dead mother to good father

I've posted a few times about Lacan's concept of foreclosure, or the idea that the transcription of power from the maternal imago to the paternal imago can be reversed.

A patient seemed to reprocess foreclosure in the form of a relationship with a borderline partner who had lied, cheated, was able to have her question reality, etc. at an incredibly deep level. Following the idea of codependency, his borderline traits must have matched up to something borderline in her, even if he was the much more conspicuous one.

She had a very harsh father who she felt to be angry with her and critical but he was "honorable" or at least she felt him to be so, and there was a hope to win some approval from such a figure. She was able to differentiate her partner from him because he wasn't honorable and there was a "blackhole" in him that threatened to both "suck you in" and "ooze." He "wasn't a person really."

The transference she had towards her father had gone to her partner and she registered the two in a similar way, but to see him as 'not a whole person' is part of the imago of Death which she left behind for the paternal.


Interestingly, Klein had the 'good (internal) object' in contrast with the 'bad (internal) object' and doesn't register foreclosure formally. She has examples of restoring a dead object, but never connects it formally to the good object.

Dead object > good object

I'm still struggling to name the same operation in the egoist. It could be simple, and the bad object identified with perfection could, in transcription, become a good object too. However, I want to keep the phenomenology distinct. The goodness of the altruist isn't the same as the goodness of the egoist. Maybe it's better to say

perfect/bad object > "the fair object"    

... or maybe it's too early for me to be trying to think through this...

Dr. Strange, the pugneus, the part-ego, and the auto-erotic stages.

I saw Dr. Strange this weekend and I was very intrigued by the link of his hands, as a superhuman surgeon, and Time. Watches (time pieces) figure prominently in the movie. In an early scene, Dr. Strange is attempting to remove a bullet from a patient's brain, and another, denigrated doctor is watching, and Strange tells him to cover his ticking watch.

The ontic level or level of Being involved in the story shifts from the pugneus to the part-ego, from Strange being legendary for his skills in talents in relation to others in society, to the deeper level of magic. This shift occurs after he gets into an accident and his hands are damaged. There are initially scenes in which he tries to muster his will-power and ingenuity to restore his hands. As mentioned in previous posts, the omnipotence of wishes (like The Secret) in the pugneus stage are showcased here in his hope that his will can manifest a change in his hands. The will is taken to be able to have powerful effects, and "beat the odds" but it doesn't work for him. He goes into the part-ego stage and needs magic to help.

In the part-ego stage, he encounters both good magicians and bad ones that live outside of society. The former group protects society (and probably more generally nature) from more powerful supernatural beings which indicates the auto-erotic level, which I'll turn to later. The parental-substitute of the part-ego stage is The Ancient One who is "Sorcerer Supreme" and has lived many lifetimes and therefore holds the secrets to immortality. Despite learning magic, Dr. Strange is aware that he lacks immortality and this causes friction between him and The Ancient One. So, although Time is related to the pugenus stage, there is still a sense that the timelessness of the part-ego stage can't be taken for granted. I understand this to be related to the castration anxiety at every stage. Despite being at a lower level than Time, there is still a sense that one can be threatened. Take vampires or the immortals from Highlander, for example, they are immortal but are still threatened by non-existence by stakes, sunlight, having their heads chopped off, (etc.).

The bad magicians who enter into a deal with a demon-like being Dormammu, show this passage to the dark side in having blackness appear around their eyes. This likely points to the importance of the eyes as part object, erotogenic zone, at this stage (i.e. the ocular stage), but I'd still like to wait for more evidence before renaming the part-ego. (In regards to the pugneus stage, being swallowed or devoured whole is the zone of the proto phase, the hands are part of the deutero phase, and being bitten at the level of the skin is the trito phase zone. I used the Odyssey, Greek myth, and art examples to establish this, but before the encounter with Polyphemus in the Odyssey, the phases aren't as clear). It's likely that the eyes are part of the deutero phase in the part-ego stage, but I can't be sure.

With the auto-erotic stage, it seems relevant to talk about the trito phase. If God and the Devil are the good and bad parental-substitutes for the auto-erotic then having a demon illustrates the difference between the generations that is established in the Oedipus complex. Just as triangulation with a peer is possible, or incest desires for a sibling exist in some clinical work, the trito phase of the auto-erotic takes us from the stronger transference to the devil, to the offspring of the devil (a demon). Also important here are the (non-sexual) fetish objects. More precisely, 'fetish' has its much older meaning in relation to inanimate things related to god(s), and the sexual pervert's fetish came into parlance much later. What's important is that Dr. Strange got a fetish object that allows the user to turn back Time. Dormammu is subject to its power which shows that the fetish is part of the auto-erotic Oedipus complex and more powerful than the trito antagonist here. Similarly, the main foe for Dr. Strange is a former student of The Ancient One which seems to locate their antagonism at the part-ego trito phase. This may speak to why we don't see more of the non-human, humanoid, or mixture of human and animal that is part of the part-ego stages. Regression from the trito, to delusion at the deutero and proto phases hasn't occurred.

