In a very interesting article J. Harnik ties this to the woman’s entire body being a phallus:
in men the genital continues to be the centre of their narcissism, whilst in women there is a secondary narcissism which becomes attached to the body as a whole. (Hárnik, ‘The Various Developments Undergone by Narcissism in Men and in Women’, p. 69)
He even goes on to outline how the need to be admired, desired, or “loved” for one’s beauty exists in men as well in bisexuality, which is the case for all the positions:
This narcissism is strongly marked in a number of men whose love-life is also frequently characterized by a reversal of the typical relation between man and woman: they are attracted by a woman who falls in love with them and displays towards them the sexual overestimation appropriate to their own narcissistic valuation of themselves. It is entirely in accordance with our views on bisexuality to assume that a given psychic mechanism operates in both sexes, only more powerfully in the one than in the other… (ibid. 71)
Then he goes on to that beautiful, untroubled speculation that existed in the early days of analysis:
Thus the process commonly called 'genitalization' would play the largest part in the production of the charms of the female body. This view receives ready support from a consideration of the genital qualities developed by the female breasts, and especially the nipples. It is further confirmed by a statement of Ferenczi's with reference to the narcissistic significance of the face: 'I think it probable that the displacement of libidinal tendencies "from below upward" (Freud) which takes place in the sublimation period effects a secondary genitalization—probably with the help of the rich vascular innervation of the face—of the sexual rôle of the face, which is at first simply exhibitionistic. (By "genitalization" of any part of the body I understand, with Freud, a periodically intensified hyperæmia, oedema and turgescence, accompanied by corresponding nervous excitation.)'Indeed, one may go still further and postulate, as Radò once remarked to me personally, that this process may have prevailed in the evolution of the race as well and have led to the disappearance of hair from the face in women. This evolutional idea that the disappearance of hair from the face is due to the narcissistic desire to expose oneself is entirely in accordance with Sachs' statement, based on clinical observation, that the male exhibitionist displays his genital, whilst the form of exhibitionism which we regard as normal in women has reference to the other parts of the body, above all, to the face (ibid.p.73).
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
psychoanalytic basics- religion as recapitulating psycho-sexual development II
After the stage of animism there is a magical stage in which the 'omnipotence of thoughts' and imitation of someone becomes a be-ing of someone, which I will discuss soon. However, for now I wish to add an obvious stage onto Freud's schema: the religions of good and evil.
Because Freud thought that conscience only appeared after the Oedipus complex it is obvious why he made the leap from religions of the gods to science. However, later, in his middle period and at the end of his work he became more open to some kind of ethical sense of good and bad and remorse happening before Oedipus:
This state of mind is called a ‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two parents is taken by the larger human community (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.124-5; also On Narcissism, p.125).
So, before science and after the religions of the gods I believe that a phase of good and evil should be considered here and a transference preoccupied with analyst as father-confessor and a person weighed down by sin is in order. Additionally, the flip side of a pride and superiority that puts one above others and the story of Lucifer who believes he can compete with God is also salient.
Because Freud thought that conscience only appeared after the Oedipus complex it is obvious why he made the leap from religions of the gods to science. However, later, in his middle period and at the end of his work he became more open to some kind of ethical sense of good and bad and remorse happening before Oedipus:
This state of mind is called a ‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two parents is taken by the larger human community (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.124-5; also On Narcissism, p.125).
So, before science and after the religions of the gods I believe that a phase of good and evil should be considered here and a transference preoccupied with analyst as father-confessor and a person weighed down by sin is in order. Additionally, the flip side of a pride and superiority that puts one above others and the story of Lucifer who believes he can compete with God is also salient.
Friday, January 20, 2012
psychoanalytic basics- religion as recapitulating psycho-sexual development I
In ‘Totem and Taboo’ Freud uses the development of religion and it’s eventual replacement by science to explain nature and the appearance of human beings from evolution to explain primary and secondary narcissism and it’s replacement by the reality principle. He writes:
At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death (Freud, Totem and Taboo, p.88).
Although Freud ascribes omnipotence to the early oral child it is in contradiction to other remarks in which he recognizes that a young child isn’t sadistic because the idea of causing pain to another isn’t the motivation (Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, p. 128). The idea of omnipotence would similarly imply a knowledge of another person’s mind that the oral stage child couldn’t have. However, the idea that in animism humans anthropomorphize animals and inorganic nature would be the equivalent to a narcissistic transference. The patient who fears otherness and wants you to be like him is similar to the human who fears the world and tries to make it understandable in human terms.
So not omnipotence but rather: "primitive animism... caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us" (The Unconscious, p.171)
At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death (Freud, Totem and Taboo, p.88).
Although Freud ascribes omnipotence to the early oral child it is in contradiction to other remarks in which he recognizes that a young child isn’t sadistic because the idea of causing pain to another isn’t the motivation (Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, p. 128). The idea of omnipotence would similarly imply a knowledge of another person’s mind that the oral stage child couldn’t have. However, the idea that in animism humans anthropomorphize animals and inorganic nature would be the equivalent to a narcissistic transference. The patient who fears otherness and wants you to be like him is similar to the human who fears the world and tries to make it understandable in human terms.
So not omnipotence but rather: "primitive animism... caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us" (The Unconscious, p.171)
Monday, January 16, 2012
semiotics cont.
I
In Using ‘Use’: Pragmatic Consequences of the Metaphor of Culture as Resources Carlos Cornejo attempts to extrapolate an agent with intention from the use of signs.
Cornejo recognizes an antinomy between mechanistic views on agency (behaviourism and evolutionary psychology) and intentionalist views. He sees that current work in cultural semiotics succeeds in bypassing this antinomy by talking about ‘using resources’ but this antinomy remains. He then bravely asserts against the “19th-century suspicion against the individual mind” that the problem can be solved by recognizing the ‘grammar’ of pronouns. He writes:
Beginning with the statement that culture is used, it follows not only that there are different ways of using culture, but also that: (a) there is an agent who is using the cultural resource; (b) the agent is carrying out an action where the resource is indeed such; and (c) the action has a purpose. In other words, the grammatical use of ‘use’ demands not only a thing being used (the resource), but also: a user (condition [a] above); a context in which the resource is used (condition [b]); and a goal (condition [c]), through which a search for the used thing becomes and instrument. (Cornejo, Using Use, p.64-5)
Cornejo naively seeks to invoke teleology or intention towards a future result as if the hemeneuticians of suspicion were behaviourists who would have a problem with intentionality or that the use of grammar is somehow an argument for an autonomous subject. However, when Nietzsche or Freud criticize agency it isn’t in favour of a mechanistic account but rather it is in talking about a causa sui agent without reference to internalized objects which constitute our drives, fixations which form our character, or a confluence of impulses which overdetermine an action. Cornejo invokes the most naïve form of volition: “in the domain of human action… we see or feel within ourselves this relation toward the future [and w]hen this natural state of pre-comprehension is broken, we fall into perplexity… we ask for reasons” (ibid. p.68). We are given no form of development of agency. It is simply a “natural state” and the only evidence given for it is that grammatically to use something requires a ‘user’. Similarly, Cornejo invokes Peirce’s use of a sign, which has triadic structure, but fails to reference Peirce’s concepts of Firstness and Secondness that place the sign in a context of development. He seemingly brings it up just to make an analogy between it and a form of intention in which there is a distal or focal awareness (the interpretant) of intention and proximal or marginal awareness (which brings together the sign and object) (ibid. p. 69). Basically, what semiotics amounts to for Cornejo is lip-service to “varieties of interpretation” so that he doesn’t sound like he is claiming objectivity for the sign as he does for the subject that ‘uses’ it (ibid. p.69). Ultimately, simply claiming an agent who gives himself reasons for acting and relating the use of signs to “how cultural resources are experienced by a particular actor” merely repeats a naïve empiricism and mysticism in regards to volition (ibid. p.68)[1].
Long ago Nietzsche had already showed how an appeal to the pronoun ‘I’ -of belief in grammar- is a false induction. “A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish”, he wrote and a person wrongly “infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—“ when there is no direct link between consciousness and choosing thoughts (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil-17). In effect, there is a gap between (self-) consciousness and thoughts and though Freud and Nietzsche recognize that intentionality is in a conscious ego ideal mediated by words do inform our actions, what is called into question are the ‘reasons’ or rationalizations we represent to ourselves about how desire is formed. With Cornejo’s rational, autonomous chooser there is no discussion about how relations with others may make an object desirable. For example, a person may desire a goal because it is the way that he may gain recognition for his potency or courage amongst others. A person may desire a goal that is unpopular with others because he wants to represent himself as being above others. A person may desire to play the role of a father to his children and receive satisfaction from imagining how his children see him. A person may also prefer not to get any attention and get vicarious pleasure through his children or have a more self-effacing relationship in respect to others. There are many motivations, and many ‘language games’, through which we can talk about the motivations of others. It is rare that an agent will represent to others, and even to himself, that the reason he wanted to have a family was in order to play the role of father. Instead he will give us many ‘reasons’ for why one ought to have children or list some of the pleasures involved in some of the activities with the kids or how he might have had them for his wife[2]. Moreover, by talking about desire, we no longer talk about how there is directly one cause of an action. Actions can be over-determined or from a ‘confluence of drives’ but for the people with wisdom or what Wittgenstein calls ‘expert judgment’ the main or strongest motivation can be discerned[3]. In contrast, Nietzsche puts Cornejo’s common error in another light:
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of a rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness (ibid. -21)
Marx and Freud hold a similar view and are more explicit about how the subject is formed. “[T]he essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual” Marx writes “in reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach-6). However Marx doesn’t connect the ‘practical activity’ (i.e. technology and political economy) that informs the ‘sensuousness’ (the externalized essence of humans in culture) of people with different epistemological objects nor explanations of how certain means of production produce a certain form of religion. With Freud and psychoanalysis we can get into more concrete examples of how the subject is formed by the internalization of objects. For example, Freud gives us two examples of how we give up our conscience and intentionality in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego. He draws our attention to how in a mob one can give up one’s conscience to the leader and commit heinous acts one’s conscience would usually prohibit alone. He also brings our attention to hypnotism and how suggestions can be planted in people so that they perform tasks and rationalize their actions as if it was their intention all along. In both cases, the fact that we can have part of our mind taken over by another person betrays that the imago or transference object of intentionality or conscience first existed outside of oneself and was later internalized. If intentionality or conscience were causa sui then the hypnotist and group leader should rightfully be reckoned to possess magical powers as different primitive tribes believe. Lacan takes this reference to the internalization of an imago even further and draws our attention to how even simple logic or arithmetic arises from such an internalization. He gives the example of how a simpleton will make a mistake like, “I have three brothers Paul, Ernest, and Me”, as an illustration of how ability to count is a ‘praxis’— something we know how to do, as opposed to something we understand (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 20). For if it was something we understood and arose from our rational nature or essence how could the simpleton make such a mistake? Wittgenstein’s work is similarly aimed at dispelling philosophical claims that human nature is rational as opposed to desire based. In the first section of the Investigations Wittgenstein uses the mundane example of a child being sent to the grocer’s to get five red apples. He emphasizes that “the meaning of the word ‘five’” never came into play, “only how the word ‘five’ is used” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-1). In other words, the child used the praxis of counting and it is in this praxis that the word “five” has meaning. “Five” is to be produced by counting or through arithmetic as opposed to ‘hanging in the air’ as some mental entity[4]. I have memorized that the answer to 2+2=4 but when it comes to a larger number such as 256+298 I must either ‘carry’ on paper or in my head in order to get the sum because there is no intuitional or phenomenal access to mathematical operations which will give me the answer[5]. I ‘blindly obey’ the praxis and having signifiers for the numbers allows me to do the praxis (i.e. carry the one after nine) to calculate bigger numbers. There is mathematical certainty, Wittgenstein acknowledges, but it comes from everyone ending up with the same results as opposed to some individual intellectual intuition.
I appreciate Cornejo’s antinomy between mechanistic thinkers and intentionalists but in regards to the criticism of the subject in Nietzsche, Marx, Freud the intentionalists should properly be called mystics. Intentionalists, along with all other forms of psychology, psychopharmacology, evolutionary biology, and semiotic/narrative studies have an essentially pre 19th century philosophical view on human nature. They cannot explain the transition from animal to human or they have to appeal to a metaphysical element in contrast to the dialectical materialism of the 19th century that shows how the mind is developed through the suppression of material instincts and internalization of objects or imagos.
With this criticism in mind there are properly two main categories based upon the subjective and objective. In the former there are mystics who appeal to a subjective absolute human freedom through reason or through the conscience. In the former case the intentionalists can’t give satisfactory answers on the appearance of reason in a child nor its departure through mental illness or death. In the latter case the spiritualists talk about the eternal moral order in the subjective experience of the conscience. However, they do so as if different religions, moral orders, and revelations didn’t exist from culture to culture. These two are followed by the mechanists who are concerned with causes in relation to humans belonging to a certain genus or culture. With them the physicalists talk about humans as if they were animals and everything was evolutionary and no culture existed. The narrativists talk about culture, its propagation of roles and stereotypes, and the uniqueness of cultural difference as if culture always existed and had no body, or pre-verbal animal, which it was based upon[6]. To appreciate Peirce one must look under these ideological illusions and grasp the transition from animal to human and appreciate objectivity in both a reference to the body and for the signifiers that inform desire.
[1] I’ll explain this charge of mysticism shortly.
[2] This isn’t to say that these can never be the motivations but only that people often misrepresent what their motivations or what they are capable of doing to themselves. For example, a husband may ‘pat himself on the back’ for being good and never cheating on his wife even though he is unattractive, unable to flirt, and would never find the opportunity to cheat even if he really desired it.
[3] It is certainly possible to be convinced by evidence that someone is in such and such a state of mind, that for instance, he is not pretending. But ‘evidence’ here includes ‘imponderable’ evidence… include[ing] subtleties of glance, of gesture, or tone. I may recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one (and here there can, of course, be a ‘ponderable’ confirmation of my judgment). But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference…— if I were a very talented painter I might conceivably represent the genuine and the simulated glance in pictures (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.194).
[4] It is a property of this number that this process leads to it; it is the end of a process (is itself part of the process) (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, I, #84).
[5] Ask yourself: Would it be imaginable for someone to learn to do sums in his head without ever doing written or oral ones?– ‘Learning it’ will mean: being made able to do it (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-385, emphasis added).
[6] Wilhelm Reich coined and criticized the lack of dialectical thinking in the mechanists and mystics (See Ether, God and Devil). The two types ignore the multiplicity of transferences, drives, and instincts that comprise the individual or ignore the self-consciousness which we have of some of drives that have a teleological nature.
In Using ‘Use’: Pragmatic Consequences of the Metaphor of Culture as Resources Carlos Cornejo attempts to extrapolate an agent with intention from the use of signs.
Cornejo recognizes an antinomy between mechanistic views on agency (behaviourism and evolutionary psychology) and intentionalist views. He sees that current work in cultural semiotics succeeds in bypassing this antinomy by talking about ‘using resources’ but this antinomy remains. He then bravely asserts against the “19th-century suspicion against the individual mind” that the problem can be solved by recognizing the ‘grammar’ of pronouns. He writes:
Beginning with the statement that culture is used, it follows not only that there are different ways of using culture, but also that: (a) there is an agent who is using the cultural resource; (b) the agent is carrying out an action where the resource is indeed such; and (c) the action has a purpose. In other words, the grammatical use of ‘use’ demands not only a thing being used (the resource), but also: a user (condition [a] above); a context in which the resource is used (condition [b]); and a goal (condition [c]), through which a search for the used thing becomes and instrument. (Cornejo, Using Use, p.64-5)
Cornejo naively seeks to invoke teleology or intention towards a future result as if the hemeneuticians of suspicion were behaviourists who would have a problem with intentionality or that the use of grammar is somehow an argument for an autonomous subject. However, when Nietzsche or Freud criticize agency it isn’t in favour of a mechanistic account but rather it is in talking about a causa sui agent without reference to internalized objects which constitute our drives, fixations which form our character, or a confluence of impulses which overdetermine an action. Cornejo invokes the most naïve form of volition: “in the domain of human action… we see or feel within ourselves this relation toward the future [and w]hen this natural state of pre-comprehension is broken, we fall into perplexity… we ask for reasons” (ibid. p.68). We are given no form of development of agency. It is simply a “natural state” and the only evidence given for it is that grammatically to use something requires a ‘user’. Similarly, Cornejo invokes Peirce’s use of a sign, which has triadic structure, but fails to reference Peirce’s concepts of Firstness and Secondness that place the sign in a context of development. He seemingly brings it up just to make an analogy between it and a form of intention in which there is a distal or focal awareness (the interpretant) of intention and proximal or marginal awareness (which brings together the sign and object) (ibid. p. 69). Basically, what semiotics amounts to for Cornejo is lip-service to “varieties of interpretation” so that he doesn’t sound like he is claiming objectivity for the sign as he does for the subject that ‘uses’ it (ibid. p.69). Ultimately, simply claiming an agent who gives himself reasons for acting and relating the use of signs to “how cultural resources are experienced by a particular actor” merely repeats a naïve empiricism and mysticism in regards to volition (ibid. p.68)[1].
