An issue has begun to take shape for me about all the subtle variations in pathology.
In the past, all too quickly, the analyst would assume some part of a depth structure that wasn't manifest still had to be there. In a triangular situation with a father-substitute, for example, the analyst would anticipate death wishes even if the person wasn't bringing them up.
I remember an instructor telling me that self-reproaches must always be part of depression too. However, what a difference there is between someone who "reviles" themselves vs. someone who is low energy or "dead" and may have some ideas about defectiveness in them that they keep to themselves.
In this way, I think that it's important to make a division between the subject egoist's grandiosity in identifying with the parental imago and him or her doing so along with hate and aggressive feelings that create paranoia along with that grandiosity. In the classic literature they would talk about the megalomania of the paranoiac but this must have just meant grandiosity as an exaggeration.
Similarly, the depressed patient who is dead, empty, depleted, etc. can manifest this way and may or may not, have melancholic self-reproaches.
Personally, I'd rather reverse the two labels and have melancholia as the underlying state, because the word invokes that image in me more. But, I don't want to add to confusion here...
Any reader should know that we are talking about the proto phase of a certain stage of development here. The deutero phase is more subtle still.
In the SE the deutero phase involves a relation to a mentor, or a closer relation to a parental-substitute. In many substance abuse groups you can see the SE who pretends that he's worked through his issues in the past and is there to give advice to other group members and has an impressive sense of calm, some wise things to say, and potentially becomes a rival for the focus of attention or power (and often the therapist colludes with him not getting personal and directs others problems to him). He is the would-be mentor, and he won't deign to have personal conversations about his struggles along with the other members of the group. For some of the deutero subject egoists, I have had the impression that there's earlier grandiosity in a schizoid sense. For example, some sense that the person meditates and is in touch with reality, God, or something semi-spiritual in some way. There are many different libidinal economies.
In the SA we have the dynamic with the rescuer and the rescued in the deutero phase. The classic masochistic complainer is the person usurping the parental imago. You can often see in group that some people are disposed to giving the person advice and wanting to help them (and many that just go with the flow in offering advice or think they are supposed to). The deutero parental imago in earlier stages isn't about being unhappy in work and love, but being rescued from dying, from going to jail, from living on the margins of society, etc.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
Saturday, July 16, 2016
subject egoistic and object altruistic narcissism - over vs. covert narcissism
There's a large amount of writing on narcissism out there and when I explored the literature a few years ago I thought a lot of the binaries seemed artificial.
I came across overt vs. covert distinction before, but the material I looked at had made it seem like a position in which a person was either one or the other. The will to power and narcissism was assumed to be everyone's depth structure.
The difference reminds me of the difference between the choleric and sanguine humors as interpreted by Hegel which I linked to subject egoism and object altruism (active-egoistic and passive-egoistic respectively).
http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2013/11/psychic-bisexuality-and-four-humours.html
What's interesting for me is that at the phallic oedipal stage that the inter-mixing of the egoistic and altruistic poles is nearing completion so that each libidinal position can have a pale form of the narcissism or echoism of the others.
The SE's egoistic narcissism in which mastery of one's profession or skill is manifested (and motivated by competition) and the OA's egoistic dilletantism or aptly titled "headline knowledge," the narcissism is comparable to the narcissism of the object egoist and subject altruist. I've worked with many passive-egoistic SAs for whom an older sister's arrogance or judgmental traits provoke competition and anger. Like the OAs dilettantism and inadequacy feelings, the SA too doesn't really have confidence in her beauty and taste...
these contrasts are valid, but the deutero effects on the personality aren't clearly separated from proto functioning.
The difference between a compulsive proto SE and a more inspiring deutero SE is very striking in people, just as the OA who wants to fit in vs. the OA who strikes one as more lovable is a big difference.
