parapraxis

Someone approaches me about forgetting her wallet. She says that it's not like her to forget and that she has forgotten it twice in one day so she is sure that it has some meaning.

I ask her for her association to the wallet and she says money. I ask her for he association to money and she mentions managing life and not feeling up to the task.

I ask her about the person she imagines would find her wallet. She mentions the person would be caring (if he would be the type to not keep it for himself) and I ask her to say more about the type of person he is. She said that he would be understanding with the implications that he wouldn't judge her for being so forgetful. I ask her how it feels if she says 'I want to be cared for and I want to be understood'. She asks if she has to say it out loud. I say yes. She says it and puts her hand on her chest after she speaks the words and says that she feels the emotion in her.

clinical techniques- imagos- active imagination

In the last few months I've become more and more aware that the idiosyncratic word choices of patients that my 'even hovering attention' feels are significant don't only lead to repressed memories but also lead to encounters of missed maturation (full identifications- trito stages) or re-fusion of the ego ideal to the imago (partial identification- aim-inhibited desire of triangular complexes).

For example, one patient used the expression 'squeaky clean' which seemed out of place a little (she said it with a different tone). I asked for her association and she said boots that are cleaned and polished and shiny. I asked for her association to this and she said the army and from here produced a memory of having tried to enlist. We went on to explore her feelings at that time and why she wanted to enlist and that emotional climate had a lot in common with her current situation which is to continue in her sobriety when she's traditionally been impulsive. Her phallic trito renunciation, which she's never performed is now on the horizon even though wasted energy from earlier defusions will still have to restored to fusion before she'll have the strength.

Another patient gave used the idiosyncratic analogy of me leaving a bunch of pens on the table and telling others not to touch them in order to illustrate how one must deal with someone who is acting childlishly. I asked him to tell me the story (i.e. make one up) of how a father who left his pens on his table is trying to impart a lesson to his son. The patient spent a good 20 minutes of the session explaining how the father would test the son and ask him if he touched the pens to see if he would lie or not (all the while knowing that they had been touched because he left them in an exact configuration). The father would go one route if the son lied, another if he didn't, but in both cases he wanted the son to learn something and cared about him. As always, the test in these cases that the intervention worked is only to see the genuine affect in the response and to notice that there is progressive communication in the following sessions (new topics, talking about more personal things, etc.). I believe this patient was working with the father imago that he needed and felt defused from. I didn't have to wait for the transference to work through this in my person but was able to just witness as he fused it himself.

When one has an altruistic, imaginative patient one has to keep open for magical figures or things in the narrative. When they mention these things active imagination will allow for them to make up story and combining some of the figures with I statements, if they are defused images, or just allowing the figures to heal each other, is valuable.      

The homeless

How can someone look at homeless people and in any way imagine that they are simply lazy people who don't want to work or that they are choosing some immature, wild kind of freedom?

What about their dirty bodies, the frequent scars or scabs on them, the haunted or blank faces, and all the discomfort? Moreover, the will to live is the most basic form of the will to power and anyone who has satisfied this will wants more than just to live, he wants to have the admiration or respect of others, and eventually develops to identity and having a libidinal tie to social narcissism and religion. However, the homeless are no stoics or ascetics who are still in touch with culture and sacrificing themselves to become its flowers.

The homeless have introverted their libido and fallen away from demanding admiration and respect from others or from devotion or being loved in the phallic social ontology. This means that they are no longer concerned with reputation and being thought of as 'good' in comparison to their brothers and sisters and the people they went to school with, (etc.). They are competing with the anal father, are persecuted and unable to feel the libidinal tie to the social body without feeling controlled. They are 'bad' and don't deserve to live within the social body- like they are vampires or are monstrous in someway.

In some ways it's possible to say that they are too competitive. Not in relation to their reputation but in relation to all other people (the anal social ontology).

The neurotic mind needs so badly to see spotless agency in people; it can't accept people in pieces.

memory fragment

I'm around 10 years old. I'm visiting some cousins for what seems like the first time. I have at least one video game magazine and am fantasizing about a new video game that will come out on the Nintendo called Low G Man. In it you control a character who fires a freeze ray at enemies so that he can get close enough to stab them with his spear. I want to say that there were pictures of multiple screenshots to show that you fight 'bosses' that are very big. It is exciting to fight someone so big even though it would probably be one of those tiresome games where you had to attack some little component in an otherwise invulnerable machine. When I was much older and hadn't played a video game in years I remember seeing an ad for a game in which you fight mythological monsters who are much bigger than you and I was very tempted to play it.