Long ago Nietzsche had already showed how an appeal to the pronoun ‘I’ -of belief in grammar- is a false induction. “A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish”, he wrote and a person wrongly “infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—“ when there is no direct link between consciousness and choosing thoughts (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil-17). In effect, there is a gap between (self-) consciousness and thoughts and though Freud and Nietzsche recognize that intentionality is in a conscious ego ideal mediated by words do inform our actions, what is called into question are the ‘reasons’ or rationalizations we represent to ourselves about how desire is formed. With Cornejo’s rational, autonomous chooser there is no discussion about how relations with others may make an object desirable. For example, a person may desire a goal because it is the way that he may gain recognition for his potency or courage amongst others. A person may desire a goal that is unpopular with others because he wants to represent himself as being above others. A person may desire to play the role of a father to his children and receive satisfaction from imagining how his children see him. A person may also prefer not to get any attention and get vicarious pleasure through his children or have a more self-effacing relationship in respect to others. There are many motivations, and many ‘language games’, through which we can talk about the motivations of others. It is rare that an agent will represent to others, and even to himself, that the reason he wanted to have a family was in order to play the role of father. Instead he will give us many ‘reasons’ for why one ought to have children or list some of the pleasures involved in some of the activities with the kids or how he might have had them for his wife[2]. Moreover, by talking about desire, we no longer talk about how there is directly one cause of an action. Actions can be over-determined or from a ‘confluence of drives’ but for the people with wisdom or what Wittgenstein calls ‘expert judgment’ the main or strongest motivation can be discerned[3]. In contrast, Nietzsche puts Cornejo’s common error in another light:
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of a rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness (ibid. -21)
Marx and Freud hold a similar view and are more explicit about how the subject is formed. “[T]he essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual” Marx writes “in reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach-6). However Marx doesn’t connect the ‘practical activity’ (i.e. technology and political economy) that informs the ‘sensuousness’ (the externalized essence of humans in culture) of people with different epistemological objects nor explanations of how certain means of production produce a certain form of religion. With Freud and psychoanalysis we can get into more concrete examples of how the subject is formed by the internalization of objects. For example, Freud gives us two examples of how we give up our conscience and intentionality in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego. He draws our attention to how in a mob one can give up one’s conscience to the leader and commit heinous acts one’s conscience would usually prohibit alone. He also brings our attention to hypnotism and how suggestions can be planted in people so that they perform tasks and rationalize their actions as if it was their intention all along. In both cases, the fact that we can have part of our mind taken over by another person betrays that the imago or transference object of intentionality or conscience first existed outside of oneself and was later internalized. If intentionality or conscience were causa sui then the hypnotist and group leader should rightfully be reckoned to possess magical powers as different primitive tribes believe. Lacan takes this reference to the internalization of an imago even further and draws our attention to how even simple logic or arithmetic arises from such an internalization. He gives the example of how a simpleton will make a mistake like, “I have three brothers Paul, Ernest, and Me”, as an illustration of how ability to count is a ‘praxis’— something we know how to do, as opposed to something we understand (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 20). For if it was something we understood and arose from our rational nature or essence how could the simpleton make such a mistake? Wittgenstein’s work is similarly aimed at dispelling philosophical claims that human nature is rational as opposed to desire based. In the first section of the Investigations Wittgenstein uses the mundane example of a child being sent to the grocer’s to get five red apples. He emphasizes that “the meaning of the word ‘five’” never came into play, “only how the word ‘five’ is used” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-1). In other words, the child used the praxis of counting and it is in this praxis that the word “five” has meaning. “Five” is to be produced by counting or through arithmetic as opposed to ‘hanging in the air’ as some mental entity[4]. I have memorized that the answer to 2+2=4 but when it comes to a larger number such as 256+298 I must either ‘carry’ on paper or in my head in order to get the sum because there is no intuitional or phenomenal access to mathematical operations which will give me the answer[5]. I ‘blindly obey’ the praxis and having signifiers for the numbers allows me to do the praxis (i.e. carry the one after nine) to calculate bigger numbers. There is mathematical certainty, Wittgenstein acknowledges, but it comes from everyone ending up with the same results as opposed to some individual intellectual intuition.
I appreciate Cornejo’s antinomy between mechanistic thinkers and intentionalists but in regards to the criticism of the subject in Nietzsche, Marx, Freud the intentionalists should properly be called mystics. Intentionalists, along with all other forms of psychology, psychopharmacology, evolutionary biology, and semiotic/narrative studies have an essentially pre 19th century philosophical view on human nature. They cannot explain the transition from animal to human or they have to appeal to a metaphysical element in contrast to the dialectical materialism of the 19th century that shows how the mind is developed through the suppression of material instincts and internalization of objects or imagos.
With this criticism in mind there are properly two main categories based upon the subjective and objective. In the former there are mystics who appeal to a subjective absolute human freedom through reason or through the conscience. In the former case the intentionalists can’t give satisfactory answers on the appearance of reason in a child nor its departure through mental illness or death. In the latter case the spiritualists talk about the eternal moral order in the subjective experience of the conscience. However, they do so as if different religions, moral orders, and revelations didn’t exist from culture to culture. These two are followed by the mechanists who are concerned with causes in relation to humans belonging to a certain genus or culture. With them the physicalists talk about humans as if they were animals and everything was evolutionary and no culture existed. The narrativists talk about culture, its propagation of roles and stereotypes, and the uniqueness of cultural difference as if culture always existed and had no body, or pre-verbal animal, which it was based upon[6]. To appreciate Peirce one must look under these ideological illusions and grasp the transition from animal to human and appreciate objectivity in both a reference to the body and for the signifiers that inform desire.
[1] I’ll explain this charge of mysticism shortly.
[2] This isn’t to say that these can never be the motivations but only that people often misrepresent what their motivations or what they are capable of doing to themselves. For example, a husband may ‘pat himself on the back’ for being good and never cheating on his wife even though he is unattractive, unable to flirt, and would never find the opportunity to cheat even if he really desired it.
[3] It is certainly possible to be convinced by evidence that someone is in such and such a state of mind, that for instance, he is not pretending. But ‘evidence’ here includes ‘imponderable’ evidence… include[ing] subtleties of glance, of gesture, or tone. I may recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one (and here there can, of course, be a ‘ponderable’ confirmation of my judgment). But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference…— if I were a very talented painter I might conceivably represent the genuine and the simulated glance in pictures (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.194).
[4] It is a property of this number that this process leads to it; it is the end of a process (is itself part of the process) (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, I, #84).
[5] Ask yourself: Would it be imaginable for someone to learn to do sums in his head without ever doing written or oral ones?– ‘Learning it’ will mean: being made able to do it (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-385, emphasis added).
[6] Wilhelm Reich coined and criticized the lack of dialectical thinking in the mechanists and mystics (See Ether, God and Devil). The two types ignore the multiplicity of transferences, drives, and instincts that comprise the individual or ignore the self-consciousness which we have of some of drives that have a teleological nature.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
semiotics
II
[H]ow different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think”. And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion. (It would also be possible to speak of an activity of butter when it rises in price…) -Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.153.
What constitutes the semiotic turn philosophically is not a reference to something individual in a particular actor, but a level of object-relatedness to another person. When another person begins to matter enough to us that we begin to study their behaviour and put together a theory of mind so as to conceptualize their motivations and desire we can form guesses about the future. Then their use of objects and their emotional reactions to others will form patterns (signifieds) to which we can add signifiers. One puts together a theory of mind about others, gleans the word that is used in a similar situation by others, and then uses it to communicate that situation when the desire takes him. There aren’t ‘varieties of interpretation’ but correct and incorrect forms of use that are illustrated in the activity of people correcting other people’s word choices. Wittgenstein is more instructive than Peirce or Saussure because he attempts to engage his reader’s phenomenology. In the Philosophical Investigations he helps us to understand the use of the sign as follows:
Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language (Wittgeinstein, Philosophical Investigations- 206).
If you imagine yourself sharing dinner with an indigenous tribe in some unknown country and you see a few bowls of liquid on the table it would be by seeing how they are used by others (i.e. they drink it, or put their hands in it, etc.) that the object would take on some significance to you. You would be able to signify it by paying attention to the gestures people make towards it and paying attention to the word that seems to be used only in reference to the bowl of liquid. For example they might say ‘Could you please pass the X’, ‘Could you please pass the Y’ and knowing the words they use in common with other objects at the table helps you to eliminate some of the possibilities. Seeing another person drink from the bowl one can understand it is something edible (i.e. be aware of the bowl of liquid as drink). However, by paying attention to the interactions of at least two others it is possible to have a rule for the sign. Additionally, as Wittgenstein points out in the example, the bowl of liquid will be embedded in the custom of dinner and will reference etiquette, and etiquette will reference differences in rank and the internalization of convention. For example, it might be polite to let the elders at the table drink from the bowls first. In this sense signs will be inseparable from a culture in which there are always different ranks between people, different codes of formality for the expressions of emotion, and different forms of possessions that grant status to an individual. In a letter to Lady Welby Peirce makes a similar claim about a sign requiring two other actors and a rule. He asks us to
analyze for instance the relation involved in ‘A gives B to C’ Now what is giving? It does not consist in A’s putting B away from him and C’s subsequently taking B up… it consists in A’s making C the possessor according to Law. There must be some kind of law before there can be any kind of giving, -- be it but the law of the strongest… In A’s putting away B, there is no Thirdness. In C’s taking B there is no Thirdness. (Peirce, Collected Papers, 8.331-2).
Phenomenologically, Thirdness in its most basic form would be seen in something like jealousy. If a child sees that another child is getting the approval of its mother then he is seeing a relation between two other people and by seeing what the other child did to be in the good graces of the mother the child can make a prediction and try to get the mother’s love for himself or try to sabotage the other child’s repeated attempt. Peirce directly relates Thirdness to ‘making some kind of prediction and… to say that a prediction has a decided tendency to be fulfilled, is to say that the future event are in a measure really governed by a law’ (ibid. 1.26)[1]. In our explorer example, the explorer will clearly make a prediction that a certain word is the right one to refer to the bowl of liquid and that will be the correct sign if it results in someone gesturing to it or passing it. Moreover, once he gets to understand the people better he may have the chance to decide whether or not he wants the good graces of the elders and will wait for them to drink from the bowl first or whether he will remain aloof as an attempt to show his power or from actual indifference. However, we can also imagine his hosts may also decide that he’s not a peer of theirs and he may have to take his meals outside of the huts or be seen as a witch.
The key factor in Thirdness is not a reference to one’s own intentionality but to another agent’s intentionality. That intentionality may be seen as an attempt to fulfill some lack whether that lack is being hungry, or that lack is to gain recognition from others, or one lacks peace of mind and is anxious and compulsively talks to fill the silence. Our explorer will only be able to learn language to the extent that he is able to form a theory about the lack of other people. He knows that they will be hungry and need sleep like himself, but maybe he’s perplexed by how to properly use the word ‘confident’ to describe someone or can’t tell the difference between someone who is pretending to be interested in him to get something from him vs. being interested in him as a person. Many signs or ‘language-games’ will be lost on him if he has not studied, or isn’t receptive, to people’s behaviour[2]. Additionally, if he has an inferiority ‘complex’ his theory of mind may have many blind-spots. For example, if he defensively thinks that all women are really just attracted to strong men so he can feel superior to them with his intelligence he will never pay attention to what different types of women actually want[3].
Since language must reference the needs and lack in other people it is not a matter of having ‘varieties of interpretation’. Language will begin by referencing the basic needs of the body (hunger and sex) and the basic lack that creates desire for recognition, devotion, love, to do his duty, to be a good parent, and the other motivations found in language-games. What a person does for recognition, for example, may change from culture to culture depending on the available resources, the use of those resources to create technology, and division of classes and labour. However, our explorer will still be able to reference how recognition amongst the tribe is granted to the elderly who possess magic and is attached to the skill of a hunter that is demonstrated by the food he brings back. Outside of basic sustenance issues and power relations, culture becomes wrapped up with religious, philosophical, and artistic expressions for which psychoanalysis has provided the beginnings of a psychological roadmap. As I mentioned above, it is only by reverting to pre-19th century philosophical views that narrativists can claim an unbridgeable relativism between cultures and ‘varieties of interpretations’. The ability of the explorer to understand the culture of the tribe goes as deep as his ability to judge the feelings and motivations of its members.
III
With the use of sign and intentionality being subsumed under the requirement of a theory of mind and a certain level of object-relatedness we can now investigate Firstness and Secondness as categories in which ‘meaning’ doesn’t play a part. In other words, with Firstness and Secondness the subject is still ‘in itself’ and not yet ‘for itself’. Although an adult may condition a pre-oedipal child to use signifiers, just as a scientist can condition some varieties of ape for that matter, left on their own they will not create signs[4]. This is the condition in which we find feral children or those children raised in locked rooms with their caregivers only giving them food. However, these children, and animals in general, are still essentially ‘thinking’ and interacting with the environment[5]. The question is how are they relating to others and the environment and what are they able to take as objects in this ‘in itself’ mode. The common mistake in philosophy is to imagine that the pre-oedipal child, who hasn’t yet experienced the need for the desire of the mother and jealousy, is like the explorer from the example above. Wittgenstein writes:
Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country’ that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And “think” would here mean something like “talk to itself” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-32).
This is essentially the view of the intentionalist who only studies self-conscious agents. The child passively receives signification from its mother and then its own rational choosing and volition kicks in and there is no worry about how the child actually arrived at the ‘for itself’ relation in language. My reader, like many analytical philosophers may have doubts about this and wonder why the child can’t be ‘for itself’ all along and merely has to learn his parent’s language so he can share his thoughts. This is where Kant’s transcendental idealism arises. Kant engages with the work of the empiricists like Hume that claim that knowledge is analytical. For example, a dog is defined as a furry animal with four legs and a tail and all these parts of the dog can be observed and be included in the definition. However, Kant brings our attention to the fact that along with analytical propositions there are also synthetic propositions as with the one’s involved in arithmetic. For example, to say 5+7=12 requires some praxis on the part of the subject. There is nothing in the 12 which can be observed to give us 5+7 and even if we consider the 12 to refer to stones on a table (in a group of 5 and 7) the question becomes what observable property in those two piles suggests the praxis of putting them together? Moreover, even if we combine the two piles, to count the stones, it becomes a question of how we remember that we’ve already counted 1 by the time we turn attention to the next 1 to give us 2. In other words, I must be able to take something in the external world as an object and this implies that my experience of the external world is something that I can hold in memory to combine with my present experience of reality. This act of memory and holding the image of one stone in mind while noting the presence of another stone and then collecting them together as ‘one and one’ things can’t be a perceptible feature of the world either and must be the work of the subject. This necessity pushed Kant to perform a ‘Copernican revolution’ and require that the subject can’t be dealing with ‘things in themselves’ but must be re-presenting the ‘appearances’ of them to himself in order to take an object in consciousness and in memory. This move is further corroborated by the necessity of a subjective experience of time and space. The naïve empiricist who takes time and space as objective realities would claim that we walk around in a ‘container’ of time and space that is the direct cause of our sense of them. However, it must be remembered that we experience time and space within dreams – no matter how quickly they shift from one frame to the next— that doesn’t come from any causation of outer reality or ‘appearances’. To say that we can form a memory of it must mean that we can represent it to ourselves and therefore there is a subjective factor. This isn’t to say that time and space don’t exist in ‘things in themselves’ because that would be a transcendental realism or pre-critical idealism[6]. Kant writes:
We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus inferred as its external cause ... . In the true sense of the word, therefore, I can never perceive external things, but I can only infer their existence from my own internal perception, regarding the perception as an effect of something external that must be the proximate cause ... . It must not be supposed, therefore, that an idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A367 f.).
By referencing the necessity of performing a synthesis in arithmetic and that counting requiries that the subject can take objects in acts of memory and seeing that time and space lack direct causation the Copernican turn of Kant requires that we motivate the child in taking new objects within the re-presented ‘appearances’ of the ‘thing in itself’. ‘Appearances’ don’t translate straight away into the world of the explorer. The diversity of ‘appearances’ must be put together and broken apart by work done by what Kant calls the transcendental imagination. He writes:
The first thing which must be given to us in order to achieve the a priori cognition of all objects, is the diversity of the pure intuition; the synthesis of this diversity by means of the imagination is the second; but this gives, as yet, no cognition. The conceptions which give unity to this pure synthesis… furnish the third requisite for the cognition of an object, and these conceptions are given by the understanding. (ibid. A124).
