But the room just filled up with
mosquitos,
they heard that my body was free.
Leonard Cohen
Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see
you deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the
stings of the little ones. Forest and rock know how to be silent with you.
Be like the tree which you love, the broad-branched one -- silently and
attentively it overhangs the sea.
In regards to imagos the trito stage is usually distinguished by the sole father imago with the triangular stage has both the mother and the father and the deutero has the combined parent and the proto stage has the mother imago alone.
In regards to ego and object drives the trito phase has a rudimentary form of the drive that appears in the following stage.
The phallic trito phase has the drive to be regarded as an adult and be married that becomes elaborated as the social ideal in the latency stage to strive for the success of a certain class, religion, or nation.
The anal trito phase has the drive to be regarded as good at everything and this becomes elaborated in the phallic stage as focussing on being good at a particular skill or in a field of knowledge.
The oral trito phase has the first instance of the will that opposes others. This is in contrast to the anal trito stage in which one competes in regards to having the best way to do things which becomes elaborated in being admired for doing 'something' (some skill or understanding in a field of knowledge) that puts one among the 'good class' or those with a good reputation in one's community.
Additionally, after the triangular complex establishes the difference between the generations the trito stage is the establishment of this difference among one's lower generation.
In the phallic trito stage, for example, the phallic father and his incest taboo possession of the mother becomes internalized as a drive to marriage/monogamy in the phallic trito and the moral quality of the phallic father that exists as social anxiety becomes internalized as the guilt conscience. However if the differences between the generations is undermined by the parents then the child can become fixated at the trito stage. Freud writes:
We must also take into consideration 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. (The Ego and The Id, p. 29-30).
I understand this to be that the trito drives are in place but at the same time there is a narcissistic pull to feel that one is part of the older generation, since a parent broke the taboo, and rebel against them.
In the above quotations we have the phallic symbol of a candle and a tree to denote the trito father imago as well as a group of swarming insects that get at ones blood (the Nietzsche quotation goes on to reference this blood sucking). The inside has blood the outside has a swarm attacking the inside and the barrier is obviously the skin. As the Nietzsche quotation continues the sense of one being a giant who is attacked by little men grows:
Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see
you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee to where a rough, strong breeze
blows!
Flee into your solitude! you have lived too
closely to the small and the pitiful. Flee from their invisible vengeance! For
you they have nothing but vengeance.
No longer raise your arm against them! They
are innumerable, and it is not your lot to shoo flies.
Innumerable are the small and pitiful ones;
and rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin of many a proud structure.
You are not stone; but already have you
become hollow from many drops. You will yet break and burst from the many
drops.
I see you exhausted by poisonous flies; I
see you bleeding and torn at a hundred spots; and your pride refuses even to be
angry.
They would have blood from you in all
innocence; blood is what bloodless souls crave -- and therefore they sting in
all innocence.
But you, profound one, you suffer too
profoundly even from small wounds; and before you have healed, the same
poison-worm crawls over your hand.
You are too proud to kill these gluttons.
But take care lest it be your fate to suffer all their poisonous
injustice!
They buzz around you also with their
praise: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want to be close to your skin and
your blood.
They flatter you, as one flatters a God or
devil; they whimper before you, as before a God or devil; What does it come to!
They are flatterers and whimperers, and nothing more.
Often, also, do they show themselves to you
as friendly ones. But that has always been the prudence of cowards. Yes!
cowards are wise!
They think much about you with their petty
souls -- you are always suspect to them! Whatever is much thought about is at
last thought suspicious.
They punish you for all your virtues. They
pardon you entirely -- for your errors.
Because you are gentle and of honest
character, you say: "Guiltless are they for their small existence."
But their petty souls think: "Guilty is every great existence."
Even when you are gentle towards them, they
still feel themselves despised by you; and they repay your beneficence with
secret maleficence.
Your silent pride is always counter to
their taste; they rejoice if once you are humble enough to be vain.
What we recognize in a man, we also
irritate in him. Therefore be on your guard against the small ones!
In your presence they feel themselves
small, and their baseness gleams and glows against you in invisible
vengeance.
You did not see how often they became
silent when you approached them, and how their energy left them like the smoke
of a waning fire?
Yes, my friend, you are the bad conscience
of your neighbors, for they are unworthy of you. Therefore they hate you, and
would rather suck your blood.
Your neighbors will always be poisonous
flies; what is great in you -- that itself must make them more poisonous, and
always more fly-like.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude -- and
there, where a rough strong breeze blows. It is not your lot to shoo flies.
The sense of being a giant among men yet being hurt by interactions with them- being 'thin skinned'- is very palpable in these lines. In regards to social ontology it is as if one should be special to every other and to not be regarded as such is felt as suffering.
In the Odyssey, the run in with the cyclops leads to an encounter with Aeolus. Since it leads to Odysseus being sent back off course when he had almost made it home I have compared it structurally to his return from Hades to Circe's island and the return from Helios' island to Chardybdis as a site of defusion. However, technically, it doesn't force him to return to the island of Polyphemus. The next stop I have taken to represent the oral trito and it is the encounter with the Laestrygonians which is translated as skin reapers or skin harvesters. They are a race of giants who are cannibals. Homer writes:
Just
short of the town, they came on a girl drawing water; she was tall and
powerful, the daughter of King Antiphates. She had come down to the clear
stream of the spring Artakia (Artacia), from which the townsmen fetched up
their water. They approached her and spoke to her, asking who was king of this
land and who his subjects were; and she pointed at once to her father's lofty
house. They entered the palace and found his wife there, but she stood
mountain-high and they were aghast at the sight of her. She sent out forthwith
to fetch King Antiphates her husband from the assembly-place, and his only
thought was to kill them miserably.
The impression here of multitudes "throning up" is important here but also, hurling down great rocks gives a parallel to Rhea swaddling a stone and feeding it to Cronos instead of Zeus. Additionally, the loss of Odysseus' fleet save for a single ship seems like an important metaphor for a sense of the ego (or more correctly, the ego ideal having a demand of perfection that is measured in a social ontology by the experience of lack).
It must be remembered that dreams and all other psychic acts are over-determined and sometimes you won't get the ideal image of the sky filled with mosquitos, flies, boulders, or swarms of something that are attacking. I had a patient who had a dream of Machu Picchu and who described it as beautiful, wonderous, etc. and being destroyed piece by piece by people. It didn't seem like the tourists were making bold attacks on it, but like Nietzsche's flies it was just little punctures of the skin adding up.
I asked him to turn it into an I statement and it resonated strongly with him. I had another patient who had a dream of being attacked by zombies and the zombies only bit at her skin.
Following the subject egoist and object altruist division of the masculine I've also done some work on the novel Angels and Insects in which the image of floating swarms of objects appear. At one moment the love interest appears surrounded by butterflies. Additionally, in celebrations confetti or rice is thrown to make an event 'magical'.
I've been sticking to the subject egoistic trends in my analysis so far but I will widen them soon enough.
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