much work must be put into the woman to deserve her) means that one is only using the object to work through one’s own self-preoccupation (one’s attempts to master one’s own traumas).
Homosexuality in this sense is not a perversion to the extent that love is possible in the relationship.
This sense of perversion must also be contrasted with a previous post in which Freud was shown to consider kissing a perversion. Stoller called things like the kiss polymorphisms. I don't think this designation has caught on but maybe it might be better just to call the individual a pervert instead of talking about his acts as perversions...
“Many civilizations have subsumed femininity under the Maternal, but Christianity in its own way developed this tendency to the full, the question is whether his was simply an appropriation of the maternal by men and therefore, according to our working hypothesis, just a fantasy hiding the primary narcissism from view, or was it perhaps also the mechanism of enigmatic sublimation? “ 135
-I understand primary narcissism to be a matter of oceanic oneness or at least a non-verbal communication/connection with the world. Kristeva puts forward the interesting idea here that the male returns to this connection by sublimating in art (Davinci) but it would no longer be a real connection, as it was with the sorceress and those with “mystical schizoid” fixations, but a mediated one. It’s interesting to think that Kristeva is linking art to perversion in a way. Just as the phallic-Oedipal produces sexuality that re-cathects old trauma (it takes the skin- in being spanked, it takes the anal autistic objet- in the fetish, it takes mutilation of the body, asphyxiation, etc… ) art in this sense could be an attempt to work through all the early traumas in a social, as opposed to sexual, sense. I think this is clearly the case with horror writers and science fiction writers who re-create the paranoid schizoid world of Klein with its terror and monsters. But, with Davicini’s pictures of the maternal it seems that it's not just fixations of fear and pain that can be revisited but also fixations of affection, longing and idealization. Kristeva relates this to perversion herself when she mentions that:
“no one is spared [“love is an unfurling of anguish at the very moment when the identity of thought and the living body breaks down”]. Except perhaps the saint or the mystic, or the writer who, by force of language, can still manage nothing more than to demolish the fiction of the mother-as-love’s-mainstay and to identify with love as it really is: a fire of tongues, an escape from representation. For the few who practice it, then, modern art is not a realization of maternal love— a veil over death, assuming death’s very place and knowing that it does? A sublimated celebration of incest…145
Nothing is more precise in designating perversion as the absence of love (it’s heartlessness and use of the other as object) as incest with the mother. The lack of spiritualization of sex (by not acknowledging the father possesses the mother and acknowledging his claim by the exercise of courtly love in which dedications, poems, and much work must be put into the woman to deserve her) means that one is only using the object to work through one’s own self-preoccupation (one’s attempts to master one’s own traumas).
Homosexuality in this sense is not a perversion to the extent that love is possible in the relationship.
This sense of perversion must also be contrasted with a previous post in which Freud was shown to consider kissing a perversion. Stoller called things like the kiss polymorphisms. I don't think this designation has caught on but maybe it might be better just to call the individual a pervert instead of talking about his acts as perversions...
Thursday, December 8, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- the superego
I'm still surprised by how often the superego is written and talked about as conscience alone and then even just as one form of conscience which men have and women often lack. Freud mentions it in many texts as being based upon ever developing estimations of the parents- not just the father- and to capture those estimations and the ideals they would be tied up with is such an interesting riddle to solve. How did analysts allow psychoanalysis to become so boring?
Nor must it be forgotten that a child has a different estimate of its parents at different periods of its life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex gives place to the super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later they lose much of this. Identifications then come about with these later parents as well, and indeed they regularly make important contributions to the formation of character; but in that case they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental imagos.
I hope you have already formed an impression that the hypothesis of the super-ego really describes a structural relation and is not merely a personification of some such abstraction as that of conscience. One more important function remains to be mentioned which we attribute to this super-ego. It is also the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself, which it emulates, and whose demand for ever greater perfection it strives to fulfil. There is no doubt that this ego ideal is the precipitate of the old picture of the parents, the expression of admiration for the perfection which the child then attributed to them. (New Introductory Lectures, p.64-5)
What's more is that the superego and the development of the mind goes on past Oedipus and Freud would come into convergence with Hegel whose Phenomenology of Spirit is an attempt to capture the post-oedipal development of consciousness.