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness is Peirce’s attempt to understand how the imagination performs its work on appearances and eventually leads to the sign. Peirce acknowledges that the work of Hegel too is carrying out the same task of understanding the work of the imagination in relation to these three categories by which the subject can perform praxis on his transcendental re-presentations[7]. Kant, after making the Copernican turn, had an agenda to make morality a synthetic a priori process like arithmetic. He wanted to keep alive the possibility that our human essence was being a rational chooser and it was philosophers of the 19th century who explored the social ontology of the subject as seen above. Although, their intuitions were correct and their logic sound, Hegel and Peirce didn’t have the data that has been accumulated by psychoanalysts and zoologists to communicate their insights[8]. In the next section I will attempt to position the three Categories or stages within their findings and synthesize the two.
[1] I prefer Wittgenstein’s more innocuous ‘rule-following’ to ‘law’, which is inextricable from its political and scientific contexts. Science doesn’t exist in every culture but rules do. Moreover, Peirce also allows that categories exist beyond Thirdness which would allow for future developments of self-consciousness and the fact that science arrived very recently in civilization. Perice writes:
By way of a preface, I must explain that in saying that the three, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, complete the list, I by no means deny that there are other categories. On the contrary, at every step of every analysis, conceptions are met with which presumably do not belong to this series of ideas (Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.525).
It’s also important to recognize that the technology, communications, and more specialization in a political economy allow more developed cultures to grant a more developed phenomenology to certain gifted individuals (i.e. the innovating scientist). Not everyone in our culture has a scientific view on the human mind. And, even many people that claim to do so by identification and don’t have a practical understanding of the concepts involved.
[2] Wittgenstein relates receptivity to a natural sympathetic state of one’s body which will be discussed later on in relation to mimicry and the mirror stage: “Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains. For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like of a soul which some body has” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-283). In addition to this strange phrase, ‘a soul which some body has’ we can add the equally strange phrase of ‘an object that some subject uses to think’ (Lacan, Seminar XI, p.62).
[3] Wittgenstein’s private language argument is basically that we feel sensations such as a knot in one’s stomach with fear, or melting sensations in love, our muscles tighten in anger, etc. but we don’t learn the names for these feelings by referring to these sensations. For example, I don’t say I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart is beating quickly and in a dictionary I can look this up and find out that I’ve got stage fright. We learn what we feel by our caregivers judging our emotions and labeling them for us or by judging the physical behaviour and actions of others and then being able to reflexively apply it to our own behaviours and actions. The fact that language-games for different motivations, emotions, idioms, etc. exist shows that some people have wisdom or expert judgment. Thus someone who claims to have a feeling without showing the behaviours or actions a wise person sees with others doesn’t have privileged epistemological access to ‘knowing’ what his feelings are even though the wise person thinks he is faking:
I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: "But surely another person can't have THIS pain!" -- The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word "this". Rather, what the emphasis does is to suggest the case in which we are familiar with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-253).
[4] This isn’t to say that the child will not display any active or creative use of language- Koko the gorilla combined words in novel ways- but rather that the parents are the guarantors of language rather than the child itself (or its theory of mind).
[5] The matter of what thinking is deserves much more space and a more careful study of both Peirce and Wittgenstein’s work. However, I believe that it is safe to assume that human beings are descended from animals and that a large part of what ‘thinks’ in us is something analogous to Freud’s self-preservative instinct and taking care of basic needs. The memories of what things granted us satisfaction and the fears of those things which caused us pain provides a simple yet powerful approach to a lot of our behaviours. It is clear that besides self-preservation instincts and the internalization of an object, which drives us to preserve a certain image of ourselves in the eyes of other people, there is a form of thinking that exists in language-speaking humans that is different than animals. Wittgenstein gives interesting examples of separating instinct from thought when he writes:
It is very easy to imagine someone knowing his way about a city quite accurately, i.e. he finds the shortest way from one part of the city to another quite surely— and yet that he should be perfectly incapable of drawing a map of the city. That, as soon as he tries, he only produces something completely wrong. (Our concept of ‘instinct’.) (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology-556).
[6] In the Stanford entry on Kant the author makes the same connection:
While Kant does clearly allude to this theoretical background, it is noteworthy that views of the sort he articulates in the Aesthetic—that space and time are transcendentally ideal, that they are mere “forms” of intuition, that they depend upon the “subjective constitution of the mind,” and so on—do not obviously make contact with the Leibniz/Newton debate (Kant’s view on time and space, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Hegel would go farther to say that we are time conscious of itself
[7] The resemblance of these three Categories to Hegel’s stages was not remarked for many years after the list had been under study… [and] only goes to show that there really are three such elements (Peirce, Collected Papers- 8.329).
[8] There might also be an issue of needing to remain unintelligible to those who would persecute them for atheism. Additionally, Hegel did write a Philosophy of Nature that was aimed at trying to articulate something of an ontogenetic development of organic life, but I have yet to read it.
[H]ow different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think”. And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion. (It would also be possible to speak of an activity of butter when it rises in price…) -Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.153.
What constitutes the semiotic turn philosophically is not a reference to something individual in a particular actor, but a level of object-relatedness to another person. When another person begins to matter enough to us that we begin to study their behaviour and put together a theory of mind so as to conceptualize their motivations and desire we can form guesses about the future. Then their use of objects and their emotional reactions to others will form patterns (signifieds) to which we can add signifiers. One puts together a theory of mind about others, gleans the word that is used in a similar situation by others, and then uses it to communicate that situation when the desire takes him. There aren’t ‘varieties of interpretation’ but correct and incorrect forms of use that are illustrated in the activity of people correcting other people’s word choices. Wittgenstein is more instructive than Peirce or Saussure because he attempts to engage his reader’s phenomenology. In the Philosophical Investigations he helps us to understand the use of the sign as follows:
Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language (Wittgeinstein, Philosophical Investigations- 206).
If you imagine yourself sharing dinner with an indigenous tribe in some unknown country and you see a few bowls of liquid on the table it would be by seeing how they are used by others (i.e. they drink it, or put their hands in it, etc.) that the object would take on some significance to you. You would be able to signify it by paying attention to the gestures people make towards it and paying attention to the word that seems to be used only in reference to the bowl of liquid. For example they might say ‘Could you please pass the X’, ‘Could you please pass the Y’ and knowing the words they use in common with other objects at the table helps you to eliminate some of the possibilities. Seeing another person drink from the bowl one can understand it is something edible (i.e. be aware of the bowl of liquid as drink). However, by paying attention to the interactions of at least two others it is possible to have a rule for the sign. Additionally, as Wittgenstein points out in the example, the bowl of liquid will be embedded in the custom of dinner and will reference etiquette, and etiquette will reference differences in rank and the internalization of convention. For example, it might be polite to let the elders at the table drink from the bowls first. In this sense signs will be inseparable from a culture in which there are always different ranks between people, different codes of formality for the expressions of emotion, and different forms of possessions that grant status to an individual. In a letter to Lady Welby Peirce makes a similar claim about a sign requiring two other actors and a rule. He asks us to
analyze for instance the relation involved in ‘A gives B to C’ Now what is giving? It does not consist in A’s putting B away from him and C’s subsequently taking B up… it consists in A’s making C the possessor according to Law. There must be some kind of law before there can be any kind of giving, -- be it but the law of the strongest… In A’s putting away B, there is no Thirdness. In C’s taking B there is no Thirdness. (Peirce, Collected Papers, 8.331-2).
Phenomenologically, Thirdness in its most basic form would be seen in something like jealousy. If a child sees that another child is getting the approval of its mother then he is seeing a relation between two other people and by seeing what the other child did to be in the good graces of the mother the child can make a prediction and try to get the mother’s love for himself or try to sabotage the other child’s repeated attempt. Peirce directly relates Thirdness to ‘making some kind of prediction and… to say that a prediction has a decided tendency to be fulfilled, is to say that the future event are in a measure really governed by a law’ (ibid. 1.26)[1]. In our explorer example, the explorer will clearly make a prediction that a certain word is the right one to refer to the bowl of liquid and that will be the correct sign if it results in someone gesturing to it or passing it. Moreover, once he gets to understand the people better he may have the chance to decide whether or not he wants the good graces of the elders and will wait for them to drink from the bowl first or whether he will remain aloof as an attempt to show his power or from actual indifference. However, we can also imagine his hosts may also decide that he’s not a peer of theirs and he may have to take his meals outside of the huts or be seen as a witch.
The key factor in Thirdness is not a reference to one’s own intentionality but to another agent’s intentionality. That intentionality may be seen as an attempt to fulfill some lack whether that lack is being hungry, or that lack is to gain recognition from others, or one lacks peace of mind and is anxious and compulsively talks to fill the silence. Our explorer will only be able to learn language to the extent that he is able to form a theory about the lack of other people. He knows that they will be hungry and need sleep like himself, but maybe he’s perplexed by how to properly use the word ‘confident’ to describe someone or can’t tell the difference between someone who is pretending to be interested in him to get something from him vs. being interested in him as a person. Many signs or ‘language-games’ will be lost on him if he has not studied, or isn’t receptive, to people’s behaviour[2]. Additionally, if he has an inferiority ‘complex’ his theory of mind may have many blind-spots. For example, if he defensively thinks that all women are really just attracted to strong men so he can feel superior to them with his intelligence he will never pay attention to what different types of women actually want[3].
Since language must reference the needs and lack in other people it is not a matter of having ‘varieties of interpretation’. Language will begin by referencing the basic needs of the body (hunger and sex) and the basic lack that creates desire for recognition, devotion, love, to do his duty, to be a good parent, and the other motivations found in language-games. What a person does for recognition, for example, may change from culture to culture depending on the available resources, the use of those resources to create technology, and division of classes and labour. However, our explorer will still be able to reference how recognition amongst the tribe is granted to the elderly who possess magic and is attached to the skill of a hunter that is demonstrated by the food he brings back. Outside of basic sustenance issues and power relations, culture becomes wrapped up with religious, philosophical, and artistic expressions for which psychoanalysis has provided the beginnings of a psychological roadmap. As I mentioned above, it is only by reverting to pre-19th century philosophical views that narrativists can claim an unbridgeable relativism between cultures and ‘varieties of interpretations’. The ability of the explorer to understand the culture of the tribe goes as deep as his ability to judge the feelings and motivations of its members.
III
With the use of sign and intentionality being subsumed under the requirement of a theory of mind and a certain level of object-relatedness we can now investigate Firstness and Secondness as categories in which ‘meaning’ doesn’t play a part. In other words, with Firstness and Secondness the subject is still ‘in itself’ and not yet ‘for itself’. Although an adult may condition a pre-oedipal child to use signifiers, just as a scientist can condition some varieties of ape for that matter, left on their own they will not create signs[4]. This is the condition in which we find feral children or those children raised in locked rooms with their caregivers only giving them food. However, these children, and animals in general, are still essentially ‘thinking’ and interacting with the environment[5]. The question is how are they relating to others and the environment and what are they able to take as objects in this ‘in itself’ mode. The common mistake in philosophy is to imagine that the pre-oedipal child, who hasn’t yet experienced the need for the desire of the mother and jealousy, is like the explorer from the example above. Wittgenstein writes:
Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country’ that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And “think” would here mean something like “talk to itself” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-32).
This is essentially the view of the intentionalist who only studies self-conscious agents. The child passively receives signification from its mother and then its own rational choosing and volition kicks in and there is no worry about how the child actually arrived at the ‘for itself’ relation in language. My reader, like many analytical philosophers may have doubts about this and wonder why the child can’t be ‘for itself’ all along and merely has to learn his parent’s language so he can share his thoughts. This is where Kant’s transcendental idealism arises. Kant engages with the work of the empiricists like Hume that claim that knowledge is analytical. For example, a dog is defined as a furry animal with four legs and a tail and all these parts of the dog can be observed and be included in the definition. However, Kant brings our attention to the fact that along with analytical propositions there are also synthetic propositions as with the one’s involved in arithmetic. For example, to say 5+7=12 requires some praxis on the part of the subject. There is nothing in the 12 which can be observed to give us 5+7 and even if we consider the 12 to refer to stones on a table (in a group of 5 and 7) the question becomes what observable property in those two piles suggests the praxis of putting them together? Moreover, even if we combine the two piles, to count the stones, it becomes a question of how we remember that we’ve already counted 1 by the time we turn attention to the next 1 to give us 2. In other words, I must be able to take something in the external world as an object and this implies that my experience of the external world is something that I can hold in memory to combine with my present experience of reality. This act of memory and holding the image of one stone in mind while noting the presence of another stone and then collecting them together as ‘one and one’ things can’t be a perceptible feature of the world either and must be the work of the subject. This necessity pushed Kant to perform a ‘Copernican revolution’ and require that the subject can’t be dealing with ‘things in themselves’ but must be re-presenting the ‘appearances’ of them to himself in order to take an object in consciousness and in memory. This move is further corroborated by the necessity of a subjective experience of time and space. The naïve empiricist who takes time and space as objective realities would claim that we walk around in a ‘container’ of time and space that is the direct cause of our sense of them. However, it must be remembered that we experience time and space within dreams – no matter how quickly they shift from one frame to the next— that doesn’t come from any causation of outer reality or ‘appearances’. To say that we can form a memory of it must mean that we can represent it to ourselves and therefore there is a subjective factor. This isn’t to say that time and space don’t exist in ‘things in themselves’ because that would be a transcendental realism or pre-critical idealism[6]. Kant writes:
We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus inferred as its external cause ... . In the true sense of the word, therefore, I can never perceive external things, but I can only infer their existence from my own internal perception, regarding the perception as an effect of something external that must be the proximate cause ... . It must not be supposed, therefore, that an idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A367 f.).
By referencing the necessity of performing a synthesis in arithmetic and that counting requiries that the subject can take objects in acts of memory and seeing that time and space lack direct causation the Copernican turn of Kant requires that we motivate the child in taking new objects within the re-presented ‘appearances’ of the ‘thing in itself’. ‘Appearances’ don’t translate straight away into the world of the explorer. The diversity of ‘appearances’ must be put together and broken apart by work done by what Kant calls the transcendental imagination. He writes:
The first thing which must be given to us in order to achieve the a priori cognition of all objects, is the diversity of the pure intuition; the synthesis of this diversity by means of the imagination is the second; but this gives, as yet, no cognition. The conceptions which give unity to this pure synthesis… furnish the third requisite for the cognition of an object, and these conceptions are given by the understanding. (ibid. A124).
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness is Peirce’s attempt to understand how the imagination performs its work on appearances and eventually leads to the sign. Peirce acknowledges that the work of Hegel too is carrying out the same task of understanding the work of the imagination in relation to these three categories by which the subject can perform praxis on his transcendental re-presentations[7]. Kant, after making the Copernican turn, had an agenda to make morality a synthetic a priori process like arithmetic. He wanted to keep alive the possibility that our human essence was being a rational chooser and it was philosophers of the 19th century who explored the social ontology of the subject as seen above. Although, their intuitions were correct and their logic sound, Hegel and Peirce didn’t have the data that has been accumulated by psychoanalysts and zoologists to communicate their insights[8]. In the next section I will attempt to position the three Categories or stages within their findings and synthesize the two.
[1] I prefer Wittgenstein’s more innocuous ‘rule-following’ to ‘law’, which is inextricable from its political and scientific contexts. Science doesn’t exist in every culture but rules do. Moreover, Peirce also allows that categories exist beyond Thirdness which would allow for future developments of self-consciousness and the fact that science arrived very recently in civilization. Perice writes:
By way of a preface, I must explain that in saying that the three, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, complete the list, I by no means deny that there are other categories. On the contrary, at every step of every analysis, conceptions are met with which presumably do not belong to this series of ideas (Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.525).
It’s also important to recognize that the technology, communications, and more specialization in a political economy allow more developed cultures to grant a more developed phenomenology to certain gifted individuals (i.e. the innovating scientist). Not everyone in our culture has a scientific view on the human mind. And, even many people that claim to do so by identification and don’t have a practical understanding of the concepts involved.
[2] Wittgenstein relates receptivity to a natural sympathetic state of one’s body which will be discussed later on in relation to mimicry and the mirror stage: “Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains. For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like of a soul which some body has” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-283). In addition to this strange phrase, ‘a soul which some body has’ we can add the equally strange phrase of ‘an object that some subject uses to think’ (Lacan, Seminar XI, p.62).
[3] Wittgenstein’s private language argument is basically that we feel sensations such as a knot in one’s stomach with fear, or melting sensations in love, our muscles tighten in anger, etc. but we don’t learn the names for these feelings by referring to these sensations. For example, I don’t say I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart is beating quickly and in a dictionary I can look this up and find out that I’ve got stage fright. We learn what we feel by our caregivers judging our emotions and labeling them for us or by judging the physical behaviour and actions of others and then being able to reflexively apply it to our own behaviours and actions. The fact that language-games for different motivations, emotions, idioms, etc. exist shows that some people have wisdom or expert judgment. Thus someone who claims to have a feeling without showing the behaviours or actions a wise person sees with others doesn’t have privileged epistemological access to ‘knowing’ what his feelings are even though the wise person thinks he is faking:
I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: "But surely another person can't have THIS pain!" -- The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word "this". Rather, what the emphasis does is to suggest the case in which we are familiar with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations-253).
