foreheads and dissociated identities.

I wait for something to happen 3 times before I let myself get excited about formalizing a technique or a concept.

There are several I've had lately, but I'm saving them for some papers, and haven't put them up. Additionally, confidentiality is an issue. I will change names and details so people can't be identified, but if someone reads their vignette, they would know it was them. I wouldn't want a post to interfere with treatment.

Anyway, 3 times now, while getting into anger, a patient has felt tensions in his or her forehead and it hasn't increased or decreased, but just held. I ask them to imagine what something or someone would look like if he/she/it looked like their forehead felt (if it looked externally, like they feel internally), and 3 times it has been a male aggressor (and a fourth time I am not yet counting, it was a gargoyle). In each of these times the patient was able to describe in detail the angry look of the person who came out of their forehead and then afterwards they were able to feel the gestures, emotions, physiognomy, etc. map onto their own body and integrate the man (and gargoyle). In each of the cases it resulted in the erasure of their dissociated anger (which shows up when they are backed into a corner or need to protect someone). Otherwise they are echoists and "lovers and not fighters" and the anger in them is wild and not in harmony with their economics of libido.

I've had the thought that Athena from the head of Zeus is a reversal and that it is really Zeus coming from the head of Athena as it is with these patients.

While the forehead has held an aggressive, dissociated identity (even if used for protection), the chest is very common for holding representations of other people (children, other adults) that can be angry, sad, and have other feelings.

The importance of the chest is pushing me to look into respiratory and inhalation papers in classic psychoanalysis.

I can also say that the shoulders are an important zone and have often been key to mapping on the physiognomy of demons, hunchbacks, bats and other productions from patients.