Anyway, I thought I'd share some material and the link I found it at
http://www1.appstate.edu/~hillrw/Narcissism/shycovertnarcissist.html
| Self-Concept | Grandiosity; preoccupation with fantasies of outstanding success; undue sense of uniqueness; feelings of entitlement; seeming self-sufficiency | Inferiority; morose self-doubts; marked propensity toward feeling ashamed; fragility; relentless search for glory and power; marked sensitivity to criticism and realistic setbacks |
| Interpersonal Relationships | Numerous but shallow relationships; intense need for tribute from others; scorn for others, often masked by pseudohumility; lack of empathy; inability to genuinely participate in group activities; valuing of children over spouse in family life | Inability to genuinely depend on others and trust them; chronic envy of others� talents, possessions, and capacity for deep object relations; lack of regard for generational boundaries; disregard for others� time; refusal to answer letters |
| Social Adaptation | Socially charming; often successful; consistent hard work done mainly to seek admiration (�pseudo- sublimation�); intense ambition; preoccupation with appearances | Nagging aimlessness; shallow vocational commitment; dilettante-like attitude; multiple but superficial interests; chronic boredom; aesthetic taste often ill-informed and imitative |
| Ethics, Standards, and Ideals | Caricatured modesty; pretended contempt for money in real life; idiosyncratically and unevenly moral; apparent enthusiasm for sociopolitical affairs | Readiness to shift values to gain favor; pathological lying; materialistic lifestyle; delinquent tendencies; inordinate ethnic and moral relativism; irreverence toward authority |
| Love and Sexuality | Marital instability; cold and greedy seductiveness; extramarital affairs and promiscuity; uninhibited sexual life | Inability to remain in love; impaired capacity for viewing the romantic partner as a separate individual with his or her own interests, rights, and values; inability to genuinely comprehend the incest taboo; occasional sexual perversions |
| Cognitive Style | Impressively knowledgeable; decisive and opinionated; often strikingly articulate; egocentric perception of reality; love of language; fondness for shortcuts to acquisition of knowledge | Knowledge often limited to trivia (�headline intelligence�); forgetful of details, especially names; impaired in the capacity for learning new skills; tendency to change meanings of reality when facing a threat to self-esteem; language and speaking used for regulating self-esteem |
NOTE: This chart originally appeared in Akhtar, S. J. (1989). Narcissistic personality disorder: Descriptive features and differential diagnosis. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12, pp. 505-530.A Covert/Shy Narcissist will have grandiose fantasies but will also be plagued by a feeling of unworthiness and thus shame for even having fantasized about his or her �greatness.� This type of narcissist, �is likely to be characterized by an incapacity to sustain ambitions or to pursue even attainable goals with full dedication, yielding to others rewards that he or she may legitimately deserve. The final result is often significant masochistic self-damage, self-pity, feelings of hurt, and depression
While feeling they deserve to be recognized for their specialness, unlike the Arrogant/Overt Narcissist, the Covert/Shy Narcissist is plagued by self-doubts and thus does not as readily seek the affirmation from others he or she believes is due. Moreover, because of this strong sense of worthlessness, this type of narcissist often will not seek out appropriate friends or romantic partners because they fear exposure as frauds; for this reason their associates tend to be conspicuously inferior to themselves. Cooper observes that this narcissist, �secretly harbors fantasies that he or she is engaged in a heroic rescue of someone of lesser capabilities.� And, when their friends and associates offer praise, the Shy/Covert Narcissist believes that this admiration is phony and insincere. They tend to devote a considerable amount of time ruminating over the unfairness of how little their true worth is appreciated and how others get the recognition for things that they themselves did.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Zizek and wanting to be interesting
The Freud Museum has a blog http://freudquotes.blogspot.com
They put quotations from Freud, and related to psychoanalysis in general, list some events, post some videos, etc.
There's something of a Lacanian orientation and so sometimes we get some Zizek or some heavy dose of Lacanian jargon.
I thought I'd share a few thoughts.
“Freud uses three distinct terms for the agency that propels the subject to act ethically: he speaks of ideal ego (Idealich), ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) and superego (Ueberich). He tends to identify these three terms: he often uses the expression Ichideal oder Idealich (Ego-Ideal or ideal ego), and the title of the chapter III of his booklet The Ego and the Id) is “Ego and Superego (Ego-Ideal)”. Lacan introduces a precise distinction between these three terms: the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its revengeful, sadistic, punishing, aspect. The underlying structuring principle of these three terms is clearly Lacan’s triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real: ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the “small other,” the idealized double-image of my ego; Ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself; superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and meet its demands. The old cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed their innocence (“the more they are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot”) is superego at its purest.