[4] This isn’t to say that the child will not display any active or creative use of language- Koko the gorilla combined words in novel ways- but rather that the parents are the guarantors of language rather than the child itself (or its theory of mind).
[5] The matter of what thinking is deserves much more space and a more careful study of both Peirce and Wittgenstein’s work. However, I believe that it is safe to assume that human beings are descended from animals and that a large part of what ‘thinks’ in us is something analogous to Freud’s self-preservative instinct and taking care of basic needs. The memories of what things granted us satisfaction and the fears of those things which caused us pain provides a simple yet powerful approach to a lot of our behaviours. It is clear that besides self-preservation instincts and the internalization of an object, which drives us to preserve a certain image of ourselves in the eyes of other people, there is a form of thinking that exists in language-speaking humans that is different than animals. Wittgenstein gives interesting examples of separating instinct from thought when he writes:
It is very easy to imagine someone knowing his way about a city quite accurately, i.e. he finds the shortest way from one part of the city to another quite surely— and yet that he should be perfectly incapable of drawing a map of the city. That, as soon as he tries, he only produces something completely wrong. (Our concept of ‘instinct’.) (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology-556).
[6] In the Stanford entry on Kant the author makes the same connection:
While Kant does clearly allude to this theoretical background, it is noteworthy that views of the sort he articulates in the Aesthetic—that space and time are transcendentally ideal, that they are mere “forms” of intuition, that they depend upon the “subjective constitution of the mind,” and so on—do not obviously make contact with the Leibniz/Newton debate (Kant’s view on time and space, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Hegel would go farther to say that we are time conscious of itself
[7] The resemblance of these three Categories to Hegel’s stages was not remarked for many years after the list had been under study… [and] only goes to show that there really are three such elements (Peirce, Collected Papers- 8.329).
[8] There might also be an issue of needing to remain unintelligible to those who would persecute them for atheism. Additionally, Hegel did write a Philosophy of Nature that was aimed at trying to articulate something of an ontogenetic development of organic life, but I have yet to read it.
feminine subject- subject masochist
No Altruism! I see in many men an excessive impulse and delight in wanting to be a function; they strive after it, and have the keenest scent for all those positions in which precisely they themselves can be functions. Among such persons are those women who transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert them selves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up. (Nietzche, Gay Science- 119)
Saturday, January 14, 2012
masculine subject- object narcissist
"In some of our patients we come across phantasies which refer to the possibility of a recognition of the man and to the formulation of conditions under which the patient, after their fulfilment, would be prepared to reconcile herself to her femininity. I mention first of all a condition I have met with many times; it runs: 'I could be content with my femininity if I were absolutely the most beautiful of all women'. All men would lie at the feet of the most beautiful woman, and the female narcissism would consider this power not a bad compensation for the defect so painfully perceived. It is in fact easier for a beautiful woman to assuage her castration complex than for an ugly one. However, the idea of being the most beautiful of all women does not have this effect in all cases. We are well-acquainted with the expression of a woman, 'I should like to be the most beautiful of all women so that all men would adore me; then I would show them the cold shoulder'. In this case the craving for revenge is quite clear; this remark was made by a woman of an extremely tyrannical nature which was based on a wholly unsublimated castration complex"
Abraham, K. (1922). Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex. Int. J. Psycho-Anal.
Abraham, K. (1922). Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex. Int. J. Psycho-Anal.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
psychoanalytic basics- Reichian therapy
The video I’ve chosen to write on is called ‘Room for Happiness’. It is a video on ‘psychiatric orgone therapy’ which is also known as orgonomy or Reichian therapy. It was produced by the American College of Orgonomy which is one of two institutes that continues to teach the clinical techniques pioneered by Wilhelm Reich to medically trained doctors. In this essay I will describe the essence of the technique as it is shown in the video and then go on to show that it is a complementary approach to the psychoanalytic theory of repression and the unconscious. Lastly, I will evaluate the video in regards to how well it holds up to the theory.
The treatment begins with psychotherapy in which the patient expresses his concerns and complaints to the therapist. In the first therapy shown the patient expresses her fear to tell her father how she really feels about him because she doesn’t want to have his disapproval. The Reichian therapist tells her to stand the anxiety and express herself. The patient also relates that some sessions are all talk and no body-work and it’s when she doesn’t feel like talking that the body-work begins. The patient moves from the chair to a mattress and is instructed to breathe deeply through the mouth which is supposed to engage a more primitive respiratory pattern and bring in more energy or excitation to the organism. It heightens both feelings as well as defences against these feelings. So, either the patient gets more in touch with the feeling she is resistant to talking about or the defences against those feelings are worked with in their somatic manifestations. The concept is that all feelings have bodily expressions. One wants to hit out or bite in anger, one wants to reach out in longing, one wants to sob in sadness, etc. as a child who lacks the complex psyche of the adult would express herself. The therapist sees tight muscles or the muscle spasms that suppress the repressed feelings and applies pressure to the area in order to force the muscles to stop holding. The emotional response breaks out and the patient discharges the affect and therefore no longer has to expend the energy to hold it in check. What is the most impressive in watching the video are the strong displays of affect which the patients undergo. Specifically, the fourth patient is covered in sweat and striking the bed with amazing force as he expresses his rage.
Although the video only shows the application of character analysis when the body-work is being done, in theory, it is also performed during verbal interchanges. The third patient has a puffed up and rigid chest and when the therapist presses on the chest the patient begins to cough and the muscles begin to spasm. The therapist explains that the muscular armour is being released but the patient is resisting the expression of the impulse and it is manifested in the coughing. Conceivably, the therapist might go on to work with another segment of armour but the patient begins to talk. In response the therapist says, “mr superior, mr. independent, doesn’t need anyone” and goes on in a voice over to say that the patient doesn’t want to experience being vulnerable or being dependent on people because if he did, he might be hurt; he keeps himself very much aloof and emotionally cut off from people to protect himself. This analysis of the resistance isn’t made at a deep interpretative level but draws attention to the resistance in the here and now.
Orgonomy or Reichian therapy evolved out of psychoanalysis or more specifically the character analytic technique of Wilhelm Reich while he was still a member of the IPA. The reason I chose to compare orgonomy to psychoanalysis is because it recognizes everything that Freud says is essential to psychoanalysis but only adds the dimension of bodywork. Famously, Freud said that any investigation which takes “the facts of transference and resistance… may call itself psychoanalysis, though is arrives at results other than my own” (Freud, ‘History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’, p. 16). Reichians also follow a later, less known qualifying statement he made that excludes many who today call themselves psychoanalysts:
the genesis of a neurosis invariably goes back to very early impressions in childhood…. This therefore makes it nonsensical to say that one is practising psycho-analysis if one excludes from examination and consideration precisely these earliest periods—as happens in some quarters (Moses and Monotheism, p. 73)
In Reich’s Character Analysis he follows the dialectic between psychoanalytic clinical technique and meta-psychology and explains how character analysis adds an important new dimension[i]. Basically, Freud began by way of a topographical point of view in which he used interpretation to make the unconscious conscious[ii]. From this position he went to resistance analysis that is linked to the dynamic point of view[iii]. This approach examines not the repressed impulse but
… the analyst takes a more passive attitude and attempts to get an insight into the more contemporary meaning of the patient’s behaviour, why he or she doubts, arrives late, speaks in a ranting or confused manner, communicates only every third idea or so, criticizes the analysis… the analyst will endeavour to influence him through a consistent interpretation of the meaning of his actions (Reich, Character Analysis, p.44)
The analyst interprets how this resistant behaviour is based upon the transference of feelings from the early relations of the patient’s childhood onto the analyst. Reich’s innovation in Character Analysis is to move from content to form and to offer an order of what is to be analyzed. He writes:
[a]dherence to the basic rule is something rare, and many months of character-analytic work are required to instill in the patient a halfway sufficient measure of candidness. The way the patient speaks, looks at and greets the analyst, lies on the couch, the inflection of the voice, the degree of conventional politeness which is maintained, etc. are valuable cues in assessing the secret resistances with which the patient counters he basic rule… it is not only what the patient says but how he says it that has to be interpreted… (ibid. p. 49, emphasis mine)
For Reich the secret resistances are both ways that the patient has regressed to positions that take him away from genuine contact with the analyst, and also fixations/adaptational problems which see him desire or fear too much contact with him. Both get in the way of allowing the unconscious material to emerge. The patient who eagerly produced associations and assented to interpretations but who wasn’t getting better is someone who epitomizes these problems and had a latent negative transference. In Reich’s presentation this is a step that leaves the dynamic point of view for the economic. The economic can be understood as the position of energy across several systems that emerge from the principle of dynamic creation. For example, the ego qua perceptual consciousness system is derived from the id. The child doesn’t come out of the womb talking and with the ability to do arithmetic. Classical psychoanalysis holds that cognitive abilities are derived from dynamic conflicts between id and object and the following ‘desexualization’ of the internalized representation of the object[iv]. Even though everyone dynamically goes through many stages of dynamic development and desexualisation some individuals economically function more in certain cognitive styles than others and in comparison to other people[v]. Reich’s concern isn’t with the economics of the ego’s functioning but with the economics of the libido within an individual[vi]. In his theory, orgastic potency is synonymous with the ability, or hope to, love another and the desire to succeed in life. When disappointments in love or narcissistic injuries see a person repress these desires then sexual stasis occurs (Character Analysis, p.14, 257). In sexual stasis the energy that was outward directed (success, love) is turned inward and the unconscious becomes activated (Function of the Orgasm, p. 130, 158,164)[vii]. This stasis energy activates pre-oedipal impulses (fixations) which are in turn tied to archaic superego responses which the individual may regress to[viii]. Reich gives an example of the character-analytic technique:
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… (Reich, ‘Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood’, p. 229)[ix].
Reich linked the regressive dying quality of the patient to the hatred that couldn’t be directed towards the father. He held that the economic point of view means that this kind of regression must be worked through first before the positive transference of the patient could be analyzed[x]. Libido must be moved from the pre-oedipal regressions to the genital position before the patient can work through it[xi].
In his next move into body-work, what needs to be added to this metapsychology is a genetic standpoint to explain the muscular armouring. Following the dual use of economic above it can be conceived of as the determination of the specific stages in which cognitive styles and the fused aggressive and libidinal impulses (i.e. drive to bite vs. to mutilate vs. to murder vs. to he held, etc.) and the defused forms of superego these two drives take. However, it can also be taken in a more general sense to talk about the act of repression itself. As opposed to a Cartesian view that places the mind over the body the route Reich took to orgonomy was based upon a dialectical materialism that recognized that the ego derives from an id. The id is first and foremost a bodymind which, when one considers all the vital processes occurring (from the hearbeat, secretion of chemicals, to synapses firing) ego consciousness plays a very small role in what goes on in the body from one moment to the next. The aggressive and libidinal drives, along with emotions, exist as bodily expressions of the id. This means that in order for repression to occur suppression must occur and the impulses have to be held back before they are ultimately banished from seeking expression. This creates muscular armour when the impulses are reactivated since it is the muscles that allowed repression to take place and so they are dynamically connected to the repressed impulses. Reich followed his intuitions that the far away eyes, tight jaws, stiff necks, raised shoulders, collapsed chests, upturned pelvises, and ungrounded legs of his patients were related to the genesis of the repression of certain impulses[xii].
In working with the muscular armour against these impulses/affects Reich and those who have followed his efforts or have come to these ideas without the metapsychology of psychoanalysis have found another way to access the unconscious. However, new forms of body-psychotherapy often leave the psychoanalytic foundation of Reich’s thought behind, ignore the unconscious impulses and their derivatives, and focus on PTSD[xiii]. The approaches also generally focus on the client’s own awareness of the muscular armour and their mindful relaxation of it as opposed to the Reichian technique of forcing the muscle to relax. Some of the most recent approaches which show these trends are the sensorimotor approach of Pat Ogden, the work at the Trauma Center done by Bessel Van Der Kolk, Somatic Experiencing by Peter Levine and various yoga and mindfulness programs arising throughout America and Europe. Despite the poverty of theoretical understanding and sometimes blatant mysticism in many of these new approaches the number of yoga, minfulness, ptsd programs, etc. are increasing in public facilities.
In the video and what it represents of the current approach of orgonomy there are two major things that fall short of the theory. Firstly, as mentioned above, the psychoanalytic stance of neutrality (not giving advice, using a couch, and working with derivatives of the unconscious in dreams or slips and not just in the transference) is not followed. The approach is a psychotherapeutic one and no longer psychoanalytic. Secondly, as opposed to interpretation of the form of resistance as per the example of dying or in terms of how ‘secret distrust’ will undermine the therapy itself, the therapist attacks the character resistance. Reich himself talks of destroying the armour and uses aggressive language but in his examples of therapy he doesn’t brow-beat the patient but empathically mentions how narcissistic or masochistic tendencies will undermine the therapy[xiv]. The subtlety of describing the form of the patient’s bearing or movements is not displayed in any of the therapies. Reich often mentions that it is precisely this factor of hitting upon the dead-like, lord-like, and even animal-like qualities that people display which bring forward the changes (‘Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood’, p. 223-5, Function of the Orgasm, p.320).
It appears that Reich’s character analytic technique and the analytic stance from which it was developed have fallen from use within the community that still preserves Reich’s body-based innovations. Additionally, it also seems like many analysts practice an interpretation or resistance analysis that is still content based and hasn’t made use of the form as Reich had advocated. Character analysis as such would seem to represent a peak that separates psychoanalysis and body-psychotherapy and which neither can claim as their own.
Bibliography:
Room For Happiness (2004) Dir: Dick Young, studio: American College of Orgonomy,
Adler, A. (1964). ‘The Accentuated Dogmatized Guiding Fiction’ in The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks
Forman, M. (1976). Narcissistic Personality Disorders and the Oedipal Fixations. Ann. Psychoanal., 4:65-92
Freud, S. (1914). On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX
Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX
Freud, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII
Reich, W. (1931). Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 12:219-230
Reich, W. (1933) Character Analysis, tr: Vincent R. Carfagno, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
Reich, W. (1942) Function of the Orgasm, tr: Theodore P. Wolf, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
Spotnitz, H., Meadow, P. (1976). Treatment of the Narcissistic Neuroses, NY, Man. Center For Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies.
Totton, N (2006) ‘Birth, Death, Orgasm, and Perversion: A Reichian View’ in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Psychoanalysis By Dany Nobus, Lisa Downing, Great Britain: Karnac
[i] The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (vol.3) shares Reich’s position regarding metapsychology and technique:
A dialectic existed in Freud's work between metapsychology and clinical practice: the identification of new clinical facts would bring about a corresponding evolution in metapsychology, and this in turn had an affect on theoretical-clinical description. Although the foundations of metapsychology are well established, there is no reason to believe that it is incapable of change and enrichment from advances in clinical knowledge, just as it may evolve through metapsychological research papers (http://www.enotes.com/metapsychology-reference/metapsychology-188005).
[ii] Just like the French settlers in new territory speak an antiquated version of French and didn’t move along with the changes in France so to does psychoanalysis show it’s history by the new territories it came too. Those of the Kleinian English school remained at the level of the original interpretation of the impulses. Hartmann, Lowenstein, Jacobson, etc. and the American ego-psychology school retained the resistance analysis synonymous with Anna Freud, Fenichel, and made important contributions of their own (as did Klein). Then Reich’s economic ideas came in to American humanistic psychotherapy in leaders of the movement like Frits Perls (Gestalt), Arthur Janov (Primal), and the many existential approaches that work with liberating the aliveness of an individual.
[iii] “The topographical point of view determines the principle of technique to the effect that the unconscious has to be made conscious. The dynamic point of view dictates that this making conscious of the unconscious must not proceed directly but by way of resistance analysis” (Reich, Character Analysis, p.42).
[iv] “the ego deals with the first object-cathexes of the id (and certainly with later ones too) by taking over the libido from them into itself and binding it to the alteration of the ego produced by means of identification. The transformation [of erotic libido] into ego-libido of course involves an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization” (Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p.45-6).
[v] The processes involved in the formation of a neurotic phobia, which is nothing else than an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct, present us with a model of the manner of origin of this supposititious ‘instinct towards perfection’—an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed to every human being. The dynamic conditions for its development are, indeed, universally present; but it is only in rare cases that the economic situation appears to favour the production of the phenomenon (Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.42)
This also leads us to the work of Shapiro in Neurotic Styles who looks at how different defences such as paranoia, hysteria, etc. go hand in hand with the economically based cognitive style of an individual.
[vi] In this use of economic Reich is effectively adding another dimension to Alfred Adler’s notion of superiority by conceptualizing love and disappointments in love to be another factor leading to mental illness. Adler effectively creates an economic view of narcissism in an individual in which there is a contact point with reality to the extent that an individual seeks to realize his superiority in rational achievement through work and community. When an individual begins to remove himself from work and relationships due to the pride of wanting to be seen as superior (when others don’t recognize him as such) the economy shifts to ‘guiding fictions’ or illusions about one’s superiority to others on a spectrum to the delusions of grandeur in the psychotic (Adler, ‘The Accentuated Dogmatized Guiding Fiction’). In footnote xiv the Adlerian economics of narcissism are clearly visible in Reich’s description of addressing the secret resistances.
