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.