liberals in America

I had a post months back on the insight that conservatives in America, as opposed to all other first world nations, have stopped universal healthcare and keep alive the idea that others should die from their choices. "The government shouldn't come in to protect them, the government does everything badly, and better to have people die than to let the government encroach on our lives too much." Also, they don't think it's bad to accuse the government of instituting "death panels" in their design for socialized medicine and project their own intentions onto the government.

Depending on your character, you either think this is horrible, or you see the "great game," the "contest," and a representation of "spirit" as it manifests in the active pole. From the potlatch in the most primitive political-economies this kind of spirit has been visible and can't be denied by any thinking person...

But I'm writing because an article appeared on a list I'm on, that I thought was the nice inversion of this. Here we have a liberal who is saying that he and all other liberals have to kill themselves.
 
In the final paragraph we get the answer for the left. More love of the Other. Love of the oppressed and downtrodden.

Instead of understanding the right in order to give them a new contest and game- one that is above mere accumulation of wealth and one that could take no delight in the death of the poor or the conning of the dull- the left doubles down on the oppressed.

They will kill their egoism and the desire to find whatever happiness they can in the system, and they will rescue mom because dad is bad, and they can't trust that he will do it. If they can't rescue mom, then they will make themselves suffer and understand her suffering until they might get the chance. How can they enjoy themselves when the mother who gave them life is unhappy. This would be a disgrace.  

FIRST 100 DAYS: KILL WHITEY

Stephen Sheehi

Whitey is in the White House. Whitey is in Congress. Whitey is in law enforcement. Whitey is in ours churches, in our synagogues, and yes, in our mosques. Whitey is in the classrooms as readily as the board room. Whitey resides as easily in Newsweek than as in the National Review or Breitbart. Whitey is in New York and Los Angeles as frequently as he is in Scranton and Charleston. Look in the mirror because that is where Whitey is. You and me. We all conjured Whitey to power and now we have to fuckin’ kill Whitey*.  But, remember, Whitey does not die. You only kill him in perpetual deaths.

The Confederacy Has Won

Whitey is a vampiric fascist fuck, who is only killed until the next sequel (slavery, Jim Crow South, Reaganomics, the Contract on America, the Neocons, the Trumpocracy). While Whitey is not singular or partisan, we must focus on the Trumpocalypse: Whitey-in-Chief, Team-Whitey, and its deconstructed state, which is the embodiment of the victorious Confederacy.

Confederacy now dominates Whitey’s Cabinet: Jeff Sessions (AL), Rex Tillerson (TX), Sonny Perdue (GA), Tom Price (GA), Mick Mulvaney (SC), Andrew Puzder (TN), Elaine Chao (married to Mitch McConnell, KY), Rick Perry (TX), Niki Haley (SC) and Linda McMahon, born and raised in North Carolina.

I hear Whitey, “Stephen, you are playing the regional card. The Orange Scoundrel is a well-known racist and son of a slumlord.” No, I am saying that, if you want to understand the politics of this current regime including the Republican Party, you best look at the history, political discourse, phantasy, and desires of the Confederacy and the South, which especially hinges on the deflecting discourse of “states’ rights.”

Listen to the language of the Confederacy and understand the afterlives of its burning phantasy in the South. The South is a place where Whitey segregates his own racism and gives self-affirmation to his own liberalism, Whitey’s version of soft power. Whitey’s liberal smugness deafened us to hear “the South will rise again” for what it is: a threat and a disclosure of Whitey’s repressed desire for white supremacy, locked away below the Mason Dickson’s racial unconscious. And while liberal Whitey rolled his eyes at the Stars and Bars (in a discomforting, unconscious fear of disclosure), people of color always held that anxiety of self-knowledge for him. Liberal smugness dampened the full resonance of what is meant by “states’ rights,” which we hear clearly now as the discordance of “deconstructing” the state in order to leave no obstacle (“regulations”) to Whitey’s race privilege and no protection from Whitey’s full psychopathic desire and avarice.

