Monday, July 27, 2015

Auto-erotic and "the idea"

People with eidetic memories can remember a whole page of a book. They don't remember every idea or sentence but have something of a "photographic" memory.

The idea of going beyond the particular and seeing "family resemblances" doesn't mean Platonism. There's not some internal epistemological object that one checks to see if things or people accord to in order to judge if they are part of a category. Rather, the negation of the particular means that sensuous qualities can be grouped together and that they just strike someone as similar. That function works without language, or rather language can be used to "mean" this operation.

Take, for example, when someone walks in a funny way that reminds you of someone else. The gait doesn't have a name but it's a sensuous quality that another person with a different body can have.

This negation of the particular is also where family resemblances will include such things as beauty, goodness, and other Platonic ideals. The point is that they are really of this world and based upon life.

The lovers of the negative, who want to make this function mean more and have its own subsistence in a metaphysical world and reify it into Being that has a non-social ontology are often woefully ignorant of doing so.

Much of the phenomenological movement in psychoanalysis does just this in their references to Heidegger and Husserl. They want to make atomistic individuals who are triangulated through Being and are guilty of the most fundamental reification. One has to strive hard in their work to actually find real discussion of motivations and ego ideal measurements of self and other.

This just goes to show that we have all fallen beneath the height of Nietzsche's, Marx's, and Freud's modernism, and often hate them for it.

    

The auto-erotic and the part-ego

I've been thinking about the designation of part-object.

It definitely has its own classic use as the breast or penis without reference to the object.

As I've shown in the phantasies of the earth having its contents sucked out by the machine, there isn't a reference to people and the earth seems to symbolize the breast.

There is an imago there or an "internal object" and a general transference to the world but as a depersonalization this means that a person would also be able to receive it too. The main thing is that the ego ideal associated with this stage of development doesn't exercise criticism in some palpable way because that would require more cognition and comparison with others. However, this doesn't mean conflict at later levels can't cause a defusion to take place at this level or that, as Klein write, bombing and destruction of the environment can't similarly affect the transference.

At the "auto-erotic" stage the representations of people could be called part-object, but as noted above, this isn't to say that they are regarded as walking breasts or penises. The designation of part-object here, I believe, is best explained as the idea that other people have "good stuff" such as money, sex, comfort, etc. that the individual wants. He isn't concerned with egoism/competition or altruism/restoration of them, because this still requires more cognition so the ego ideal can measure. However, the focus on getting the 'good stuff' is how the simplistic mind works here.

This has a foil, however. In the previous post I brought up Aspergers. What characterizes this, in my experience with it, is how the sufferer reacts to every person, every other, in the same way. He also has what could be called a part-ego, by which I mean, that he has an important interest or important facts or important reference points that must be invoked with every exchange with others. For some people it is bringing up God or their religious beliefs, for some it is dinosaurs or what they think is powerful, for others it is repeating what a focal person says (becoming their echo), and for some it is bringing up 'factoids' (without any one reference point). This part-ego is an 'observing-ego' in some ways which probably references the child's lack of motor skills. This is also possibly a place to invoke Wilhelm Reich's ocular stage (although, I've drawn attention to the relevance of the eye in volar stage in feminine development too).  


So, in the dichotomy of Internal vs. External Space, the previous oral stage has internal and external autistic shapes/light darkness that can populate it.

Space in the sense of the revelation of things and people is still important for what I'll still call the auto-erotic stage. However, the dichotomy or ontological choice would be between relating to External Space, whilst still in this half-ego functioning, or relating to one's mnemic traces of external Space.....

Earlier posts that relate to the epistemophillic drive bear on this: Can a person be open to the external Space in ways that need to new info or do they only, nihilistically, want things to be the same? - nothing new, but everything should be as they remember it.

The question is other than being able to see people and things ing their particularity, what is the ability here, to join them together by their similarity or "family resemblances".

This something more that is common above the particular, seems like a good metaphor for the something more that objects that must be referenced by the part-ego.


Friday, July 24, 2015

The auto-erotic and the oral stage

I'm not sure if the stage before the auto-erotic is the birth stage, maybe it should just be called the oral stage. The problem is that I don't work with the psychosexual or erotogenic zones directly.

In some ways I envy the classical analysts who do work with the zones and body parts now along with the Kleinians. I didn't get trained in their techniques and I sometimes feel like they are working with some primal part of the person that I don't have access to. Of course, this envy rises when I experience frustration with my techniques but when they are working then I think I've found the 'the way' that gets to the essence and that the interpersonal is the bedrock...

Anyway, if you take the phantasy from the Truman Show of someone feeling like their world is unreal it's also linked not to a representation of God but of other people doing it. Similarly, in the Hobbesian phantasy of the Leviathan there is a war of all against all which we've seen in Mad Max is also mixed with the representations of others with the land. I've had patients that have had both of these phantasies.

They can be contrasted to higher level phantasies in the volar stage in which paranoia doesn't concern all people but, Matrix or Highlander style, there is a person who is special/magical/superhuman in a crowd of normal people and he is the object of paranoia. Similarly, instead of the wold/people feeling unreal then this becomes transferred to an object and there's the phantasy of the unreal lover who the object egoist isn't really sure about. However, it's not just his love that is questioned, but the ideal of some giant humiliation that is supposed to occur from him. This is one patient, however, and the phantasy of a con-man who has made one's whole life a lie (as opposed to the world) seems suitable here too.