I remember my cousin being good looking: darker skin, nice complexion, thick hair and all the other signs of health. He had short hair and dressed like his mother bought him clothes in a mall; in a store where she could also buy clothes for her husband. I think he looks like my mother would prefer that I look.  However, he needs to prove too much and it makes him ugly. At some point he gets past building himself up and tries to take me down. I remember him telling me that my feet only look so big because my legs are skinny. I think now that he must have felt competitive with me because I was tall.

I'm in the basement where they have a bumper pool table. I alternate between different construals of it. It looks like a poker table with a bunch of mushrooms growing in the middle of it or it looks like a breakfast table where pinball-like lights and pop-ups register the feelings of other people in the house. I play my brother and lose. He begins to gloat. I think that's the wrong word but it's one that was passed down in my family. It was said with too much emphasis by my grandfather. Probably because it registered a secret hurt of his- someone who he wanted respected saw it as his short-coming- and he in turn hunted it out in others in order to censure them instill the same shame he felt himself. The word needed to come into existence so badly that he became a hunter who would shoot any animal and he drove the word out of its sense.

 My cousin is watching us play and so is my mother. My brother would normally be easy to ignore but, maybe not. Maybe this is the point where I no longer let myself feel competitive with him. I begin to cry. I want to say that I go over to my mother like she can protect me from my shame of crying in front of my cousin. The scene becomes a blur here. I intentionally stay away from my cousin for the rest of the trip. I want to avoid having to become aware of his avoidance of me. The video game magazine is not exciting to look at anymore and I now force myself to read pieces of information that I would normally ignore.

The hand- psychosexual component

As promised, here are some different articles that the importance of the hand as symbol, its relation to later sexuality, and its relation to orality is mentioned.

It really seems obvious, considering the handshake, that the hand must have symbolic meaning.

In relation to the oral ego ideal that concerns otherness itself (the representation of the first whole, instead of part object) shaking hands shows an acknowledgment of the other. Waiving hello and goodbye also have a similar form.

In coitus the vagina replaces the hand and like the hand it grasps the penis; this is reflected in the fantasies and problems characteristic of female sexuality… (Chasseguet Smirgel, Feminine Guilt and the Oedipus Complex, p. 101)

The blessing is done in such a way that with the hand that symbolizes the paternal penis the Kohenites put upon the people the divine name that equally symbolizes the paternal penis. The god-father and the people with the penis thus joined together, as it were, establish a friendship, I may say, conclude a blood-covenant.

The blessing is given by the divine hand that, as a protecting and defending phallus, rises over the people. With the putting on of the hand-phallus, that is, the divine name, of god-father upon the people, the latter's penis becomes identical with that of the father.

Feldman, S. (1941). The Blessing of the Kohenites, p. 321

 He then vividly fantasied sucking the breast, made movements, approximating his thumb and index finger for which he could not at first find words, and then exclaimed: "I am biting with my finger! First, I want to bite with my mouth, then I use my fingers, and then strike with my hand!" Hand, therefore, equals a sadistic mouth as well as a sadistic penis for the patient, paralleling our previous observation that penis represented a sucking mouth in his passive fantasies. Thus we have in these fantasies of infancy the exact analogue of the patient's adult coitus: the penis (or hand) serves as a sucking mouth in the act, and as a sadistic mouth in fantasy.  P. 80

Our search for an adequate explanation has led us to one major conclusion: the inhibitions are largely defenses against unconscious fantasies which represent the penis (and hand) as instruments of destructive, largely oral sadistic, drives. P. 86

Hendrick, I. (1933). Pregenital Anxiety in a Passive Feminine Character

With the boy., as pointed out, complete substitution for the micking act is gained, namely, penis equals breast, hollow of the hand equals mouth, ejaculation of semen equals milk (Rank, Genesis of Genitality, p. 134)