What follows from these precise distinctions is that, for Lacan, superego “has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned”: superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. So which one of the other two is the proper ethical agency? Should we – as some American psychoanalysts proposed, relying on a couple of Freud’s ambiguous formulations – set up the “good” (rational-moderate, caring) Ego-Ideal against the “bad” (irrational-excessive, cruel, anxiety-provoking) superego, trying to lead the patient to get rid of the “bad” superego and follow the “good” Ego-Ideal? Lacan opposes this easy way out – for him, the only proper agency is the fourth one missing in Freud’s list of the three, the one sometimes referred to by Lacan as “the law of desire,” the agency which tells you to act in conformity with your desire. The gap between this “law of desire” and Ego-Ideal (the network of social-symbolic norms and ideal that the subject internalizes in the course of his or her education) is crucial here. For Lacan, the seemingly benevolent agency of the Ego-Ideal which leads us to moral growth and maturity, forces us to betray the “law of desire” by way of adopting the “reasonable” demands of the existing socio-symbolic order. The superego, with its excessive feeling of guilt, is merely the necessary obverse of the Ego-Ideal: it exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the “law of desire.” The guilt we experience under the superego pressure is not illusory but actual – “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire,” and the superego pressure demonstrates that we effectively are guilty of betraying our desire.”
― Slavoj Zizek, How To Read Lacan
First, notice how he begins with "Freud uses three distinct terms" but then in the second paragraph he mentions American psychoanalysts "relying on a couple of Freud's ambiguous formulations." The ideal ego vs. ego ideal is not to be found in Freud, and is wholly a Lacanian invention that can't even be built by textual ambiguities.
Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, uses the ego ideal explicitly in relation to an individual regarding a leader, general, king, or some kind of authority as an authority for him. He also sees a parallel formulation of this in love which is compared to hypnotism.
There are different levels of authority in society and, the ego ideal reflects differences in an individual's level of ambition, how much he or she may regard themselves as an authority despite lack of societal honors or achievements, and group psychology dynamics of how an individual may react in smaller groups, mobs, or parties. Zizek instead makes this difference:
the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to give my best,
In this very vague distinction we are asked to entertain that a person would like to be seen a certain way by others and that this is different from some sense of society in general (the big Other) who propels me to give our best. Then, over top of this, he wants to then identify the ego ideal with
(the network of social-symbolic norms and ideal that the subject internalizes in the course of his or her education)... For Lacan, the seemingly benevolent agency of the Ego-Ideal which leads us to moral growth and maturity, forces us to betray the “law of desire” by way of adopting the “reasonable” demands of the existing socio-symbolic order.
Zizek first says the ego ideal "propels me to give my best" and revives an atomistic conception of the individual. The individual is related to himself in some way and striving for some values that American ego psychologists would claim to be self-chosen. Even if Zizek makes them dependent on socio-symbolic norms that are more passively "internalized" he is still offering the same type of picture as an ego psychologist.
I'm not saying an individual has no relation to himself and everything is about his appearance to others. I think that an individual can make both moral and non-moral promises to himself about what he will or won't do and keep to them. He can swear revenge after someone being taken from him, he can pledge himself to take care of a child that's not his own, and promise himself to never cheat in a relationship, etc. In his post-structuralism, Zizek seems to be equating this with betraying an individual's true desire and that this betrayal is what starts up the superego's need for punishment. Presumably, an individual who is a cross dresser might decide to "mature" and be "normal" and then his superego will attack him. Because he's not a clinician he has to make things about some existential aspect of our lives and always pretend that things are deeper or a reversal of the common perception.
The attack of the superego comes from an attack on individuals who were in the ego ideal. A boyfriend cheats on a woman and she wants to angrily hurt him or the woman he was with and this isn't expressed and becomes a need for punishment. Just as she wanted the couple to lose everything she now puts herself into situations of self-sabotage in which she stands to lose everything. Moreover, this attack on the couple resonates with the bad maternal imago of her childhood and she identifies the life of having lost everything with her bad mother of childhood.
Problems in love, social humiliations (at work or with friends), breaking promises, and our lives as social animals is what is central in psychoanalysis and pathology in mental health. Existential concerns about authenticity sound interesting and deep but show a disturbing lack of empathy with the experience of others.
How long will psychoanalysis stay in the hands of people who are trying to be interesting?
How long will it stay in the hands of people who want to valorize consciousness and ignore the body as a way to access repressed impulses and trauma?
How long will it apologize for its past?
They put quotations from Freud, and related to psychoanalysis in general, list some events, post some videos, etc.