[vii] The unconscious is activated in various aggressive (biting, mutilation, murder, etc.) or libidinal drives (desire to be touched, for vicarious pleasure, for sex, etc.). These impulses have a dynamic relation with various manifestations of the superego. Freud writes:
the super-ego, originating as it does from the id, cannot dissociate itself from the regression and defusion of instinct which have taken place there. We cannot be surprised if it becomes harsher, unkinder and more tormenting than where development has been normal (Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety’, p. 115-6).
…that the prevention of an erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego (Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, p.138).
The libidinal impulses are also paired with superego reactions in which defusion leads to reactions of abandonment, self-pity, dissociation, (etc.). Where guilt or self-pity are obviously very complicated superego reactions Freud conceived of earlier forms of the superego as being things like the oral fear of being eaten by the totem animal (Freud, ‘Economic Problem of Masochism’, p. 164-5). Melanie Klein’s work has been to outline these earlier forms but Reich’s work seems to be about registering their phenomenology and interpreting their form.
[viii] “[W]e find two layers of repressions in the compulsive character: the outer layer consists of sadistic and anal impulses, while the deeper layer is made up of phallic impulses. This corresponds to the inversion which takes place in the regression process: those impulses which receive a new cathexis lie closest to the surface; whereas object-libidinal genital strivings are deeply repressed, ‘covered over’ by layers of pregenital positions (Reich, Character Analysis, p. 216).
[ix] As per footnote vii, I believe this regression to a feeling of deadness should be taken as a primitive superego reaction. This explains the dynamic linking of the ‘contactlessness’ of the character to the aggressive or libidinal impulse as seen in Reich’s work:
It is seen again and again in analysis that the dynamic value of the same element of repressed material varies depending on the degree to which the ego defences have been loosened. If… the affects pertaining to the defensive formation of the character are liberated first, then a new cathexis of the infantile instinctual expression takes place automatically. (Reich, Character Analysis, p. 81-2).
This kind of regression seems common with narcissistic disorders, often paired with hypochondria, and the phenomenology seems well established:
The other major diagnostic signs and findings involve the phenomenology of the narcissistic regression. The fear of temporary fragmentation, or the temporary fragmentation itself, results from a temporary decathexis of the self or self-objects. These structural regressions of the self and the attempts to adapt to them have certain characteristic ways of being described by the patient or observed by us. One way the patients manifest this is to worry about the mind and/or body and its functioning. They report vague, or sometimes insistent, preoccupations with fears of cancer, dying, or heart attacks. A related complaint is feeling like a “mummy” or “ghost,” or the sensation of having a plastic shield all around the body. In other words, the patient doesn't feel or experience himself as being in touch with others, the world, or himself. We know that these are complaints of an underlying feeling of deadness, a dreaded feeling that is metapsychologically a manifestation of decathexis of the self and/or a temporary fragmentation of the archaic self…When the dominant experience is that of “mummy” or “ghost,” the mood the patient lives out is one of low energy, remoteness, distance, depression, and isolation. His voice and presence have a kind of lifelessness which the patient will describe as a state of being “turned off.” (Forman, ‘Narcissistic Personality Disorders and the Oedipal Fixations’, p.71)
[x] I concentrated my presentation on the problem whether, in the presence of a latent negative attitude, the analyst should interpret the patients incestuous desires or whether it would be better to wait until the patient’s distrust had been eliminated. Freud interrupted me. ‘Why don’t you want to interpret the material in the sequence in which it appears? Of course, it is necessary to analyze and interpret the incest dreams as soon as they appear!... The whole things was foreign to Freud. He did not understand why the analyst should not interpret the material in the sequence in which it appeared… (Reich, Function of the Orgasm, p.167-8).
[xi] Nick Totton, a ‘neo-Reichian’, persuasively argues that Reich’s notion of genitality is not related to the Oedipus complex but actually to the castration complex and that orgastic potency is in fact linked to perversion. See ‘Birth, Death, Orgasm, and Perversion: A Reichian View’ in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Psychoanalysis. Totton isn’t saying that only perverts have orgastic potency but that its perverse impulses in narcissistic, neurotic, and perverse structures that produce the orgasm discharge that Reich originally though of as genitality.
[xii] In general both the aggressive and libidinous impulses and the part they play in narcissistic (self-love) and masochistic (other-love) economies are gauged together in one large economy in the body-psychotherapist’s examination of the vitality and health of the body.
[xiii] PTSD in a post-latency manifestation is a re-living of a traumatic experience while pre-latency it is seen in the repetition-compulsion and may be re-enacted. This difference is noted in a war neurosis in which dreams or thoughts lead to the trauma re-playing in one’s mind where Freud relates the earlier repetition compulsions to being paired with impulses on the individuals part: “cases of simultaneous object-cathexis and identification— cases, that is in which the alteration in character occurs before the object has been given up. In such cases the alteration in character has been able to survive the object-relation and in a certain sense to conserve it” (Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 29-30). For example, the repetition to have an “injured third party” in romantic relationships or to groom a protégé who ends up leaving you are examples of repetitions that are traumatic and repeated.
[xiv] Reich doesn’t interpret to the patient that she is narcissistic and superior but rather brings her attention to how her pride would cause her to leave the therapy:
To begin with, I explained that her strong inhibition about discussing these things was connected with her pride, i.e. she was too proud to admit such emotional stirrings. She immediately agreed, adding that her whole nature rebelled against such admissions. Asked whether she had ever experienced love or desire spontaneously, she answered that this had never been the case. The men had always desired her; she had merely acquiesced to their love. I explained the narcissistic character of this attitude, and she understood it very well. I further made it clear that there could be no question of a genuine love striving; rather she had been irritated to see a man [the analyst] sitting there completely unmoved by her charms and found the situation unbearable. The fantasy had been an expression of the desire to make the analyst fall in love with her. That this had been the case was confirmed by the recollection that, in the fantasy, the conquest of the analyst had played the major role and had afforded the actual source of pleasure. Now I could draw her attention to the danger concealed in this attitude, namely that, as time went on, she would not be able to tolerate the rejection of her desires and would eventually lose interest in the analysis. She herself was already aware of this possibility. (Reich, Character Analysis, p.133-4).
Hyman Spotnitz the creator of modern psychoanalysis could be seen as beginning the metapsychological structural point of view to therapy. He notes that the schizophrenic’s ego doesn’t have either the cognitive capacities of the neurotic because of regressions, is more sensitive to injuries and disappointments, and has a primary narcissistic problem with the ‘otherness’ of the analyst. He writes:
‘Do we want a narcissistic transference to develop?’ We do because in a negative, regressed state, the patient may experience the analyst as being like him or part of him. Or the analyst may not exist for him. The syntonic feeling of oneness is a curative one, while the feeling of aloneness, the withdrawn state, is merely protective. Because traces of narcissism remain in everyone, we seek, when beginning treatment, to create an environment that will facilitate a narcissistic transference so that, first we can work through the patient’s narcissistic aggression. (Spotnitz, Treatment of the Narcissistic Neuroses, p. 58).
He advocates joining the defences of the patient until they have their own insight into them. While this is no doubt is necessary with psychotic and severely regressed patients it doesn’t do anything to assuage the pride of the patient in the example above. Joining her narcissism about her beauty or interpreting it both fail to bring it to bear on its relation to the analyst (as Reich masterfully did). A full structural point of view applied to therapy would have different techniques with the different psychotic, perverse (impulsive), and neurotic (compulsive) structures.
The treatment begins with psychotherapy in which the patient expresses his concerns and complaints to the therapist. In the first therapy shown the patient expresses her fear to tell her father how she really feels about him because she doesn’t want to have his disapproval. The Reichian therapist tells her to stand the anxiety and express herself. The patient also relates that some sessions are all talk and no body-work and it’s when she doesn’t feel like talking that the body-work begins. The patient moves from the chair to a mattress and is instructed to breathe deeply through the mouth which is supposed to engage a more primitive respiratory pattern and bring in more energy or excitation to the organism. It heightens both feelings as well as defences against these feelings. So, either the patient gets more in touch with the feeling she is resistant to talking about or the defences against those feelings are worked with in their somatic manifestations. The concept is that all feelings have bodily expressions. One wants to hit out or bite in anger, one wants to reach out in longing, one wants to sob in sadness, etc. as a child who lacks the complex psyche of the adult would express herself. The therapist sees tight muscles or the muscle spasms that suppress the repressed feelings and applies pressure to the area in order to force the muscles to stop holding. The emotional response breaks out and the patient discharges the affect and therefore no longer has to expend the energy to hold it in check. What is the most impressive in watching the video are the strong displays of affect which the patients undergo. Specifically, the fourth patient is covered in sweat and striking the bed with amazing force as he expresses his rage.
Although the video only shows the application of character analysis when the body-work is being done, in theory, it is also performed during verbal interchanges. The third patient has a puffed up and rigid chest and when the therapist presses on the chest the patient begins to cough and the muscles begin to spasm. The therapist explains that the muscular armour is being released but the patient is resisting the expression of the impulse and it is manifested in the coughing. Conceivably, the therapist might go on to work with another segment of armour but the patient begins to talk. In response the therapist says, “mr superior, mr. independent, doesn’t need anyone” and goes on in a voice over to say that the patient doesn’t want to experience being vulnerable or being dependent on people because if he did, he might be hurt; he keeps himself very much aloof and emotionally cut off from people to protect himself. This analysis of the resistance isn’t made at a deep interpretative level but draws attention to the resistance in the here and now.
Orgonomy or Reichian therapy evolved out of psychoanalysis or more specifically the character analytic technique of Wilhelm Reich while he was still a member of the IPA. The reason I chose to compare orgonomy to psychoanalysis is because it recognizes everything that Freud says is essential to psychoanalysis but only adds the dimension of bodywork. Famously, Freud said that any investigation which takes “the facts of transference and resistance… may call itself psychoanalysis, though is arrives at results other than my own” (Freud, ‘History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’, p. 16). Reichians also follow a later, less known qualifying statement he made that excludes many who today call themselves psychoanalysts:
the genesis of a neurosis invariably goes back to very early impressions in childhood…. This therefore makes it nonsensical to say that one is practising psycho-analysis if one excludes from examination and consideration precisely these earliest periods—as happens in some quarters (Moses and Monotheism, p. 73)
In Reich’s Character Analysis he follows the dialectic between psychoanalytic clinical technique and meta-psychology and explains how character analysis adds an important new dimension[i]. Basically, Freud began by way of a topographical point of view in which he used interpretation to make the unconscious conscious[ii]. From this position he went to resistance analysis that is linked to the dynamic point of view[iii]. This approach examines not the repressed impulse but
… the analyst takes a more passive attitude and attempts to get an insight into the more contemporary meaning of the patient’s behaviour, why he or she doubts, arrives late, speaks in a ranting or confused manner, communicates only every third idea or so, criticizes the analysis… the analyst will endeavour to influence him through a consistent interpretation of the meaning of his actions (Reich, Character Analysis, p.44)
The analyst interprets how this resistant behaviour is based upon the transference of feelings from the early relations of the patient’s childhood onto the analyst. Reich’s innovation in Character Analysis is to move from content to form and to offer an order of what is to be analyzed. He writes:
[a]dherence to the basic rule is something rare, and many months of character-analytic work are required to instill in the patient a halfway sufficient measure of candidness. The way the patient speaks, looks at and greets the analyst, lies on the couch, the inflection of the voice, the degree of conventional politeness which is maintained, etc. are valuable cues in assessing the secret resistances with which the patient counters he basic rule… it is not only what the patient says but how he says it that has to be interpreted… (ibid. p. 49, emphasis mine)
For Reich the secret resistances are both ways that the patient has regressed to positions that take him away from genuine contact with the analyst, and also fixations/adaptational problems which see him desire or fear too much contact with him. Both get in the way of allowing the unconscious material to emerge. The patient who eagerly produced associations and assented to interpretations but who wasn’t getting better is someone who epitomizes these problems and had a latent negative transference. In Reich’s presentation this is a step that leaves the dynamic point of view for the economic. The economic can be understood as the position of energy across several systems that emerge from the principle of dynamic creation. For example, the ego qua perceptual consciousness system is derived from the id. The child doesn’t come out of the womb talking and with the ability to do arithmetic. Classical psychoanalysis holds that cognitive abilities are derived from dynamic conflicts between id and object and the following ‘desexualization’ of the internalized representation of the object[iv]. Even though everyone dynamically goes through many stages of dynamic development and desexualisation some individuals economically function more in certain cognitive styles than others and in comparison to other people[v]. Reich’s concern isn’t with the economics of the ego’s functioning but with the economics of the libido within an individual[vi]. In his theory, orgastic potency is synonymous with the ability, or hope to, love another and the desire to succeed in life. When disappointments in love or narcissistic injuries see a person repress these desires then sexual stasis occurs (Character Analysis, p.14, 257). In sexual stasis the energy that was outward directed (success, love) is turned inward and the unconscious becomes activated (Function of the Orgasm, p. 130, 158,164)[vii]. This stasis energy activates pre-oedipal impulses (fixations) which are in turn tied to archaic superego responses which the individual may regress to[viii]. Reich gives an example of the character-analytic technique:
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… (Reich, ‘Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood’, p. 229)[ix].
Reich linked the regressive dying quality of the patient to the hatred that couldn’t be directed towards the father. He held that the economic point of view means that this kind of regression must be worked through first before the positive transference of the patient could be analyzed[x]. Libido must be moved from the pre-oedipal regressions to the genital position before the patient can work through it[xi].
In his next move into body-work, what needs to be added to this metapsychology is a genetic standpoint to explain the muscular armouring. Following the dual use of economic above it can be conceived of as the determination of the specific stages in which cognitive styles and the fused aggressive and libidinal impulses (i.e. drive to bite vs. to mutilate vs. to murder vs. to he held, etc.) and the defused forms of superego these two drives take. However, it can also be taken in a more general sense to talk about the act of repression itself. As opposed to a Cartesian view that places the mind over the body the route Reich took to orgonomy was based upon a dialectical materialism that recognized that the ego derives from an id. The id is first and foremost a bodymind which, when one considers all the vital processes occurring (from the hearbeat, secretion of chemicals, to synapses firing) ego consciousness plays a very small role in what goes on in the body from one moment to the next. The aggressive and libidinal drives, along with emotions, exist as bodily expressions of the id. This means that in order for repression to occur suppression must occur and the impulses have to be held back before they are ultimately banished from seeking expression. This creates muscular armour when the impulses are reactivated since it is the muscles that allowed repression to take place and so they are dynamically connected to the repressed impulses. Reich followed his intuitions that the far away eyes, tight jaws, stiff necks, raised shoulders, collapsed chests, upturned pelvises, and ungrounded legs of his patients were related to the genesis of the repression of certain impulses[xii].
In working with the muscular armour against these impulses/affects Reich and those who have followed his efforts or have come to these ideas without the metapsychology of psychoanalysis have found another way to access the unconscious. However, new forms of body-psychotherapy often leave the psychoanalytic foundation of Reich’s thought behind, ignore the unconscious impulses and their derivatives, and focus on PTSD[xiii]. The approaches also generally focus on the client’s own awareness of the muscular armour and their mindful relaxation of it as opposed to the Reichian technique of forcing the muscle to relax. Some of the most recent approaches which show these trends are the sensorimotor approach of Pat Ogden, the work at the Trauma Center done by Bessel Van Der Kolk, Somatic Experiencing by Peter Levine and various yoga and mindfulness programs arising throughout America and Europe. Despite the poverty of theoretical understanding and sometimes blatant mysticism in many of these new approaches the number of yoga, minfulness, ptsd programs, etc. are increasing in public facilities.
In the video and what it represents of the current approach of orgonomy there are two major things that fall short of the theory. Firstly, as mentioned above, the psychoanalytic stance of neutrality (not giving advice, using a couch, and working with derivatives of the unconscious in dreams or slips and not just in the transference) is not followed. The approach is a psychotherapeutic one and no longer psychoanalytic. Secondly, as opposed to interpretation of the form of resistance as per the example of dying or in terms of how ‘secret distrust’ will undermine the therapy itself, the therapist attacks the character resistance. Reich himself talks of destroying the armour and uses aggressive language but in his examples of therapy he doesn’t brow-beat the patient but empathically mentions how narcissistic or masochistic tendencies will undermine the therapy[xiv]. The subtlety of describing the form of the patient’s bearing or movements is not displayed in any of the therapies. Reich often mentions that it is precisely this factor of hitting upon the dead-like, lord-like, and even animal-like qualities that people display which bring forward the changes (‘Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood’, p. 223-5, Function of the Orgasm, p.320).