We have said that it is the heir to the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed self-sufficiency; it gradually gathers up from the influences of the environment the demands which that environment makes upon the ego and which the ego cannot always rise to; so that a man, when he cannot be satisfied with his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in the ego ideal which has been differentiated out of the ego. In delusions of observation, as we have further shown, the disintegration of this agency has become patent, and has thus revealed its origin in the influence of superior powers, and above all of parents. But we have not forgotten to add that the amount of distance between this ego ideal and the real ego is very variable from one individual to another, and that with many people this differentiation within the ego does not go further than with children (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, p. 110).
For what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment—his fellow-men—and public opinion (On Narcissism, p.96).
Sartre and Lacan and the other French theorists would make us all out to be unhappy consciousnesses, as if we've all developed to the same point and from there it becomes a matter of freedom or choice determined from the Real. Jung, Freud, and the earlier writers knew that neurotics were often higher human beings and it is from their more advanced consciousness that they got sick in their lonely towers.
Nor must it be forgotten that a child has a different estimate of its parents at different periods of its life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex gives place to the super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later they lose much of this. Identifications then come about with these later parents as well, and indeed they regularly make important contributions to the formation of character; but in that case they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental imagos.
I hope you have already formed an impression that the hypothesis of the super-ego really describes a structural relation and is not merely a personification of some such abstraction as that of conscience. One more important function remains to be mentioned which we attribute to this super-ego. It is also the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself, which it emulates, and whose demand for ever greater perfection it strives to fulfil. There is no doubt that this ego ideal is the precipitate of the old picture of the parents, the expression of admiration for the perfection which the child then attributed to them. (New Introductory Lectures, p.64-5)
What's more is that the superego and the development of the mind goes on past Oedipus and Freud would come into convergence with Hegel whose Phenomenology of Spirit is an attempt to capture the post-oedipal development of consciousness.
We have said that it is the heir to the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed self-sufficiency; it gradually gathers up from the influences of the environment the demands which that environment makes upon the ego and which the ego cannot always rise to; so that a man, when he cannot be satisfied with his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in the ego ideal which has been differentiated out of the ego. In delusions of observation, as we have further shown, the disintegration of this agency has become patent, and has thus revealed its origin in the influence of superior powers, and above all of parents. But we have not forgotten to add that the amount of distance between this ego ideal and the real ego is very variable from one individual to another, and that with many people this differentiation within the ego does not go further than with children (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, p. 110).
For what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment—his fellow-men—and public opinion (On Narcissism, p.96).
Sartre and Lacan and the other French theorists would make us all out to be unhappy consciousnesses, as if we've all developed to the same point and from there it becomes a matter of freedom or choice determined from the Real. Jung, Freud, and the earlier writers knew that neurotics were often higher human beings and it is from their more advanced consciousness that they got sick in their lonely towers.
feminine subject: eye as vagina
Despite Freud's claim that there is only one genital and it is the phallus, there is clearly the use of the eye as a symbol for the vagina. It exists in the esoteric traditions as well as in the fatherless world of horror movies and the occult and, I'd guess, in the psychotic.
I've been working on a little piece about this connection which I hope to be able to put up here soon, but not before I can give a decent summary of the posts on the different phallic stages and their relation to the hero myth.
The last picture is Argus who, as poly-ocular, is probably a forerunner of the Medusa/hydra who are poly-phallic. However, this suggests, contra Freud, that the poly-phallic isn't hiding its opposite (i.e. the castrated woman) but that representations of power were initially feminine and then disavowed and covered up by masculine representations in patriarchy.