There's something of a Lacanian orientation and so sometimes we get some Zizek or some heavy dose of Lacanian jargon.
I thought I'd share a few thoughts.
“Freud uses three distinct terms for the agency that propels the subject to act ethically: he speaks of ideal ego (Idealich), ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) and superego (Ueberich). He tends to identify these three terms: he often uses the expression Ichideal oder Idealich (Ego-Ideal or ideal ego), and the title of the chapter III of his booklet The Ego and the Id) is “Ego and Superego (Ego-Ideal)”. Lacan introduces a precise distinction between these three terms: the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its revengeful, sadistic, punishing, aspect. The underlying structuring principle of these three terms is clearly Lacan’s triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real: ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the “small other,” the idealized double-image of my ego; Ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself; superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and meet its demands. The old cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed their innocence (“the more they are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot”) is superego at its purest.
What follows from these precise distinctions is that, for Lacan, superego “has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned”: superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. So which one of the other two is the proper ethical agency? Should we – as some American psychoanalysts proposed, relying on a couple of Freud’s ambiguous formulations – set up the “good” (rational-moderate, caring) Ego-Ideal against the “bad” (irrational-excessive, cruel, anxiety-provoking) superego, trying to lead the patient to get rid of the “bad” superego and follow the “good” Ego-Ideal? Lacan opposes this easy way out – for him, the only proper agency is the fourth one missing in Freud’s list of the three, the one sometimes referred to by Lacan as “the law of desire,” the agency which tells you to act in conformity with your desire. The gap between this “law of desire” and Ego-Ideal (the network of social-symbolic norms and ideal that the subject internalizes in the course of his or her education) is crucial here. For Lacan, the seemingly benevolent agency of the Ego-Ideal which leads us to moral growth and maturity, forces us to betray the “law of desire” by way of adopting the “reasonable” demands of the existing socio-symbolic order. The superego, with its excessive feeling of guilt, is merely the necessary obverse of the Ego-Ideal: it exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the “law of desire.” The guilt we experience under the superego pressure is not illusory but actual – “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire,” and the superego pressure demonstrates that we effectively are guilty of betraying our desire.”
― Slavoj Zizek, How To Read Lacan
First, notice how he begins with "Freud uses three distinct terms" but then in the second paragraph he mentions American psychoanalysts "relying on a couple of Freud's ambiguous formulations." The ideal ego vs. ego ideal is not to be found in Freud, and is wholly a Lacanian invention that can't even be built by textual ambiguities.
Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, uses the ego ideal explicitly in relation to an individual regarding a leader, general, king, or some kind of authority as an authority for him. He also sees a parallel formulation of this in love which is compared to hypnotism.
There are different levels of authority in society and, the ego ideal reflects differences in an individual's level of ambition, how much he or she may regard themselves as an authority despite lack of societal honors or achievements, and group psychology dynamics of how an individual may react in smaller groups, mobs, or parties. Zizek instead makes this difference:
the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to give my best,
In this very vague distinction we are asked to entertain that a person would like to be seen a certain way by others and that this is different from some sense of society in general (the big Other) who propels me to give our best. Then, over top of this, he wants to then identify the ego ideal with
(the network of social-symbolic norms and ideal that the subject internalizes in the course of his or her education)... For Lacan, the seemingly benevolent agency of the Ego-Ideal which leads us to moral growth and maturity, forces us to betray the “law of desire” by way of adopting the “reasonable” demands of the existing socio-symbolic order.
Zizek first says the ego ideal "propels me to give my best" and revives an atomistic conception of the individual. The individual is related to himself in some way and striving for some values that American ego psychologists would claim to be self-chosen. Even if Zizek makes them dependent on socio-symbolic norms that are more passively "internalized" he is still offering the same type of picture as an ego psychologist.
I'm not saying an individual has no relation to himself and everything is about his appearance to others. I think that an individual can make both moral and non-moral promises to himself about what he will or won't do and keep to them. He can swear revenge after someone being taken from him, he can pledge himself to take care of a child that's not his own, and promise himself to never cheat in a relationship, etc. In his post-structuralism, Zizek seems to be equating this with betraying an individual's true desire and that this betrayal is what starts up the superego's need for punishment. Presumably, an individual who is a cross dresser might decide to "mature" and be "normal" and then his superego will attack him. Because he's not a clinician he has to make things about some existential aspect of our lives and always pretend that things are deeper or a reversal of the common perception.