How to Kill Whitey

Whitey is about identification(s). Whitey is about politics and about economics. But Whitey is also about the psyche and the unconscious. Whitey is in us all, no matter what race, class, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. We all harbor Whitey’s desires, Whitey’s love of capital, Whitey’s pathological obsession with individualism. We all are cops. We all want to snitch on the Anarchists, who are either “lawbreakers” or wreck our “kumbaya” by visibly (and bravely) challenging the state’s monopoly on violence. Pacifist and liberal Whitey jumps to delegitimize violence as a political tool because it causes dissonance in Whitey’s unconscious. Liberal Whitey disavows violence. He calls the cops on skateboarders, “looters and pie-throwers” but also on the hooded black teenager who walks at night, Skittles in hand, through our gated communities. Deep down, we know that we are beneficiaries of state violence, capitalist individualism, and racial and class hierarchy, all the while holding our protest signs.

Yet, while there are many places Whitey resides, we move from the most immediate to eventually arrive at the camouflaged. Right now, Whitey’s most imminent threat is in a white enthnonationalist White House, where unabashed anti-Semites and racists, women-haters, and climate change deniers flash white supremacist signs and talk of states’ rights and alt-facts.

We kill Whitey by resisting economic models of governance, states’ rights, and the logic of the security state. Do not cooperate.  Not with Republicans. Not with Democrats who want to search for “middle” or “common ground” with the “reasonable” opposition. That is Whitey mediating his power. Our weapons, at this point, are only obfuscation, resistance, attrition, organization, and mobilization. Listen to the impossible, to voices that you dismissed as “unreasonable,” as “idealistic,” as not “winnable.” If you are confused by the vertigo of losing power, be quiet, be brave, and listen to that feeling of your falling. That is the world that black and brown people feel from day to day in the United States. That is the feeling of living under occupation by Whitey. But from that space arises a power to resist, to transform. In the free fall, the choice exists to relinquish privilege or identify with it (hence, the terms reactionary or revolutionary). From that space, we exorcise identifications with Whitey by following the seditious love for the Other. We push through Whitey’s vampiric embrace to embrace what you can never understand: the pain of the Other, a pain that Whitey created. Allow yourself to sit with that tension, guilt, and realization of the true topography of White privilege. From that perpetual realization, Whitey will never be safe.

Some more clinical examples in altruism.

As with the examples of self-sabotage in which you play the consequences of the patient's behavior forward until they build the place that they think they will end up, it's also relevant to build representations from bodily sensations and ask the patient to bring Time to bear upon them.

Client talks about being a good person who has faith in others and is hopeful, and that he has positive energy. He mentions that others “latch on to him:” both other good people and "users." Users want his help, see that they can gain from him, and hope to get “extra” from him. I tell him that it sounds like he a surplus of, or extra, energy, money, or positivity to spare in his life and people see that in him, but I then ask if he ever feels depleted. He says he can feel “burnt out, like he’s run thin, frustrated, disappointed, and not feel appreciated."

He spontaneously tells me that he is one of the only employees that comes in to work on his own time and that he does a lot of extra for his boss. Then he tells me how his boss wanted him to come in for more extra hours that he wouldn’t be paid for and that he was pretty frustrated.

I begin EMDR after I hear the anger in his voice about this, and I ask him to feel his bodily responses. He says he feels it in his chest and it grows. I tell him to picture his boss and say all the things he wants to without holding back. He does but then reports that the representation of his boss, in his mind's eye, looks disappointed after he did this.

I ask him to put together the implicit thoughts of the boss's feelings towards him. Client say that he’s disappointed in him, that he used to go that extra mile, and that he used to be better.