On the other hand in the masculine process of displacement, the penis aggressively penetrating into a hole (hand, vagina) takes on the significance of a tooth (see the masturbatory significance of tooth dreams in men which are unintelligible without differentiating between the first and second teeth). So this symbolism is a (phylo—genetic) sediment ontogenetically used as a conductor for the displacement, the driving force of which we recognize in this next stage of teething as oral sadism, manifesting itself in biting (Rank, Genesis of Genitality, 135)

To the question of why the woman's hand played so exaggerated a part I would make the following conjectural reply. Originally the hand and the mouth were the sole executive organs of the patient's aggression. (In the reversal due to the sense of guilt the hand became an organ of punishment.) At the same time the hand was a symbol for the mouth. It is true that the yielding of the semen into the woman's hand was a caricature of giving, for the fluid ran from it as from a sieve. Possibly the patient took so readily to the symbolic meaning of the hand because it contained no teeth, which would have reminded him of his own aggression. Moreover, the preference for the female hand amounted to an indirect recapitulation of infantile aggression, in identification with the phallic mother: he had wanted to strike her with his hand and now the woman was committing an 'aggression' upon him, which was in agreement with the idea of ejaculation as a punishment. At times the patient ironically lamented that it was not possible to construct a hand inside the vagina. With reference to the improbable symbolism of the hand for the mouth, see Case II (writer's cramp) in 'Der Mammakomplex des Mannes'  (p.212)

Bergler, E. (1937). Further Observations on the Clinical Picture of 'Psychogenic Oral Aspermia'

The Odyssey- psychosexual and psychosocial development and myth

I've used this blog, for the most part, to write about psychosocial development. Psychoanalysis was largely disappointing to me because it didn't make use of phenomenology. In that regard I introduced psychic bisexuality as a horizontal axis and the Ego Ideal and the forms of perfection and death as a vertical axis.

Now that phenomenology offers us a guide its time to pair the psychosocial with the psychosexual as it appears in myth.

Towards this end I've submitted the fathers of Greek mythology

Tartarus- Ocular  
Uranus-part-object/auto-erotic
Cronos- oral
Zeus  -anal
Heracles - phallic 

I've also shown that the sequence of imagoes goes

proto- mother
deutero- combined parent
"Oedipus"- both parents
trito- father

Thanks to the people at Theoi.com who supply a comprehensive collection on Greek and Roman myth we have fragments like this:

"By nightfall they [the Argonauts] were passing the Isle of Philyra. This was where Kronos son of Ouranos, deceiving his consort Rhea, lay with Philyra daughter of Okeanos in the days when he ruled the Titanes in Olympos and Zeus was still a child, tended in the Kretan cave by the Kouretes of Ida. But Kronos and Philyra were surprised in the very act by the goddess Rhea. Whereupon Kronos leapt out of bed and galloped off in the form of a long-maned stallion, while Philyra in her shame left the place, deserting her old haunts, and came to the long Pelasgian ridges. There she gave birth to the monstrous Kheiron, half horse and half divine, the offspring of a lover in questionable shape."

Here we have an oral primal scene and in Chiron we have a combined figure that would point to this as the oral deutero. Chiron means "skilled with the hands." and he trained Achilles. The focus on the hand may be significant here as a psychosexual object and the horse appears after the polyphallic stage (Medusa and Heracles' hydra) in the form of Pegasus which means that the horse may play a part in other deutero stages. Anyway, this kind of mapping of symbols for the deutero stages vs. what is individual to the stage is what has to be performed. The hand appears in older psychoanalytic literature as something that can be part of a confluence of drives and have sexual importance. I'll track it down and post it here.

Anyway, eventually this will have to be expanded past Greek myth into a comparative mythology and I wonder if there are people out there who are still interested in this kind of work...

Along with general Greek and Roman myth I have long conceived of the Odyssey as a work in psychosexual development. It follows the imago development pattern

Troy - proto and deutero
Cicones- Oedipus and defusion                   auto-erotic    
Lotus Eaters- trito

Cyclops- proto and deutero
Aeolus- Oedipus and defusion                     oral
Giants- trito

Circe- proto and deutero
Hades- Oedipus and defusion                       anal
Sirens- trito

Scylla and Charybdis- proto and deutero
Helios -Oedipus and defusion                       phallic
Calypso- trito

From Helios there was a return to Charybdis
From Hades a return to Circe
and something of a return can be seen when the winds of Aeolus return the ship back to being lost.
Also after Troy Odysseus robbed the Cicones and was forced out.