The attack of the superego comes from an attack on individuals who were in the ego ideal. A boyfriend cheats on a woman and she wants to angrily hurt him or the woman he was with and this isn't expressed and becomes a need for punishment. Just as she wanted the couple to lose everything she now puts herself into situations of self-sabotage in which she stands to lose everything. Moreover, this attack on the couple resonates with the bad maternal imago of her childhood and she identifies the life of having lost everything with her bad mother of childhood.
Problems in love, social humiliations (at work or with friends), breaking promises, and our lives as social animals is what is central in psychoanalysis and pathology in mental health. Existential concerns about authenticity sound interesting and deep but show a disturbing lack of empathy with the experience of others.
How long will psychoanalysis stay in the hands of people who are trying to be interesting?
How long will it stay in the hands of people who want to valorize consciousness and ignore the body as a way to access repressed impulses and trauma?
How long will it apologize for its past?
Friday, June 10, 2016
guilt and reparation in echoism pt 2
Just to clarify on the guilt, which I attached to the "libido" build up in projective identification, the sense of the reparation in the person having to call her friend has another dimension.
A patient with altruistic guilt after his mother died was related to his resentment. An altruist wants to merge and be close, give gifts, and more generally energy to the other person. Because this patient had resentments towards his mother, he didn't talk to her much and held back his "energy". When she went on to die, I didn't detect death wishes against her so much as the feeling that having inhibited his being close to her, meant that she could have been sad and "given up" in a way. The idea was that if he had been close she might not have gone that way. This is a variation of the omnipotence of wishes that the altruist's love can be magical and help someone, and to withhold this makes them responsible.
The link to the built up libido, that isn't projected into the other in PI, is probably better conceived of analogously to the narcissist's rage and aggression, or exhibition wanting to come out. The echoist, in PI with death, feels empty, dead, etc. and the built up libido can be expressed in things like cutting and various forms of pain that amount to "better to feel pain, or torture" than nothing at all (or be alone). I encountered this first through Wurmser and it has showed itself to be true in several patients. Cutting, being with someone dominating, etc. is an expression. However, this has to be differentiated from deutero expressions in PI with the castrated mother who is the model of being aggressed by someone else.
A patient with altruistic guilt after his mother died was related to his resentment. An altruist wants to merge and be close, give gifts, and more generally energy to the other person. Because this patient had resentments towards his mother, he didn't talk to her much and held back his "energy". When she went on to die, I didn't detect death wishes against her so much as the feeling that having inhibited his being close to her, meant that she could have been sad and "given up" in a way. The idea was that if he had been close she might not have gone that way. This is a variation of the omnipotence of wishes that the altruist's love can be magical and help someone, and to withhold this makes them responsible.
The link to the built up libido, that isn't projected into the other in PI, is probably better conceived of analogously to the narcissist's rage and aggression, or exhibition wanting to come out. The echoist, in PI with death, feels empty, dead, etc. and the built up libido can be expressed in things like cutting and various forms of pain that amount to "better to feel pain, or torture" than nothing at all (or be alone). I encountered this first through Wurmser and it has showed itself to be true in several patients. Cutting, being with someone dominating, etc. is an expression. However, this has to be differentiated from deutero expressions in PI with the castrated mother who is the model of being aggressed by someone else.
"guilt" and "reparations" in echoism
I had a conversation with a friend this weekend. The subject matter was what she referred to as her guilt regarding friendships. The idea was that by getting close or friendly with someone that she feels the obligation to be close to them and make them happy in some way. Then, if she pulls back at all from the labor involved in this or has other people she spends time with, then the other person can feel hurt, or pull back themselves (as if there was a disappointment or they were let down). Then she feels "the guilt" as if she has to call them, keep in touch, and often put in work while the other person isn't any longer. There's a sense that the other person became disappointed and that the echoist has to make up for it.
We can contrast the control and possession in the love of the egoist that leads to jealousy, to the merger and oneness that drives the altruist, which can lead to aloneness.
There is projective identification here in which the guilty party is identified with the parental imago. The other party wants to get close and have that feeling of merger/oneness: they will spend a lot of time together, they will do the same things together, they will share important feelings and share secrets, etc.