Another relevant issue at the auto-erotic stage is that Dormammu wants to take over the earth and bring it into his dark domain. This is different from annihilating the earth, and thus paranoia about the earth being annihilated must be earlier than the auto-erotic. I've mentioned that before Uranus, there is a stage in Greek myth in which Day and Night exist. I'm not sure if earth annihilation exists here either, or whether the previous stage in which Gaia exists along with Tartarus is the proper stage. Anyway, the paranoid object in the part-ego stage is a sense of war in which both other people (and non-human, supernatural, humanoids, animals too) along with environmental features are a threat. There are scenes in which collapsing buildings threaten one as well as people. (Several patients describe similar paranoid fantasies that they often compare to war). The paranoid object in the auto-erotic stage is better referenced to the idea of nature, instead of the entire planet. There are portals to other lands (deserts, ocean, forests, etc.) that exist in the magical buildings that house the fetish objects. Many patients have paranoid fantasies of storms that devastate the land (but again, don't destroy the earth) and this sense of the different places of nature and threats to them and their inhabitants is prominent. (In my analysis of Mad Max I mentioned such storms).      

These are my first offhand responses to the levels of Being and I'll write more if something else is still pulling at my ear.

ps. Buddha and his earlobes and the ear in relation to balance, proprioception, blind-sight, and other phenomena make me anticipate an aural stage/phase. I have a feeling that it might be in the auto-erotic and belong to the altruistic pole...
         

Sleep, self-statements, and details.

A colleague has shared a problem with generating self or other statements when a patient told him about a problem with sleep.

In a previous post I used sleep as an example of loss. One used to be able to sleep and so it's like sleep used to be there to embrace or take care of one and then left. If you ask the person to consider sleep as a person who used to be with them in the night and has since left, they can use their own vocabulary to express "you left me, I need you, I'm not the same since I left... etc."

This colleague told me that the patient came up with some adjectives, but that the patient never came up with anyone after making the other-statements. However, before getting into any of the many "resistances" a patient might have in this case (i.e. not trusting the therapist with the answer, a general inability to be spontaneous and allow surprises, etc.) I asked the therapist if he had got into the details of what didn't allow the patient to sleep. He said he hadn't asked!

I wrote this up for him about a patient who said he had problems sleeping, and who told me, only after I had asked, that it was his "damn dogs!" 

***

I ask him why he has the "damn dogs" sleep with him and he says that sometimes they are good and he wants them in the bed with him. He talks about having the “comfort” of the dogs in bed to feeling like they are “too much.” Thinking about it, he feels a “mild annoyance” towards them and says “they are great, but selfish.” I enquire about this last remark and he says that everyone is selfish.

I ask him to think about the general relation to his dogs in the good phase and then the bad phase. He says he wants to give the dogs love and warmth and for them to feel part of the family. He says they are like his kids.

At first the dogs are “pure love” and then they want too much, they are pushy, and selfish assholes.

I ask him how the dogs might see him. He says, as a "protector, friend but then as a betraying asshole". They think he “doesn’t want them anymore” and that he “abandons” them

He uses the description he gave of the dogs as self-statements and they felt true. He talked about how he has wanted “too much” and felt others “didn’t love him as much as he loved them”

I asked him to also use the thoughts he had about how the dogs might think about him (“you are a protector, friend, etc.”) and he creates a list of people (2 girlfriends in his 20s and one male friend in high school)

He also generally related it to his father (“Dad was never around as much as I wanted him to be”. “There were fleeting moments we were together… and then he’s gone or I’d leave.”)

He says that the women had been “threatening with their presence” and gave the impression that if they didn’t get their way then they would leave.

He says at some point he changed and said he won’t be the one to chase after someone. He says he felt like a “sucker” and “fool.” He remembers feeling weak and embarrassed when they would make a scene in front of his friends.

***

Don't go straight for sleep and the abstract relation--  no matter how interesting it is that people can have relations to Time, Space, sleep, their bodies, etc. that reference oedipal (i.e. interpersonal) relations with people in their lives. 

Stay close to the material your patient gives you.

Marx against much of Marxian scholarship.

While so many academics want to make their name by talking about how capitalism has changed into something Marx didn't see or couldn't have anticipated, it's ironic that much of their work can be dismissed as regressing to the interest in discourse and narrative found in the Young Hegelians.


Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. (German Ideology) 

'walking on eggshells' and the previous post.

I always get the feeling that there is some autism spectrum MD who reads my post and wants to universalize something when it wasn't my intention to say x accounts for every instance of y.

In the previous post I found an example of walking on eggshells that was part of a triangulation related to the primal scene. This doesn't mean that every relationship involving walking on eggshells is a primal scene of the subject altruist. As I mentioned, I've worked with many fun-loving object altruists who come home to an angry or bitchy romantic partner who chews them out.

This does in fact raise an interesting question regarding disclosure of the paternal function.

I've payed attention to depression as being projective identification with the parental imago of Death (as opposed to the parental imago of perfection). However, this imago of Death may only appear with paternal disclosure (as I've hypothesized before). Instead of Death the paternal imago involved, the altruist may have the more mundane experience of feeling hate or anger from the parental-substitute. Similarly, instead of psychopathy in the egoist, in which parental substitutes are felt to be powerful, dangerous, malicious figures, the paternal imago reduces this to a relation of the egoist to feeling contempt and judgment from the parental-substitute.  

subject altruist in the ego and object drives and primal scene.