Odysseus' fleet is reduced beginning with the Cicones and this is an important structure in the story.

My hope is to begin with comparing Greek mythology in general with the specific story of the Odyssey and find the correlations between the symbols as they relate to specific stages and those that represent the proto, deutero, Oedipal, and trito.

This will be slow and I'll continue to post about other facets of my work but, I'm posting this now so I might find some other researchers who could work with me.

Ego Ideal- "demands for perfection" vs. "self-regard"

In previous posts I've separated two functions of the ego ideal but I haven't been very clear about their difference.

I've recently found a passage in which Freud makes the difference explicit. Those who lack a high ego ideal or powerful demands for perfection are those who have a high self-regard which means they take on leader positions:

the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader… In many individuals the separation between the ego and the ego ideal is not very far advanced; the two still coincide readily; the ego has often preserved its earlier narcissistic self-complacency. The selection of the leader is very much facilitated by this circumstance. He need often only possess the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an impression of greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in that case the need for a strong chief will often meet him half-way and invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim. The other members of the group, whose ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embodied in his person without some correction, are then carried away with the rest by ‘suggestion’, that is to say, by means of identification (group psych, p. 129-30).

I believe that Freud’s point is best spelled out here by saying that where others have a high ego ideal in terms of defusion at the phallic-oedipal leading to proto or polyphallic stage Herculean labors, those who become leaders or ‘personalities’ have taken back some of their transference and increased their own self-regard. In other words, the people who get into positions of power are seldom those who are the most hard-working, the most intelligent or skilled, but they usually feel entitled to be in those positions and can inspire others to have a similar confidence in them. They "give the impression of greater force" but it's because the paternal imago has been split and they can stimulate it in others who haven't split it. The phallic-narcissist of the deutero stage can be differentiated from the workaholic of the proto/polyphallic stage because the former is more familiar with authorities and interested in the image of potency instead of actually mastering a skill, field of knowledge, etc. 

This phallic-narcissistic or phallic deutero position of high self-regard has been examined in previous posts but the mother's phallic image, which is generated from the split paternal imago, shouldn't be confused with a high ego ideal that demands perfection that can't be fulfilled (in defusion). 

William & Emily

THERE is something about
Death Like love itself!
If with some one with whom you have known passion
And the glow of youthful love,
You also, after years of life
Together, feel the sinking of the fire
And thus fade away together,
Gradually, faintly, delicately,
As it were in each other's arms,
Passing from the familiar room--
That is a power of unison between souls
Like love itself!

Edgar Lee Masters- Spoon River Anthology

a beautiful arrangement by Richard Buckner

and a less restricted live version

http://youtu.be/91nJE7_b4zs

"feminine masochism" vs. victimization in projective identification

I wanted to make just a short note to say that in the subject altruist the defusion of the ego ideal concerns impulses for the restoration of the the dead, injured, or harmed (in ego or object drive) mother. Just as there are different forms of perfection in egoism, death in altruism can be literal death (conceived of as the not-finite) but also death in regards to the other's image or social status. Death is also transcribed to the father, just as perfection is.

Working with groups it's often surprising how many people want to protect the leader and make attacks on his behalf, but who are otherwise self-effacing where their own egoism is concerned.

I believe that 'feminine masochism' or what I believe is better called echoism, captures the defused state of altruism. When altruism is no longer something that vicarious pleasure is gained from (i.e. fusion) but becomes a compulsive act without pleasure but based on fear (phobos) we use terms like self-effacing, people pleasing, (etc.) This should in turn be contrasted to projective identification in the altruist. In projective identification the altruist is herself victimized (near death, injured, about to face social ruin, etc.) and projects anxiety around restorative ego drives into another person.

I've had several patients that come from work in substance abuse who present themselves in a dangerous or near death environment, or who present themselves as overwhelmed by planning or managing their lives. I become aware of the anxiety they put in me and want to cut through the confusion and fear or just to touch ground and hold back the impulse to "life coach" or hold their head still so it stops spinning.