I've also differentiated the volar deutero from an earlier stage. In the former a person inspires a regal sense in others, or can't bow before any authority. He feels bigger than the all humans (partly divine, superhuman, immortal, etc.). At the auto-erotic level, he gives one the impression of being an encylopedia or knowing all facts.

In some ways, the auto-erotic stage is probably the stage of autism in the sense of asperger's. In the object egoist who is a "chameleon" or plays roles with others and doesn't feel real (or projects that onto the world/people) there is an "as if" quality or something off about the person and it leads to eccentricity in pathology when the person is playing the "house wife" or another role in a way that is almost campy. Similarly, the great memory and recall of facts that can get in the way and bore others in "asperger" types is very clear too.

Now, in some ways this makes the preceding stage, the stage of phantasy and daydreaming which might deserve auto-erotic more than the part-object stage preceding the volar stage...

Additionally, the preceding stage, which as I've mentioned, has representations of the earth and great storms in phantasy without reference to humans, seems to be the one with the representation of God.

Additionally, one of the patients with the earth and the machine phantasy, also came forward with autistic (not asperger) behavior of rubbing his jeans when talking to other people. He noted that it was the "feel" that kept him grounded when he was anxious.

There is still an open question, however, about whether "the machine" means that inanimate objects become the first real father-substitute for the child, as opposed to their later importance as transitional objects. It makes sense with the idea that real autistic kids are focused on their "autistic shapes" in the feelings of objects. This echoes the importance of light and dark in vision without reference to more specific colors. Autistic kids are interested in the non-human environment and so they cling to the father-substitute of things once power is transcribed to them from the mother's deutero seduction of the child.

Thus, while many analysts talk about the breast as the part-object, and part-object relations in a way that deals with sexual using another person, or some other banal sense of it, there is a good chance that this is the stage of the fetish object in sexual terms. It also seems like the true autoe-erotic sense of phantasy about an object while getting pleasure, from oneself, can come from autistic objects and sensations and doesn't require an actual mnemic trace. The mnemic trace can come to populate one's daydreams just as more important object relations do afterwards. However, it seems to make sense to say the inside and outside division happens at this stage, and then next, the Space of mnemic traces and memories of specific things and objects appears. In the previous stage, the sense of animate vs. inanimate and not just autistic shapes as nonsense, but some Reichian 'orgone' like connection to energies in other things and their fields seems to be afoot.

I don't think the child's mnemic trace of the breast is attached to a simple visual image... Also the part-object of the breast seems to be replaced by inanimate objects. So now we have part-object referring to breast and we have it referring to humans that are in some ways dependent on or linked to the land.

So, the Mad Max paranoia of all against all and the link to the land there, must be differentiated from the earlier form of paranoia in which the earth is destroyed. The end of the world phantasy is paranoia at this earlier oral stage...

phantasy of inner vs. external world is also oral too

the earth vs. the machine is a fantasy involving the breast and its precious internal contents

There doesn't seem to be a reference to human objects in the oral deutero stage as there is in the auto-erotic stage. There is the reference to inanimate objects though....

Is there any reason to keep the name auto-erotic for the stage preceding the volar? As far as Freud meant it, wasn't it for the relationship of masturbation that doesn't reference an external object? However, he also used it for mnemic trace too in phantasy, and if mnemic traces, memory, and the asperger stage keeps the name auto-erotic with its part object (mixed with the land) or the general stage of the encounter with Otherness, then maybe the people who I insulted above have something to offer. The relation to others in which they are treated as instruments and in which the volar fascination, the anal infatuation, or the phallic love (i.e. object drive relations) aren't yet there, does indicate a part-object drive relation to them here... so if auto-erotic is loosely used as for the purposes of oneself maybe, it can be salvaged...

I'm probably committing a grammar crime here that might not be forgivable.

Anyway, these, are my unedited thoughts at this stage in my career.


   



   
  

conceit tensions

I'm still always impressed with the altruist's tensions of conceit: how some people can't take a compliment, how some people can't let themselves be regarded as a talented or skilled, how some people must always let their friends take the best things and don't let themselves think about taking them for themselves...

I started building a theme with one patient. He would try to figure out the code in multiple choice and not take the test in the normal way, he'd pay others to do homework, he sold drugs and made a lot of money illegally, and established a general pattern of being special and not having to do what others do.

I asked him how he'd respond if someone asked him what makes him so special he doesn't have to do things the way others do. He said that he'd say "It is what it is" and doesn't owe this guy an explanation.

 I dropped this theme for a bit but then another conversation led us to the same point of him talking about exceptional things he is able to do that others can't. He doesn't bring them up in a egoistic way in which he wants the other person to feel inferior, but rather just as a matter of fact, if not a general astonishment (like "whoa dude, can you believe it!?!").

I asked him this time to say the words "I am special, I am exceptional".

He doesn't say them but instead says "I destroy things" "I will tear the heart out of your chest"...

There's definitely a manic part of his libidinal economy that is an identification with the parental imago (i.e. that has some power mixed in it, as opposed to the maternal imago of death). However, it still seems like even it must bow before conceit tensions and then spit out the melancholic part that has a self-observation of being bad....