One of the most common repetitions in subjects altruists (SA), though it's certainly in objects altruists too, is having to "walk on eggshells" with a romantic partner who gets angry with one. This is often seen in how many altruists stay in bad jobs with bad bosses. Where other people at the job can be surprised the boss talks to subordinates the way he does and ultimately leave soon, if not get fired for standing up to him, the SA feels that this is acceptable. Often he or she ends up making small mistakes or forgetting something and provides the boss with an opportunity to be upset.

Although I've seen this for a long time, I haven't had the chance to do much individual work with someone stuck in the repetition...  I've recently had the chance, and found that it shared some primal scene elements.

I've posted before about how the repetition of physical abuse in relationships, victimization, appeared as projective identification (PI) with the mother in a primal scene in which the child believed, or actually saw, the mother being beaten by the father (or some parental-substitute equivalents).

Working with one client I was able to see that this walking on eggshells with the boss also had an element of the client sacrificing herself for another employee which would also make this PI between mother and child. In other words, the client saw the mother take on her father's anger for something the client was responsible for, and now she plays this out with a coworker. And, until this coworker comes along to complete the triangle, she is paired with a bad boss, and is in wait.

I've posted on this before as well. The Electra complex of the object egoist represents aggression towards both parents (parental imagos/substitutes) and the Antigone complex is the loss of both parents (or in the SA's passive-egoism, the prohibition against becoming a parent, an adult, happily married, etc. in one's life).

So much is written on dyads in contemporary psychoanalysis, but there are so many interesting triangulations to figure out.

I also have a previous post on another SA primal scene for which I used the cartoon Inspector Gadget.   It concerns the SA's rescuing impulse and how that can end with the rescued parental substitute not recognizing the Sa's help at all.

It seems that every deutero phase has the chance for the individual to have a primal scene involving their relations to the mother (which later becomes transcribed to the paternal imago) or when the half of the paternal imago, which wasn't split off to create the deutero phase, comes to ascendency, there is a chance that a trauma/fixation can occur in which the focus was the phallic mother losing her idealization to the egoist or showing her worth as the good object to the altruist. In regards to the latter, this is dramatized very well in a number of stories. Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations has his low class, father-substitute Joe who he is embarrassed of, but who it breaks his heart to leave. In the more recent Inside Out movie, there is the imaginary friend who sacrifices himself so that the protagonist, Joy, can get out of the valley of discarded memories. He's represented as kind of silly and ridiculous, as a mixture of several animals and things, which also calls to mind the chimera and other representations of symbols/mythological things that come in threes (i.e. the dad, mom, and child).

"thought" acts or acts in fantasying and light, dark, and fire pt 1

I've posted before about speech acts. For me these came to light in people with aggression blocks or inhibited personalities who have problems saying no or being assertive. Often they'd talk about childhood incidents in which they were wronged and displaced onto others were condemnations about parents or siblings. They wouldn't express this anger themselves and when asked to they felt resistance to do so. However, after they did say it (with affect) they felt a breakthrough and a release occurred.

With many psychotic patients I've encountered resistance to fantasying about certain things that follows the pattern of speech acts. A psychotic man mentions a woman who was smiling at him at a gas station. I ask him to use active imagination and create a story about her approaching him and how she might come into his life in some way. He won't let himself do it.

Another psychotic man brings up his childhood home and his longing for it. I ask him to imagine he's a few blocks away from it and to imagine what kind of figure or figures are in the way of him getting home. He says the devil. He goes through twists and turns, imagines his mother and brother come to aid him, but no matter what, the devil interferes with it. I ask him to imagine something happens to the devil or that he somehow makes it to the house but he can't let himself.

With these 'experiments' it's easy to imagine that it's simply a transference issue with me and that they could really imagine these things if they wanted to. However, in the instances in which things have moved forward, the resistance is attached to strong affect or anxiety.

A man in a psychotic depression represents his depressive feeling as him being in space, or utter darkness, without anything in it (a universe of total emptiness and darkness). He doesn't even have a body in this representation but is just the point at which his vision exists. The first thing he imagines to enter this universe is a single beam of light. He can imagine that it hits him and that his face emerges but he can't go farther than imagining his neck also enjoys the warmth of the light.

As with some others, he attaches the idea of God to this light and, in what appears to be a dialectic, he won't accept or trust that the light will nurture, warm, or provide for him and has his own light in the form of a fire. The fire that he can "immerse" himself in can be provided by alcohol, video games, or things of an addictive nature. He represents this fire as him "keeping control" for himself and feels turning to the light is a "surrender" he doesn't want to do. When asked to imagine the act of surrendering to the light, he changes the visual representation into accepting a hug from an unknown figure. He associates accepting it with taking the stranger's pity. We work past this resistance through the transference. He accepts it but doesn't put his own arms around the figure and feels a powerful physical urge to "retch." He then scotomizes the feeling and ends his fantasying.