There is something like intrusiveness anxiety. The echoist in projective identification with the parental imago who feels the other person wanting to have a lot of time and share so much with them, backs away. It's a subtle feeling of too muchness, and moreover, the echoist in PI can feel tired, without much to give, and then you get the "ghosting". The previous merging contact becomes reduced and the echoist in PI doesn't answer calls, might have headaches or physical problems that take them out of commission, or generally is removed in such a way that there is not an overt sense of being rejected, but a sense of abandonment or just a sense of emptiness.
The altruist, as the abandoned party, is part of the echoist's PI. This resembles paranoia in the egoist who wanted to slander, kill, beat up, etc. the parent and in PI he becomes the grandiose parental imago of perfection (i.e. narcissist) and projects this aggression into another person in the role of the child (i.e. individual confronting some one of more power, authority, etc.) and who feels wants to bring the narcissist down. The child/self and the parent/object are connected through drives and emotions. Thus, after the abandoned altruist pulls back, the echoist feels their own aloneness, and the echoist returns to thinking about the altruist as alone and hurt and like he (the echoist) was responsible.
This example is in friendship, but similar variations exist in ego and object drive parallelism. I'm still reluctant to use to say amity drive, but work relations (ego) and love relations (object) and friendships (amity) all show repetitions and setups for narcissistic and echoistic injuries.
Another note here, is that for the first time I am using egoist and narcissist or altruist and echoist in a way that isn't interchangeable.
The "grandiose" person in PI with the imago of perfection seems to capture one sense of Freud's use of narcissism. The egoist is driven and competitive but in narcissism he already feels himself to be perfect in some way and isn't as driven and gives the sense of not needing the admiration or recognition of others that the egoist strives for... However, that "libido" builds up in him and there will be the need to have some big exhibitionistic display of power or, anger will build up and there will need to be some kind of aggression that is expressed.
Again, it's important to remember that this operation and the grandiosity will vary depending on the level of development. From auto-erotic megalomania, to feeling like a superior (non-human) alien or another form of being, to feeling like one is bigger than human society and has a freedom outside of the "rat race' (the narcissist often 'living off the grid'), to the individual feeling like he has the best (perfect) ways of doing things, to the narcissist giving one that arrogant feeling that he is better than others in the community.
The echoist is in PI with the parental imago of Death and appears to the altruist as a figure of goodness, but internally the echoist feels depleted and empty and doesn't feel goodness inside. As with the narcissist, the assumption of the parental imago means that the drive is weakened. Just as perfection takes many forms, so too does death, and the altruist may feel like the echoist is dead in the sense of having a bad reputation, in the literal sense of having disappeared so the altruist feels like the echoist might have died, in the sense of being horrible hurt or crippled with the echoist losing the ability to take care of himself, the echoist just vanishing and the altruist feeling like he vanished, etc.
One last note is that the "guilt" that the echoist feels isn't true guilt in the sense that the echoist might feel bad about her intentions to do something bad to someone else. Its a form of remorse, in which conscience flares up after the action has been done. Instead of remorse, a more active word like penitent might be better, but I don't have the best sense for the use of those words and their religious associations might mislead.
We can contrast the control and possession in the love of the egoist that leads to jealousy, to the merger and oneness that drives the altruist, which can lead to aloneness.
There is projective identification here in which the guilty party is identified with the parental imago. The other party wants to get close and have that feeling of merger/oneness: they will spend a lot of time together, they will do the same things together, they will share important feelings and share secrets, etc.
There is something like intrusiveness anxiety. The echoist in projective identification with the parental imago who feels the other person wanting to have a lot of time and share so much with them, backs away. It's a subtle feeling of too muchness, and moreover, the echoist in PI can feel tired, without much to give, and then you get the "ghosting". The previous merging contact becomes reduced and the echoist in PI doesn't answer calls, might have headaches or physical problems that take them out of commission, or generally is removed in such a way that there is not an overt sense of being rejected, but a sense of abandonment or just a sense of emptiness.
The altruist, as the abandoned party, is part of the echoist's PI. This resembles paranoia in the egoist who wanted to slander, kill, beat up, etc. the parent and in PI he becomes the grandiose parental imago of perfection (i.e. narcissist) and projects this aggression into another person in the role of the child (i.e. individual confronting some one of more power, authority, etc.) and who feels wants to bring the narcissist down. The child/self and the parent/object are connected through drives and emotions. Thus, after the abandoned altruist pulls back, the echoist feels their own aloneness, and the echoist returns to thinking about the altruist as alone and hurt and like he (the echoist) was responsible.
