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....