I ask him to turn these into ego and object-statements ("I am disappointed in you, you used to go that extra mile and now you don't, you used to be better"), and client says his ex-girlfriend comes up. He explains how she had “invested more” and went the extra mile in the first 6 months but then she didn’t give as much. I ask him to focus on the time that he felt disappointed in her and I begin EMDR, and he feels it again in his chest, but also in his jaw. The sense of it in his jaw grows. He mentions that it feels like he can’t move his jaw and like it’s made of stone. I ask him to take the internal felt sense and say how it might look externally, if a person looked like he felt. 

He begins describing a man with “sunken eyes” who looks "sad." He said he literally looks like a picture and is totally still. Client says he “doesn’t expect him to move”. I ask him to fast forward this image of him and what would happen in this man’s future. Client said he pictures him slowly “disintegrating:” starting from his head down-- that the stone man would just be blown to dust.  Writer asks him to picture the dust that he disintegrates into and to see if he can map it onto his body (the zones he was are of) in any way. Client says he can and then his face turns red and writer asks him if it is done and he says yes.

He said he felt in his chest and he pictured his heat turning to dust but then after it was fully disintegrated, that it emerged full and new. Writer asked him to focus on this new heart and to see how it wants to change the rest of his body. He says the tension in his jaw and chest are gone and he feels like he can move his tongue too. He said he felt tension from his hands go away and that he doesn’t feel like anything wants to change or is changing further. I ask him to float back to another time he felt like this in his life and tries to install the picture of well-being he associates to.

In altruism, the representation of the parental imagos can often be as "dumb," "silly," "underestimated," or "taken for granted".  Joe from Great Expectations is a good example. He is a good imago and has this coloring from the altruistic pole, but instead of idealization within the active pole of power/prestige/perfection, he is seen as dumb, lower class, and coarse. 

This is a phallic mother/combined parental imago/ or deutero representation of the parental imago and shows up with good frequency. 

Client is with a woman who has severe mental health issues and who has done very hurtful things to him and he is unable to leave her, although he has good reasons to that he can admit.   

She can say horribly mean things to him in her fits of rage. He feels like he's begun to hysterically adopt her anxiety and can feel himself fighting not to mirror her fits of rage at other points.

I note that these are bad traits or problems and asks client if it feels like he's trying to take them on for her in some way. 

Despite my failing to articulate this well, client agrees enthusiastically with this, but says that she doesn't see how much he does.

I ask him to complete the sentence... if she could see how much I took on her pains and problems then she might...?

He says "care more, not take me for granted, not be so selfish or spoiled."

I ask him to put these into ego and object-statements ("I should care more, I took you for granted, I've been selfish and spoiled, I didn't see how much you've done for me...") and he says that his family comes to mind, he names a few people, and I ask him to focus on who sticks out the most. he says his grandmother.

He says that "she stuck by my side my whole life" and "she gave me chance after chance and went above and beyond." "I slapped her in the face."

I ask him to picture her in his mind's eye and how she would be looking upon him if she was here.

He says she looks perfect and that she's smiling and he begins crying.

I tell him to picture her and to articulate the remorse he feels and express it to her. I begin EMDR, and he does so.

He then says that she looks angry and disappointed.

He talks about the last time he talked to her and how she hung up the phone on him

I ask him if it feels true if he says "I deserve to be cut off," and he says it does.

He then adds that he pushed her to the point that she had to cut him off. He then adds that he's not talking to his child nor family. I interpret that he's being like his grandmother is to him, with his family, and that he's like she was with him before, with his girlfriend.

This seems to click for him and I ask him to try to talk to her representation again and tell her what he feels. I begin EMDR.

He says that she forgives hm and she loves him.

I ask him to scan his body to see if he's holding on to anything else. He says that his heart feels different and so does his breath.

He says he feels excitement and love but also just serene.

I'm not touting this as a cure for the client being able to leave this relationship. There are many parts of the personality involved in connecting a person to their bad situation. This is just one part cleared up and the other parts have to be attended to. 

Similarly, when the patient experienced a major trauma or ego injury, there is not just one part that was injured. I have had to go back to major events several times from the angles of different parts of psychic bisexuality.