This example is in friendship, but similar variations exist in ego and object drive parallelism. I'm still reluctant to use to say amity drive, but work relations (ego) and love relations (object) and friendships (amity) all show repetitions and setups for narcissistic and echoistic injuries.
Another note here, is that for the first time I am using egoist and narcissist or altruist and echoist in a way that isn't interchangeable.
The "grandiose" person in PI with the imago of perfection seems to capture one sense of Freud's use of narcissism. The egoist is driven and competitive but in narcissism he already feels himself to be perfect in some way and isn't as driven and gives the sense of not needing the admiration or recognition of others that the egoist strives for... However, that "libido" builds up in him and there will be the need to have some big exhibitionistic display of power or, anger will build up and there will need to be some kind of aggression that is expressed.
Again, it's important to remember that this operation and the grandiosity will vary depending on the level of development. From auto-erotic megalomania, to feeling like a superior (non-human) alien or another form of being, to feeling like one is bigger than human society and has a freedom outside of the "rat race' (the narcissist often 'living off the grid'), to the individual feeling like he has the best (perfect) ways of doing things, to the narcissist giving one that arrogant feeling that he is better than others in the community.
The echoist is in PI with the parental imago of Death and appears to the altruist as a figure of goodness, but internally the echoist feels depleted and empty and doesn't feel goodness inside. As with the narcissist, the assumption of the parental imago means that the drive is weakened. Just as perfection takes many forms, so too does death, and the altruist may feel like the echoist is dead in the sense of having a bad reputation, in the literal sense of having disappeared so the altruist feels like the echoist might have died, in the sense of being horrible hurt or crippled with the echoist losing the ability to take care of himself, the echoist just vanishing and the altruist feeling like he vanished, etc.
One last note is that the "guilt" that the echoist feels isn't true guilt in the sense that the echoist might feel bad about her intentions to do something bad to someone else. Its a form of remorse, in which conscience flares up after the action has been done. Instead of remorse, a more active word like penitent might be better, but I don't have the best sense for the use of those words and their religious associations might mislead.
Monday, May 30, 2016
The straw-man of the relationalists.
The more I read of relational psychoanalysis, the more I can see that they made Freud into a straw-man. I can sympathize, and since their ego psychologist educators valorized Freud, I'm sure they couldn't rebel against them without rebelling against him too. However, instead of another political division, they could have returned to Freud's texts and showed the ego psychologists that they misunderstood their foundation.
They can't pretend like Freud wasn't concerned with the relations between others:
The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well.
The relations of an individual to his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the object of his love, and to his physician—in fact all the relations which have hitherto been the chief subject of psycho-analytic research—may claim to be considered as social phenomena; and in this respect they may be contrasted with certain other processes, described by us as ‘narcissistic’, in which the satisfaction of the instincts is partially or totally withdrawn from the influence of other people. (Freud, 1921, p. 69)
How can they ignore that there are facts like the 'omnipotence of wishes,' feelings of depersonalization, and loss of "faith" that aren't relations in which the individual measures himself in relation to others, but relations between him and studying efficacy over time, his body, and the environment/world?
Moreover, these relations that aren't measured against others aren't simply regarded as a one person model, but are still expression of parental imagos that were internalized.
"Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life—his perceptions, thoughts and feelings—, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it. Thus even the feeling of our own ego is subject to disturbances and the boundaries of the ego are not constant.
Further reflection tells us that the adult's ego-feeling cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have gone through a process of development, which cannot, of course, be demonstrated but which admits of being constructed with a fair degree of probability. An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time—among them what he desires most of all, his mother's breast—and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special action. A further incentive to a disengagement of the ego from the general mass of sensations—that is, to the recognition of an ‘outside’, an external world—is provided by the frequent, manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal and avoidance of which is enjoined by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted domination" (1930, 66-7)
There is a lot that Freud didn't fully theorize fully, and there are passages in his work that are misleading, but he's given us a strong foundation that is still better than any other model of the mind that I've seen.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
deutero Bellerophon complex
I've had a request for more clinical data on the Bellerophon complex.
Before I share a little from a former patient, let me emphasize that there is a difference between the proto and deutero versions.