It appears that Reich’s character analytic technique and the analytic stance from which it was developed have fallen from use within the community that still preserves Reich’s body-based innovations. Additionally, it also seems like many analysts practice an interpretation or resistance analysis that is still content based and hasn’t made use of the form as Reich had advocated. Character analysis as such would seem to represent a peak that separates psychoanalysis and body-psychotherapy and which neither can claim as their own.
Bibliography:
Room For Happiness (2004) Dir: Dick Young, studio: American College of Orgonomy,
Adler, A. (1964). ‘The Accentuated Dogmatized Guiding Fiction’ in The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks
Forman, M. (1976). Narcissistic Personality Disorders and the Oedipal Fixations. Ann. Psychoanal., 4:65-92
Freud, S. (1914). On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX
Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX
Freud, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII
Reich, W. (1931). Character Formation and the Phobias of Childhood. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 12:219-230
Reich, W. (1933) Character Analysis, tr: Vincent R. Carfagno, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
Reich, W. (1942) Function of the Orgasm, tr: Theodore P. Wolf, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
Spotnitz, H., Meadow, P. (1976). Treatment of the Narcissistic Neuroses, NY, Man. Center For Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies.
Totton, N (2006) ‘Birth, Death, Orgasm, and Perversion: A Reichian View’ in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Psychoanalysis By Dany Nobus, Lisa Downing, Great Britain: Karnac
[i] The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (vol.3) shares Reich’s position regarding metapsychology and technique:
A dialectic existed in Freud's work between metapsychology and clinical practice: the identification of new clinical facts would bring about a corresponding evolution in metapsychology, and this in turn had an affect on theoretical-clinical description. Although the foundations of metapsychology are well established, there is no reason to believe that it is incapable of change and enrichment from advances in clinical knowledge, just as it may evolve through metapsychological research papers (http://www.enotes.com/metapsychology-reference/metapsychology-188005).
[ii] Just like the French settlers in new territory speak an antiquated version of French and didn’t move along with the changes in France so to does psychoanalysis show it’s history by the new territories it came too. Those of the Kleinian English school remained at the level of the original interpretation of the impulses. Hartmann, Lowenstein, Jacobson, etc. and the American ego-psychology school retained the resistance analysis synonymous with Anna Freud, Fenichel, and made important contributions of their own (as did Klein). Then Reich’s economic ideas came in to American humanistic psychotherapy in leaders of the movement like Frits Perls (Gestalt), Arthur Janov (Primal), and the many existential approaches that work with liberating the aliveness of an individual.
[iii] “The topographical point of view determines the principle of technique to the effect that the unconscious has to be made conscious. The dynamic point of view dictates that this making conscious of the unconscious must not proceed directly but by way of resistance analysis” (Reich, Character Analysis, p.42).
[iv] “the ego deals with the first object-cathexes of the id (and certainly with later ones too) by taking over the libido from them into itself and binding it to the alteration of the ego produced by means of identification. The transformation [of erotic libido] into ego-libido of course involves an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization” (Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p.45-6).
[v] The processes involved in the formation of a neurotic phobia, which is nothing else than an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct, present us with a model of the manner of origin of this supposititious ‘instinct towards perfection’—an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed to every human being. The dynamic conditions for its development are, indeed, universally present; but it is only in rare cases that the economic situation appears to favour the production of the phenomenon (Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.42)
This also leads us to the work of Shapiro in Neurotic Styles who looks at how different defences such as paranoia, hysteria, etc. go hand in hand with the economically based cognitive style of an individual.
[vi] In this use of economic Reich is effectively adding another dimension to Alfred Adler’s notion of superiority by conceptualizing love and disappointments in love to be another factor leading to mental illness. Adler effectively creates an economic view of narcissism in an individual in which there is a contact point with reality to the extent that an individual seeks to realize his superiority in rational achievement through work and community. When an individual begins to remove himself from work and relationships due to the pride of wanting to be seen as superior (when others don’t recognize him as such) the economy shifts to ‘guiding fictions’ or illusions about one’s superiority to others on a spectrum to the delusions of grandeur in the psychotic (Adler, ‘The Accentuated Dogmatized Guiding Fiction’). In footnote xiv the Adlerian economics of narcissism are clearly visible in Reich’s description of addressing the secret resistances.
[vii] The unconscious is activated in various aggressive (biting, mutilation, murder, etc.) or libidinal drives (desire to be touched, for vicarious pleasure, for sex, etc.). These impulses have a dynamic relation with various manifestations of the superego. Freud writes:
the super-ego, originating as it does from the id, cannot dissociate itself from the regression and defusion of instinct which have taken place there. We cannot be surprised if it becomes harsher, unkinder and more tormenting than where development has been normal (Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety’, p. 115-6).
…that the prevention of an erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego (Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, p.138).
The libidinal impulses are also paired with superego reactions in which defusion leads to reactions of abandonment, self-pity, dissociation, (etc.). Where guilt or self-pity are obviously very complicated superego reactions Freud conceived of earlier forms of the superego as being things like the oral fear of being eaten by the totem animal (Freud, ‘Economic Problem of Masochism’, p. 164-5). Melanie Klein’s work has been to outline these earlier forms but Reich’s work seems to be about registering their phenomenology and interpreting their form.
[viii] “[W]e find two layers of repressions in the compulsive character: the outer layer consists of sadistic and anal impulses, while the deeper layer is made up of phallic impulses. This corresponds to the inversion which takes place in the regression process: those impulses which receive a new cathexis lie closest to the surface; whereas object-libidinal genital strivings are deeply repressed, ‘covered over’ by layers of pregenital positions (Reich, Character Analysis, p. 216).
[ix] As per footnote vii, I believe this regression to a feeling of deadness should be taken as a primitive superego reaction. This explains the dynamic linking of the ‘contactlessness’ of the character to the aggressive or libidinal impulse as seen in Reich’s work:
It is seen again and again in analysis that the dynamic value of the same element of repressed material varies depending on the degree to which the ego defences have been loosened. If… the affects pertaining to the defensive formation of the character are liberated first, then a new cathexis of the infantile instinctual expression takes place automatically. (Reich, Character Analysis, p. 81-2).
This kind of regression seems common with narcissistic disorders, often paired with hypochondria, and the phenomenology seems well established:
The other major diagnostic signs and findings involve the phenomenology of the narcissistic regression. The fear of temporary fragmentation, or the temporary fragmentation itself, results from a temporary decathexis of the self or self-objects. These structural regressions of the self and the attempts to adapt to them have certain characteristic ways of being described by the patient or observed by us. One way the patients manifest this is to worry about the mind and/or body and its functioning. They report vague, or sometimes insistent, preoccupations with fears of cancer, dying, or heart attacks. A related complaint is feeling like a “mummy” or “ghost,” or the sensation of having a plastic shield all around the body. In other words, the patient doesn't feel or experience himself as being in touch with others, the world, or himself. We know that these are complaints of an underlying feeling of deadness, a dreaded feeling that is metapsychologically a manifestation of decathexis of the self and/or a temporary fragmentation of the archaic self…When the dominant experience is that of “mummy” or “ghost,” the mood the patient lives out is one of low energy, remoteness, distance, depression, and isolation. His voice and presence have a kind of lifelessness which the patient will describe as a state of being “turned off.” (Forman, ‘Narcissistic Personality Disorders and the Oedipal Fixations’, p.71)
[x] I concentrated my presentation on the problem whether, in the presence of a latent negative attitude, the analyst should interpret the patients incestuous desires or whether it would be better to wait until the patient’s distrust had been eliminated. Freud interrupted me. ‘Why don’t you want to interpret the material in the sequence in which it appears? Of course, it is necessary to analyze and interpret the incest dreams as soon as they appear!... The whole things was foreign to Freud. He did not understand why the analyst should not interpret the material in the sequence in which it appeared… (Reich, Function of the Orgasm, p.167-8).
[xi] Nick Totton, a ‘neo-Reichian’, persuasively argues that Reich’s notion of genitality is not related to the Oedipus complex but actually to the castration complex and that orgastic potency is in fact linked to perversion. See ‘Birth, Death, Orgasm, and Perversion: A Reichian View’ in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Psychoanalysis. Totton isn’t saying that only perverts have orgastic potency but that its perverse impulses in narcissistic, neurotic, and perverse structures that produce the orgasm discharge that Reich originally though of as genitality.
[xii] In general both the aggressive and libidinous impulses and the part they play in narcissistic (self-love) and masochistic (other-love) economies are gauged together in one large economy in the body-psychotherapist’s examination of the vitality and health of the body.
[xiii] PTSD in a post-latency manifestation is a re-living of a traumatic experience while pre-latency it is seen in the repetition-compulsion and may be re-enacted. This difference is noted in a war neurosis in which dreams or thoughts lead to the trauma re-playing in one’s mind where Freud relates the earlier repetition compulsions to being paired with impulses on the individuals part: “cases of simultaneous object-cathexis and identification— cases, that is in which the alteration in character occurs before the object has been given up. In such cases the alteration in character has been able to survive the object-relation and in a certain sense to conserve it” (Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 29-30). For example, the repetition to have an “injured third party” in romantic relationships or to groom a protégé who ends up leaving you are examples of repetitions that are traumatic and repeated.
[xiv] Reich doesn’t interpret to the patient that she is narcissistic and superior but rather brings her attention to how her pride would cause her to leave the therapy:
To begin with, I explained that her strong inhibition about discussing these things was connected with her pride, i.e. she was too proud to admit such emotional stirrings. She immediately agreed, adding that her whole nature rebelled against such admissions. Asked whether she had ever experienced love or desire spontaneously, she answered that this had never been the case. The men had always desired her; she had merely acquiesced to their love. I explained the narcissistic character of this attitude, and she understood it very well. I further made it clear that there could be no question of a genuine love striving; rather she had been irritated to see a man [the analyst] sitting there completely unmoved by her charms and found the situation unbearable. The fantasy had been an expression of the desire to make the analyst fall in love with her. That this had been the case was confirmed by the recollection that, in the fantasy, the conquest of the analyst had played the major role and had afforded the actual source of pleasure. Now I could draw her attention to the danger concealed in this attitude, namely that, as time went on, she would not be able to tolerate the rejection of her desires and would eventually lose interest in the analysis. She herself was already aware of this possibility. (Reich, Character Analysis, p.133-4).
Hyman Spotnitz the creator of modern psychoanalysis could be seen as beginning the metapsychological structural point of view to therapy. He notes that the schizophrenic’s ego doesn’t have either the cognitive capacities of the neurotic because of regressions, is more sensitive to injuries and disappointments, and has a primary narcissistic problem with the ‘otherness’ of the analyst. He writes:
‘Do we want a narcissistic transference to develop?’ We do because in a negative, regressed state, the patient may experience the analyst as being like him or part of him. Or the analyst may not exist for him. The syntonic feeling of oneness is a curative one, while the feeling of aloneness, the withdrawn state, is merely protective. Because traces of narcissism remain in everyone, we seek, when beginning treatment, to create an environment that will facilitate a narcissistic transference so that, first we can work through the patient’s narcissistic aggression. (Spotnitz, Treatment of the Narcissistic Neuroses, p. 58).
He advocates joining the defences of the patient until they have their own insight into them. While this is no doubt is necessary with psychotic and severely regressed patients it doesn’t do anything to assuage the pride of the patient in the example above. Joining her narcissism about her beauty or interpreting it both fail to bring it to bear on its relation to the analyst (as Reich masterfully did). A full structural point of view applied to therapy would have different techniques with the different psychotic, perverse (impulsive), and neurotic (compulsive) structures.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Reich's sociology III
Although the father being the symbolic head of the family (as opposed to the maternal uncle) is the precondition of the castration complex and very well may have occurred in isolated incidences when the uncle was the symbolic head it is key not to look for absolutes. In other words, it is never all children experience the castration complex in patriarchy and previously none did. It is always a matter of emphasis.
This is where academic thinking stops because it can only view things in this either/or way.
To enter into patriarchy then, we have the men who have experienced, and received a fixation at, the castration complex taking positions of power and introducing rituals which will indoctrinate others into their way of thinking. This is where sex enters back into the picture and the elite either strike fear into the heart of youths in sexual matters or the frustrations experienced in abstinence are used for identifications with the aggressor:
Mehinaku boys are secluded for two to three years to achieve their full growth as adults. Enforcing the taboos associated with seclusion is the master of the medicines, an invisible being that lives alongside the boy in seclusion. What really stirs up the medicine spirit’s wrath is sexual relations. [They are told that a] boy who slips out at night to have sexual relations with a girl will group up ridiculously stunted. 145AP
The solidarity of the boys in seclusion is further reinforced by their separation from women… the boys’ comradery is also buttressed by aggression towards women. As soon as the most stringent phrases of fasting associated with the ritual are over, the boys set to work making large numbers of wax-tipped arrows. When the arrows are ready, one of the boys keeps watch from a small slit window in the wall of the house. ‘Now!’ he calls, and suddenly a volley of arrows descends upon a group of women unlucky enough to be caught in the plaza. Women are fair game during the piercing seclusion and shooting at them is the boy’s principle sport 187 AP
This is where academic thinking stops because it can only view things in this either/or way.
To enter into patriarchy then, we have the men who have experienced, and received a fixation at, the castration complex taking positions of power and introducing rituals which will indoctrinate others into their way of thinking. This is where sex enters back into the picture and the elite either strike fear into the heart of youths in sexual matters or the frustrations experienced in abstinence are used for identifications with the aggressor:
Mehinaku boys are secluded for two to three years to achieve their full growth as adults. Enforcing the taboos associated with seclusion is the master of the medicines, an invisible being that lives alongside the boy in seclusion. What really stirs up the medicine spirit’s wrath is sexual relations. [They are told that a] boy who slips out at night to have sexual relations with a girl will group up ridiculously stunted. 145AP
The solidarity of the boys in seclusion is further reinforced by their separation from women… the boys’ comradery is also buttressed by aggression towards women. As soon as the most stringent phrases of fasting associated with the ritual are over, the boys set to work making large numbers of wax-tipped arrows. When the arrows are ready, one of the boys keeps watch from a small slit window in the wall of the house. ‘Now!’ he calls, and suddenly a volley of arrows descends upon a group of women unlucky enough to be caught in the plaza. Women are fair game during the piercing seclusion and shooting at them is the boy’s principle sport 187 AP
Friday, January 6, 2012
Reich's sociology II
Again, what is at stake in Reich's claim that the Oedipus complex isn't universal is the difference between the Trobriand Islanders and other primitive groups which don't display the same neurotic behaviour found in patriarchal organizations:
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”. 127-8
Another patriarchal tribe is described in Thomas Gregor’s Anxious pleasures:
The Mehinaku, like other tribes of the area, appear to be subject to a host of illnesses of apparently hysterical origin 148 AP
A man’s sexual failures are common knowledge, and his reputation as a lover rides precariously on the shifting currents of community gossip…. Evidence for the seriousness of impotence to men is the substantial effort they have invested in trying to understand its causes and find a cure… there are a number of effective cures known to all men 137-9 AP
Sexual relations are dangerous, according to the men, because women’s genitals are frightening. When pressed for an explanation of this fear, the men complain women’s vaginas are ‘dark’ in colour, foul in smell, and otherwise ‘revolting’... above all else, women’s genitals are dangerous because they are associated with menstrual blood. 140-1 AP
According to the villagers, female genitals are symbols of wounds. A man unfortunate enough to dream of the genitalia would do well to leave his machete and ax at home in the morning since he risks a serious injury… the interpretations are surprisingly psychoanalytic 153 AP
The best wrestlers are said to have sexual relations very infrequently and never before intertribal bouts. 145P
The Mehinaku theory of conception is male centered. Children are accumulations of semen and may even be referred to by their fathers as ‘my former semen’ 167 “The baby is accumulated semen resulting from numerous acts of intercourse…the infant is formed through repeated acts of intercourse that accumulates enough semen to form the baby” 88 AP
All Mehinku women live with the threat of rape… despite the women’s anxiety, they accept the system and even enforce it… the men know they can can count on their wives and daughters’ support when it is time to rape someone else’s wife or daughter…. It is rare to hear the men use the first-person pronoun or verb form in describing rape, however hypothetical. Moreover, the men are anxious to emphasize that the matter is dictated by custom rather than personal anger or desire… and also in typical fashion, an informant points out that if it were done differently, the men would suffer a worse fate than the women [“all the men would die”]… rape is not primarily an expression of personal sexual or aggressive needs, but a group response to an open challenge to the patriarchal system 103-4 AP
After the bullroarers are carved and painted, they are attached to twenty foot cords hafted to ten-foot poles. The women are warned to get inside their houses… the sound of 15 or more large bullroarers whirling simultaneously on the village plaza can only be compared to that of an airplane revving its engines in one’s living room. Next to a clap of thunder, it is the loudest sound the villagers will hear. The women are told they are listening to the voice of the spirit. Most of them, however are only modestly impressed… A woman who [leaves the house and sees the bullroarers] suffers an uncertain supernatural penalty: all her hair may fall out. But few women take this threat seriously… far from being frightened, [most] women regard the performance with the attitude of appreciative spectators… ironically the men are fully aware that the women are party to the secret of the bullroarers… as an object of intimidation [the bullroarers] do not reach the status of Kauka’s flutes [kept in the men’s house “Women curious enough or bold enough to watch the building of the men’s house would be subject to gang rape” 57 M] but it would be an error to underestimate its symbolic significance. The women watch the show, but they do so from the poorest seats in the house. It is the men who bully them off the plaza-stage and shout abuse when they are not quick enough about it. 107-8 AP
From an early age, a girl knows that she is “just a girl” and in many respects inferior to boys. As she matures, she learns that the vagina is “smelly” and “disgusting”. She must take care that others do not see it when she sits or walks. With her first menses, she discovers that she is a danger to others. She can be held responsible for contaminating food, defiling sacred rituals, and making men sick. When she enters the network of sexual affairs, she finds that she must comport herself carefully. A casual boyfriend may seize on any unusual or uninhibited conduct in sexual relations and joke about it among his friends. One of the reasons that a woman expects gifts of her lovers is that a token of commitment is insurance that she will not be denigrated in village gossip… Significantly there is no word in the Mehinaku language for a woman’s sexual climax 33-4 AP
Women, a boy comes to realize, are physically weak, mentally deficient, morally inferior, and dangerous. They cannot recall the basic myths (“the words will not stay in their stomachs”), they are frightened to walk through the forest alone, and they are given to invidious and incessant gossip… A man’s place is with other men in the men’s house. A man who spends too much time at home with the women is like a woman himself, and that is what he may be called by jeering village gossips. 177 AP
Kalu, one of the more assertive women, remarks, “I could not go fishing. The line would cut my hands. I am afraid of big animals. We women have no strength… the men are worthy of respect” 24 AP
The difference between the matriarchal tribes and the patriarchal is that previously the woman’s brother, the uncle, was the symbolic head of the family while in patriarchy the husband is the head of the family. By having the father be the head of the family this means that the mother’s dissatisfaction with him and the denigration of his name leads to the child forming the castration complex:
the mother of the future pervert herself denies sexual reality and denigrates the father's phallic function. It is possible that she gives the child in addition the feeling that he or she is a phallic substitute. In the histories of these patients we frequently find that another model of virility was held up to the child, sometimes the mother's own father, or brother, sometimes a religious figure, or God is the one phallic object of value (Primal Scene and Sexual Perversion, p.381).
