Monday, July 27, 2015

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.


No comments:

Post a Comment