Thursday, November 20, 2014

auto-erotic object relation

I've previously mentioned volar stage relations in which their is complete possession of the altruist. He or she can't have any friends or not even any pets. The egoist in the sexual relationship with them demands that they alone exist and that they have unfettered access to them.

I've lately encountered an auto-erotic object relation in which the egoist in the sexual relation gets to have even more control. An altruistic female has to endure a husband who she cooks for, cleans for, who can ask her to find the remote, find something for him, and can generally interrupt her at any time of the day. They even had a discussion about what she should be doing at night after he goes to sleep. For every activity she does, from washing the dishes to driving, he can criticize her or find something wrong. She asks permission to leave the house and any time she will not be at his beck and call. Even routine visits she makes to friends is up for discussion every Tuesday .

What is this kind of intimacy except him being a part of her very mind?

I've mentioned a psychotic patient who attributed thoughts she had about her unattractiveness, thoughts about traumatic moments in the past, etc.  to "the enemy". She would say that you have to be careful because people "can put a statement on you". She also externalized her superego in a function that remained self-critical but didn't find an actual external person. Instead it resembles Freud's example of delusions of being watched in which the watcher isn't a concrete person.

A baby at the auto-erotic stage doesn't have any language, but I guess that we have to imagine that it already has a sense for good and bad and a feeling of away and towards satisfaction is present and in the process of primary identification with the parents the ur self-judgment is formed that is comprised of these simple good and bad feelings... Being hungry or cold, eating bad food, etc. and having consciousness of this sense of badness above the id instincts that drive these basic properties is the hallmark of the auto-erotic.

The strange thing to me is to imagine the egoist who chooses this almost complete control of the object even though it renders him so patently infantile. He is functionally a baby who is constantly angry and whining that the world isn't perfectly ordered so that his whims are satisfied before he experiences them...

I of course use choose in the sense that it is surprising that he doesn't experience any shame at the idea of himself as acting like this. His regression must be very strong.

There is, of course, more going on in the relationship and the altruist finds ways to trick the egoist and go around him on some things, but the sub-volar level of interaction is still very apparent.  

No comments:

Post a Comment