"You are mother's real little man" in no way evoked in the small boy a comparison with his own father. The latter, denigrated in the eyes of the mother, had become a negative value, an absence, the very image of castration. In all events it was not towards this father that K. could turn to find the phallic image with which he could identify. Only through his mother could he hope, eventually, to have acess to it. Thus his masculine identifications were at this point split in two. Although certain of his hobbies were an attempt on K.'s part to identify with the idealized grandfather, in his creative and professional life he seemed constrained to identify with the castrated father at the same time trying to cloak the ensuing depression in the fiction of playing an eternal game. In his erotic life, on the other hand, he identified with the masculine image offered by the mother—the phallic grandfather with a whip in his hand—but on a deeper level this necessitated an identification with his mother, who alone had the right to the paternal phallus (The Anonymous Spectator, p. 296-7)
The castration complex has both a sexual and social sense which McDougall gives two examples of:
Supported in his own specific sexual identity he often reserves scorn for the 'straight' sexes, the people who make love in the old-fashioned way—the way of the despised and denigrated father. Thus paradoxically the ordinary heterosexual is thought of as deprived (unconsciously as castrated because the victim of paternal and social pressure), and is a representative of the castrated paternal imago. The son has discovered, as one analysand put it, 'a more spicy dish'. (This patient whose problems were also reflected in his alcoholism, paid prostitutes to urinate on him. He felt that others were envious of his special recipe.) This feeling of being 'in the know', chosen over the heads of ordinary mortals to receive the secret of the gods, marks the illusion of the incestuous child who believed himself to be the apple of his mother's eye—to the detriment of the scorned father who is attributed the child's place as the excluded one, the castrate. But the incestuous child is able to continue his illusion of being mother's sole object of desire on condition that he agrees only to play at sexuality. (Primal Scene and Sexual Perversion, p. 375).
"to be like the others" still signified castration, "to be accepted by the others" was equivalent to losing his identity. He would then be forced to go over to the other side, the side of the brothers—and the fathers. To make such a move would mean the risk of losing all hope of possessing the mother's phallic secret and thus one day possessing the means of totally satisfying her… his feeling of identity would be reduced to nothing. For K. could only find his identity in the eyes of his mother. Only through her could he hope to acquire his manhood. His wish for his father's love and for the right to identify with him and thereby introject an authentic paternal-phallic image was felt to be forbidden by his mother, and had therefore to remain unconscious. His mother remained sole guardian of his narcissistic integrity (McDougall, Anonymous Spectator, p. 298).
So the issue at stake is that the castration complex is central in neurosis and not the oedipal complex. However, both Reich and Freud seemed to confuse the Oedipus complex with the castration complex at times.
"Castration" into language would have to occur before the phallic mother could potentially refer the child to another, absent 'phallic object'. This means that the earlier (poly-)phallic stage in which the child has an ideal of excellence or gift-giving would itself be where the subject is born into language qua sign. (I'll have to do another post in the future on Wittgenstein and Peirce).
update- to get rid of confusion I'm no longer referring to these stages as related to complexes (polyphallic, castration, oedipus, father).
To show the parallel developmental structure I'm referring to the oral, anal, phallic, etc. as for example
proto-phallic (poly-phallic), deutero-phallic (phallic-narcissistic), phallic-narcissistic (castration complex), phallic-Oedipal (Oedipal complex), trito-phallic (genital stage)
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”. 127-8
Another patriarchal tribe is described in Thomas Gregor’s Anxious pleasures:
The Mehinaku, like other tribes of the area, appear to be subject to a host of illnesses of apparently hysterical origin 148 AP
A man’s sexual failures are common knowledge, and his reputation as a lover rides precariously on the shifting currents of community gossip…. Evidence for the seriousness of impotence to men is the substantial effort they have invested in trying to understand its causes and find a cure… there are a number of effective cures known to all men 137-9 AP
Sexual relations are dangerous, according to the men, because women’s genitals are frightening. When pressed for an explanation of this fear, the men complain women’s vaginas are ‘dark’ in colour, foul in smell, and otherwise ‘revolting’... above all else, women’s genitals are dangerous because they are associated with menstrual blood. 140-1 AP
According to the villagers, female genitals are symbols of wounds. A man unfortunate enough to dream of the genitalia would do well to leave his machete and ax at home in the morning since he risks a serious injury… the interpretations are surprisingly psychoanalytic 153 AP
The best wrestlers are said to have sexual relations very infrequently and never before intertribal bouts. 145P
The Mehinaku theory of conception is male centered. Children are accumulations of semen and may even be referred to by their fathers as ‘my former semen’ 167 “The baby is accumulated semen resulting from numerous acts of intercourse…the infant is formed through repeated acts of intercourse that accumulates enough semen to form the baby” 88 AP
All Mehinku women live with the threat of rape… despite the women’s anxiety, they accept the system and even enforce it… the men know they can can count on their wives and daughters’ support when it is time to rape someone else’s wife or daughter…. It is rare to hear the men use the first-person pronoun or verb form in describing rape, however hypothetical. Moreover, the men are anxious to emphasize that the matter is dictated by custom rather than personal anger or desire… and also in typical fashion, an informant points out that if it were done differently, the men would suffer a worse fate than the women [“all the men would die”]… rape is not primarily an expression of personal sexual or aggressive needs, but a group response to an open challenge to the patriarchal system 103-4 AP
After the bullroarers are carved and painted, they are attached to twenty foot cords hafted to ten-foot poles. The women are warned to get inside their houses… the sound of 15 or more large bullroarers whirling simultaneously on the village plaza can only be compared to that of an airplane revving its engines in one’s living room. Next to a clap of thunder, it is the loudest sound the villagers will hear. The women are told they are listening to the voice of the spirit. Most of them, however are only modestly impressed… A woman who [leaves the house and sees the bullroarers] suffers an uncertain supernatural penalty: all her hair may fall out. But few women take this threat seriously… far from being frightened, [most] women regard the performance with the attitude of appreciative spectators… ironically the men are fully aware that the women are party to the secret of the bullroarers… as an object of intimidation [the bullroarers] do not reach the status of Kauka’s flutes [kept in the men’s house “Women curious enough or bold enough to watch the building of the men’s house would be subject to gang rape” 57 M] but it would be an error to underestimate its symbolic significance. The women watch the show, but they do so from the poorest seats in the house. It is the men who bully them off the plaza-stage and shout abuse when they are not quick enough about it. 107-8 AP
From an early age, a girl knows that she is “just a girl” and in many respects inferior to boys. As she matures, she learns that the vagina is “smelly” and “disgusting”. She must take care that others do not see it when she sits or walks. With her first menses, she discovers that she is a danger to others. She can be held responsible for contaminating food, defiling sacred rituals, and making men sick. When she enters the network of sexual affairs, she finds that she must comport herself carefully. A casual boyfriend may seize on any unusual or uninhibited conduct in sexual relations and joke about it among his friends. One of the reasons that a woman expects gifts of her lovers is that a token of commitment is insurance that she will not be denigrated in village gossip… Significantly there is no word in the Mehinaku language for a woman’s sexual climax 33-4 AP
Women, a boy comes to realize, are physically weak, mentally deficient, morally inferior, and dangerous. They cannot recall the basic myths (“the words will not stay in their stomachs”), they are frightened to walk through the forest alone, and they are given to invidious and incessant gossip… A man’s place is with other men in the men’s house. A man who spends too much time at home with the women is like a woman himself, and that is what he may be called by jeering village gossips. 177 AP
Kalu, one of the more assertive women, remarks, “I could not go fishing. The line would cut my hands. I am afraid of big animals. We women have no strength… the men are worthy of respect” 24 AP
The difference between the matriarchal tribes and the patriarchal is that previously the woman’s brother, the uncle, was the symbolic head of the family while in patriarchy the husband is the head of the family. By having the father be the head of the family this means that the mother’s dissatisfaction with him and the denigration of his name leads to the child forming the castration complex:
the mother of the future pervert herself denies sexual reality and denigrates the father's phallic function. It is possible that she gives the child in addition the feeling that he or she is a phallic substitute. In the histories of these patients we frequently find that another model of virility was held up to the child, sometimes the mother's own father, or brother, sometimes a religious figure, or God is the one phallic object of value (Primal Scene and Sexual Perversion, p.381).
"You are mother's real little man" in no way evoked in the small boy a comparison with his own father. The latter, denigrated in the eyes of the mother, had become a negative value, an absence, the very image of castration. In all events it was not towards this father that K. could turn to find the phallic image with which he could identify. Only through his mother could he hope, eventually, to have acess to it. Thus his masculine identifications were at this point split in two. Although certain of his hobbies were an attempt on K.'s part to identify with the idealized grandfather, in his creative and professional life he seemed constrained to identify with the castrated father at the same time trying to cloak the ensuing depression in the fiction of playing an eternal game. In his erotic life, on the other hand, he identified with the masculine image offered by the mother—the phallic grandfather with a whip in his hand—but on a deeper level this necessitated an identification with his mother, who alone had the right to the paternal phallus (The Anonymous Spectator, p. 296-7)
The castration complex has both a sexual and social sense which McDougall gives two examples of:
Supported in his own specific sexual identity he often reserves scorn for the 'straight' sexes, the people who make love in the old-fashioned way—the way of the despised and denigrated father. Thus paradoxically the ordinary heterosexual is thought of as deprived (unconsciously as castrated because the victim of paternal and social pressure), and is a representative of the castrated paternal imago. The son has discovered, as one analysand put it, 'a more spicy dish'. (This patient whose problems were also reflected in his alcoholism, paid prostitutes to urinate on him. He felt that others were envious of his special recipe.) This feeling of being 'in the know', chosen over the heads of ordinary mortals to receive the secret of the gods, marks the illusion of the incestuous child who believed himself to be the apple of his mother's eye—to the detriment of the scorned father who is attributed the child's place as the excluded one, the castrate. But the incestuous child is able to continue his illusion of being mother's sole object of desire on condition that he agrees only to play at sexuality. (Primal Scene and Sexual Perversion, p. 375).
"to be like the others" still signified castration, "to be accepted by the others" was equivalent to losing his identity. He would then be forced to go over to the other side, the side of the brothers—and the fathers. To make such a move would mean the risk of losing all hope of possessing the mother's phallic secret and thus one day possessing the means of totally satisfying her… his feeling of identity would be reduced to nothing. For K. could only find his identity in the eyes of his mother. Only through her could he hope to acquire his manhood. His wish for his father's love and for the right to identify with him and thereby introject an authentic paternal-phallic image was felt to be forbidden by his mother, and had therefore to remain unconscious. His mother remained sole guardian of his narcissistic integrity (McDougall, Anonymous Spectator, p. 298).
So the issue at stake is that the castration complex is central in neurosis and not the oedipal complex. However, both Reich and Freud seemed to confuse the Oedipus complex with the castration complex at times.
"Castration" into language would have to occur before the phallic mother could potentially refer the child to another, absent 'phallic object'. This means that the earlier (poly-)phallic stage in which the child has an ideal of excellence or gift-giving would itself be where the subject is born into language qua sign. (I'll have to do another post in the future on Wittgenstein and Peirce).
update- to get rid of confusion I'm no longer referring to these stages as related to complexes (polyphallic, castration, oedipus, father).
To show the parallel developmental structure I'm referring to the oral, anal, phallic, etc. as for example
proto-phallic (poly-phallic), deutero-phallic (phallic-narcissistic), phallic-narcissistic (castration complex), phallic-Oedipal (Oedipal complex), trito-phallic (genital stage)
Thursday, January 5, 2012
psychoanaltyic basics- perversion II
Taking the 4 subject positions I’d like to put forth the findings of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's work on perversions and see if I can expand it:
As I have had occasion to show in my essay on the ego ideal (1973) as well as in other studies, the denial of differences between the sexes is intrinsically linked to the difference between generations. The little boy feels, "If my mother does not have a vagina to be filled, I, the little prepubescent boy with my little penis and my pregenital sexuality, have no need to identify with my father who does not possess anything more than I to satisfy my mother. I will be an adequate sexual partner for my mother as I am. 517
He can thus manage to avoid the Oedipus complex and that which is correlated with it, the threat of castration: his father is not his rival and he does not have to take away his object—the mother—whom he thinks he already possesses and who enthrones him as a privileged partner. He does not try to capture or introject the penis of the father who, therefore, will not retaliate. Besides—and this is essential in my opinion — he tries to pass the anal penis, the precursor of the genital penis, as equal or superior to the paternal penis whose genital and procreative functions are denigrated or denied. 518
This takes us back to fetishism, and I would like to put forth, provisionally, the following hypothesis: the fetish represents the anal phallus insofar as it comes to occupy the place of the genital penis and excludes it from the sexual scene and from the psyche in general. It is therefore not only the mother's missing phallus. The excitation the fetishist derives from the fetish (or, rather, the excitation it permits) is necessary to maintain the lure on which his psychosexuality is built. The fact that its wearer is a man, a woman, or the subject himself, or that it is reduced to an inanimate object—a garment, shoes, underwear, or hair—separated from any real support, becomes secondary (although not indifferent, of course) to the need for the fetish to exist somewhere in a manner which is unfailing and perfectly exciting. 519
I would like to put forth the hypothesis that the concept of castration itself should be enlarged. I have already stressed on several occasions that Freud's theory of sexual phallic monism, inferring that the oedipal boy has no desire to penetrate his mother, lacking at all levels the knowledge of the existence of the vagina, deprives the oedipal situation of most of its dramatic impact. The father does nothing to the mother that the little boy could not do, since the latter only wishes to have "vague and unprecise contacts" with her, where "his penis is obscurely involved," and ignores that the mother could be gratified in any other way, in particular through coitus. The theory of sexual phallic monism goes along perfectly with the defenses of the pervert, and Freud's theory of fetishism proceeds directly from it. In reality, women, including mother, are not castrated; mother actually possesses a vagina that the little boy cannot fill and fulfill. The denial does not apply to the "castration" of the mother, but to her vagina which is the place of the erotic exchanges between the parents and inevitably leads back to the existence of its complement, the penis of the father.