The second picture of the alien creature with no eye seems to represent the ghostly power of the maternal that has been disavowed. The lack of eyes seems to tie the creature into the vast network of nature so that one isn't just facing a single enemy but a force beyond an individual thing that is animating it and could animate other things as well. It is not an individual consciousness and as the history of patriarchy has shown, there is nothing more important than the idea of an individual consciousness, soul, or subject.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Nietzsche's Instinct
“Instinct. When the house burns one forgets even lunch. Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.” (BG&E)
Isn't there a place for something like instinct and conditioning in our interactions?
Between the comedy of love, jealousy, and suffering when your beloved leaves isn't there a place in which you just get used to a person?
You like to look over and see her face.
Philosophers might talk about humour involving the novel but you remember watching and re-watching a comedian deliver the same joke many times and delighting in the tone of voice or the expression on his face and imitating it yourself.
There's a spot that's yours in a public place that you go to on your break.
After the instinct is in place it's not painful so much as a feeling of senselessness to notice yourself trying to look over, listen again, or return to see if it's free, when the experience is no longer available.
Isn't there a place for something like instinct and conditioning in our interactions?
Between the comedy of love, jealousy, and suffering when your beloved leaves isn't there a place in which you just get used to a person?
You like to look over and see her face.
Philosophers might talk about humour involving the novel but you remember watching and re-watching a comedian deliver the same joke many times and delighting in the tone of voice or the expression on his face and imitating it yourself.
There's a spot that's yours in a public place that you go to on your break.
After the instinct is in place it's not painful so much as a feeling of senselessness to notice yourself trying to look over, listen again, or return to see if it's free, when the experience is no longer available.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
psychoanalytic basics- repetition III
The story of Jason and Medea is a much better example of the narcissistic repetition-compulsion.
In the early part of the quest Jason encounters the six armed Gegeines which as a reference to the polyphallic puts the early part of the myth on par with the medusa of Perseus and the hydra of Heracles.
Jason meets the emaciated king Phineas who would stand for the denigrated father before the tasks to obtain the fleece (i.e. a new object-cathexis of the mother with the fleece representing her pubic hair as writers point out and then its renunciation in a new ideal).
Then in the latter part of the myth it is Medea who by magic, knowledge, and cunning helps Jason to perform his 'tasks' to get the Fleece and overcome the dangers on the return to Iolcus. However, once the obstacles are surmounted Jason attempts to marry another and breaks his promise to Medea.
Medea is the one who become deified (becomes an immortal) in this story, not Jason, and clearly she is the one of more power. She would represent the reverse identification repetition in which she chooses Jason to aid and groom only to be left by him as would be experienced by the phallic mother.
This myth seems a better complementary myth to Perseus than the myth of Heracles. The myth of Heracles, like that of Orpheus, seems to relate one aspect of mental bisexuality while Jason and Perseus are a compromise formation of the narcissistic and masochistic.
I will have more to write on this soon.
In the early part of the quest Jason encounters the six armed Gegeines which as a reference to the polyphallic puts the early part of the myth on par with the medusa of Perseus and the hydra of Heracles.
Jason meets the emaciated king Phineas who would stand for the denigrated father before the tasks to obtain the fleece (i.e. a new object-cathexis of the mother with the fleece representing her pubic hair as writers point out and then its renunciation in a new ideal).
Then in the latter part of the myth it is Medea who by magic, knowledge, and cunning helps Jason to perform his 'tasks' to get the Fleece and overcome the dangers on the return to Iolcus. However, once the obstacles are surmounted Jason attempts to marry another and breaks his promise to Medea.
Medea is the one who become deified (becomes an immortal) in this story, not Jason, and clearly she is the one of more power. She would represent the reverse identification repetition in which she chooses Jason to aid and groom only to be left by him as would be experienced by the phallic mother.
This myth seems a better complementary myth to Perseus than the myth of Heracles. The myth of Heracles, like that of Orpheus, seems to relate one aspect of mental bisexuality while Jason and Perseus are a compromise formation of the narcissistic and masochistic.
I will have more to write on this soon.
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