The deutero version is non-universal and means that the individual feels an equality with the parental imago. He or she feel special and like the parental-substitute has a special interest in him or her, while the proto version feels the authority figure or love interest is more distant and 'unattainable adult.'
I've considered using the myth of Heracles (SE), Arachne (OE), Orpheus (OA), etc. to signify the proto complexes of the different libidinal positions. However, most psychoanalysts are used to just referring to the Oedipus complex to cover all triangular relationships (if they even talk about complexes at all). To introduce 8 new names seems too much, while introducing 4 and making a proto and deutero distinction between the two doesn't seem as intimidating. Moreover, there are also passive-altruistic and passive-egoistic versions, and how they play out in the ego or object drives.
In the passive-altruistic deutero version of the Bellerophon complex in the ego drives you have:
1. The OA initially idealizes his boss (parental-substitute).
2. He learns how to do his job and then feels like he knows how to do it better than his boss.
3. He sees faults in his boss and then begin to feel that he is disappointing and feels sorry for him.
4. He feels that he can start his own company and be more successful and that he isn't paid enough and/or doesn't receive enough gratitude for his help.
5. He doesn't assert himself to ask for a pay raise, or to express that he doesn't feel appreciated. It feels ungrateful or like it is the parental-substitute's prerogative to judge and reward these things.
6. His frustration grows but when you explore what would happen if he asks for a raise, for example, he believes that the parental-substitute won't be happy with him asking. The expectation is that the boss, even though he seems to need the OA, might tell him to leave.
7. When you explore what will happen to the boss if the OA leaves, he imagines the boss's company will suffer and he might go out of business.
8. The failure of the boss's company is tied to the boss feeling sad and can deepen to the idea that he might have a 'breakdown' and maybe even become suicidal.
9. The OA feels like he would be responsible for this and this is his impediment.
In ego and object drive parallelism, a similar feeling of being able to find a more desirable partner is experienced and a similar unconscious fear that one's partner would become sad, have a breakdown, or want to die is similarly the impediment.
Additionally, it's one thing to worry about the boss's image-ego, but the idea that he'd have a "breakdown," become depressed, or commit suicide shows that the relation extends into earlier levels of Being.
Before I share a little from a former patient, let me emphasize that there is a difference between the proto and deutero versions.
The deutero version is non-universal and means that the individual feels an equality with the parental imago. He or she feel special and like the parental-substitute has a special interest in him or her, while the proto version feels the authority figure or love interest is more distant and 'unattainable adult.'
I've considered using the myth of Heracles (SE), Arachne (OE), Orpheus (OA), etc. to signify the proto complexes of the different libidinal positions. However, most psychoanalysts are used to just referring to the Oedipus complex to cover all triangular relationships (if they even talk about complexes at all). To introduce 8 new names seems too much, while introducing 4 and making a proto and deutero distinction between the two doesn't seem as intimidating. Moreover, there are also passive-altruistic and passive-egoistic versions, and how they play out in the ego or object drives.
In the passive-altruistic deutero version of the Bellerophon complex in the ego drives you have:
1. The OA initially idealizes his boss (parental-substitute).
2. He learns how to do his job and then feels like he knows how to do it better than his boss.
3. He sees faults in his boss and then begin to feel that he is disappointing and feels sorry for him.
4. He feels that he can start his own company and be more successful and that he isn't paid enough and/or doesn't receive enough gratitude for his help.
5. He doesn't assert himself to ask for a pay raise, or to express that he doesn't feel appreciated. It feels ungrateful or like it is the parental-substitute's prerogative to judge and reward these things.
6. His frustration grows but when you explore what would happen if he asks for a raise, for example, he believes that the parental-substitute won't be happy with him asking. The expectation is that the boss, even though he seems to need the OA, might tell him to leave.
7. When you explore what will happen to the boss if the OA leaves, he imagines the boss's company will suffer and he might go out of business.
8. The failure of the boss's company is tied to the boss feeling sad and can deepen to the idea that he might have a 'breakdown' and maybe even become suicidal.
9. The OA feels like he would be responsible for this and this is his impediment.
In ego and object drive parallelism, a similar feeling of being able to find a more desirable partner is experienced and a similar unconscious fear that one's partner would become sad, have a breakdown, or want to die is similarly the impediment.
Additionally, it's one thing to worry about the boss's image-ego, but the idea that he'd have a "breakdown," become depressed, or commit suicide shows that the relation extends into earlier levels of Being.
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