The patient who adopts the theory of phallic sexual monism spares himself fears of castration. He has nothing to envy as far as his father is concerned; his father's penis has no meaning, he does not wish to take it away from him, and he does not want to dislodge it from the vagina or womb of the mother. For him the "big" and fertile penis of the father is a totally useless organ. The desire to acquire the virile attributes of the father is intrinsically linked to the transmission of the name and the inheritance which assigns to the subject his place within a lineage (the impostor, like the pervert, refuses the filiation). The lack of interest in obtaining the father's penis protects the patient from retaliation. In addition, it allows him to bypass tremendous suffering due to his feeling of inadequacy, which Freud (1920) has magnificently described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and also in "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" (1924). Therefore, I propose that we join to and make an intrinsic part of the castration complex the painful feeling of inadequacy of the pregenital child unable to satisfy his mother sexually and to give her a child. (Loss of Reality in Perversion, p.521-2
Chasseguet-Smirgel’s central point again is that:
The sexual pervert and related personality structures will always, in one way or another, search to realize the fantasy that underlies the theory of phallic monism in infantile sexuality: that is to say, the twofold negation of the difference between the sexes and the generations (Perversion, Idealization and Sublimation, p.354).
She does a beautiful investigation of the writings of De Sade and others to establish this point however, her imagination in applying this principle seems restricted. I’d like to combine her principle with the 4 positions I’ve outlined previously:
Narcissism:
Subject- will to conquer Object- ‘be conquered’ and be the cause of desire
-with the 3rd term of ‘blame’ or revenge
Masochism:
Subject- merge in love Object- ‘be loved’ and be the cause of delight
-with the 3rd term of ‘self-effacement’ or being nice
The first position that leaps to mind and follows her principle is the principle of religious mysticism that claims that everyone has a soul whether man or woman, child or adult and that all souls are worth the same regardless of how much one develops one’s talents or realizes power in the world. This position of religious mysticism would be the masochistic position concerning ‘love’ for everyone and ‘being nice’ taken to the perverse position of turning the cheek and disavowing all aggression. Christ calls us all to be like children.
The object masochistic position of ‘being loved’ wants to be the cause of delight and to be loved by an adult subject but there seems to be a reversal involved in seeking to gain approval from children rather than adults when we look at clowns. Furthermore, in The Sorceress and the Hysteric Katherine 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. In the irreverent and absurd universe that is created the differences between the sexes are also covered up as stereotypes are reversed for comedic effects.
Lastly, in the masochistic position the 3rd term of ‘being nice’ qua not being vulgar can be reversed so that the pervert would conceivably ‘get off’ on being vulgar and saying things which aren’t nice (both as vulgar and irreverent) in order to cause other people to be uncomfortable.
With the subject narcissist the clearest example of perversion comes from denying one’s place as ‘heir to the throne,’ and becoming a leader by spending it in dissolution with degenerates. This is shown in Prince Hal in Henry the Fifth and by the Russian concept of the Superfluous Man who is a man of great abilities but chooses not to realize them in any way. It’s a mirror in some ways to Christ keeping company with prostitutes and sinners but instead it’s a would be Caesar who is doing the same. One is neither an adult nor child and neither does the opposite sex inspire any direction in life in this type. In other words, nihilism denies the difference between the sexes and the generations by saying there is no meaning: whether in comparison between man and woman or between adult and child. Life is meaningless for all.
With the object narcissist I believe we have the position of penis envy par excellance in the radical feminist. The radical feminist denies the difference between the narcissistic and masochistic positions and denies the difference between the generations by having a radical political agenda which doesn't seek to speak to the generational differences and becomes more of an aesthetic object for English students than an actual political force.
The 3rd term of blame or revenge I believe is also most clearly negated in the act of renouncing pleasure for oneself and becoming an ascetic. This form of morality involves a person delighting in the power they have over themselves rather than over others and comprises an ever narrowing scope of pleasure as more and more has to be renounced to the superego. The blame is taken from the other and put into the narcissist’s own body which makes the desires of the flesh bad with the need for them to be controlled.
I’ve detailed these examples of perversion of the social rather than the sexual type because the sexual are much more widely known. This list isn’t supposed to be exhaustive but rather attempts to give examples in several different areas.
As I have had occasion to show in my essay on the ego ideal (1973) as well as in other studies, the denial of differences between the sexes is intrinsically linked to the difference between generations. The little boy feels, "If my mother does not have a vagina to be filled, I, the little prepubescent boy with my little penis and my pregenital sexuality, have no need to identify with my father who does not possess anything more than I to satisfy my mother. I will be an adequate sexual partner for my mother as I am. 517
He can thus manage to avoid the Oedipus complex and that which is correlated with it, the threat of castration: his father is not his rival and he does not have to take away his object—the mother—whom he thinks he already possesses and who enthrones him as a privileged partner. He does not try to capture or introject the penis of the father who, therefore, will not retaliate. Besides—and this is essential in my opinion — he tries to pass the anal penis, the precursor of the genital penis, as equal or superior to the paternal penis whose genital and procreative functions are denigrated or denied. 518
This takes us back to fetishism, and I would like to put forth, provisionally, the following hypothesis: the fetish represents the anal phallus insofar as it comes to occupy the place of the genital penis and excludes it from the sexual scene and from the psyche in general. It is therefore not only the mother's missing phallus. The excitation the fetishist derives from the fetish (or, rather, the excitation it permits) is necessary to maintain the lure on which his psychosexuality is built. The fact that its wearer is a man, a woman, or the subject himself, or that it is reduced to an inanimate object—a garment, shoes, underwear, or hair—separated from any real support, becomes secondary (although not indifferent, of course) to the need for the fetish to exist somewhere in a manner which is unfailing and perfectly exciting. 519
I would like to put forth the hypothesis that the concept of castration itself should be enlarged. I have already stressed on several occasions that Freud's theory of sexual phallic monism, inferring that the oedipal boy has no desire to penetrate his mother, lacking at all levels the knowledge of the existence of the vagina, deprives the oedipal situation of most of its dramatic impact. The father does nothing to the mother that the little boy could not do, since the latter only wishes to have "vague and unprecise contacts" with her, where "his penis is obscurely involved," and ignores that the mother could be gratified in any other way, in particular through coitus. The theory of sexual phallic monism goes along perfectly with the defenses of the pervert, and Freud's theory of fetishism proceeds directly from it. In reality, women, including mother, are not castrated; mother actually possesses a vagina that the little boy cannot fill and fulfill. The denial does not apply to the "castration" of the mother, but to her vagina which is the place of the erotic exchanges between the parents and inevitably leads back to the existence of its complement, the penis of the father.
The patient who adopts the theory of phallic sexual monism spares himself fears of castration. He has nothing to envy as far as his father is concerned; his father's penis has no meaning, he does not wish to take it away from him, and he does not want to dislodge it from the vagina or womb of the mother. For him the "big" and fertile penis of the father is a totally useless organ. The desire to acquire the virile attributes of the father is intrinsically linked to the transmission of the name and the inheritance which assigns to the subject his place within a lineage (the impostor, like the pervert, refuses the filiation). The lack of interest in obtaining the father's penis protects the patient from retaliation. In addition, it allows him to bypass tremendous suffering due to his feeling of inadequacy, which Freud (1920) has magnificently described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and also in "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" (1924). Therefore, I propose that we join to and make an intrinsic part of the castration complex the painful feeling of inadequacy of the pregenital child unable to satisfy his mother sexually and to give her a child. (Loss of Reality in Perversion, p.521-2
Chasseguet-Smirgel’s central point again is that:
The sexual pervert and related personality structures will always, in one way or another, search to realize the fantasy that underlies the theory of phallic monism in infantile sexuality: that is to say, the twofold negation of the difference between the sexes and the generations (Perversion, Idealization and Sublimation, p.354).
She does a beautiful investigation of the writings of De Sade and others to establish this point however, her imagination in applying this principle seems restricted. I’d like to combine her principle with the 4 positions I’ve outlined previously:
Narcissism:
Subject- will to conquer Object- ‘be conquered’ and be the cause of desire
-with the 3rd term of ‘blame’ or revenge
Masochism:
Subject- merge in love Object- ‘be loved’ and be the cause of delight
-with the 3rd term of ‘self-effacement’ or being nice
The first position that leaps to mind and follows her principle is the principle of religious mysticism that claims that everyone has a soul whether man or woman, child or adult and that all souls are worth the same regardless of how much one develops one’s talents or realizes power in the world. This position of religious mysticism would be the masochistic position concerning ‘love’ for everyone and ‘being nice’ taken to the perverse position of turning the cheek and disavowing all aggression. Christ calls us all to be like children.
The object masochistic position of ‘being loved’ wants to be the cause of delight and to be loved by an adult subject but there seems to be a reversal involved in seeking to gain approval from children rather than adults when we look at clowns. Furthermore, in The Sorceress and the Hysteric Katherine 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. In the irreverent and absurd universe that is created the differences between the sexes are also covered up as stereotypes are reversed for comedic effects.
Lastly, in the masochistic position the 3rd term of ‘being nice’ qua not being vulgar can be reversed so that the pervert would conceivably ‘get off’ on being vulgar and saying things which aren’t nice (both as vulgar and irreverent) in order to cause other people to be uncomfortable.
With the subject narcissist the clearest example of perversion comes from denying one’s place as ‘heir to the throne,’ and becoming a leader by spending it in dissolution with degenerates. This is shown in Prince Hal in Henry the Fifth and by the Russian concept of the Superfluous Man who is a man of great abilities but chooses not to realize them in any way. It’s a mirror in some ways to Christ keeping company with prostitutes and sinners but instead it’s a would be Caesar who is doing the same. One is neither an adult nor child and neither does the opposite sex inspire any direction in life in this type. In other words, nihilism denies the difference between the sexes and the generations by saying there is no meaning: whether in comparison between man and woman or between adult and child. Life is meaningless for all.
With the object narcissist I believe we have the position of penis envy par excellance in the radical feminist. The radical feminist denies the difference between the narcissistic and masochistic positions and denies the difference between the generations by having a radical political agenda which doesn't seek to speak to the generational differences and becomes more of an aesthetic object for English students than an actual political force.
The 3rd term of blame or revenge I believe is also most clearly negated in the act of renouncing pleasure for oneself and becoming an ascetic. This form of morality involves a person delighting in the power they have over themselves rather than over others and comprises an ever narrowing scope of pleasure as more and more has to be renounced to the superego. The blame is taken from the other and put into the narcissist’s own body which makes the desires of the flesh bad with the need for them to be controlled.
I’ve detailed these examples of perversion of the social rather than the sexual type because the sexual are much more widely known. This list isn’t supposed to be exhaustive but rather attempts to give examples in several different areas.
Monday, January 2, 2012
feminine subject
Heaven is a place on earth with you
Tell me all the things you want to do
I think the darkness of the song is represented on two fronts
I say you the bestest
Lean in for a big kiss
Put his favorite perfume on
There seems to be some promiscuity in that the sexual interaction with someone leaps to a reference to another.
And when she sings about the epic sense of love giving life meaning and then says 'now you do' it seems like it's much more related to an internal object then an actual person:
It's better than I ever even knew
They say that the world was built for two
Only worth living if somebody is loving you
Baby now you do
It is like we'd have an object narcissist who is darkly looking for sex with others to bolster her sense of personal attractiveness mixed with a subject masochist who is choosing to love 'death' (as a sense of self-pity and detachment from the world).
video game represents both these aspects in her revenge infidelity to her boyfriend (who'd rather play video-games) and detachment from the world into an artificial world.
hysteric-hysteroid, compulsive-obsessive
The idea of doing this blog was first attached to the idea of sharing all the reaction papers I have to write for articles in class. Some of the posts have been taken from the reaction papers, some from previous essays, but the bulk has been reflections on my personal research.
Here's part of a reaction paper I just finished:
I especially liked the finding that men who felt conflicted about endorsing traditional male gender roles had poorer attachment and a more fragile self (p.53). In my own research there seems to be an irony that those who are ambivalent about roles and feel inadequate in relation to them are also often hyper masculine and feminine.
For example in writing about the hysteric whose conflicts are at the Oedipal level with the father as the love object and the hysteroid where the conflicts are at an earlier phallic level and the mother is the love object, some analysts write:
In many instances the hysteroid would appear to be a caricature of the hysteric, much as the hysteric has been said to be a caricature of femininity. Each characteristic is demonstrated in even sharper dramatic relief. The bounds of social custom and propriety are breached. The latent aggressivity of the exhibitionism, the competitiveness and the self-absorption becomes blatant, insistent, and bizarre. The chic becomes the mannequin; the casual, sloppy; the bohemian, beat. Thus, a hysterical patient was able to enjoy the pleasures of the beauty parlor only after analysis had broken through her defense against exhibitionism while a hysteroid patient changed the color of her hair one to two times a week to keep pace with her rapidly shifting moods. The adaptational functioning of the hysteroid is erratic. Inconstancy and irresponsibility cause the patient to suffer realistic rebuffs, injuries, and failures. By contrast, the hysteric often voices desperation and provokes concern in others but rarely is in actual danger. Historically, in the hysteroid, academic and vocational patterns usually reflect the same erratic quality of attainment, alternating with periods of serious dysfunction (Easser, B.R., Lesser, S.R. (1965). Hysterical Personality: A Re-Evaluation, p. 398-9)
In as similar way, the compulsive character (see Reich's Character Analysis) who plays the role or script of the man just as he does his ‘duty’ as father and protector, tax-paying citizen, model employee, etc. can also be caricatured by the obsessional. The harnessing of the will to perform one’s duty and enact the roles one identifies with, becomes exaggerated into the exalting of reason and contempt for emotions that we often find in obsessional intellectuals and philosophers:
• Belief in the omnipotence of intelligence and reason;
• Denial of the power of emotional forces and contempt for them;
• Extreme value placed on foresight and prediction;
• Feelings of superiority over others related to the faculty of foresight;
• Contempt for everything within self that lags behind the image of
intellectual superiority;
• Dread of recognizing objective limitations of the power of reason;
• Dread of "stupidity" and bad judgment.
(http://www.ptypes.com/expansive_solution.html).
What's particularly interesting to me, although merely a matter of intuition and speculation at this point, is that the hysteric represents a feminine or masochistic trend at the genital stage where the hysteroid represents a masculine or narcissistic trend and vice versa for the compulsive and obsessional. Those who deify reason and have contempt for the affects like Plato, Spinoza, and some other rationalists (where Aristotle and some empiricists are more against women than emotions) are affect blocked masochists in my estimation. Plato's dialogues definitely shows his emotional intuition and Spinoza's intellectual love of god makes him into a masochist mystic.
Here's part of a reaction paper I just finished:
I especially liked the finding that men who felt conflicted about endorsing traditional male gender roles had poorer attachment and a more fragile self (p.53). In my own research there seems to be an irony that those who are ambivalent about roles and feel inadequate in relation to them are also often hyper masculine and feminine.
For example in writing about the hysteric whose conflicts are at the Oedipal level with the father as the love object and the hysteroid where the conflicts are at an earlier phallic level and the mother is the love object, some analysts write:
In many instances the hysteroid would appear to be a caricature of the hysteric, much as the hysteric has been said to be a caricature of femininity. Each characteristic is demonstrated in even sharper dramatic relief. The bounds of social custom and propriety are breached. The latent aggressivity of the exhibitionism, the competitiveness and the self-absorption becomes blatant, insistent, and bizarre. The chic becomes the mannequin; the casual, sloppy; the bohemian, beat. Thus, a hysterical patient was able to enjoy the pleasures of the beauty parlor only after analysis had broken through her defense against exhibitionism while a hysteroid patient changed the color of her hair one to two times a week to keep pace with her rapidly shifting moods. The adaptational functioning of the hysteroid is erratic. Inconstancy and irresponsibility cause the patient to suffer realistic rebuffs, injuries, and failures. By contrast, the hysteric often voices desperation and provokes concern in others but rarely is in actual danger. Historically, in the hysteroid, academic and vocational patterns usually reflect the same erratic quality of attainment, alternating with periods of serious dysfunction (Easser, B.R., Lesser, S.R. (1965). Hysterical Personality: A Re-Evaluation, p. 398-9)
In as similar way, the compulsive character (see Reich's Character Analysis) who plays the role or script of the man just as he does his ‘duty’ as father and protector, tax-paying citizen, model employee, etc. can also be caricatured by the obsessional. The harnessing of the will to perform one’s duty and enact the roles one identifies with, becomes exaggerated into the exalting of reason and contempt for emotions that we often find in obsessional intellectuals and philosophers:
• Belief in the omnipotence of intelligence and reason;
• Denial of the power of emotional forces and contempt for them;
• Extreme value placed on foresight and prediction;
• Feelings of superiority over others related to the faculty of foresight;
• Contempt for everything within self that lags behind the image of
intellectual superiority;
• Dread of recognizing objective limitations of the power of reason;
• Dread of "stupidity" and bad judgment.
(http://www.ptypes.com/expansive_solution.html).
What's particularly interesting to me, although merely a matter of intuition and speculation at this point, is that the hysteric represents a feminine or masochistic trend at the genital stage where the hysteroid represents a masculine or narcissistic trend and vice versa for the compulsive and obsessional. Those who deify reason and have contempt for the affects like Plato, Spinoza, and some other rationalists (where Aristotle and some empiricists are more against women than emotions) are affect blocked masochists in my estimation. Plato's dialogues definitely shows his emotional intuition and Spinoza's intellectual love of god makes him into a masochist mystic.
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